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Title: The State and Society Author: Colin Ward Date: February 19, 1962 Language: en Topics: the State, society Source: Retrieved on 21st September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/state-society Notes: This is the text of a lecture given to the Cole Society (Oxford University Sociology Society) at All Souls, on February 19th.
When G. D. H. Cole died, I remember being amazed as I read the tributes
in the newspapers from people like Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson
alleging that their socialism was learned from him here, for it had
always seemed to me that his socialism was of an entirely different
character from that of the politicians of the Labour Party. Among his
obituarists, it was left to a dissident Jugoslav communist, Vladimir
Dedijer, to point out what this difference was; remarking on his
discovery that Cole “rejected the idea of the continued supremacy of the
Slate” and believed that “it was destined to disappear.”
For Cole, as for the anarchist philosophers from Godwin onward, I he
distinction between society and the state was the beginning of wisdom,
and in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Social and Political Theory
in this university, he remarked that “I am well aware that it is part of
the traditional climate not only of Oxford, but of academic teaching and
thinking in Great Britain, to make the State the point of focus for the
consideration of men in their social relations”, and went on to declare
his belief that “Our century requires not a merely Political Theory,
with the State as its central problem, but a wider Social Theory within
which these concepts and relations can find their appropriate place.”
For him this demanded a “pluralism” which recognises the positive value
of the diversity of social relationships, and which repudiates what he
called “the Idealist notion that all values are ultimately aspects of a
single value, which must therefore find embodiment in a universal
institution, and not in the individual beings who alone have, in truth,
the capacity to think, to feel and to believe, and singly or in
association, to express their thoughts, feelings and beliefs in actions
which further or obstruct well-being — their own and others.”
This particular rejection of the Idealist theory of the State was voiced
in 1945, the year when the States that liquidated Hiroshima and the
State that liquidated the Kulaks celebrated their victory over the State
that liquidated the Jews. If you think that people’s personal
philosophies are a response to the experience of their own generation,
you would have expected that year, of all years, to have initiated a
period in which vast numbers of people, recoiling from this object
lesson in the nature of the state— all states— would have begun to
withdraw their allegiance from their respective states, or at least to
cease to identify themselves with the states which demanded their
allegiance.
But the wave of rejection of the grand, all-embracing, and ultimately
lethal political theories has been very largely a movement of ...
professors. You have only to think of the strands contributed to the
rejecting of political messianism and historical determinism by Cole’s
successor, Professor Berlin, or by Professors Popper, Oakshott and
Talmon. It has come from the right and the centre, and to a lesser
extent from the left, but it does not seem to have been accompanied by a
new theory of society and the state and of the relationship between
them.
In the loose, and no doubt, erroneous way in which we attach currents of
thought to particular decades, we can characterise the nineteen-fifties
as the period of the attack on messianic political theories and on
“ideologies”, and we can note how it coincided with that period in the
early fifties when the most important topic discussed among the
intelligentsia was the social make-believe of U and non-U, while a new
generation was lamenting that there were no longer any causes to get
worked up about. Then suddenly the climate changed and thinking people
found themselves face to face with those ultimate questions of social
philosophy on which the professors had given us such tantalising hints.
Suez, Hungary, the Bomb, the dethronement of Stalinism, must have made
millions of people in both East and West ask themselves those questions
which resolve themselves in the question “To whom do I owe allegiance,
and why?”
Do I belong to myself or to somebody else, or something else? Are my
social obligations to the many informal and overlapping social groups to
which I adhere of my own volition and can withdraw from if I wish, or to
an entity which I have not joined, and which assumes the existence of a
contract to which I have not put my hand? Are my loyalties to society or
to the state?
These are not academic questions. They are being answered today by the
state in its Central Criminal Court, where it is arraigning those
members of the Committee of 100 who have dared to assert, through
disobedience, that their loyalties lie elsewhere.
“We have to start out” declared Cole in 1945 “not from the contrasted
ideas of the atomised individual and of the State, but from man in all
his complex groupings and relations, partially embodied in social
institutions of many sorts and kinds, never in balanced equilibrium, but
always changing, so that the pattern of loyalties and of social
behaviour changes with them.” This approach which is both pluralistic
and sociological in its orientation, explains the sympathy which Cole
felt for anarchists like Kropotkin, who also sought “the most complete
development of individuality combined with the highest degree of
voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible fields, for
all imaginable purposes ... ever modified associations which carry in
themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new
forms which answer best the multiple aspirations of all.”
Cole’s “pluralism” had its ancestry, I believe/partly in the eclectic
and libertarian tradition that runs through English socialism, and
partly from an academic tradition through Maitland from Gierke and those
early German sociologists who reacted against German idealistic
philosophy. It was echoed recently by Professor Edward Shils, in
expressing his regret that what tie calls the “pluralistic theory” has
“over the years degenerated into a figment of antiquated syllabi of
University courses in Government and Political Science.” He thinks that
it is ready for “a new and better life” because of its relevance to the
needs of the “new” nations of Africa and Asia, since they are said to
lack what Gunnar Myrdal calls an infra-structure which is defined as
“the complex network of civic and interest organisations, co-operative
societies, independent local authorities, trade unions, trade
associations, autonomous universities, professional bodies, citizen’s
associations for civic purposes and philosophic groups, through which a
participation more effective than that afforded by the usual
institutions of representative government could be achieved.”
Well, I don’t know why pluralism (and the infra-structure it implies)
should be confined to the trunk of cast-off political clothes which we
hope might come in handy for our poor relations in the “new” nations. I
want some more effective infra-structure here, and I want a more
effective participation too, and like Myrdal, I see it arising from a
strengthening of society at the expense of the state. When we look at
the powerlessness of the individual and the small face-to-face group in
the world today, and ask ourselves why they are powerless we answer, not
merely that they are weak because of the vast central agglomerations of
power (which is obvious), but that they are weak because they have
surrendered their power to the state. It is as though every individual
possessed a certain quantity of power, but that by default, negligence,
or thoughtless and unimaginative habit, he had allowed some-one else to
pick it up, rather than use it himself for his own purposes.
The German anarchist Gustav Landauer made a profound and simple
contribution to the analysis of the state and society in one sentence:
“The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but
is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently.” (This is a refinement of the idea I have just
suggested of personal quotas lying around waiting to be used and since
we haven’t the initiative to use them ourselves, being adopted by the
state so that a power vacuum is avoided). It is we and not an abstract
outside entity, Landauer implies, who behave in one way or the other,
state-wise or society-wise, politically or socially.
Landauer’s friend and executor, Martin Buber, in his essay Society mid
the State begins with an observation of the American sociologist Robert
Maclver that “to identify the social with the political is to be guilty
of the grossest of all confusions, which completely bars any
understanding of either society or the state.” And he goes on to trace
through philosophers from Plato to Bertrand Russell the confusion
between the social and the political. The political principle, for
Buber, is characterised by power, authority, hierarchy, dominion. The
social principle he sees wherever men link themselves in an association
based on a common need or a common interest.
What is it, he asks, that gives the political principle its ascendancy?
And he answers, “The fact that every people feels itself threatened by
the others gives the State its definite unifying power; it depends upon
the instinct of self preservation of society itself; the latent external
crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises. A permanent
state oi true, positive and creative peace between the peoples would
greatly diminish the supremacy of the political principle over the
social.”
“All forms of government” Buber goes on, “have this in common: each
possesses more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact,
this excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we
understand by political power. The measure of this excess, which cannot
of course be computed precisely, represents the exact difference between
administration and government.” He calls the excess the “political
surplus” and observes that “It’s justification derives from the external
and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis beween nations
and within every nation. The political principle is always stronger in
relation to the social principle than the given conditions require. The
result is a continuous diminution in social spontaneity.” The conflict
between these two principles, dominion and free association as Gierke
called them, rajniti and lokniti as Jayaprakash Narayan calls them, is a
permanent aspect of the human condition. “The movement of opposition
between the State and society” said Lorenz von Stein, “is the content of
the whole history of all peoples.” Or as Kropotkin put it in Modern
Science and Anarchism “Throughout the history of our civilisation, two
traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman
tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the
federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian
tradition.”
There is an inverse correlation between the two: the strength of one is
the weakness of the other. If we want to strengthen society we must
weaken the state. Totalitarians of all kinds realise this; which is why
they invariably seek to destroy those social institutions which they
cannot dominate.
Shorn of the metaphysics with which politicians and philosophers have
enveloped it, the state can be defined as a political mechanism using
force, and to the sociologist it is one amongst many forms of social
organisation. It is however “distinguished from all other associations
by its exclusive investment with the final power of coercion” (Mclver
and Page: Society). And against whom is this final power directed? It is
directed at the enemy without, but it is aimed at the subject society
within.
This is why Buber declares that it is the maintenance of the latent
external crisis that enables the state to get the upper hand in internal
crises. Is this a conscious procedure? Is it simply that wicked men
control the state? Or is it a fundamental characteristic of the state as
an institution? It was because, when she wrote her Reflections on War,
Simone Weil drew this final conclusion, that she declared “The great
error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists
have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics,
when it is especially an act of interior politics, and the most
atrocious act of all.” For just as Marx found that in the era of
unrestrained capitalism, competition between employers, knowing no other
weapon than the exploitation of the workers, was transformed into a
struggle of each employer against his own workmen, and ultimately of the
entire employing class against their employees, so the State uses war
and the threat of war as a weapon against its own population. “Since the
directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by
sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death — the war of
one State against another State resolves itself into a war of the State
and the military apparatus against its own people.”
It doesn’t look like this of course, if you are part of the directing
apparatus, calculating what proportion of the population you can afford
to lose in a nuclear war just as the American government and indeed all
the governments of the Great Powers are calculating. But it does look
like this if you are a part of the expendable population — unless you
identity your own unimportant carcase with the State apparatus — as
millions do..
In the 19^(th) century T. H. Green avowed that war is the expression of
the “imperfect” state, but he was wrong. War is the health of the state,
it is its “finest hour”, it expresses its most perfect form. This is why
the weakening of the state, the progressive development of its
imperfections is a social necessity. The strengthening of other
loyalties, of alternative foci of power, of different modes of human
behaviour, is an essential for survival. In the 20^(th) century,
unreliability, disobedience and subversion are the characteristics of
responsible citizenship in society.