We return to Colin Ward through the work of Martin Buber, in parallel essays addressing the nature of and the relation between the State and Society. For both authors, the relation between the two – in Buber’s terms, the relation between the “political principle of government” and the “social principle of administration” – is one of permanent tension; a tension between centralising sovereign authority and spontaneous association, with the growth of one paid for by the diminishing of the other.
Political power, or sovereignty, rests in turn on the distinction between friend and foe (Carl Schmitt), a distinction that marks both the relation with external and foreign enemies. Authoritarianism and war are thus permanent possibilities, if not features of, the State. The weakening of the State and its violence therefore depend upon the freeing up of and creation of the plurality of associative-social communities. And it is amidst the later that one can begin to see and imagine anarchy and it is from this same perspective that one can perceive the danger of “state” inspired instruments of insurrection by threatening anarchy with new forms of supposedly “radical”, or even, “anarchist” sovereignty.
To talk of an anarchist “sovereignty” may appear paradoxical – if by anarchism is understood the exclusion or destruction of all sovereign or state power. But if sovereignty is inevitably expressed in the “political principle of government” and if the “political” cannot be altogether subsumed by “social administration”, then must not anarchists confront the political in more creative ways than simply saying that they are opposed to it? Can political forms be read off or created from forms of “social administration”? And is any such political form stable given the ever changing nature of social relations? In other words, what does or should an anarchist politics amount to?
Society and the State (1951)
Martin Buber
(Source: Martin Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, Translated from the German and edited by Maurice Friedman, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1957)
In Bertrand Russell’s book on Power, which appeared late in 1938 – the author calls it a ‘new social analysis’ – power is defined as ‘the fundamental concept in social science, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics’. This bold concept on the part of a distinguished logician, which reminds us of Nietzsche’s doctrine that he attacked so vigorously, is a typical example of the confusion between the social principle and the political principle even in our time, one hundred years after the rise of scientific sociology. It has long been recognized that all social structures have a certain measure of power, authority, and dominion, without which they could not exist; in none of the non-political structures, however, is this the essential element. But it is inherent in all social structures that men either find themselves already linked with one another in an association based on a common need or a common interest, or that they band themselves together for such a purpose, whether in an existing or a newly-formed society. The primary element must not be superseded by the secondary element – association by subordination, fellowship by domination or, schematically speaking, the horizontal structure by the vertical. The American political scientist, Maclver, has rightly said 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.’
The defective differentiation between the social and the political principles, upon which the more or less problematical cooperation of all human group-existence rests, goes back to very ancient times. A classic example of mistaking the one principle for the other, though, to be sure, of a very different kind, is the well-known chapter in the Politeia, where Plato begins by tracing the origin of the polis directly from the primæval social fact of division of labour, and then, almost imperceptibly, goes on to include among the essential occupations that of the rulers, so that we suddenly find the population split up into two pre-eminently political sections: those who give orders and those who obey them; rulers and ruled; those who possess the instruments of coercion and those who are subject to them – all this under the harmless guise of the mere division of labour. We should take careful note of what Plato does here. He has his Socrates set his interlocutors the task of ‘seeing with their mind’s eye a polis in the making’. The readers of this dialogue naturally thought in terms of the contemporary Athens as it had emerged from the reforms of Kleisthenes; in other words, in terms of a society of free citizens who were hardly aware of the difference between the rulers and the ruled because of the constant interchange between the former and the latter within the citizenry, whereby the constituents of today became the representatives of tomorrow; and because, furthermore, the fact that the officials could be elected and dismissed obviated any feeling that an irksome bureaucracy might arise. This community, in which a firm foundation of slavery made it theoretically possible for every citizen to participate in the business of the Council while engaged in his private concerns, could, indeed, be deduced from an evolution of the division of labour – an evolution in which the vocation of politics was not specialized. However, the class or rather the caste of the guardians which Plato introduces into this discussion comes not within the scope of the historical polis but of that of his Utopia, where this caste, which has been represented to us as one vocation among others, actually stands in a political relationship to the rest of the community: that of a ruling society over against a society of the ruled. The term ‘society’ and not a mere ‘group’ is used here advisedly inasmuch as, in liberating its members from private property and private marriage, Plato raises it above the general community and constitutes it as a separate society.
This confusion of the social principle with the political is typical of by far the greater part of the thinking of ancient times. There is no tendency whatever towards an ideological distinction between political and non-political social structures in most of the ancient empires, obviously because the latter were allowed no independent existence or development of any kind. The one exception in this respect is ancient China, where two civilizations existed side by side: the State-urban civilization, which was centred in the royal court and based on the army, the bureaucracy and the litterati; and the rural civilization, which was based solely on the village community. The former was a political-historical civilization in every respect, while the latter was absolutely unhistorical, being determined solely by the unchanging natural rhythm of the seasons and of the human generations, that is to say, a social civilization in the strictest sense of the term. It was the latter civilization, relatively self-sufficient and enclosed within itself, that served as the foundation for Lao-tse’s doctrine. That doctrine interposed between the individual and the state (the single States which together constituted the empire) two purely social structures, namely the home and the community. In the Confucian system, which was rooted in the urban civilization, there remained, however, only one of these two social structures – the home, the family which, contrary to its status in the village, was in its urban form completely integrated into the State.
A similar ideological development took place in classical antiquity, but from very different causes. There – at all events in the polis where, in the main, discursive thought was evolved, that is to say, in that of Athens – the well-developed social principle had penetrated so deeply into political life and merged with it so completely that while, on the one hand, the Demos was almost like a social gathering, on the other the family receded into the background of social life, and corporate existence, however firmly entrenched, nowhere attained genuine autonomy. In this connection, as we have already seen in Plato’s thinking, no strictly ideological distinction was drawn between the State and the unions, which were not part of the State: The State, the polis, so completely coincided with society, or the community, the koinonia, that asocial persons, the dyskoinoetoi, were regarded as the antithesis of the friends of the State, the philopolides, as though it were not possible for a man to be social and yet not political in his thinking. It was only with the decline of the polis, when it was fast disintegrating from within and servitude loomed on the historical horizon without, that the thinking finally drew a distinction between the two principles. Two hundred years after Lao-tse, Aristotle interposed the family and the community – by which term he, too, meant primarily the rural community – between the State and the individual; and to the community were joined various kinds of associations. But of the social category, that of the koinonia, he had only the most general notion, so that he could describe the State as a certain kind of koinonia though, indeed, one transcending and comprehending all the others, while all the others are regarded as mere preliminary stages to this society on the one hand, and mere means towards the ends of the State on the other. Thus, even here, no genuine categorical distinction between the social and the political principle can be drawn; and even though Aristotle in one passage calls man a zoonkoinonikon and in another a zoon politikon, both terms mean the same thing. And though Aristotle explicitly tells us that man was not created solely for the political community but also for the home, he sees in the polis the consummation of the koinonia, in which – and in which alone – men’s co-existence in a community has any purpose and significance. In fact, the polis is called the koinonia of all the particular koinonias within which all families and communities and societies and associations of all kinds band themselves together. Aristotle’s idea of the State is identical here with ours of society, that is to say, a unit comprehending all the different associations within a specific national entity. Such an idea of the State bars any approach to a strict and consistent differentiation and separation between the social and the political principles. Incidentally, it is noteworthy that of all the unions which Aristotle recognizes as special forms of the koinonia, he attaches significance to the family alone and, unlike Plato, recognizes it as the primæval cell in the process of the division of labour. In his view, the family alone is the foundation of the State, and he does not attach any permanent importance to the rural community, since it is destined to be absorbed in the polis, while he considers the associations important only because they have a place within the State. The restrictive process of thought, which was evolved from Lao-tse down to Confucius and from which all social structures that might successfully have resisted absorption by the centralizing State are excluded, here comes to full flower in the thinking of a single philosopher.
The post-Aristotelian thought of ancient times did not remedy this defect in the ideologial approach to the principles in question. Even the apparently more precise Latin idea which, for the ‘collectivity’ (koinonia) substituted ‘society’ (societas), did not serve the purpose. True, in those days there was no such thing as a society of citizens in the modern sense of an all-inclusive society existing side by side with the State and vis-a-vis the State; but sociality did exist in all its forms, which manifested itself in all the large and small associations; and the same principle of cooperation predominated in all of them, a principle which enters into all kinds of alliances with the political principle, but nevertheless possesses a specific reality of its own which strives for recognition. Even the stoa, which went farthest in this direction, did not explicitly recognize the social principle. In the last days of the stoa Marcus Aurelius did, indeed, give the Aristotelian definition a social stamp by saying that ‘We are born to cooperate’; but what was not achieved was just that which must be required of any ideological specification if it is to achieve the character of genuine apperception, namely, the search for, description and interpretation of those elements of reality which correspond to the newly-acquired specific idea. The new concept of society loses concreteness because it is deprived of its limitations; this occurs in the most sublime manner in that the ideal of universal humanism is formulated without any indication being given as to how it is to be realized. Whether the Stoic speaks in the new terms of a society of the human race (societas generis humani) or in the old terms of a megalopolis, it amounts to the same thing: a high-souled idea emerges to confront reality but cannot find a womb from which, to propagate a living creature because it has been stripped of corporeality. Plato’s State which, though directed against the polis, was nevertheless derived from it, actually was a structure, though it existed only in thought. Zenon’s slogan – ‘Only one way of life and only one political regime’ – as proclaimed a century later, was only a fine sentiment; and finally so little remained of it that Cicero could envisage the Roman Empire as the fulfilment of cosmopolitanism. Incidentally, there is no practicable universalism – universalism that is realizable, though with the utmost effort – except that adumbrated by the prophets of Israel, who proposed not to abolish national societies together with their forms of organization, but rather to heal and perfect them, and thereby to pave the way for their amalgamation.
Medieval Christianity adopted the fundamental concept of the Stoic universalism in a Christianized form, in that at one time it designated the unified humanity to be striven for as a res publica generis humani, a world State, and at another as an ecclesia universalis, a universal church. Nevertheless, the social principle as such is expressed now and then in this connection in a purer form than was ever conceived by the Stoics. Thus, for example, William of Occam, the great fourteenth-century thinker whose theory of intuition gave the quietus to scholasticism, said: ‘The whole human race is one people; the collectivity of all mortal men is a single community of those who wish for communion with one another.’ Every particular association is recognized by him as a part of this community. In general, however, medieval thought did not go beyond Aristotle’s amalgamation of the social with the political. The flourishing corporations of the period were, indeed, taken into account in the legal ideology; but no sociological recognition of the non-political associations as such was evolved. On the contrary: there was a growing tendency to include them, in theory, within the State and, in practice, to subject all of them to it; or, as the legal historian Gierke put it: ‘Exclusive representation of all community life by the State.’
It was only in the late Renaissance that thinking reached the point of a vigorous stand in defence of the rights of the non-political unions in relation to the State. The most vigorous expression of this point of view is to be found in the book entitled Politics by the German jurist Althusius (1603). Even there these bodies do not stand between the individual and the all-inclusive society – this special concept is still lacking – but between the individual and the State as in Aristotle’s concept. Hence no difference in kind is recognized between the associations and the State, except that each and every one of the farmers enjoys relative autonomy, while the State possesses exclusive sovereignty. Nevertheless, the State is faced by an ‘insurmountable barrier’, (as Gierke phrases it) in relation to the unions; in other words, the State may not infringe upon the special rights of these social unions. Society is not yet, indeed, conceived as such in this view, but it is constituted in its idea; it is not society, but the State under its name, which appears as the ‘immortal and eternal society,’ as Grotius formulated it, or under its own name as a ‘composite society,’ in the words of Althusius – the association of associations. But the very fact that all of them are viewed as being linked with one another was in itself something definitely new in sociological thought. This new idea was suppressed for two hundred years -by the idea of the unlimited power of the State, which took on a more logically consistent form than ever before.[1]
In Hobbes’ system of thought the intermediate formations are missing as a matter of principle, since he recognizes no stages precedent to the establishment of the State, in which the unorganized individuals unite for fear that otherwise they will destroy one another. Such a unification, which is achieved by means of the subjection of the wills of all the individuals to the will of a single person or a single assembly, is designated by Hobbes in his book De Cive as civitas sive societas civilis. Here, for the first time as far as I am aware, we have in the writings of a modern thinker the widely disseminated idea of the ‘civil society, which we find again late in the seventeenth century in Locke’s essays, in the eighteenth century in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Justice and in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, and which recurs, in the nineteenth century, in the philosophy of Hegel and the sociology of Lorenz von Stein, as the antithesis to the State. In Hobbes’ view, civil society is entirely identical with the State. Hobbes, too, is cognizant of the social principle in the form of free contracts between individuals for the recognition and preservation of the rights of ownership; he is aware of its existence, and tolerates it in the above sense because he regards the political ‘Leviathan’ as still incomplete. But the German sociologist Tönnies doubtless apprehends Hobbes’ ultimate meaning when he interprets his views in the following terms: ‘The State would carry out its idea to perfection if it controlled all the activities of its citizens, if all wills were directed in harmony with a single supreme will. So long as this has not come to pass, society still exists within the State.’ In other words, when the State finally becomes complete, it will annihilate the last vestige of society. Such a complete State has been approximated in a considerable degree in our own time by that known as the totalitarian type.
The age of Hobbes saw the rise of the Third Estate, which attempted to supersede the double society of the Middle Ages by a unitary society which did not, however, extend beyond its own bounds and which evoked a liberal attitude on the part of the State towards the individual, but an increasingly illiberal attitude on its part towards associations. The State was prepared to tolerate only a pulverized, structureless society, just as modern industrial capitalism at first tolerated only individuals without the right of association. A little over a century after the appearance of the ‘Leviathan’, the physiocrat Turgot declared in the Encyclopædia (in an article entitled ‘Fondations’): ‘The citizens have rights, rights sacred for the actual body of society (by which he meant nothing else but the State); they have an existence independent of it; they are its essential elements … but the particular bodies do not exist in their own right and for their own sake. They have been constituted solely for the sake of society, and they must cease to exist as soon as their usefulness is at an end.’ Turgot does not, however, include among his ‘particular bodies’ all the free associations, some of which he lauds in the course of that same article. Yet only five years later Rousseau wrote the contrary in his Contrat Social where, in his fundamental concept, the volonté général, the social and political principles are again confused in the most dubious manner, though he was well able to distinguish between the social contract and the establishment of a State in a legal manner: ‘So that the common will may be manifested, there must be no partial associations within the State.’ In other words, there may not exist within the State any society which is constituted of various large and small associations; that is to say, a society with a truly social structure, in which the diversified spontaneous contacts of individuals for common purposes of co-operation and co-existence, i.e. the vital essence of society are represented. But if ‘partial societies’ already exist, Rousseau goes on to say, ‘their number should be increased and inequalities prevented.’ In other words, if it proves impossible to suppress the formation of free associations, their scope should be restricted by creating other associations determined entirely by the purposes and planning of the State; moreover, care must be taken that the free societies should never become stronger than the unfree ones.
In general, the French Revolution could content itself with carrying out the first of these two precepts, especially since it had abolished the right of association (an attempt in that direction had already been made under Louis XVI) because an ‘absolutely free State should not tolerate corporations in its midst’ (resolution of the Constitutional Assembly, August 1791). On the other hand, both of Rousseau’s methods were applied jointly in a large measure during the Russian Revolution.
Only after a fully-fledged bourgeoisie had sprung from the loins of the French Revolution did it become possible to attempt to set the State and Society, as such, over against one another. The first two attempts in this direction were far apart in every respect.
The first of the two attempts was suggested by Saint-Simon. The more or less chimerical plans for reforms of this highly ingenious dilettante were based, in essence, on an accurate and important distinction between two modes of leadership, namely,
social leadership, or Administration, and political leadership, or Government. Saint-Simon did not adequately define these types of leadership, but we shall convey his meaning correctly if we say that administrative powers are limited by the technical requirements implicit in the specific conditions and functions of the leadership, while governmental powers are limited, at any given time, solely by the relation between the power of government and that of other factors. Society – by which Saint-Simon means the subject of economic and cultural production – administers, in so far as it is organized; but the State governs. Saint-Simon’s proposal to divide the conduct of the State – that is to say, to entrust the conduct of the national affairs to a select group of men, capable and well versed in the sphere of social production, thereby giving it an administrative character, while leaving to the political authorities only the responsibility for the defence and security of the country – this proposal need not concern us here. But it is worth-while quoting what Saint-Simon said in this connection: ‘The nation went into the revolution to be governed less; but it achieved nothing except to be governed more than ever.’
The other fundamental division between the social and the political principle, that of Hegel, is antithetical to Saint-Simon’s in its evaluation of the two. But its very purpose is different. Unlike Saint-Simon, Hegel compares not two forms of leadership with one another, but civil society in general with the State in general. The two factors are not, however, placed in polar opposition: society stands between the family and the State, between a relative whole and unity and an absolute whole and unity, as an incomplete and disunited multiformity, between form and form as something formless, an offspring of the modern world, an aggregation of individuals in which each is an end in himself and concerned with nothing else whatsoever; and all of them work together only because each uses the others as a means towards his own ends; and the groups and classes composed of individuals obsessed with their own ends get into conflicts which society, by its very nature, is unable to resolve: such power inheres in the State alone, because it prevails over the ‘waves of Passion’ by means of the ‘Reason that illumines them’. The State is the ‘moderator of social misery’ because its substance is not a private matter like that of society, but generality and unity, while its foundation is ‘the force of Reason manifesting itself as will’. Such is the result of the most unequivocal distinction ever made between the two principles – a glorification of the State that reminds us of Hobbes. Hegel’s critical portrait of society lacks everything that is still to be found in our own age, such as social consciousness, solidarity, mutual aid, loyal comradeship, spirited enthusiasms for a common enterprise; there is no trace whatever of creative social spontaneity which, though it is not concentrated like the power of the State, nevertheless exists in numerous single collective phenomena and, within the social sphere, very quietly counterbalances the conflicting forces. On the other hand, a State is seen here which we know, not from world history, but only from Hegel’s system. He tells us, indeed, that in pondering the idea of the State we must not have any particular State in mind, but that ‘the idea, this true God, must be considered for itself’. A given historical State exists, so says Hegel, ‘in the world, hence in the sphere of arbitrariness, accident and error’. And just as a cripple is a living man for all that, ‘the affirmative, life, exists’ in spite of the defect; and it is this ‘affirmative’ which is the essential thing here. But if we apply this to society as well, the whole picture will be completely changed.
With Saint-Simon and Hegel we find ourselves on the threshold of modern sociology. But the society known to this sociology has become something different, namely, the society of the modern class struggle. Two men at that time undertook, each after his own fashion, to create a synthesis between Hegel and Saint-Simon. One was Lorenz von Stein, the founder of scientific sociology, and the other Karl Marx, the father of scientific socialism. The thinking of both men was so deeply rooted in the new situation that, on the crucial issue of the relationship between the social and the political principle, they were unable to take over the heritage either of Saint-Simon or of Hegel. Stein, who was a disciple of Saint-Simon’s, could not share his belief that control of the State should be taken over by the leaders of social production because he regarded society only as the main arena of human conflict. He tried to hold fast to Hegel’s views concerning the overmastering and unifying function of the perfect State, but did not really succeed. Marx, who adopted Hegel’s mode of thought, objected to such a function on the part of the State because, as a ‘superstructure,’ the latter was necessarily a tool in the hands of the ruling class of society, and he strove to set up in its stead a State that would pave the way for a classless society by means of a dictatorship of the lowest social order, which would then be absorbed into the classless society. Stein, who held that ‘the movement of opposition between the State and society was the content of the whole inner history of all the peoples,’ attributes supremacy to the State in terms of philosophical abstraction; but in dealing with the concrete reality he affirms society, which is shaken through and through by conflicts; his concern is with that society. Hence the science of social reality begins with Stein (and not with Comte, as some think, because the latter lags behind his master Saint-Simon in distinguishing between the social and the political principle). Marx, who evinced no particular interest in the State in his theoretical thinking, could suggest nothing but a highly centralized all-embracing and all-disposing revolutionary State which leaves no room for the social principle and so thoroughly absorbs the free society that only in a messianic vision can it be merged in it. That is why a socialist movement began with Marx in which the social principle is found only as an ultimate aim, but not in the practical scheme.
Even nowadays, in the midst of wide-ranging and extremely detailed social knowledge and planning, sociology is faced ever and again with the problem of the relationship between the social and the political principle. This relationship must not be confused with that between Society and the State because, as Tarde rightly says, there is no form of social activity which cannot, on some side or at some moment, become political; we must realize that social forms, on the one hand, and State institutions, on the other, are crystallizations of the two principles. But it is most essential that we recognize the structural difference between the two spheres in regard to the relationship between unity and multiformity.
The society of a nation is composed not of individuals but of societies, and not, as Comte thought, of families alone but of societies, groups, circles, unions, co-operative bodies, and communities varying very widely in type, form, scope, and dynamics. Society (with a capital S) is not only their collectivity and setting, but also their substance and essence; they are contained within it, but it is also within them all, and none of them, in their innermost being can withdraw from it. In so far as the mere proximity of the societies tends to change into union, in so far as all kinds of leagues and alliances develop among them – in the social-federative sphere, that is to say – Society achieves its object. Just as Society keeps individuals together in their way of life by force of habit and custom and holds them close to one another and, by public opinion, in the sense of continuity, keeps them together in their way of thinking, so it influences the contacts and the mutual relations between the societies. Society cannot, however, quell the conflicts between the different groups; it is powerless to unite the divergent and clashing groups; it can develop what they have in common, but cannot force it upon them. The State alone can do that. The means which it employs for this purpose are not social but definitely political. But all the facilities at the disposal of the State, whether punitive or propagandistic, would not enable even a State not dominated by a single social group (that is to say, by one relatively independent of social divarications) to control the areas of conflict if it were not for the fundamental political fact of general instability. The fact that every people feels itself threatened by the others gives the State its definitive unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it when necessary to get the upper hand in internal crises. A permanent state of true, positive, and creative peace between the peoples would greatly diminish the supremacy of the political principle over the social. This does not, however, in the least signify that in that event the power to control the internal situation of conflict would necessarily be lessened thereby. Rather is it to be assumed that if, instead of the prevailing anarchical relationships among the nations, there were co-operation in the control of raw materials, agreement on methods of manufacture of such materials, and regulation of the world market, Society would be in a position, for the first time, to constitute itself as such.
Administration in the sphere of the social principle is equivalent to Government in that of the political principle. In the sphere of the former, as of the latter, it is essential that experts demonstrate how the wishes and decisions of the union or the association are to be carried into effect; and it is also essential that those appointed to carry out the experts’ instructions should follow those instructions, with everyone doing his share. By Administration we mean a capacity for making dispositions which is limited by the available technical facilities and recognized in theory and practice within those limits; when it oversteps its limits, it seals its own doom. By Government we understand a non-technical, but ‘constitutionally’ limited body; this signifies that, in the event of certain changes in the situation, the limits are extended and even, at times, wiped out altogether. All forms of government 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. I call it the ‘political surplus.’ Its justification derives from the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis between the nations and within every nation, which may at any moment become an active crisis requiring more immediate and far-reaching measures and strict compliance with such measures. Special powers must be accorded to the government even in States under a parliamentary regime when a crisis arises; yet in such States also it is in the nature of the case that the ‘political surplus’ should be indeterminate. 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.
Yet the social vitality of a nation, and its cultural unity and independence as well, depend very largely upon the degree of social spontaneity to be found there. The question has therefore been repeatedly raised as to how social spontaneity can be strengthened by freeing it as much as possible from the pressure of the political principle. It has been suggested that decentralization of political power, in particular, would be most desirable. As a matter of fact, the larger the measure of autonomy granted to the local and regional and also to the functional societies, the more room is left for the free unfolding of the social energies. Obviously, the question cannot be formulated as a choice between ‘Centralization’ and ‘Decentralization.’ We must ask rather: ‘What are the spheres in which a larger measure of decentralization of the capacity to make dispositions would be admissible?’ The demarcation would naturally have to be revised and improved continually to conform to the changing conditions.
Apart from this change in the apportionment of power, it is also in the interest of a self-constituting society to strive towards a continuous change in the nature of power, to the end that Government should, as much as possible, turn into Administration. Let us put it in this way: Efforts must be renewed again and again to determine in what spheres it is possible to alter the ratio between governmental and administrative control in favour of the latter. Saint-Simon’s requirement, that a society productive in the economic and cultural spheres should have a larger share in shaping public life, cannot be fulfilled, as has been suggested in our own days, by having the administrators seize the government (which would certainly not lead to any improvement), but by transforming Government into Administration as far as the general and particular conditions permit.
Will Society ever revolt against the ‘political surplus’ and the accumulation of power? If such a thing were ever possible, only a society which had itself overcome its own internal conflicts would ever venture to embark upon such a revolution; and that is hardly to be expected so long as Society is what it is. But there
is a way for Society – meaning at the moment the men who appreciate the incomparable value of the social principle – to prepare the ground for improving the relations between itself and the political principle. That way is Education, the education of a generation with a truly social outlook and a truly social will. Education is the great implement which is more or less under the control of Society; Society does not, however, know how to utilize it. Social education is the exact reverse of political propaganda. Such propaganda, whether spread by a government or by a party, seeks to ‘suggest’ a ready-made will to the members of the society, i.e., to implant in their minds the notion that such a will derives from their own, their innermost being. Social education, on the other hand, seeks to arouse and to develop in the minds of its pupils the spontaneity of fellowship which is innate in all unravaged human souls and which harmonizes very well with the development of personal existence and personal thought. This can be accomplished only by the complete overthrow of the political trend which nowadays dominates education throughout the world. True education for citizenship in a State is education for the effectuation of Society.
[1] This does not mean that in that epoch there was no further development of Althusius’ ideas, particularly in the doctrine of Leibniz.
The State and Society
(Source: Lecture given to the Cole Society (Oxford University Sociology Society) at All Souls, on February 19th, 1962. The Anarchist Library)
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 19th 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 20th century, unreliability, disobedience and subversion are the characteristics of responsible citizenship in society.
Colin Ward and Martin Buber: Society and the State
We return to Colin Ward through the work of Martin Buber, in parallel essays addressing the nature of and the relation between the State and Society. For both authors, the relation between the two – in Buber’s terms, the relation between the “political principle of government” and the “social principle of administration” – is one of permanent tension; a tension between centralising sovereign authority and spontaneous association, with the growth of one paid for by the diminishing of the other.
Political power, or sovereignty, rests in turn on the distinction between friend and foe (Carl Schmitt), a distinction that marks both the relation with external and foreign enemies. Authoritarianism and war are thus permanent possibilities, if not features of, the State. The weakening of the State and its violence therefore depend upon the freeing up of and creation of the plurality of associative-social communities. And it is amidst the later that one can begin to see and imagine anarchy and it is from this same perspective that one can perceive the danger of “state” inspired instruments of insurrection by threatening anarchy with new forms of supposedly “radical”, or even, “anarchist” sovereignty.
To talk of an anarchist “sovereignty” may appear paradoxical – if by anarchism is understood the exclusion or destruction of all sovereign or state power. But if sovereignty is inevitably expressed in the “political principle of government” and if the “political” cannot be altogether subsumed by “social administration”, then must not anarchists confront the political in more creative ways than simply saying that they are opposed to it? Can political forms be read off or created from forms of “social administration”? And is any such political form stable given the ever changing nature of social relations? In other words, what does or should an anarchist politics amount to?
Society and the State (1951)
Martin Buber
(Source: Martin Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, Translated from the German and edited by Maurice Friedman, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1957)
In Bertrand Russell’s book on Power, which appeared late in 1938 – the author calls it a ‘new social analysis’ – power is defined as ‘the fundamental concept in social science, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics’. This bold concept on the part of a distinguished logician, which reminds us of Nietzsche’s doctrine that he attacked so vigorously, is a typical example of the confusion between the social principle and the political principle even in our time, one hundred years after the rise of scientific sociology. It has long been recognized that all social structures have a certain measure of power, authority, and dominion, without which they could not exist; in none of the non-political structures, however, is this the essential element. But it is inherent in all social structures that men either find themselves already linked with one another in an association based on a common need or a common interest, or that they band themselves together for such a purpose, whether in an existing or a newly-formed society. The primary element must not be superseded by the secondary element – association by subordination, fellowship by domination or, schematically speaking, the horizontal structure by the vertical. The American political scientist, Maclver, has rightly said 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.’
The defective differentiation between the social and the political principles, upon which the more or less problematical cooperation of all human group-existence rests, goes back to very ancient times. A classic example of mistaking the one principle for the other, though, to be sure, of a very different kind, is the well-known chapter in the Politeia, where Plato begins by tracing the origin of the polis directly from the primæval social fact of division of labour, and then, almost imperceptibly, goes on to include among the essential occupations that of the rulers, so that we suddenly find the population split up into two pre-eminently political sections: those who give orders and those who obey them; rulers and ruled; those who possess the instruments of coercion and those who are subject to them – all this under the harmless guise of the mere division of labour. We should take careful note of what Plato does here. He has his Socrates set his interlocutors the task of ‘seeing with their mind’s eye a polis in the making’. The readers of this dialogue naturally thought in terms of the contemporary Athens as it had emerged from the reforms of Kleisthenes; in other words, in terms of a society of free citizens who were hardly aware of the difference between the rulers and the ruled because of the constant interchange between the former and the latter within the citizenry, whereby the constituents of today became the representatives of tomorrow; and because, furthermore, the fact that the officials could be elected and dismissed obviated any feeling that an irksome bureaucracy might arise. This community, in which a firm foundation of slavery made it theoretically possible for every citizen to participate in the business of the Council while engaged in his private concerns, could, indeed, be deduced from an evolution of the division of labour – an evolution in which the vocation of politics was not specialized. However, the class or rather the caste of the guardians which Plato introduces into this discussion comes not within the scope of the historical polis but of that of his Utopia, where this caste, which has been represented to us as one vocation among others, actually stands in a political relationship to the rest of the community: that of a ruling society over against a society of the ruled. The term ‘society’ and not a mere ‘group’ is used here advisedly inasmuch as, in liberating its members from private property and private marriage, Plato raises it above the general community and constitutes it as a separate society.
This confusion of the social principle with the political is typical of by far the greater part of the thinking of ancient times. There is no tendency whatever towards an ideological distinction between political and non-political social structures in most of the ancient empires, obviously because the latter were allowed no independent existence or development of any kind. The one exception in this respect is ancient China, where two civilizations existed side by side: the State-urban civilization, which was centred in the royal court and based on the army, the bureaucracy and the litterati; and the rural civilization, which was based solely on the village community. The former was a political-historical civilization in every respect, while the latter was absolutely unhistorical, being determined solely by the unchanging natural rhythm of the seasons and of the human generations, that is to say, a social civilization in the strictest sense of the term. It was the latter civilization, relatively self-sufficient and enclosed within itself, that served as the foundation for Lao-tse’s doctrine. That doctrine interposed between the individual and the state (the single States which together constituted the empire) two purely social structures, namely the home and the community. In the Confucian system, which was rooted in the urban civilization, there remained, however, only one of these two social structures – the home, the family which, contrary to its status in the village, was in its urban form completely integrated into the State.
A similar ideological development took place in classical antiquity, but from very different causes. There – at all events in the polis where, in the main, discursive thought was evolved, that is to say, in that of Athens – the well-developed social principle had penetrated so deeply into political life and merged with it so completely that while, on the one hand, the Demos was almost like a social gathering, on the other the family receded into the background of social life, and corporate existence, however firmly entrenched, nowhere attained genuine autonomy. In this connection, as we have already seen in Plato’s thinking, no strictly ideological distinction was drawn between the State and the unions, which were not part of the State: The State, the polis, so completely coincided with society, or the community, the koinonia, that asocial persons, the dyskoinoetoi, were regarded as the antithesis of the friends of the State, the philopolides, as though it were not possible for a man to be social and yet not political in his thinking. It was only with the decline of the polis, when it was fast disintegrating from within and servitude loomed on the historical horizon without, that the thinking finally drew a distinction between the two principles. Two hundred years after Lao-tse, Aristotle interposed the family and the community – by which term he, too, meant primarily the rural community – between the State and the individual; and to the community were joined various kinds of associations. But of the social category, that of the koinonia, he had only the most general notion, so that he could describe the State as a certain kind of koinonia though, indeed, one transcending and comprehending all the others, while all the others are regarded as mere preliminary stages to this society on the one hand, and mere means towards the ends of the State on the other. Thus, even here, no genuine categorical distinction between the social and the political principle can be drawn; and even though Aristotle in one passage calls man a zoon koinonikon and in another a zoon politikon, both terms mean the same thing. And though Aristotle explicitly tells us that man was not created solely for the political community but also for the home, he sees in the polis the consummation of the koinonia, in which – and in which alone – men’s co-existence in a community has any purpose and significance. In fact, the polis is called the koinonia of all the particular koinonias within which all families and communities and societies and associations of all kinds band themselves together. Aristotle’s idea of the State is identical here with ours of society, that is to say, a unit comprehending all the different associations within a specific national entity. Such an idea of the State bars any approach to a strict and consistent differentiation and separation between the social and the political principles. Incidentally, it is noteworthy that of all the unions which Aristotle recognizes as special forms of the koinonia, he attaches significance to the family alone and, unlike Plato, recognizes it as the primæval cell in the process of the division of labour. In his view, the family alone is the foundation of the State, and he does not attach any permanent importance to the rural community, since it is destined to be absorbed in the polis, while he considers the associations important only because they have a place within the State. The restrictive process of thought, which was evolved from Lao-tse down to Confucius and from which all social structures that might successfully have resisted absorption by the centralizing State are excluded, here comes to full flower in the thinking of a single philosopher.
The post-Aristotelian thought of ancient times did not remedy this defect in the ideologial approach to the principles in question. Even the apparently more precise Latin idea which, for the ‘collectivity’ (koinonia) substituted ‘society’ (societas), did not serve the purpose. True, in those days there was no such thing as a society of citizens in the modern sense of an all-inclusive society existing side by side with the State and vis-a-vis the State; but sociality did exist in all its forms, which manifested itself in all the large and small associations; and the same principle of cooperation predominated in all of them, a principle which enters into all kinds of alliances with the political principle, but nevertheless possesses a specific reality of its own which strives for recognition. Even the stoa, which went farthest in this direction, did not explicitly recognize the social principle. In the last days of the stoa Marcus Aurelius did, indeed, give the Aristotelian definition a social stamp by saying that ‘We are born to cooperate’; but what was not achieved was just that which must be required of any ideological specification if it is to achieve the character of genuine apperception, namely, the search for, description and interpretation of those elements of reality which correspond to the newly-acquired specific idea. The new concept of society loses concreteness because it is deprived of its limitations; this occurs in the most sublime manner in that the ideal of universal humanism is formulated without any indication being given as to how it is to be realized. Whether the Stoic speaks in the new terms of a society of the human race (societas generis humani) or in the old terms of a megalopolis, it amounts to the same thing: a high-souled idea emerges to confront reality but cannot find a womb from which, to propagate a living creature because it has been stripped of corporeality. Plato’s State which, though directed against the polis, was nevertheless derived from it, actually was a structure, though it existed only in thought. Zenon’s slogan – ‘Only one way of life and only one political regime’ – as proclaimed a century later, was only a fine sentiment; and finally so little remained of it that Cicero could envisage the Roman Empire as the fulfilment of cosmopolitanism. Incidentally, there is no practicable universalism – universalism that is realizable, though with the utmost effort – except that adumbrated by the prophets of Israel, who proposed not to abolish national societies together with their forms of organization, but rather to heal and perfect them, and thereby to pave the way for their amalgamation.
Medieval Christianity adopted the fundamental concept of the Stoic universalism in a Christianized form, in that at one time it designated the unified humanity to be striven for as a res publica generis humani, a world State, and at another as an ecclesia universalis, a universal church. Nevertheless, the social principle as such is expressed now and then in this connection in a purer form than was ever conceived by the Stoics. Thus, for example, William of Occam, the great fourteenth-century thinker whose theory of intuition gave the quietus to scholasticism, said: ‘The whole human race is one people; the collectivity of all mortal men is a single community of those who wish for communion with one another.’ Every particular association is recognized by him as a part of this community. In general, however, medieval thought did not go beyond Aristotle’s amalgamation of the social with the political. The flourishing corporations of the period were, indeed, taken into account in the legal ideology; but no sociological recognition of the non-political associations as such was evolved. On the contrary: there was a growing tendency to include them, in theory, within the State and, in practice, to subject all of them to it; or, as the legal historian Gierke put it: ‘Exclusive representation of all community life by the State.’
It was only in the late Renaissance that thinking reached the point of a vigorous stand in defence of the rights of the non-political unions in relation to the State. The most vigorous expression of this point of view is to be found in the book entitled Politics by the German jurist Althusius (1603). Even there these bodies do not stand between the individual and the all-inclusive society – this special concept is still lacking – but between the individual and the State as in Aristotle’s concept. Hence no difference in kind is recognized between the associations and the State, except that each and every one of the farmers enjoys relative autonomy, while the State possesses exclusive sovereignty. Nevertheless, the State is faced by an ‘insurmountable barrier’, (as Gierke phrases it) in relation to the unions; in other words, the State may not infringe upon the special rights of these social unions. Society is not yet, indeed, conceived as such in this view, but it is constituted in its idea; it is not society, but the State under its name, which appears as the ‘immortal and eternal society,’ as Grotius formulated it, or under its own name as a ‘composite society,’ in the words of Althusius – the association of associations. But the very fact that all of them are viewed as being linked with one another was in itself something definitely new in sociological thought. This new idea was suppressed for two hundred years -by the idea of the unlimited power of the State, which took on a more logically consistent form than ever before.[1]
In Hobbes’ system of thought the intermediate formations are missing as a matter of principle, since he recognizes no stages precedent to the establishment of the State, in which the unorganized individuals unite for fear that otherwise they will destroy one another. Such a unification, which is achieved by means of the subjection of the wills of all the individuals to the will of a single person or a single assembly, is designated by Hobbes in his book De Cive as civitas sive societas civilis. Here, for the first time as far as I am aware, we have in the writings of a modern thinker the widely disseminated idea of the ‘civil society, which we find again late in the seventeenth century in Locke’s essays, in the eighteenth century in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Justice and in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, and which recurs, in the nineteenth century, in the philosophy of Hegel and the sociology of Lorenz von Stein, as the antithesis to the State. In Hobbes’ view, civil society is entirely identical with the State. Hobbes, too, is cognizant of the social principle in the form of free contracts between individuals for the recognition and preservation of the rights of ownership; he is aware of its existence, and tolerates it in the above sense because he regards the political ‘Leviathan’ as still incomplete. But the German sociologist Tönnies doubtless apprehends Hobbes’ ultimate meaning when he interprets his views in the following terms: ‘The State would carry out its idea to perfection if it controlled all the activities of its citizens, if all wills were directed in harmony with a single supreme will. So long as this has not come to pass, society still exists within the State.’ In other words, when the State finally becomes complete, it will annihilate the last vestige of society. Such a complete State has been approximated in a considerable degree in our own time by that known as the totalitarian type.
The age of Hobbes saw the rise of the Third Estate, which attempted to supersede the double society of the Middle Ages by a unitary society which did not, however, extend beyond its own bounds and which evoked a liberal attitude on the part of the State towards the individual, but an increasingly illiberal attitude on its part towards associations. The State was prepared to tolerate only a pulverized, structureless society, just as modern industrial capitalism at first tolerated only individuals without the right of association. A little over a century after the appearance of the ‘Leviathan’, the physiocrat Turgot declared in the Encyclopædia (in an article entitled ‘Fondations’): ‘The citizens have rights, rights sacred for the actual body of society (by which he meant nothing else but the State); they have an existence independent of it; they are its essential elements … but the particular bodies do not exist in their own right and for their own sake. They have been constituted solely for the sake of society, and they must cease to exist as soon as their usefulness is at an end.’ Turgot does not, however, include among his ‘particular bodies’ all the free associations, some of which he lauds in the course of that same article. Yet only five years later Rousseau wrote the contrary in his Contrat Social where, in his fundamental concept, the volonté général, the social and political principles are again confused in the most dubious manner, though he was well able to distinguish between the social contract and the establishment of a State in a legal manner: ‘So that the common will may be manifested, there must be no partial associations within the State.’ In other words, there may not exist within the State any society which is constituted of various large and small associations; that is to say, a society with a truly social structure, in which the diversified spontaneous contacts of individuals for common purposes of co-operation and co-existence, i.e. the vital essence of society are represented. But if ‘partial societies’ already exist, Rousseau goes on to say, ‘their number should be increased and inequalities prevented.’ In other words, if it proves impossible to suppress the formation of free associations, their scope should be restricted by creating other associations determined entirely by the purposes and planning of the State; moreover, care must be taken that the free societies should never become stronger than the unfree ones.
In general, the French Revolution could content itself with carrying out the first of these two precepts, especially since it had abolished the right of association (an attempt in that direction had already been made under Louis XVI) because an ‘absolutely free State should not tolerate corporations in its midst’ (resolution of the Constitutional Assembly, August 1791). On the other hand, both of Rousseau’s methods were applied jointly in a large measure during the Russian Revolution.
Only after a fully-fledged bourgeoisie had sprung from the loins of the French Revolution did it become possible to attempt to set the State and Society, as such, over against one another. The first two attempts in this direction were far apart in every respect.
The first of the two attempts was suggested by Saint-Simon. The more or less chimerical plans for reforms of this highly ingenious dilettante were based, in essence, on an accurate and important distinction between two modes of leadership, namely,
social leadership, or Administration, and political leadership, or Government. Saint-Simon did not adequately define these types of leadership, but we shall convey his meaning correctly if we say that administrative powers are limited by the technical requirements implicit in the specific conditions and functions of the leadership, while governmental powers are limited, at any given time, solely by the relation between the power of government and that of other factors. Society – by which Saint-Simon means the subject of economic and cultural production – administers, in so far as it is organized; but the State governs. Saint-Simon’s proposal to divide the conduct of the State – that is to say, to entrust the conduct of the national affairs to a select group of men, capable and well versed in the sphere of social production, thereby giving it an administrative character, while leaving to the political authorities only the responsibility for the defence and security of the country – this proposal need not concern us here. But it is worth-while quoting what Saint-Simon said in this connection: ‘The nation went into the revolution to be governed less; but it achieved nothing except to be governed more than ever.’
The other fundamental division between the social and the political principle, that of Hegel, is antithetical to Saint-Simon’s in its evaluation of the two. But its very purpose is different. Unlike Saint-Simon, Hegel compares not two forms of leadership with one another, but civil society in general with the State in general. The two factors are not, however, placed in polar opposition: society stands between the family and the State, between a relative whole and unity and an absolute whole and unity, as an incomplete and disunited multiformity, between form and form as something formless, an offspring of the modern world, an aggregation of individuals in which each is an end in himself and concerned with nothing else whatsoever; and all of them work together only because each uses the others as a means towards his own ends; and the groups and classes composed of individuals obsessed with their own ends get into conflicts which society, by its very nature, is unable to resolve: such power inheres in the State alone, because it prevails over the ‘waves of Passion’ by means of the ‘Reason that illumines them’. The State is the ‘moderator of social misery’ because its substance is not a private matter like that of society, but generality and unity, while its foundation is ‘the force of Reason manifesting itself as will’. Such is the result of the most unequivocal distinction ever made between the two principles – a glorification of the State that reminds us of Hobbes. Hegel’s critical portrait of society lacks everything that is still to be found in our own age, such as social consciousness, solidarity, mutual aid, loyal comradeship, spirited enthusiasms for a common enterprise; there is no trace whatever of creative social spontaneity which, though it is not concentrated like the power of the State, nevertheless exists in numerous single collective phenomena and, within the social sphere, very quietly counterbalances the conflicting forces. On the other hand, a State is seen here which we know, not from world history, but only from Hegel’s system. He tells us, indeed, that in pondering the idea of the State we must not have any particular State in mind, but that ‘the idea, this true God, must be considered for itself’. A given historical State exists, so says Hegel, ‘in the world, hence in the sphere of arbitrariness, accident and error’. And just as a cripple is a living man for all that, ‘the affirmative, life, exists’ in spite of the defect; and it is this ‘affirmative’ which is the essential thing here. But if we apply this to society as well, the whole picture will be completely changed.
With Saint-Simon and Hegel we find ourselves on the threshold of modern sociology. But the society known to this sociology has become something different, namely, the society of the modern class struggle. Two men at that time undertook, each after his own fashion, to create a synthesis between Hegel and Saint-Simon. One was Lorenz von Stein, the founder of scientific sociology, and the other Karl Marx, the father of scientific socialism. The thinking of both men was so deeply rooted in the new situation that, on the crucial issue of the relationship between the social and the political principle, they were unable to take over the heritage either of Saint-Simon or of Hegel. Stein, who was a disciple of Saint-Simon’s, could not share his belief that control of the State should be taken over by the leaders of social production because he regarded society only as the main arena of human conflict. He tried to hold fast to Hegel’s views concerning the overmastering and unifying function of the perfect State, but did not really succeed. Marx, who adopted Hegel’s mode of thought, objected to such a function on the part of the State because, as a ‘superstructure,’ the latter was necessarily a tool in the hands of the ruling class of society, and he strove to set up in its stead a State that would pave the way for a classless society by means of a dictatorship of the lowest social order, which would then be absorbed into the classless society. Stein, who held that ‘the movement of opposition between the State and society was the content of the whole inner history of all the peoples,’ attributes supremacy to the State in terms of philosophical abstraction; but in dealing with the concrete reality he affirms society, which is shaken through and through by conflicts; his concern is with that society. Hence the science of social reality begins with Stein (and not with Comte, as some think, because the latter lags behind his master Saint-Simon in distinguishing between the social and the political principle). Marx, who evinced no particular interest in the State in his theoretical thinking, could suggest nothing but a highly centralized all-embracing and all-disposing revolutionary State which leaves no room for the social principle and so thoroughly absorbs the free society that only in a messianic vision can it be merged in it. That is why a socialist movement began with Marx in which the social principle is found only as an ultimate aim, but not in the practical scheme.
Even nowadays, in the midst of wide-ranging and extremely detailed social knowledge and planning, sociology is faced ever and again with the problem of the relationship between the social and the political principle. This relationship must not be confused with that between Society and the State because, as Tarde rightly says, there is no form of social activity which cannot, on some side or at some moment, become political; we must realize that social forms, on the one hand, and State institutions, on the other, are crystallizations of the two principles. But it is most essential that we recognize the structural difference between the two spheres in regard to the relationship between unity and multiformity.
The society of a nation is composed not of individuals but of societies, and not, as Comte thought, of families alone but of societies, groups, circles, unions, co-operative bodies, and communities varying very widely in type, form, scope, and dynamics. Society (with a capital S) is not only their collectivity and setting, but also their substance and essence; they are contained within it, but it is also within them all, and none of them, in their innermost being can withdraw from it. In so far as the mere proximity of the societies tends to change into union, in so far as all kinds of leagues and alliances develop among them – in the social-federative sphere, that is to say – Society achieves its object. Just as Society keeps individuals together in their way of life by force of habit and custom and holds them close to one another and, by public opinion, in the sense of continuity, keeps them together in their way of thinking, so it influences the contacts and the mutual relations between the societies. Society cannot, however, quell the conflicts between the different groups; it is powerless to unite the divergent and clashing groups; it can develop what they have in common, but cannot force it upon them. The State alone can do that. The means which it employs for this purpose are not social but definitely political. But all the facilities at the disposal of the State, whether punitive or propagandistic, would not enable even a State not dominated by a single social group (that is to say, by one relatively independent of social divarications) to control the areas of conflict if it were not for the fundamental political fact of general instability. The fact that every people feels itself threatened by the others gives the State its definitive unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it when necessary to get the upper hand in internal crises. A permanent state of true, positive, and creative peace between the peoples would greatly diminish the supremacy of the political principle over the social. This does not, however, in the least signify that in that event the power to control the internal situation of conflict would necessarily be lessened thereby. Rather is it to be assumed that if, instead of the prevailing anarchical relationships among the nations, there were co-operation in the control of raw materials, agreement on methods of manufacture of such materials, and regulation of the world market, Society would be in a position, for the first time, to constitute itself as such.
Administration in the sphere of the social principle is equivalent to Government in that of the political principle. In the sphere of the former, as of the latter, it is essential that experts demonstrate how the wishes and decisions of the union or the association are to be carried into effect; and it is also essential that those appointed to carry out the experts’ instructions should follow those instructions, with everyone doing his share. By Administration we mean a capacity for making dispositions which is limited by the available technical facilities and recognized in theory and practice within those limits; when it oversteps its limits, it seals its own doom. By Government we understand a non-technical, but ‘constitutionally’ limited body; this signifies that, in the event of certain changes in the situation, the limits are extended and even, at times, wiped out altogether. All forms of government 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. I call it the ‘political surplus.’ Its justification derives from the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis between the nations and within every nation, which may at any moment become an active crisis requiring more immediate and far-reaching measures and strict compliance with such measures. Special powers must be accorded to the government even in States under a parliamentary regime when a crisis arises; yet in such States also it is in the nature of the case that the ‘political surplus’ should be indeterminate. 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.
Yet the social vitality of a nation, and its cultural unity and independence as well, depend very largely upon the degree of social spontaneity to be found there. The question has therefore been repeatedly raised as to how social spontaneity can be strengthened by freeing it as much as possible from the pressure of the political principle. It has been suggested that decentralization of political power, in particular, would be most desirable. As a matter of fact, the larger the measure of autonomy granted to the local and regional and also to the functional societies, the more room is left for the free unfolding of the social energies. Obviously, the question cannot be formulated as a choice between ‘Centralization’ and ‘Decentralization.’ We must ask rather: ‘What are the spheres in which a larger measure of decentralization of the capacity to make dispositions would be admissible?’ The demarcation would naturally have to be revised and improved continually to conform to the changing conditions.
Apart from this change in the apportionment of power, it is also in the interest of a self-constituting society to strive towards a continuous change in the nature of power, to the end that Government should, as much as possible, turn into Administration. Let us put it in this way: Efforts must be renewed again and again to determine in what spheres it is possible to alter the ratio between governmental and administrative control in favour of the latter. Saint-Simon’s requirement, that a society productive in the economic and cultural spheres should have a larger share in shaping public life, cannot be fulfilled, as has been suggested in our own days, by having the administrators seize the government (which would certainly not lead to any improvement), but by transforming Government into Administration as far as the general and particular conditions permit.
Will Society ever revolt against the ‘political surplus’ and the accumulation of power? If such a thing were ever possible, only a society which had itself overcome its own internal conflicts would ever venture to embark upon such a revolution; and that is hardly to be expected so long as Society is what it is. But there
is a way for Society – meaning at the moment the men who appreciate the incomparable value of the social principle – to prepare the ground for improving the relations between itself and the political principle. That way is Education, the education of a generation with a truly social outlook and a truly social will. Education is the great implement which is more or less under the control of Society; Society does not, however, know how to utilize it. Social education is the exact reverse of political propaganda. Such propaganda, whether spread by a government or by a party, seeks to ‘suggest’ a ready-made will to the members of the society, i.e., to implant in their minds the notion that such a will derives from their own, their innermost being. Social education, on the other hand, seeks to arouse and to develop in the minds of its pupils the spontaneity of fellowship which is innate in all unravaged human souls and which harmonizes very well with the development of personal existence and personal thought. This can be accomplished only by the complete overthrow of the political trend which nowadays dominates education throughout the world. True education for citizenship in a State is education for the effectuation of Society.
[1] This does not mean that in that epoch there was no further development of Althusius’ ideas, particularly in the doctrine of Leibniz.
The State and Society
(Source: Lecture given to the Cole Society (Oxford University Sociology Society) at All Souls, on February 19th, 1962. The Anarchist Library)
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 19th 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 20th century, unreliability, disobedience and subversion are the characteristics of responsible citizenship in society.