Sociology Plus
British Pluralism Definition
British pluralism is a tradition of political thought that offers a critique of the authority and structure of the modern state, arguing that power should be dispersed among the many associations of civil society rather than concentrated in a sovereign centre. It is distinct from American pluralism, which is chiefly a theory of political competition in which organised interest groups vie for, but never fully secure, a monopoly of state power.
Two Traditions of Pluralism
Although the civil societies of most modern nation-states are “pluralist” in a cultural sense — linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity — this says nothing about hierarchy, status, power, or how difference is managed politically. Arguments about political pluralism as a normative goal have come mainly from liberal democracies, with the British and American versions the two leading examples of the past century. American pluralism, associated above all with Robert A. Dahl, became the more widely debated during the Cold War; but British pluralism, with its call to break up and disperse state power, arguably offers more to those seeking to extend liberal democracy.
Origins and Key Thinkers
British pluralism first emerged between roughly 1880 and 1920 as a radical current among socialists, Christians, anarchists, and social liberals, partly in response to the rise of the labour and cooperative movements and the challenge of running a new mass democracy that was also the largest empire in history. Its leading figures included the legal historian F. W. Maitland, the philosopher and priest John Neville Figgis, and the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. Despite their differences, they shared an interest in law, political institutions, and the practical forms of democratic life.
Core Arguments
The pluralists were wary of the state’s capacity to become tyrannical even in a representative democracy, and were sceptical of the unchecked “will of the majority.” Drawing on the study of medieval law and civic association, Figgis argued that the state is derivative of the politics of association rather than its source: the state does not grant permission for social organisations to exist but must frame its laws so as to protect the rights of association against its own claims to represent abstractions such as “the people.” Group life, on this view, is intrinsic to individual welfare and prior to it. Cole and Laski both sought to show how state power could be devolved to reflect not only territorial but also functional needs, so that the diverse interests of citizens could be represented at every level of society.
Decline and Revival
As a movement, British pluralism collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s, undone partly by its own failed experiments in guild socialism and social credit, and partly by the Great Depression and the rise of communist, fascist, and social democratic ideologies. It remained obscure until the late twentieth century, when David Nicholls began to recover its arguments and, above all, the post-Marxist theorist Paul Q. Hirst restored it to prominence. After reissuing the early pluralists in The Pluralist Theory of the State (1989), Hirst developed a pluralist critique of representative democracy and then, in Associative Democracy (1994), set out a positive programme for political pluralism in modern societies. This revival left a promising research agenda — though, without a contemporary equivalent of the labour and cooperative associations that once sustained it, one still lacking the agents and institutions to carry it forward.