Pluralism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The notion of pluralism emerged in England and the United States during the early twentieth century as a conceptual response to the increasingly associative character of society, the rise of governmental interventionism, the lobbying activities of organized groups, and the nascence of immigrant subcultures. Pluralism may be defined as both a descriptive, or positive, theory and a prescriptive, or normative, theory of individual participation by social association in the political process. Positively, the concept establishes (1) the existence of a plurality of interests and corresponding social groups which, as latent centres of power, may organize into associations; and (2) the transformation of this diversity into public policies by means of pressures exerted on each other and on governments. Normatively, the concept endorses the formation of interest groups as subjects of democratic politics and the sequence of group conflict, bargaining, and compromise that characterize the shaping of public policies, on the condition that basic rights and principles of justice remain respected and protected.

Two Early Varieties: Sociopolitical And Ethnocultural Pluralism

British Labour Party intellectual Harold J. Laski gave the name pluralism to the approach in 1915. He borrowed the term from the pragmatist philosophy of William James, who had used it to describe the character of a “distributive” reality, contrasting with monist ideas, particularly Georg W. F. Hegel’s, about a unified “block universe.” Likewise inspired by James’s philosophy, Horace M. Kallen introduced the term cultural pluralism into the American debate in 1924. Starting from the premise that unequal social resources will translate into unequal political resources, both Laski and Kallen advocated for reformist programs. Laski, in Grammar of Politics (1925), focused on diminishing the discretionary exercise of organizational power by economically powerful minorities. Kallen, in Culture and Democracy (1924), aimed at doing away with assimilationist pressures by culturally privileged majorities discriminating against immigrant ethnic groups.

Both agendas favored a politics of inclusion, in the sense that policy making in pluralist democracies should embrace, on an equitable basis, as many societal interests as possible. However, cultural pluralism should not be perceived as an exact analogue of political pluralism. The “identity-bearing communities” of the former contrast with the voluntary associations, or groups “by choice,” of the latter variety. A potential conflict exists here between group life and the development of individual capacities, which is absent from political pluralism, and which public policies need to take into account.

Both varieties were rediscovered—in substance, if not through explicit recourse—after World War II (1939–1945). American political scientist Robert Dahl revived Laski’s variety; Dahl, in his later works (Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, 1982; Democracy and its Critics, 1989), returned to pluralism and the democratizing dimension that the British thinker had first supplied. This included industrial self-government and an employee-controlled economy as the main prerequisite of a more participatory democracy.

A succession of theorists rediscovered Kallen’s notions; these theorists include Tariq Modood in Britain and Will Kymlicka in Canada, who both supported progressing toward multicultural acceptance, and avoiding both fragmentation and conformity. They promoted a plural state, informed by a politics of recognition, as the vehicle for achieving true multicultural citizenship.

Group Theory And Its Reemergence With The Cold War

Even before Laski and Kallen, Arthur F. Bentley had presented an approach in 1908 that essentially reduced human behavior to group action. If the immediate impact of his book The Process of Government (1908) was negligible, that situation changed after a considerable number of pressure group studies were published in the United States between World War I (1914–1918) and World War II, and after the New Deal had finally established organized labor and organized agriculture as political players alongside business in bargaining for political benefits. Bentley’s work was resuscitated in the 1950s by David B.Truman (The Governmental Process, 1951), Earl Latham (The Group Basis of Politics, 1952), and others who judged that organized interest groups made up the principal ingredient of present-day government. At the same time, against the backdrop of the cold war, the need was felt for a comprehensive theoretical perspective designed to explain and justify the political systems of the “free world,” meaning the United States and Western Europe. Stripped of most of its prescriptive implications, elevated to the status of an antitotalitarian public philosophy, the concept of pluralism seemed to serve the purpose perfectly. The 1950s to 1970s were the heyday of the academic and political discourse on pluralist democracy.

Both Truman and Dahl, even in his early works, conceded that political activity, including control of group leaders and access to government, was determined—to a considerable extent—by income, education, and status. Cross pressures, resulting from conflicting group loyalties, might lead to political apathy. Political resources were unequally distributed between business and labor. Capitalist democracies thus offered extensive opportunities for “pyramiding” such resources into structures of social power and political influence. In view of these limitations, beginning in the mid-1970s, two avenues for further theorizing suggested themselves.

Neocorporatism Versus Democratization Of Economy And Society

One avenue to structure social power and political influence was to unequivocally embrace “realistic” Schumpeterianism, fitting groups into a model of elitist democracy where governments would explicitly privilege the organizations of capital and labor as partners in policy making over associations with weaker political resources. Group leaders would manufacture consent for policies resulting from interest intermediation. Group members would consequently be controlled from above. Such liberal conceptions neocorporatism, as they came to be labelled, were particularly developed in, and focused on, Western Europe, with Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehm-bruch (Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, 1979) in the forefront of neocorporatist writers.

The second alternative, according to Dahl, consisted in raising the normative question how one might remedy the so-called defects of pluralism. Looking for possible solutions to what “authority in a good society” might be like, Dahl— ever more critical of institutional rigidity, social inequality, and political apathy—suggested a “radical” alternative to the present status quo. The large business corporation became the major target for structural, participatory reforms, aimed at enfranchising blue and white-collar employees.

Largely evolving separately from the debate on sociopolitical pluralism, discussions of ethnocultural pluralism have raised a number of thorny problems, not least among them the question of how to balance individual against group rights. Any determined movement in the direction of group rights might work to endanger individual autonomy, and bar individuals from opting out of their group by adopting ideas and practices running counter to their ethnocultural heritage. To be effective, policies of differentiated group treatment (e.g., affirmative action) may need to show an awareness of the connection between economic and cultural power. A more equitable distribution of social and political resources could, then, help individuals to make meaningful choices—including the choice to exit a group perceived as confining.

Put in a nutshell, what might be termed successive pluralist research has amounted to nothing less than a persistent inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy under changing socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions.

Bibliography:

Bellamy, Richard. Pluralism and Liberalism. London: Routledge, 1999.
Dahl, Robert A. Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
Eisfeld, Rainer, ed. Pluralism. Developments in the Theory and Practice of Democracy. Opladen, Ger.: Budrich-Verlag, 2006.
Merelman, Richard M. Pluralism at Yale. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Stears, Marc. Progressives, Pluralists and the Problems of the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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