"PLURALISM" REFINED

ANOTHER DIVE DOWN THE NOMENCLATURE RABBIT HOLE

In my ongoing effort at a parallel track of unearthing historical examples of temporalist pluralism while also (informed by that spade work) refining the nomenclature and taxonomy of pluralism, this post contributes toward the latter prong of the project. For those less interested in getting the language right, get ready: another ambitious exploration in the historical sociology of pluralism – focusing on guild corporatism – is on its way. But it’s a big job, again, so have a little patience with me.

Here I want to condense into a more precise and systematic model pluralist distinctions provided in earlier posts. In one case there is the distinction I’ve frequently made between “American” and “European” pluralism. Or, at least, the concept of pluralism adhered to from within the different intellectual and political schools of thought more associated with those regions. I also want to include in this taxonomic rejigging the distinction recently offered in my post on Griffiths’ parsing of pluralism, particularly the notion of strong and weak pluralism. I think we can generate some parsimony by combining these two axes into a single trinity, which would be both more elegant and more precise.

My thinking on this matter was stimulated by reading a promising, though ultimately, disappointing book by Alan Cawson, Political Theory and Corporatism. The premise of the book is that the author does a comparative analysis of the efficacy of what he identifies as three traditions of political theory: pluralism, liberalism, and corporatism. From something like the frame of Griffiths, this sounds like an odd juxtaposition, since he’d consider corporatism to be a subset of pluralism. The reason, of course, that Cawson doesn’t perceive such a problem is that of course (despite, I believe, being a Brit) he’s defining pluralism in what I’ve called the American meaning. His use of corporatism does come closer to Griffiths’ understanding of that term, though Cawson’s framing of corporatism is very much an example of weak pluralism, within Griffiths’ taxonomy.

In any event, all this has inspired me to try and clarify and refine the terms of reference a bit better than so far achieved. I found there to be many more problems in Cawson’s book, but I’ll restrict my comments to this particular consideration. For readers unfamiliar with the distinctions I’ve made previously, what I’ve called the American model of pluralism – meaning not that specific to American life, but that promoted by post WWII American sociology – is that of a highly individuated society in which common interests lead people to coalesce into pressure groups that attempt to exert pressure upon government decision and policy making.

And, of course, there’s no denying that such a thing exists. Cawson does a find job of pointing to how inadequate such processes are as legitimizing functions of mass democracy. Not all groups, for instance, have common power opportunities or resources. As a consequence, it hardly follows that all such groups have equal access to government influence. But such processes are a real thing.

The important distinction for our purposes though is that under this “American” model of pluralism these pressure groups are elective, facultative, and transitory. This notion of “grassroots democracy” can be seen as appealing to a liberal marketist mindset: just as uncoordinated flows of supply and demand, as though by an invisible hand, generate appropriate resource distributive prices; so an uncoordinated flow of values and interests, as though by an invisible hand, generates transitory coalitions for the purposes of democracy expression.

Again, I’m not denying the existence of such processes, nor disputing the valid criticisms Cawson makes of any assumption that those processes effectuate “democratic” governance. My point is merely that this is a radically different set of social forces than we’re referencing with the European understanding of pluralism: i.e., the pluralism seen in Walker’s history of the German hometowns, Grossi’s history of European law, or polycentric, centrifugal federalism. My idea then, as alluded to above, was that there may be a more elegant nomenclature for simultaneously noting this American/European distinction, while also providing a more vivid and precise substitute for Griffiths’ strong/weak distinction.

I’ve come up with a descending trinity that looks like this:

1. Heterarchical pluralism (Jurisdictional)

2. Hierarchical pluralism (Jurisdictional)

3. Coalitional pluralism

Starting from the bottom: the “American” pluralism that I’ve described above is a coalitional order. The second definition of coalition provided by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary is:

2 : a temporary alliance of distinct parties, persons, or states for joint action

This seems to be a perfectly workable definition of this “American” understanding of pluralism. One could quibble to what degree “temporary” is etymologically built into the word, but it serves my purposes and who am I to argue with Merriam-Webster. So, moving forward, I’ll discard my reference to this definition of pluralism as American for a categorization of it as coalitional pluralism.

In broad strokes, I’d contrast this coalitional pluralism with jurisdictional pluralism. Unlike the more fluid and transitory coalition, a jurisdiction is an established area defined precisely by its ability to exercise law. Again, turning to Merriam-Webster:

1: the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law

So, hopefully, it is obvious the difference between a coalition, transitory and fluid, formed for purposes of influencing the law making and applying entity, on the one hand; and on the other hand, the entity that indeed does make and/or apply the law. The difference between coalitional and jurisdictional pluralism then should be clear. However, as noted in Griffiths’ distinction between strong and weak pluralism, not all jurisdictional pluralism is the same. So, I thought, as I was undertaking this bit of nomenclature revision, perhaps I could integrate this distinction as well into a more complete taxonomy. Here are a couple passages from that earlier post to remind readers what those terms meant in Griffiths’ parsing of pluralism.

Weak refers to subordinate entities which derive their authority through concession of the sovereign...In those cases, a legal monist entity, perhaps for efficiency or maybe legitimacy purposes, has delegated some bandwidth of responsibility to other, presumably lower, levels of operation. These delegations though are strictly administrative in that no compromise or division of sovereignty is entailed.

Strong legal pluralism, in contrast, refers to entities that create their authority independent, and even in some cases in defiance, of supposed superior authority, and thereby at least complicate, if not refute such authority's claim to sovereignty. Of course, also, strong legal pluralism would apply to situations in which compacting entities created a new level of authority, and maybe even sovereignty, while still retaining their own legal legitimacy.

So, was there a nomenclature that captured Griffiths’ distinction and provided continuity with my nomenclature revision to coalitional pluralism? Before fully unpacking that piece of the story, for those unfamiliar, I’ll briefly refer us to the meaning of the popular suffix “archy,” as in monarchy, or oligarchy, or patriarchy, etc. Etymonline.com explains the etymology as such:

-archy

word-forming element of Greek origin meaning "rule," from Latin-archia, from Greek-arkhia "rule," from arkhos "leader, chief, ruler," from arkhē "beginning, origin, first place," verbal noun of arkhein "to be the first," hence "to begin" and "to rule" (see archon).

So, it’s quite similar to the idea of sovereignty, as being a locus of the origin of law or rule. And as I’ve noted frequently in on this Substack, the European idea of pluralism is precisely this corporatist one: that some kind of group, organization, or more impactfully, some institution provides its own area of sovereign jurisdiction: e.g., in the German hometowns’ autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire, or fedun’s of a federation. The distinction in this case is between those situations in which the “lower” corporation’s authority is derived from the delegation of a monist sovereign and those in which the corporations hold their sovereignty on the basis of their own history and power. As in the medieval constitution, the kings were limited by counter-authority, legal and political.

So, the distinction here I feel is well captured by distinguishing between different archical arrangements. Griffiths’ “weak” pluralism can be characterized as hierarchical pluralism, in that, as just described, the corporation is a sub-unit of the monist sovereign, gaining whatever authority it has from that sovereign’s delegation, and so remaining effectively under its sovereign power. On the other hand, Griffiths’ “strong” pluralism, where corporations maintain their authority independent of the preferences of a broader political power, like a crown or a state, suggests a set of distributed sovereigns – each with sovereignty within its own jurisdictions – each counter-balancing the power of the others. One option was to call this polyarchical, but I chose instead to go with heterarchical.

The former had the virtue of suggesting that there could be many such loci of limited sovereignty, which is surely what would be preferred in the pluralist constitutional ideal of the temporalist. However, there’s no logical necessity of such multiple loci. Even a division of sovereignty between two loci, as in the consociational arrangement between the Flemish and French in Belgium would still constitute a form of pluralism.¹ In the end, I felt more important in a contribution to the pluralist lexicon was to emphasize the difference or otherness, the distinction of sovereignty (or archy) as plural.

Then, applying this new nomenclature: as we have seen already, and will see much more in the series to come, in categorizing guilds, we could say that at the dawn of their origin there may have been aspects of coalitional pluralism entailed, but once they became guilds in the sense we understand that term in historical and sociological analysis, expressions of corporative pluralism in Griffiths’ second set of distinctions, they were unambiguously expressions of jurisdictional pluralism.² However, whether they were forms of hierarchical or heterarchical pluralism varied from one historical occasion and location to another.

The final wrinkle in this is that, if I do happen in the future to use the term “pluralism” without any such modifying adjective (which I no doubt will, sometimes just out of insufficient attention to detail), it can probably be safely assumed that I’m referring to heterarchical pluralism. That, as I assume is obvious to regular readers here, is my default regulatory norm in pursuit of a model of pluralism which may help temporalism to regenerate the gemeinschaft and institutions sufficient to cushion society against the coming impact of runaway spatialism. There, I think I’ve covered my bases.

So, moving forward, this will be the nomenclature I’ll be using to distinguish between these different kinds of pluralism invoked – too often without sufficient attention to nuance and detail – within the scholarly literature. And, as mentioned, the first opportunity to put this new taxonomy to work will be in the exciting, upcoming series on guild corporatism, old and new. So, if you want to be the first to hear about the lessons to be learned from this further intellectual archaeology of the history of pluralism, and haven’t yet, please…

And, as always, if you know others interested in the stuff we discuss around here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. I’m also looking forward to doing a bit of a dive into at least a brief series on consociation. Which might be distinguished as civil, as opposed to territorial, federalism.

2. It is possible, even though in some cases with an asterisks, to have corporative coalitional pluralist entities. In some instances quite lucrative ones, but by definition they are not jurisdictional, as they do not make, but only aspire to influence law or policy. The National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club would be examples of such entities. They don’t fit the coalitional part of the definition as easily as they have an enduring organizational life, but the membership — unlike a guild — is elective and fluid. And, they are pressure groups. There are of course also corporative coalitional pluralist entities that fully fit the definition, such as those formed to oppose the implementation of a specific policy: e.g., locating a waste disposal facility in the region or cutting back the hours of the local library.