From a long essay reacting to Paul Hirst’s ideas on Associative Democracy, which we excerpted yesterday.

Rosemary Bechler:

“How could such a competition for community standards be contained and the conflict of competing lifestyle groups, mitigated? The only way to contain the conflicts arising from cultural heterogeneity, he thought, is to extend the principle of pluralism from belief to conduct.

The state should become only one governing body among many, strictly neutral between the sects, a limited rather than an omnicompetent body. It would be the primary source of such essential, binding rules as those governing non-violence and rights of associational exit and entry. But it would only have primacy in its specific function of securing ‘the freedom of individuals in respect of associations and the rights of associations with respect to each other.’

A pluralist state that had devolved governance through the forms of cooperation and competition available to associations in this way, publicly funded according to a common formula, could maximise opposition to extremists who use the freedom of political association to promote their own cause, while minimising the stake of competing for political power. Groups would have to give up trying to shape the laws that apply to all, to suit their beliefs alone. They would exchange the ultimately futile struggle for dominance of the political agenda for the practise of governing themselves and competing to realise their beliefs about conduct. The monocultural echoing chamber of the national media would disappear as the plethora of constituencies, large and small, moderate and extremist, were cut down to whatever size they are. As he put it, adding cheerfully that this formulation should at least appeal to Christians, who believe in Original Sin, “Power divided and limited reduces the damage that evil people can do if they acquire it, and also their incentive to do so… “

The alternative is stark. The liberal state, which claims to respect the rights of the individuals, must be increasingly engaged in undermining those rights by acting against the institutions where individuals pursue their common life. This was the second, equally important gain, that it could stem the turn towards totalitarianism of a state ever-more engaged in enforcing legal and cultural homogeneity.

For Hirst instead, a “truly plural society” can only flourish where it is recognised, “that democratic governance does not consist just in the powers of citizen election or majority decision, but in the continuous flow of information between the governors and the governed, whereby the former seek the consent and cooperation of the latter.” His associations are not isolated Burkean little platoons designed for keeping people quiet and bound into the hierarchy, where a well-ordered family is a good dress rehearsal for revering one’s monarch. The hugely various forms of horizontal cooperation and competition that he pursues in Associative Democracy across local and regional levels, buttressed by an activist, interventionist but pluralist state, have one thing in common – they educate through the voluntary encounter with others, thereby increasing the capacity for self-governance of the people involved. Citizens learn, through negotiation, how to live side by side. Even the least active have far more sway than citizens living in liberal democracies today, both in terms of voice and – more crucially – in terms of exit.

This negotiation is what democratic citizenship is, and its skills emerge from the promotion of choice through competition.

For Hirst, self-governance is grounded in voluntary, and cooperative initiatives: and it is part of an attempt to build something, not to prevent others from building something different. It is only this liberty, exercised in our own interest, which teaches us that, “We cannot claim liberty for ourselves while at the same time denying it to others.” Hirst knew that it was essential to find new sources of social solidarity: “Solidarity” he said,” cannot be taken as a given, it has to be built up from active cooperation in more complexly-divided and more individuated populations.” Because he took these sophisticated and individuated populations seriously for who they were, he put empowerment, “rather than the illusory hope of equality of outcomes as the means to the goal of social justice” at the core of his vision.

The left who tend to make an exception of themselves when it comes to Hirst’s opening premise that there cannot be one overarching judge imposing his or her view of the good life on any complex and free society, balk at this decision. But for his part, Hirst was convinced that the gains of such a move were considerable (even for the left).

Associationalism might have a chance precisely because this “vital supplement to existing institutions” could give “a real stake in society” to “a constituency that goes way beyond the left”. In his discussion of religious pluralism he listed, for example, “radical advocates of multicultural policies, religious conservatives and many secular liberals” i.e. nearly all of those most actively concerned with the relationship between religion and the state, as all expressing “strong dissatisfactions with the existing state of affairs.” All of these, he reasoned, not to mention the many as yet relatively untouched by such concerns, could only benefit from the opportunity given them by associative democracy to practise what one preaches.

Hirst was quite scathing about “social democratic conservatives wedded to the nation state” for whom associationalism was “too radical”. But we have to remember, as Graham Smith reminds us in his cogent contribution to Revisiting Associative Democracy, that Hirst also gave the state a particularly significant role in this gradualist project of reform, which would not become widespread, “unless it has a state at least not actively hostile.” It is this balancing act or calculation regarding the state that he left us to consider, a consideration I believe germane to the future of democracy.”