Abstract
Moral pluralism has dominated liberal political philosophy, as we saw in the work of Rawls and other political liberals, but political scientists who take a more empirical approach tend to define pluralities rather in terms of interests. Both of these varieties of pluralism are, as we have seen, derived from Mill, although neither takes identity groups seriously, except for nationality, to which they assign a special role. In this chapter I trace the development of interest pluralism as the heir to the post-Millian rejection of identity. Divorced from its role in shaping personality, group membership had come to be understood by the close of the nineteenth century as the collective and voluntary expression of the interests of existing individuals, already fundamentally constructed by national membership. In these terms, group membership invoked older concerns in political philosophy concerning the status and power of factional interests.
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Notes
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 335;
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), 251–63.
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
See e.g.: Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Macmillan, 1962), ch. 6.
This suggests that the persistence of the underlying liberal concept of the person as infinite consumer, despite what Macpherson has called the developmental democracy phase of the nineteenth century, might be due not only to the liberal commitment to capitalist economic relations, as Macpherson suggests, but also to the simultaneous development of the idea of class interest. This latter idea was paradoxically, of course, part of the liberal critique of unrestrained capitalism. See C.B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 32–3.
Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
Harold J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 22.
Harold J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 275.
Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 19. While in his early writings Laski saw the state as simply one association among many, he came in his later work to recognize it as a uniquely compulsory organization that assumes the special role of moderating the activities of associations to ensure equality between citizens. In Grammar of Politics, although still an organization of individual wills, the state has become the “fundamental instrument of society” or “the source of ultimate reference.” See Laski, Grammar of Politics, 39, 34. The task of the state is to coordinate functions, to balance competing interests, and to satisfy the common needs of men and women as citizens.
Harold J. Laski, The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), 67–8.
In The Foundations of Sovereignty, Laski argues for the real corporate personality of the group—that it has a “mind” of its own, distinct from its members. In later work, notably the Grammar, he moves away from this. See Bernard Zylstra, From Pluralism to Collectivism (Assen: van Gorcum, 1968), 54.
Harold J. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (New York: Viking Press, 1935), 95.
Henry Mayer Magid, English Political Pluralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 35.
G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory (New York: Stokes, 1920), 189.
G.D.H. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth (London: Swarthmore Press, 1918), 57.
G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920), 25.
Paul Q. Hirst (ed.), The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1989), 40–1.
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 35.
John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 106. Gunnell discusses at length the enthusiastic reception of English pluralism in American political theory circles during the 1920s.
The most important texts were: David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), and
Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).
Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 233.
Marilyn Friedman makes a similar distinction between communities of choice and those she terms “communities of place,” into which persons are born. She also describes the complex interrelationship between the two forms of membership, and concludes that while chosen communities help to define individuals, most people are probably ineradicably constituted by their membership in communities of place. See Marilyn Friedman, “Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, ed. Shlomo Avineri and Avner De-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118.
See e.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992).
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© 2005 Katherine Smits
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Smits, K. (2005). Interest Pluralisms and the Erasure of Social Identity. In: Reconstructing Post-Nationalist Liberal Pluralism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980168_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980168_4
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