Introduction

Abstract

‘If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our “individuals” are becoming groups. No longer do we write “the Man versus the State”, we write “the Group versus the State” ’.¹ On the eve of the First World War, the British political scientist Ernest Barker, a sympathetic critic of the theory of political pluralism, thus eloquently captured something of the mood of his age. He was right to suggest that one achievement of pluralist theory had been to displace the two central categories of modern political thought — namely, the state and the individual. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the spectre of a bureaucratic Leviathan towering over an atomized society, the pluralists warned that individualism and statism were two sides of the same coin, and urged that only a revival of intermediary associations could circumvent both evils.