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Recovering Politics for Socialism: Two Responses to the Language of Community*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

F. M. Barnard  and
Richard Vernon
F. M. Barnard
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
Richard Vernon
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Abstract

Socialism is often defined in terms of “community,” or, as Professor John Wilson once put it, as a “society of friends.” Thus defined, it is contrasted with the competitive relations of bourgeois society. But in some recent theory and practice, political competition is taken to be a defining feature of a legitimate socialist order. The persistence of political institutions is thus stressed, both by Western socialist theorists and by reformers in Eastern and Central Europe, and the orthodox view that “state” is to be superseded by “community” is sharply rejected. These two critiques differ, however, in one major respect: for Western socialists, the state is to be legitimated by the principles of socialist rationality, while for many reformers of Eastern and Central Europe it is to be legitimated by political life itself. From this second point of view, neither “friendship” nor “rationality” responds to the tensions which a socialist polity, no less than any other, will face: for both these concepts, to the extent that they are taken to set pre-established norms, constrict the “space for political action, ” and thus remove the necessary conditions for legitimacy.

Résumé

Le socialisme est sou vent défini en termes de « communauté » ou, selon l'expression de John Wilson, comme une « société d'amis ». Cette définition permet d'établír un contraste avec les relations de compétition de la société bourgeoise. Toutefois, d'après les développements des faits et de la théorie, la compétition politique devient une caractéristique d'une société socialiste légitime. La persistance des institutions politiques est maintenant soutenue, aussi bien par les thésoriciens socialistes de l'Ouest que par les réformateurs du Centre et de l'Est de l'Europe: la vision orthodoxe du remplacement de l' « Etat » par la « communauté » est maintenant rejetée. Les critiques formulées par ces deux courants diffèrent principalement sur un aspect: pour les socialistes de l'Ouest, l'Etat est légitimé par les principes de la rationalité socialiste, alors que, pour les réformateurs de l'Est et du Centre de l'Europe, il est légitimé par la vie politique. D'après ce second courant, ni l' « amitié », ni la « rationalité », ne rendent compte des tensions auxquelles le régime socialiste, comme tout autre résgime, fait face: ces deux concepts, quand ils fixent des normes pré-établies, resserrent le terrain de l'action politique et excluent les conditions nécessaires pour la légitimité.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 717 - 737
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1983

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References

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10 We agree on this point with Oakeshott, Michael, when he says that “it is the activity itself which defines the questions as well as the manner in which they are answered” (Rationalism in Politics [London: Methuen, 1962], 97; see also, similarly. 112)Google Scholar. It is the balancing—and frequently very fine balancing—that we wish to bring out in “mediation”: the balancing between diverse purposes being turned into “public objects” and the balancing of justificatory reasons that are meant to sustain them.

11 for a somewhat parallel argument see Newman, J. H., An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, 1909), 34.Google Scholar

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14 Hutter, Horst, Politics as Friendship (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 2.Google Scholar The idea of politics as friendship is pursued in some depth in Mansbridge, Jane J., Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980).Google Scholar What she calls “unitary” democracy—because it is “like friendship” —is said to be distinguished by consensus, and favourably, though not uncritically, contrasted with “adversary” democracy, the model of democracy that “most Americans had grown up with.” As the crucially decisive basis for consensual unitary democracy Mansbridge singles out “common interests” rather than intense participation or the absence of “elitism.” We Lie indebted to Professor David Braybrooke for having drawn our attention to this careful study.

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24 For example, the idea of a total transformation of socialist man is described as a “corrupt fantasy” and the political economy of Communist regimes as forced modernization rather than as the liberation of a society , (Irving Howe's “Introduction,” in his Essential Works of Socialism, 18.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as EWS). The saliency of politics as “a vital and exciting world of work and struggle” is insisted on by Walzer, Michael, (“Politics in the Welfare State,” EWS, 824)Google Scholar and that of the state as the expression of collective freedom through its “rational” universality over and above any particular interest is affirmed by Ricoeur (“Power and State, ” EWS, 736). That a state, simply by becoming socialist ceases to be a threat to human liberty, is dismissed as “sheer fatuity” by Howe and Lewis Coser (“Images of Socialism, ” EWS, 845).

25 Thus, in an article written in 1842, Marx, closely following Hegel, derives the state from “reason in society” and speaks of it as “the great organism in which legal, ethical, and political freedom has to be actualized and in which the individual citizen simply obeys the natural laws of his own reason, human reason, in the laws of the state.” Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans, by Easton, Loyd D.Guddat, Kurt H. (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 130.Google Scholar

26 Connolly, “A Note on Freedom under Socialism,” Political Theory 5 (1977), 466–67; “citizen self-consciousness” and a number of rational-institutional arrangements and constitutional safeguards are to ensure that the “ideal of socialism that is.intrinsically authoritarian” is kept in check within the socialist state (469–71, emphasis in original). See also Ricoeur, , “Power and the State, ” EWS, 736:Google ScholarRicoeur, , is perhaps the most explicit of these writers in insisting on the autonomy of politics.Google Scholar

27 Evidently it is not the collectivist ethos of Marxism that is objected to. If Connolly and the other socialist writers cited are critical of the downplaying of the state by Marxist socialists of the orthodox variety, they are no less critical of the “individualism” and “interest pluralism” of American politics.

28 For a most useful analysis of the distinction between individual and social rationality, see Benn, S. I.Mortimore, G. W. (eds.), Rationality and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1976), chap. 14.Google ScholarBurke, Edmand is, of course, the best-known advocate of the third interpretation.Google Scholar

29 Most recently, for example, Hollis, Martin, takes this line, in his Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

30 We are thinking here of some of the German political romantics rather than Burke. Adam Miiller exemplifies this position perhaps most uncompromisingly. He “outdoes” Burke whom he deeply venerated. He called him the last prophet who had come to this disenchanted earth: but, it seems, he did not truly understand him.

31 This appears to be Sheldon S. Wolin', way out in “Weber, MaxLegitimation, Method and the Politics of Theory,” Political Theory 9 (1981), 402.Google Scholar Clearly, the “context” could include all kinds of norms, customs, habits and traditional ways of going about things. So broad an answer tells us nothing about the autonomy of political norms.

32 For a recent exposition of this counterfactual condition, see Habermas, Jürgen, “Aspects of the Rationality of Action,”Google Scholar in Geraets, Theodore F., (ed.), Rationality Today (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 1979), 195.Google Scholar Its most detailed elaboration so far will be found in Habermas, JürgenLuhmann, Niklas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).Google Scholar

33 This is a widely shared view with strong Romantic overtones that can be traced in modem political and sociological writings to Rousseau. Herder, English, French, and German Romantics (and chiefly conservative political romantics) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more recently to the influence of Ferdinand Tönnies' Community and Society and Robert Nisbet's Community and Power. For a critique of the emergence of modem “community” language, see Barnard, F. M., “Metaphors, Laments, and the Organic Community,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 22 (1966), 281–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Equally widespread is the idea that it is the economic market of a capitalist economy which is the source of human alienation, and that it is through the emergence of this market that liberal (individualist) doctrines of politics assumed dominance. This idea has considerably gained in academic popularity since the publication of Macpherson's Possessive Individualism. The long-entrenched view about the incompatibility of socialism with a market economy has been challenged by a number of economists within Communist states, including some pluralist socialists. For a recent “Western” exposition of this challenge, see Miller, “Socialism and the Market. ”

34 For a brief and lucid discussion of polítical norms and political action, see Nettl, J. P., “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968), 588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 This is at the root of Tocqueville's concerns in his discussion of eighteenth-century rationalism in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), 138.Google Scholar The rationalist does not easily understand that a political society, unlike an intellectual product, is not shaped by reason but by the concurrence of its inhabitants: hence “what is a merit in the writer may well be a vice in the statesman” (147).

36 See, for example, Von Wright, Georg Henrik, Norm and Action (London: Routledge 1963), esp. 11–15.Google Scholar

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38 Since the point of the essay is a juxtaposition of two “typological” approaches to socialist politics, it unavoidably involves generalizations which individual writers may variously endorse or not wholly accept. Moreover, our focus of interest, the relations between political norms and political action, was not necessarily theirs too.