The single most impressive fact in the twentieth century in Western society is the fateful combination of the widespread quest for community – in whatever form, moral, social, political, and the apparatus of political power that has become so vast in contemporary democratic states. The combination of search for community and existing political power seems to me today just as it did twenty years ago, a very dangerous combination. For, I argue in this book, the expansion of power feeds on the quest for community. All too often, power comes to resemble community, especially in times of convulsive social change and of widespread preoccupation with personal identity, moral certainty, and social meaning. This is, as I try to make clear throughout the book, the essential tragedy of modern man’s quest for community. Too often the quest has been through channels of power and revolution which have proved destructive of the prime source of human community. The structure of political power which came into being three centuries ago on the basis of its eradication of medieval forms of community has remained -has indeed become ever more –destructive of the contents of new forms of community.
I would, to the best of my ability, preclude any possible supposition on the reader’s part that there is in this book any lament for the old, any nostalgia for the village, parish, or other type of now largely erased form of social community of the past. Rereading the book today, I am frank in saying that I cannot find a nostalgic note in the entire book. It is not the revival of old communities that the book in a sense pleads for; it is the establishment of new forms: forms which are relevant to contemporary life and thought. What I have tried very hard to do, however, is to show that a structure of power capable of obliterating traditional types of community is capable of choking off new types of community. Hence the appeal, in the final pages of the book, for what I call a new laissez faire, one within which groups, associations, and communities would prosper and which would be, by their very vitality, effective barriers to further spread of military, centralized political power’. (@xxii)
The State as Revolution
The argument of this book is the most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state… The conflict between the central power of the political state and the whole set of functions and authorities contained in church, family, guild and local community has been, I believe, the main source of those dislocations of social structure and uprootings of status which lie behind the problem of community in our age. (@91)
The Contexts of Individuality
“All freedom,” wrote Lord Acton, “consists in radice in the preservation of an inner sphere exempt from State power.” The political mystic may boggle at this, but the proposition is, when amended to include any type of power, political or other, irrefutable. Both freedom and the desire for freedom are nourished within the realization of spiritual privacy and among privileges of personal decision. Apart from these, any structure of authority becomes almost limitless in its scope.
But to recognize the role of privacy and the importance of autonomies of choice is to be forced to recognize also the crucial problem of the contexts of privacy and personal choice. For man does not, cannot, live alone. His freedom is a social, not biologically derived process. We are to consider, as I have argued in this chapter, the indispensable role of the small social groups in society. It is the intimacy and security of each of these groups that provide the psychological context of individuality and the reinforcement of personal integrity. And it is the diversity of such groups that creates the possibility of the numerous cultural alternatives in a society. (@227)
The Contexts of Democracy
Freedom, it has been well said, lies in the interstices of authority. This is indeed, I believe, the real reconciliation of the demands of order and the demands of freedom. Authority, any society, any association, must have. It is simply the structure of the association. But the sole possibility
of personal freedom and cultural autonomy lies in the maintenance of a plurality of authorities in any society. Each of these may be enough as an individual system to provide a context of security for its members. So long as there are other and competing authorities, so long as man has even the theoretical possibility of removing himself from any that for him has grown oppressive and of placing himself within the framework of some other associative authority, it cannot be said that his freedom has suffered.
It is in these terms, I think, that the role of political government becomes clear in the democracies. Not to sterilize the normal authorities of associations, as does the total State through a preemption of function, a deprivation of authority, and a monopolization of allegiance, but to reinforce these associations, to provide, administratively, a means whereby the normal
competition of group differences is held within bounds and an environment of law within which no single authority, religious or economic, shall attain a repressive and monopolistic influence –this is the role of government in a democracy. (@249)
It will be recognized at once that planning and administration in terms of decentralization, localism, and associative autonomy is more difficult than administration carried on under the myth of territorial masses of discrete individual atoms. Not only does it go against the tendency of the whole history, of modern economic, educational, and political administration, but, on its own terms, it raises problems of organization that are immense. “It is obvious”, Karl Mannheim wrote “that the modern nature of social techniques puts a premium on centralization, but this is only true if our sole criterion is to be technical efficiencv. If, for various reasons, chiefly those concerned with the maintenance of personality, we deliberately wish to decentralize certain activities within certain limits, we can do so.” (@254)
There is the kind of State that seeks always to extend its administrative power and functions into all realms of society, always seeking a higher degree of centralization in the conduct of its operations, always tending toward a wider measure of politicization of social, economic and cultural life. It does not do this in the name of power, but of freedom – freedom from want, insecurity and minority tyranny It parades the symbols of progress, people, justice, welfare and devotion to the common man. It strives unceasingly to make its ends and purposes acceptable – through radio, newspaper and document – to even the lowliest of citizens. It builds up a sense of the absolute identity of State and society – nothing outside the State, everything within the State….
But there is also the kind of State that seeks, without sacrificing its legitimate sovereignty grounded in the will of the people, to maintain a pluralism of functions and loyalties in the lives of its people. It is a State that knows that the absorption of the institutional functions of an association, be it family, local community, or trade union, must soon be followed by the loss or weakening of psychological association. It is a state that that seeks to diversify and decentralize its own administrative operations and to relate these as closely as possible to the forms and spontaneous association which are the outgrowth of human needs and desires and which have relevance to the economic, educational and religious ends of a culture. It seeks cultural diversity, not uniformity. It does not make a fetish of either social order or personal adjustment, but it recognizes that the claims of freedom and cultural autonomy will never have recognition until the great majority of individuals in society have a sense of kinship, religion, occupation, profession and locality. It will not spurn the demands of human security but it will seek means by which such demands can be met through spontaneous association and creation rather than through bureaucratic rigidities of formal law and administration,
Either type of state may be labelled democratic and humanitarian. But the difference between the two types is infinitely greater than the differences between capitalism and socialism, or between monarchy and republic. The first type of state is inherently monolithic and absorptive and, however broad its base in the electorate and however nobly inspired its rulers, must always border upon despotism.
The second type of state is inherently pluralist and, whatever the intentions of its formal political leaders, its power will be limited by associations whose plurality of claims upon their members is the measure of their members’ freedom from any monopoly of power in society. (@262)