Pluralism and Social Democracy

...The welfare state will never work well, and won't be sustained in hard times when budgets are tight, unless it rests on a welfare society, unless the work of government officials and professional helpers is seconded by the work of amateurs, neighbors, volunteers, who are simply fellow citizens...

...studying a common history and literature...

...In the modern world, however, none of this can be a uniform collective experience, and every effort to make it that is inauthentic...

...they are shaped, nurtured, socialized by other people, in a specific time and place...

...And in a radically individualist society governed by market forces, economic ambition, social mobility, and mass culture are increasingly dominant...

...But we do need some ultimate recourse against social tyranny...

...The solidarity of citizens (the French Revolution's "fraternity," extended now to men and women alike) is a complicated business...

...But it also provides, or can provide with political assistance, the necessary conditions of liberty, equality, and solidarity...

...It is not easy to say what the state should be doing to sustain this structure right now, in the context of a rapidly globalizing economy whose protagonists already claim that state power is an anachronism...

...celebrating the holidays, enacting the rituals of a common life...

...THE PROJECTS of free men and women are inherited as much as they are invented...

...no one is exalted...

...These efforts ought to be interfered with...

...Social democracy was for too long identified solely with the state and with the project of "seizing state power...

...We are not light-headed...

...I suppose that we ought to value bold, free-wheeling individuals who refuse such work, who break loose from all the groups and then choose among them, or among their "fragments," and so fashion their own identity: these are the heroes of postmodernism...

...that is what the state is for...

...There are many projects and arguments, and it is this pluralism that makes individual choice possible...

...They inherit projects and arguments, which they then join, elaborate, revise, or reject...

...Without these traditions and groups we would never acquire the minimal endowment (of identity, character, worldview) that makes coherent choice possible...

...But we must recognize also that these heroic figures are radically dependent upon the people who stay behind, who inhabit the groups and keep them alive...

...For the conversion of one social good into other goods with which it has no intrinsic connection is itself a tyrannical act...

...Solidarity must have its local and particular sites...

...Ultimately, what makes it possible for me to choose is the fact that other people have chosen (or have simply stayed on where they were planted by their parents) and so have kept alive a way of life, a community that I can enter (and exit...

...And yet what social democracy implies is the democratization of society...

...I am describing both freedom and equality in complex and socialized forms, and my claim is that they really can emerge coherently out of a full-scale pluralism...

...They have to do with market imperialism and the failed defense of autonomous distributions in politics, education, welfare, health care, and so on...

...And if it is to serve its purpose, the state must be more fully inclusive and democratic than any of the groups whose activity it regulates...

...But even the freest of men and women still experiment and innovate under moral constraints, which derive from the social and political world that is their inheritance as well as, sometimes, their burden...

...We want to create a society in which men and women are free from the domination of the wellborn, the wealthy, and the powerful...

...of trade unions defending the material interests of their members in the labor market...

...They have to do with the decline of the parties and movements of the left...

...But this constraint doesn't serve equality alone...

...First, they must provide students with a clear and firm understanding of the substantive values and also the constraints and burdens that make up their common citizenship—and their other (religious, ethnic, racial) affiliations and allegiances too...

...arrogance on the one hand, fear and deference on the other, cease to be the normal emotions of social interaction...

...Without that defense, the most important goods will be seized by a single group of people: the wealthy, the powerful, or the well born (or, a real possibility these days, the highly educated)—a different group in different times and places, but alike in its singularity and in its eagerness for domination...

...THE POLITICAL left today includes many people from the first part of the population, who live in more or less just social settings and join in associations that defend these settings—and find the defense increasingly difficult...

...The allegiance they require is incompatible with the contemporary forms of social mobility...

...And so, second, they must help students acquire a sense of their own critical capacities...

...The commitments of the left today are what they have been...

...As we used to say, these people are "objectively" on the left, since that is where their interests presumably lie, but they are often mobilized elsewhere...

...The careers they offer, to the parish priest, say, or the union organizer, or the editor of the party paper, meet the demands of moral idealism but not of economic ambition...

...This is not a paradox, but a simple fact about modern life...

...they experiment with commitment...

...The more intense our participation at this level, in these settings, the more engaged we are likely to be as citizens of the larger community...

...One of the chief tasks of social criticism is to give them their proper name, to say that this is tyranny—whenever religious or cultural associations perpetuate longstanding oppressive practices (the denial of education to their women members, for example...

...No doubt, this gets more difficult in more highly differentiated societies...

...or they use their political office to extort money from citizens seeking their help, or to organize special services for themselves, or, again, to advance the careers of their children...

...But the associations that we value most highly are rarely economically efficient...

...the argument about multiculturalism in the schools reflects these new difficulties...

...The schools sponsor one kind of belonging and accommodate the others...

...From all this there follows the left's continuing commitment to education as a public project (as well as a series of private, communal projects) of a certain sort: democratic, decentralized, experimental...

...T00 MANY Old Leftists made equality the enemy of liberty, and this hostile relationship has become a standard maxim of liberal political philosophy...

...They make for a false solidarity, which won't be able to meet its moral or political tests...

...Ultimately, they have to bring themselves in, and that self-help depends upon the inclusiveness of citizenship and the support of the larger political community...

...I am not going to try to sort out the causes of the dangers and the problems...

...The public schools always have a double task...

...If singularity is impossible, commonality isn't...

...This isn't a vicious circle...

...And for these same reasons, the social and economic integration of the second part is increasingly problematic...

...The cultural endowments they offer are costly...

...All the groups that I have described, on which we depend for individual freedom, complex equality, and social cooperation, are threatened today by the hegemony of the market: (1) The communities of culture, history, faith, and political commitment that provide individuals with the content of their character and give them their first experience of solidarity are institutionally weaker than they have ever been...

...You are not bound to finish the work," says an old Jewish proverb, "but neither are you free to give it up...

...Its citizens must be citizens in the fullest sense: politically educated, competent, and informed...

...They are citizens of countries, members of groups...

...The more sites and settings, the more points of entry, the more associations where cultures are enacted and values sustained, the more opportunities for the collective defense of interests, the greater the number of engaged men and women—the more free and egalitarian society will be...

...What qualifies them as free is the capacity to choose for themselves —their projects, associations, work in the world, their friends, lovers, and comrades...

...Liberty, equality, solidarity: our understanding of these three has changed over the years, but the deep commitments endure...

...IHAVE NOW sketched an argument for the necessity of pluralism—in support of freedom, and of equality, and of solidarity...

...the associations require the political framework of state power...

...I NSOFAR as these last points are true, local remedies are available, even if they are not likely to be entirely sufficient: they are the work of leftist parties and movements resisting the power of money in politics...

...their choices (which is not to say that they will always get what they want) and also that they must have the inner resources to sustain a life of choice, so that they both are and remain autonomous men and women...

...or whenever all the groups, or the strongest among them, adopt exclusionist policies, denying the everyday opportunities of social life to immigrants or blacks or Jews or any set of stereotyped and degraded "others...

...In all these cases, state power is the necessary instrument of justice...

...They have to do with the self-aggrandizement of the few and the weakness of the many...

...Let me take each of them in turn...

...it is the deep structure of democratic politics itself...

...Solidarity is an experience before it is a choice...

...If for every individual there was one and only one association, solidarity would be parochial and limited, and group conflict would be intense, endless, often deadly...

...The commitment to freedom, then, requires support for settlement or, better, for a variety of settlements...

...Sometimes, indeed, we are well served by more-or-less permanently empowered staffs: we don't have time for all the meetings that greater democracy would require...

...no one is degraded...

...The freedom to do whatever one wants with one's life, or one's body, or one's time and energy, or one's money has never been obvious DISSENT / Winter 1998 • 47 to people on the left...

...they are fiercely debated by people who call themselves experts...

...It is a great mistake for protagonists of "identity politics" to advocate this kind of singularity...

...Social democracy depends upon the vitality of associational life...

...The constraint of some is necessary to the freedom of many...

...The mix of groups, cultures, and histories is an inescapable feature of all "advanced" (and most "advancing") 50 DISSENT / Winter 1998 societies...

...If students inherit the "work" of previous genera48 DISSENT / Winter 1998 tions, they must nonetheless choose for themselves what to do with it, how (and whether) to carry it forward...

...The maxim is partly, but only partly, true: there is a natural tendency toward inequality in all the spheres of production and distribution, and there is a further tendency, more dangerous, for individuals who have acquired superiority in one sphere to use that superiority to advance themselves in all the others...

...I suspect that it is a fact about social life generally, in all times and places, but it is brought to the fore by the multiple processes of differentiation that are a feature of our own time...

...But citizenship, properly understood, can incorporate difference, and social justice is served only if it does...

...What is crucial is that, if one is born into these or those groups, it is possible for one to get out—and, having gotten out, it is also possible for one to find alternative associations...

...It requires some resistance to (what I have elsewhere called) the Four Mobilities— social, geographical, familial, and political— that undercut class loyalties, shatter neighborhoods, break up families, cut deeply into party commitment and membership...

...2) In all the spheres of distribution, groups that defend internal standards—health care for the sick, housing for the homeless, education for all the children who are capable of learning—are increasingly challenged by the theory and practice (the two brought together in ways that should make the left envious) of the market price and the profit margin...

...and, most important of all, organized in the widest possible range of parties, unions, movements, 52 DISSENT / Winter 1998 circles, schools, groupings, and so on...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 53...

...But they are also agents of individualization...

...The one depends on the many, the many on the one...

...rXAMPLES OF social tyranny can be found in almost all the groups that make up i civil society...

...Politics is the art of bringing these tangled dealings into some coherent pattern...

...the forms of autonomy they defend stand in the way of marketization...

...responding together to difficulty, crisis, natural disaster...

...And so political interventions to prevent or inhibit such acts, and to maintain the autonomy of the different distributions, also represent a defense of freedom...

...Because of technological transformations and economic globalization, and also because of an aggressive campaign on behalf of laissezfaire ideology and market power, more and more people in the "advanced" countries of the West are actually in danger of sliding from the first part of the population into the second...

...Freedom will undercut itself unless there is a collective effort to cope with its effects: to create and re-create stable social settings—families and communities—that produce strong individuals and provide them with seriously and interestingly different possibilities...

...The state regulates civil society, but it is itself constituted as a democratic state by the civil society that it regulates...

...Oligarchic tendencies in this or that organization raise difficulties for, but don't necessarily block, this project...

...The sense of closeness with other people has to be earned—by fighting together or working together for a cause...

...possessed of the complete set of civil rights and liberties...

...The plurality of associations (there are some two hundred thousand "voluntary associations" in the United States), the possibility for people to "vote with their feet," the intermittent rebellions and institutional reformations that make oligarchy an always unstable arrangement—all these suggest that democracy in society does not require free elections in every group...

...People experience solidarity separately and differently...

...But as a political practice it must begin, as I have begun, with the multiple associations of civil society—which include, of course, the unions, parties, factions, editorial boards, and youth groups of social democracy itself...

...it is built from the ground up...

...ALL THIS is more visible in the United States, perhaps, than in European countries, but it is everywhere the way things tend...

...mosturr is the mark of a free society, whose members are self-determining men and women: they move among the various groups and associations, across ethnic, religious, ideological, and sometimes political frontiers...

...Since Robert Michels wrote his grim account of "the iron law of oligarchy," these have rarely been the subject of theoretical reflection...

...Interventions of this sort, to limit the reach of political power or constrain the cash nexus (so that all social goods are not up for sale), make it possible for different individuals, differently endowed, with different interests and ambitions, to pursue different goods, confident that the goods are actually available for pursuit and can be had for the "right reasons"— because of need or talent or interest or achievement...

...This doesn't mean that they must be absolutely equal in status, wealth, or power...

...they are not even attractive utopias...

...The singular, universal political community requires a particularistic associational life...

...Here people get something closer to the health care they need, the jobs they qualify for, and the schooling they want or can manage, than their grandparents or great-grandparents did: this is the (limited) success story of left politics...

...But the market is incapable of helping the grow ing number of excluded men and women...

...We don't decide to join...

...we are enrolled by our parents (hence one of the few reliable discoveries of political science: the best predictor of party allegiance is parental party allegiance...

...Ideally, this should make possible a society free from social tyranny, where individuals are up or down with reference to this or that good, but no one is up or down everywhere...

...In the lower third of the population, however, exclusion from all these goods, or minimal realization of them, produces an intensified inequality from which there seems no escape...

...Because we can imagine valuable projects that span generations—the creation of a just society, say, or, at least, the argument about what a just society would look like—we are not sympathetic to a radical individualism...

...What should practical political philosophers do...

...it represents a radical demand for simplification and homogenization in a world that will never again be simple and homogeneous...

...But they won't prosper, expand, draw more people into everyday participation, help the excluded help themselves, unless there is a political decision on their behalf, unless the universal state enters into a social alliance with particularity and difference...

...no such society yet exists...

...I can't be a political adventurer or a cultural vagabond unless other people are settlers...

...The groups will survive in any case, for they answer to profound human needs...

...Different people will be unequal in different ways, but these inequalities will not be generalized across the spheres: all social goods won't come in train to the same people...

...2) Breaking out of the old patterns of superiority and subordination...

...What this means in practice is that all left parties and movements are internally divided between those people who have already benefited from egalitarian policies and those who have benefited minimally or not at all...

...The test of solidarity, the mark of a cooperative commonwealth, is mutual aid—the recognition of our fellow citizens, all of them, as men and women toward whom we have obligations by virtue of the fellowship...

...of welfare workers who won't live by the "bottom line" or consign needy people to the discipline of the market...

...some of them, at least, are local, willful, and political...

...Closeness today can only come from a series of reiterated experiences, different for different people and for different groups of people, but related and overlapping—so that I fight, work, study, celebrate, and so on, in a variety of social settings, with a (changing) variety of other men and women...

...It has to be brought into play with great care, for it is a power radically disproportionate to, and therefore dangerous to, the different groups that coexist in civil society...

...But all this won't be enough to bring in the growing number of excluded men and women...

...Simple equality of that sort is the bad utopianism of the old left...

...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...

...None of this can be prevented without endless tyrannical interventions in ordinary life...

...The pluralism that supports freedom is constituted by ethnic, cultural, religious, and political traditions and the groups of men and women that sustain them...

...But it must be used...

...Mutual aid will be one of these activities, coexisting with the others and deriving from them its obligatory character...

...But I am not talking about the freedom of self-created individuals to do what they please...

...If philosophy is to engage with politics, it had better be political, not metapolitical, philosophy...

...We learn to be citizens in many different associations: neighborhoods, churches, unions, professional groups, parties and movements, societies for mutual aid, and so on...

...Efforts to begin at the top, government-led campaigns for Americanization or Russification, say, or populist campaigns against foreign immigrants and "alien influences" reflect a loss of faith in the democratic construction of a common life...

...The activists of all the different groups must deal with one another not as strangers but as fellow citizens with similar or at least related and overlapping concerns...

...seriousness has been one of our historical marks, often to a fault...

...nor am I talking about the equal possession of all social goods by all men and women...

...the freedom that they manifest ought to be constrained...

...That is why it is so important that the fellowship be concretely enacted, so that we are actually engaged with one another, not all of us with all of us (for that cannot be a realistic engagement), but some with some, in a great plurality of associations and activities...

...With a little help from the state...

...These are not realistic possibilities...

...or whenever the company of men and women who control the market or the state dominate all the other distributive spheres...

...character and identity, distinction and individuality are slowly acquired, with the help of the others and also, often, in rebellion against them...

...of teachers insisting upon the independence of their schools, refusing to serve political purposes, reaching out to children in trouble...

...But another part, the lower third, is coming increasingly to experience a radical exclusion from all the productive and distributive spheres—in the form of unemployment (in Europe) or underemployment or employment only in the "second sector" of the economy, where government regulations are rarely enforced, health insurance and pensions are not available, and collective self-defense is virtually impossible DISSENT / Winter 1998 • 49 (the American pattern...

...Solidarity can be dangerous when it is only a feeling, an emotional substitute for, rather than a reflection of, actual, on-the-ground, day-by-day, cooperation...

...of health care professionals looking for ways to help the most vulnerable of their patients...

...3) Creating a cooperative commonwealth...

...We don't (any longer) admire people who make themselves agents of historical necessity, instruments of an all-powerful party, disciples of a sectarian leader, ideological or religious zealots...

...Against religious orthodoxy and social conformity, the demand for free choice, the defense of experiment and innovation, is legitimate, important, stirring...

...So it should be used only in response to cries of oppression and demands for justice that come from within society itself, and only in association with and in support of the self-defensive efforts of the oppressed...

...Fear of falling in the first group, resentment and anger over having fallen (or being down) in the second group, make many of their members susceptible to a familiar kind of populism, which readily takes rightist, chauvinist, or fundamentalist forms...

...They use their wealth, say, to buy political office or influence, or places for their children in elite universities, or better forms of health care than are available to anyone else...

...We can only decide to stay . . . or not...

...Excluded men and women must be participants in this welfare society, helped to help themselves in the most concrete ways, in the most local settings, before they can function effectively in the larger society and in the different spheres of production and distribution...

...Many of our most important groups are in the sociological sense involuntary associations: families, nations, classes, religions, even, often, political parties...

...So you will immediately recognize the following tripartite structure...

...Insofar as goods are differently available, the resulting distributions won't be determined by the standard forms of domination and usurpation...

...it won't provide them with jobs or underwrite the autonomy of nonmarket spheres of activity...

...Or rather, the liberal democratic and social democratic societies of the West have actually achieved something like complex equality (a modest version) for some part of the population, the top two-thirds, say, though the position of many of these people is precarious...

...Among the top twothirds, inequalities of institutional power, wealth, educational attainment, prestige, and leisure are at least relatively dispersed—in comparison, say, to earlier social formations...

...Indeed, there are signs that after a period of moving toward complex equality, we are now moving away from it...

...It's not, however, the whole of freedom's meaning: indeed, if there were no projects of such value, so central to our lives that we were prepared to impose them on our children, the freedom to choose (or refuse) would be very nearly meaningless...

...3) The welfare services that arise within civil society, the kinds of mutual aid sponsored by churches, unions, and fraternal organizations, are also in trouble: they have for a long time depended upon state subsidy as well as upon voluntary contributions of money and time (in the United States, more than 50 percent of the money spent by religious organizations on welfare services comes from public funds), and state officials are under increasing pressure to turn to private, for-profit forms of social provision...

...And that the democratic state must provide...

...This means that the world must be open to This is a revised version of a talk originally given at a Social Democratic Party conference, "Philosophy Meets Politics," held in Berlin, October 1996...

...It was a historical mistake of large proportions, for which we have paid heavily, to allow socialism to be identified with tyranny of that sort...

...1) Free men and women...

...But if they move so fast and in such numbers that the groups and associations cannot sustain an inner life, and if they experiment so casually that they are not marked by the experience, the freedom to move and experiment will become less and less significant...

...And there is no way to resist the tendency except by invoking the solidarity of citizens and using the state's power to collect and allocate money...

...Human beings are social creatures, who are capable of freedom precisely because they are particular people, with families and histories, language and culture...

...But these do best for people who are already doing well, leaving behind a growing number of men and women who are effectively deprived of all but the most minimal services, provided by underpaid civil servants or exhausted volunteers, with always inadequate resources...

...Nor, however, do we accept the postmodernist illusion of pure self-creation, the contemporary form of intellectual egotism...

...What is crucial for freedom is not that the choice come first, which would require that all social groups be dissolved and formed anew in each generation...

...But all the multiple and divided identities are enclosed within the bounds of citizenship...

...the welfare services they organize generate no measurable profit...

...Civil society—so we have been taught since Hegel—is a realm of fragmentation...

...The left is committed to the idea of ( I ) free men and women (2) breaking out of the age-old patterns of superiority and subordination, and (3) creating a cooperative commonwealth...

...This is a hard achievement...

...In fact, ethnicity, religion, profession, work, and residence make for multiple identities—and some of these are themDISSENT / Winter 1998 51 selves divided and ambiguous as a result of immigration, intermarriage, two-career families, social mobility, and so on...

...But pluralism is not the product of individual choice, except in a very special sense: it is the product of diverse cultures, groups, traditions, parties, and movements sustained across generations by men and women who willingly take on the "work" urged by their parents or predecessors...

...The pluralism that supports solidarity is constituted by the whole set of groups and associations where people come together to sustain a way of life or uphold a conception of justice or defend a set of interests...

...But this freedom to come and go requires that there be somewhere to come from and go to: it requires a genuine pluralism, a diversity of groups with members who are engaged, entangled, committed, hard at work...

...Anyone who has lived in the twentieth century or studied its history knows that political conflict and the competition for leadership always make for power inequalities, and that entrepreneurial activity always makes for economic inequalities, and that everyday social communication —gossiping, boasting, admiring, and judging —always makes for status or reputational inequalities...

...The stories they tell are less immmediately exciting than those of an increasingly commercialized mass culture...

...The distributions will make instead for "complex equality," which is to say for radically dispersed and disaggregated inequalities...

...But I do want to stress that these causes are not impersonally or world-historically determined...

...National and ethnic chauvinism is a predictable reaction to this differentiated engagement with otherness...

...At the same time, the left is, or should be, committed to the excluded men and women of the second part...

...I want to make only one point, which is crucial to any leftist defense of pluralism...

...They have to analyze, criticize, refine, and revise the values and commitments of their fellows, and then they have to describe honestly the difficulties that these values and commitments encounter in the contemporary world: the nature of the opposition, the sites of political struggle, the institutional obstacles, and the general tendency of the necessary reforms...

...In fact, of course, you are free to give it up, and that's an important part of what freedom means...

...At the same time, the multiplication of difference brings more and more people into political life, multiplying also the sites and settings for both competitive and cooperative activity...

...The pluralism that supports equality is constituted by the different social goods, and the autonomous spheres within which they are produced and distributed, and the associated men and women—workers, teachers, doctors, clerics, journalists, civil servants, and so on— who work within those spheres and defend their autonomy...