Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy: Reflections on Opening up Communism

The processes of transition from communist rule in Eastern Europe and the dilemmas of reform in the Soviet Union invite reflection on the role of pluralism in rendering a political system legitimate and democratic. In this book, Frederick M. Barnard examines differing conceptions of political pluralism, focusing on the question of how political differentiation can evolve and flourish without leading to crippling political fragmentation. He emphasizes the necessary balance between political differentiation and societal cohesion. The book uses certain proposals put forward by pluralist reformers during the Prague Spring as a point of departure in examining broader questions about socialism and pluralism. These proposals outlined a unique form of pluralist socialism. In reflecting on them, Professor Barnard takes up a number of issues fundamental not only to socialist theory but to political theory generally, such as the political conversion of doctrinal "isms" and in this context the nature and role of political ideology; the relation of the state to society; and the importance of political accountability. He examines the ways in which Czechoslovak pluralist ideas differed from others advanced at the time in Poland and Yugoslavia as well as from those common in Western democracies, and these differences clarify opposing arguments about the meaning and method of democratizing society, such as the question of whether democratization requires the deprofessionalization of politics if not the total withering away of the state. Throughout the book, the author explores the political-philosophical as well as the procedural-democratic problems involved in legitimizing socialism as a pluralist political system, and, in so doing, also throws new light on central concerns in Western political debate. This is a clearly written exposition of a complex set of issues that should be of interest to political philosophers as well as to scholars and students of Eastern European and Soviet political theory.

Pluralism, socialism, and politjical legitimacy

Pluralism, socialism, and political legitimacy Reflections on opening up communism

F. M. BARNARD

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne

Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. c ambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521402521 © Cambridge University Press 1991 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Barnard, F. M. (Frederick M.) Pluralism, socialism, and political legitimacy : reflections on opening up communism / F. M. Barnard, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-40252-2 (hardback) 1. Communism - 1945- 2. Socialism. 3. Pluralism. 4. Soviet Union - Politics and government - 1985- 5. Europe, Eastern Politics and government — 1989— I. Title. HX44.B346 1991 320.5-dc20 91-8143 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-40252-1 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-09207-4 paperback

To the memory of Bertus Mechner and his vision of social justice

Contents

Preface

Page

lx

1 Introduction I. Variants of pluralism II. Socialism and politics III. Pluralism as openness IV. Liberal neutrality and socialist plurality V. The structure of the argument

1 3 9 13 15 19

2. The Context I. Humane socialism: Marxism and Masarykism? II. Economic equality and political participation III. The spring of political reform IV. From monism to pluralism V. The leading-role principle VI. Party reform and political reform VII. Opposition and political opposition

21 21

28 31 34 38 42

3. Socialist pluralism and pluralist socialism I. English antecedents II. Czechoslovak departures III. The deconsecration of politics IV. The "anomaly" of socialist pluralism

47 48 53 58 61

4. Ideological differentiation under socialism I. Philosophy and politics II. Marxism and ideology

66 68 73

24

Contents III. IV.

Redefining ideology in politics Ideology and legitimacy

76 81

5.

Socialism and the language of sentiment I. Substahtive and procedural legitimacy II. Community and competition III. Common purposes and public objects IV. Fraternity and citizenship

86 86 89 93 98

6.

Socialism and the language of rationality I. Rationality and political rationality II. Conversation and contestation III. Norms and processes IV. Neutrality and socialism V. Universality and citizenship

103 103 108 112 115 118

7.

Socialism, politics, and citizenship I. "Command" socialism and Klokocka's critique II. Socialism as a civic order IIL The "general will" and a politics of opinion IV. Debate, dissent, and public choice

119 119

Conclusion I. Diversity and unity II. Credal consensus and political dissensus III. Continuity and reversibility IV. Yields of opening up communism V. Slogans and words

139 140 144 146 148 149

8.

122 128 133

Appendix: Electoral confrontation under socialism

153

Index

185

Preface

These reflections have taken shape over some twenty years. Their first impulse came from a visit I made to my native country in 1967, after an absence of nearly thirty years. The old friends I met, their fears and their hopes, induced me to turn again to speculations that I thought I had put behind me. In particular, Leah Patakova, the daughter of one of these friends, succeeded in persuading me that the embers of Masaryk's Czechoslovakia were not altogether dead, that a spark here and there might yet be rekindled. To make sure that I would keep this in mind, Leah supplied me for the next two years with issues of Literami Listy, one of the liveliest forums of the public debate that has come to be known as the Prague Spring. In 1969 an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship provided an opportunity to familiarize myself with the content and background of this debate. In the course of subsequently writing the occasional piece about the Prague Spring, I discussed some salient themes with Richard Vernon, a newly acquired colleague at the University of Western Ontario. Rather intriguingly, he suggested that these themes invite comparison with ideas of socialist pluralism originating in England half a century earlier. Out of these suggestions grew a number of joint efforts, evidence of which found its way into this study. Sections I in Chapter 3 and II in Chapter 5, in particular, owe much to Professor Vernon's collaboration, and the Introduction benefited appreciably from his own writings and from the helpful comments he made on mine. I wish to express thanks also to Political Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and East Central Europe for permission to use material published in these periodicals, as well as to Kosmas, Journal of Czechoslovak and Central European Studies, in which my translation of Vladimir Klokocka's "Electoral Confrontation under Socialism" first appeared. Not least, however, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Emily Loose at Cambridge University Press, New York, for her IX

x

Preface

unfailing editorial counsel, and to Barbara Palmer for a number of clarifications and stylistic improvements. Undoubtedly, powerful stimulation came from two recent conferences, one on Masaryk in London, 1986, the other on Czechoslovakia in Toronto, 1988, whose organizers, Professors Stanley Winters and Gordon Skilling, respectively, kindly consented to the use of material contained in my conference papers, and actual developments in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary formed a by no means negligible source of urgency in the final writing of these reflections. Momentous events since in Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia only help to reinforce the importance that the reformers of the Prague Spring attached to the removal of the constitutional provision assuring the Communist party its maintenance of political power. That elections would remain empty of meaning in the absence of this fundamental change was clear enough in 1968. What was left in uncertainty, possibly of necessity, was its eventual timing. Yet, then as now, few pluralist socialists had the slightest doubt that, unless "socialism" ceased to mean a ruling party's total control over social, political, and economic life, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the privileged constitutional position of Marxism-Leninism, it would scarcely be able to meet the demands of any form of pluralist democracy. Of course, the transformation of Communist regimes in the nineties may manifest no desire to maintain or evolve socialism of any kind. If so, the Czechoslovak "opening up" of communism during the late 1960s may have been not only the first serious attempt at revisionism but also the last propitious opportunity of so doing without causing the complete demise of socialism, however defined. Admittedly, what, if any, revisions communism can absorb without ceasing to retain any recognizable identity is a moot point. Marxist-Leninists have certainly nursed few illusions in the past about communism's capacity to withstand the onslaught of "revisionism." If, they feared, revisionism was not nipped in the bud, it would erode the very ground on which they stood. Turning "capitalist," though, may prove no easy undertaking either, in countries in which the infrastructure for a privatized economy simply does not exist and in which the vast majority is unaccustomed to taking individual initiatives or to assuming responsibility for their outcomes. Diversity and competition, moreover, although they may enrich life, may also render it more hectic and

Preface xi more stressful. Frustration with "capitalism" may therefore easily follow in the wake of frustration with "socialism." Strictly speaking, though, conjectures about the fortunes of Communist or ex-Communist regimes form no major part of these reflections. Being so markedly different in their history and political traditions, peoples of Eastern Europe can be expected to take different routes in their search for democracy. Likewise, I am not eager to do more than sketch in broad strokes the Czechoslovak background of what, by force of largely external circumstances, remained what I call a thought experiment, a thought-over possibility rather than an implemented political reality. If I give certain pride of place to the ideas of one Czech pluralist, Vladimir Klokocka, I do so because they disclose insights of value in their own right, apart from their conceivably being closest to what at the time seemed optimally, or tactically, realizable. They expressed, moreover, the position of an insider and thereby assume particular force within the context of Marxist debate about socialism and politics, for only fairly recently have Marxists been willing to concede openly that Marx provided little theoretical or institutional guidance for socialism as a civic order. Klokocka, to my knowledge, is one of the first of Marxist writers, within a Communist country, who in detailed institutional, as well as conceptual, terms sought to come to grips with the relationship of politics and socialism and, expressly, with the workings of democracy under socialism. In a sense his ideas may therefore be seen as something of a blueprint for current developments in some Communist states, thereby investing them with topical significance in addition to their historical interest, especially on such issues as party political differentiation, parliamentary supremacy, and electoral contestation under socialism. To be sure, several of Klokocka's ideas, seen from the perspective of liberal democratic practices, are neither profound nor original, taken as such. The whole point, however, as I see it, is that they must not be taken as such but must be viewed from within their particular context as a daring attempt by a self-confessed Marxist to address questions that have hardly been raised since the Bolshevik Revolution, let alone answered. Although I offer this study as an essay in the broader understanding of political philosophy rather than as one of the more specialized, or more systematic, modes of inquiry into Communist regimes, I do

xii

Preface

hope that students of Communist politics might find the extended framework within which I approach the subject of socialist pluralism of some interest. At first, I chose to situate the central theme — political dissensus within "end-value" consensus - within a wider conceptual locale simply because this method seemed to me the most congenial. Increasingly, however, I discovered in the debate of the Prague Spring larger questions about the nature and status of political ideology, political rationality, and political mediation, questions that go beyond both the context of their emergence and the immediate problems Communist regimes face in attempting to legitimate themselves politically. To put it slightly differently, although the Prague Spring certainly forms a central point of reference, the overall concern of these reflections is the twofold problem of the conversion of doctrinal "isms" into political action and of the linking of assumedly self-validating principles with procedural forms of democratic legitimation. In attempting to explore this twofold problem I could not help admitting to myself, though, how groping these efforts manifestly are and how they leave almost as many difficulties unresolved as they succeed in unraveling.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Not least remarkable among the innovative ideas of the thought experiment known as the Prague Spring was the emergence of a version of pluralism that might perhaps best be described as civic pluralism. Decidedly at variance with the "English" pluralism of the guild socialists, it was very different also from "American" pluralism, where the primary emphasis is on interest-group rivalry and pressure-group activity. Moreover, this new version of pluralism was no less novel as a critique of socialist thinking. For, unlike the tradition of Western political thought, in which citizenship ranks as one of the supreme human values, the tradition of socialism appears in the main to have looked upon complaints about the denial of citizenship as being too narrow a grasp of human bondage to merit foremost placing in the schedule of human laments. In the socialist tradition, broadly considered, the primary grievance is not civic passivity, or even political tyranny, but the dominance of things. In Marx's theory of alienation, for example, tyranny is mediated only indirectly through human beings, since, directly, humans are themselves the victims of things. If, therefore, politics is viewed as the realm of outcomes fundamentally generated by nonhuman forces, as it frequently is within this theory, then humans can hardly expect that it will assuage their fears or sustain their true ends or purposes. On the contrary, in being itself the product of a hidden, nonhuman dominance, politics is most likely to conceal or, at best, deflect true human needs. Rather than revealing, then, the source of unfreedom, it will veil it; and rather than disclosing the genuine nature of human existence, it will distort it. Man's true essence and his true freedom, therefore, come into view only when the delusive veil of politics is fully exposed by a mind purged of all cognitive falsifications of human consciousness. Liberating itself from politics, society will at once 1

2

Introduction

create and benefit from the conditions of an unfalsified vision of truth and reality. Unfortunately, not even theorists of the ideal speech situation have been able to supply intelligible pointers toward the recognition or identification of a wholly unfalsified consciousness. After two decades of rule in the name of socialism, Czechoslovak socialists were asking themselves what precisely an unfalsified social consciousness consisted of, and how in practice it might transform man's private and public life. More pressingly still, they wondered how it was to come into being in the first place. Was the demise of politics the indispensable condition as well as the inevitable outcome? Some time before socialist critics in the West expressed doubts about the liberating effects of the demise of politics, socialist critics in Eastern Europe had suspected that the very theory which saw in politics and citizenship examples of bourgeois illusions was itself an illusion. By 1968, at any rate, the belief in the withering-away thesis of the state was wearing thin indeed and was seen not only as patently false but as a calculated masking device, intended to serve the designs of a monopoly of political power, of a power that, during the years of Communist rule, had intensified at a daunting rate. No wonder, therefore, that few could see in this rule the shriveling of the state any more than they could catch a glimpse of the likelihood of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, or criticizing drama after dinner. At the same time, socialist critics in Czechoslovakia could still recall "bourgeois" citizenship and were therefore in a position to make comparisons. To them, as to many of their countrymen, such comparisons seemed by no means favorable to the status quo. Much of the rethinking, therefore, that took shape during the 1960s consisted of a search for the recovery of those political values that once lent meaning to the notion of a "civic order," an order, that is, in which individuals and groups of individuals could find ways of exercising their rights as citizens. It is this search that forms the main focus of these reflections, for it was in and through this search that a distinctly civic pluralism came to be seen as the necessary requirement of socialism as a political system. The specific content of this search attained its most precise formulation, I believe, in the writings of Vladimir Kloko£ka, a Czech political jurist who, at the time, was a leading member of a (Communist party) commission entrusted since 1966 with the working out of electoral

Variants of pluralism 3 reforms. Klokocka's ideas strike me as particularly relevant to what I call civic pluralism, in that they intimately combine the recognition of diversity with the need for civic unity. Unfortunately, his ideas have suffered virtually total neglect, for the most part because his major publication, a book on pluralist democracies that came out shortly after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, was almost immediately withdrawn from circulation and thus had little chance of becoming at all known.1 One chapter, in particular, on contestation under socialism, raises issues of importance to questions of political differentiation within any system, and I have therefore included a translation of substantial parts of this chapter as an appendix to this volume. I.

Variants of pluralism

All forms of political pluralism, whatever their specific character, pose the problem of combining diversity with unity. Pluralists, by definition, cannot accept a wholly monistic understanding of statehood or nationhood. Within the overarching order bounded by the state there exist for them divergences of opinion, interest, and attachment that demand public recognition. Yet, though they insist that such divergences must not be obliterated, they cannot, as political pluralists, afford to ignore the fact that, if a civic order is to prevail for a society as a whole, diversity cannot, and must not, totally obliterate a sense of unity. For, if it did, the outcome would be fragmentation and not pluralism. There are no doubt extreme pluralists — some might call them anarchists — who interpret the word to mean the exact opposite of monism and for whom there is no need for the institution of statehood or any central unifying authority to hold society together. Whatever social coherence is required society is capable of providing from its own intrinsic sources of human mutuality.2 Frequently, this view im1

2

Vladimir Kloko£ka, Volby v pluralitnich democraciich [Elections in pluralist democracies] (Prague: Svoboda, 1968). (I was able to obtain a copy before the book was withdrawn and get it out of the country.) J. G. Herder was, I believe, the first among modern thinkers to make the distinction between "mechanical" states and "organic" nations. Saint-Simon and Fourier took up the idea of society as a natural organism that renders the state dispensable so that "civil society" might be viewed as a wholly self-regulating social body with its own internal ties of community. One of the publisher's (anonymous) readers interestingly commented that, instead of being within the continuum of a single tradition of thought,

4

Introduction

plies also a critique of the idea of the state as a neutral or impartial arbiter of contending interests, in that it alleges that the incidence of internal social conflict is vastly and deliberately exaggerated in order to justify the paramount status (or sovereignty) of political authority in one form or another. The image of society as a permanent field of battle, as a cluster of individuals and groups jostling and fighting, helps to deceive people into thinking that the state, called in to arbitrate as an umpire, is itself above contending interests, when, in truth, it is the masked instrument of the most powerful strands within society. This image is usually identified with interest-group rivalry, with the vying of diverse sections of society over access to the centers of political power - a form of pluralism that has recently come under attack as the typification of "adversary democracy."3 And, where dissatisfaction with this "American" expression of pluralism has not issued in anarchic reactions, it has not uncommonly led to the repudiation of pluralism altogether. Moderate pluralists, though they emphasize multiplicity, nonetheless recognize that, for society to be a society, diversity must of necessity be tempered with a measure of unity. And it is with so modified a variant of pluralism that most Czechoslovak pluralists converged in their search for the recovery of citizenship. Although they saw their vision of pluralist socialism as opposed to that of monistic socialism — which they identified with the central command regimes of the Stalinist era - they sharply distinguished between pluralism and fragmentation and between statehood as a masking device and statehood as a civic order, as the "space" of citizenship. And though they demanded the acceptance of conflict as a fact of life in any society, they nonetheless insisted on the need for reconciling particularizing loyalties with unifying loyalties, for striking a certain balance that would prevent conflict between them from taking on a chronically disabling form. Some normative understandings, some rule-governed limits, had to be built into pluralism in order to determine how much diversity is

3

the distinction between extreme and moderate pluralism might well derive from two traditions: adversarial pluralism from the Protestant tradition, with its emphasis on the individual, and collaborative pluralism from what Catholic writers (e.g., in Poland) sometimes call solidarism, with its emphasis on plural social entities. See, for example, Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic, 1980).

Variants of pluralism 5 compatible with how much unity - a kind of trade-off between society and statehood. In support of this line of thinking, Czechoslovak pluralists, notably Klokocka, invoked the metaphor of a game. A game is of necessity rule-governed; how things are done is an essential ingredient of game playing. As we shall note, Klokocka deplored the fact that, generally, socialist regimes have paid insufficient attention to the way things are done in the public realm. The doctrinal identification of politics with class struggle clearly did not help matters, for observing rules of the game formed no part of its modus operandi. In class struggle, as in warfare, there are few if any self-limiting rules; almost anything is fair provided it succeeds. By contrast, Klokocka's image of a game was intended to ensure that political contestation remained compatible with societal civility. And he felt that agreement on certain core values might act as a moderating influence upon the stakes of the game and thereby assist the observance of rules. On this view, pluralism implies a conception of politics that is procedural rather than substantive; it is not so much a program of political action as it is a style of acting politically. As envisaged by Klokocka and other Czechoslovak pluralists, then, political differentiation did not set aside the idea of societal unity. Without societal unity, most of them recognized, the concept of statehood as a shared civic order is rendered meaningless. At the same time, they felt that the "command system" of monistic socialism was altogether obsessed with the notion of unity, which the pluralists, not unlike Marx in "On the Jewish Question," diagnosed as a form of delusion, a sort of flight to the magical. As they saw it, "unity" was systematically pressed into service in order to buttress the governmental monopoly of a single party and thereby immensely enlarge the scope of its central and centralizing authority. The practice of linking this centralized unity with "mass democracy" could not but reinforce its magical appeal. Thus, the pluralists argued, any recognizable mode of authentic democracy or self-government was vitiated from the outset. Yugoslav pluralists, confronted with a similar situation, and similarly suspecting the language of unity, identified the malaise, unlike the Czechoslovak pluralists, with the state as such. For them, as for Marx, states are vehicles of particular interests which, through their command over economic and political resources, manage to present

6

Introduction

particular interests as general interests. That the content of particular interests, appropriated by the state, is different under monistic socialism from the content under capitalism seemed to Yugoslav pluralists of little significance in the operation of statehood and its endemic thrust toward centralism. In place of the centralized command system under monistic socialism, they favored the dispersal of distinct industrial self-management units, somewhat on the model of the Paris Commune. Economic decentralization of this kind was thought to promise the pluralization of socialism and, thereby, the overcoming of the hiatus (and alienation) between civil society and the state or, more precisely, between the pursuit of particular social goals and the recognition of general societal goals.4 Interestingly, most Czechoslovak pluralists reversed the order of priority. For them, it was not economic reforms that would restructure socialist society but expressly political reforms. Indeed, some went so far as to argue that there could be no economic reforms without prior political reforms. Any attempt to minimize the function of statehood courted, in their view, the danger of trivializing politics itself. Unlike Yugoslav pluralists, they resisted therefore the tendency to look upon the state as a thing of the past, as a kind of relic of outdated religious, social, philosophical, and economic beliefs. Instead, they viewed as the most pressing issue the relation of socialism to statehood and politics and, in turn, of politics to pluralism. This, rather than the content of socialism per se, engaged their principal interest in reforms. And it was in focusing on the relation between socialism and politics that they gained the conviction that politics, if it was to be a democratic politics, demanded a pluralist conception of socialism, regardless of its doctrinal content. Ideas of socialist pluralism, therefore, in which the demise of statehood and the declining role of politics still loomed rather prominently, appeared to Czechoslovak pluralists as disturbingly suspect. Similarly, as much as Czechoslovak pluralists agreed with Polish pluralists that the complexity of modern industrial organization created tensions and divergences that called for recognition within a socialist system, they were not inclined to attribute direct causality to 4

For a thoughtful treatment of the theory of self-management, see Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982). A useful collection of texts on contemporary socialist pluralism may be found in Ude Bermbach and Franz Nuscheler, Sozialistischer pluralismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1973).

Variants of pluralism 7 such complexity in the emergence of political pluralism. And, though they equally emphasized the possibility of conflicting interests within socialist as within any other systems, they were less anxious to view the idea of pressure-group pluralism as the only or the most appropriate response to social conflict. To be sure, Czechoslovak pluralists did not speak with a single voice; and just as there were supporters of the Yugoslav model, so there were supporters of the Polish conception of pluralism. As the debate wore on during the Prague Spring both of these approaches gave rise to misgivings, to the fear that anything short of expressly political differentiation and representation at the state level, secured by new constitutional provisions, might lend itself to manipulation by the entrenched monopoly party. Indeed, the latter's hegemony might be all the more fully justified by the recognition of the plurality of interests, in that the Party might claim to be eminently qualified to represent society as a whole and, therefore, to act as an umpire in the mediation of conflicting partial interests. The closest antecedent to socialist pluralism in the search for segmental autonomies after Proudhon and prior to the Prague Spring and the thinking of the Yugoslav praxis philosophers is the pluralism of British socialists such as Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. Its central feature is the critique of "sovereignty," of the notion of a single, supreme, and unified locus of power. In its place it puts the devolution of self-government and the creation of segmental autonomies. By contrast, the "interest-group" version of socialist pluralism has its doctrinal home not in England but in the United States of America. Its emphasis is not upon political devolution or the growth of segmental autonomies but upon the multiplication of access points, by means of which influences and pressures can be brought to bear on central governments. By and large, it was this (American) understanding of pluralism, though historically remote from socialist thinking, that has nevertheless been in vogue, not only among Communist pluralists but also in Western analyses of Communist states, designed to show that even highly "authoritarian" or "totalitarian" forms of government are not as monolithic as they are commonly believed to be.5 5

For a seminal account of both the history and the variety of "pluralism" as well as its problematic application to Communist regimes, see Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union: Essays in Honour of H. Gordon Skilling (London: Macmillan, 1983). For a perceptive tracing of Polish pluralism, see S. Ehrlich, Pluralism on and off Course (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), esp. pp. 195-7.

8

Introduction

One of the major theoretical merits of the Czechoslovak thought experiment lies in its having shown (rather impressively, I think) that these earlier models are by no means exhaustive representatives of political pluralism. Unlike either of these earlier expressions of pluralism, the Czechoslovak vision of pluralist socialism did not rule out ideological expressions of divergence. Admittedly, such ideological divergence must not be confused with the "moral" or "value" or "philosophical" pluralism that at times is held to distinguish liberal from nonliberal politics. Likewise, it must not be confused with an utterly "pragmatic" or "value-free" conception of pluralism. In essence, Czechoslovak critics of monism identified political pluralism with the availability of plural alternatives in the implementation of overarching "end values" by converting these into "performative" principles. Whatever disagreements emerged in the course of this conversion would be perceived not as disagreements over moral ends, ultimate values, or fundamental philosophical beliefs but rather as disagreements over particular ways of acting politically. Ideological differentiation, thus understood, would essentially consist therefore of a divergence over the choice of derived regulative principles in the exercise of political action, and it is in this sense that I speak of performative principles in politics. A distinction between horizontal and vertical pluralization might further clarify the kind of ideological differentiation that Czechoslovak pluralists had in mind.6 In the light of this distinction, notions of workers' self-government, industrial autonomy, and invigorated local government might qualify as essentially "horizontal" forms of pluralization, whereas the pluralization of expressly political power through the operation of political parties, by way of electoral and parliamentary contestation, might be viewed as a form of "vertical" pluralization. The civic pluralism suggested by Czechoslovak reformers clearly broke new ground in deviating from both horizontal expressions of socialist pluralism and vertical expressions of liberal pluralism. Unlike the former, it put major emphasis on party/political differentiation, and unlike the latter, it affirmed the possibility of ideological contestation within a system of core beliefs. Moreover, it did much to call into question a widely influential thesis which posits the demise of 6

For this distinction I am indebted to discussions with the Polish sociologist Jerzy Wiatr; see also his "Elements of Pluralism in the Polish Political System," Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1 (1966): 2 4 - 5 .

Socialism and politics

9

ideology as the indispensable condition for the demise of totalitarianism. For what the Czechoslovak thought experiment proposed was not the end of ideology but its redefinition. Even this highly condensed survey of contemporary expressions of socialist pluralism leaves little doubt about the difficulty of identifying pluralism with any one particular system. Not only may it refer to the existence or the creation of multiple cultures, interests, or values, each vying for recognition by the central powers that be, it may refer also to expressly segmental autonomies seeking to dispense with central authorities. Similarly, it may refer to forms of representative politics and systems of parliamentary government or, alternatively, to systems of direct democracy at multiple "functional" levels, fired by the utmost dislike of any form of parliamentarianism. Finally, it may refer to a pragmatic, "value-free" process of mediation through pressures and intergroup bargaining, or to the existence of multiple end values and their contestation by means of political parties. It is within and out of these contrasting expressions of pluralism that the civic pluralism for which Czechoslovak reformers were searching assumed its distinctive complexion. II.

Socialism and politics

Definitions of socialism in terms of ownership, planning, income distribution, cooperation, social welfare, and so on will be found in most histories of socialist thought, but I am not at all sure whether, outside doctrinal Marxism-Leninism, any single one would meet with general acceptance. Certainly, in both the West and the East contemporary theorists of socialism might hesitate to identify socialism simply with state ownership of the means of production or with wholesale planning. Broadly speaking, socialism traditionally stands for the critique of human mutuality, social inequality, and economic exploitation under unrestricted "capitalism." Implicit in this critique is a conviction that the use of natural and technological resources should be socially determined and not left to the decisions of private entrepreneurs, the availability of private capital, or the blind interaction of market forces guided by the desire for private gain. Ideally, the institutional framework should be such as to enable people to see and feel themselves working for the public good, although not a few socialist critics do wonder whether scale and distance make this a tangibly realizable goal.

10

Introduction

To them the institutionalization of civil rights together with a basic measure of social equity seems a good deal closer to reality than visions of communal fraternity.7 In part, this lowering of doctrinal sights is no doubt a reaction to claims made by nominally socialist regimes on behalf of their policies of state expropriation. Commonly, such expropriations were presented as the assumption of "social control" and/or as the expression of Rousseau's general will, assimilated to processes of economic life. As such, they gave rise to questioning, for, apart from misrepresenting Rousseau, they introduced a category that glaringly poses a notorious unclarity. Particularly, when "state" and "society" cease to form recognizably distinct notions, as they do in most Communist versions of socialism, there is no reason why social control should not mean state ownership and centralized state control, or the integration of autonomous social activities within the homogenizing operations of state bureaucracies. As things were, an increasing number of people in Communist states began to wonder whether the link between social control and state control, and between state control and the goals that impelled the transformation of societies into socialist societies, was not in truth a good deal more problematical than official pronouncements were wont to portray. This doubt was largely occasioned by the postrevolutionary status of civil rights and the practical meaning of socialist legality. Clearly, whether or not a state's laws can give birth to intrinsically moral ends, few would deny that a state has the inherent capacity of creating, altering, or abolishing rights. The trouble is that, once the distinction between state and society is blurred or completely lost sight of, civil rights may go begging for effective recognition. Worse still, their very meaning may be rendered questionable under conditions in which the state claims to be the embodiment of each of its members and in which the social infrastructure is virtually absorbed by the central organs of the state. The close identification of state and society has prompted some pluralists in Communist countries to rediscover "society." For them plu7

See, for example, C. A. R. Crossland, The Future of Socialism (New York: Schocken, 1967), chap. 4, esp. p. 75. Crossland rightly points out, I feel, that one cannot treat "socialism" as being an exact descriptive word. "There is therefore no point in searching the encyclopaedias for a definitive meaning; it has none, and never could" (p. 64).

Socialism and politics 11 ralization has come to mean first and foremost the attenuation, if not the entire dismantling, of the hegemony of centralized state control. They wish to see a marked relaxation of the state's grip on the economy, the trade unions, local institutions, and cultural associations. Integral to these aims is a growing conviction that the worker's alienation in industry was not generated uniquely by the private ownership of the means of production, as Marxists have commonly argued. Alienation, as one pluralist critic (in Yugoslavia) put it, occurs whenever there is "a monopoly over decision-making in a statist system." Socialist states, according to this critic, are no exception, insofar as they and their bureaucracies acquire undue privileges in and through "appropriating the surplus value created by the working class."8 Although the theory of self-management, as it was put forward in Yugoslavia, was subsequently presented as a theory in its own right, antedating the Bolshevik Revolution, it was clearly intended in the first place as a corrective to the central command economy of the Soviet system. Yugoslav "praxis" philosophers viewed this economic reconstruction as the road to "humanization," along lines closely resembling those of the early Marx in that, unlike liberal political reforms, it was to transcend the narrow "bourgeois" liberation of individuals as citizens. Toward this end, their doctrine of self-management primarily called for a drastic reform of socioeconomic structures in and through the replacement of state ownership and central bureaucracy by a pyramid of councils, at each of whose levels values associated with democracy and the social emancipation of man were to be translated into reality. Yet, though reforms of this kind were meant to involve the deprofessionalization of politics and the replacement of societal elites by self-governing citizens at all levels of organization, they did not, at any rate in the Yugoslav case, imply the abandonment of the idea of levels of authoritative decision making, so that, although the "state" was to wither away, the "authority" of binding decisions for a societal whole remained. A self-managing society, in other words, was still committed to the idea of unity amid diversity and, therefore, somehow had to come to terms with the most fundamental problem in any form of political pluralism, the problem of mediating unity, or, 8

Mihailo Markovic, "Philosophical Foundations of the Idea of Self-management," in B. Horvat, M. Markovic, and Rudi Supek, eds., Self-governing Socialism (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975), 1:340. See also, on alienation, Horvat, Political Economy of Socialism, pp. 84-105.

12

Introduction

as some self-management pluralists interestingly call it, the "general will" of the people as a whole.9 Later chapters will return to this problem and to the manner in which socialist pluralists in Czechoslovakia strove to approach it. Here I merely wish to bring out the most obvious difference between them and the Yugoslav pluralists. Whereas the Yugoslav praxis philosophers of self-management to some extent bypassed the question of explicitly political mediation, the Czechoslovak pluralists, in the main, made political mediation, as we have noted, a central issue, going so far as to urge the reprofessionalization of politics. For them, the paramount objective was to discover a political understanding of socialism. Forms of economic ownership increasingly appeared less important, and the possibility of "plural ownership" by means of competitive trade-union, cooperative, and private undertakings, in addition to public enterprises, was no longer thought ubiquitously incompatible with "socialism." Instead, socialism came to be increasingly identified with a certain fundamental attitude toward the hierarchy of human values. What seems to have mattered first and foremost to adherents of "socialism with a human face" (to judge from private conversations as well as from public but nonofficial pronouncements during the late 1960s) was that ambitions for, or privileges of, private wealth should not be allowed to undermine the priority of social and environmental concerns and the maintenance of equity in the administration and status of civil rights. Seen from this essentially political and "civic" perspective, therefore, not only rigidities of monistic socialism but also overly economic preoccupations of pluralist conceptions of socialism were found wanting, for while the former failed to be recognizably democratic, the latter failed to be recognizably political. Though pluralists in Czechoslovakia agreed with pluralists in Yugoslavia about the desirability of industrial devolution or federation through "self-management," they nonetheless insisted that federation was one thing and depoliticization through the recovery of "society" quite another. Similarly, pluralists in Czechoslovakia were by no means unaware of the crippling inefficiency of Communist command economies. Yet, if they readily concurred with some form of "market socialism" as an economic alternative, they nonetheless shrank, for the most part, from 9

Markovic, "Philosophical Foundations," p. 331.

Pluralism as openness 13 viewing market socialism as definitive of socialist pluralism. Although they welcomed a system of plural ownership, they could not look upon market socialism, any more than upon federation, as a device capable of rendering strictly political decisions dispensable. There are decisions to be made about priorities of policy affecting a country as a whole, and these decisions, to be viewed as politically legitimate, require certain political mechanisms to be in place. The appropriateness of federative or market arrangements themselves depends on these political mechanisms, and not the other way round. III.

Pluralism as openness

In brief, and this is the gist of these introductory remarks, pluralism qua dispersal of power, whether economic, social, cultural, or political, simply does not tell us enough. Such an understanding of pluralism could easily refer to an empty shell. In order to assume tangibly political meaning, pluralism, I wish to suggest, needs something more. And this more, in a democracy, as the Czechoslovak thought experiment kept reiterating, comprises a recognizable openness to questioning, so that general issues can be raised and policies (and constraints) seen as the expression of public choices. For only thus can decisions constitute generally binding decisions for a society as a whole. The danger in identifying federation or market socialism with socialist pluralism, tout court, lies in wittingly or unwittingly underwriting the interest-group model of pluralism, which, if it is not entirely based on notions of the economic market, is nevertheless thought of as a marketlike form of politics in that general outcomes are said to result from independent but intersecting decisions and claims. Such outcomes, being as much unintended as intended consequences, are hard to trace to particular agents and hence do not easily lend themselves to the working of political accountability, which, for many, including most pluralists in Czechoslovakia, was the touchstone of political democracy. Prevailing understandings of democracy, in other words, were for the most part political, not economic. Furthermore, implicit in these understandings was a preference for sharing public decisions instead of leaving them in the hands of technocrats or economic experts who claim, or actually possess, superior qualities and special qualifications. This preference in turn implied the conviction that citizens on the

14

Introduction

whole know their own interests better than anyone can know them on their behalf. To safeguard these, they felt, was not principally a matter of the market or of administrative devolution but a matter of strictly political norms and political procedures. Only the latter, Czechoslovak democrats insisted, would ensure the rendering of public account and the recognition of civic choice. Similarly, the frequent identification of pluralism with the needs of industrial complexity gave rise to uneasiness. For why should pluralism, thus understood, in any way advance the idea of political differentiation? Clearly, political pluralists saw a danger here of conflating industrial (or economic) complexity with political complexity, and the possible need for the dispersal of industrial enterprises with the dispersal of political power. A conflation of this kind, many feared, could easily lead, as indeed it has led, to a conception of pluralism in terms of a multiplicity of pressure groups, with incompletely overlapping membership, in which the interplay between claims rather than their confrontation is the defining characteristic. In the interplay of interests, as distinct from the confrontation of opinion, claims are typically pressed by temporary alliances rather than stable political parties. Industrial advancement, in helping to multiply such sectional claims, may increase structural complexity to a degree likely to pose serious organizational problems for a central command system, but it does not thereby, as experience hitherto suggests, give birth to political parties or impel a command system to pluralize politically. Models of pluralism in terms of structural complexity alone, therefore, may prove not only inadequate but also potentially misleading. It follows, I think, that pluralism, as a political system, is not simply the opposite of monism or unity. Fragmentation, we noted, could equally assume this role. Yet fragmentation — or, in its extreme form, atomization - is not pluralism. Indeed, as pluralists in Czechoslovakia discovered, atomization militates against political pluralism no less than monolithic centralism, for it breeds powerlessness and does so in a double sense, in the sense of political helplessness of the ruled and in the sense of political opaqueness of those who do the ruling. The combined effect is the demise of political participation in the case of the former and the demise of political responsibility in the case of the latter. Whatever happens publicly seems the outcome of nonidentifiable intentions — because hidden from public view — or the consequence of initiatives that are lost in a labyrinth of causes. Open and autonomous association, as much as open and accountable govern-

Liberal neutrality, socialist plurality 15 ment, seems under these circumstances exceedingly doubtful, if not utterly chimerical. To be sure, from the doctrinal point of view of philosophical liberalism, any form of pluralism under socialism may be just as chimerical, if not altogether foreclosed. It is to this doctrinal objection to socialist pluralism that I now wish to turn. IV.

Liberal neutrality and socialist plurality

Liberal conceptions of political pluralism generally stress the multiplicity of ultimate or "end" values together with the intrinsic neutrality of the state toward such values. On this view, the liberal state excludes from its competence (or jurisdiction) so-called external preferences, that is, social ideals or beliefs about what everyone should aspire to. To give political weight to such preferences would be to deny the state's impartiality; it would mean allowing one person's idea (or one group's idea) of what is good or proper or in the general interest to override the claims of others and thereby to impair the principle of "equality of concern." Similarly, by virtue of the liberal notion of multiple end values, pluralism would need to be understood in terms of irreducible divergences between "ends of life" proposed by different people. While principles of self-management, federation, market socialism, or interest-group competition may or may not be definitive of, or even compatible with, socialist pluralism, clearly, on the liberal model of pluralism, the very idea of socialist pluralism as a political order is categorically called into question. Doctrinally, pluralism and socialism are held to be terminologically exclusive. A socialist political order shuts out, therefore, the possibility of plural parties, ideological differentiation, or political contestation, to the extent that socialism depends on the exclusive recognition of one particular "end of life" or moral world view. In this understanding, socialism is by definition monistic. Whereas a liberal society is "open" to multiple credal possibilities, socialist society is "closed" to all but one creed. There are variants of this understanding, but they all assume a strict symmetry between political contestation and contestation that I earlier described as credal or philosophic. Accordingly, all significant divergences in the political realm are paralleled by divergences in the realm of philosophy, so that the latter explain, sustain, and justify the former. Because we have divergent philosophies we have divergent politics;

16

Introduction

indeed, without such divergent philosophies, there could scarcely be any divergent politics. If we adopt this line of argument, then our philosophy, world view, or end-of-life belief system must determine whatever we mean by any of the irreducibly "contestable" terms of our political vocabulary. For the interpretation of any one term or concept is shored up by the interpretation of all the others, and hence political discourse is locked into closed sets of mutually reinforcing meanings, each of which stems from a given world view or "ism." For example, what we think "justice" means is derived from and shored up by what we think "equality" means, or "fairness," or "freedom." Each of such world views is wholly self-sustaining, having no common ground with any other, thereby excluding the possibility of diverse claims being discursively assessed. The kind of pluralism that philosophical liberalism therefore favors is one of complete tolerance of irreducible diversity, of an anarchic-like multiplicity of wholly incommensurable world views. This close identification of liberalism and pluralism with a wholly anarchic multiplicity of world views, each of which is totally selfcontained and has nothing whatsoever in common with any other, begs the question of whether it can be taken at all seriously as a political model of liberalism. For, surely, what is most striking about this anarchic model is the degree of its political unreality. If liberalism as a political doctrine indeed derives its reason of existence from the blank and irreconcilable confrontation between world views, adherents of one view seeing no meaning in the claims of any other, then one would truly be hard put to recognize it among political liberals anywhere in the world. Madison, for example, who thought of himself as a liberal in politics, certainly held no such view. Factions that irreconcilably oppose each other had no place in his federalist scheme of things. Hume, whether or not we take him for a liberal, likewise did not think of political parties in those terms; for, were they thus understood, it would mean the end to a climate of civility, and politics would be indistinguishable from warfare. It would mean mistaking parties for "factions." "Factions," Hume writes, "subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation."10 Parties, by contrast, see themselves, as the word 10

David Hume, "Of Parties in General," Political Essays, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 7 7 - 8 . Madison, while conceding the virtual inevitability of factions in the form of rival interest groups, nonetheless hoped that

Liberal neutrality, socialist plurality 17 itself implies, as parts of a civic order and not as the means of its displacement.11 Tocqueville, who, as I believe, is closest to Hume in sharply distinguishing parties from factions, and in thinking of parties as integrating forms of contestation, indeed felt that shared end beliefs could not but further a democracy of political diversity. Thus, though both men agreed that people should be able to band together to affirm and contest their political convictions, they nonetheless denied that, in so doing, they should look upon their fellow citizens as unintelligible strangers or potential enemies. Wholly unbounded contestability could hardly explain, therefore, how "tolerance" is at all politically thinkable; why, and how, should members of a society accept the institutions that make tolerance, in the form of coexistence, possible? Surely, whatever it is that makes holders of rival beliefs accept each other's existence as legitimate must somehow be incorporated into a model of liberal pluralism. Yet, once this is admitted, the stark contrast between liberal and socialist conceptions of pluralism decidedly pales. Although the socialist idea of civic pluralism is certainly very different from the liberal idea, it nonetheless shares with it the desire to strike a balance between diversity and unity. Its presuppositions for political differentiation, markedly at variance though they are with those of the liberal idea, nonetheless converge in upholding the principle of societal oneness and societal civility. And they do so on grounds not unlike those stressed by Hume and Tocqueville, whose thinking, whether or not it is recognized as typically liberal, undoubtedly coincides with common liberal democratic understandings of pluralism and politics. Additionally, both men rather strikingly foreshadow the interpretation of ideological contestation that eventually emerged in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. Like Hume and Tocqueville, reformers, notably Klokocka, made a point of distinguishing integrative forms of political differentiation from those likely to rend a nation apart and of separating philosophical Weltanschauungen in their entirety from

11

the constitution would "break and control the violence of factions," which (in the often-quoted Tenth Essay in The Federalist) he describes as a dangerous vice and one of the most serious threats to popular government. Though he deplored militant factions, Hume found that it would be neither "practicable nor desirable" to do without parties "in a free government." See Hume, "On the Coalition of Parties," Political Essays, p. 93. For some apposite remarks on Hume in connection with the politics of socialism, see John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 6 1 - 2 .

18

Introduction

partial borrowings in the form of "performative" principles. Hume's and Tocqueville's line of thought offers therefore, I feel, a useful perspective from which to view the theoretical contours of the reformers' attempt to combine principled contestation with the acceptance of certain core meanings or values enshrined within a broader belief system such as "socialism." What appears as essentially contestable in politics, accordingly, is not the intelligibility or the assessment of meaning, per se, but rather the order of importance in which meanings are assessed. As distinct from philosophy, politics is chiefly concerned with the ranking of meanings and not with their analytical essence. Lenin's attack on "freedom of criticism," for example, in What Is to Be Done? does not suggest that he meant by "freedom of criticism" something different from what J. S. Mill presumably meant by it in On Liberty.12 All Lenin does is to rank it differently, indeed to sacrifice it in the hope that the end to be achieved will justify the sacrifice. This is an illiberal position, no doubt, but hardly evidence for the nonintelligibility of meaning. Surely, if opponents did not understand what they disagree about, disputes would be literally meaningless. Moreover, if there could be collisions only between frameworks of belief, it would be impossible to explain the occurrence of contestation within frameworks of belief other than by treating it as merely an instance of technical disagreement over means. Yet, could there not be grounds other than technical disagreements to account for such contestation? I shall maintain that there could be such grounds and that positions taken upon such grounds could qual12

For this example I am indebted to Professor Richard Vernon, whose discussion "Moral Pluralism and the Liberal Mind," in J. M. Porter and Richard Vernon, eds., Unity, Plurality, and Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 143-61, I found intensely stimulating in the writing of this section. Not surprisingly, contemporary American pluralism, affirming the need for organized interest groups, is repugnant to both individualist and collectivist democrats. Clearly, both historically and philosophically, an appreciable gap separates the democratic liberalism of individualism from the democratic liberalism of pluralism, so that when we speak of liberal democracy as the mainstream of Western democracy, it is not always obvious which liberalism is implied. And, if pluralism under socialism is considered highly paradoxical, is not the connection between pluralism and liberalism itself highly tenuous? I shall pursue this question a little further in Chapter 3. Here I merely wish to recall that, historically, "pluralism" in and through diverse intermediary orders, organizations, and estates was more closely characteristic of the conservative, organic conception of political life than of the essentially mechanical and atomistic conception of liberal-

The structure of the argument 19 ify as political insofar as they might perfectly well involve ends and not only means, even though the ends need not be holistic "ends of life." Political disputes, in other words, seem entirely conceivable in the absence of rival Weltanschauungen, in that they could consist of differences over the practical interpretation of a shared system of belief and in that these differences could be as real and potentially as intense as rivalry between distinct general beliefs. At any rate, the socialist thought experiment under discussion does rather strongly suggest that a monism of belief need present no insurmountable obstacle to a pluralism of politics. V.

The structure of the argument

In the chapters that follow, the possibility of this coincidence between a monistic credal system and a pluralistic political system forms a major theme. In the main, this theme comprises two features. One feature is perhaps best described as cognitive, in that what is meant is a space existing in any belief system between knowing and doing, within which divergent ways of what I called "ranking" (between a belief's core concepts) seek expression and practical interpretation. The other feature is in essence institutional, in that the effective conversion of credal concepts into practical policy inherently demands (in a democracy) legally guaranteed instruments for the articulation of political choice, so that the translation of ideas into action is open to public scrutiny and to the giving or withholding of public consent through procedural processes of political legitimation. On these lines the structuring of the argument of the book falls roughly into four parts. First, an attempt is made to identify what is distinctive about the kind of political pluralism that emerged in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s within a conceptual context of thinking in which statehood — in contrast to most versions of liberal pluralism - is viewed as other than neutral or agnostic. Second, in taking up the question of political contestation under socialism, the argument seeks to determine how far such contestation of necessity demands the rivalry of holistic beliefs. To further this, a distinction is proposed between "belief system" and "ideology," designed to show that political differentiation does not depend on the presence of competing systems of belief; that there can be political dissensus within credal consensus. In this respect, expressions of plu-

20

Introduction

ralism disclosed by reformers in Czechoslovakia clearly differ from variants of socialist pluralism developed first in England and subsequently in Yugoslavia and Poland, as they do from understandings of pluralism in Soviet politics put forward by interest-group theorists in the West. To mark this difference, "pluralist socialism" is terminologically set apart from expressions of "socialist pluralism." Third, since in their advocacy of a specifically civic expression of socialism, pluralists in Czechoslovakia found prevalent images of socialist legitimation of statehood sadly wanting, two chapters have a closer look at these and, in so doing, press into service the distinction between public objects and common purposes as well as between scientific and political rationality. Chapter 5 tries to show the inadequacy of communitarian images in the legitimation of socialism as a civic order, and Chapter 6 suggests that the language of substantive rationality, as distinct from that of procedural rationality (favored by Czechoslovak pluralists), might prove equally inadequate in promoting a politics of opinion, a politics of civic democracy. Finally, the argument turns to mediating practices in politics, to the way things are done in the pursuit of public ends. It contrasts Communist practices, guided by prepolitical norms, established outside political processes, with practices guided by political norms, which have their origin in a locale not hidden from public view or immune to public scrutiny. Implicit in this juxtaposition is the conviction, widely shared by Czechoslovak reformers, that what makes things right politically is the procedural legitimacy of "getting there" rather than the ostensibly transcendent legitimacy of objective necessity, substantive rationality, or a consciousness freed from every source of cognitive distortion. In support of this direction of thinking, three distinctions are adduced: between substantive and accidental wholes, between consensus and cooperation, and between an ethic of faith and an ethic of responsibility. They are designed to bring out divergent understandings of the path to societal unity and its inherent nature.

CHAPTER 2

The context

Impressive by any standard of debate anywhere, the ferment of ideas in Czechoslovakia during the late 1960s was truly unique for a Communist-ruled country, in both extent and intensity. Extending over such diverse subjects as science, art, linguistics, law, literature, technology, economics, and politics, the debate involved a probing that left no hallowed belief or practice immune to review. Matters presumed to be settled were reopened, and no iniquity or mere bungling was safe from discovery. The first eight months of 1968 stand out in particular as an era of questioning of almost unprecedented proportions. I.

Humane socialism: Marxism and Masarykism?

It is tempting to think that these events render convincing proof of the working of historical continuity, in that they bear witness to the resilience of Czechoslovakia's democratic traditions of the interwar period. Few commentators could in fact resist this temptation, both within Czechoslovakia and abroad. I fear I cannot quite share this faith in historical continuity. Too many occurrences since 1938, and particularly since 1948, speak against it. But to question the historical continuity of a single pervasive culture of politics is not to deny causal relevance to the past. Humans may be the authors of their history, but no one, as Marx qualifiedly reminds us, creates the stuff of history out of whole cloth. However man may wish to transcend and transform the present in order to create something new, he cannot dispense with categories and concepts of the past. He cannot, as Marx puts it, be totally oblivious of the traditions of past generations; they enter our very being and "weigh heavily upon our thinking."1 1

Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), p. 96.

21

22

The context

According to this view, those who searched for a new, and possibly unrealizable, form of socialist democracy could hope to make little headway without recourse to what Marx called "borrowed language."2 They had to make use of concepts belonging to Czechoslovakia's democratic past; they had to build on historical memories in order to render intelligible what could only dimly be envisaged. Not surprisingly, therefore, when concepts such as humanity, democracy, morality, justice, and legality assumed centrality, the reformers could scarcely fail to remember Thomas Masaryk or the Republic closely associated with his name. It was, as it were, in the logic of events, in the most literal sense of logos, of language and reason, that, as the process of reappraisal gathered momentum, an increasing number of reformers began to cherish the conviction that the tradition of Marx and the tradition of Masaryk were not things irreconcilable; that, critically reinterpreted and imaginatively applied, they were capable of forming a new civilization, a civilization that could embrace socialism and democracy. The search for this novel and conceivably revolutionary synthesis infused a special meaning into the phrase "socialism with a human face," which (metaphorically, at any rate) summed up the central thrust of the Czechoslovak thought experiment. To be sure, the phrase was, like most political slogans, prodigiously vague; yet, in spite (or because) of its vagueness, it came to serve as an effective rallying symbol, especially after its official adoption by Alexander Dubcek, who, in January 1968, had replaced Antonin Novotny as general secretary of the Communist party. For Dubcek's image as a man of integrity undoubtedly helped to make the slogan a credible principle of reform. Not everybody, however, viewed the slogan with enthusiasm. Two different reasons account for this. Clearly, to agitate officially for the humanization of socialism more than implied the condemnation of the hitherto existing type of socialism with which Communist functionaries at various levels had become identified. For them the new course spelled fear and apprehension; suddenly, their power and their positions appeared threatened. Above all, they dreaded the idea of spontaneity, for spontaneity harbored risks and uncertainties not amenable to bureaucratic control. The recurrent mention of Masaryk's name irritated them particularly. Many of them had so far looked 2

Ibid.

Humane socialism: Marxism and Masarykism? 23 upon the debate as a merely tactical diversion. As long as all that talk about freedom and democracy could be channeled into routine propaganda, and thus easily controlled and manipulated, no great harm was done; it could be turned off as it had been turned on, at will, and in the direction that at the moment seemed most desirable. Masaryk's name interfered with this opportunism; it conferred upon the slogan and its use a degree of commitment that threatened to give birth to genuine changes in the system. Hard-line communists were not slow to recognize this, nor were they mistaken; the following two decades, called "normalization," left no doubt that eradicating the vestiges of Masarykism proved no easy undertaking. The other reason was distrust. People had become accustomed to the most ethical-sounding rhetoric during the bleakest years of terror. They were only too familiar with a situation that had a good deal in common with that portrayed by Marx in the "Eighteenth Brumaire," in that it consisted of a confused mixture of high-sounding phrases together with doubt and helplessness, of enthusiastic reform aspirations together with slavish adherence to the old routine.3 Sensitive to both the fears and the distrust, the new leadership faced no undemanding task in striking a balance that would minimize the fear of the entrenched and, at the same time, maximize the trust of the waverers. In this it was assisted, often unwittingly, by the media, which, with few exceptions, displayed a remarkable degree of selfrestraint, born no doubt of an appreciation for the limits of the immediately attainable. This cautious self-restraint, however, by no means impeded a bold change in the very language in which ideas of reform found expression. Instead of the sham moralism, frequently laced with a military jargon characteristic of commanders in the battlefield, even leading communists started to use words that carry generally intelligible meaning, that make sense to ordinary minds. It was a case of style and substance coming together. The spirit that animated the new style was, in essence, the spirit of the European Enlightenment. In its political expression, it proclaimed the message of citizenship, the no3

Ibid., p. 101. Reform aspirations involving an attempted synthesis between Marxian notions of socialism and Masarykian ideas of democracy found expression chiefly in articles: in Literdrni Listy, by J. L. Fischer and J. B. Capek; in Kulturni Tvorba, by J. Korola; in Novd Mysl, by O. Jana£ek; in Ride Prdvo, by V. Olivora; and in Zivot Strany, by J. Galandauer. For excerpts of these views, see Wolf Oschlies, "Masarykismus," Politische Studien, 18 (1970): 668-85.

24

The context

tion that adults had a right to shape their civic life in ways that accorded with their own wishes and appealed to their own reasons. Twenty years later it seems odd that it was Gustav Husak who most trenchantly lent point to this notion. "We had people in government," he wrote, "who used methods suitable to a kindergarten." With an obvious reference to Russia, Husak speaks of the "European" who knows what "enlightenment" means. The European of today wants to know what is going on in his state; he wants to understand policy decisions bearing on his life and help to shape them; he wants to have a voice in electing his leaders and to praise, criticize, or replace them on the basis of their performance; in a word, he wants the constitutional principle "the people are the source of all power" transformed into concrete, everyday practice. The citizen wants to see in his national and state representatives his own civic and political self-realization. He wants guarantees that he can exercise his right of choice, control, and responsibility, freely. This is the problem of the progressive democratization of our social order and of the liberation and development of everybody's creative capacities.4 Husak's words merit quoting in that they typify most poignantly the wind of change. No longer is there any beating about the bush: Concepts such as enlightenment and citizenship, he says, have intrinsic meaning; they are not empty categories, the creation of capitalist myth makers, but possess a validity of their own, regardless of social or economic structures. Furthermore, Husak's words disclose, indeed they acknowledge, that abolishing private property does little in itself to establish socialism as a civic order. II.

Economic equality and political participation

In part, Husak could undoubtedly invoke Marx, at any rate the early Marx, in saying what he did. For Marx never pretended that abolishing private property or wholly leveling incomes would free society from domination, exploitation, or alienation — leaving aside here the meaning or meanings of these words. Czechoslovakia in the 1950s 4

Kulturny Zivot, no. 2 (January 12, 1968). See also Jan Prochazka, "A co si o torn myslite vy?" My, 10 (1968): 5—7, where Masaryk is singled out as the foremost protagonist of the Enlightenment idea of autonomous man: "Masaryk . . . knew that a nation whose citizens can judge for themselves, by their own light of reason, is more difficult to govern, but he thought it also more capable of surmounting times of moral crisis. Not the merely obedient subject is the aim of enlightened government but an intelligent citizen, willing to assume independent initiative and able to offer responsible criticism on public affairs."

Economic equality, political participation 25 demonstrated that economic equality did not mean political equality or even a widening of "participation" in any form or shape. Mass mobilization through streamlining, propaganda, and terror may succeed in converting a highly differentiated infrastructure into a homogenized superstructure, but such methods of coercive integration have more in common with Hitler's seizure of power than they have with Marxist or socialist aims.5 As one Czech commentator aptly put it, "structure swallowed infrastructure."6 Ceskoslovenska spolecnost (1969), one of the most thorough and sophisticated sociological studies to appear in a Communist country about a Communist country, documents the situation most tellingly. Although Czechoslovakia during this period had the least inequality of income of all Communist countries, less than a third of the adult population had any influence or political power, and less than half had any say in decision making even at the lowest management level. Not surprisingly, few workers in the "workers' state" felt any more involved in public affairs than they had within the "bourgeois" state. Indeed, Czechoslovak levels of participation in the 1950s not only contradicted official ideological claims of "extensive participation of broad masses in various functions" but also compared unfavorably, as the study shows, with levels of participation in the United States.7 Economic egalitarianism, therefore, came to be perceived as a cloak for the manifest inequality of power. Coupled with this disillusionment was a growing sense of almost total bewilderment. Leading functionaries of the vanguard party, heroes of the revolution, overnight became odious traitors, the scum of the earth, despicable enemies of the people. It is not easy to find words to describe this turnaround, this negation of all trust and loyalty. At 5

6

7

Czechoslovakia in the 1950s demonstrated the closest parallel to Hitler's revolution, both in the seizure of power and in the use of power, as Hugh Seton-Watson shrewdly observes in Nationalism and Communism: Essays, 1946—63 (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 78. Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 13; see also Jaroslav Krej£i, Social Change and Stratification in Postwar Czechoslovakia (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 6 0 - 7 2 . Pavel Nfachonin, ed., Ceskoslovenskd spoletnost (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969), pp. 159-61, 241—64, 599—607. The trouble with ideological claims of "active participation by the masses" is that it frequently implies or postulates a "general will" in the form of a wholly consensual understanding of common purpose that is not easily distinguishable from "totalitarianism." See Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld, 1974), pp. 211-16.

26

The context

any rate, no known existing term in the vocabulary of politics seems capable of capturing at all adequately the Czechoslovak situation of the 1950s. Neither the concept of totalitarianism nor the older idea of despotism conveys the then prevailing atmosphere of arbitrariness, of the anonymity of public decisions, and of the reign of unmitigated brutality. Equally unprecedented was the pervasiveness of angst, of a constant dread of not knowing who one's friends or enemies were among one's closest and frequently longtime "comrades."8 Implicit in, as well as characteristic of, this almost total collapse of every sense of fellowship was a virtually systematic discontinuity of word and deed. If the former deprived human existence of all humanity, the latter threatened to drain discourse of all meaning. Insecurity, fear of having every aspect of one's life dominated by a nebulous elite wielding limitless power, together with ever-mounting apathy, proved in the end so dysfunctional to the very system that had created it that even prominent communists began to wonder whether what had hitherto been presented as the inexorable outcome of objective necessity was in truth necessary at all. After nearly twenty years of Communist rule, voices began to be heard that questioned the objective necessity of the status quo in a language that unmistakably recalled the early Marx - often together with the "late" Rousseau. The Czech novelist Ludvik Vaculik, for example, in his courageous speech at the Fourth Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in June 1967, after lamenting the loss of the most elementary freedoms, declared in Rousseau-like manner that the country no longer had any citizens. Was it necessary, he asked, that Communist Czechoslovakia had lost so many of its moral and traditional sources of strength, that people had no sense of belonging, that they could not see their value as individuals within society, that they had no confidence in themselves, their fellows, or their leaders, who seemed to have forgotten to apply ethical criteria to their words and deeds? Other speakers at the Congress echoed Vaculik's cri de coeur. Like him, they asked whether personal insecurity, mutual distrust, loss of truth8

On this sense of insecurity, see Peter Hruby, Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980), p. 93. For an "insider's" reflections, see Zdendk Mlynaf, Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism (London: Macmillan, 1980). For a survey of the show trials of that period, see Z. A. B. Zeman, Prague Spring (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 144-50, and for a treatment in depth, see Eugen Loebl and Du§an Pokorny, Die Revolution rehabilitiert ihre Kinder: Hinter den Kulissen des Slansky-Prozesses (Vienna: Europa, 1968).

Economic equality, political participation 27 fulnes, the erosion of citizenship, were necessary corollaries of socialism or characteristics intended to distinguish socialist democracy from bourgeois democracy.9 Increasingly, too, a number of communists in Czechoslovakia came to distrust the dismissal of concepts, values, and principles as "bourgeois," which, in actual fact, were "landmarks in man's quest for selfdiscovery," as the Czech philosopher Milan Machovec called them, landmarks that were valid for any regime, regardless of its class structure or mode of production. Failure to recognize this, Machovec adds, constitutes one of the "most serious blunders" of socialism as a political order. 10 Yet, favorably disposed though Communist intellectuals increasingly were to a reappraisal of pre-Communist and nonCommunist values, notably those linked with Masaryk and his era, they could not and did not conceal the conflict of loyalties in which they found themselves. Even so outspoken a critic as Vladimir Klokocka, who expressed views astonishingly close to those of Masaryk, made no explicit mention of him. Though by no means the first to uphold the idea of a parliamentary road to socialism, he was one of the first in a Communist country to insist upon a parliamentary form of socialism. A democratic socialist regime had to legitimate itself procedurally. "Methods of acting in the political sphere," he wrote, "have not received the attention they demand within socialist states. Who governs always seemed more important than how one governs."11 Wholly in the vein of Masaryk's political ethics, Klokocka pleaded for constitutionality in order to promote a societal ethos capable of combining dissent with political civility. A loyal opposition, contestation within boundaries, minorities that can turn into majorities: on these he rested such a possibility.12 And it was through modalities of this 9

10

11 12

Reference was usually made to Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which he speaks of "crude and unreflective Communism." Vaculik's speech, as well as other speeches made at the Fourth Congress in June 1967, can be found in Milan Kundera, ed., Reden zum IV. Kongress des tschechoslowakischen Schriftstellerverbandes (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). Milan Machovec, TomdS G. Masaryk (Prague: Melantrich, 1968), p. 25; see also pp. 181-5. Kloko£ka, Volby, pp. 245-54. Ibid. Among non-Communist writers, Vaclav Havel and Alexander Kliment went well beyond what Kloko£ka held practicable or possibly desirable. Kliment demanded an opposition of non-Party people; Havel advocated a two-party model and the formation of a democratic party in opposition to the Communist party. Ivan Svitak, an ex-Communist philosopher, who became an outspoken critic of the "lead-

28

The context

kind that he conceived of a form of procedural legitimation that would sanction public actions politically. It would of course be historically naive to wholly detach the Prague Spring from happenings outside Czechoslovakia. The break between Stalin and Tito in 1948, Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's antiStalin speech three years later, the Hungarian and Polish revolts, the Sino-Soviet rift: These clearly were events that caused sizable tremors throughout the Communist world. Without the cracks wrought by these tremors it is highly doubtful if the reform ideas in Czechoslovakia, or indeed the open articulation of what became known as Eurocommunism, would have made much headway. As it was, the cracks disclosed to the world deep ideological tensions and conflicts of interest that hitherto had been kept hidden beneath the veneer of Communist unity. What is more, the cracks revealed that the sources of tension were too complex to be resolved by surface changes or the revamping of party slogans. "Liberalization," it was apparent, would be no easy undertaking. A major transformation was worryingly called for; disturbing unknowns might have to be met. Yet, none of these worries and apprehensions stopped people, communists and noncommunists alike, from sensing that change was in the air.

III.

The spring of political reform

Even so, the Prague Spring came as a jolting surprise to most people, both within Czechoslovakia and in the world at large. The tumultuous Writers' Congress, less than a year earlier, at which bold words were undeniably spoken, hardly caused a ripple outside the Party leadership, partly because bold words had been spoken before at writers' congresses without causing a public stir and partly because the writers' speeches were not reported in the press. This is not to say, of ing role" idea of the Communist party - an idea anchored in the Czechoslovak constitution of 1960 - proposed the creation of at least two new parties which would provide an active opposition to and alternative for the Communist ruling party. Two legal scholars, Peter Pithart and Ivan Bystrina, though less strident than Svitak, argued in favor of a multiparty system, electoral competition, and the acceptance of an institutionalized opposition. On the other hand, the proposals put forward by Zden£k Mlynaf and Michal LakatoS for the pluralization of the systerri were politically more moderate than Kloko£ka's, though it is by no means certain whether they confined themselves merely to the practicable or whether they indeed spoke of what was in their view ultimately desirable.

The spring of political reform 29 course, that the Party took no notice of the speeches or that no other significant forces had been pressing for change as the sixties unfolded. Despite these developments and the fact that the Party's reaction to the speeches eventually helped to oust Novotny, few would have predicted at the time that the challenge to the status quo would turn out to be as drastic as in fact it was. And it is still not entirely clear if it was mounted purely from within the hierarchy of the Party by a handful of influential members or whether it was the cumulative result of spontaneous and largely uncontrolled, if not uncontrollable, efforts among diverse segments of the population, including a fair dose of unfathomable fortuna. One thing, however, seems pretty certain. In its initial phase oppositional pressures originating from outside the Communist party could produce few tangible results unless they found support from people within the Party capable of influencing policy. To say, therefore, that the Party was not the "true father of reform" is likely to confuse the issue.13 The effective pressures, it seems, came neither from the Party leadership nor from the Party as a whole but from factions and individuals who could make their influence felt by the degree of their professional expertise or by their access to the communication media or both.14 The setting up of five auxiliary commissions in 1963 by experts in diverse important areas of industrial and scientific life to act as advisory bodies to the Central Committee of the Party was one significant response to pressures from such factions. Further ad hoc commissions to study reform proposals were subsequently instituted by the Thirteenth Party Congress of 1966, and one of these was expressly entrusted with working out proposals for political reform. Although the members of these commissions were all Party members, they rarely included members of the Central Committee in any numbers.15 13

14

15

Kusin, Intellectual Origins, p. 119. I attempted to sketch this rather blurred situation in Socialism with a Human Face: Slogan and Substance (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Press, 1973). See A. H. Brown, "Pluralistic Trends in Czechoslovakia," Soviet Studies, 17 (1966): 453-72, and "Political Change in Czechoslovakia," Government and Opposition, 4 (1969): 169—94; see also H. Gordon Skilling, "Background to the Study of Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe," Government and Opposition, 3 (1968): 294-324; and Barbara Jan^ar, "The Case for a Loyal Opposition under Communism: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia," Orbis, 12 (1968): 415-40. Brown, "Pluralistic Trends," p. 460.

30

The context

Whether the creation of these commissions was merely a delaying tactic of the Party leadership or a sign of the growing assertion of Party members both within and outside the apparat is hard to say, but, as often happens in human affairs, it is not easy to distinguish intended from unintended consequences. It may well have been the intention of the Novotny regime, and indeed of the majority of the post-Novotny Central Committee, to bring about improvements in the country's economy with a minimum of political change. Yet, once the process of reforms had been set in motion, its momentum could not easily be contained. The true parenthood of the Prague Spring, therefore, may turn out to be a question that defies precise resolution. The alignment of forces that eventually led to the downfall of Novotny from the position of general secretary of the Party was quite heterogeneous in motives, interests, and aims.16 And much the same was true of the new Party leadership as it gradually emerged by April 1968, for it comprised quite disparate elements, ranging from conservative hard-liners to moderates and progressives - as seen from the perspective of reform aspirations.17 However, after the initial phase, the new leadership might have been overtaken by events. If this was indeed the case, the changes in Czechoslovakia could be said to contrast sharply with those that took place earlier in Yugoslavia and Poland, which, guided from the top, remained eminently more manipulable and, as in Poland, more easily reversible. No doubt the virtual liberalization of the media from censorship, as well as the rapid formation of independent opinion groups, constituted the principal difference in Czechoslovakia. In combination, these circumstances led to a cluster of events that were as unprecedented as they were unplanned. The Soviet critics of the Prague spring, bemoaning the lack of central direction, may therefore have been not altogether off the mark in perceiving the situation as highly volatile. To them, as also to less biased observers, the new leadership appeared not to know ex16

17

See Jancar, "Case for a Loyal Opposition," p. 431. Whereas the Slovak wing of the Party was united in its opposition to Novotny, the Czech wing consisted of rather diverse and dispersed segments, hardly trusting each other. Of the eleven members composing the Presidium of the Central Committee between April 1968 and the Soviet invasion in August, only three can be regarded as progressivists: FrantiSek Kriegel, Josef Smrkovsky, and Josef Spacek. The others were moderates like Dubcek, Jan Piller, and Oldfich Cernik or conservatives like Oldfich Svestka, Drahomir Kolder, or Vasil Bilak. But there were shades of differences even within these general categories.

From monism to pluralism 31 actly where it was going - or was driven - how far, how fast, or how freely.18 But even if the situation was in fact not quite as volatile as the Soviet leadership claimed, it was certainly rather confused. Many of the erstwhile opponents and critics were now in support of, or absorbed by, the new leadership, whereas the new critical elements consisted of antireformists or of disgruntled radicals seeking more drastic and more speedy measures. Earlier revisionist attempts, if anything, slowed down the process of change. Certainly, memories of the Polish and Hungarian revolts, far from acting as a spur, in truth acted directly to the advantage of Novotny's regime, providing it with a welcome pretext for tightening the slightly loosened reins. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that even by April 1968, despite an unprecedented sense of freedom, there was a somewhat uncertain faith in the outcome of the reformers' striving for change. IV.

From monism to pluralism

The most striking feature of the reformers' efforts was undoubtedly the search for acceptable forms of contestation. In order to come closer to what might be thought acceptable contestation within a socialist system, a distinction between "opposition" and "political opposition" might prove useful.19 Opposition, in this distinction, is taken to mean all forms of disagreement with or hostility to a particular regime. Political opposition, by contrast, is identified with institutionalized forms of contestation, directed not against a particular civic order but merely against those wielding governmental power at a given time. Institutional or "loyal" opposition, thus conceived, has typically been unknown in most Communist states even before they turned (or were turned) Communist. Had the diverse proposals for its introduction 18

19

In the earlier stages of the reform movement it seemed to me that the conservative hard-liners were biding their time through silence. By May 1968 it was openly suggested that they in fact encouraged liberalization in the hope that it would play into their own hands. See, for example, Emanuel Mandler, "With the Party against the Party," Student, May 7, 1968, or "Documents: Czechoslovakia - before the Invasion," Survey, 69 (1968): 2 2 - 3 . The range of differentiation in expressed views was considerable, and classifications in terms of conformists and dissenters run the danger of "absurd oversimplification," as H. Gordon Skilling has rightly pointed out in Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 395. The distinction is made by Ghita Ionescu, The Politics of the European Communist States

(New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 2-3.

32

The context

found implementation, Czechoslovakia would have been the first Communist country to have transcended not only its Communist past but also the widely prevalent attitudes toward opposition during its pre-Communist past. It would have demonstrated that it is possible to strike a balance institutionally between diversity and unity or between dissent and consensus. Three stages may be broadly distinguished in the projected transition from the idea of opposition as an "antistate" or "counterrevolutionary" force to the idea of it as a positive and procedurally legitimating ingredient of socialist constitutionality. In the case of Czechoslovakia during the 1960s this transition roughly corresponds, I believe, to the change from monistic conceptions of socialism to pluralistic conceptions, which, in turn, is largely typified by the particular interpretation given to the "leading-role" principle of the Communist party. Within the original monistic conception, the political hegemony of the Communist party is unquestioned. Recognition of other political focuses of power or influence is deemed incompatible with the Party's leading role. In Czechoslovakia, as in all other Communist states, such recognition was held to be tantamount to the acceptance of opposition to the socialist system in its entirety. Within the intermediary, or quasi-pluralistic, conception of socialism, multiple pressures and interests are fully recognized, but such recognition in no way impairs the principle of the leading role of the Communist party. Indeed, the recognition of social pluralism is held to enhance it. Since pluralization is confined to the social infrastructure, in which particularist interests are said to vie for public acknowledgment, the Communist party, representing the suprasectional or public interest, is made out to be eminently suitable to act as supreme arbiter in the resolution of sectional conflicts and thereby wholly to validate its leadership role in politics, its possession of the highest political authority. Finally, within the third, or truly pluralistic, conception of socialism, the recognition of diversity in the social realm is extended to the political realm. During this stage, as during the first, the recognition of plural focuses of power is held to be incompatible with the unchallenged monopoly of the Communist party. But there is one important difference. Now the recognition of plurality is viewed as an inescapable necessity in politics, including socialist politics, and not as a threat.

From monism to pluralism

33

Although I speak of stages, I think of the transition in conceptual terms and not as a temporal causality that can be neatly bracketed within distinct time periods. All the same, the pattern of events in Czechoslovakia leading to and encompassing the Prague Spring broadly corresponds to these three major shifts in political thinking. If the raison d'etre of a Communist party - either as a proletarian mass party (before Lenin) or as a vanguard party - is to end class struggles and class regimes, the attainment of these goals should clearly have signaled its redundancy. Yet more than half a century after the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, and several decades after it in other Communist states, Communist parties still claim full control, and the states show no signs of withering away. Indeed, Communist parties claim everywhere to embody the state and base their monopoly of political power precisely on this claim. Four justifications have officially been given (at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920) for the continued, and presumably permanent, existence, if not supremacy, of Communist parties in socialist states: (1) ideological control and leadership; (2) control and supervision of the main state organs; (3) control and direction of social organizations; and (4) presentation of candidates in elections.20 It was against this officially and ideologically anchored political hegemony of the Party that discontent had been mounting in the Communist-ruled states. Increasingly, the conviction hardened that under these conditions no progress toward pluralizing the system or legitimating dissent was at all feasible. By tradition, the Czechoslovak Communist party, like all Communist parties, identified "opposition" with "class enemy" and pluralism with bourgeois liberalism. Other parties were viewed not as competitors in pluralist contestation but as hostile forces that had to be overcome, like opponents in the field of battle, by whatever means seemed strategically the most promising. They were labeled bourgeois or fascist and, as government parties, were looked upon as the pillars, if not the embodiment, of capitalist interests and imperialist designs. That the Czechoslovak Communist party was perfectly legal and perfectly free to compete with other parties in prewar Czechoslovakia did not stop it from viewing itself as an implacable foe of the parliamentary 20

See Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919—43: Documents (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 1:121, 130-2, 134, 171.

34

The context

system and, indeed, of the entire societal and constitutional order as such. Klement Gottwald, its general secretary, did not hold back when he was challenged over his frequent trips to Moscow. "Yes," he replied to his parliamentary critics, "we do travel to Moscow for tuition, and do you know what they are teaching us? They teach us how to twist your necks."21 Only under emergency conditions, and for purely tactical reasons, did the Communist party advocate coalition with other parties within a "national front." It did so after Hitler's rise to power, when nothing came of the coalition plans, and from 1945 to 1948, when the "national front" was intended to silence opposition. Although it was the single largest party, it failed to command a parliamentary majority; by claiming to speak for the "national front" it could therefore more easily present pluralism as running counter to the popular will. And it is this "national front" facade that has ever since been invoked to stifle dissent and any form of party-political contestation.

V.

The leading-role principle

This is the historical background, fiercely condensed, against which the new thinking about political contestation during the late 1960s must be judged. The situation in Czechoslovakia, then, since 1948, came closest to a "hegemonic party system" in which the Communist party wholly controlled the size and policy of whatever other parties were tolerated within the so-called national front. Such parties were not allowed to accept new members or to run their own candidates in elections. Dissent within or outside the national front was not permitted. Within the Communist party itself, criticism - provided it was "constructive" - was formally encouraged, but any deviation from the official Party line faced the risk of being denounced as criminal heresy, for which a plethora of incriminating "isms," from Titoism, Masarykism, and revisionism to cosmopolitanism, Zionism, and bourgeois nationalism, frequently in the oddest combinations, was pressed into service.22 In terms of Gordon Skilling's typology of opposition, 21 22

Cited in Kusin, Intellectual Origins, p. 119. See Edward Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia, 1948—60 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p p . 1 1 9 - 4 2 . For a brief discussion o f c o m m u n i s m in Czechoslovakia over t h e last seventy years, see m y "Czechoslovak Political Culture: Continuity or Discontinuity?" Cross Currents, 9 (1990): 1 8 7 - 9 4 . T h e category "hegemonic

The leading-role principle 35 all such deviation was "integral" opposition, that is, opposition to the system or regime of socialism itself.23 Despite the risks, intraparty competition for positions, as well as purely personal rivalries, did of course exist, often, if not most often, within the highest organs of the party. Skilling has termed such competition "factional" opposition. It might be useful, however, to speak also of factional pressure, in which the chief aim is the exercise of influence upon party policies rather than the displacement of officeholders. And it seems that it was frequently this kind of factional assertion that party members were pleading for in pressing for "freedom of expression." Given such freedom, they felt, there was no need for other parties since the Communist party would then itself be perfectly capable of providing the necessary checks and balances throughout the political system and within the executive organs of the civil service. I described this position as closely typifying the "second stage," in which all that mattered was to ensure intraparty democracy and legal guarantees for certain civic freedoms. On this view, the creation of an institutionalized opposition in the form of a second party appeared largely unnecessary.24 Even those reformers who could see the need and value of an opposition party did not make its existence a condition of democracy.

23

24

party system" was, as far as I know, first introduced by Jerzy Wiatr. He applied it to the postwar situation in Poland where several parties coexisted with the Communist party without being permitted to compete for political power. See Wiatr, "One Party Systems: The Concept and Issue for Comparative Studies," Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party Systems, ed. E. Allardt and Y. Littunen (Helsinki: Academic Bookstore, 1964), and "Elements of Pluralism in the Polish Political System," Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1 (1966). Skilling, "Background," p p . 297—8. Skilling distinguishes four types o f opposition within C o m m u n i s t systems o f Eastern Europe: (1) "integral opposition," overt or covert disloyalty a n d resistance to the existing socialist regime; (2) "factional o p p o sition," personal rivalry within the highest organs o f party a n d g o v e r n m e n t with or without t h e support o f broader social a n d political groupings; (3) "fundamental o p position," dissent that is frequently associated with (2) but entails disagreement over broader issues o f party policy; a n d (4) "specific opposition," criticism that overtly takes the form o f dissent o n specific issues without questioning basic policies or e x isting authority structures within party or government. T h i s view appears to have been shared by a n u m b e r o f C o m m u n i s t reformers in Czechoslovakia, such as Eduard Goldstucker (Student, May 7, 1968), Zdendk Mlynaf and Miloslav Krai (Reporter, March 6 - 1 3 , 1968), w h o saw democratization chiefly in terms o f intraparty democracy a n d the provision o f legal guarantees for civic liberties. See also Mlynaf, "Our Political System a n d the Division o f Power," Rude' Prdvo, February 13, 1968.

36

The context

They, too, gave utmost priority to intraparty democracy and legal safeguards against the abuse of political power. Underlying this view was the (possibly realistic) conviction that the Communist party would not (or could not) willingly surrender its leading role and that, therefore, an opposition outside the ranks of the Party was for quite some time problematical. Noncommunists, too, conceded that they were altogether too atomized to exercise any appreciable check against the highly organized Communist party for the foreseeable future. 25 Others, again, argued that free contestation between political parties might possibly militate against intraparty democracy, as it did during the multiparty system of the First Republic, and that this would only help to accentuate the centralizing tendencies within the Communist party.26 Possibly, therefore, the thesis that the Party itself could provide for restraints from within was not invariably a ploy against the institutionalization of a political opposition. More often than not, especially among Communist reformers, it was a plea for greater freedom of dissent within the Party rather than a pretext for preserving the status quo. It must be admitted, however, that most discussions on political parties during this period bristled with equivocations. Notwithstanding these equivocations, there was a substantial consensus on the need for effective checks to the monopoly of political power. How to provide such checks, within the doctrinal context of official Communist thinking since the Second Congress of the Communist International, was, however, another matter. The problematic interpretation or reinterpretation of the enshrined leading-role principle was clearly a major stumbling block. During the early stages of the reform movement, especially, very few dared to challenge the Party's hegemony. Indeed, some advocates of pluralism went so far as to argue that pluralization demanded stronger, and not lesser, leadership from the Communist party, claiming that it alone stood above sectional interests. The Party, it was said, was best fitted to provide the coordinating and integrating bases for political unity.27 25

26

27

For example, the writer Alexander Kliment fully acknowledged that t h e n o n c o m munists were t o o atomized to constitute a serious challenge to t h e e n t r e n c h e d a n d patronage-wielding communists for a considerable period ahead; s e e "The Activity o f the U n n a m e d , " Literdrni Listy, March 14, 1968. For example, Mlynaf, "What N e x t with O u r Democracy?" RudS Prdvo, March 2 6 , 1968, w h o argued that a multiparty system may have very undesirable a n d u n d e mocratic results. So Ren£ Rohan, " T h e Party a n d Changes in Social Structure," in Pavel Machonin, ed., Socidlni structura socialisticke spolednosti [ T h e social structure o f socialist society]

The leading-role principle 37 The professed faith in the Party to perform this unifying function was, as time went on, qualified somewhat by warnings that the leading role of the Party must not be exercised in a way that would render other "social organizations" (within which "approved parties" were usually included) totally dysfunctional.28 Possibly, too, claims in support of the enhanced role of the Party might have been made with tongue in cheek, designed to sell pluralism to the Party leadership. Be that as it may, a fair number of Czechoslovak reformers did seem to feel that, even in the absence of the formal abandonment of the leading-role principle, some space could be created for a diffusion of jurisdictional authority and for the institutionalization of certain civic rights and freedoms, whereby the Party's monopoly of political power could be appreciably curtailed. Although the Action Programme of April 1968 was rather vague about the concrete steps that were to be taken in this direction, it did spell out some criteria by means of which leadership was to be distinguished from dictation. Thus it urged that the prestige of the legislature be significantly augmented so that it could constitute an effective supremacy within the state and actually decide upon laws and policy issues instead of acting merely as a nominal forum for approving proposals already decided upon elsewhere.29 Furthermore, in order to (Prague: Svoboda, 1966), p p . 6 6 0 - 7 2 . In o n e o f his earlier articles Mlynaf took precisely this position ("Problems o f Political Leadership a n d the N e w E c o n o m i c System," World Marxist Review, 7 [ 1 9 6 5 ] : 7 6 - 8 1 ) . Michal LakatoS admittedly w e n t b e y o n d Mlynaf, in pleading for the recognizable a u t o n o m y o f interest g r o u p s a n d their distinct electoral representation, in Prdvny Ozbor, 3 , as early as 1966; yet, writing in 1968, h e still speaks o f the "cognitive function" o f the Party (Kulturni Noviny, February 2 4 , 1968). S e e also the discussion o n "Party, Class, a n d Society," in Pravda, D e c e m b e r 2 1 , 1967, by a n u m b e r o f Slovak intellectuals w h o also portray the Party as the w a t c h d o g o f the public interest. 28

29

Michal LakatoS, "Civil Society in Search o f Its Place," Kulturni Noviny, February 2 4 , 1968. All references to the Action Programme are to the English translation in R. A. Rem-

ington, ed., Winter in Prague: Documents on Czechoslovak Communism in Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), Document 16, esp. pp. 9 8 - 1 1 1 . The Action Programme had a rather mixed reception, though within party circles it was received favorably on the whole. Radosloav Selucky, a prominent Czech economist, expressed the prevailing mood. After voicing a number of criticisms, he judged the Programme to be "a good thing" and urged the speedy institutionalization of its proposals ("The Programme of Democratic Regeneration of Socialist Czechoslovakia," in the Czech trade union daily Prdce, April 11, 1968). See also an article by Jaroslav Kozel, then the new ideological secretary of the party, in Rude Prdvo, May 16, 1968 ("On Current Questions of Ideological-Political Work"), where he insists that reasoned argument is the only acceptable method of gaining support and confidence for the party.

38

The context

secure popular feedback, as well as to prevent undue concentration of power, the Action Programme advocated the regular use of public opinion polls. Finally, it stipulated constitutional provisions that would ensure the insulation of the courts and the police from political influence and Party manipulation.30 On the other hand, the Action Programme firmly rejected the idea that the national front could form a political forum in which political parties could separate into government and opposition factions. Divergences were to be reconciled by negotiation "on the basis of the common socialist conception of national front policy," but, significantly, minority views were no longer to be subjected to persecution of any kind, as only "too often happened in the past."31 Although the new Party Statutes, published shortly before the Soviet invasion, took this line of thought a step farther in proclaiming the right of a minority to maintain its viewpoint after a decision had been made and to request its reconsideration at a later date, they, like the Action Programme, declined to abandon the Leninist doctrine of democratic centralism. In point of fact, strict Party discipline was reendorsed, and the organization of permanent opinion groups or interest alliances was expressly ruled out.32 Both documents, in short, sharply set apart the articulation of positions from their political aggregation. As far as official pronouncements go, the Party, despite its displayed tolerance during the Prague Spring, made no significant commitments whatsoever that would recognizably infringe upon its political monopoly.

VI.

Party reform and political reform

Many reformers were less than satisfied with both documents. The Programme, they felt, was ominously silent on the question of new parties and too equivocal on the question of dissent. Although some welcomed the Statutes' provisions for minority rights, others saw in them a threat to Party unity: "Two parties in one cannot exist for long," commented the playwright Pavel Kohout; "either it splits or it 30 32

Remington, Winter in Prague, pp. 110-11. 31 Ibid., pp. 100, 103-4. Jifi Pelikan's edition of the transcript of the Fourteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist party (subsequently declared illegal under Soviet pressure) contains the draft Party Statutes in two versions, the earlier providing for the publication of the views of minority factions in the Party, and the later, a more cautious formulation (The Secret VysoCany Congress [London: Lane, 1970]).

Party reform and political reform

39

purges itself."33 Another playwright, Vaclav Havel, viewed the Programme's emphasis upon representation of "social organizations" rather than political parties as an attempt to create an opposition without the slightest chance of competing with the entrenched Party, partly because of its lack of cohesion but largely because membership in social organizations frequently implied membership in the Communist party or, at any rate, acceptance of its political monopoly. Instead, he proposed something entirely novel in the history of Czechoslovak politics, the creation of "two comparable alternatives," a two-party model. 34 Havel was clearly determined to put an end to the equivocations, to the "half heartedness," as he put it. He was not prepared to put his faith in public opinion polls or the abolition of media censorship, for this presupposed a further act of faith in the likelihood "that governments will take notice of public opinion or will draw appropriate inferences from public criticism." Democracy, he insisted, was a matter not of faith but of guarantees, and guarantees, in turn, required for their maintenance not merely the competition of views but the competition of power. "Power respects only power; a government will act if its very existence is at stake, and not just its good name." Similarly, Havel dismissed the assumption that internal democratization of the Communist party entailed democracy in society as a whole as "unfounded and illusory." Without control from outside, he argued, internal control would soon degenerate. Noncommunists, he concluded his remarkable article, must be given the chance to be right sometime, if communists had a right to err from time to time.35 Least guarded among the critics of monistic socialism was the philosopher Ivan Svitak. He openly spoke in favor of the creation of two new parties, so that both Marxist noncommunists and non-Marxist Christians would have a chance to enter political life: a social democratic and a Christian democratic party.36 This proposal, though unpopular with communists who dreaded the revival of the Social Democratic party, enjoyed considerable support from many others, particularly from university students and members of the clubs of 33

34 35 36

Pavel K o h o u t , Aus dem Tagebuch eines Konterrevolutiondrs ( L u c e r n e : B u c h e r , 1969), p . 139. Vaclav Havel, "On the Subject of Opposition," Literami Listy, April 4, 1968. Ibid. Ivan Svitak, Verbotene Horizonte: Prag zwischen zwei Wintern (Freiburg: Romback, 1969), p. 89.

40

The context

independent political activists (KAN), which Svitak had helped to come into being. It may be of interest to note that neither the radicals nor the moderates among the reformers thought in terms other than those of parliamentary contestation. West German and American notions of extraparliamentary opposition, in vogue at that time, found no favor with most Czechoslovaks, including the students. Rudi Dutschke, a highly popular student leader in West Germany during the late 1960s, made absolutely no impact on student opinion when he visited Prague. His ideas were ridiculed as "not worthy of being taken seriously even by a fifteen-year-old."37 His championship of "direct democracy" and "permanent revolution" left Czechoslovak students stone-cold. They had had enough of slogans that served for so long as pernicious instruments of mass manipulation. A German book, published in the same year (1968), contains an interview between Dutschke and Klokocka, which reflects quite revealingly the drastically different mode of thinking of the Czech reformers as compared with the German "revolutionaries." Moreover, since the report on political reforms, on which Klokocka had been working, never saw completion, the views expressed in this book — and developed further in the Czech book Volby - may be taken as broadly indicative of the direction in which political reform, in the absence of foreign intervention, might eventually have gone. Although critical of the Action Programme, Klokocka could on the whole be said to have striven to keep within the limits of what at the time seemed optimally attainable. I shall therefore return to these views in greater detail later. Here I merely wish to summarize his vision of making electoral and parliamentary contestation politically legitimate. Klokocka's major premise is the principle that elections are a universal component of political life and not simply a bourgeois device for masking class rule. However, to be the former, they must offer alternatives that openly and recognizably entail political differentia37

Cited by Vera Blackwell, "Czechoslovakia at the Crossroads," Survey, 68 (1968): 79. Robert Kalivoda, in his closely reasoned article "Democratization and Critical Thinking," Literdrni Listy, May 2 and 9, 1968, did advocate various forms of direct democracy, but he was almost a lone voice as regards direct democracy at the national level. For the interview between Klokocka and Dutschke, see Demokratischer Sozialismus (Hamburg: Konkret, 1968), pp. 9 - 1 1 .

Party reform and political reform 41 tion. Without such differentiation there can be no political contestation.38 Second, political contestation is to be thought of not as opposition to the overall social order but as opposition within it. What is at issue is the claim by one party to possess an inherent right to embody the political legitimation of socialism, for this is to legitimate the monopoly of political power and political patronage. Klokocka does not mince matters: "The rule of the majority does not mean the monopoly of the majority."39 Third, for minorities to be recognized as potential majorities, "the notion of opposition must lose its antistate flavor."40 A constitutional court was to be established to ensure the legitimacy of political opposition within set limits and to guard the independence of parties in both elections and parliament.41 Fourth, the system of representative democracy was to be fully rehabilitated. Twenty years of so-called revolutionary (direct) democracy have shown, Klokocka maintains, that it provides no effective control of political power at the central or national level. National representatives must be full-time politicians in a permanently functioning parliament.42 Finally, Klokocka insists on making politics the realm of contingency, in which political actors, as individuals and as organized parties, must accept risks. Parties whose membership is fixed by some arbitrary Proporz are no parties. Elections whose outcome is constitutionally predetermined are no elections; they are symbolic exercises, designed to advertise existing power holders. They do nothing to politicize public life; they depoliticize it and render it unfit for the expression of political choice.43 Klokocka leaves open the question of whether nongovernment parties form coalitions during elections in opposing existing power holders, but he is unequivocal about the need for an institutional opposition. In this he clearly departs, and most radically at that, from official Communist understandings of "criticism" and "democratic centralism." Furthermore, klokocka regards the institutionalization of political opposition as a stabilizing move, as a way of strengthening rather 38 39 40 41 42 43

Klokoeka, Volby, pp. 5 - 7 , Demokratischer Sozialismns, Demokratischer Sozialismns, Demokratischer Sozialismus, Demokratischer Sozialismus, Demokratischer Sozialismus,

26-7. pp. 55, 77, 105; Volby, pp. 256, 261. pp. 53, 79; Volby, pp. 25, 271, 284. p. 54; Volby, pp. 18, 263. pp. 5 6 - 8 , 86; Volby, pp. 18, 265, 276. pp. 78, 87; Volby, p. 240.

42

The context

than weakening legitimate political power. Banning opposition, he remarks, merely creates a semblance of unity, and it does so only by suppressing conflicts simmering underneath. 44 Launched against the background of discredited public discourse, the officially instituted framework of Klokocka's reform proposals conferred a notable measure of institutional realism upon the slogan of "socialism with a human face." Although, unlike the pluralists in Yugoslavia, Klokocka showed little interest in questions of selfmanagement in industry, workers' alienation, or the establishment of social but nonstate enterprises, he did give utmost consideration to what became known officially as the "new logic" of socialist politics.45 Together with his team leader, Zdenek Mlynaf, who headed the commission for political reform, Klokocka made political democracy the centerpiece of socialist reconstruction. And it was his insistence upon institutionalized electoral and parliamentary contestation that came to be increasingly seen as the defining quality of political "openness," as the indispensable condition of a civic order that yielded the opportunity of public choice. Even earlier waverers began to take the projected changes seriously, and a substantial number of members of the Academy of Sciences now enthusiastically endorsed the "new logic" of socialist politics.46 It is this undisguised focus upon strictly political modes of socialist pluralism that marks off Klokocka's brand of "reconstruction" from both the "praxis" philosophers and the "socialist market" economists, as it sets it apart from competitive "interest" conceptions of pluralism, on the one hand, and cooperative "functional" conceptions of guild socialism, on the other. Chapter 3 will seek to shed more light on these differences, notably on those that separate the Czech and the English variants. VII.

Opposition and political opposition

Neither Barbara Jancar's nor Gordon Skilling's categorizations of opposition quite fit the Czechoslovak thought experiment, for neither of these makes the distinction that most reformers made between opposition to the regime and opposition to the ruling party. Institution44 45 46

Demokratischer Sozialismus, p. 79; Volby, p p . 284—5. RudePrdvo, F e b r u a r y 13, 1968. "Does Opposition H a v e a Place in O u r System?" Kulturni Noviny, April 19, 1968.

Opposition and political opposition 43 alizing opposition was intended solely to avert the monopolization of political power by one party; it was not intended to weaken, let alone to destroy, the socialist order as such. Opposition to, and even the replacement of, the Communist party in power was not to be interpreted as a "counterrevolutionary" act. If, it was argued, opposition in capitalist systems did not herald the end of a bourgeois mentality, why should opposition in a socialist system herald the end of a socialist mentality?47 All the same, the new thinking about political contestation under socialism was bound to pose formidable problems, which, though they were not insurmountable over time, would have demanded exceptional sagacity on the part of those engaged in taking the first steps. In essence, some form of balance had to be sought between what needed reforming and what was needed to do the reforming; for, without some recognizable continuity, the prospect of even moderate advances being made in the direction of political pluralism was exceedingly problematic, especially in the face of entrenched hard-liners at home and barely disguised hostility within the then dominant leadership in the Soviet Union. In view of the precarious context in which the search for balance took place, it is hard to decide how much validity is to be credited to the so-called irreversibility theory, according to which "liberalization" and "pluralization" are not only inevitable corollaries of "modernization" but are indeed irreversible phenomena, once they are set in motion in any political system. In Czechoslovakia's case the theory referred to two "irreversible" trends, to the diffusion and differentiation of social and political life and to the "Europeanization" of the hitherto Moscow-dominated Party.48 As will be argued later, there are compelling reasons for questioning this theory, not merely from the advantage of hindsight but in terms of its intrinsic logic. Surely, one cannot take for granted that political change follows from economic change, that greater differentiation in the latter means greater differentiation in the former, or that technology in itself forces the pace of 47

48

See, for e x a m p l e , Z. Jicinsky and V. Klokofka, "The Adaptation o f the Political System to the N e e d s o f O u r Society," Rude Prdvo, May 30, 1968. "Opponentism," or noninstitutionalized opposition, such as that o f the Catholics in Poland or ethnic g r o u p s in Yugoslavia, is discussed by Jancar, "Case for a Loyal Opposition." Ionescu, Politics of European Communist States, p p . 2 7 1 - 9 0 . In s o m e respects this theory has affinities with the "end o f history" thesis o f Francis Fukuyama (after Hegel); see Fukuyama, "The End o f History?" National Interest, s u m m e r 1989, p p . 3 - 1 8 .

44

The context

political reforms. At any rate, this is what an increasing number of Czechoslovak reformers themselves conceded.49 But if the validity of the irreversibility theory seems open to doubt, it nonetheless points to an important contrast between reforms and revolts in countries such as Yugoslavia and Poland, on the one hand, and the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, on the other. For, whereas in Czechoslovakia the impulse increasingly came from the most diverse sources, in Yugoslavia and Poland the change was initiated, as well as strictly monitored, by the new elite. Being more manipulable, it was conceivably also more easily reversible. What occurred during the Prague Spring, therefore, seemed to lend support to the view that the clock could never be put back again, that, even after the Soviet invasion, the transformation, once started, would relentlessly proceed or, at any rate, prevent a return to the status quo ante. Whether this in itself warrants the irreversibility theory as a historical generalization — let alone as a law of historical development — is of course another matter. On the face of it, it has every appearance of wishful thinking or, at best, of being in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy still in search of self-fulfilment. To say this is not to belittle, however, the all too short period between "opposition" and "political opposition," whose most striking feature without a doubt was the plurality of voices heard in the forum of public discourse. Men and women in a Communist state were openly speaking their minds, and none of the traditional taboos was closed to debate.50 Yet, if this unmistakably symptomized a decline of "totalitarianism," it surely failed to portray a decline of "ideology."51 If anything, the debate disclosed what Giovanni Sartori once called the 49

Mlynaf explicitly rejected the irreversibility theory in "We Talk about Democracy in Politics," Reporter, March 6 - 1 3 , 1968; and Robert RoSko, a leading sociologist at the Slovak A c a d e m y o f Sciences, stressed that there was "nothing automatic in the process o f democratization," in "What D o W e U n d e r s t a n d by Democratization?" Pravda, October 26, 1968. T h e economists O. §ik and R. Selucky also c a m e to the conclusion that political reform must p r e c e d e e c o n o m i c reform, not the other way r o u n d . See

Radoslav Selucky, Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe: Political Background and Eco50

51

nomic Significance ( N e w York: Praeger, 1972), p. 2 0 . O n the internal Party conflicts to which the debate for the liberalization o f c o m m u nism gave rise, see Richard Lowenthal, "Development versus Utopia in C o m m u n i s t Policy," Survey 74/75 (1970): 3 - 2 7 . See, for e x a m p l e , Z. Brzezinski, "Totalitarianism and Rationality," American Political Science Review, 5 0 (1956): 7 6 1 .

Opposition and political opposition 45 52 "cognitive opening up" of ideology, for it clearly amounted to a remarkable resurgence of interest in the nature, meaning, and function of ideology in politics, both in form and in substance. And, though much of the discussion during the Prague Spring, especially within Communist circles, ostensibly centered on so-called deformations of socialist democracy, the dispute was in fact over the interpretation of socialism and democracy as such.53 The Polish philosopher Adam Schaff has argued that the replacement of classes by strata is the principal reason for Communist rethinking. "There emerge in socialist societies," he writes, "as the traditional classes tend to disappear, new social divisions and an intricate stratification. In this field, classic Marxist theory offers little guidance."54 Schaff's explanation is sound enough as far as it goes, but it fails to go far enough. A number of Czechoslovak writers in the sixties went farther and, as I see it, came closer to the heart of the matter, which is not social differentiation but political differentiation. It must be borne in mind, though, that those who favored the introduction of competitive politics thought of parties not as opposed organized classes, as Marx most frequently did, or as "strata parties," as Marx occasionally did, but as differentiated opinion groups. 55 52

Giovanni Sartori, "Politics, Ideology, a n d Belief Systems," American Political Science Review, 6 3 (1969): 4 0 3 . S e e also Frederick M. Barnard, "Actions, Reasons, a n d Political Ideology," in J. M. Porter, ed., Sophia and Praxis: The Boundaries of Politics (Chatham:

Chatham House, 1984), pp. 35-64. 53

54

See, for e x a m p l e , J. Fibich, "Institutional Alienation a n d the F r e e d o m o f Man,"

Filosophia, 6 (1967), translated in Czechoslovak Press Survey, 2026, Radio Free Europe Research, March 11, 1968, pp. 1-8; or Pavel Machonin, "The New Unity of Society," RudePrdvo, March 7, 1968. See also n. 27 and 50 to this chapter. A d a m Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual ( N e w York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p .

206. 55

Although the formation of opinion groups and the founding of partylike clubs have generally been associated with students and "intellectuals," an increasing number of factory workers took up policy positions, starting with the important Ostrava region in Moravia/Silesia. This development rapidly extended to other industrial areas and took on the form of "Committees for the Defense of Free Speech." See "Documents: Czechoslovakia," Survey, 69 (1968): 30. Surprisingly, perhaps, little was said at the time about the virtues of the "working class" - a device frequently used to keep the intellectuals in their place; if it was used at all, its use generally went with demands for its reappraisal and more critical interpretation. See, for example, Zdendk Valenta, "The Working Class and the Intelligentsia," who argues that the original proletariat has ceased to exist as a result of technological, economic, and sociological changes. Consequently, the working class is in "the process of entering a new phase"

46

The context

The core question posed by the critics in Czechoslovakia was clearly a question of political power. Why was there, they asked, this concentration of unchecked power, both within the Party, through strict Party discipline and "democratic centralism," and outside the Party, through control of the media, the legislative, executive, and judiciary organs, as well as of social, cultural, and economic organizations? In posing this question, the critics, we observed, did not aim at the displacement of the "system," insofar as one (vaguely) means by it the broad overall arrangement of society as a "socialist" society. Yet, underlying this widely professed consensus, there was an uncertain and varying consciousness of the optimally attainable. As it turned out, the question was not only "how non-monopolistic a monopolistic party can be," to borrow a phrase from Raymond Aron,56 but also "how safe a small communist state was from interference by a large communist state." The world has learned the answer to the second question; the first question still awaits an answer. For, clearly, despite the tremendous changes in East and Central Europe, it is far from self-evident how things will unfold in the two heartlands of Marxism-Leninism, China and the Soviet Union.

56

(Novd Mysl, 2 [1968]: 198-210). See also a polemical exchange between Zdengk Sumbera and Jaroslav Klofa£ in Kulturni Tvorba, 50 (1967), and in Rude* Prdvo, January 17 and February 14, 1968. Pluralization was by no means confined to party political differentiation, the focus of our interest. Demands were made for more cooperative enterprises, industrial self-management, more independent trade unions and other professional and cultural organizations. In other words, in concentrating on political pluralism I have no wish to belittle the importance of social, economic, or cultural pluralism. Raymond Aron, "Can the Party Alone Run a One-Party State?" Government and Opposition, 2 (1967), cited in Ionescu, Politics of European Communist States, p. 45.

CHAPTER 3

Socialist pluralism and pluralist socialism

By its interest in pluralism, the Czechoslovak reappraisal of politics and socialism invites, I believe, comparison with earlier attempts to combine socialism with pluralism, notably those associated with English guild socialism. Without wishing to imply that the Czechoslovak pluralists aimed at a revival of guild socialism, I do think it of interest that, like their English "precursors," they saw the "natural" unfolding of socialism in the direction of pluralism, in one form or another. Consequently, the course that the actual development had taken in the wake of the revolutionary transformation of Czechoslovak society failed, in their view, to coincide with the natural development. Somehow, what in fact had happened was not what should have happened. Principally, therefore, I wish to explore two questions in this chapter. One is the fundamental issue concerning the link between socialism and pluralism in the form envisaged by English socialist pluralists, notably H. J. Laski and G. D. H. Cole. The other concerns the claim that "wrong turns" were taken after the establishment of socialism in Czechoslovakia, which prevented the linkage between socialism and pluralism. To explore these two questions may help to explain why, in the second half of the century, socialist pluralists in Czechoslovakia were inclined to lean on ideas of their own country's political past rather than on ideas of the English socialist pluralists of the first half of the century. As a matter of historical record, socialism and pluralism have only rarely converged in the past. That they did so in the present century, first chiefly in the writings of Laski and Cole and subsequently in diverse efforts to pluralize Communist regimes in East and Central Europe, culminating in the Prague Spring of 1968, may almost be taken as exceptions to the general rule. For the socialist pluralism of Laski and Cole, no less than the pluralizing attempts of the 1960s, has a rather uncomfortable place within both pluralism and socialism and may 47

48

Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

therefore seem doubly anomalous. On the one hand, pluralism has come to be overwhelmingly identified with the politics of liberal democratic societies; so close indeed is the common association of the two that the idea of pluralism under socialism seems almost paradoxical. And, on the other hand, both schools found themselves in opposition to the most powerful trends in current socialist thinking. The English pluralists were confronted with a Fabian version of democratic socialism, which Cole unkindly called "Webbismus" - a version of socialism that stressed the central management of the economy and disclosed no pluralistic component at all. The Czechoslovak reformers, likewise, could find little to support their cause in Marxism-Leninism or, for that matter, in the then current Western socialist thought of the New Left. All this does suggest that the notion of pluralism under socialism may be a distinctly contestable idea or even, as some might think, inherently self-contradictory.

I.

English antecedents

English socialist pluralism was a complex phenomenon, and no brief outline can do justice to the variety and mutability of the positions evolved by Laski, Cole, and others.1 Although not blind to the possibility of conflict, the English pluralists did not remotely think of it as confrontation between political parties, engaged in electoral or parliamentary contest. Nor did they associate conflict with plurality, for, by segregating areas of concern within distinct autonomies, they assumed its incidence to be drastically curtailed if not altogether eliminated in the pluralist order. Something of the central point of English socialist pluralism is captured by Robert Dahl's notions of "mutual guarantees" and "consensual associations."2 By guaranteeing the autonomy of major social and economic groups, and thus reserving 1

2

Discussions of English pluralism include: H. A. Deane, The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); K. C. Hsiao, Political Pluralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927); H. M. Magid, English Political Pluralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); and D. Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London: Macmillan, 1975); for the guild socialists, see S. T. Glass, The Responsible Society (London: Longmans, 1966). R. A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 1 5 19. G. D. H. Cole provides a valuable brief statement of his views on conflict in his "Conflicting Social Obligations," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 15 (1915): 140-59.

English antecedents 49 many or most issues to specialized functional constituencies in which there was a high possibility of agreement, the English thinkers sought to place some important matters beyond the scope of public decision. Confrontation over the use to be made of public authority, therefore, would become not only less frequent but also, it was assumed, less necessary as the scope of public enactment diminished. Their concern, in short, was not with the question of the mode of access to public authority but with curtailing its range; and here perhaps we may detect the influence of the legal (as distinct from political) interests out of which so much of pluralist thinking grew. The jurisprudential concerns of the pluralist school extended, of course, far beyond the question of the legal status of economic institutions, though it was this that figured most centrally in the writings of socialists such as Laski and Cole. Their proposals for economic reorganization represent a special application of some doctrines concerning associations in general, doctrines drawn from Gierke, Maitland, Figgis, and Duguit, among others. The central thrust of these doctrines lay in a challenge to the "concession" theory of corporations, which represented institutions as creatures of sovereign legal enactment.3 Social institutions, the pluralists contended, were no less primary - legally, morally, or ontologically - than the state; and law itself, as Laski at one stage argued, was not an imperative expression of public authority but emerged from the interplay of social institutions.4 Unblinkered by Hobbesian or Austinian doctrines of sovereignty, one would be able to envisage a pluralistic order of "coordinate" authority; authority, that is, which is to be partitioned among various institutions and no longer concentrated (by virtue of a legal fiction) at a single center. Though other considerations doubtless played their part - the influence of syndicalism, adaptations of Rousseau, Durkheim's sociology, pre-Raphaelite nostalgia, among others - these jurisprudential concerns are precisely reflected in the pluralists' vision of socialism. Socialism was taken to mean the devolution of authority to associations of producers, responsible for the management of common affairs within their own sector; intergroup relations were to be 3

4

See esp. H. J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1917; rpt., London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), pp. 1-25, and "The Pluralistic State," Philosophical Review, 28 (1919): 562-75. See Laski's introduction to L. Duguit, Law in the Modern State (New York: Huebsch, 1919), p. xvii.

50

Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

handled by processes of negotiation within legal constraints; and the "plurality" of this order is that of a functionally segmented society. The legal matrix of the pluralists' thinking - of Laski's, in particular - sets their proposals somewhat apart from other works in the socialist tradition, within which so strong an emphasis on the rule of law is unusual. But in two major respects the pluralists' proposals were within the mainstream of socialist ideas. For one thing, their vision of autonomous producers' associations, related by mutual exchange and adjustment, may be seen as an attempt to give concrete and specific form to a notion which, as it stands, is empty - that of returning the product to the producer. It is in this sense that their proposals qualify as socialist, for in other respects their concerns could be described indifferently as socialist or as liberal or democratic or anarchistic. For another, the pluralists' thinking is allied fundamentally with both Marxian and anarchistic wings of socialism, in the minimal significance it attached to political action and institutions in the socialist order. And it is principally in this respect that they markedly differ from their "successors" in Czechoslovakia. The absence of overt political conflict within Communist regimes is perhaps most frequently ascribed to their authoritarian character and to the absence of "bourgeois" freedoms of speech and association. But the interest of the English socialist pluralist case is that it points to a different set of considerations. As we have seen, the English pluralists were fully sensitive to the question of legal freedoms, proposing, on occasion, to separate the legal order from political power and to subject government itself to legal restraint. "The rule of law," Laski wrote, "is, clearly, independent of the state, and, indeed, anterior to it. . . . It is imposed upon public persons, even more than on private."5 Though the state, it sometimes seems, was to serve as the organ by which the transfer of power was to be effected, it was to lose rapidly its hegemonic status and to shed its authority in favor of self-governing associations of producers, whose freedom was a necessary condition of socialism. The reasons for the diminished role of public conflict are not to be sought, then, in any curtailment of freedom of expression; they are to be sought, rather, in the absence of any political location within which confrontation over general ends could occur. Intergroup relations, in the English pluralists' scheme, were to be 5

Ibid.

English antecedents 51 managed by processes of bargaining and negotiation. Vertical relations of power were to give way to horizontal relations of adjustment and exchange. This proposal - which comes close to the heart of the English school's conception of pluralism - recalls broadly the theorists of socialist anarchism, such as Proudhon, who saw the socialist order as one in which "polity" would have been absorbed by "economy,"6 as a system, in other words, in which horizontal relations of the kind exemplified by economic exchange have entirely replaced the imperative authority of the state. Such a fundamentally economic paradigm of order necessarily tends in an apolitical direction. By contrast, what is specific to political relations is the possibility of contesting certain claims in the light of others that are held by those who propose them to have an overriding significance or value; and such situations, by their very nature, are not amenable as a rule to the model of trading, for what is at issue is confrontation and not exchange. It is this, above all, that the pluralists in Czechoslovakia sought to underline, for they recognized that political competition rests on the assumption that the ensemble of relations in a society may be modified by political authority and that the ends that authority is to serve are a matter of dispute or, at any rate, potentially so. In an economic context of thinking, on the other hand, the ends are not a subject of contestation over the authoritative ordering of claims, for, strictly, they are nothing more than outcomes brought about by reciprocal contracts and exchanges. In virtually dispensing with the need for the authoritative resolution of divergent claims over general ends, the English socialist pluralists understandably had little use for political institutions to meet such a need. And it is not surprising, therefore, that their theories more closely paralleled the economic than the political model of diversity or that they amounted, in effect, to a doctrine of "society" without a "state." The focus for activities that Laski described as political lay within "society" itself - that is, in the self-governing economic associations that the pluralists wished to see. The vestigial public institutions (which they rather misleadingly called the "government") of socialist society were not seen as a focus for public debate over contested general ends. Government was usually seen as a kind of "group" on a par with other 6

P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century (New York: Haskell House, 1969).

52

Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

associations, differing only in that its basis was "territorial" rather than "functional"; as a territorial association, it was argued, its proper role was to satisfy those needs which people have by virtue of living within certain boundaries.7 The needs came close, perhaps, to the economists' notion of indivisible benefits; but, however these needs were envisaged precisely, it is clear enough that the English school wished to sever government strictly from contestation, assigning it the task of dealing with those matters which affected people indifferently and not those over which they diverged. It was within the social and economic associations, they contended, that democratic values could be more effectively realized. For one thing, each citizen, it was argued, would be able to participate in all those diverse "coordinate" spheres of activity with which he or she was concerned and would no longer be confined to casting a single anonymous vote at sporadic national elections. For another, it was claimed (by Cole) that effective representation was possible only on the basis of functionally defined constituencies. A homogeneous group of electors would be able to exercise far closer control over its representatives, virtually reducing them to delegates, since their tasks would be clearly and strictly defined by the constituency they represent.8 One may suspect, though, that what is given with one hand is taken away with the other. For although members of functional constituencies are given the opportunity to participate with a far higher frequency and in a variety of social and economic concerns, there is no longer anything of any general political significance in which to participate. Similarly, in his discussion of representation, Cole systematically closes off the notion of political representation in its general understanding. It is perfectly true that a person cannot be represented; but his deduction - that people can be represented only in some specific capacity, as farmers, miners, consumers, and so on — is scarcely persuasive. For if a person cannot be represented, it does not seem that a facet of a person can be represented either. What can be represented is a position, an interest, a principle, or a claim; but to grasp 7

8

G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory (London, Methuen, 1920), pp. 95-101, and Self-government in Industry, 3rd ed. (London: Bell, 1919), pp. 119-48. For a discussion of Cole's thinking in the context of recent theories of democracy, see C. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 35-44, and F. M. Barnard and R. A. Vernon, "Pluralism, Participation, and Politics," Political Theory, 3 (1975): 180-97. Cole, Social Theory, pp. 103-14.

Czechoslovak departures

53

the notion of any of these is to imagine either a context of general issues to which divergent responses are possible or one of pressure politics by special interest groups directed toward a central authority or government. And it does not seem that either context formed part of the English pluralists' vision.

11.

Czechoslovak departures

The pluralist socialism that found expression in Czechoslovakia reveals, by contrast, a more direct causality between itself and politics.9 It centered, as we saw, on three political modalities — constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, and party contestation - and comprised, doctrinally, a sweeping reappraisal of state and society under socialism. In strictly formal terms, the institutional requirements had been met since Czechoslovakia's foundation in 1918. The changes that the pluralist reformers proposed did not, therefore, call for any additions to the institutional structure. All they called for was its operationalization, so to speak, the more effective working of what in sheer physical terms (if one can put it this way) was manifestly already there. Czechoslovakia already had a constitution, a parliament, and, in addition to the Communist party, two other parties. What was needed, therefore, was not a matter of "more" but a matter of "better"; or, more correctly, it was not so much a case of gaining something new as it was a case of regaining what had been lost: Institutions were to 9

When I speak of Czechoslovak pluralists, I have in mind principally those reformers who advocated quite explicitly some form of political pluralism, such as the philosophers Karel Kosik and Ivan Svitak, or writers such as Ludvik Vaculik, Vaclav Havel, and Pavel Kohout, or economists such as Evzen Lobl, Ota Sik, and Radoslav Selucky, or political scientists and sociologists such as Vladimir Klokocka, Pavel Machonin, Zden£k Mlynaf, and Michal LakatoS. Neither Alexander Dubcek nor any other member of the Party's Central Committee made any explicit mention of "pluralism" in their official pronouncements. Undoubtedly the most remarkable collective statement in support of political pluralism appeared in the Party daily Rude Prdvo, July 10—12, 1968, signed by seventy-five members of the interdisciplinary team that was constituted to inquire into the social and human implications of the scientifictechnological revolution. All signatories were members of the Philosophical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Rather prophetically, the title reads "Before the Decision." Perhaps the best treatment of the Czechoslovak reform proposals, in addition to those cited in Chapter 2, are H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), and Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

54

Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

be invigorated by returning to them the operational meaning they once had. In short, the transition that was to lead from "monolithism" (the term most frequently used) to pluralism was to involve above all a series of qualitative changes, which, cumulatively, were to bring about a thorough reconstruction of socialism as a civic order and a new texture of public life in its diverse forms. Upon coming to power, the Communist regime made very few changes in the original constitutional provisions until 1960, when a new constitution was drawn up to reflect more closely the procedural working of "socialist democracy." In point of fact, the new constitution actually enshrined the Communist party's right to govern as a juridical requirement of Czechoslovak statehood. By identifying the political nation with the "working class," and the leadership of the working class with the leadership of the Communist party, the constitution formally telescoped Party and nation, vesting the "general will" of the nation in the permanent monopoly of the Communist party. In effect, it endowed the Party with sovereignty over the nation's collective fortunes, as the "natural" guardian of its common good and the embodiment of each of its members. Hence, as in Rousseau's scheme of things, there could be no question of rights against a sovereign who comprised the true interests of all. As the legally recognized guardian of the rights and freedoms of every citizen, the Party could look upon any challenge to itself as an attack upon the nation as a whole and upon each of its individual members. Accordingly, genuine electoral contestation was implicitly ruled out. Even had the fielding of competitive parties been granted, it would, under the new constitution, have formed no threat to the Communist party's dominance. An unfavorable election result would simply, yet perfectly legally, have been declared an infringement of the Party's constitutional right to rule, and any voter known to have wanted to bring about the displacement of the Party from its position of dominance laid himself or herself open to the charge of having committed an unconstitutional act. Unless, therefore, this particular constitutional provision was revoked, there was little hope for any pluralizing reforms within a system in which the ruling party, instead of subjecting itself to confrontation, subjected confrontation to itself. This is not to say that the pluralists expected the revised constitution to give birth to unlimited freedoms within the private or the public sphere. A reformed constitution meant for them first and foremost the creation of a civic ethos

Czechoslovak departures

55

that combined unity with diversity. Legally anchored freedoms were to coincide with a shared consciousness of necessary constraints. The former embraced the area in which diversity could find expression; the latter defined its demarcation. The recognition of limits, set by agreed principles, was to ensure that instituting pluralism was compatible with the preservation of certain basic values that were held to be generally accepted. Constitutionality, therefore, was expected to strike a balance between such a common will and its diverse political expressions. Under the officially sanctioned doctrine of direct democracy, there was no cause for seeking such a constitutional balance. The Party itself was viewed as eminently qualified to forge the required balance. As the supreme arbiter, as the national leader, it was portrayed as the ideal watchdog of the public interest. Moreover, according to official doctrine, the Party merely pointed the way, enabling detailed decisions to be made at regional and local levels, right to the factory floor, thereby diffusing power and, where necessary, appropriately balancing it. In principle, therefore, responsibility was said to rest as much with the locus of implementation as with the locus of direction, while "mass participation" and "maximum feedback" were claimed to further ensure the required diffusion and balancing of positions and interests. The pluralists made no attempt to deny that the existing system was "direct"; what they failed to detect was its democratic dimension. To them it represented merely a disguised command structure, with intermediary organizations acting as transmission belts and with "discussions" and "meetings" serving as purely token forms of participation. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of reformers questioned the capacity of direct democracy to strike the appropriate balance between diversity and unity nationally. At the national level they pleaded therefore for a return to an effective representative system in the form of an invigorated parliament. A national parliament, meeting on a day-to-day basis - and not just for a few days during the year - was once again seen as the only practicable way of recognizably putting democracy to work.10 Although to orthodox communists the demand for a return to parPavel Machonin, ed., Ceskoslovenskd spolednost [Czechoslovak society] (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969), pp. 159-61, 241-64, 599-607. The book contains a summary in English.

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Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

liamentary politics had a distinctly heretical ring, "progressivists" thought it both imprudent and problematical to propagate a parliamentary road to socialism and, after its attainment, to deny it political usefulness: imprudent, because this severely undermined the Party's credibility; problematical, because it implied that socialist power holders had no need of being checked or replaced in the manner in which nonsocialist power holders were checked and replaced. For the progressivists, parliament provided the only authoritative link between state and society, a link which, they argued, had been snapped within the monolithic system, rending the superstructure and the infrastructure wholly apart, each in complete alienation from the other.11 Parliament also provided, in their view, the only forum in which contesting opinions and interests could publicly confront each other within a procedural framework capable of producing a majority position on any given issue. Although they made no claim to moral Tightness in respect of the majority principle, they saw it as the only working method that could come to terms with differences without resort to violence.12 Clearly, to seek agreement through public mediation was to depart drastically from the democratic-centralist model, in which differences were held to be short-lived and wholly capable of resolution within the Party without any form of public mediation. To be sure, the pluralists' assumption that public mediation must invariably produce a majority is no more warranted in socialist systems than it is in any other system. But to concede this in no way impairs the procedurally mediating function of the principle itself, at any rate within a parliamentary understanding of democracy. The proposed rehabilitation of parliamentary democracy did not, however, signal a return to the representative system of the First Republic. No one was more adamant on this than Kloko£ka, whose ideas on contestation I summarized in Chapter 2. Interestingly, what he has to say on representation not only contrasts sharply with Czechoslovakia's nonsocialist past but also markedly diverges from expressly socialist notions of representation, such as those of Cole or, for that matter, of Marx himself as he formulated them in The Civil War in France. In place of mere delegacy, Klokocka wants to strengthen the represen1!

12

Linking society with the state was precisely the role that the Communist party claimed for itself. For a perceptive article on this point, see Kliment, "Activity of the Unnamed." Kloko£ka, Volby, p. 254.

Czechoslovak departures 57 tational status of the parliamentary member. Without more "space" the representative has no chance to do anything, right or wrong, and hence can scarcely be held accountable for anything. More space implies for Klokocka the introduction of full-time representatives. He has no use for part-time representatives who meet for about ten days during the year. The justification that had been given for this state of affairs had, in his view, lost all credibility. No one any longer believed that part-time representatives maintained closer ties with "the people," since virtually all were known to be full-time party functionaries.13 That a self-professed Marxist should openly endorse a full-fledged parliamentary system and the need for professional politicians is surely not a little astonishing. Yet, so profound was the disillusionment with the withering-away-of-the-state thesis, with all the talk of mass democracy and democratic centralism, that even Marxists like Klokocka found it difficult to hide from themselves, or from others, the realization that if socialism was to come to grips with politics it would scarcely ever do so by turning to Marx - or, for that matter, to Lenin - for doctrinal help. Meaningful representation, however, was inconceivable without meaningful elections. Although it was not unanimously held that parties were the sole instrument of representation, they were seen to provide the most suitable electoral basis for making recognizably political choices. Implicit in this view are two points: One is that elections have to offer political and not merely personal choices; the other is the notion that parties are not simply sectional interest groups but opinion groups which combine sectionality, in that they are parties, with generality, in that they take up positions on general values or objectives contained within the shared belief system. The newly projected constitutional court was to ensure a "cognitive space" within which parties were to operate in parliament and during elections, in order to present competitive alternatives in the ordering of general ends.14 13

14

Clearly, this would bring about a considerable change also in the internal organization of political parties and would demand a relaxation of party discipline - a point, curiously enough, that was not given explicit treatment in much of the public debate. As we noted, neither the Action Programme nor the new Party Statutes of 1968 were very forthcoming in making any changes in the direction of relaxing party discipline, and factions were expressly ruled out. Klokocka, Volby, p. 298. I shall return to the question of elections under socialism in Chapter 7. The Appendix also enlarges on this point.

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Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

Like most reform proposals, multipartyism was not conceived as something sacred, and there certainly was no hankering after the party system of prewar days, with its method of listing candidates and controlling elected members. Rather, it was seen as an instrumentality in the service of public choice, by means of which majorities and minorities could alternate. Even if the pendulum failed to swing at one election, it was expected to do so at the next, so that minorities would always be able to view themselves as potential majorities. The foremost concern was to put into practice what the Communist party had hitherto claimed in principle: that the ruling party express the will of the majority. Coupled with this concern was the admonition not to confuse "majority" with "monopoly." The aim was to discover ways of legitimating a socialist regime politically, that is, to seek a form of rightness that was not opaquely presumed but was instead the manifest outcome of processes of public validation. III.

The deconsecration of politics

The changes proposed were generally seen by Czechoslovak reformers as the logical development of a revolutionary process which, somewhere on the line, had gone astray and taken a wrong turn, or several wrong turns. There was among them a shared feeling that the revolutionary taking of power by the Communist party involved a restructuring of society designed to make it amenable to effective central control, thereby appreciably weakening, if not altogether destroying, existing sources of diversity. For those, therefore, who associated socialism with the release of infinitely varied creativity, the actual outcome of the revolution appeared sadly discontinuous with the legitimating grounds for its occurrence. Principally, three wrong turns were believed to have caused the discontinuity. First, instead of diffusing power, the revolution had helped to concentrate it within the Party leadership. In place of the expected devolution of authority, there followed a systematic atomization of society, denying every chance to the formation of segmental autonomies and plural associations. Second, the revolutionary party itself became subject to streamlining and the most rigorous concentration of power; differentiation and dissent were as drastically curtailed within the party as they were within society at large. Far from ushering in an era of freedom and democracy, the revolutionary party itself lost the

The deconsecration of politics 59 freedom and democracy it was to confer upon the rest of society. Third, and to many reformers most disastrously, terror and rhetoric, following the revolution, made reality indistinguishable from fiction and fabricated make-believe. Utter dissociation was presented as integration, and enforced unanimity of purpose was taken for consensual unity. Unity, in fact, was endowed with the sacredness of Rousseau's general will, and any form of pluralization was denounced as an act of desecration. Not surprisingly, one of the prime objectives of the reformers was to "secularize" politics, to puncture its pretensions to sacredness. Rather intriguingly, in their critique of political monism and its religious pretensions, the Czechoslovak pluralists appear continuous with the English pluralists. Laski, in particular, had advanced the view that the modern state claimed for itself the attributes of a church. To destroy this illusion was therefore the foremost task of socialist pluralism. If the state's object was to consecrate political power, it was for pluralism to deconsecrate it.15 This important similarity between Czech and English pluralists must not, however, obscure no less important divergences. For Laski and the English pluralists the demystification of politics implied its virtual elimination. Somewhat reminiscent of Marx, they intended to put an end to the imperative (and hence, in their view, necessarily oppressive) authority of political organization. But if the English school sought to liberate the diversity of society from state authority, the Czech reformers sought pluralization within the field of political relations itself. In Laski and Cole, diversity understood as economic and functional differentiation — existed within the frame work of an assumed unity of political consciousness; in the thinking of Czech pluralists, however, the terms of political unity could never be taken for granted but had to be worked out within an ongoing process of mediation. To exclude this process was, for them, to exclude the possibility of both politically meaningful diversity and politically meaningful representation. Among the meager references in Marx's writings that bear upon this question, only one seems to have an acute relevance to the Czechoslovak thought experiment. In the "Eighteenth Brumaire" Marx acidly reflects on the "representation" of the French peasants by Louis Bo15

H. J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), pp. 21—4. For an elaboration of this theme, see R. A. Vernon, "The Secular Political Culture," Review of Politics, 37 (1975): 490-512.

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Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

naparte. Though forming an economic class, Marx contends, the peasants are politically inarticulate; they can be "represented" by others, but they cannot represent themselves.16 Czechoslovakia, in the reformers' eyes, was in a similar plight. For here, too, a class, indeed the whole nation, shared an economic identity, in that its members were all employees of the state, but at the same time lacked a political identity other than that which was imposed upon it by a nonelected, and thus (democratically) unrepresentative body, the Communist party. The nation was represented but did not represent itself, to paraphrase Marx's comments. Even if a class - and, by extension, a socialist society - is held to have a single set of consistent interests and a common uncontested system of beliefs, the problem of translating such global elements into concrete action remains. It was this that at least some of the Czech pluralists grasped. In so doing they not only raise some perennial questions about the relation between belief and action, or between theory and practice, but also invite a reappraisal of the meaning of political ideology as something distinct from a general belief system. And it is in this distinction and the implied recognition of the possibility of ideological differentiation within a general belief system such as socialism that, as I pointed out earlier, I see one part of the value of the Czechoslovak thought experiment. The other part I see in the institutional steps that were proposed toward the implementation of such differentiation. In the light of these two innovations, the hitherto existing models of pluralism, whether they are of the socialist or the capitalist variety, appear equally inadequate. In linking pluralism with essentially legal and social organization, the English school of socialist pluralism offered an inherently nonpolitical model, in which ideological divergence - as opposed to functional differentiation could have no place. But ideological divergence is given equally short shrift in the interest-group version of pluralism, or at least potentially 16

Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 320-48, esp. p. 339. "One tenth of the nation (members of the Communist party) should not be allowed to rule over nine tenths of the nation," wrote Ivan Svitak, "without giving the majority of the people the right to organize itself in order to develop independently its own political activity" (Verbotene Horizonte, p. 128). See also (in more guarded language) Z. Mlynaf and V. Pavli£ek, "Political Organization in Relation to the Development of the Social Structure of Socialist Society," in Machonin, Socidlni struktura socialisticke spolednosti, pp.

542-59. See also n. 27, Chapter 2.

The "anomaly" of socialist pluralism 61 so, for such a form of pluralism is perfectly compatible with a closed political system in which ideological consensus is taken for granted or, as in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, is assumed to be implicit in the notion of "revolutionary socialism." It is precisely this assumption that the pluralist reformers strove to challenge. In attempting to "cognitively open up" what the revolution succeeded in closing to debate or inquiry of any kind,17 they sought to question the allegedly consensual ethos of the revolution. It was with this aim in mind that they injected into the system political modalities capable of opening socialism to plural interpretation in the realm of political action and, in this applied form, to potential contestation. This, surely, is radically different from a Bentley-Truman kind of pluralism, which, though admittedly popular with a number of Communist "interest pluralists,"18 was viewed as somewhat deficient by most Czechoslovak reformers of the late 1960s in that it failed, as the revolution had failed, to effect a legitimation of governmental power politically.

IV.

The "anomaly" of socialist pluralism

There is, as I observed in the Introduction, a widely held belief that, because pluralism is commonly associated with political liberalism, socialist pluralism is of necessity a downright anomaly. I wish to suggest here that the idea of some fundamental connection between pluralism and political liberalism is a doubtful idea, which, I suspect, essentially rests on what may be called a "metonymic" fallacy. Features associated with regimes termed "liberal democratic" are held to be inherently constitutive of liberalism as a political doctrine. Of course, if pluralism is supposed to mean interest-group competition and, si17

18

I am borrowing here Sartori's terminology. For an earlier reference, see n. 52, Chapter 2. The interest-group model looms most prominently among socialist pluralists, who put particular emphasis on quantitative changes. See, for example, J. Wiatr and A. Przeworski, "Control without Opposition," Government and Opposition, 1 (1967): 124— 39. Of interest, by way of contrast, is Jifi Cvekl, "What Kind of Model of Socialism?" Nov&Mysl, 21 (1968): 1011-20; and Jifi Cerny, "The Problem of Marxist Pluralism in Contemporary Czech Philosophy," Filosoficky Casopis, 17 (1969): 133-41. Conceivably, the emphasis on quantitative change could be attributed to the acceptance of Hegel's dialectic thesis, taken over by Marx, that the constant increase of quantitative differences suddenly changes at a certain point into qualitative differences. On this point, see Georg Lukacz, Tactics and Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 21.

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Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

multaneously, such competition is taken to be definitive of liberal democracy, the relation between the two becomes analytic. But nothing is gained by this conflation, since it merely obscures the complexity of the pluralist tradition as it does that of the liberal one. In point of fact, these traditions are of quite distinct vintage. There were thinkers, Justus Moser in the eighteenth century, for example, or PierreJoseph Proudhon in the nineteenth century, who were outspoken pluralists but certainly no liberals. They held notions of community and mutuality that have nothing whatsoever in common with the fundamental individualism and antitraditionalism of core liberalism. And, if liberalism is identified with the ideal of the limited state, then some versions of pluralism, and particularly those most closely associated with liberal democracy, such as pressure-group models, seem indeed radically opposed to it. For, in their lobbying designs, these versions contain a powerful trend toward the expansion of the scope of central government. This is not to deny that there is some plausibility in associating pluralism with liberal economic principles or with the idea of a free market. At least since the publication of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy more than forty years ago, the causal linking of economic and political competition has enjoyed great prominence, a prominence which left its mark also on some Czechoslovak pluralists of the 1960s.19 It is, I believe, a thoroughly misleading view, even though it is sanctioned by popular usage in phrases such as the "market place of ideas." In the first place, the value relation between units of exchange is altogether different in a political context from what it is in an economic context. In an economic context, the units, as commodities, become objects of value through the market; in a political context, the units, as ideas, lose their value on this basis of exchange precisely because they then become commodities. As ideas, therefore, their value depends first and foremost not on external rates of exchange but on intrinsic properties, on qualities they possess in their 19

That economic competition and the exchange of goods and money in the market could serve as a model for political competition and, indeed, as a "basis for political democracy and individual freedom," in that there is a "direct connection between the universality of the goods—money relationship and democratic society," is a major theme in Radoslav Selucky's Reform-Modell CSSR (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), pp. 77-9. For a fuller critique, see R. A. Vernon, "The 'Great Society' and 'The Open Society': Liberalism in Hayek and Popper," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 9 (1976): 261-76.

The "anomaly" of socialist pluralism 63 own right. Ideas can be challenged or defended, accepted or rejected, but they cannot be traded or consumed. In the second place, "competition" itself is quite differently understood in each case. The competition of commodities operates through the anonymous interaction of supply and demand, and it terminates at the point of equilibrium. The competition of ideas, on the other hand, neither operates in this manner nor attains a comparable result. Its modus operandi has as little in common with the process of bargaining and the achievement of market equilibriums as it has with the Marxian notion of dialectic resolution. Political competition, as distinct from both economic competition and militant confrontation, is not designed to be terminal. Its significance lies not in solutions or resolutions but in providing alternative options. If, therefore, political competition is analogous or logically parallel to economic competition, it is so only in the rather obvious, if not trivial, sense of entailing rivalry and choice. Such superficial similarities undoubtedly help to make the analogy plausible, but they also help to conceal much more important dissimilarities, which, I believe, substantively negate it. This argument, if sound, might give cause for treating the link between pluralism and liberalism with some circumspection, as it may also cast doubt on the matter-of-factness with which economic competition is held to be a necessary if not indeed also a sufficient condition for the existence of political pluralism. At the same time, in questioning the analogy between economic and political forms of competition, I do not wish to deny the force of a deep-seated suspicion that frequently lurks behind the view that political competition is feasible only where there is economic competition. What this suspicion rightly draws attention to is the need for a measure of selfsustaining autonomy on the part of diverse institutions and associations. I say "rightly" because, without it, no form of pluralism can count for much. The English pluralists, in their emphasis on segmental autonomies, were very much aware of this need. The Czechoslovak pluralists, sensitive though they were to the hegemony of a resolutely entrenched Party, went a step farther. While stressing that differentiation was illusory without autonomous sources of power, they also called for expressly political sources of power. Whereas the English pluralists confined the effective range of autonomous differentiation to social and economic concerns, the Czech pluralists, as we saw, insisted upon the existence, and continued existence under socialism,

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Socialist pluralism, pluralist socialism

of distinct political modalities. Furthermore, they did not exclude from the notion of political differentiation the idea of an institutional opposition, nor did they rule out the possibility of ideological contestation. The latter — to be explored in Chapter 4 — was utterly foreign to the English pluralists, for whom such contestation was as fundamentally at odds with their understanding of socialism as it was contrary to their drastically attenuated conception of politics as such. It seems, therefore, that though there may exist no inherent link between pluralism and liberalism, and between understandings of economic competition and political competition, there is one characteristic typifying the Czechoslovak thought experiment that warrants comparison with liberal democratic expressions of politics: that of public conflict between diverse interpretations of what is to be done toward promoting the common good. Unlike pragmatic bargaining in which only negotiable ends are at stake, this conflict is over substantive ends, and it is precisely this kind of conflict that has hitherto been thought incompatible with socialist regimes and socialist societies. The pluralistsocialist ideas that emerged in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, therefore, charted entirely new regions: They set out to show that there was nothing, at any rate in principle, to prevent a socialist system from offering scope for plural choices about what was to be done in the political pursuit of public ends. In virtue of these novel ideas that Czechoslovak reformers brought to bear on pluralism and socialism, I put forward the terminological distinction in the title of this chapter between socialist pluralism and pluralist socialism. By the former, I understand a phase or vision of societal change in which (as in Laski and Cole) a pattern of social and economic differentiation is linked with socialist principles but in which the meaning of socialism is not raised as a political question. By the latter, in contrast, I understand a situation or conception in which (as in the thinking of some pluralists in Czechoslovakia) socialism is found in need of political differentiation. Comparing these two approaches to pluralization, I principally argued that, unlike social differentiation, political differentiation is not reducible to economic differentiation or to models drawn from market competition. In raising the meaning of socialism as a political question, pluralist socialism insists upon what socialist pluralism denies: the distinctiveness of the state as a sphere of general ends and the role of politics as a forum for the public contestation of such ends. And this amounts

The "anomaly" of socialist pluralism 65 to no less than a radical transmutation of the way one thinks of socialism. Once socialism moves from being the doctrine of a purely social order to that of a civic order, and from credal unity to political unity, consensus over credal values arguably no longer forms a barrier to dissensus over their performative interpretation or practical application. So viewed, dissensus under socialism is not inherently nonideological or "pragmatic" - a matter of merely disagreeing over the choice of means to agreed or given ends - but is a dispute over the placing of ends themselves. And it is this, I feel, that qualifies dissensus as political and, given public choice, lends it effective (democratic) weight in a schedule of societal ends. Whatever else, therefore, distinguishes pluralist socialism from socialist pluralism, there can be little doubt that it is this political, and not merely technical, understanding of disagreement that gives an entirely different complexion to each of the two approaches to pluralism and socialism traced in this chapter.

CHAPTER 4

Ideological differentiation under socialism

We may agree that claims, to qualify as political claims, require general grounds for their justification and, at the same time, fail to agree on what constitutes generality in a given case. By the same token, we may share a general system of belief and, at the same time, differ over its interpretation in specific situations. A comprehensive belief system such as socialism, though it may command broad acceptance as the credal basis for a social order, may nonetheless be perfectly capable of divergent interpretations in particular circumstances. It appears that it is principally such divergent interpretations or "definitions" that pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia had in mind in the 1960s when they searched for ways of political contestation under socialism. And it is in the light of this search that I speak of "ideological" differentiation within a socialist system of belief. Clearly, this understanding of ideology has as little in common with terror, totalitarian regimes, overarching "isms," or Weltanschauungen as it has with pejorative connotations tied to its Marxian origins.1 Clearly, 1

Not long after the term was first coined in the early nineteenth century, it acquired a pejorative meaning because of its alleged idealist or bogus scientific connotations. But it was only with Marx and Engels (in the German Ideology) that "ideology" acquired sinister meanings and came increasingly to be associated with deception in public life and politics. To be sure, the association of formal justification with actual fraud is found in earlier thinkers, notably in Rousseau's critique of the fraudulent legitimation of states. Since Marx, pejorative and sinister meanings of the word have prevailed on the whole. Hannah Arendt, for example, in her influential Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World, 1958), pp. 460-79, as also in subsequent writings, such as "Truth and Politics," in David Spitz, ed., Political Theory and Social Change (New York: Atherton, 1967), p. 10, insists that ideologies are political weapons that render the question of truth and truthfulness in politics irrelevant. (For a critical discussion of the latter, see my "Infinity and Finality: Hannah Arendt on Politics and Truth," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1 (1977): 29-57.) In a similar

vein, Leszek Kolakowski maintains that political ideologies "carry a built-in necessity of lying," presumably because they are inherently "antiscientific"; see "Why an Ideology Is Always Right," in Maurice Cranston and Peter Mair eds., Ideology and Politics 66

Ideological differentiation 67 too, this understanding demands a certain detachment of the word from the concept; for, though the word in its political use is indeed relatively new, the concept is of somewhat older vintage. Without going back farther than the eighteenth century, the concept, notably in its pejorative meanings of fraud, self-deception, or sinister manipulation, found frequent expression in the writings of Holbach, Helvetius, Diderot, Rousseau, and Herder, in their strictures of institutions that rendered humans an easy prey to fraud and delusion. In its nonpejorative use, too, the concept is older than the word. Two understandings in particular, those of Hume and Tocqueville, come to mind. Without of course using the word, Hume and Tocqueville associated political differentiation with principles, which, though they derive from philosophy, are also contrasted with philosophy. Principles of this kind distinguish for both men "parties" from "factions," that is, from groups that do not conjoin the staking of claims with the assertion of philosophically based principles. By linking political positions and grounds for political differentiation with principles borrowed from philosophy without identifying them with philosophy, these two understandings come remarkably close to the nonpejorative interpretation of "ideological" differentiation by some Czech reformers. I feel therefore that they might appropriately serve as starting points for an inquiry into the kind of justifying political rationality for which the socialist reformers were groping. (Florence: European University Institute, 1980), p. 127. The presentation of ideology and truth as adversaries in politics has indeed become a familiar line of argument, but it is not uncontested. Clifford Geertz, in particular, has made a significant effort toward a more neutral conception of ideology as a general concept, in terms of "culture," in "Ideology as a Cultural System," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 47—76, and in more recent writings. See also W. A. Mullins, "On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science," American Political Science Review, 66 (1972): 498—510; Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); Arne Naess, "Ideology and Rationality," in Cranston and Mair, Ideology and Politics, pp. 133—4; and my "Actions, Reasons, Political Ideology," pp. 35—64. Descriptively, one of the best accounts of ideology known to me is still Hans Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie (Zurich: Rentsch, 1961). A provocative recent work on ideology, which opposes politics and ideology, is Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). In "The Elements of the Concept of Ideology," Malcolm B. Hamilton identifies some twentyseven definitional components of the term; yet, surprisingly, there is not one definition of or approach to ideological differentiation in the sense in which we are concerned with it in regard to the Czechoslovak pluralists. For Hamilton's useful survey, see Political Studies, 35 (1987): 18-38.

68

Ideological differentiation

I.

Philosophy and politics

In his essay "Of the Original Contract" Hume speaks of philosophical or speculative principles as "annexed" to their political or practical use and as a "fabric" reared to "protect and cover that scheme of actions which it [a party] pursues."2 In this formulation Hume succeeds in bringing out the close interlacing of principles, on the one hand, and organization and action, on the other. And this interlacing may well be regarded as a defining characteristic of an ideological style of politics in the nonpejorative sense, for the interlacing seems designed to link certain general (philosophical) beliefs with the positions taken by individuals and groups on particular issues of public concern and thus to strike a certain balance between philosophy and politics. No doubt the philosophically backed positions could in effect or indeed by design serve to conceal and protect partisan interests, as Hume himself observes. But it does not follow from this that such "covering" principles are nothing but lies, pretexts, or rationalizations, and Hume does not suggest that they are. The crucial point for our purpose is that general principles are invoked which, normally, are amenable to rational discourse. Hume, it is true, is not entirely unambiguous about the "rationality" of general principles, insofar as he doubts their rationally self-sustaining properties. At the same time, it is surely significant that he sees the need for principles as a political instrumentality and, as such, as a rationally defendable and rationally challengeable quality of political contestation. The legitimation of claims in political terms requires, accordingly, methods of authentication other than those derived from traditional or authoritarian sources. The "fabric" that a political party must rear to support its scheme of action demands ingredients of justification that do not rest solely on usage hallowed by time or on command backed by physical force. If Hume is not entirely unequivocal about the nature of political principles, Tocqueville certainly is. Although Tocqueville is by no means ignorant of the fact that principles are frequently abused or are sacrificed to "petty and transitory ambitions and interests," he nonetheless refuses to identify political principles with particularist interests or particularist interests with the only true source of political action. And he refuses to do so not only because this diminishes for him the status 2

Hume, Political Essays, p. 43.

Philosophy and politics 69 of politics and debases the role of politicians but also because it altogether fails to correspond to experienced reality. In experienced reality, principles do have, to an impressive extent, causal efficacy in the generation of political action. Only in cultures and periods in which principles carry no weight, or in which they no longer carry any weight, is a wholly pragmatic politics, a completely ad hoc manner of doing things in the public realm, at all conceivable. But such cultures or periods Tocqueville describes as "barbarian," for they lack the capacity of conceptualizing action. For them life, and hence politics, is a matter of sheer practice, of mindless doing, in that whatever is done issues from no attempt at justificatory accounting.3 Political action, properly so called, requires, in contrast to ad hoc improvisation, the perception of the concrete and specific through some generalizing prism. Politics, for Tocqueville, becomes "civilized" if and when people have learned to conceptualize and reflect upon what they wish to bring about, so that at least some events are the outcome, or at any rate are seen as the outcome, of reasoned intentions based on principled judgments. Tocqueville speaks of this conceptualization as a sort of "metaphysical" conversion, in that, as in the case of Hume, a certain interlacing takes place between general philosophical principles and particular political judgments. 4 At least two points are worth noting here. One is that it is of secondary importance whether the philosophical principles that are pressed into service are designed to disguise the true motives behind political claims. In both approaches, Hume's and Tocqueville's, what matters is not the motivational source of claims but the mode in which they are presented. In other words, what counts as a political justification is not the genetic sanction of a claim but its rational sanction, the 3

4

Alexis de Tocqueville, Discours prononce a la seance publique annuelle (3 avril, 1852) de VAcademie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, cited in Jack Lively. The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 61. If I may, perhaps improperly, borrow here from theology, an ideological style of politics involves not only "faith" but also "works." Whatever merit the element of faith might have could be more than offset by the lack of concrete appeal or tangible credibility as a guide to or explanation of political commitment and political action. But if a total dedication to "faith" could prove politically disastrous, a total dedication to "works" could mean the end of a politics of opinion itself, for a completely pragmatic, ad hoc style of politics, were it at all conceivable, would have no need of discursive rationality of any sort, whether in the form of authentic debate or of deceptive rationalizations. Tocqueville to Corcelle (October 16, 1855), Oeuvres et correspondance inedites, 2:301, cited in Lively, Social and Political Thought, pp. 5 8 - 9 .

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reasons that are given for or against a proposed or accomplished line of action. The question of motivation, therefore, is clearly set apart from the question of formulation. The other point is that to invoke general principles, borrowed from philosophy, in support of or in opposition to public claims is not the same as to invoke comprehensive systems of belief or Weltanschauungen, for what is involved or intended in the making of such claims is not the comprehensiveness of a principle but its persuasive force and its perceived relevance as a justification for positions publicly taken. In either case, however, the explanatory or justificatory force of rational sanctions hinges on the possibility of viewing "reasons" as in some sense constitutive of what is said and done so that they infuse a measure of meaning into a position taken. Reasons, in short, have to make sense, in this structural-conceptual manner; for, if they systematically fail to do so, one could hardly speak of principled political action, of a politics of opinion, or of ideological commitment in any intelligible form. Unfortunately, "political ideology" is frequently applied in a manner that is likely to conflate the two types of justifying sanctions that both Hume and Tocqueville were anxious to keep apart and to which I referred as the genetic and the rational sanction, the former relating to the source and possible motivation of public claims, the latter to their mode of presentation. Leaving aside for the present wholly pejorative identifications of ideology with lies, empty rhetoric, or blatant irrationality, it may help to clarify the meaning of "rational sanctions" if a word is added about the conceptual relation between political ideology and political rationality. In this direction the Czechoslovak pluralists, particularly Klokocka, prove highly instructive, for, analogously to Hume and Tocqueville, they sharply distinguish broad credal principles, such as those constitutive of socialism as a Weltanschauung, from the kind of justificatory principles that parties employ in support of their position on questions of policy and by means of which they identify themselves or differentiate themselves from others. That two or more parties borrow from the same broad principles in no way detracts, on this view, from the political sanctioning force of the justifying principles employed, in and through which a party's position is rendered supportable or challengeable. A sanction, accordingly, is not any the less rational for having drawn its justifying principles from within the same

Philosophy and politics 71 system of belief, insofar as a broad system of belief can give rise to more than one rationally defensible interpretation - which, in fact, it frequently does in the case of most philosophical "isms" on which political sanctions draw. On this point, too, Kloko£ka is rather revealing. Almost echoing Tocqueville, Klokocka declares that what is rational in politics is not the same as what is rational in science or philosophy.5 Each rationality is governed by a different "logic," so to speak, and each has its own function. In speaking of political rationality as something sui generis, Klokocka also recalls the Aristotelian enthymeme of rhetoric, which is "rational," even though it may fail to employ strict syllogistic argument.6 As in the case of the Aristotelian enthymeme of rhetoric, so in Klokocka's understanding of ideology in politics, the criterion of rationality is that of an extrinsic logic of persuasive cogency and not that of the intrinsic logic of philosophic truth or scientific method. Whatever discoveries the latter yields are totally independent of popular appeal or popular intelligibility. Rationality in politics, on the other hand, is a type of reasoning whose cognitive or epistemic status is never wholly detachable from its capacity for making sense to a fair number of people, rally support, notably in a democracy, and providing persuasive grounds for commitment and concerted action. Sanctions that lack the capacity of shared meaning, because they are devoid of recognizably relevant and persuasive intelligibility, have little if any politically valid reactionality, even though they may draw on the logic of scientific or philosophical truth. It follows that the requirement of authentic truth, a vital requirement in philosophy and science, may clash in politics with that of popular appeal and effective motivating power. Employing strict logical reasoning, or engaging in painstaking scientific research, therefore, though it may disclose the "truth," may nonetheless fail to persuade people or move them to action. The possibility, accordingly, that mere rationalizations may at times prove politically more effective than epistemic truthfulness cannot be ruled out. And, no doubt, it is in view of this that ideology, like rhetoric, is rendered suspect as a rational causality. Pluralist socialists like Klokocka do acknowledge this possibility in their emphatic distinction between rationality and Tightness in politics and rationality and right5

Klokoeka, Volby, pp. 241-52, 260.

6

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1: 1354a-1355b.

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ness in science or philosophy.7 At the same time, or indeed precisely because of this possibility, they insist on the need for contestability in politics. Politics, for them, is par excellence the domain of a plurality of truths, and hence it is of necessity the domain of contingency. The risk that persuasive or widely acceptable reasons may fail to be the right reasons, they fully concede, cannot be escaped in politics. It is because of this that they stress that the rationality that sanctions majority decisions can make no claim to moral or scientific rightness. The will of the majority, though politically supreme in a democracy, is not endowed with the rightness of Rousseau's general will. Unity in politics does not partake of the holy, just as a political party, commanding a majority, possesses no sacred right to claim political monopoly. This, above all, we noted, was the impressive lesson Czechoslovak pluralists of the 1960s strove to drive home. And it is in this striving that their views, in their importance for democratic theory and political ideology, clearly transcend the context of their origin. Of course, it might be tempting to regard differentiation within a system of belief as merely a divergence over means and hence to look upon the rationality involved as a purely instrumental form of rationality and not as a rationality of ends, in the sense of Max Weber's value rationality.8 There are grounds, as I indicated earlier, for questioning this purely instrumental-technical interpretation of political divergence within a system of belief. For, surely, if two or more groups differ over the bearing of their shared beliefs on what is to be done politically on specific issues in specific situations, they might well be differing over the general meaning, in a given instance, of ends, even though these ends are embedded within a shared framework of belief and the difference expressed in a common vocabulary. If an "end" is taken to mean something capable of being practically pursued, then 7

8

Klokocka, Volby, pp. 252, 260. This, in essence, was also Tocqueville's position (see Chapter 6, n. 12). Cf. Steven Lukes, "Means and Ends," in Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), chap. 6, esp. pp. 114-16. The relation of general theorems of belief to particular justifying principles is not altogether different from what Kant says about relating theory ("a collection of rules . . . envisaged as principles of a fairly general nature") to practice ("those realizations of a particular purpose which . . . comply with certain . . . principles of procedure"); see "On the Common Saying: 'This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice,' " Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 61.

Marxism and ideology 73 it is precisely ends, and not means, that the dispute is about. And there is no reason to suppose that such divergence must be trivial or secondary, for intensity of political conflict is a matter of the extent to which interpretations of core beliefs diverge and not necessarily a matter of doctrinal distance between fundamental principles. Indeed, it might be closer to the truth - as Tocqueville also maintained - that political differentiation, as distinct from militant confrontation, is feasible only within a context of shared credal understandings (Tocqueville referred to the prevailing religious mores in America). But, be that as it may, distinguishing contestation within belief systems from contestation between belief systems does suggest the possibility of setting apart credal consensus from political consensus. II.

Marxism and ideology

It is apparent that the type of ideological differentiation and political contestation envisaged by the socialist thought experiment under discussion fits only awkwardly, if at all, into the Marxian theory of ideological conflict. Confrontation within this theory assumes the form of "dialectical" opposites, that is, of "contradictions" within a system, fatal to its continued existence, so that, sooner or later they of necessity cause the supersession of the system as a whole in some ontological sense. Whatever existed before is abolished (aufgehoben) by destruction or extinction or sublimated by absorption into a new system of existence. Little or nothing of the kind is suggested by the socialist reformers in Czechoslovakia, for what they advocated was the continued existence of rival alternatives, where the viability of one alternative does not entail the extinction or even transcendence of the other. It is precisely the conception of wonontological conflict which characterizes the institutionalization of political confrontation within a pluralist-socialist order and which marks it off from revolutionary strife and the type of ideological contestation that not uncommonly accompanies it. Similarly, it is evident that the conception of ideology that Klokocka and other pluralist socialists had in mind is radically at variance with its Marxian understanding in terms of false consciousness. Political opinions may be based on reasoning or factual evidence that is plainly false; yet the act of believing in them is a state of mind that either

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exists or fails to exist but cannot be true or false. We can, in other words, have false beliefs, but we cannot believe falsely.9 Being incapable of valid reasoning, or of seeing things in their true light because I am dim-witted, sick, drugged, enraged, enveloped in fog, or manipulated by smoke screens, I shall undoubtedly have a blurred vision or perception of the world around me. Whatever I see, think, and feel will spring from such sources of deception and self-deception, and in this sense I shall certainly act from a false consciousness. However, "false consciousness," in the way in which Marx and Engels applied the term, contains not only cognitive implications but also moral implications - willfully distorting things as opposed to merely seeing them distorted. And though it may have served their polemical purposes not to distinguish too closely between delusions and deceptions, nothing but confusion ensues from conflating deceiving with being deceived. Furthermore, the Marxian conception of ideology minimizes, or altogether rules out, the notion that reasons in politics can have a causality of their own. To be grounded in self-sustaining reasons, politics would have to be other than wholly derivable from class and sectional interests, and this is a possibility that is almost definitionally excluded. Just as in Rousseau's thesis of the fraudulent contract, so in Marx's theory of the state, politics solely serves the dominant class of the rich and powerful. Now, it is perfectly arguable that the causal links among reasons, motives, intentions, and actions may be less direct or more tenuous than rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment would have us believe. But whether or not their faith in man's power of rational self-direction was misplaced, or premature, the idea that people do act upon reasons of their own is one we generally accept in ordinary experience whenever we call upon others to account for their actions or are ourselves called upon to account for ours. And, usually, we accept reasons as causes if they make sense to us without inquiring further into the economic, psychological, sociological, or any other grounds that may or may not have given rise to them. The possibility that reasons might be used to mask what is done or intended to be done does not, accordingly, rule out the possibility that they might quite genuinely 9

Sartori notes that believing involves a conviction and commitment. Neither would be conceivable, surely, if whatever is believed could not be held to be true for the believer. See his "Politics, Ideology, Belief Systems," p. 63.

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account for what people do or aspire to do. There is no ground, in other words, for assuming that because we do not always tell the truth the distinction between truth and falsehood is lost, so that our consciousness of reality is indeed a wholly falsified consciousness. Clearly, it is one thing to grant that the generality of political claims is frequently feigned, that electoral promises are rarely honored or even honestly made, or that people are goaded into wishful thinking. But it is surely an entirely different thing to identify politics with little more than artful make-believe, mendacity, or sinister manipulation. Marx, it is true, did not question the possibility of humans acting rationally. Once apparent history is replaced by true history, the path to rationality will be blocked no longer; false consciousness will no more intrude upon human minds. What he did question was the possibility of associating rationality with or applying it to anything other than "science." There was for him but one kind of rationality, the rationality of scientific method as it was understood in his (essentially positivist) age. Beyond or outside science, thus conceived, rationality had no ground to stand on. And, being an entailment of knowledge (Wissen), it had no place in the realm of opinion. To speak of the rationality of a politics of opinion, therefore, was to make a hollow sound indeed. In contrast to this Marxian view of rationality, political pluralists like Klokocka made no scientific knowledge claims on behalf of political rationality. All they presupposed was reasoned intentionality, by virtue of which political action was made amenable to purposive interpretation. Intentionality and purposiveness implied that whatever was done for whatever reason carried a meaning for the actor, as it also provided the basis for his or her accountability. The principal point pluralists in Czechoslovakia wished to stress was that such meaning and such accountability in politics were something sui generis, which cannot be disclosed through the uncovering of economic or other social causes, since what these might reveal was altogether different from what actors in politics themselves see in what they say and do. They might indeed help to explain what an actor cannot rationally account for, what he or she fails to recognize as his or her reasons for acting. But such "causal" reasons are clearly of an order of causality quite different from that of "purposive" reasons. And it was precisely the absence or utter opacity of the latter in which the pluralist critics saw the source of an almost systematic discontinuity between reasons and

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actions: Whatever reasons were given for whatever was said and done ceased to have intelligible relevance. Reasons no longer counted as reasons; they simply were not taken seriously any longer. As a result, public discourse was seen as bereft of all rationality. In Tocqueville's terms, politics reverted to barbarism, and speech itself became suspect. Under such conditions there is scope for no principles of any kind; it is the end of a politics of reasoned opinion. It follows that what is crucial as a requirement of a politics of opinion is neither a question of class interests or market forces nor a question of philosophic or scientific rationality. Rather, it is a question of whether or not defendable or challengeable reasons are entailed, or are perceived to be entailed, in what is said and done; that they form, so to speak, a structural component. Such a structural component, though, is in essence a conceptual quality, for reasons as entailments of action are not causal antecedents in the physical or mechanical sense of "cause." Recognizing purposes is not the same as discovering an oil leak. No doubt, if we wish to uncover the origin of actions, we might do well to study class structures, market forces, income statistics, or medical records. Yet such inquiries might tell us very little about reasons, intentions, or purposes capable of serving as rational explanations or moral justifications. To make sense of a political action, therefore, requires above all a form of intelligibility that is independent for its meaning of nonrational sources or conditions. Only in having this form of intelligibility does politics lend itself to being discussed, justified, and contested. And it is by virtue of this quality that political ideology, as presented here, can be said to have cognitive meaning or rational structure. To be sure, the meaning it commands, and the structure it possesses, can stake no claim to substantive rationality, to the rationality of epistemic truth. All it can and does claim is political rationality, the rationality of a politics of opinion. III.

Redefining ideology in politics

If this nonpejorative understanding of ideology is at all conceivable, it may go some way toward the possibility of drawing an analogy between the rational structure of personal actions and the rational structure of political actions, though perhaps no more than the possibility, for, clearly, such an analogy is a highly puzzling problem in itself. But,

Redefining ideology in politics

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supposing that it can be drawn, it could be argued that the mediation of party-ideological principles helps to provide a way of identifying political action with recognizable agents, willing and able to acknowledge what they say and do, for reasons, purposes, or ends that they can appropriate as their own, not unlike the way in which individuals own up to their actions in the pursuit of personal goals. Conceptually interlaced with forms of "organization," political ideology could thus be said to disclose that recognizability of public agency which Tocqueville attributed to associations as organizational analogues of "great men" or hereditary notables in a nondemocratic society.10 This presupposes, of course, that within the limitations of time and space people acting in politics are playwrights as well as players, that they are indeed agents and not merely instruments or victims. To be sure, the extent to which collective purposes can ever be made to coincide wholly with individual purposes is not soley a matter of writing the right plot or of finding the right organizational form. But, insofar as joint purposes lend themselves at all to conceptualization, political ideologies could well be looked upon as meeting this task. Two points are to be noted here. One is that a group or party, characterized by the kind of interlacing described earlier - between principles and organization — sees itself not as something distinct from shared understandings but rather as constitutive of these. Associations of this kind are what they are because of their shared understandings; they express, rather than create, a shared consciousness. The other point concerns the individual member. Among Czechoslovak pluralists, Klokocka, we noted, is particularly anxious to stress the need for party representatives rather than mere delegates. The representative is to be a person in his or her own right, capable of being a playwright (in whatever limited sense) as well as a player, so that he or she may, at any rate in principle, individually relate to, and account for, what is done in the pursuit of stated ends. Perhaps both points may appear clearer if I restate (in summary form) the kind of properties that political ideology, seen in the light of the Czechoslovak reform ideas, are expected to possess in order to provide the required mediation in conceptual and associational terms. Although these typifying characteristics were not always spelled out 10

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 516.

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by the reformers, they were quite evidently presupposed in one form or another. I propose to single out four such characteristics, each of which seems to me pertinent in some degree to any political context. In the first place, for ideological arguments to be taken at all seriously, they must contain, or must be seen to contain, purposive reasons that have a causality in their own right, instead of being, or being viewed as, something reductively caused. For example, in contrast to looking upon the spread of ideologies from the West, such as Marxism, as the result of the disruption of traditional religions, ideologies must themselves be held to have brought about the disruption. And, however strongly they may be said to "reflect" historical forces, social structures, or economic interests, their "rational" content must be cognitively discernible from their "genetic" source or origin. Second, though political ideologies, as understood here, are expected to borrow from generalizing Weltanschauungen, such as socialism, they are not seen as directly derivative from these in the way logical inferences are in a syllogism. In pressing their claims, parties merely draw upon the broader belief system in order to situate their rational sanctions, but the system of belief from which they borrow has an existence that is independent of the mediating use to which it is put. Conversely, the borrowed principles, designed to ground or sanction a party's claims, assume a life of their own in the course of their application to particular policies or policy proposals. I referred to them earlier as performative principles, in order to distinguish them from the core principles of a general world view such as "socialism," "free enterprise," or whatever. One might also describe such performative principles (as they have been described, in fact) by way of "shorthand guides" or "appropriate equipment," in order to typify the role they play in party political contestation.11 Third, ideology thus used in politics, though inherently distinct from 11

Nannerl Keohane makes a useful distinction among theory, philosophy, and ideology in politics by using the analogy of politics with a game. A political theorist bases his "intellectual constructions" upon his role as an observer of the game. The political philosopher constructs a system of beliefs relative not to the game of politics but to what Keohane calls "basic reality"; his preoccupation is not with what works but with what is true. Ideologies, on the other hand, are "appropriate equipment" for those who play the game, who combat and perform in the area of action, providing them "with a shorthand guide to action." See her "Philosophy, Theory, and Ideology: An Attempt at Classification," Political Theory, 4 (1976): 8 1 - 2 . I prefer, on the whole, to speak of ideologies as grounds for acting.

Redefining ideology in politics 79 philosophical discourse, need not, for this reason, be seen as capriciously random, devoid of structured and rational argument, let alone as illusory or in some sense sinisterly "mythical." To be sure, as we noted earlier, its "logic" is the logic of what I called extrinsic intelligibility and not the logic of intrinsic syllogistic reasoning, the logic of opinion rather than the logic of knowledge, of common understandings and not of scientific method. But, on this account, political ideology need not, I argued, be dismissed as verbal trickery or as a form of artful concealment. For, without being either science or philosophy, ideological reasoning can provide a cognitive "space" (Klokocka's favorite term), a conceptual locale, wherein differentiating positions in politics can be accommodated and reasoned grounds for a politics of opinion confronted. The alternative to it, I wish to suggest, is neither science nor philosophy but, as the Czech pluralists insisted, a politics of central commands, spuriously based on scientific knowledge claims that are not amenable, and are not intended to be amenable, to popular challenge and public debate. Political ideology, in short, qualifies as "rational" if and when it contains reasoned arguments that are ordinarily intelligible, that ordinary people can understand and talk about. A politics of knowledge, as distinct from opinion, were it at all possible, could hardly, on this interpretation, be a politics of democracy, for the kind of choice and the kind of participation democratic politics offers, or the kind of accounting it demands, differ altogether from what we look for when we call upon engineers, doctors, or accountants and their expertise. Finally, by virtue of its interlacing with organization, a political ideology can serve as a boundary of joint commitments, as a measure of what leaders can expect of their followers and followers of their leaders. In this way, ideologically bounded commitments could militate against what Robert Michels called the iron law of oligarchy, in that they potentially limit the discretionary powers of party elites. Wittgenstein's observation that the "limits of my language mean the limits of my world" has in this connection a certain poignancy,12 for, in its light, political ideology could be viewed as a conceptual boundary of our way of thinking about "what is" and "what ought to be done." Serving as such a boundary, it could be said to circumscribe the latitude of 12

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 6.

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party leaders in their wheeling and dealing, or indeed in their playing fast and loose with reasoned ends or principled objectives that are ideologically presented as justifying grounds for action. Unless followers feel pledged to unconditional allegiance, leaders can therefore ill afford to willfully tinker with publicly avowed positions or entirely disregard the constraints that ideologically held claims present. Thus viewed, a political ideology could be said to mediate individual and collective grounds for political action, even though in practice it may encounter problems in resolving conflicts posed by a mix of collective purposes, only some of which any one person may wish to recognize as his or her own. The burden then lies in deciding in each case whether, on balance, one is able to sustain one's allegiance to a common cause or feels that one has to contract out - a decision that, as a rule, is not easily made. In point of fact, this is, as we shall observe, a problem that bedevils Klokocka's simultaneous plea for effective political parties and effective political personalities as individuals. Notwithstanding this problem in practice, joint commitments in politics, contained within a shared ideology, do in principle yield the possibility of viewing political agency as a variant of human agency in terms of intentional or purposive conduct, for which men and women as individuals can be held accountable. All the same, the degree of political causality of which an ideological style of politics is capable must not be exaggerated. Conceptual lenses may help to map out reality, but they do not determine reality, just as "language" does not literally mean the limits of my world. Unlike philosophical principles in their theoritical generality, political principles are interlaced not only with organization but also with changing issues of the day, and their doctrinal "fabric" (as Hume would say) has to mesh with realistic assessments of these issues and with requirements set by electoral and parliamentary considerations. The Austro-Marxists were virtuosi in this, in that their leaders developed an unusual skill (or opportunism) in trimming their sails to the wind.13 13

See Tom Bottomore and Patrick Doode, eds., Austro-Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Living in imperial Austria, the Austria of many nationalities, the Austro-Marxists, notably Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Karl Renner, and Rudolf Hilferding, learned very early to apply the Marxist conception of history to a very complex reality which defied a simple schematic use of Marxist "method." It is not so much that the Austro-Marxists desperately tried to use revolutionary talk merely to disguise their real pragmatism. Rather, it seems that they were acutely aware — and this appears to be true of the mainstream of social democracy in Europe - of the tension

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Yet neither leaders nor followers are always fully aware or totally in control of change. Changing reality may overtake both and thus itself generate a need for reappraising ideological boundaries. It follows that ideological constraints are not themselves immune to change coming, as it were, from outside. Ideological conceptualizations that cease to have intelligibility and relevance to perceived reality lack commonality of meaning and, consequently, lose rational causality as political reasons. They can be officially imposed, but they cannot be made to carry the weight intended by the authority imposing them. Custodians of entrenched ideological positions may continue to proclaim what few continue to believe, but they cannot easily make use any longer of what they proclaim politically. To paraphrase Rousseau, they can enforce an ideology, but they cannot obligate people to pay any heed to it;14 a politics of opinion cannot be imposed. Once an ideology is enforced, a country no longer has, to quote Paul Ricoeur, "a public which has opinions and an opinion which is given public expression."15 Should, therefore, custodians of an ideology try too hard to force peoples' perception of reality into ideological "cages," they may discover that ideological constraints have their own limits, too, and that to ignore these limits may court the danger that they, the ideological "trappers," may themselves be ensnared by their own traps. IV.

Ideology and legitimacy

The new, and highly original, thinking on ideological contestation that found expression in Czechoslovakia and, particularly, in Kloko£ka's

14 15

between ideas as such and their conversion into political action. Moreover, party ideologies, whatever they are, originate under specific historical conditions; when these change, their doctrinal content has to adjust to the change. Liberals had to face the fact that industrial developments seriously undermined many of their doctrinal assumptions in the social and economic sphere, just as social democratic parties had to come to terms with these as well as with bureaucratic and oligarchic tendencies in their own organization, as Robert Michels sadly discovered. Such "contradictions," "ambiguities," or "ironies" are perhaps part and parcel of political reality, regardless of its ideological underpinnings. See, for example, William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), or Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. 3, chap. 10. Ricoeur, "The Political Paradox," in William Connolly, ed., Legitimacy and the State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 269.

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reform proposals leaves little doubt that differentiation of "opinion" was seen as at least as important as differentiation of "interest." Although Czechoslovak pluralists did not deny that the proliferation of social interests in the wake of advanced industrialization imposes severe strains upon a central command structure of political rule, they doubted that such strains could by themselves bring about the pluralization of socialist regimes. In this, too, they are markedly at variance with English, Yugoslav, and Polish socialist pluralists, who put maximum emphasis on social and economic sources of differentiation and for whom whatever political disagreements might arise were reducible to these sources. It was precisely this reductionist understanding of politics which the pluralist reformers in Czechoslovakia found seriously wanting. They felt that if social differentiation and economic complexity did indeed in themselves create a pluralistic civic order, East Germany should have traveled a good deal farther on the road to pluralism than Czechoslovakia, and much farther still than Yugoslavia. Yet, in fact, almost the reverse happened to be the case. In view of this, it seems to me that there is something to be said for distinguishing between a "functional" requirement and a "causal" requirement. A system in which economic power is so intricately tied up with forms of political power — through state ownership of all means of production — and in which the political power of the state is in turn so closely intertwined with the domination of a single political party undoubtedly calls for functional differentiation if it is to work at all, but such a functional requirement by no means constitutes a causal determinant of political pluralism. It is hardly surprising that Czech pluralists rejected the reductionist argument. To fall back upon the reductionist theory of politics would have meant endorsing the very basis of monistic thinking that they were most anxious to repudiate, since it denied any intrinsic causality to politics itself. Politics would have to revert to the status of an epiphenomenon and, as such, would be in no need of reform or rethinking; it would simply not be worth bothering about. Economic reorganization could do it all. This, in point of fact, was precisely the position of Communist hard-liners during the 1960s. Only when other communists began to concede that political institutions possessed a life of their own and that politics itself was a causality in its own right, a phenomenon, and not an epiphenomenon, demanded by any system

Ideology and legitimacy 83 of societal organization, that a need arose for new thinking. Politics, it was now felt, had to be situated into a socialist scheme of things, or, conversely, socialism had to come to terms with politics; and the real question was no longer whether politics mattered or not but how it could be recovered, and in what form. In short, the idea of a nonreductionist politics was now taken as a given, and taken very seriously indeed, with some pluralists going so far as to accord "centrality" to politics.16 Furthermore, a number of pluralist socialists, Klokocka among them, in recognizing politics as a self-sustaining causality within socialist, as within any other, society, recognized also the need for a particular form of politics, for a politics that would not flinch from ideological differentiation. To meet this need was, for them, to meet the requirements of political democracy. But, to meet the requirements of political democracy, the pluralists realized, was not to rely on the automatic workings of industrial complexity. Rather, it was to create a plurality of distinctly political modalities. Among these they included, as we saw, constitutional, parliamentary, and electoral reforms, capable of giving life to a politics of opinion and, through it, to a recognizably democratic politics of socialism. Of these reform proposals, the redefinition of political ideology appears to me the most revolutionary. Since, notoriously, "ideology" has connotations that radically diverge from the meaning it acquired during the Czechoslovak debate of the 1960s, I felt that an attempt should be made to explore this new meaning, if only to see what light it might shed on the question of rationality in politics as a whole. Further probing is no doubt needed to come to grips with this vexing question. So much, however, seems clear: Whatever political ideology definitionally is, precisely, it is not simply false consciousness or willful makebelieve; and, though it is neither science nor philosophy, it does possess a cognitive status of its own that qualifies it as a species of human reasoning. Against the background of this new thinking, ideological differentiation in politics no longer involves or demands a fundamental doc16

Jerzy Wiatr, as far as I know, was the first Marxist to express himself so strongly in discussing the role of politics under socialism; see his "Elements of Pluralism." The Polish socialist pluralist Stanislaw Ehrlich maintained a similar position, arguing that pluralism is a basic democratic value as well as the "most rational" principle of any society; see his Pluralism on and off Course, p. 233.

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trinal distance between contesting groups or parties. All it requires is the possibility for diverse opinions or positions to assert and aggregate themselves publicly, and thus to defend or challenge each other, in the search for the political legitimation of a societal order. Monistic socialism, the pluralist reformers maintained, had failed to yield this possibility and, in failing to do so, offered no opportunity for meaningful political participation or meaningful citizenship. The reason for this failure, as spelled out by Kloko£ka and several other pluralists, is said to lie in a complete misreading of politics and democracy and, above all, in an almost systematic disregard for what makes democracy political, and makes it so on a scale that is commensurate with the demands and requirements of a nation-state. Because of this misreading and disregard, monistic socialism never matured into a democratically political or a participatory civic order. Confusing credal consensus with political consensus, and generalizing philosophical principles with particularizing ideological principles, it conflated core values with political values and unconditional Tightness with conditional Tightness. As a result, the pluralists argued, images of political legitimation, designed to sanction socialist regimes, remained unexamined and unchallenged, whether they were images of a factory, a consensual community, a friendship club, or a debating society. No one asked, or even wondered, if there was anything wrong with these images, singly or in combination, if or how they tallied with the reality of politics, under socialism or any other system of belief. No one bothered to inquire into the kind of organization, sentiment, or rationality that supposedly sustained and suffused them, and no one, apparently, troubled himself to disclose how any of these images aided an understanding of civic belonging, of what it is or takes to be a citizen in a socialist order of things. It was, above all, the last complaint that grounded the other complaints, reflecting as it did the conviction of the socialist critics that monistic socialism, with which they identified existing Communist regimes, had profoundly laid bare its utter poverty as a civic order and its utter failure to legitimate itself politically. For the critics, the rational basis for a political legitimation of a societal order therefore was no longer a foregone conclusion, like the axioms of geometry. Rather, it was something that had to be tested and reaffirmed within an ongoing context of public opinion, within a context, that is, which was in no sense predetermined by "genetic" sanctions of scientific knowl-

Ideology and legitimacy 85 edge claims or by articles of doctrinal faith but was forever open to questioning, and to questioning by everybody, at any rate in principle. Only if politics were to be conceived in wholly private or personal terms, in the way emperors of Russia or Austria at times thought of their countries, seeing no difference between the domain of a state and the domain of an estate, would public justificatory discourse of any kind be rendered superfluous. Where the state is no different from an estate, there is no need for the public utterance of reasoned justifications or the giving of reasoned accounts of any sort. An ideological style of politics, by contrast, does imply the need for reasoned explanations and intelligible justifications in the public realm, even though the rationality involved may not be the rationality of scientific or philosophic discourse, its purpose being to ground opinion rather than to validate epistemic truth claims. A rationality of epistemic truth claims, as opposed to a rationality of opinion, once it is established, can be viewed as settled, and if not as finally settled, nonetheless as sufficiently settled, until scientists, philosophers, and experts of all kinds question its truth. And whether truth is thus seen as subject to scientific review or in philosophically unchanging terms, it is scarcely ever judged to be the work of opinion or the outcome of public debate, in which anyone can have his or her say and, having this say, understand himself or herself as a citizen. In short, though truthfulness in giving public reasons is assuredly a desirable requirement, "truth," in its pristine epistemic sense, is hardly the stuff that ideological politics is made of or, for that matter, the content and condition of a person's self-understanding as a participant in that associative culture known as political democracy. What, therefore, the pluralist critics of existing "socialist" regimes laid bare are principally two things. One is the idea that the meaning of citizenship under socialism has so far escaped the attention that it merits. The other is the idea that political legitimation under socialism cannot be taken for granted or assumed to be settled once and for all. In looking more closely at these discoveries, the remaining chapters will have occasion to make further use of a number of conceptual distinctions introduced so far, such as those between rational and genetic sanctions, between scientific and political rationality, and between credal and political consensus.

CHAPTER 5

Socialism and the language of sentiment

The head of a kindergarten is accredited by his or her qualifications to know what is in the best interest of his or her charges. Whether or not Communist party leaders and government functionaries generally have the interest of their country, as they see it, at heart, many of the pluralist critics in Czechoslovakia were by no means certain that they always knew best what that interest was. Above all, they questioned whether the principle itself was the kind on which to base the running of a democratic state, that is, a state in which the adult members were to be treated as citizens. The outcome of this questioning was a search for new bases of political legitimation; the paternalist principle of "teacher knows best" had ceased to meet the legitimating requirements of socialism as a civic order, once this order claimed for itself the status of a democracy.l The chief concern of this chapter and the following two chapters is in essence therefore the question of civic legitimation under socialism. Toward this end they will comment on the language and images that have commonly been pressed into service as a way of legitimating socialism politically. Although, on the face of it, these images have little in common with the idea of a kindergarten, they share with it a profound failure to come to terms with political reality and the reality of politics. I.

Substantive and procedural legitimacy

Approaches to legitimation may broadly be divided into two kinds, which I shall call procedural and substantive. A substantive approach would require us to examine political institutions and their outcomes 1

"Kindergarten" was, as we saw, the image Gustav Husak, then leader of the Slovak Communist party, used to denounce the central command system of Communist rule. See n. 4 in Chapter 2.

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Substantive and procedural legitimacy 87 in the light of criteria that we inherently claim to know, on quite independent grounds, to be right. To ask of any decision (or decisionmaking capacity) "Is it legitimate?" is to ask about what happens when we compare it with some ideal schedule of ends or values that enjoys our confidence. There is a crude analogy with solving an arithmetic problem: How we do it - quickly or slowly, using our fingers or not is of no cognitive importance, as long as the answer comes out right. A procedural approach, however, is altogether different in attaching importance to how. Are the decision-makers' credentials in order? Did they have jurisdiction? Did they consult appropriately? Did they avoid conflict of interest? Did they count all the votes? These are the sorts of questions that arise when we examine legitimacy in a procedural way; and clearly they are not questions about the Tightness of the decision in the same sense as in the first approach. Possibly, this distinction could serve as a basis for differentiating among types of political thinking, perhaps even for establishing some kind of analytical spectrum. A substantive approach to political legitimation might then be said to belong most characteristically to a premodern context, in which political justification was relentlessly tested against an assumed natural and cosmological order. From the seventeenth century on, however, such assumptions were gradually eroded by the growing emphasis on the legitimating force of contracts. The new emphasis clearly focused on justification in and through agreed lines of doing things. The question was essentially no longer one of political content and its correspondence to a right order in nature and the cosmos but rather one of political process, of the form of "mediating" sanction. The distinction also allows us to typify reforming waverers during the Czechoslovak debate in the 1960s, who, like Rousseau, wanted to have their (procedural) cake and (substantively) eat it too. Rousseau, as is known, made political legitimacy depend upon elaborate procedural safeguards in the determination of the general will. At the same time he wanted the general will to be right substantively, in absolute and unchanging terms, so that it was "always right," regardless of the procedures that preceded it; for, after all, procedures, even though correct, might delude people into thinking the general will to be genuine when in truth it was mistaken. Procedurally, therefore, mistakes can be made; procedures may uncover what the general will is, but only contingently so; they cannot (absolutely or substantively) define it. Going about seeking the general will

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in the right way is one thing; finding it unmistakably and inherently right is quite another. It is just this tension between contingency and necessity, between potential Tightness and actual Tightness, between what is procedurally entailed and what is substantively or logically entailed, that is at issue here. Both approaches contain difficulties and (somewhat predictable) dangers. A procedural approach, obviously, carries with it the risk of making light of what is true objectively and worthy of universal recognition, irrespective of rules, opinions, and votes. A substantive approach, though it courts a less obvious danger, nonetheless runs a potentially comparable risk. By looking upon procedures not as defining the formulation of questions but as a sure path to right answers, such an approach invokes criteria of Tightness that have nothing whatsoever to do with the procedural context itself, at any rate in principle, since the criteria are not arrived at procedurally, or by stipulated methods of agreement, but are known as right antecedently, in the absence of any legitimating process. Procedures, in truth, are for practical purposes dispensable, as, in the final analysis, they are with Rousseau. Why pay careful attention to what is knowable before any procedural process gets under way? Presumably, there must be a superior agent in the mise-en-scene who enjoys extraordinary and extraconstitutional status, authorizing him to declare what is to be known as true and rightful, regardless of public opinion, the casting of votes, the pressure of diverse demands, or the intensity of dissent. But if this is so, no constitutional safeguards or procedural norms are at all secure or capable of being taken seriously. The administration of law under monistic socialism, the pluralists argued, provided a telling example of the intrusion of such an external agent, with the result being total confusion between the procedural Tightness of law and its alleged substantive Tightness. Legality was found defective under monism, the pluralists charged, not because it failed to observe procedural principles of due process but because it was not socialist enough, because it failed to conform to "socialist legality." And making it more socialist meant the intervention of extralegal as well as extraconstitutional agents who, by invoking lofty images and high-sounding sentiments, in fact succeeded in bringing about the Aufhebung of all legality. Therefore, it was not simply the occasional failure of legality that the pluralists deplored but its virtual destruction, and not chiefly by default or recklessness but

Community and competition 89 through the systematic intrusion into law of a wholly nonlegal, if not antilegal, source of authority and universe of discourse. A thoroughly causal explanation of this odd combination of doctrinal highmindedness and highly destructive heedlessness with respect to the legal (and political) bases of legitimacy is not intended here. It may be worthwhile inquiring, though, into what it is that lies behind the destructive heedlessness and brings about the baneful distortion of law and politics and, with it, a total misconception of the meaning and function of civil rights. I am inclined to identify this misconception with the underlying tendency of most socialist theory to misunderstand the role (and the limits) of legal institutions. Even if the "rule of law" is formally upheld, laws, in this view, are invested with tasks that should hardly be expected of them. Consequently, it is not so much a case of socialist reality falling short of living up to socialist principles as it is a case of the principles themselves falling short of validity as soon as they are incorporated in law and translated into legal terms. For, whereas law (or politics) has as its essential rationale the occurrence of conflict, socialist principles eschew conflict or wish it away as something purely transitory. Socialism, among its basic themes, has a quest for community, for consensual fellowship, for harmony and cooperation, in which conflict has no place or, at any rate, no permanent place. And I believe that a major obstacle in coming to grips with this seemingly chronic tension between basic socialist themes and the demands arising out of social life and public concerns - to which legal and political principles and practices seek to address themselves - lies in the images to which doctrinal socialism is wont to appeal, in particular images of sentiment such as those of community and friendship. In this chapter I want to comment on these images and their political implications. But I also wish to take a further step. In Chapter 6 I intend to show that socialist theorists, eager to replace the language of sentiment with the language of rationality, have frequently done so on assumptions no less consensual than those of the communitarians. II.

Community and competition

Community is supposed to define relations in socialist societies as competition defines relations in capitalist societies. The distinction between community and competition, as informing principles of social rela-

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tions, may perhaps be illuminated by the context in which it became crucial to modern social theory. "In civilized society," wrote Adam Smith, "[man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons."2 Smith's "civilized society" the clear (if not unqualified) precursor of subsequent notions of market or bourgeois society, as well as of Hegel's "civil society" - rests conceptually upon this sharp contrast between the vast scale of social interdependence and the limited scope of personal friendship. For, beyond the limited range over which friendship supplies a sufficient motive for action, men depend entirely upon ties of mutual interest and norms of reciprocity (of moral or legal origins) for both association and exchange. These transactions, taken together, constitute "society," a construct which - as at least one commentator has stressed3 - is a resultant, an ordering contained not in intentions but in interactions; it is a "construct" and not an object of unmediated concern to those whose activities it comprises. In its logic, therefore, society, if not the opposite to friendship, certainly neither is friendship, nor is it a variant or analogue of friendship. To the extent, then, that communitarians imagine that bonds of friendship can unite a whole society, they challenge the basic assumptions of a school of social theory with which bourgeois civilization is very often identified.4 Although socialism may be less inhospitable to marketlike features than some have supposed,5 it is not difficult to see that any version of socialism will be driven to some degree of dissent from Smith's claims, if not to outright rejection. For what Smith terms "society" is necessarily composed of relations of competition, modified by internal and external constraints. But if it is supposed that work is (properly) an expression of authentic selfhood, then economic production and distribution have features that are not respected by market reciprocities, nor are they measurable by market criteria. If a society's product is thought to be in some sense its product, an expression of its collabora2 3

4

5

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Dent, 1910), 1:12. See F. A. Hayek's discussions of this topic, especially New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 267-9, and Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 1:35-57. See John Wilson, "Towards a Society of Friends," Canadian Journal of Political Science 3 (1970): 628-54. See David Miller, "Socialism and the Market," Political Theory, 5 (1977): 473-89.

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tive force and also the essential means of its self-determination, then once again features are brought into play that market mechanisms cannot satisfy. Stressing one or the other line of thinking or, often, both simultaneously, theorists of socialism have been led necessarily to deny the impersonality and instrumentalism of relations that Smith accepts. And if Smith himself accepted them only with misgivings, the remedies he devised are scarcely of a kind to satisfy a socialist, for they palliate without transforming the logic of market relations. A communitarian vision of a society of friends offers, therefore, certain attractions. It contains one of the oldest (ethical) principles of socialism, the universal (Kantian) principle of treating others as ends and never as means only. For if there is one characteristic that typifies friendship, it is the notion of equality, of accepting each other as wholly coequal, or, negatively, of not using the other for the advancement of one's own goals or purposes. A sense of community or friendship also encapsulates some central socialist concerns, such as the curbing of excessive individualism and excessive inequalities of income and wealth, in a manner well judged to illuminate the contrasts essential to socialist critiques of bourgeois society. And, not least, a communitarian mode of life suggests a certain stability, combined with security, in material things, as well as, in the realm of the spirit, a certain peace and harmony, the consensual oneness of a fellowship of believers. Unfortunately, two difficulties present themselves. The first involves the Smithian problem of the scope of benevolence, which, interestingly, has been resurrected (somewhat transformed) in the context of socialist theory. The second involves the political meaning of such a communitarian image of socialism. I shall discuss these difficulties in turn, and, the second of these being most closely related to the concerns of this chapter, they will understandably engage us most in the remaining sections. That one's "whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons" is, up to a point, only an empirical view and as such incapable of taking us very far. There can be little doubt that the scope of benevolence is historically variable, and very largely dependent upon forms of community (or communitylessness) with which socialist (no less than Tory) critics are concerned.6 But a conceptual 6

See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961); also Raymond Plant, "Community: Concept, Conception, and Ideology," Politics and Society, 8 (1978): 79-107.

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question is also involved, for variations in the scope of friendship are surely inseparable from variations in its meaning, and it cannot be that its connotations remain stable while its denotations change.7Consider, as an analogy, the concept of a "wife." Polygamy is a possible organization of marriage, but it affects not simply the number of wives a man may have but also what it means to have a wife: One would not have ten of what one has one of now; one would have ten persons bearing the same title that only one bears in a monogamous society. Even more drastically, of course, the concept of a "husband" would change, for while a man's rights in relation to his wives would at least remain exclusive, his wives' in relation to him would not. My point, however, is not so much to stress the asymmetrical properties of the change as it is to note that, with the quantitative change in the relation between husband and wife, there is a change not only in the nature of exclusiveness but in the very meaning of marriage in its accepted sense. So, I believe, it is with friendship. For friendship, though perhaps for different reasons, is likewise an exclusive concept. Its degree of exclusiveness is indeed variable. "Friend!" as an answer to "Who goes there?" merely distinguishes between parties to an armed conflict. "He's a friend of mine" may indicate a desire to claim more or less close acquaintance, whereas "He's no friend of mine" discriminates acquaintance, however close, from liking. But these different uses are, despite their differences, exclusionary in their meaning; and the necessity of their being so stems not from any challengeable empirical views as to the scope of human benevolence but from the essentially voluntary dimension of the concept. Whereas even marriages may be imposed, it is necessarily the case that one should choose one's friends, and hence necessary in principle that one could choose to refuse friendship. This, in point of fact, is an argument that was frequently heard in 1968 after Czechoslovakia had been invaded by its "socialist friends." In a quite different context, Peter Winch comments critically upon the injunction to social workers that they "befriend" their clients: This, he rightly points out, abolishes the idea of friendship by transforming it from a personal choice to a professional requirement.8 Its transformation into a societal requirement is 7 8

Wilson, "Society of Friends," p. 640. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge, 1958), p. 123.

Common purposes and public objects 93 even more conceptually offensive, for a requirement is not the same thing as a choice that happens to bear the same name. For reasons already noted, I do not wish to rely upon empirical assertions which, after all, may do no more than reflect the very situation that socialist critics seek to amend. It may well be true that bourgeois societies erect barriers to the scope of benevolence, interposing relations of inter- and intraclass competition between individuals,9 though it is not obvious that they do so to a greater extent than the political systems of societies that are not termed bourgeois. But whatever might be said about the scope of benevolence, it is surely beyond doubt that the strength of benevolence, however extended, is uneven and, in the light of any known evidence or logical assumption, likely to remain so. Distance, in other words, no less than divergence, interferes with the feeling of unmediated or spontaneous unity and community, a belief in which Czechoslovak pluralists saw as the root of most doctrinal misconceptions of monistic socialism. In his essay on freedom under socialism, William Connolly explores this feeling at some length.10 Let us assume away scarcity, alienation, and all barriers that may be ascribed with any plausibility to our present mode of living; it will still be the case, Connolly states, that even socialist men will inhabit space, and space inherently creates relations of relative proximity and relative distance and, thereby, varying tendencies of integration and disintegration. For Connolly this consideration points to the continuing need for political activities and political institutions under socialism since, even on the most ideal assumptions, there will be competing bases for identification that demand political resolution. Could, then, on this argument, a communitarian socialist society exist as a society, let alone a political society? To this question I now want to turn. III.

Common purposes and public objects

It is noteworthy that the vision of community challenges the social and economic assumptions with which the bourgeois order is identified and does so in a direct and uncompromising way. But what it 9

10

C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 53-61. William Connolly, "A Note on Freedom under Socialism," Political Theory, 5 (1977): 461-72.

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implies with respect to political questions is not easy to see. One possible if quite elaborate implication is outlined by Marx in "On the Jewish Question" especially. In the concrete interdependencies of economic life, Marx contends, there is in bourgeois society a perceived lack of community. This lack expresses itself in the mental projection of a purely abstract unity, a unity constituted by merely formal equality: the idea of the state. Unable to overcome their real contradictions, men fictitiously posit their resolution in the realm of political citizenship. By inference - an inference explicitly drawn out in the later writings of Marx and Engels - the achievement of concrete unity will render political relations unnecessary; for once the notions of shared identifications and common status have been restored to their place in economic life, the make-believe compensations of political universality will lose their point. The (abstract) "citizen" will have been absorbed into the (concrete) "man." Now, since this line of argument is so central an issue for the revisionist views to be discussed in Chapter 7, it may be worth pointing out that Marx's manner of proceeding is doubly problematic. First, Marx either concerns himself here with only a limited aspect of politics or views the political in a strikingly limited way, as a locus of shared identifications and common purposes. It is, of course, Marx contends, a fictitious locus, but whatever we may make of that, we are left with a conception of politics in which conflict or disagreement has no place. "On the Jewish Question" takes up the claim that political unity through citizenship might be a substitute for the chaos of social and economic life, only to reject it. Neither statehood nor citizenship is anything of the kind; each breeds an illusory sense of equality that masks the real inequality of social life. The reality of social and economic life having been divorced from the unreality of the modern state, the only way, apparently, in which Marx can look upon political life is as a make-believe fantasy, a dreamland, governed by the abstract liberty of egoistic man. Yet, once the spurious citizen is transformed into the genuine species-being of socialist man, the unreality of political bliss turns into the reality of communal bliss, and artificial, egoistic man takes on the characteristics of a Rousseauian type of citizen, for whom conflict and disagreement are solely the work of egoism and faulty judgment. Marx's Aufhebung of the state and political citizenship brings on a society in which communal man absorbs the political citizen and communal life absorbs

Common purposes and public objects 95 the political state. And, evidently, in the wake of these twofold absorptions, disagreement and conflict, too, are aufgehoben. Second, and along related lines, there is a conflation here between the common purposes, which a society may or may not have, and the public objects, which are essential to its political character. Neither, in fact, implies the other. Marx, I believe, is as mistaken in thinking their separateness perverse as he is in telescoping one into the other through some Aufhebung. People are members of an organization because, presumably, they have purposes in common. In this sense, purposes are constitutive. Organizations are what they are because of the particular purposes that sustain them. Public objects, on the other hand, are societal ends in need of (external) justification through the mediation of agreement; they do not constitute society, they confront it. The notion of public object, therefore, is logically distinct from the notion of common purpose. To become recognizably public, purposes require "conversion" or "translation," and the extent to which this is possible can be known only through political mediation. It is political activity itself that discloses if and what purposes can be turned into objects and how.11 This discovery of the what, the if, and the how - at once a matter of cognitive and evaluative judgment - acutely raises, I believe, the question of whether the definition of public objects generates its own values and norms or depends on prior and extrapolitical norms. But to raise this question in this form may wrongly suggest a choice between wholly "pragmatic" and wholly "evaluative" approaches to politics; wrongly, because the thrust of the argument is in a different direction. There is no suggestion implied that politics is, or should be, devoid of principles. What is at issue - as Klokocka and other pluralists made clear in Czechoslovakia - is the manner in which validating principles are brought into play. Clearly, there would be no problem if principles in politics were like principles of engineering, for then they would be readily applicable 11

I agree on this point with Michael Oakeshott when he says that "it is the activity itself which defines the questions as well as the manner in which they are answered" (Rationalism in Politics [London: Methuen, 1962], p. 97; see also, similarly, pp. 112-13). It is the balancing - and very fine balancing - that I wish to bring out in "mediation": the balancing between diverse purposes being turned into "public objects" and the balancing ofjustificatory reasons that are meant to sustain them. For a somewhat parallel argument, see J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, 1909), p. 34.

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to action as principles of engineering are to building a bridge. Once it is admitted, however, that these two kinds of principles are not the same, political validation cannot be taken for granted once and for all. In other words, political principles call for revaluation, and the only known way of achieving this is through debate, through putting the weight of justifying opinion on the scale of public judgment. And this, surely, yields as much scope for disagreement as it does for agreement. Validation or legitimation, therefore, is only recognizably political, at any rate in the democratic sense, if expressions of doubt and dissent are not spurned or severely inhibited by prepolitical or extrapolitical norms. I shall return to this question in Chapter 6. My present concern is simply to deny the claim that shared identifications and common purposes can by themselves bring into being a realm of public objects. To make such a claim, it seems to me, is to mistake cause for effect; it is to conflate what inherently is distinct. When Rousseau insists that those appeals that he terms "particular" cannot be admitted to political life, he does so because he rightly considers general standards essential to justification; lacking "universality," such appeals have no political weight. To be sure, he does not naively suppose that such universality of vision is easily attained; unlike Marx, he stressed - to the point of outright pessimism — the obstacles to enlightenment, and, unlike later theorists of the "ideal speech situation," he identified public debate with conflict rather than consensus. But all the same, surely he poses a false alternative here. Either we have a politics of particular wills, he implies, in which case we have conflict, or we have a politics of the general will, in which case conflict arises only to the extent that some participants are failing to generalize or erring in doing so. What he systematically excludes is exactly the situation of greatest political interest: one in which rival ends are supported by general claims. For he supposes, without offering any grounds for doing so, that the acceptance of a common standard entails agreement on common ends, provided only that no one is deceived. A common standard can yield sharply conflicting ends, however, their divergence testifying not to the intrusion of private purposes or to anyone's deception but, simply, to the space between general belief and political action. Far from subverting the universality of a standard, such conflict may in fact be taken to display its universality, in warranting belief in its intrinsic meaning beyond and apart from

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specific and contested applications. Indeed, it is only if standards are separable from ends that specific applications can be contested, for otherwise political choices would be foreclosed. A polity, therefore, is distinct from either a "society" or a "community"; for if a society is constituted by networks of mutual interdependence, and a community by shared identifications, a polity is constituted by standards or criteria of choice in the mediation of agreement. And neither "competition" - as the principle of (bourgeois) "society" - nor "friendship" - as the principle of (socialist) "community" - can thus supply a possible political principle. Although a polity indeed depends upon civic identification, what is raised within it is precisely the question of what it is that one identifies with. In this respect, political identification is mediated, as communal identification is not, by norms, standards, or criteria that are matters of choice and not of existential fact, like language, color, or birth. Similarly, whatever friendship is, and however capable it may be of quantitative extension, it is not a distinctly political modality. Though political commitments may be accompanied by sentiments of caring and liking, caring and liking require no justification, whereas political arguments do; indeed, they are political only to the extent that they involve public and impersonal defensibility rather than personal affection or, if it comes to that, personal hostility. A case in point is George Bernard Shaw's explicit denial that he was, as a committed socialist publicist, an "old friend" of the working class, a compliment he declined not only on the grounds that he was not at that point old but also because he was no "friend": "I had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them." Both rich and poor, Shaw elaborates, "are really hateful in themselves. For my part, I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their destruction. The working classes, the business classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live. . . . And yet, I am not in the least a misanthrope; I am a person of normal affections."12 Commenting on this passage, Raymond Williams observes that it is not that one doubts Shaw's kindliness, his "normal affec12

Quoted in Williams, Culture and Society, p. 182.

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tions," but that one sees these, quite clearly, as presocial attachments, attachments that can hardly be mediated in any adult world.13 Perhaps it might be more exact to describe such attachments as subpolitical rather than as presocial. For what is at issue here is Shaw's conviction that there is a system of power relations which is indictable and challengeable by political means, and that the intention of so challenging it is something wholly distinct from any expression of affection. Shaw's feelings for the poor, or the rich, for that matter, bear in no way upon the question of "rights," which is a question of entitlements, of things one can demand and legally insist upon, not because of the extent or range of benevolence but because of certain institutional arrangements. And such arrangements are settleable only in terms of proposed schemes of actual and possible relations which are, admittedly, "social" in their reference but which, in essence, are political, in that assent to them can be given or withheld and in that both the giving and the withholding of assent determines the use that is made of political authority in the creation (or abolishing) of such legal entitlements. Clearly, it is to these, as rights, that Shaw seeks to point. And, likewise, it is to these that the pluralists in Czechoslovakia sought to call attention.

IV.

Fraternity and citizenship

My concern, then, is not at all to oppose to the model of communal man the model of economic man or to substitute competitive egoism for mutual caring. But I find it difficult to accept that these two models are the two basic sources from which conceptions of politics have been drawn.14 For I believe (and tried to argue) that the logic of political relations resists subsumption under either the logic of friendship or the logic of economic competition. It may indeed be the case that at 13 14

Ibid., p. 183. Horst Hutter, Politics as Friendship (Waterloo: Wilfrid Lurier University Press, 1978), p. 2. The idea of politics as friendship is pursued in some depth in Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic, 1980). What she calls "unitary" democracy - because it is "like friendship" - is said to be distinguished by consensus and favorably, though not uncritically, contrasted with "adversary" democracy, the model of democracy that "most Americans had grown up with." As the crucially decisive basis for consensual unitary democracy, Mansbridge singles out "common interests" rather than intense participation or the absence of "elitism." I am indebted to Professor David Braybrooke for having drawn my attention to this careful study.

Fraternity and citizenship 99 different times one or the other model has assumed primacy. But that only informs us about the disposition of people who are differently placed to select different metaphors. The appropriateness of these metaphors to political life is, however, always open to challenge; personal friendship as a metaphor may be found no more satisfactory than the metaphor of economic competition - and for very much the same reason: They represent friendship as typical of human association and competition as the denial of human association, and, thereby, they equally becloud what, in politics, is crucial, namely, the mediation of association itself. It is no surprise, therefore, that both models display tendencies hostile to the saliency, or even the very existence, of the state. To reduce the state to a medium through which social pressures flow, as in most versions of (competitive) interest-group pluralism, or to call for its removal as an instrument or symbol of man's alienation, as in some communitarian theses, is plainly to assume no need for institutions through which the terms of association can be challenged or endorsed or modified and conflicts of opinion mediated. The argument from friendship recalls the Marxian equation of community and statelessness. One writer envisions the possibility of a metamorphosis of values, in which the "active value of friendship" will assume primacy and, in so doing, transform existing society into one guided by an "ethic of community." Through this transformation the "true political condition of socialist society" will come into being, and whatever minimal need remains for political mediation will be met by an administration of things rather than a government of men.15 What, presumably, makes this situation "truly political" is the dispensability of the state. Freed from estrangement and repression, from false consciousness and exploitation, men no longer need the state in order to belong. Feeling at home wherever they are, their particularity as individuals no longer conflicts with their membership in a totality, just as their existence as men no longer conflicts with their existence as citizens. Not unlike the "communal man" of the young Marx, socialist friendship is to usher in the complete fusion of the social and the political, of the private and the public.16 Since no more gaps de15 16

Wilson, "Society of Friends," p. 654. See Marx, "On the Jewish Question," the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and, above all, the Third Manuscript in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

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mand to be bridged, no more tensions to be resolved, politics is clearly redundant. This idyllic conception of a socialist society - and not just "society" - contrasts, however, rather strikingly with recent reappraisals of socialism as a political order. Far from viewing socialist states as declining, socialist critics find them alarmingly more powerful than any preceding political order. The persistent official downgrading of the political in Communist states is seen therefore as a strategic pretext for the suppression of active citizenship.17 It was this trend, as we saw, that particularly distressed the pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. Like their counterparts in Yugoslavia and Poland, Czech pluralists attributed the civic malaise to the notion that socialism of necessity engendered social unity and did so quite spontaneously, just as it "naturally" promoted agreement about societal ends. They warned, therefore, that, unless socialist regimes came to terms with the real nature of contemporary society, they would become addicted to feeding on make-believe and empty rhetoric. A number of pluralist critics, we noted, went further, and diagnosed as the principal source of the erosion of citizenship the destruction of politics as a domain of public participation and public choice, what they called the "depoliticization of public life."18 This, according to them, virtually reduced the public realm to a realm of purely social, party-functional, or simply personal relations. Disagreements, from this perspective, were held to be resolvable in the manner in which lovers make up or friends shake hands; thus "space for political action," as Klokocka put it, was effectively preempted. 19 The alternative to make-believe, Czech pluralists argued, is to admit that societal ends are never beyond contestation. Any government that claims to rule on behalf of the vast majority of its citizens must 17

18

19

See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, who speaks of the thesis of the provisional character of the state as a "malevolent paradox" designed to justify the endless prolongation of the totalitarianism of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ("Power and the State," in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism [New York: Bantam, 1971], p. 738). Kloko£ka, Volby, p. 240; for a fuller argument on this, see also Appendix, herein. Although pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia did not represent a single school of thought, they did agree in regarding "monistic" socialism as a threat to meaningful citizenship. On the search for a repoliticization of public life, see my "Between Opposition and Political Opposition," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 5 (1972): 533— 52. On the conceptual links in this search with the political philosophy of Thomas G. Masaryk, see my "The Prague Spring and Masaryk's Humanism," East Central Europe, 5, pt. 2 (1978): 215-31. KlokoCka, Volby, pp. 255, 285.

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somehow be able to substantiate such claims. And, to be made to substantiate them, governments must be open to challenge, so that what they present as the "general will" can always be questioned. For only then - and here the pluralists echo Rousseau - does the need arise for giving reasons, for stating openly what the general will is and why it ought to be upheld.20 What is at issue, therefore, is to discover means of disclosing the general will at any given time so that it can be seen for what it is and, if necessary, challenged. A socialist state, in short, like any other state, has to evolve a modus operandi that can reconcile, or at any rate balance, the need for political agreement with the need for political contestation, even though the legitimate basis of such a modus operandi is itself a matter of common understandings. It is this balanced tension that pluralist socialists recognized as the generic problem of any civic order. So far Communist governments have refused to meet any challenge to their monopoly of political power, as we observed before. Coupled with this refusal, Communist regimes typically demonstrated a determined unwillingness to trade entrenched habits of "community" talk in exchange for what they denounced as the language of bourgeois liberalism in Marxist disguise — "a surreptitious attack on Marxism under the cloak of Marxism."21 The strategy, clearly, was to identify pluralism with liberalism, and liberalism with bourgeois capitalism. It was a strategy that may have been effective enough in the early stages of monistic socialism. By the 1960s it was challenged on both counts in Czechoslovakia. Few now still accepted what I called the metonymic fallacy, which lumped liberalism and pluralism into the same tradition.22 And fewer still were deceived by the attribution of the label of "bourgeois," since it had become public knowledge that the label was consistently used to invalidate from the outset unfavorable comparisons of socialist democracy with liberal democracy.23 20 21

22

23

Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. 4 , C h a p . 1. Alfred Kosing, "Die Verfalschung u n d Preisgabe d e r materialistischen Dialektik durch d e n m o d e r n e n Revisionismus," Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, 2 0 (1972): 2 1 1 . S e e also A r n o Winkler, "Zum W e s e n d e r biirgerlichen K o n z e p t i o n v o m 'politischen Pluralismus; " Stoat und Recht, 1 8 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 0 8 4 - 1 1 0 3 . S e e Chapter 3 . I a m i n d e b t e d to Professor H a y d e n White for this term. H e uses it most effectively in The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: J o h n s H o p k i n s University Press, 1973), esp. p p . 2 8 1 - 3 3 0 . S e e , for e x a m p l e , Karel Kosik, in A n t o n i n L i e h m , e d . , Gesprdch an der Moldau (Vienna: M o l d e n , 1968), p p . 3 3 0 - 4 8 ; Selucky, Reform-Modell CSSR, p p . 7 7 - 9 ; Svetozar Stojanovic, Between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and Its Future (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 101.

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But by far the strongest motivation for the recovery of politics and citizenship under socialism was a profound weariness with the rhetoric of intimate togetherness, with the vocabulary of communal oneness, intrinsic friendship, fraternal bonds, undivided loyalty, steadfast solidarity, spontaneous unity, or instant unanimity. Public utterances, cluttered with cliches of this communitarian type, had become thoroughly discredited; they ceased to command tangible meaning. The repetitive use of any cliche or slogan will doubtless become tiresome over time. The real trouble with the mindless use of words, though, is not only that it becomes tedious and counterproductive especially when public discourse is practically bankrupt — but that it threatens language itself. It is one thing to have a language that is inadequate to do the work of politics, or even wholly inappropriate. And it is another, and far more calamitous, thing to have no language at all. For, without it, there can be no "public" and certainly no politics of opinion. The end of public language, in short, means either the dawn of the intimacy of intrinsic love and friendship, writ large, in which language, as speech, can be dispensed with, or the severity of the drill squad, in which command takes the place of speech.

CHAPTER 6

Socialism and the language of rationality

Disillusionment with the language of community and friendship in Eastern Europe was intriguingly paralleled by Western socialist critics, who, no less forthrightly, repudiated the communitarian rhetoric of nominally socialist regimes, together with the vestiges of the withering-away theory of the state that frequently accompanied it. What was less forthright or unambiguous, I wish to suggest, was the outcome of these efforts in terms of the recovery of a politics of opinion, chiefly, I believe, because they seemingly failed to observe the distinction Czechoslovak pluralists, and most expressly Klokocka, made between epistemic rationality and the rationality of politics.

I.

Rationality and political rationality

Three themes strike me as significant points of departure in the critique of socialist theorists in the West. The first is their taking issue with the idea of man undergoing a total transformation under socialism. The idea is dismissed as a wholly unfounded notion, a "corrupt fantasy," that is as dangerously misleading as it is misleadingly dangerous. The second major critique of nominally socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, Russia in particular, is their rejection of the claim that rapid industrialization liberated "the masses," when in fact the liberation was a case of "forced modernization." Third, and for our purpose most relevantly, the Western socialist critics, like their Eastern counterparts in Czechoslovakia, strove to revitalize the state as a "vital and exciting world" and at the same time to stress that a state, simply by becoming a socialist state, did not cease to be a state. Any attempt to becloud or disguise this fact was debunked as "sheer fatuity." Nonetheless, the Western critics felt that the socialist state, unlike other states, offered the possibility of "rational universality," the kind 103

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of universality, that is, which Marx is supposed to have had in mind when he spoke of a regime of classlessness.l Interestingly, in linking rationality with the state, Western theorists of socialism appear to lean as heavily on Hegel as they profess to lean on Marx, with the possible exception of the "pre-Marxist" Marx.2 For they speak of the state as "the repository of collective aspirations," as "the collective identity of a people," or as the "ethical polity," which "expresses the fundamental will of the nation as a whole."3 Men who have become disaffected from the state are said to have become essentially disaffected from themselves.4 A critique that starts with guardedly recovering the idea of the state in Marxist thinking gradually approaches, it seems, something of an apotheosis of the state. In seeking to rescue politics from the visionary language of community, these Western critics in fact appear to submerge politics in the idea of the state. Here and there, it is true, attention is given to the need, much stressed by Czechoslovak reformers, for rational political processes; for the most part, however, the state 1

2

3

4

Howe, Essential Works of Socialism, p. 18; hereafter cited as EWS. The saliency of politics as "a vital and exciting world of work and struggle" is stressed chiefly by Michael Walzer, "Politics in the Welfare State," EWS, p. 824, whereas most of the other contributors focus on the importance of the state. The state as the expression of collective freedom through its "rational" universality over and above any particular interest is affirmed by Ricoeur, "Power and the State," EWS, p. 736. That a state, simply by calling itself socialist, ceases to be a threat to human liberty is dismissed, however, as "sheer fatuity" by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, "Images of Socialism," EWS, p. 845. Evidently, it is only if and when the universality of classlessness becomes the defining criterion of a state's rationality that a possibility exists for socialist states to emerge, that is, states that have shed the structure of a commanding power and thereby cease to be a threat to human liberty. Unfortunately, this acutely poses the problem of a purely "classless" society. Thus, in an article written in 1842, Marx, closely following Hegel, derives the state from "reason in society" and speaks of it as "the great organism in which legal, ethical, and political freedom has to be actualized and in which the individual citizen simply obeys the natural laws of his own reason, human reason, in the laws of the state." Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 130. Connolly, "Note on Freedom," pp. 466-7; "citizen self-consciousness" and a number of rational-institutional arrangements and constitutional safeguards are to ensure that the "ideal of socialism that is intrinsically authoritarian" is kept in check within the socialist state (pp. 4 6 9 - 7 1 ; emphasis in original). See also Ricoeur, "Power and the State," EWS, p. 736. Evidently, it is not the collective ethos of Marxism that is objected to. If Connolly and the other socialist theorists are critical of the downplaying of the state, they are no less critical of the "individualism" and "interest pluralism" of American politics.

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itself is meant to embody reason in some apodictic sense. Rather than being the outcome of political action, the state is made out to prefigure, in a normatively prepolitical sense, the rationality of its politics. Somewhere along the line there is a radical shift in the presumed basis of political Tightness, a move from what I called procedural legitimacy to something akin to "substantive" or "transcendent" legitimacy. Such a shift in the basis of political legitimacy clearly points to a rationality strikingly at variance with the rationality that Czechoslovak pluralists had in mind. There is not the slightest attempt made by the latter, as we saw, to make any of the ethical or universalist claims for their conception of political rationality found in the writings of Western state socialists. Whereas the pluralists refer to rationality as a modality, as a procedural form or manner of grounding a politics of opinion, the state socialists in the West refer to rationality as a substantive end in itself, as something capable of being absolutized and universalized in some transcendent sense. Now, to speak of political rationality in such universalized and absolutized terms is surely to speak of it in a way that is notoriously unclear. What, precisely, are we to make of a state that is claimed to be rational? Is it a state in which individuals are enabled to pursue their own rational ends, however these are defined? Or is it a state that has rational ends of its own, independent of, and irreducible to, the rationality of individual ends? Or, again, is it a state that embodies a rationality not only different from but also superior to the rationality of individual ends, in that it possesses a reason that, unlike an individual's reason, grasps the meaning and nature of things in and through the logic of history in a way that surpasses human understanding, that is beyond the reach of ordinary human minds?5 How, in other words, is rationality, as used by the Western state socialists, to be interpreted politically? Evidently, the means-to-ends conception of instrumental rationality, favored by economists, is not at issue here; for, as a rule, socialist rationality, in the way it is employed, does not refer to the maximization of rates of return over cost or to the appropriation of the technically most efficient means in relation to given ends. But if neither cost - benefit thinking nor instrumental rationality is implied, and, furthermore, if rationality is to mean 5

For a most useful analysis of the distinction between individual and social rationality, see S. I. Benn and G. W. Mortimore, eds., Rationality and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1976), chap. 14.

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more than simply the modality of giving reasons, is it to be taken as a species of knowledge, whose validity is as intrinsic as scientific or philosophical truth? This indeed appears to be the case. For there is something eminently substantive associated with the rationality claimed for socialism and the socialist state, in its blending of epistemic truth and objective "scientific" validity. But this is not all there is to it. Epistemic truth is also linked to practical causality, to knowing and doing. As in the Marxist version of "praxis," human activity and social relations are in effect assimilated to logical propositions, in that, within the so-called unity of theory and practice, doing entails knowing and knowing entails doing.6 Apparently, it is this merging of epistemic and practical causality that discloses not just greed, deceit, and corruption but inherent contradictions, that is, logical defects in addition to moral defects in the very structure of capitalism. The doctrinal argument that rests on these combined logico-practical insights is familiar enough. Capitalist modes of production, together with the factitious culture and the fictitious needs it creates, are in contradiction with man's innate sociability and the demands of his true intrinsic nature. The contradiction, though real, is obscured by cognitive distortions, largely brought about by religious, political, legal, educational, and broadly cultural, institutions, which, in turn, are created by and subservient to the ruling class of capitalists. In essence, this means that the irrationality of the capitalist state is inseparably joined to its immorality and hence, conversely, that the rationality of the socialist state is inseparable from its morality. The principal task of socialist rationality, therefore, is to disclose, and subsequently remove, capitalist-created sources of cognitive distortion, so that human beings, once freed from a falsified social consciousness, can discover their true human essence. This line of argument, brutually summarized, appears to me closest to what contemporary state socialists have in mind when they invoke rationality as a structural ingredient of statehood. In addition to its persuasiveness, the argument powerfully appeals to deeply felt ethical aspirations. Socialist rationality is clearly designed to confer upon the state a capacity for promoting universal moral ends. A socialist state 6

For a history of the concept of "theory and practice," see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), esp. chap. 15.

Rationality and political rationality 107 is to generate an environment that would enable humans to recover their human essence, which, presumably, is a moral essence. Thus conceived, socialist statehood entails the advent of an ethical society, that is, of a society offering maximal opportunity for leading a life of morality, in which the pursuit of political ends would mean the pursuit of moral ends. It is no part of my undertaking to comment on the argument itself or, in particular, to raise questions regarding the appropriateness of assimilating social relations to logical relations. Likewise, I have no wish to enter into a lengthy discussion of its (Socratic) tendency to treat rationality and morality as though they could not be other than coterminous, although I do intend to touch on it in a later section of this chapter. Here I merely want to focus upon what I think the argument implies for politics, for the rationality of the state. Recall the threefold interpretation of claims in support of a rational socialist state. According to the first interpretation, the state is seen as an instrument designed to promote the rational goals of its individual citizens, that is, the ends or purposes they choose to pursue for reasons that they consider to be valid or good for themselves, regardless of whether they are valid and good in some absolute or objective sense. This may be thought an altogether unobjectionable way of viewing the rational state, at any rate from a liberal point of view. Unfortunately, it hardly resolves the question concerning the kind of ends which the rational state as an instrumentality of socialism is called upon to serve. And, unfortunately too, there appears to be on this question little agreement among socialists and socialist theorists. With some, it is true, the development of the individual personality figures quite prominently, as it did with most earlier socialists, whereas with others "individuality" tends to get run together with "individualism" and is severely frowned upon. Second, it may be equally unobjectionable to invest the state itself with ends of its own, if "ends" are understood as "public objects" in the sense described earlier. To do so does not imply, however, that a state, and in particular a socialist state, has constitutive purposes or functions of the kind ascribable to its parts, such as armies, the police, welfare institutions, and so forth. Unfortunately again, certain socialist doctrines seem to ignore this distinction when they identify the socialist state with the proletariat or the working class, somewhat as Hegel identifies the state at times with the civil service (Beamtenstaat)

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or the law (Rechtsstaat). A conflation of this kind courts the danger of taking common purposes for public objects or, in other words, of mistaking the part for the whole. It is the third possible interpretation of a state's rationality, however, that is by far the most perplexing and, perhaps, the least unobjectionable. For what it involves is not only the (epistemic) claim that the state has uniquely privileged access to social truths but also the further (practical) claim that men and women ought to accept these truths for the good of the state as well as their own good as citizens. It is at such an interpretation, above all, that the pluralist critics in Czechoslovakia balked. For, under these circumstances, any contestation over public ends, any challenge to the state's policies, is ontologically excluded. Clearly, a state claiming self-evident rationality for itself is its own sufficient validation; like Kant's rational community, it legitimates itself.7 Short of such self-legitimation, it is not easy to see who or what would determine the rationality of the state. To reply that the "context" could do this8 is surely to give too broad an answer. Any given context, including a socialist context, comprises too many kinds of norms to tell us much about the standards required to assess the rationality of the state, let alone disclose if and how such standards are to be ascertained politically. However we look at it, the idea of a substantively rational state, therefore, bristles with problems, the resolution of which does not easily suggest itself. II.

Conversation and contestation

Jiirgen Habermas's device of the "ideal speech situation" is a most confident, if exceedingly abstract, recent answer to such troubling questions.9 Yet, even if his notion of public debate were less reticent 7

8

9

The idea of nationality being capable of self-explanation is elaborated in Martin Hollis, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). This appears to be Sheldon S. Wolin's way out in "Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory," Political Theory, 9 (1981): 402. The original exposition of this theory will be found in Jiirgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmannn, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971); for a more recent statement of this counterfactual condition, see J. Habermas, "Aspects of the Rationality of Action," in Theodore F. Geraets, ed., Rationality Today (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), and Habermas, Moralbewusstsein undkommunihatives Handeln (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983).

Conversation and contestation 109 about the form or scale of its political expression, it would be suspect to pluralist socialists who think of political debate in terms of contestation as well as discussion, and of political rationality as other than the rationality of scientific or philosophical discourse. For them, as we noted, the most thorough and totally enlightened debate might still leave conflicts unresolved or even unmodified. Habermas's ideal speech situation, by contrast, is to resolve conflicts, as it is expected to yield objectively valid knowledge, that is, knowledge upon whose validity rational people are bound to concur. Provided that people engaged in debate without anticipating in any way the result of their discussion, and provided that they were wholly free from falsifications of consciousness, they could not but see the truth staring them in the face. This presupposes, it seems, that there is a correct answer to be found to every dispute and that such an answer, being rational, would be seen as fair and acceptable to every honest person freed from all impediments to his or her rational judgment. Given these assumptions, advocates of the ideal speech situation perhaps rightly expect humans to reach consensus on what is to be done in the public realm and, apparently, to do so on grounds that strikingly recall Rousseau's theory of the general will, except that Rousseau hardly shared Habermas's faith in the unifying properties of discussion, or in an ordinary person's capacity for that cognitive clarity which would enable him not merely to seek the public good but also to know it, and know it with inexorable certainty, so that wishing for the public good would mean knowing what to look for. If, however, one cannot share Habermas's apparent confidence in the likelihood of everyone arriving at the same judgment about what is indisputably rational, fair, true, justified, or unclouded, one has to settle for less unequivocal, less certain, and less final resolutions of conflicting claims. The pluralist critics in Czechoslovakia evidently did not share this confidence. To them open disagreement, or even confrontation, if institutionalized, seemed politically less problematic than a doctrinal faith in social truths, held to be discoverable by debate and, once discovered, unassailable. After all, they had learned during decades of socialist, or nominally socialist, rule that failure to grasp or accept such truths might render them unfit for citizenship or worse. Unassailable social truths that are to set men free could, they found, prove no more liberating than similar redemptive claims of earlier vintage, secular and nonsecular alike.

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There can be little doubt that rational bases of statehood are very different from sentiments of community and friendship. For, whereas few would wish to argue about likes and dislikes or their intensity, most people should have no difficulty, in principle, in discussing reasons that are put forward as explanations or justifications. At the same time, though, the substitution of the language of rationality for the language of sentiment may turn out to be somewhat deceptive. To judge from the way the rational state is projected, it is hard to resist the impression that beneath the language of socialist rationality there lurks the image of an ethical community, in which truth is not only attainable but inherently compelling. And what is compelling about it is not simply a commitment to certain procedural norms in doing politics or in exercising one's right (and duties) as a citizen. Rather, "rationality" seems to contain a commitment to certain outcomes, to certain solutions, which procedures must somehow entail. As in a congregation of believers, there is a sacred truth to be had and, once discovered, jointly upheld. On this analogy, rationality as truth calls, therefore, for its virtual consecration. Perhaps, though, such images of secular redemption cannot be avoided. The rhetoric of a rational state or an ethical community of friends may be confused, overly confident, and potentially dangerous, but in an essentially secular culture it may be — as is often said — indispensable, for it meets human needs for order, harmony, and meaning, which modernity allegedly fails to meet, or to meet at all adequately.10 And it seems that some Western socialist critics of the language of community, although they have no desire to revive the vocabulary of sentiment, nonetheless hanker in one form or another after meaningful oneness, after a sense of fellowship and an associative societal culture that is denied in the capitalist state. Coupled with 10

This is a widely shared view with strong romantic overtones that can be traced in modern political and sociological writings to Rousseau, Herder, and English, French and German romantics, and, more recently, to the influence of Ferdinand Tonnies's Community and Society and Robert Nisbet's Community and Power. For a critique of the

emergence of modern "community" language, see my "Metaphors, Laments, and the Organic Community," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 22 (1966):

281—301. Equally widespread is the idea that it is the economic market of a capitalist economy which is the source of the modern predicament. This idea has gained considerably in academic prestige since the publication of C. B. Macpherson's Possessive Individualism.

Conversation and contestation 111 this longing, moreover, there is a conviction that what is so supremely desirable is in fact attainable. Given an unfalsified social consciousness and a sincere striving for agreement, the rational could not but be the actual. What the language of sentiment failed to reveal, or indeed helped to obscure, is now thought to be discoverable through the language of reason. Still it is one thing to have doubts about the meaning and redemptive force of calls for substantive rationality in politics and quite another to deny that anything is gained from the change of language, from the affirmation of state rationality. At least three gains, I believe, are worth noting. The first, and possibly most important, is the recognition that the state is not a thing but an idea, a rational construct, the creation of beings capable of forming concepts and desirous of adopting such conceptual creations as ends worthy of pursuit. As the creation of the human mind, the state might also be said to be intrinsically knowable in a way creations of nature are not, so that its rationality, thus understood, confers upon it a certain degree of universal intelligibility, if not universality itself, in some possibly Platonic sense. Be that as it may, the language of rationality makes the state thinkable in a manner in which the language of sentiment does not. For while the notion of rationality lends itself to political extension, the notion of intimacy, characterizing friendship, is obliterated by such extension. The second, and related, gain is the realization that human beings, in pursuing societal ends or public objects, by means of the state, do entertain goals or aspirations that potentially transcend their personal needs, interests, and desires and thus encompass concerns that go beyond the confines of family bonds, communal sentiments, or feelings of personal friendship. The third, and equally related, gain is the perception that, in seeking "impersonal" ends of this kind, humans require a medium through which these ends can, as "public objects," take on a reality that extends beyond the span of their individual lives. In thus having a continuity of its own, a state might well be viewed as having a sort of life of its own, a degree of oneness other than that identifiable with the individuality of an actual person. To speak of the state, therefore, as a "being," sui generis, may perhaps be somewhat less fantastic than opponents of political idealism would have us believe.

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III.

Norms and processes

To be sure, investing the state with a certain rationality and a certain universality is not the same as investing it with the capacity of being its own explanation, for a political rationality that lays claim to selfevidence has no need to seek validation through argument of any kind. It relieves political actors of the burden of giving reasons, of explaining and justifying what they are about. Although a regime such as the command system of monistic socialism may permit or even encourage (token) debate and (constructive) criticism, it has no need, pluralist critics argued, to take either at all seriously. Knowing best what is for the best, it can act like the principal of a kindergarten the image adduced at the beginning of Chapter 5. And if the ruled also think, or are made to think, that the rulers know best what is best for them, they may well consider it proper or convenient or prudent to leave politics and affairs of state to those at the helm, with the least possible interference by themselves. If, therefore, claims to the possession of a self-validating rationality could indeed be sustained, a state staking such claims could, at any rate in principle, ignore any such interference. By the same token, it would have no need whatsoever to render proof of its legitimacy. Such validating requirements as popular consent or civic trust would be either deemed superfluous or simply taken for granted. Legitimation would, so to speak, be ontologically built into a state's anatomy; it would be an internally given entailment and not a mere potentiality, an uncertain contingency, calling for external authentication. It follows that unless socialist states are in a position to appropriate self-validation in so automatic a manner, they can hardly press claims to the possession of a rationality that is inherently self-explanatory and externally unassailable. This, indeed, was the gist of the pluralists', and notably Kloko£ka's, argument. For they concurred with most Western understandings of democracy that consensus can never be taken for granted, that the common presumption must be in favor of a lack of consensus. Instead of a foregone conclusion or logical entailment, therefore, legitimation in politics, if it lays claim to democratic sanctions, must rest upon a rationality that is susceptible to the giving and withholding of support to whatever reasons a government can muster for what it sets out to do. And, though at times reasons appear unequivocally plausible, they speak at other times more darkly, or in

Norms and processes 113 several voices, and appear then differently cogent or important or urgent, so that what is rational for some may be less so for others. It would seem, therefore, that a certain normative openness for judging rationality is essential to enable diverse understandings of the public good to seek expression and support and that, consequently, all a state, socialist or otherwise, can legitimately claim is a contingent rather than an absolute rationality, a rationality of opinion rather than a rationality of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, if a state's policies wholly rest on set prior norms, established in and through extrapolitical notions of friendship, communal solidarity, or socialist rationality, its "space" for political action is, in a sense, preordained. Political action no longer guides or shapes public life but is itself guided and shaped by prepolitical norms, that is, by norms that are not held to be subject to political validation of any kind - they are simply outside and beyond any political process. A state, thus conceived, is premised on what may be called a category reversal of that (democratic) idea, according to which political action, directly or indirectly, sanctions the norms regulating the modus operandi of its existence.11 A category reversal of this kind is precisely what the pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia objected to. In their view, it most vexingly blocked their demands for political legitimation in that it presumed what in truth needed discovery and continual rediscovery through an ongoing process of validation and reappraisal by way of political mediation. To rest statehood, therefore, on preestablished "rational" norms meant to them the total denial of the central principle they sought to affirm, the saliency of politics itself. Normative openness, as the condition for the autonomy and saliency of politics, by no means implies, however, the rejection of rationality as a mode of political discourse or, for that matter, the repudiation of moral restraints. What it does imply is that a civic order is not the inexorable contrivance of some antecedent and self-validating rationality but is instead the contingent outcome or "concurrence" - as Tocqueville would say12 - of political actors giving and demanding 11

12

For a brief and lucid discussion of political norms, see J. P. Nettl, "The State as a Conceptual Variable," World Politics, 20 (1968): 588-9. This is at the root of Tocqueville's concerns in his discussion of eighteenth-century rationalism in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 138—69. The rationalist does not easily understand that a political society, unlike an intellectual treatise, is shaped not by reason (in some objective

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reasons for what is done in the pursuit of national ends, in the translation or conversion of common purpose into public objects. Rationality in politics, in other words, is not something derivable from prepolitical or nonpolitical theorems, as logical inferences are from given premises. Strictly, it is not a thing at all, qua result or outcome; rather, it is a characteristic that does or does not adhere to the activity of politics itself, to the manner or form in which public claims are pressed or grounded or challenged or rejected. To speak therefore of normative openness is not to invite or condone arbitrariness or indifference to nonpolitical norms but to free political actors from the manipulation of extraparliamentary and extraconstitutional authorities, guided by norms that have little or nothing to do with the working and the ethos of procedures serving the expression and assertion of public choice, of civic democracy. Norms do, of course, have diverse meanings, and there is a conspicuous lack of agreement, especially among philosophers, about the proper context of their application.13 For our purpose, however, norms are understood as those regulative principles or precepts which political actors accept or adopt as guides for their public conduct. How these relate, or should relate, to other norms, in particular to moral principles, is undeniably an important question, and one that has persistently worried political philosophers from their first reflections upon the nature and function of the state. No doubt it has preoccupied also the political thinking of the Western state socialists under discussion and, conceivably, accounts for their determination to subordinate political norms to the overarching normativeness and presumed ethical content of rationality. Their motivation, however, is not at issue here. What is at issue is the nature of the implications that are traceable to their line of thinking. Two of these implications strike me as particularly troublesome. I shall discuss them briefly before turning to a frequently made objection to socialism itself as a basis of statehood. One of the worrying implications of the idea of a substantively rational state is the danger of assimilating problems in politics to problems in science or philosophy, that is, to problems that, in principle, are resolvable by applying the methods of scientific or logical inquiry.

13

sense) but by the concurrence of its members. Therefore, "what is a merit in the writer may well be a vice in the statesman" (p. 147). See, for example, George Henrik von Wright, Norm and Action (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 11-15.

Neutrality and socialism 115 Socialists, in particular, insofar as they understand themselves as scientific socialists, are prone to this danger, in that they might be strongly inclined to view political problems as pseudoproblems which, at bottom, are economic problems or technological problems or cognitive problems of one kind or another. The other implication of subordinating political norms to prepolitical norms is the tendency to assume that what, after Tocqueville, I called concurrence, the blending and clashing of opinion in search of agreement, is, apart from standing in the way of swift and decisive action, likely to divert attention from the sure path of objective rationality. Why wait for the wholly contingent outcome of political mediation or engage in the uncertain groping of opinion if knowledge and certainty can be had without these? If some form of politics, therefore, needs retaining at all, it does so only as an exercise in public relations, as a harmless and empty ritual, not all that different in content and design from Plato's noble lies. On this assumption, too, the process of politics is in truth perfectly expendable. Even if claims made on behalf of substantive rationality are expressed in terms of moral rather than scientific knowledge, the move from moral norms to political action is hardly comparable to following the instructions of an engineering blueprint. One may grant the possibility of total agreement on certain broad moral principles, such as keeping promises, being loyal to one's friends, or helping those in distress, and yet find it highly doubtful that such forms of moral agreement imply agreement also on their political interpretation and implementation, or on such specifically political questions as who should rule, how, for how long, and in pursuit of what ends or purposes. And the danger lies in holding that credal agreement on what is morally right cannot but issue in agreement on what is politically right. It was precisely an assumption of this kind that worried pluralists in Czechoslovakia because they saw in it a plausible pretext for a selfrighteous Party to persist in staking out the moral high ground of politics and, thereby, to vitiate any attempt at setting apart credal consensus from political consensus. IV.

Neutrality and socialism

Finally. I want to consider the objection that a commitment to socialism as a political order in itself prejudges the question of a state's

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legitimacy. This objection, if valid, negates the very possibility of socialist statehood, regardless of its images of legitimation. For, by this prior commitment, the socialist state would be seen as jeopardizing the idea of neutrality that, allegedly, sustains statehood definitionally. By subscribing to one particular (and exclusive) form of social and economic life, state socialists as well as pluralist socialists could be held to undermine the essential (Rousseauian) generality or (Hegelian) universality of the state. A "socialist state" on this view would plainly be a contradiction in terms. In effect, this means that any socialist system hoping to recover a legitimate politics for socialism would, first of al, have to cease being socialist — which is precisely the position liberal and Communist critics of the Czechoslovak reform aspirations had taken.14 Yet, how valid is this objection? Could not much the same objection be mounted against the "capitalist" state, for could not its particular social and economic organization be said to militate against the generality or universality of the state? And was not this exactly the burden of Marx's attack on the capitalist state? It may be arguable whether the working classes are any more universal than the middle classes, but it by no means follows that capitalism carries within it guarantees of impartial universality, regardless of the political structure of society. If it did, Hitler's Germany would qualify for recognition as a universal state, as would the Union of South Africa. It seems to me that to take universality either for granted or as inherently precluded because of certain prepolitical or nonpolitical conditions is, once again, to call into question the status of politics as a causality in its own right. Undeniably, social and economic aims and forms of organization do impinge upon political institutions as they do upon individual self-understandings. But, surely, it does not follow that they in themselves threaten the universality of a state, unless the political institutions on their own part fail to guard and protect it. What, in the minds of socialist reformers, denies the universality of nominally socialist states is not their claim to be socialist but the use 14

For an evenhanded treatment of orthodox Communist (chiefly Soviet) condemnations of pluralist-socialist reform proposals, see David Lane, The Socialist Industrial State: Towards a Political Sociology of State Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), pp. 143-74. For a liberal critique, see Chapters 1 and 7, herein. It may well be that this might come to be the prevailing view in the nineties within countries previously subject to one-party Communist rule; it was certainly not the prevailing view, as far as one could tell at the time, in Czechoslovakia during the late sixties.

Neutrality and socialism 117 they make of this claim in buttressing the dominance of a ruling party and in appropriating the language and content of public discourse. For neither political rule nor public discourse, the socialist critics argued, is an item of exclusive property. What they proposed, therefore, was not at all that the commitment to socialism be opened to challenge but that political rule and public discourse be opened to democratic practices and the institutional monopoly over them broken. If, then, there is an answer to the formal problem posed by the objection, it can be, I feel, only a political one; for no known moral norms, or even constitutional guarantees, can protect us against the abuse of words, and our only recourse is that those who abuse them should face the political consequences of so doing. It is on grounds such as these, I believe, that pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia wished to leave open what socialism was to mean politically at any given time, and what political norms were needed to ensure that it yielded scope for a civic order that was recognizably democratic. With this in mind, their aim, we found, was to create adequate cognitive and institutional space for diverse and changing political interpretations of core values or general principles that are widely accepted within society at large. State socialists of rationality, in contrast, appear to hold that such general beliefs themselves contain adequate and clearly identifiable norms of political action, provided they accord with recognized principles of rationality, whose validity is presumed to be self-sustaining.15 Instead of political mediation determining what is and what is not politically right, they themselves determine the Tightness of political mediation. This difference - whether norms of politics arise essentially out of political activity itself or apodictically prefigure it - seems to me to involve a divergence not simply of emphasis but of fundamental thinking about the nature of political mediation and the status of political action. This should not, as I urged before, be misconstrued to imply normative arbitrariness or a denial of the preeminence of constitutional norms, that is, of norms that themselves originally derive from polit15

Since the point of this chapter is a juxtaposition of two "typological" approaches to the legitimation of socialist statehood, it unavoidably involves generalizations that individual contributors to Essential Works of Socialism may only variously endorse or not wholly accept. Moreover, my focus of interest, the relation between political norms and political processes, was not essentially theirs.

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ical processes of mediation. The crucial concern is solely with the question of whether norms in politics arise out of intrinsic principles that defy discursive challenge, such as those of disinterested love or friendship, epistemic truth, or self-evident rationality, or, alternatively, are the work of discursive principles, whose validity is, by definition, a matter of debate and contingent acceptance. How this question is adjudged determines, according to pluralist views expressed in Czechoslovakia during the late sixties, whether or not political norms form an integral part of democratic procedures, in and through which a politics of opinion acquires its publicly recognizable legitimating force. V.

Universality and citizenship

It was not the purpose of the last two chapters to adjudicate what goals it is proper for socialism to pursue or, for that matter, to pronounce upon the desirability or the necessary appropriateness of socialism itself as a political order. Nor did they attempt to take a stand on the Marxian claim that it is the development of socialism through which, and through which alone, human universality can be attained and, with it, the transcendence of purely political citizenship. They did, however, seek to take a stand on what political citizenship is not, or does not mean, by exploring images of communal fraternity, personal friendship, and intrinsic rationality and assessing their legitimating force in politics. If this was a somewhat indirect as well as negative approach to citizenship, Chapter 7 will confront it more centrally and straightforwardly. From the direction in which the last two chapters point, it does seem that, between the personal warmth of sentiment and the impersonal detachment of rationality, the idea of politics under socialism still awaits elaboration, and the kind of legitimation that it might provide still remains to be disclosed.

CHAPTER 7

Socialism, politics, and citizenship

It is from the perspective of politically legitimating socialism as a civic order that Klokocka's reforming vision seems to me the most remarkable among the diverse Czechoslovak reform proposals of the late 1960s. To my knowledge, it is also the most detailed "insider's" critique of the defects of nominally socialist systems as political systems. I shall attempt, therefore, in this chapter to draw out of his critique of "monistic" socialism and his prognosis of a pluralist socialism those theoretical points that may help to supplement and, possibly, further clarify the line of argument pursued in the last two chapters. I.

"Command" socialism and Klokocka's critique

The hitherto existing command system totally misconceives, according to Klokocka, the nature and function of politics. This misconception derives from the erroneous belief that, unlike capitalist society, socialist society entails societal unity. Given this belief, elections — Klokocka's chief concern - cease to carry political meaning. The alternatives open to public choice are personal, not political alternatives. By having lost what Klokocka describes as their defining "pluralistic essence," elections, strictly speaking, become otiose; they become empty rituals, indistinguishable from May Day parades. For what in fact takes place is the transformation of political elections into promotional and symbolic exercises. Instead of disclosing where popular support lies, May Day elections merely serve to advertise existing power holders.l Klokocka's central argument is that the assumption of spontaneous social unity underlying monistic socialism spells the doom of politics as the domain of public choice. In denying the diversity of positions 1

Klokoeka, Volby, pp. 27, 213, 239, 248-9, 298. 119

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on public concerns, it denies the opportunity for their articulation. Klokocka speaks of this denial as the "depoliticization of public life."2 The trouble with the assumption of "socialist unity" is that it feeds on and in turn nourishes a wholly illusory understanding of socialist society as of any society. The belief that the revolutionary and postrevolutionary "abolition of antagonistic class struggle" terminates the diversity of opinions, interests, and bases of loyalty, or rules out divergences over priorities, is, according to Klokocka, the inevitable corollary of this illusion. Just as the coming into existence of Communist states fails to usher in an era of international socialist harmony and unity, so also does the emergence of any one Communist state fail to put an end to internal conflicts and divergences; old conflicts survive or are supplanted by new ones. The need for politics, in short, is not rendered obsolete, partly because socialism generates no spontaneous unity and partly, if not largely, because it generates no other method of mediating divergences procedurally.3 Of particular interest in this connection is Kloko£ka's juxtaposition of politics and science. Political solutions are right if they find acceptance, regardless of whether or not they are right as scientific solutions. It is not intrinsic Tightness, therefore, or a Tightness unequivocally and assuredly upheld by everyone, but a Tightness tentatively agreed upon that characterizes politics. Only this kind of Tightness, Klokocka insists, is open to contestation and thus capable of review in the light of diverse and changing understandings of the common good. Political ends, thus understood, are therefore never final ends or unchallengeable ends but are contingent and competing alternatives. As such, they may give rise to conflict; yet the clash of political alternatives is, according to Klokocka, comparable to a competitive game rather than to open warfare, in that it is capable of mediation within an agreedupon framework of procedural mutuality. Given this analogy, politics, like all games, is subject to rules which those who play the game must know and abide by. Players, that is, must know and agree upon what is and what is not "done." Among the players Klokocka includes not only individuals but also social organizations, political parties, and the communication media. When he speaks of rules, he has in mind publicly stated and publicly recognized norms of public conduct, securities, rights, freedoms, and obligations; these are for him the 2

Ibid., p. 240.

3

Ibid., pp. 251-6, 260-1, 271, 282-5.

"Command" socialism and Klokodka's critique 121 grammar of a nation's political language in and through which ways of acting politically are understood and evaluated.4 The forum in which the political game is to be played at the national level is for Klokocka a representative parliamentary assembly, for, at this level, he distrusts the operation of direct democracy. The rhetoric of direct democracy, he fears, is apt to becloud the manner in which agreements or understandings are reached. Too much emphasis, he says, has in the past been put on "who rules" rather than on "how one rules." Indeed, Klokocka puts primacy on what we earlier described as procedural legitimacy, in that what matters to him first and foremost in politics is not content but method.5 Recognition of the priority of method, of proper procedures, is therefore, in his view, the essential precondition of political reform. Although aware of the defects of representative democracy, Klokocka sees them as a lesser threat to citizenship than the behind-the-scenes manipulation of socalled direct democracy, especially at the national level. At this level, as distinct from the level of local government or participation at the working place, a system of direct democracy, Klokocka fears, may easily serve as a cloak for the absence of genuine democracy, that is, the kind of mediation that comes into play amid diverse opinions and interests. Recoiling from the experience of direct democracy under monistic socialism, on the one hand, and from the machinations of party bosses that dominated parliamentary life in interwar Czechoslovakia, on the other, Klokocka opts for a system of parliamentary representation in which the representatives could enjoy a real measure of autonomy vis-a-vis both their constituencies and their party elites. He wants to see functionaries replaced with personalities, mere executive tools with self-directed agents, able and willing to assume responsibility by appropriating what they say or do in public as their own actions. Only then does Klokocka hold out the possibility for the emergence of political accountability.6 Politics, then, is clearly no mere epiphenomenon for Klokocka. Far from accepting the thesis of the withering away of the state - the decay of politics and its replacement by the rule of the civil service he urges its most vigorous recovery. Only such a recovery can bring about what Klokocka strikingly calls "a space for political action."7 4 6

Ibid., pp. 251-2, 255-6. 5 Ibid., pp. 245, 253-4. Ibid., pp. 263-71. 7 Ibid., p. 285.

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Moreover, since politics for Kloko£ka only starts "wherever and whenever confrontation starts," he views the rehabilitation of a parliamentary opposition as an essential component in the recovery of politics. "Opposition," he observes, has quite wrongly been identified with "antistate activity," for, rather than being treasonable, it serves as that "critical mirror" which "benefits the ruling majority itself." Indeed, he goes so far as to speak of institutionalized opposition as a crucial ingredient in the legitimation of the "state-forming process."8 Opening up the hitherto existing system of socialist rule to democratic processes of mediation, including electoral confrontation, undoubtedly exposes it to risks from which it had until now been effectively sheltered. Klokocka makes no attempt to conceal this fact. On the contrary, he makes plain that to exclude such risks is to foreclose the chance of creating a space for political action, of providing an opportunity for the exercise of political choice. Unless politics is viewed as a domain in which risk is accepted, not as something incidental to it but as something of its very essence, any attempt to reform the electoral and political practices of Communist regimes is doomed from the very outset. Remove risks, and elections cease to be elections. There is voting in plebiscites: The citizen votes, but he does not elect. Voting by itself tells us little about the purpose of the exercise; it is the purpose of the exercise that discloses the point of voting. Klokocka displays no ambiguity on this point.9 These, briefly summarized, are the salient themes in Klokocka's vision of socialist democracy, of socialism as a political order. It is perhaps the greatest achievement of Klokocka's remarkable insight into politics that he so clearly recognizes that taking possession of political space means entering the domain of contingency. The acceptance of contingency is for him the inescapable cost of recovering politics for socialism - a cost which, evidently, Communist regimes have so far been unwilling to incur. II.

Socialism as a civic order

In reflecting upon Klokocka's reform proposals I want to dwell on two related topics. The first concerns the discovery that socialism as a political order is faced with essentially the same problems as any other 8

Ibid., pp. 277, 284-5.

9

Ibid., pp. 252, 260-1, 277-98.

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political order that lays claim to being democratic. Commonplace though it sounds, it is in truth a profound departure from Marxian and post-Marxian thinking about socialism and a direct challenge to that variety of it which has assumed prominence in Communist countries. The second topic concerns the search for modalities that would enable socialism to come to grips with the requirements of a political order, that is, of an order in and through which the idea of citizenship can acquire tangible meaning. This search is of added interest in that it raises questions that transcend the confines of socialist theory. For what is involved is the uncovering of a modus operandi capable of reconciling the need for diversity with the need for unity, of allowing and limiting political contestation. Underlying the search for such a modus operandi are, I shall suggest (in Chapter 8), certain philosophical and sociological assumptions about the meaning of "agreement" and "unity," which, though clearly hinted at, are not theoretically worked out in Klokocka's reform proposals. Although Klokocka viewed himself as nothing other than a loyal Marxist in presenting his proposals, it is more than a moot point to what extent he could have drawn on Marx's political understanding of socialism. For, notwithstanding Marx's praise for the Paris Commune, his prevailing position was unmistakably closer to "monism" and "centralism" than to any form of "pluralism." A far more likely socialist source could possibly be found in Proudhon, although Proudhon - no less than the English socialist pluralists of the following century — would have shown scant enthusiasm for the multiparty, parliamentary form of democracy that Klokocka had in mind. Marx and Engels, it is true, did allow for a parliamentary path to socialism where historical conditions warrant it. Klokocka, however, was concerned not with a parliamentary road to socialism but with a parliamentary system under socialism. And of this Marx had nothing to say. Conflicting understandings of the common good were generally dismissed in words similar to those used in the Communist Manifesto, in which law, morality, and religion are dismissed as "so many bourgeois prejudices." To be sure, Marx might have welcomed proposals aimed at enlarging personal, associational, and intellectual freedoms. Although as a rule he thought of political parties as militant class organizations, he might also conceivably have accepted the existence of "strata parties" qua occupational and cultural interest groups. But he would most certainly have been appalled by the notion of competitive

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party politics, professional politicians, and the elevation of politics to a position of centrality. Though Marx, and orthodox Marxism after him, did anticipate - despite some ambivalence - the continuation of the nation-state beyond the revolution, this continuation was viewed as a process of political decomposition. By and large, "politics," for Marxists, had negative connotations; and, most commonly, they were concerned with revolutionary politics, with strategies and tactics of destruction, whose chief target was the overthrow of authority, not its legitimation. If any authority was to replace political government, it was (according to Engels and Lenin) the authority of the factory. In sharp contrast to earlier "utopian" understandings of socialism, which envisioned socialist society as a consensual community of friends that needed no authority whatsoever, the conception of socialist society in terms of a factory implied a rigorous command structure with no squeamishness about the institutionalization of hierarchy. Klokocka rejects both the image of a factory writ large and the image of a society of friends. Both involve for him formidable misconceptions about the nature of social and political life. To think of a nation as though it were a factory reveals not only a curious judgment of scale but also a serious failure to grasp the ethical content of socialism and the qualitative difference between the command structure characteristic of factory management and the mode of mediation characteristic of a political order under democracy. On the other hand, to think of a nation as a congregation of believers, or as a meeting or face-to-face relation of friends, is to reveal not only a similarly deficient sense of scale but also an equally remarkable disregard for the distinction between the private and the public, a disregard which is as destructive of friendship as it is destructive of politics. In short, neither image will do; each in its way fatally distorts the nature of social and political relations, and each, if for different reasons, threatens to render citizenship meaningless. Klokoc'ka stresses time and again that socialist power holders are in no less need of being checked or replaced than capitalist (or nonsocialist) power holders. The "rightness" of political action - a contingent Tightness, as we noted — is not guaranteed by its coherence, or alleged coherence, with prior general principles of belief, for these cannot in themselves predetermine the form political mediation is to take or the evaluation of its outcome in any specific case. Principles

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need interpretation, qualification, and weighing in the light of particular circumstances, competing priorities, and past experiences. It is only in and through public discourse and procedural mediation that the political meaning of general principles is established. Whatever type of majority is considered sufficient to decide this then provides the legitimating ground for political action, and to disclose such majorities, Klokocka argues, is above all the task of parliamentary mediation and regular elections. Klokocka realizes, however, indeed he stresses, that the conception of majoritarian politics stakes no claim to absolute Tightness in the manner Rousseau does on behalf of the general will. Majority decisions are viewed by Klokocka as a working method, a modus operandi of combining contestation with cooperation. A majority at any given time establishes what he calls the "supreme will of the people." But it is neither sacred nor irreversible.10 What is of crucial importance here is the method or general character of mediation. Political mediation means public mediation for Klokocka; it means the visible recognition of divergences and the visible coming to grips with divergences. Political mediation, thus conceived, seeks, above all, to put an end to the opaqueness of legitimating sanctions. To be sure, the mere disclosure or transparency of the way "acts of state" are sanctioned does not establish their intrinsic validity. It does, however, reveal their genesis as Party decisions within the democratic-centralist model do not, for within this model differences are assumed to be purely temporary, inherently capable of resolution and, if not of resolution, then of termination, but always strictly within Party walls, and not publicly. Klokocka's idea of public debate, of an institutionally recognized opposition, and of political differentiation within an overarching belief system is, therefore, hardly a mere tinkering with hitherto sanctioned positions. Not since Lenin's break with parliamentary democracy have Communist tenets been so radically challenged. And if this was a radical departure from Communist political principles, it was nothing short of a reversal of existing practices, in which political decisions were made within a closely circumscribed realm and in the light of norms, goals, and principles whose authenticating source had nothing whatsoever to do with the institutions that officially validated or "legitimated" public policy and its outcome. 10

Ibid., p. 263.

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The changes projected by Klokocka's reform proposals involve therefore a truly fundamental break with hallowed theory and practice since the Bolshevik Revolution. With respect to the political traditions of Czechoslovakia, however, Klokocka's proposals imply a recovery twice over. In the first place, they signify the repatriation of the legislative and legitimating source of law within parliament as the locus of supreme political authority. In the second place, though relatedly, they signify the relocation of decision-making power from a space that is hidden and beyond public control to a space that is visible and potentially controllable, and through which democratic accountability can assume tangible meaning. And instead of norms and policies being determined anonymously, if not mysteriously, somewhere behind the scenes, they are now to be visibly created by those in whose name they have hitherto been officially proclaimed. No longer predetermined, or indeed preordained, political outcomes are now to emerge from ongoing processes of validation and challenge through parliamentary, electoral, and constitutional practices, in open debate, and under publicly observable scrutiny. Even such questions as what "socialism" is or is not and what is or is not considered compatible with it would no longer be questions that are decided but darkly by some self-appointed authority. In an important sense, moreover, Klokocka's proposals go beyond recovery, for, in their insistence on the relative independence or autonomy of the individual member of parliament, they put forward a form of representative democracy that was not known in interwar Czechoslovakia. Now, for the first time, parliamentary representatives were to be looked upon as "masters" in their own right as well as in their own sphere, actively shaping things instead of being entirely shaped by them or altogether treated as puppets. For Klokocka, representation is intimately linked with differentiation. Although differentiation is not confined to political parties, political parties are singled out as providing the most suitable form of making political choices, that is, choices between alternatives that are recognizably "positional" and not purely personal. Furthermore, parties are viewed as opinion groups rather than as interest groups, whose function is the shaping of national policy rather than the exercise of indirect influence or pressure. In Klokocka's scheme of things, therefore, just as political consensus is set apart from credal consensus, so political pluralism is sharply distinguished from interest pluralism. A

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politics of opinion evidently means for him a plurality of opinion groups with principled positions and declared electoral and parliamentary programs, and not merely lobbying access to sources of political power. This is not to say that Kloko£ka's proposals do not raise problems of their own. His emphasis on political parties as the most effective source of political differentiation, for example, is by no means easily reconcilable with his emphasis on making the individual parliamentary member an autonomous agent. Surely, if parties, as Kloko£ka insists, are to be a political force in their own right and are to compete for power as electoral contestants, they are unlikely to be able to dispense with the maintenance of internal discipline. Admittedly, internal party discipline does not demand virtually dictatorial powers for party leaders of the kind that existed under the electoral list system in prewar Czechoslovakia. Yet, whatever the electoral system, there is bound to be tension between the idea of effective party power and the idea of effective autonomy for individual party members. Ideally, the meshing of party discipline and a certain scope for individual initiative and the assumption of personal responsibility should not prove impossible. Experience, however, suggests differently. Anthony Trollope, one of the keenest observers of politics in his time, rather vividly depicts how, as a rule, individual politicians cannot help being "shaped and fashioned" and, almost inevitably, "formed into tools" for the purpose at hand, be it to build up or to pull down. Even stones of the strongest caliber, he says, whether they like it or not, are "quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles." A politician, in order to meet the demands of a party, has to rid himself of his individual independence, of his fine scruples, of his personal sensibilities. Increasingly, he has to "feel the need of subservience, not only in acting but also even in thinking." T o be of use as a politician, and of service to his party, he has to become a smooth pebble, and, in order to become a smooth, rounded pebble, he has to "harden his skin and swallow his scruples." Trollope does not deny the possibility of autonomous individual self-action in politics, the kind of action that marks off the great statesman from the ordinary politician, but he doubts that the rising statesman or politician, "as he puts on his harness," can allow himself to do more than dream of this. 11 To note difficulties such as these in the implementation of Klo11

Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (1883), chap. 20.

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kocka's reform proposals is not, however, to belittle their novelty within the context of Marxist-Leninist thinking. For within this context, political parties are seen as militant classes locked in irreconcilable strife and not as competing alternatives, designed to act as checks upon governmental power. Nor is it to detract from the importance and urgency of what was primarily intended. The most pressing need, as Klokocka made abundantly clear, was to break the monopoly of one party, so that the outcome of elections would not be decided before they even got under way. Voters, not vote seekers, were henceforth to determine who is to govern, and a multiparty system was to ensure that political power was no longer viewed as an unquestionable birthright. III.

The "general will" and a politics of opinion

Although Klokocka rejects Rousseau's doctrine of the general will, he accepts Rousseau's basic principle that claims lacking the support of general standards of justification carry no political weight. Contending opinions and interests have no political validity if their rationale rests on wholly particularist aims. Clearly, to identify political contestation with the "liberal" idea of special-interest-group rivalry is not Klokocka's way of viewing pluralism.12 If, therefore, his reform proposals have a somewhat liberal ring, the source of this lies elsewhere. Essentially it lies, I think, in his attitude toward political dissent, for dissent, in his scheme of things, is not confined to, or even prominently placed within, the sphere of particularist interests. Thus, although he is at one with Rousseau in applying general standards to the assessment of the public good, he differs from him in pluralizing, so to speak, the nature of the general will, in that he affirms what Rousseau categorically denies: that there can be a general will and, at the same time, a diversity of positions on its political meaning and application. This can be so, he says, not because political dissent is necessarily traceable to selfish designs, warped judgment, or defective vision but because people, though they genuinely view the public good from the perspective of generality, might honestly differ over its content at certain times and on certain issues. Klokocka seems wrong, however, in thinking that Rousseau was 12

In this respect Klokocka's position is not very different from Mansbridge's critique of American pluralism in Beyond Adversary Democracy.

"General will" and a politics of opinion 129 13 averse to establishing the general will procedurally. What appears to confuse Klokocka (as it has confused other readers of Rousseau), is that Rousseau superimposes on what has been called "procedural legitimacy" the sanction of a legitimacy that is independent of procedural politics. The former, as Klokocka perceptively recognizes, is of wholly contingent validity: It implicates only those who at any given time concur on what is right for the common good. Whatever understandings are thus reached are never foregone conclusions. Viewing the general will as something emerging from processes of deliberation and the counting of votes, Rousseau speaks of it precisely in terms of such contingent validity.14 Its rightness is purely the rightness of procedural legitirnacy, the kind of rightness that Klokocka calls political rightness, which he distinguishes from scientific and moral rightness. When, however, Rousseau views the general will as always right, he speaks of it as something inherently right, as the expression of a rightness that contains its own validation, without regard to opinions or votes. Its rightness is of a kind to which public opinion must defer but which it does not create.15 Disagreement now means that some (or most) are too dim, or too selfish, to see what is unquestionably right. Unity and agreement now are not a matter of contingent processes but are built-in givens, objective truths, merely waiting to be discovered. Such outcomes do implicate everyone; they negate contingency, particularity, or uncertainty. What is objectively true validly applies to everyone; it rules out legitimate dissent. Rousseau and, according to Klokocka, monistic socialism, by invoking one single objective truth 13

14

15

In both his Social Contract and his earlier discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau is in fact preoccupied a good deal with procedural legitimacy. Similarly, his constitutional proposals for Poland and Corsica, as also his Letters from the Mountain, abound with procedural details for the purpose of making political accountability work. It is true, though, that in several moods he was less than optimistic on this score. A fuller discussion of this point may be found in my Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), esp. chap. 4. Rousseau speaks of processes of deliberation and the counting of votes in Social Contract, Bk. 2, chap. 3, and Bk. 4, chap. 1. His problematic reference to the "cancelling out of pluses and minuses" may also be viewed as a procedural way of establishing political legitimacy. This is the prevalent interpretation given to Rousseau's idea of the general will. It is only fair to add that Rousseau in truth wanted both, the substantive qualities of "transcendent" legitimacy and the political qualities of "procedural" legitimacy. The general will was right because it was intrinsically possessed of rightness, and it was right because most people recognized its rightness procedurally and thereby confirmed it politically.

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and one single objective Tightness, inherently and systematically exclude what in fact is of greatest political interest: the confrontation of diverse visions of truth, Tightness, and general ends. Does, then, Kloko£ka's disagreement with Rousseau on this score typify his thinking as manifestly liberal? Furthermore, does not his stand on constitutionalism, electoral choice, the rule of law, and the supremacy of parliament clearly point in the same direction? Finally, does not Klokocka's recognition of the importance of diversity, indeed its elevation to a position of centrality, establish him as a thinker firmly embedded in traditions of the purest liberal water? Each of these questions might well prompt an affirmative answer. And yet it is precisely these convergences with liberalism that becloud important divergences, divergences that stem from radically different assumptions about the kind of diversity and the kind of competition that political pluralism, for Klokocka, implies or demands. Above all, they misleadingly suggest that liberalism and pluralism are perfectly interchangeable terms. Take the recognition of diversity. Quite apart from the fact that "diversity," for Klokocka, a self-confessed Marxist, has no conceptual association with "free enterprise," and hence with economic competition or sheer interest-group rivalry, it also does not mean for him the multiplicity of mutually noncorrigible end values, each of which commands equal worth or standing within an essentially value-neutral state. If this is orthodox liberalism, Klokocka's pluralism has scarcely anything in common with it, for his pluralism is by no means neutral about its core belief system. The "confrontation" that Klokocka has in mind is not one that has as its context the unbounded or infinite possibilities of all-out diversity but one that is circumscribed within constitutionally defined limits and within credal boundaries set by generally agreed-upon core values. A pluralist liberal might understandably wonder if political differentiation is at all conceivable within a consensus over core or ultimate values. Isaiah Berlin, for example, denies that under these conditions divergences could assume the form of political disagreement. "Where ends are agreed," he writes, "the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines like arguments between engineers or doctors."16 Yet, it is exactly what 16

Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 118.

"General will" and a politics of opinion 131 Berlin negates that Klokocka most emphatically avers, since, for him, differences within an overall system of belief are eminently capable of taking the form of political differences. Berlin's point is that one cannot properly speak of a shared overall agreement if there are disagreements over the interpretation of end values or that, conversely, if there is overall agreement on end values there can be no political disagreement but merely technical disagreement. Consensus over "ultimate ends" rules out political dissensus. It is precisely this thesis that Klokocka wants to challenge by making the distinction between credal consensus and political consensus, between broad core beliefs and their translation into political action. In failing to make this crucial distinction, a liberal thesis of this nature, Klokocka fears, might directly play into the hands of those who look upon every confrontation with the ruling party as a confrontation with the regime as such and hence see it as a contest over the socialist order itself.17 This damaging confusion, in Klokocka's view, could be avoided if the question of the regime and the question of governmental power were strictly kept apart, since it is governmental power, not the regime, that is the object of political contestation. The point of contestation, then, is not the clash of mutually noncorrigible end values but the desirability of reminding power holders that political power is not an exclusive property like a piece of real estate, let alone a monopoly to which they can stake claims of permanent ownership.18 Klokocka himself speaks of the divergences that differentiate political parties within his scheme as "ideological," but he does so within the circumscribed sense in which we earlier discussed ideological differentiation within a system of belief. Thus, though he strongly urges ideological pluralization, he refuses to question the overall or "ultimate" values of the socialist order as a whole.19 This kind of political pluralism, on the liberal thesis adduced above, is clearly suspect or, at best, highly dubious. Yet, whether or not such doubt is justified in fact, in principle it is itself not beyond doubt, for, as was suggested earlier, the alleged kinship between pluralism and liberalism, both historically and conceptually, is by no means beyond challenge. Frequently, as we found, the relation is bedeviled by too close an identification of pluralist features often found in liberal democracies with core ideas of philosophical liberalism - an identification I earlier de17 19

Klokocka, Volby, pp. 260-1. Ibid., pp. 260-1, 238-9, 252.

I8

Ibid., pp. 246, 254, 260-3.

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scribed as a metonymic fallacy. This fallacy, I suggested, has led to the conflation of the tradition of liberalism and the tradition of pluralism, which, being of quite distinct historical origins, had better be kept apart. And it looks as though Klokocka did in fact view these two traditions as inherently unconnected. Admittedly, to say this is not the same as to regard either tradition in itself as though it were all of a piece, nor is it to deny that Klokocka's ideas disclose obvious affinities with principles and practices of liberal democracies, including those of prewar Czechoslovakia. Seen from this perspective, a good deal that he has to say sounds familiar enough: the legitimacy of opposition parties, the rule of law, constitutionally anchored freedoms, or the right of minorities. These unquestionably are hallowed modalities of liberal democratic politics. What is far from familiar, we noted, is to hear it said by a Marxist, and a Marxist who was officially entrusted to advise the Communist leadership. At the same time, could not institutional features and political practices associated with liberal democracies under capitalism (in one form or another) be conceptually dissociated from the context in which they had their origin and carry meaning and validity in their own right? Klokocka certainly thought that they could, and so did a number of other Marxist critics, who, some time before him, argued that democratic institutions found in non-Communist states are not necessary corollaries of capitalism but contain independent, self-sustaining qualities, regardless of their use in "bourgeois" democracy. So did, for example, Karel Kosik, the Czech philosopher, who declared that the label "bourgeois" has, for the most part, served as a convenient device to stop debate, to shut people up, and to block from the outset unfavorable comparisons of socialist democracy with liberal democracy. "In 1948," he writes, "all that was democratic was destroyed in the name of socialism; now, in 1968, we strive to recover all that was democratic, and once again in the name of socialism."20 Similarly, in Yugoslavia, the Marxist philosopher Svetozar Stojanovic argued that it is precisely the identification of everything critical of Communist practices as "bourgeois," together with the refusal to recognize any merits in bourgeois democracy, which "seriously threatens the development of socialist democracy."21 It appears, therefore, that liberal 20

21

Karel Kosik, in Liehm, Gesprdch an der Moldau, p. 3 4 2 . In some respects this indeed looks like inventing the wheel again, as a perceptive (anonymous) reader o f this study in manuscript form appositely remarked. Stojanovic, Between Ideals and Reality, p. 101.

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democracy, if not liberalism itself, was no longer viewed as intrinsically unrelated to the idea of socialist democracy. But if "bourgeois" was found to be a deceptive label, so was the use made of the phrase "broad masses" and the notion of the "leading role" of the Communist party. Anonymous broad masses, it was argued, could not but breed anonymous governments, governments whose source of legitimacy and locus of political responsibility were totally opaque. A "mass" democracy that claimed as its legitimating source the amorphous collectivity of an undifferentiated electorate in support of an unchallengeable party was therefore no less spurious than the allegedly sham democracy of bourgeois society. Would, however, the mere proliferation of political parties and political actors stem the tide of anonymous, nonaccountable governments? Those who, like Klokocka, strove to recover politics for socialism by no means supposed that the sheer quantitative increase of political agents would suffice. What was required, they knew, was the distinctive autonomy of diverse political agents. That is why a number of reformers put so much emphasis on the invigoration of political modalities capable of giving birth to a pluralism that would indeed be a political pluralism. T h e point of pluralization was differentiation, and not the mere augmentation, of groups, especially if these were only nominally plural whereas, in reality, they were centrally controlled. It was precisely the fear of such a pseudopluralism that induced Klokocka, among others, to distrust the direct political mediation of "broad masses." Debate, to be recognizably free as well as recognizably public, and thereby recognizably political, had to have a locale that was perceived as self-directing or autonomous. Only by institutionalizing the possibilities for such distinct perimeters of political activity, it was felt, could political pluralism assume real meaning. For only then could divergent positions take organizational form and lend palpable expression to political differentiation and political contestation over the public good. IV.

Debate, dissent, and public choice

Unlike some Western Marxists, Klokocka is not inclined to put his faith in the resolution of disagreement through "ideal speech situations" of the kind associated with the German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, to whom earlier reference has been made. Perhaps this is so because the terms in which Habermas's scheme of things is envis-

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aged are too abstract to render it at all suitable for the purpose of political debate. More probably, though, it is the very end of political debate which, for Klokocka, carries an altogether different meaning, since the end is not the attainment of absolute Tightness or scientific knowledge or universal rationality. None of these constitutes for him the nature, importance, or function of political mediation. For Klokocka, mediation of agreement in politics is not a matter of discovering unchallengeable truths upon which all must agree. To suggest, therefore, that political mediation is like philosophic disputation or scientific discourse is to profoundly misconceive the character of political activity. It is precisely by suggesting such an analogy that Habermas's ideal speech situation courts the danger of reducing (or possibly elevating) politics to philosophic-scientific pursuits and, thereby, of depriving it of its own self-sustaining distinctiveness. Czechoslovak pluralists (including Klokocka), as we observed, were not at all happy with this analogy. After their experience with democratic centralism during and after the Stalinist era, Habermas's notion of public debate, with its emphasis on unanimity, objective validity, and implicit moral Tightness, could not but have seemed highly dubious had they been confronted with it. Perhaps this is all the more so because Habermas stipulates an unfalsified social consciousness as both the condition and the outcome of an ideal speech situation. Could not such a stipulation involve an infinite regress, if not a vicious circularity? If only those in possession of an unfalsified consciousness are to partake in public debate, ways must be found for establishing cognitive criteria for determining a person's eligibility. Who is to establish these criteria? Whose judgment counts? And whose mind would be unfalsified enough to appraise the continued absence of falsifications among those who have been chosen to take part in debate? Merely to raise these questions is to lay bare the dangers lying in their answers. Not surprisingly, Czechoslovak pluralists showed little inclination to evolve a political modus operandi on so problematic a foundation. Generally, they opted for less ambitious, less final, and, possibly, less noble ways of coming to terms with disagreement in politics. What they searched for and what they thought politics could realistically mediate are not perfect solutions, understandings, or agreements, that is, ways of resolving conflict permanently or to everybody's satisfaction, but rather the bringing about of institutionalized means that would make disagreement as well as

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agreement possible and legitimately acceptable. Such means appeared to them preferable to anything like the problematic conditions postulated by Habermas's ideal speech situations, even though they promised less impressive and less objectively valid results. Clearly, the risks of insisting upon an unfalsified social consciousness would have struck them as too prohibitively high to inspire much faith among a population that, under "scientific socialism," had known the illusion of unity amid the reality of disunity and distrust. Consensual unity, in short, however "rationally" founded, was not the central thrust of the pluralist critique of monistic socialism. The chief feature of pluralist "revisionism" such as Kloko£ka's was rather the recognition that socialism as a civic order was as much subject to performative appraisals as any other credal doctrine in search of political implementation; and that criteria of political implementation simply are not the same as criteria of doctrinal purity or, for that matter, of scientific rationality or philosophic truth finding. Similarly, people do not view themselves as citizens, the pluralists maintained, because they nod assent to certain doctrinal end values, concur over what is rational, or use the same grammar, share the same jokes, fancies, or prejudices. A socialist state has citizens, just as any other state has citizens, because, as a rule, they understand themselves as such by virtue of partaking in an associative culture with which they can identify and therefore claim as their own. The trouble with viewing socialist society as though it were an assembly of scholars, a factory, or a friendship club lies in its blindness to citizenship as something sui generis, containing a validity of its own, distinct from, and other than, any other loyalty. In Czechoslovakia, of all East and Central European states, many, including leading socialist reformers (or Communist revisionists) could still recall what it was like to have a consciousness of citizenship and therefore knew more clearly what it was they wished to regain. An acute awareness of the virtual demise of citizenship was undoubtedly the single most dominant feature that pervaded the thinking and rethinking in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s and notably during the Prague Spring of 1968. Yet this, in itself, hardly explains why the pluralist version of socialism was expected to achieve what the monistic version so signally failed to achieve. That the monistic version of socialism invoked images of legitimation that rather incongruously mingle notions of hierarchy, typifying factory management,

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with notions of equality, typifying friendship, can scarcely be gainsaid. But from this it does not follow that the pluralist alternative could be relied upon to generate that blend of diversity and unity needed to give scope for the expression of political choice and, at the same time, ensure that a society remained a society. Furthermore, even if it were granted that pluralism would recover conditions conducive to the emergence of civic life, would it do so "under socialism," that is, within a context of values that were assumed to be widely shared? Uncertainties of this kind are not easily dismissed. There is no builtin guarantee that pluralism in itself preserves any one overarching system of values or beliefs or that political multiplicity escapes fragmentation. In other words, the sheer pluralization of parties, interests, or viewpoints does not ensure a modus operandi that keeps diversity or conflict within desired bounds. To strike a balance between diversity and unity, to have oppositional politics and a measure of civic coexistence, does seem to call for certain procedural limits to the scope of contestation, for certain self-imposed norms of restraint, and such self-limiting norms are not something naturally inherent in pluralism, even though Czechoslovak pluralists tended to suggest this at times. It may be arguable that, without pluralism, such a balance may never be struck, but it does not follow that there is anything in the nature of pluralism as such to prevent it from being unrestrainedly antagonistic or totally divisive. Kloko£ka appears to have realized this, for he takes considerable pains to build restraints into his pluralization proposals by way of constitutional safeguards and the creation of a constitutional court. "Politics" is to be clearly distinguished from "class struggle" or militant confrontations akin to warfare. If there is to be confrontation, it must have agreed perimeters; it cannot be unbounded. According to Kloko£ka, socialist pluralism therefore demands political contestation within set boundaries, the exact determination of which he leaves to the judgment of legally appointed guardians of the constitution. Ultimately, however, the central question was not the extent of confrontation but the very existence of a political order under socialism and, with it, the possibility of "socialist" citizenship. The chief concern was that ordinary people, people other than Communist party functionaries, should see a way of participating in the shaping of public life. Under the existing system, noncommunists were altogether ex-

Debate, dissent, and public choice 137 eluded from having any say, however indirectly, in what was to be done for the common good. Whatever non-Communist parties were allowed to linger on were wholly the creations of the ruling Communist party and had no real electoral or parliamentary voice of their own. Noncommunists, in short, could "neither integrate nor differentiate."22 Monistic socialism was perceived therefore as an unsurmountable barrier to citizenship. While it lasted, Czechoslovak reformers could see no possibility of its resurrection; like Ludvik Vaculik, they could not but fear that, before long, the country would have no citizens whatsoever.23 The dissatisfaction with monistic socialism, intense though it was, nonetheless did not give vent to calls for a return to "capitalism" or for the demise of "socialism" however understood. Indeed, considering the degree of disenchantment with the command system of socialism, it is remarkable how acute a sense of limits characterized proposals for the pluralization of the system. If virtually all reformers had no use for the Communist leading-role principle, they nonetheless stopped short of projecting a total transformation of society, a universal possession of an unfalsified consciousness, or even the advent of ideal speech situations; for they feared that attempts at "reed22

23

Alexander Kliment thus formulated the problem in "Activity o f the U n n a m e d , " in Josef Skvorecky, ed., Nachrichten aus der C.S.S.R. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), p p . 92-3. Vaculik's speech is recorded in Kundera, Reden zum IV. Kongress, p. 128. Klokocka, we noted, speaks o f the depoliticization o f public life (Volby, p. 240). A l t h o u g h I was in Czechoslovakia at the time o f the Writers' Congress (1967), I only learned o f the content o f the speeches after I h a d left, since the speeches were not reported in the Czechoslovak media. Nonetheless, they were known to leading Party members, a n d Vaculik's speech in particular had a p r o f o u n d impact o n their attitude toward A n tonin Novotny, the Party's general secretary at the time, as it also significantly influe n c e d C o m m u n i s t thinking abroad, notably Roger Garaudy and his "French model" o f c o m m u n i s m . Vaculik appealed to what I called "civic pluralism" as a decidedly Czechoslovak tradition. A n u m b e r o f Western scholars o n Czechoslovak c o m m u nism have since written in a similar vein. See, for instance, Archie Brown a n d Gord o n Wightman, "Czechoslovakia: Revival a n d Retreat," in Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977), chap. 6, or David W. Paul, The Cultural Limits of Revolutionary Politics: Change and Continuity in Socialist Czechoslovakia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 131-6, 153, 175. Gordon Skilling, on the other hand, like myself, is reluctant to endorse so strong a continuity thesis; see his "Czechoslovak Political Culture: Pluralism in an International Context," in Archie Brown, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 115-33.

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ucation" might easily invite some educational dictatorship in place of pluralist democracy.24 Reform was to emerge through politics, not be imposed upon politics. Public policy was to be based on the untutored plurality of peoples' demands, and whatever consensus was to be had was to be the work of a process that recognizably drew its legitimating strength from public choice as the undisputed source of political authentication. 24

See, for example, Kloko£ka, Volby, p. 260, and Appendix, herein.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

When, in 1891, the German Social Democratic party was preparing the Erfurt Programme, some of the members urged that it ought to comprise political provisions for the transition from capitalism to socialism. Karl Kautsky, the chief party theoretician, rejected these requests as unjustified, claiming that the time for them was not ripe. What the Czechoslovak pluralist critics of the 1960s came to realize was that, when the time was ripe, socialism had very little to go on, since neither "revolutionary politics," as taught by Lenin, nor "class struggle," as portrayed by Marx, proved of much use in the fashioning of socialism as a civic order, as a space for citizenship. It was this realization that prompted the socialist rethinking that I tried to sketch and reflect upon. Although the rethinking did translate into institutional steps being taken toward opening up communism as a political system, time was too short for these changes to result in the kind of reconstruction that a number of reformers had envisaged. Even so, the extent of what was set in train attests to sources of innovative thought that one understandably could assume to have dried up under things as they were. And it was not only the sheer volume of ideas that was so startling but also the intensity with which men and women from all walks of life took them up and spoke and wrote about them. There probably have been few periods in history in which ideas engaged so many minds in so short a time. This ferment of ideas was suddenly interrupted by foreign intervention and, as it has seemed until very recently, permanently halted. It is difficult, and possibly pointless, to speculate on what might have happened over time in the absence of outside interference. That the implementation of political pluralism under some form of socialism would have raised problems of a magnitude that would have severely taxed the ingenuity of the reformers can hardly be gainsaid. Nor can it be ruled out that an effective challenge to the Communist party's 139

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Conclusion

political role might have strengthened the hands of bureaucrats and technocrats rather than ushered in a pluralist political culture, characterized by a diffusion of power and a measure of electoral contestation. Castigating attacks on the Party's meddling in affairs of state have been heard before, and they painfully recalled Stalin's use of them as a pretext for the drastic purges in the late 1930s. The possibility, therefore, that a successful challenge to the Communist party's leading role could have created a political vacuum, which might have invited not pluralism and a process of political legitimation but a new despotism buttressed by an invigorated secret police, cannot lightly be discounted. I.

Diversity and unity

There can be little doubt that the specter of a reversal to the status quo ante (or worse) haunted thoughtful reformers and inclined them toward self-restraint and moderation. Arguably, therefore, those who wanted to proceed with caution might be said to have had a good dose of realism on their side. My own reservation about this middle, or moderate, or ^wase-pluralistic position is that it would have proved untenable unless certain attempts had been made to change essential components of the system structurally, so that it would allow a gradual opening up of public policy making and a broader access to political power. What needed doing, in other words, at whatever rate it was undertaken, was to create substantive freedoms and effective autonomies, politically, culturally, and economically. Inescapably, this would have brought to the fore the problem of the leading role of the Communist party and, with it, the profoundly difficult task of separating control from ownership. In essence, it would have demanded political mechanisms capable of ensuring that whoever paid the piper did not wholly call the tune. Another urgent and no less problematic requirement — problematic for any regime that wishes to combine order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license - is the existence of conditions that favor contestation yet do not, nor are perceived to, threaten the prevailing language of justificatory discourse in support of, or in opposition to, the implementation of public ends, which, in the case of Czechoslovakia, was broadly understood as "socialist." Whereas in the nineties party political pluralism may well come closer to proposals

Diversity and unity 141 1 put forward by Vaclav Havel, Ivan Svitak, or Petr Pithart, in the sixties even Klokocka's reform ideas went a good deal beyond what other "insiders" thought practicable or desirable. But then, in the sixties there were indeed reasonable grounds for assuming that "socialism" accorded with the wishes of the majority. Certainly, during the Prague Spring, under drastically relaxed censorship, opinion polls revealed an impressive degree of popular agreement that Czechoslovakia should not abandon socialism as an overarching value system. All the same, a common justificatory language does not preclude differences of opinion over what is to be justified. Only if divergences were to be perceived as a threat to the boundaries set by the terms of justificatory discourse would pluralism risk being viewed as impunging the survival of widely shared values and as giving rise to fears that contestation might turn into civil war or "counterrevolution." Thus seen, therefore, the need for some sort of "nonantagonistic" contestation may have been real enough, and to recognize this is not necessarily tantamount to rehearsing a bad Stalinist joke. After all, Hobbes and Spinoza, to name just two non-Stalinists, said pretty much the same, and they were not joking. In seeking ways of putting contestation to work politically within a context that was neither value-neutral nor unbounded, the pluralist socialists of the late 1960s were, on the whole, more concerned with practical "how" questions than they were with theoretical "why" questions. Nonetheless, they did make certain "why" assumptions about political association, political accountability, and, above all, the nature of societal unity. Toward a clarification of these assumptions, some brief comments might be added as part of my concluding remarks. For this purpose I would like to press three conceptual distinctions into service: the distinction between substantive and accidental wholes, the distinction between consensus and cooperation, and the distinction between an ethic of faith and an ethic of responsibility. The fit may not be perfect, but it is perhaps close enough to render the juxtaposition of monistic and pluralistic socialism — which most frequently underlay demands for the opening up of communism - politically (or philosophically) more incisive. Whether it substantiates the case for "pluralist socialism" itself is, of course, another matter. In the light of the adduced juxtaposition, to think of socialist politics in monistic terms is to think of the state as a substantive whole and 1

For details, see Chapter 2, footnote 12.

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of societal unity as an analogue of the human body. The latter, though a composite, is at the same time a coherent substance. An accidental whole, by contrast, is not a body at all but an ensemble of relations, contingent on the parts interrelating in a way that could be perceived as though they formed a recognizable whole. Two characteristics could be said to typify an ensemble thus conceived. One is the characteristic of contingency. There is nothing in an ensemble predetermining it to be one thing rather than another; its unity or wholeness is a mere potentiality. The other characteristic is the quality of autonomy. The parts forming the ensemble are, unlike the parts forming a substantive whole, active wholes in themselves, in that they are self-directing agents in their own right, whose source of energy derives not from a single center of power but from their own intrinsic selves. To put it slightly differently, parts forming an accidental whole are not particles that make up a physical mass but are in themselves discrete individual entities. It would appear that the Czech reformers' vision had a good deal in common with the Thomist conception of an accidental whole. Citizenship, in this conception, is analogous to a relational complex of multiple and discrete activities, arising from conditions of diversity, in which individuals, groups, or parties stake distinct and potentially conflicting public claims. The monistic model of socialism, on the other hand, comes closest to Saint Thomas's conception of a substantive whole, whose parts are not contingently but necessarily related: They are what they are because of the whole to which they belong; there is nothing accidental about them; they are designed to act as complementary, if not as subservient, functions; "unity" is built into their very structure. An ensemble does not possess this kind of unity; it needs constant adjusting in order to form a whole because its constituent parts are not designed ab initio as complementary functions; rather, they are self-sustaining units in themselves. They do not contain unity; they merely generate unity, and they do so contingently, through processes of mediation along agreed procedural lines. Czechoslovak pluralists, notably Klokocka, saw in this coming-into-relation the essence of political mediation, for it embodies no predictable datum or given but is an ever-recurrent potentiality, an act of creation, that is as openended as it is uncertain. The sociological distinction between consensus and cooperation may further clarify the understanding of civic pluralism that the critics of

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monistic socialism had in mind. Although both consensus and cooperation presuppose some ground rules, some commonly accepted boundaries or limits, cooperation, unlike consensus, demands not the elimination of divergences but merely a modus operandi under which their continuation is rendered possible without causing the disruption of a given social order. Cooperation, thus viewed, does not imply total agreement; divergences are tolerated rather than homogenized. Whereas the monistic conception of socialism looks upon divergences as dangerous threats to the socialist order as a whole, the pluralist conception views divergences as perfectly natural, if not indeed as potentially fruitful, on grounds that have been made familiar by liberal pluralists such as Herder, Humboldt, and, most eloquently perhaps, J. S. Mill. In the monistic conception of socialism, unity requires consensual agreement, a single set of opinions concerning the content of the common good, coupled with the conviction that there is but one correct way of perceiving it. In the pluralistic conception, on the other hand, there is no single set of opinions necessarily capable of claiming exclusive Tightness or validity. Finally, a distinction on the lines that Max Weber drew between Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik may prove illuminating. On these lines, socialist monism could be viewed as essentially a Gesinnungsethik, a credal conviction, in which avowed beliefs form the ultimate and final authority and, thereby, the necessary and sufficient legitimation of action. Action based on this kind of authority is in no need of further explanation or justification. By contrast, action based on a Verantwortungsethik, in the form of political accountability, in terms of both intentions and outcomes, is legitimate only if it meets the requirements of public accounting, of giving reasons when they are demanded. To be sure, in either ethic people are sincere only if they act upon beliefs of whose truth they are convinced. Yet the conviction itself, adequate though it might be in matters of religion or in affairs of the heart, is plainly inadequate in the realm of politics, if by politics is meant the kind of system in which political actors are expected to answer for what they say, do, or propose to do and not merely for what they believe or hold to be true. Monistic socialism, however sincerely or intensely upheld as an ethic of faith, fails, on this argument, to qualify as a political order, if it rests solely on its credal force and shows itself unable or unwilling to account for what is said and done in its name.

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No doubt the assumption, often implicitly held rather than discursively argued, that a society engaged in a politics of opinion cannot but generate unity in the course of free contestation may itself, in the final analysis, rest on little more than an act of faith. And it is altogether possible that it is something in the nature of this kind of assumption that ultimately grounds the thinking of virtually every political pluralist, including the pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia. There certainly is no rational-demonstrable proof for why pluralism should be in a better or stronger position to achieve unity than monism. At the same time, it does not seem unreasonable to claim that pluralism offers a more publicly recognizable scope for the disclosure of the route to unity and of the manner in which it is achieved and preserved. Besides, as a political model for socialism, pluralism is scarcely more fanciful than its monistic counterpart which, apparently, identifies politics with technology or science and which shows little hesitation in combining the hierarchy characteristic of factory management with the equality characteristic of a community of friends, as though they made the most perfect bedfellows.

II.

Credal consensus and political dissensus

Unlike the Czechoslovak variant of socialist pluralism, the earlier English variant was not seriously confronted with the problem of meshing political contestation with the demands of societal unity. As we noted, the English pluralists of the 1920s, by removing from socialist society any recognizable locus of central power against which a challenge could be mounted, simultaneously removed the basis on which such challenge could have any political meaning. Thus, although neither variant envisaged the possibility, or desirability, of questioning the basic socialist order or its core values, the Czechoslovak pluralists found that the central locus of power could neither be entirely removed nor entirely dissociated from political government. And, therefore, whereas the English pluralists had no need to worry unduly about political conflict — having virtually excluded it from their scheme of things — their Czechoslovak "successors" could not escape coming to grips with the question of "nonantagonistic," but nonetheless hardly avoidable, dissension in politics. Yet, it is not what separates these variants of socialist pluralism but

Gredal consensus, political dissensus 145 what they have in common that apparently renders both of them suspect to liberal pluralists, who see in the adherence to a single system of values a source of unfreedom as well as uniformity. Generally, therefore, liberals incline to regard such a system as a barrier to genuine differentiation of any kind and an almost insurmountable obstacle to the expression of political differentiation. This point has been touched upon on several occasions, and, from what has been said, it is by no means obvious that the logic of this argument is unassailable. At the same time, to question the "liberal" argument is not the same as to underrate the difficulties that beset moves toward political differentiation within a context in which a single party has for decades been able to command a monopoly of power in both the economic and the political sphere. All that is contended here is that acceptance of some comprehensive system of values (or beliefs) need not in itself threaten the possibility of political diversity and political dissent. The notion of an ineluctable link between an overarching credal system and a politically closed authoritarian system might, in other words, be a somewhat dubious, and possibly mistaken, notion. And I therefore want to suggest that the link between "totalitarian" belief systems and "totalitarian" political systems is, at any rate in principle, more tenuous or less direct than is frequently maintained. In support of this line of argument, I put forward the distinction between rational sanctions and genetic sanctions. A comprehensive system of values or beliefs need not have authoritarian political implications, if the basis of commitment is that of reasoned justification; for such a rational sanction involves the content and not the source of the doctrine. And, insofar as the content is capable of explanation and justification, in terms of reasons, and is thus open to challenge in and through whatever reasons are given or demanded, it is not constitutive of a closed political order. It follows that, if a system of belief, applied to political action, lends itself to being rationally "opened up" in the manner suggested, it no longer "genetically" predetermines the process of political legitimation; its openness to reasoned contestation renders it inherently capable of recognizably democratic forms of public authentication. Of prime concern, then, is not the degree of comprehensiveness of a system of belief but its modus operandi. The transition from credal belief to political action is no simple automatic step comparable to the

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application of technical knowledge. For the practical meaning of some all-encompassing system of belief remains to be established; and it is this procedure that may be accomplished in a closed or open manner. That there is scope within a general system of belief for divergent ways of establishing this practical meaning, for politically "defining" it, has therefore been a central burden of my argument. Such definitions, I argued, establish essentially two things: (1) the concrete bearing of a general belief system, or system of values, on what is to be done; and (2) the specific performative principles derivable from it for the particular purpose at hand. To arrive at such definitions, I maintained, is not a matter of logical deduction from some philosophic system of belief, or of practical application of technical knowhow, but a question of weighing priorities, rights, commitments, consequences, and so on, involving judgments that are essentially political and not settleable by consulting experts in scientific logic, engineering, accountancy, or medicine. Put simply, this is just another way of saying that politics is not philosophy, public debate is not scientific discourse, and opinion is not knowledge. What, therefore, had traditionally been looked upon as distressingly deplorable - that political actors are not philosopher-kings, that political discourse is not the discourse of science or philosophy, and that political opinion is not epistemic truth - was now viewed as a necessary condition for the opening up of socialism to politics and for its public validation through a rationality that was distinctly political. The logic of such a distinctly political rationality came to be seen as the "new logic" of socialist politics in the 1960s, and it was this new logic that filled the air of cities and villages of a socialist, or at any rate nominally socialist, country. III.

Continuity and reversibility

One would like to think that this ferment of ideas had its inspirational antecedents in Czechoslovakia's prewar traditions, that, though modes of public thinking and public conduct may lie buried within a people's consciousness, they inevitably surface at appropriate junctures of history and thus lend continuity to a nation's political ethos. Unfortunately, as I indicated earlier, there are compelling grounds for questioning this comforting belief. Clearly, to accept the continuity thesis would mean turning a blind eye to intense discontinuities, especially

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since 1938, not to speak of the horrors of the 1950s; it would mean treating major events as nonevents, as historical irrelevancies, devoid of substance and political reality. By the same token, it is not easy to decide to what extent, if any, the two decades since the Prague Spring bear out the validity of the socalled irreversibility theory, according to which (as we saw) "liberalization" and "pluralization" are held to be not only logical corollaries of "modernization," "structural complexity," and "organizational necessity" but also irreversible trends projecting into the future, once they have been set in motion in any political system, Communist or otherwise. I have no wish to repeat what has earlier been said about the questionable reasoning underlying the internal logic of this theory. All I might concede here is that, at best, the theory may encourage hopes that the spirit which animated the Czechoslovak reform aspirations, and the sentiment which gave birth to the slogan of "socialism with a human face," would make a return to the inhumanities of the 1950s less likely. Yet, even this watered-down interpretation of the irreversibility principle cannot be sustained with confidence. Certainly, the signatories to Charter 77, as well as a good many others who found themselves dislodged from their occupations or, worse still, exposed to the indignities of prison life during the 1970s and 1980s, might harbor serious misgivings about its meaning and validity. Are there, then, any grounds upon which one could project a resumption of anything even remotely resembling the civic pluralism that many reformers rightly associated with the name of the founder of this small state in the heart of Europe? As I am writing these lines, there are certainly signs of hope, not least in the election of Vaclav Havel to his country's presidency. If the Prague Spring brought to political discourse a degree of credibility that few still deemed conceivable, thereby vindicating Thomas Masaryk's faith in truthfulness and the possibility of its civic affirmation, Havel, having kept this faith alive since the Prague Spring, authenticated it again as his first act as president by upholding truth and mutual trust as the foremost requisites of a return to political sanity. The Prague Spring, to be sure, merely pointed to the possible; it did not make it happen. Though some may say that it pointed to the impossible rather than the possible, few would deny that, if it did nothing else, the Prague Spring made widely thinkable what before had been virtually unthinkable. And, as it did so, it helped to endorse

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a known but understated fact: A social culture that systematically stunts the growth of individual and associative self-understandings, known as citizenship, is unlikely to give life to whatever qualifies a political order as a democracy. However events did unfold - or might have unfolded in the absence of foreign intervention - neither adds to nor detracts from the intrinsic merits of this endorsement. These merits, as I see them, constitute the lasting achievement of the Prague Spring and the politically crucial legacy it bequeathed to those who subsequently were to attempt to open up communism as a civic order. IV.

Yields of opening up communism

I believe these merits to lie in four related, though inherently distinct, directions. First of all, the Czechoslovak pluralists decidedly set apart government from society. They recognized, that is, the difference between those who claim to represent and those who claim to be represented and affirmed the ultimate and legitimate supremacy of the latter. Sovereignty, in other words, lies with those who elect governments and not with those who form the government in power, at any rate within that system of government in which the people have the final say on who should rule, for how long, and in what manner. And the people who thus have the final say usually understand themselves as citizens, and not as employees of a factory writ large or as buddies in some gigantic friendship club. On this civic self-understanding, therefore, these images no longer proved serviceable as justificatory means of legitimating socialism as a political democracy. Second, the function assigned to political contestation (including the institutionalization of parliamentary opposition) was viewed as a check to given power holders and not as a challenge to the overall social order. True, it was not generally made clear how far one can detach a social order, in a democracy, from what people actually want or aspire to; how, that is, certain basic understandings could point one way, and manifest expressions of the popular will could point another way. Somehow, reform proposals fell short of disclosing how one can stop a majority from demanding things that it is not supposed to demand because of some prior commitment to a certain social order. On the other hand, it should be remembered that many people at the time, including most pluralists, were genuinely convinced of a widespread desire to preserve "socialism," even though a growing number no longer held that Marxism was the only possible variety of socialism

Slogans and words 149 or that it was truer than any other. Indeed, as we noted, voices could be heard hinting that Marxism, far from putting to rest false understandings of social reality, in truth helped to preserve these, by nurturing illusions no less ill-founded or dangerous than those of presocialist periods. So, although people on the whole appear to have assumed that broad agreement would prevail on certain common purposes, they did so by no means uncritically, nor did they regard a measure of "socialist" continuity as a stumbling block to effective political contestation over what is or is not a public object worthy of civic pursuit. Third, and as a corollary of the distinction between agreed common purposes and contested public objects, it was now widely realized that the mediated and potential unity of a societal "ensemble" was something other than the substantive unity or oneness of a physical body. As a result, citizenship and partyism were no longer perceived as one and the same thing. Men and women, in their capacity as citizens, could differ without ceasing to be members of a societal whole. Moreover, as citizens they could disagree over what was to be done in translating common purposes into public objects without having to disagree over the doctrinal merits of a socialist way of life. What I earlier called performative principles, therefore, rather than deep doctrinal cleavages, came to be seen as the central concern of political contestation. Finally, the reappraisal sought to put an end to illusions, deceptions, and procedural opaqueness in the validation of political democracy. Allegedly self-validating claims of doctrinal "isms" were no longer viewed as sufficient forms of democratic legitimation; without publicly intelligible performative principles, there was no way, reformers felt, to achieve or assess democracy politically. Furthermore, there had to be a recognizable locus of political agency, to which public decisions could be traced, and a recognizable manner in which they could be procedurally contested. Otherwise, governmental accountability and, with it, the very foundation of democratically anchored sources of political legitimacy seemed to them sorely in need of direction and meaning. V.

Slogans and words

In the wake of the Czechoslovak thought experiment of the 1960s, "democracy" was seen once again as essentially a politics of public

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discourse and a politics of public accountability, based on the premise that the adult inhabitants of a state are indeed adults, with a right to know not only what is demanded of them but also why; that they have a right to be given reasons for what is done in their name and to seek ways and means of appraising these reasons in open and public debate. Even fairly moderate supporters of the "new logic" in politics paid lip service to this line of argument, to this understanding of socialist democracy. Taken together, the proposals for the recovery of civic life and political legitimacy amounted to a drastic reopening of much that hitherto had been taken for granted and considered beyond dispute. And even though socialism was viewed as a generally accepted credal principle, it was now held to be capable of interpretation in a manner that was both public and plural. To be sure, Klokocka and his fellow pluralists were not the first to recognize the plurality and potential divergence of social interests under socialism. They were, however, strikingly novel, if not provocative, in contending that pluralism under socialism could be political, that political divergence could take on the form of electoral confrontation, and that party contestation could involve ideological differentiation. In pursuing these innovative ideas, the reformers pressed for the legitimation of opposition, the redefinition of ideology, and the sharp dissociation of political consensus from credal consensus. These were the salient blueprints of the architects of socialist "reconstruction" and socialist "openness" in the 1960s. They were to guide the building or rebuilding of a socialism that would affirm politics as something of value in its own right, as different from science and philosophy as it was from communal friendship and militant class struggle. For these novel ideas to have found expression in a country that for decades had been in a state of enforced hibernation is astonishing enough. Yet, no less startling or, in its way, less significant was the metamorphosis of public discourse in which this resurgence came about. In place of the characteristically turgid Party jargon, consisting of some sixty or so phrases, dulled and debased by constant repetition, people in the media, and political debate generally, gave voice to utterances whose ring of authenticity boded well for the renewal of continuity between public language and political meaning. At the same time, the ideas on which this metamorphosis essentially drew transcend in their importance the locale of their manifestation,

Slogans and words 151 in that they raise questions that demand attention in "systems" other than those of socialist, or nominally socialist, countries. They disclose, for example, that the growing influence of technocrats, together with the massive intrusion of the state into social life, tends toward the cfcpoliticization of what I called "public objects" and, thereby, to the crippling rather than the invigorating of political democracy. Relatedly, they make clear that just as the unity of political democracy is other than the unity of a physical body, so political differentiation is not the same as social fragmentation or civil strife; that, if pluralism permits diversity and dissent, it nonetheless does not turn fellow citizens into enemies who can no longer be trusted to honor the rules of the game; and that, therefore, a political order is an "order" precisely if and when it enshrines a modus operandi, in and through which procedural norms serve to civilize, as it were, the clash among objectives, opinions, and interests and help to bring about their political "concurrence." Marxist-Leninists, it is true, had little use or taste for the niceties of procedural democracy. They were not, and are not, however, the only ones. Quite apart from extensive tracts of the "third world," systems that understand themselves as highly developed and merely in need of "system maintenance" are disposed to believe that notions such as democracy and pluralism, if not self-explanatory, are nevertheless so natural to and so deeply ingrained in public thinking as to scarcely demand being searched into all that vigorously, if at all. Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on one's stance), there are always those who are inclined to question such self-assured conservatism. And, if so, if some people do wonder whether it is nothing but wishful selfdeception, fear of change, or indeed a posture designed to mask and protect vested interests, might not such doubts go no less hand in hand with dispiriting vexation in non-Communist systems as they do in Communist systems? In other words, are Communist regimes exclusively required for rulers and ruled to be locked into marriages of scorn and distrust, in which arrogance of the former presumes compliance, if not servility, of the latter? Even if it is granted that the incidence of their occurrence in non-Communist regimes might be less frequent and the possibility of remedy less daunting, the point at issue, surely, is the same for both. Whether or not a certain degree of ambiguity is unavoidable in politics, or even potentially fruitful, political concepts that remain totally unexamined, or unchallenged, over

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time do court the danger of becoming mere incantations, mindless words, mindlessly spoken. And, when this happens, "democracy" or "pluralism" may just as easily lose all meaning as "socialism" is said to have done within the linguistic context of present-day Czechoslovakia.2 2

This claim is made in Vaclav Havel's remarkable speech "Words on Words," written in July 1989, some time before the "gentle revolution," on the occasion of receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association; see New York Review of Books, 36 (January 18, 1990): 5-8. I am indebted to Dr. Janet Menard for having drawn my attention to it.

APPENDIX

Electoral confrontation under socialism

The translation below covers substantial parts of Chapter 9 in Vladimir Klokocka's Volby v pluralitnich democraciich [Elections in pluralist democracies], published in Prague shortly after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. It enjoyed only a brief and limited circulation, having been withdrawn from the bookstores not long after publication. It presents a penetrating and detailed reappraisal of socialist statehood, socialist citizenship, and socialist democracy and attempts a highly original approach to pluralism under socialism. Its author, a political jurist, was at the time a leading member of the Commission for Electoral and Political Reform instituted by the Thirteenth Congress of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in 1966. After the collapse of the Dubcek era of reform, Dr. Klokocka accepted an appointment with the Institute for Political Science, Technical University of Munich. An extended version of Volby is to be republished in Czechoslovakia, and in 1988 Dr. Klokocka published an important article on the chances and risks of Gorbachev's perestroika in Unruhe ist die erste Biirgerpflicht, ed. I. Hanke and H. Keidel (BadenBaden: Nomos, 1988), pp. 207-23. Dr. Klokocka kindly agreed to the publication of this translation, which is my own. An earlier version appeared, with an introduction and commentary, in Kosmas, Journal of Czechoslovak and Central European Studies, in three parts, 1982—3. I.

Elections in the contemporary world

The possibility of a peaceful and parliamentary transition to socialism is to be expected in developed industrial countries of the capitalist West in which strong democratic traditions prevail together with institutional checks on political power. It is in these countries that favorable conditions exist for changing society structurally in a socialist direction, with socialist forces gaining ascendancy within and by means 153

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of parliamentary democratic institutions and procedures, that is, by becoming the majority. The notion of a parliamentary road to socialism is scarcely conceivable in the absence of these institutions and procedures; for it is they which make possible a peaceful transition to socialism. Under any other circumstances, socialist structural developments and reforms are not likely to be brought about by a government that has gained majority support in free electoral contests. Only such processes which permit open democratic confrontation provide an inducement for the creation and transformation of a national consensus, of its production and reproduction at newly emerging levels, and for active popular participation. The strength of this road to socialism consists in socialist reforms not being carried into society but rather growing out of society as an integral part of its natural development. Socialist forces work within the system and not upon the system, enabling it to undergo a gradual change from being a mechanism of bourgeois democracy to becoming a mechanism of socialist democracy. The attempt to give greater precision to the concept of a parliamentary road to socialism should not be thought of as a purely semantic exercise. Above all, it is necessary to dissociate from its meaning the widely held idea that the concept merely serves tactical purposes designed to deceive the enemy during the struggle for political power. That this idea has gained wide currency is not surprising, for it has frequently been employed in the past not as a principle of application but as a principle of exploitation: The parliamentary road was to be made use of [vyuziti] in the service of socialist goals. But there is more than a purely verbal difference between making use of in the sense of exploiting and using in the sense of employing. A conception that views the parliamentary and democratic road to socialism merely as a device for gaining political power is clearly too narrow. The question of power is undoubtedly a central question of revolutionary change; but it has value only as a starting point, as an initial instrument for structural reform. As such, it is a component of the dialectic unity of means and ends. If, however, political power assumes pride of place in the hierarchy of values, if the maintenance of power becomes an end in itself, then social development assumes a different direction: Means become ends. Socialist ends are subordinated to the needs of institutionalized and personalized power but not to the needs of socialism. A relentless mechanical process through a

Electoral confrontation under socialism 155 system of levers and transmission belts submits society to the dictates of political power. To confine therefore the "parliamentary road to socialism" to the period of gaining power is imprudent and dangerous. It is imprudent because in so doing one directs focal attention to the strategy of acquiring power and is thus apt to lose sight of the use of power, of what is to be done with it. Bismarck rightly said that you can use bayonets for all sorts of useful purposes but that you cannot sit on them. It is dangerous because by directing attention away from the use of power its abuse will go unnoticed. And unnoticed power becomes unchecked power, with all the risks which the entrenchment of uncontrolled power incurs. How, therefore, we understand the idea of a parliamentary or peaceful transition to socialism will largely depend on our understanding of electoral confrontation, of the function of elections in a democratic parliamentary system. Two opposite conceptions of the function of elections suggest themselves: elections as a merely formal expression of democracy, designed to confirm existing power holders, on the one side, and elections as an integral component of democracy, designed to identify majorities and minorities as the outcome of a competitive process, on the other. In the second conception of elections power is not assumed to be already established but rather is in need of being established, and of being established on the basis of limiting conditions and not absolutely. If we consider voting and its function within a socialist system, we cannot but opt for the second conception because elections of the first variety are not in reality elections at all. Although it is perfectly true that elections must be considered within the context of the particular conditions of individual countries — which constitute their historical-analytical aspects - there are a number of general or universal points to be made - which constitute the historical-synthetic aspects — that are of equal, if not greater, importance. We may broadly distinguish three kinds of developmental conditions to which certain general features of elections seem to correspond. These major patterns of development each comprise currents that both conflict and interact. One of the foremost developmental patterns is represented by industrially advanced capitalist countries. The economic, social, and cultural development in those countries creates in an ever-growing measure the preconditions for a socialist society by preparing the ground for socialist construction. They gather,

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so to speak, the building material for socialism, but at the same time they do not directly do the building. Now, it is characteristic of developed capitalist-industrial societies that there exists an internal tension between the causal tendencies in their economies and the needs of the masses which, together with other derived or additional problems, generate in them conflicts of interests. So long as socialist forces fail to gain a clear preponderance, development in such countries is determined - generally speaking - by conservative forces, which, although forced by circumstances to find solutions to recurrent social problems, are unable to do so because they lack the necessary social and political perspectives for viewing societal processes. The political form therefore lags behind social reality. Further complications arise from the so-called managerial revolution, in particular the growing influence of technocrats and other elites which, together with the growing intervention of the state in all spheres of social life, tends toward the depoliticization of public life (including political elections) and the weakening of political democracy. The analysis of elections in individual developed capitalist countries confirms that the function of elections in contemporary Western society is subject to changes in many directions. Especial significance attaches here to the question of whether real socialist alternatives exist or not. It seems, however, that, over and above definite changes in the function of elections, there is a continuity of one fundamental conceptual concern: Elections are the means whereby a political majority and minority are from time to time ascertained, notwithstanding certain inaccuracies. Even where the inadequacy of alternatives leads to a situation approaching a plebiscite, it reveals at least a majority in the formation of consensus, leaving aside the motives behind such a consensus and assuming the absence of electoral manipulation. However, so long as a system of modern constitutionalism preserves its importance in Western societies, elections will most likely remain — despite certain changes — its essential component and the medium by which political power is legitimated. The second major developmental type consists of capitalist countries in which communist and socialist movements have become prominent. We intentionally state both movements, since the basic question of whether the emphasis is to be primarily on socialism or on democratic forms is beginning to appear in a somewhat different light under contemporary circumstances than it did during an earlier period of the socialist movement.

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Whereas during the first half of this century there was a significant differentiation, if not opposition, between the socialist and communist movements, the second half reveals a beginning of integrative elements pointing to certain common assumptions and positions of all genuinely socialist forces. Domestic and international consequences of the deformation of political democracy in socialist countries, together with new social and political conditions that are attributable to the existence of socialist and communist movements in Western industrial society, prompt intellectual leaders within the communist movement to rework the model of future socialist society in which political democracy is evidently to become an inseparable and highly significant conceptual constituent of a socialist order. Even though the representatives of a socialist alternative in contemporary Western society are, above all, the communist parties, attempts are made with increasing intensity (although they are only just beginning to be made) to evolve a socialist alternative that would arise out of the distinctive causes operating in Western communist movements. These attempts have already made it evident that the future socialist model (within the conception of the communist movement) in developed capitalist countries is in principle the model of socialist democracy, based on the plurality and autonomy of socialist forces, on possibilities of their cooperation, and on guarantees for their confrontation as well as, in most cases, on guarantees for the political confrontation of nonsocialist forces. Notwithstanding some problematic questions, it can be said that within such a model elections assume a real meaning, not merely as a device for creating freely chosen institutions but also as a mechanism for the confrontation of political ideas. Furthermore, in establishing a majority and a minority they contribute an essential part of a system of mutual controls of and guarantees against the abuse of political power. Leaving aside the so-called third world, in many parts of which there exists at present neither subjective nor objective presuppositions for the emergence of modern political life in the form of parliamentary mass democracy, we may regard the socialist countries as the thirdmost-significant developmental type. We have in mind here the formation of electoral perspectives within states in which the communist movement has become the ruling power. Yet it is precisely in these countries, in which communist parties could be said to have had a chance of translating words into deeds and programs into reality, that the concept of socialist democracy (in-

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eluding that of meaningful elections) has not so far received the attention it demands as an ideological consideration of the greatest magnitude and as an institutional factor of universal significance. This is unfortunate, since the reality of development in communist states has a far greater impact on the broad mass of voters in developed capitalist countries toward their own communist and socialist movements than the programs, promises, and activities of these movements themselves. Until recently, the political model that served the socialist countries as an example had its roots in the specific conditions of Russia. It so happened that the country in which the socialist forces proved victorious for the first time, and did so under the most difficult circumstances, was a scarcely developed region, a country without the parliamentary-democratic institutions and traditions of the developed capitalist West; an environment, in short, which, in significant respects, resembled most closely the economic, social, and political structures of the third world. The Soviet political model, gradually emerging under the most unfavorable domestic and international circumstances, came to shape, for a long time, not only the development of the territories under its own control but also those of a number of new socialist states. What is more, it came to dominate in the end even the thinking of the communist movement in developed capitalist countries. After some promising beginnings, this Soviet political model finally assumed the form of Stalin's political command regime. An analogous model dominated until quite recently the political order of the new socialist countries and determined their conception of political elections. Only when the process of differentiation among socialist countries, with their distinctive economic, social, cultural, and political traditions, is allowed free scope can we expect to see a beginning of the emergence of diverse views of the meaning and function of elections, not only among new European and Asian socialist states but also within the Soviet Union itself. All this points to a striking and promising conclusion. Although there is no such thing as a general, complete, or uniform conception of socialist democracy and elections, we can nonetheless distinguish broadly two opposite versions of socialist democracy and socialist elections: the monistic version and the pluralistic version.

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The monistic conception of socialist democracy and elections

The Stalinist conception of socialist society and socialist democracy is based on political monism; its theoretical foundation is a mechanically conceived Marxist doctrine concerning the abolition of class antagonism and the overcoming of class conflicts in society during the building of socialism. But the Stalinist theory does not look for the fundamental criterion of socialist changes in the development of the material and spiritual forces of society. In its desire for an accelerated socialization, this impatient theory ignores the need for a natural balance of society (remember here the way Engels characterized the turning of the peasantry to socialism); the criterion of socialism is seen from perspectives that are purely organizational in form: Its primary task lies in the transformation of property relations. The second weakness of this theory is its idealized view of social development, according to which the removal of existing class conflicts implies the idyllic notion of an internally harmonious society which of necessity is uniform and which discovers its "common societal interest" - the interest of the whole society - in a manner comparable to the way in which Rousseau's "general will" discovers the common good. The Stalinist theory does not adequately realize that even a socialist society is a society of plural interests (though these are differently structured than in capitalist society), and hence it refuses to admit that even in this society certain conflicts may assume an antagonistic character, as, for example, the discrepancy between the universal needs of societal development and the particular form and level of its political institutions. The Stalinist conception of politics generalized the Russian revolutionary experience concerning the necessary breakup of the old state, its institutions, and "reasons of state" as the model for establishing a socialist society. The state as an instrument of the bourgeoisie must be replaced with a state serving as an instrument of the proletarian power. The Marxist teaching about the historical role of the proletariat does not in its Stalinist expression take into account, however, the scientific and technological revolution and its effect on the social stratification of society, as also on the inner structure of the working class, nor does it pay sufficient attention to the fact that industrial workers represented in Russia a weak minority of society. Moreover, just like other radically revolutionary movements that strive to sweep away the

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institutions of the old society, the Stalinist conception puts primary emphasis on the question of "who rules" rather than on the question of "how one rules." Guarantees for the realization of revolutionary goals are not seen in certain political arrangements, in certain safeguards of a procedural nature, as, for example, the interplay of majorities and minorities or the establishment of a system of autonomies and mutual controls. Indeed, to provide guarantees of this kind is held to be counterrevolutionary. The only secure guarantee consists, on this view, in the possession of political power by the most revolutionary ingredient of society, whose revolutionary ends consecrate all political means. This approach the Stalinist political model retains to the present day. It fails to come to grips with socialist democracy as a political form of socialist society, as its stabilizing factor, which facilitates the emergence of a political majority and minority on the basis of the confrontation of ideas. It shuns the only possible objective criteria and turns instead to subjective criteria. In so doing it proceeds from a number of interrelated premises: If power is to lie in the hands of the working class to enable it to fulfill its historical mission, and if the Communist party is its political vanguard, then it is this party which has to appropriate the leading role in society. Furthermore, since the revolutionary mission of the working class expresses the objective interest of the whole society, it follows also that the result is a simultaneous identity of interests of the political power holders and of society at large. Society assumes a kind of moral and political unity. Since no useful significance is attached to "how one governs," and since the decisive criterion of socialist democracy is "who is in power," the standard of measuring "democratic" and "antidemocratic" tendencies is simply the attitude toward the holders of political power. Political power is thus absolutized, and society shuts itself off from a natural political development. The monistic conception of socialist democracy, in the final analysis, becomes indistinguishable from the axiom of rigid monolithic unity. Its fullest expression is the centralist model of politics, espoused by J. V. Stalin in his essay "Questions on Leninism." On top of the pyramid of power is the Party, which, by means of levers and transmissions, exercises what it claims to be democratic power because it allegedly expresses the interests of the people and rests on their support. In this model there is no room for autonomies, guarantees, and controls. In theory the Stalinist conception bridges the age-old division between rulers

Electoral confrontation under socialism 161 and ruled, but in actuality it does not allow for the individuality of man in the singular; individual freedom is made contingent on the individual's "recognition of objective necessity," and the degree of its realization depends on his capacity to fit most effectively into a system of levers and transmissions. The axiom of an indivisible monolithic unity is the logical justification of political monopoly, which is held to be as unalterable as the unity itself. In the monistic conception of socialist society it is not important whether a government is in fact supported by a majority or a minority, for somehow it presupposes a unity of interests between society and the holders of power. Thus every government is axiomatically assumed to be a majority government, or at least a government in the interest of the majority. And, like any other political monopoly, it is "infallible" and intolerant. The Italian Marxist Lucio Lombardo-Radice, in his study on pluralism, contends that monolithism rests upon two basic pillars. One pillar consists in the total subordination of all social organizations (including departments and institutions of the state organs, such as justice) to the revolutionary party, which is entrusted with the supreme power of decision making and the ultimate resolution of all questions. The second pillar he calls the principle of unity or, more precisely, the principle of unanimity in the expression of progressive and revolutionary interests on one single track, on which, as a matter of necessity, truth, duty, and political, cultural, and philosophical progress have to run; any derailment is to be regarded as the manifestation of alien and hostile class elements. It appears, however, that the monolithic conception is not confined merely to the relation between the revolutionary Marxist party and society (which it sees in terms of an exceedingly high concentration of decision making and thus also of moral responsibility in the hands of the Party as a whole); for it applies also to relations within the Party. Excessive internal concentration and centralization of fundamental political decision making and insufficient internal controls of a vertical kind from the bottom up generate within the Party (within its own internal mechanisms as well as in its internal relationships to the mass of party organizations and lower functionaries) conditions very much like those in the rest of society. These tendencies, which bring about the decay of the living organism of the Party, could be observed in Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere,

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during the era of the command model of politics in two principal respects. One of them was the process of party depoliticization. Politics was divided into the complex of macropolitics, the realm of the so-called highest party organs, and the complex of micropolitics, the realm of the lower levels, that is, the working place, at which party rulings are applied and implemented. The matter goes somewhat deeper, however, since the effect of this twofold conception of politics in reality amounted to the eventual demise of politics altogether; the so-called micropolitical sphere turned into a wholly nonpolitical sphere. The actual shaping of policy, of the political line, became in theory the privilege of the highest party organs, and in practice it invariably came to be located within the domain of a certain closed group or, indeed, of a single person. Everything else consisted in the carrying out of the party line by means of executive, administrative, repressive, supervisory, and other similar measures. The concentration of policy making in the hands of a few individuals in substance divided the Party into, so to speak, a central and an executive apparatus, in conformity with the Stalinist principle according to which, "given a correct political line, the rest is decided by the party cadres." Whatever party organizations lost in having their own participation in politics suppressed, they were supposed to be able to more than compensate for by involving themselves in the microstructure of economic-social and administrative life — in industrial undertakings, offices, schools, and so on. This kind of substitution meant in effect the replacement of the state proper. The stifling of diverse provisions for the maintenance of at least some autonomy for specialist groups and their members resulted in constant and unchecked interference by the ruling group in party committees and party organizations as well as in the offices of state. Moreover, this process did not merely take place "below." The last years have shown that in the end even the highest party organ, the Central Committee, became likewise, in certain matters, an object of these manipulative endeavors. But the depoliticization of the Party was not only accompanied by the monopolization of policy making within certain hands; it was characterized also (and wholly in the spirit of the earlier-mentioned Stalinist doctrines) by a monopolization of policy making that was always the most "correct" line that could be taken, a line, to be precise, that could not be wrong by definition since it laid claim to correctness

Electoral confrontation under socialism 163 from the very outset. The determination of the political line was thus inseparably linked with a presumption of its infallibility. It was in this simple and categorical manner that the question of political responsibility was resolved. The supreme political line was always presumed to be the only correct one. To be sure, it was conceded that here it could be wrongly conceived, there it could be wrongly interpreted, or again elsewhere it could be wrongly applied. In all such cases defects were ostensibly attributable not to the determination but purely to the execution of the supreme party line. Responsibility for such defects rested, therefore, not on those who decided on policy but on those who carried it out — that is, precisely, those cadres "who decide everything." The Party thus ceased to function as a living organism in which the metabolism and circulation of life-giving elements were assured. The movement of transmission was in actuality unidirectional: from above downward. Such a political model constitutes through its operation a serious threat to and, potentially, in the end, the total negation of, innerparty democracy. This danger is particularly ominous in a system in which the Communist party is the sole center of political power in society as a whole, for in this kind of system the degree of inner-party democracy largely typifies the entire nature of socialist democracy and socialist constitutionalism. It is characteristic of monistic socialism - with its presumption of infallibility - to react negatively to every kind of confrontation; even the most minimal exchange of ideas becomes severely restricted, if it is not altogether suppressed. Dialogue, indispensable to any rational confrontation, is practically out of the question. A state of affairs such as this precludes in essence the differentiation of opinion or the formation of majorities and minorities. As a rule, it also promotes other forms of "guiding" that severely inhibit dissent and inevitably result in the emergence of autocratic methods throughout the political system: Authoritative statements, made from positions of coercive power, displace argument. Furthermore, the suppression of dialogue, together with the presumption of infallibility, leads in the direction of a totally regulated society. The fear of any form of confrontation, a fear grounded in the recognition of inner weakness, helps to corrode mutual relations in most areas of social life. This fear is the expression of a profound horror of a so-called ideological erosion [i.e., the demise of the official ideology], which stems from the (known) poverty of

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arguments that it and the deformed system suffer from; it is a horror of culture, of ideas, or of anything else that can be conveniently dismissed as "liberalism." The natural process of integration in the Party and in society was thus replaced by a process of total conformity instituted through party directives. The primary factor that facilitated this integrative process was a simplified view of society and the Party, derived from an essentially monistic conception of socialist democracy which, in turn, drew on Rousseauian sources. The unwillingness to recognize a plurality of interests in socialist society (even though differently structured there than in capitalist society) led, in the absence of functional and institutional guarantees that would ensure the natural confrontation of interests and the natural formation of a majority (capable of resolving certain issues), to the identification of power-based interests with "the interests of society at large." The hub and impulse of political life came to consist of ever-more-centralized apparatuslike structures designed to execute commands or directives in the most disciplined and speedy manner. This vision of a mechanical unity in both the Party and society at large found its prevailing expression in the form of a monologue, not a dialogue. The most common conclusion that was drawn then ran on these lines: The masses are fully mobilized if and when questions are correctly explained (or rather - as it was frequently formulated - "set up"). The content of "correctly," however, was never a subject for discussion. All deviations from the then ideally conceived political profile of the average citizen were looked upon as defects in politicaleducational activity or as laxness of supervision. The concentration of policy making in certain hands and under conditions of dusk or twilight in which the public has no way of seeing what rules, if any, operate, or what indeed is happening altogether, is not, however, the only feature characterizing the Stalinist model of politics. For while in reality the public is denied knowledge of and access to political processes, it is expected to mistake the retention of certain democratic forms for the real thing. These forms are retained because they serve a useful function: They provide a decorative facade that hides the actual formation of the supreme political will of the state. Elections are an important component of this democratic facade. They cannot very well do much else within a command system of

Electoral confrontation under socialism 165 politics than serve as a facade, since elections are in essence pluralistic. Elections therefore simply do not fit into a monistic conception of society and politics - they are totally superfluous. Instead of constituting the confrontation between political interests and the formation of a majority, elections change under the monistic system into totally pointless and grotesque manifestations of some "granitelike unity" and become indistinguishable from May Day demonstrations and similar types of political manifestations. Manifestational voting is a logical corollary of that system, for in a system based on an indivisible monolithic unity the idea of choice, the principle of selection (through elections), wholly loses its meaning. . . . The second element disqualifying elections within a monistic conception of socialist society is the fact that elections in themselves are politically neutral. They are an integral part of the procedural guarantees of political democracy; they are the means whereby a political majority is formed in a manner that is acceptable to society at large as well as to its political minority. The possibility of repeating these procedures provides society with a chance to correct its earlier electoral decision. Their value lies in their relativity: A political majority gained in elections is merely "larger than a minority," and a minority is merely "smaller than a majority." But elections can perform this [neutral] function only if they are not an instrument of political power but merely its criterion. On the other hand, the conception of voting which looks upon elections as merely another device in the system of levers and transmissions, and which thus cannot but be hostile to procedural guarantees, aims at confirming a majority, not at discerning it. The nomination of candidates, the electoral campaign, the system of dividing electoral mandates, voting itself, and the very notion of a representative and his mandate are all viewed and treated as the monolithic expression of a single political will. The centralized [party] apparatus ensures a unidirectional movement of this transmission from above downward. An election simply becomes a job, a chore, an obligatory task, for the voter and an imperative mandate for the representative, which ensures his control by the party apparatus. And this is true not merely of the "classical" Stalinist model but also of more attenuated varieties of political command systems. . . .

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III.

The pluralist conception of socialist democracy

The difference between the monistic and the pluralistic conception of society is not merely quantitative, as might appear on first sight; it consists, rather, of two qualitatively divergent ways of looking at society, aiming at two entirely distinct objectives. The chief trouble with the monistic conception of society, in its political form of a command system, lies in its distorted vision of society. It is determined to impose a monistic solution to a pluralistic problem, with the result of serious dysfunctions throughout the system, which involve not only the complete deformation of political power but also the loss of a common language and the destruction of shared social values. The search for an alternative, therefore, would have to find a new beginning in the rediscovery of a society's common language, in terms of which it could recognize itself as a distinctive collective entity and by means of which it could restructure its hierarchy of values. It is through the discovery of its inner communication that a society attains its political balance and partakes in its own political development. Lacking a framework of common understandings, politics is incapable of exercising its integrating function within a state. Political life to be normal requires certain common norms to sustain it; without these it is simply inconceivable. For society to become normal in this sense it must, above all, go through a process of intellectual regeneration, in which it becomes conscious of itself and discovers for itself, besides differentiating ideas, an area of commonly shared and commonly recognized social values. As long as it fails to do this it cannot enter a period of normal political life but at best can merely arrive at its threshold. The common values that are particularly significant for the political development of socialist society are those which simultaneously represent points of contact with the past and the future, for only thus do they enable a dynamic continuity in the development of society and a natural formation of its unity at new and higher levels. In the building of socialist democracy it is above all essential to recognize the pluralistic structure of socialist society. Only by recognizing that the abolition of antagonistic class struggles does not mean the elimination of all class and social differences does one set the stage for a gradual, but never wholly ending, process of natural social and political integration (a process which in the monolithic conception of

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society is largely replaced with social leveling and political unification). This pluralist process of integration never wholly abolishes the plurality of interests of diverse social groups within the socialist order but rather stimulates it and reproduces it; indeed, under changed circumstances, it promotes simultaneously the formation of new interests. The foundation of this plurality is not merely the division of labor in society but also diversity that springs from different ethnic structures and traditions, from attitudes evoked by state actions, and so on. In a pluralist socialist society interests also find reflection in ideology, which articulates a political attitude that serves various social forces as justifying and explanatory support for political action. Politics in such a pluralist socialist society remains politics and does not pretend to be anything else. It confronts social interests, attempts to resolve social and political conflicts, and strives to restore unity as a necessary basis for state action. The free formation of social and political interests (naturally within certain limits set by the state) and the autonomous existence and autonomous activity of organizations that articulate these interests must be regarded as characteristics that are inseparably linked to socialist pluralism. Italian Marxists have been particularly concerned with the question of autonomies within a party-political system with a view to mapping out an Italian road to socialism. As it emerges from a number of articles and documents published in recent years, the conception of autonomy in the political sphere of a future Italian socialist society rests on four fundamental elements: the existence of a plurality and mutual autonomy of political forces; the autonomous existence of interest groups; the free formation of the political will and a majority view through the confrontation of diverse opinions; and, finally, the legal safeguarding of oppositional political parties in electoral contests and political life generally. The pluralist conception of socialist society understands politics as the point of intersection between diverse interests; it clearly distinguishes between politics and scientific truth and between politics and moral Tightness. The search for solutions in politics is, therefore, not identifiable with the search for scientific truth. Political solutions are right if and when they are acceptable, whether or not they are also right in a scientific or moral sense. A pluralist socialist society is a

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society open to change and gradual development. The abolition of antagonistic social conflicts offers, it is true, a greater chance for a rational form of socialist politics; but this is not to say that it is free from threats or to imply that the return of capitalism constitutes the only danger. For even if the return of capitalism is prevented, a pluralist socialist system can operate successfully only if it is not threatened by the return of political command structures and bureaucratic police systems. To a certain extent, the shaping of a pluralist conception of socialism is also related to our understanding of the development of Western industrial societies and the manner in which we envisage a peaceful transition to socialism in those societies. The muchstressed fear of the restoration of capitalism in developed socialist countries should, in this connection, be seen for what it is. In our view it is not a real danger. In a developed socialist society, in a state of advanced industrialization, the idea of the restoration of capitalism is almost an anachronism. To raise fears in this direction may, however, seem opportune to those anxious to conceal breakdowns in diverse areas of the socialist economy and/or administrative failures of the power holders. Yet to raise such fears is to conceal the real threats to an advanced socialist society and thus to prevent its development; for this vitally depends on a realistic and undistorted view of things. It appears that, notwithstanding a number of obscurities in the understanding of the concept of socialism as such, there exist in the consciousness of society certain values that are connected with socialism, in the maintenance of which society has an evident interest. If this is so, it is desirable that these values be clearly formulated and constitutionally guaranteed. A pluralist conception of socialism cannot simply proceed from an unlimited freedom of confrontation; political liberalism has been superseded in all modern societies, capitalist and socialist alike. The principal question facing socialist pluralism, therefore, is the problem of setting certain socially acceptable boundaries for political confrontation. How this intervention is to take place is of course of utmost significance, for the manner in which this is done must itself be acceptable to society. The aim should be to treat the area of political confrontation as objectively as possible and remove any subjective privileges that entitle their holder to designate certain phenomena as "socialist" or "antisocialist." It is essential, therefore, that in the realm of political and judicial structures socialist pluralism be, as a matter of necessity, closely inter-

Electoral confrontation under socialism 169 connected with the control of political power. A socialist system does not cease being political, and, accordingly, there continue to be several good reasons for controlling political power. Indeed, the question of safeguards against the abuse of political power may, in the last analysis, constitute one of the most serious questions of socialism as a political system. In coming to grips with this question a socialist system must guard against optimistic illusions. On first sight it seems that deformations or defects of power are the result of faulty decisions, and hence safeguards against the abuse of power should be sought in the termination of previous faulty decisions and the discovery of new and better ones. But in actual fact, and if seen from the perspective of its functional role, socialist democracy is not primarily concerned with the content of political life — or any defective views about it — but with its methods, with the ways and means chosen in political processes and the manner in which fundamental political decisions are sought and found. Faulty decisions have always been made in politics, are being made, and will continue to be made. One of the essential requirements of socialist democracy should be the possibility of replacing, without delay, a faulty decision with a correct decision. The strength of a socialist democracy is revealed precisely during critical moments in the life of society when it becomes necessary to replace old solutions with new ones. Democratic procedure ensures a regime of peaceful and timely political changes when these become necessary. A system of firm rules for the guidance of the political process is precisely at those times the only possible common denominator on the basis of which the resolution of societal conflicts may be brought about when there is no other way of attaining substantive agreement. The right of a political majority to represent in cases of conflict the unity of the state is a device for preventing political disintegration or the risk of a vacuum of political power. The protection of the minority provides at the same time a method of enabling the minority to acknowledge the political power of the majority. Tolerance by the majority toward the minority is the essential condition for tolerance by the minority toward the majority. The indispensable requirements, then, of socialist democracy are the principle of free confrontation of views in the search for a rational position on contentious questions, the belief in the necessity of a natural formation of majorities and minorities and their natural func-

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tioning, and the conviction that political power and political offices are not possessions of their holders but a trust bestowed on them by society for a fixed period. Socialist pluralist democracy, conceived as a method of government, must, therefore, place considerable emphasis on political guarantees of a procedural and processual character; it must do so, since its criterion is not the mere interaction of institutions in society but the manner of their interaction, the way things are done, the political style of life. Socialist pluralism therefore of necessity needs a political climate characterized by a constitutionalism that is both legally instituted and compatible with socialism, whose crucial component is a system of mutual controls and distinct autonomies. This system is designed to make possible the emergence of the supreme will of the state as the result of a process that contains, as an essential part, the guaranteed autonomy of elections, conceived as a search for, and by no means as a manifestation of, a political majority. It is not the purpose of this study to deal exhaustively with the conception of socialist constitutionalism, but one thing must be made quite clear: It is not a conception that is to be understood in a purely legal or formal sense. Socialist constitutionalism refers to principles of a political and constitutionallegal character, designed to ensure a certain elasticity in its operation within a socialist democracy and thus enabling society to refuse the acceptance of what is merely a facade of democracy and is in actuality the bureaucratic deformation of socialism. The essential task is the creation of a political model and of a political atmosphere in which individual power holders are assigned clearly defined social functions and are given discretionary autonomy to carry them out on the basis of political accountability and a system of mutual controls. Politics in a socialist society is, like any other politics, in need of firm rules of the game; a mere catalogue of players' names is not enough. If socialist democracy is to be effective it must be felt as a vital need in the state, in society, and by the citizens; it must become an integral part of political life, determining the way things are done. The prerequisite for it is the provision of extensive civil rights and their political and legal assurance, in particular guarantees for personal freedom, for the legal security of individual citizens, their mutual equality before law, and their independent participation in the political life of

Electoral confrontation under socialism 171 society. This kind of participation should be not only tolerated by the state and by society but actively supported. One cannot simply identify the individual with society or assign him a place in society; the individual must be given a chance to discover his own place and to take it up by himself. The area lying between the citizens, on the one hand, and the holders of power functions, on the other, should be made another important sphere of guarantees in a socialist democracy. This is a very extensive area embracing the ways and means whereby civil society partakes in the formation of a country's political will. Constitutive of this area are social organizations, political parties, and other public institutions, their status in society and the state, their relationship to the citizens, and so on; but in addition it also includes the sphere of public opinion, its manner of formation, the role of the press, radio, television, and other mass media of communication. Clearly, the whole social climate in which the various institutions are to operate is of the greatest importance. The extent of available information at top levels as well as below largely determines the strength of public opinion, which forms the basis of both the confrontation and the reconciliation of positions on diverse issues. Factors determining the existence of public opinion and the political climate generally are increasingly becoming a subject of legal guarantees throughout the world and the objective of its progressive forces (legal statutes concerning radio and television, constitutional safeguards for the freedom of the press, and similar provisions). The stabilization of socialist democracy leads to the construction of a socialist rule of law [prdvniho stdtu, or Rechtsstaat]. The constitution and the law must become a firm basis of life within the state, of social organizations, and also of individuals. But under the concept of a state based on the rule of law we do not understand merely some kind of legal apparatus bereft of spirit, mechanically insistent upon the maintenance of any particular law. What we have in mind is the unfolding and dissemination of such values within socialist society as will strengthen among thinking citizens a consciousness of justice, a consciousness that is not merely legal but just. If we speak of guarantees we do not have purely economic, political, or personal guarantees in mind — they are not adequate enough to be relied upon. A system of guarantees and reciprocal controls must become pervasive in all the areas of life discussed earlier and find embodiment in the new consti-

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tution and eventually in the whole legal order. Law is not to be understood, however, purely as the instrument of the powers that be, as their authoritative directive, but as a medium for the stabilization of natural social relations under socialism and their protection against violence of every kind. In the area of constitutional law "socialist constitutionalism," then, means the transition from a revolutionary type of constitution to an evolutionary type of constitution; from a constitution conceived as an ad hoc tool of power to a constitution seen as an ongoing concern in terms of standing orders. The political development [of socialism] in industrial bourgeois democracies in the West will no doubt differ considerably from the development evident hitherto in socialist countries. Especially where the transition to socialism is to occur in a peaceful manner, one can expect an extraordinarily intensive preoccupation with the elaboration of socialist constitutionalism. For here, presumably, the transition could occur without the intervening period of a revolutionary constitution. In existing socialist countries, on the other hand, insofar as these succeed in adopting political pluralism, the conception of socialist constitutionalism will no doubt still bear some of the marks that characterize their existing regimes. . . . IV.

The formation of the supreme will of the state

The sphere of the formation of the supreme will of the state is one of the most sensitive areas of sociopolitical life. It is through this formative process that the direction of political activity not merely within the state but of the state as such is decided upon; for the confrontation of diverse political agents that characterizes this process is meant to result in a political unity capable of serving as the reason of state or basis of political statehood. What this process, therefore, involves is the authorization or legitimation of the state to act in the name of society. We have learned from historical experience that it is of profound importance for the relation between society and the power of the state to raise the question of the means that are chosen in forming the unity of the state. No doubt it is important to determine the content of the supreme policy of the state, its declared official program. But it matters far more in what manner and by what means society discovers its political solutions and proceeds to form the official line

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of state policy, in order to guard against the practice of presenting what is to be done as a societal interest when in actual fact it merely articulates narrow and highly privileged interests. In a system of socialist democracy politics must preserve its own distinctive place. The search for unity through the confrontation of political forces cannot be replaced by some scientific-rational method; a political solution must necessarily involve a compromise between scientific accuracy and practical political realizability. Until society has matured to the stage when, according to Marx, power over men will give way to the administration of things, it will be impossible to govern successfully without the consent and support of society, whether those who govern are "right" or not. Democracy is that method of managing the interests in society in which action constantly requires and seeks the consent of a majority. Not even a socialist form of democracy should therefore transform itself into a mechanism for the reeducation of society; no ideals of self-improvement are capable of justifying an "educational dictatorship." Not only, however, must the institutional and functional solution embodied in the supreme will of the state show respect for existing society; it must also express its structure of interests. The basic presupposition of a genuine [as distinct from an enforced] unity of the state is the maintenance of a sound relationship between politics and statehood, that is, between the need for the accommodation of interests in society and the need for a legitimating authority. Both needs are important; nonetheless, political legitimacy is vital for a state. In view of this, politics requires the supremacy of the state over parties and not the supremacy of parties over the state. Only when the process of integration involves the observance of certain procedures and mechanisms sanctioned by the state can one speak of the unity of the state in terms of a synthesis of societal-political and party-political interests. This point is of crucial relevance to our understanding of socialist democracy for it comprises the problem of political power itself. The question raised here demands resolution above everything else. It is this: Should political confrontation be viewed as an electoral contest "within the regime" or "over the regime"? The monolithic conception of Stalinist socialism seemingly fits confrontation into the framework of the regime by placing certain parties over and above society and the state. This kind of guarantee [for socialism] has proved dubious, however, in the course of past developments. For the logic

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that these developments have revealed points in precisely the opposite direction. The supreme guardian of the regime, by identifying itself with the regime, has turned every confrontation with the ruling group into a confrontation with the regime and hence into a contest "over the regime." A socialist democracy cannot accept, therefore, the privileged monopoly of a party, not only among other parties but also in relation to the state. Democracy is wholly incompatible with the idea of a "double state" - a de facto state run by a party (or rather its top hierarchy) with monopoly power over decision making, and a fictitious state designed as a facade of the regime - since such a conception prevents society from participating in the process of forming the supreme will and from exercising any control over political power. Consequently, political parties in a socialist democracy must, without exception, be distinct from, and subordinated to, the (public) will of the state. The anchoring of the leading role of the Communist party in a state's constitution is, therefore, the clearest indication of a wholly deformed system of socialist democracy. For it legally sanctions the permanent monopolization of political power over society. Such a constitutional proclamation actually prejudges the outcome of all subsequent elections; if elections fail to confirm the ruling party as the leading party, then they can simply be disregarded as an unconstitutional act by the voter. Thus elections are constitutional, and hence legal, only if they confirm the leading role of the ruling (Communist) party. But are elections elections if they offer no choice or change? A constitutional declaration about the leading role of whatever party negates the very purpose of elections and thus is wholly incompatible with them. Although it was designed to protect the principles of a socialist order, it revealed itself, in fact, to be quite ineffectual. Whatever risks other means of protecting a socialist order or of ensuring its continued existence may incur, it is necessary to recognize that to hide behind old "traditional" autocratic and bureaucratic "guarantees" may be of far greater peril to socialism than finding new solutions in authentic democratic safeguards. Every modern democracy takes pains that the political confrontation in its society will occur within the framework of the existing regime. In the second half of the twentieth century there is no room for liberal democracy or for any form of weak democracy. There can in principle, therefore, be no doubt about a democracy's right to protect

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itself and about its right to regulate the political life within a state. What may, however, be debatable is the question of what should be regarded as the basic state-forming factors and principles of a regime suitable for the protection of democracy. Understandably, views on this question will vary in a pluralist society. But it is in the interest of society at large, and a vital interest in any socialist democracy, that guarantees for the protection of the regime during electoral contests and any other process serving the formulation of the supreme will of the state should not solely be the result of some arbitrary decision made by a ruling political clique. The criteria of what is or is not suitable protection for a regime are so fundamentally crucial that they require the clearest possible public formulation and the utmost scrutiny by society before they are sanctioned by the state. These guarantees ought to be formulated quite openly within the written constitution in terms of definite principles that specify the basic requirements of a socialist political democracy, as, for example, the constitutional protection of socialist property, the nationalization of major industries, the subjection of political life and the activities of public organizations to certain democratic rules which would exclude fascist and extremely nondemocratic parties and tendencies of all kinds (of all kinds because contemporary socialist society knows victims not only of the war and of fascism but also victims of its own regime). Guarantees of an economic character, if sufficiently clearly formulated, could render impossible the return of socialized property to private hands, the renewal of capitalist principles, and the monopolization of economic power (including the determination of prices) and yet, at the same time, offer enough scope for an elastic and effective economic life. If maxims of political life were derived from principles of political democracy they would, above all, guarantee the free confrontation of political positions, ensure the emergence of governments based on political majorities, and safeguard the protection of minorities within the framework of democratic and constitutional procedures and socialist principles, so as to enable them to become majorities with an opportunity to advance and realize their own point of view. These maxims or rules represent stabilizing factors of a socialist democracy whose observance might be better ensured by subjecting them to the control of a constitutional court. Such a court could be broadly conceived as the supreme instrument for controlling public life, which

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would decide not merely on cases of conflicting competences between diverse institutions but also on complaints by individual citizens who felt that their constitutional rights had been infringed. Last but not least, a court of this kind may be called upon to consider charges of unconstitutionality with respect to acts committed by public organizations, including political parties. If, as a result, organizations were to be removed from public life because they conflicted with or were hostile to socialism and democracy, such exclusions would be the outcome of "due process," in conformity with firm guidelines, and in full publicity. It is within such a constitutional framework that the process of forming the supreme will of the state could take place and enable a relatively free play of all political forces in developed socialist societies. The essential point about such a conception of socialist democracy is the recognition that what is at stake is not a mere shift of monopolized political power from one privileged political party to another or to another level of the organizational hierarchy but a real qualitative change. Its aim is to create objective criteria for the protection of the regime, to deny the possibility of their subjective interpretation, and thus to provide a healthy political basis for society, a kind of unwritten but real "national front" [as distinct from the "national front" veneer of existing Communist rule], which will form a shared political ethos or morality. Maximal stabilization of certain principles underlying the regime in turn permits maximal liberation for political confrontation and the creation of a free space for competition on the basis of socialist democracy. The free play of political forces that are essentially socialist in character is absolutely indispensable for the successful formation of the supreme will of the state. It alone offers any hope for the discovery of political solutions that will be acceptable to society. The basic presupposition of such a free confrontation is the autonomy of political actors (citizens, organizations, parties, and other institutions), without which confrontation would be fictitious rather than real. If, then, we have in mind the creation of the unity of the state in terms of a process in which this unity emerges as the supreme policy of the state, we have to attach utmost importance to mutual autonomies among authorized power holders as the surest guarantee against the concentration of power in the hands of one institution or, in the end, of one person. Only thus can we ensure free confrontation on the one hand

Electoral confrontation under socialism 177 and the avoidance of an abuse of political power on the other. But this is not simply a matter of devising a better division of functions among individual institutions, such as parliament, government, or the presidency, as we were wont to believe in previous reorganizations of political life. The division of power between individual organs and institutions can bring about a system of mutual controls only if at the same time holders of power functions are viewed not as servile cogs or levers in a system of transmission but as autonomous entities, capable of making independent decisions for which they can assume responsibility and hence also be held responsible. V.

Fundamental elements of political representation

It is through political representation that - from the point of view of modern socialist democracy — social interests and their political articulators enter into the process of forming the supreme policy of the state. Parliament is normally the institutionalized expression of representation, and it could be so likewise within a socialist system. It is through parliament that particular political interests are not only represented but also integrated or at least coordinated by means of confrontation and the operation of the majority principle in the formation of a general social will, which forms the basis of the supreme will of the state. Admittedly, the presuppositions for the formation of political representation through a socialist parliamentary system differ among socialist states. Palmiro Togliatti, in his studies on Gramsci's work, arrives at the conclusion that it would be absurd to demand from a proletarian revolution the birth of a parliamentary regime, particularly if this revolution happens to occur in a country that never knew parliamentarianism. In other countries, however, in which parliaments achieved the purpose of providing a forum for the expression of the popular will, it is possible, Togliatti maintains, to solve through parliaments the problem of inducing the masses not only to express their will but also to take an active part in economic and political life. At the same time, he admits that the gaining of power by the working class always means the expansion of direct forms of democracy. The most fundamental question of a socialist parliamentary system is the concept of socialist democracy itself. Every great revolutionary

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movement - and hence also the communist movement - tends in the direction of carrying out radical and far-reaching changes in politics and, in so doing, destroys or drastically transforms the existing power structure and its underlying principles. This is particularly the case where the overthrow of power relationships is achieved as a result of violent political conflicts. By its very nature a revolutionary democracy abolishes a system of autonomies, together with the division and separation of power, and strives to strengthen the direct influence of the people through a concentration of state power. It is in this sense that we may understand Togliatti's remark that the accession to power by the working class always signifies an expansion of direct forms of democracy. The tendency toward direct democracy threatens to impair, however, political participation in areas in which democracy cannot dispense with intermediaries. Unfortunately, disenchantment with representative democracy during the old [bourgeois] regime has given rise to a host of illusions about the possibilities of direct democracy in the formation of the supreme will of the state. That the problem of democracy at the state level is inherently different from the problem of democracy at the working place or local government level has apparently escaped notice. The tendency toward an unmediated form of democracy has also received support from a dogmatic conception of classical Marxism. The model of building a socialist state power, insofar as it was worked out at all by Marx, Engels, or even Lenin, was largely a response to the rather unsatisfactory situation in democratic capitalist countries of that time. Lenin naturally looked upon diverse constitutions based upon parliamentary democracy and the division of power wholly from the perspective of the working class and its chances of realizing proletarian democracy. When, for example, he described bourgeois parliamentarianism, he linked it, from this perspective, with two effects: with the separation of the legislative power from the executive power on the one side, and with irresponsibility of the representatives on the other. Both elements seemed obstacles to him on the road to realizing the political will of the popular masses and strengthening the forces of socialism. All this helped toward the combination and concentration of power and the weakening of political representation in favor of a political command system, not merely in the party sphere but throughout the whole structure of the state.

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The experience gained in the past from the working of such a socialist system of power concentration calls for a rehabilitation of representative democracy. A socialist democracy during its period of consolidation ought to be a representative democracy in principle in order to satisfy the demands of a developed socialist society. . . . In connection with the idea of a socialist parliament it would be best to think in terms of a representative mandate that would leave the representative a certain autonomy in the exercise of his political will. There is sufficient scope for inner-parliamentary controls, in addition to the pressure of public opinion, so as to grant the parliamentary representative a measure of autonomy. The relation between the representative and the voters cannot successfully rest, in a socialist society, on a conception of representation in which the representative is merely the executor of the voters' instructions. A categorical political imperative in the hands of the voters deprives the representative of his political responsibility. By granting the representative a degree of political autonomy one assists the formation of political personalities without removing the control of the voter over the representative or his party. For the voter clearly possesses the supreme sanction over his political representative through his power of choice during elections. One of the characteristics of a representative political democracy is the risk the representative incurs by acting on his own political initiative, since this may well result in his rejection by the voters. . . . Modern mass democracy, as it is conceived in developed capitalist, but also in socialist, countries has led to a somewhat depersonalized parliamentary mandate in that the representative has become too dependent on political parties and other mass organizations. This depersonalization of power, which Western authors such as Durkheim, Hermens, and others have commented upon, is not, however, total, nor is it uniformly evident in different political systems. The more complex political life tends to become, the more anxiously do voters look for certain securities and "plain alternatives" in elections and politics generally. An expression of this tendency is the longing for political personalities who personify political alternatives. The anonymity, the complexity, and the uncontrollability of party-political activity in particular has generated this kind of response among voters. . . . Depersonalization has been exceptionally marked in socialist parliaments in which the representatives totally adapted themselves to

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whatever policy was directively imposed on them. But whereas in reality the representative lost his personality, his own face, so to speak, the electoral system made out that it presented the voter with a personalized political choice. In effect this meant that the voter selected persons, not personalities. More precisely, it meant the delivery of votes to nominated functionaries. . . . The idea that the highest representative assembly of a socialist state (as distinct from local representative bodies) can be composed of amateurs, that is, of people who are supposedly able to do full justice to political representation despite having other occupations, has also become untenable for the future. This notion stems from the belief that by retaining his ordinary occupation and place of work the representative strengthens his popular ties. The growing complexity and the ever-more-exacting nature of parliamentary work and of politics generally, in a society in which the state actively intervenes in all areas of economic, social, cultural, and political life, call for professional political representatives, that is, for parliamentarians who devote themselves entirely to this function. But if the existence of professional politicians is hardly avoidable in this modern world, this need by no means weaken their links with the people. At any rate, whatever negative effects it might produce is better brought out into the open with a full understanding of what is involved. Surely this is preferable to a situation in which the existence of professional representatives is officially denied while in actual fact the so-called working representatives are invariably full-time party functionaries, that is, professional members of the political apparatus. . . . After the experience with the monolithic conception of socialist society, in which the imperatively direct power of the voter merely served as a disguise for the real imperative power of the ruling apparatus, it is surely appropriate to introduce again a representative parliamentary system that would act both as the highest legislative body and as the supreme authority of political control over the executive power of the government. . . . VI.

The functions of elections

Among the diverse means that can be employed to resolve political conflicts in society, elections assume a very special place. For it is necessary to realize that, owing to the complexity of modern society, it is

Electoral confrontation under socialism 181 impossible to convert the wide range of existing interests into one common political interest. If the holders of diverse political interests cannot be convinced of any one overarching common interest, it becomes necessary to settle the confrontation of interests by other generally accepted means, such as political elections. However, for elections to become an integral part of political democracy and a vital function of socialist society, the primacy of politics must be generally acknowledged. Hence the most fundamental question to be raised in this connection is the purpose of elections. Are they intended to constitute an actual component of socialist democracy, or are they intended to be largely illusory, a mere pretense of political democracy? In the former case elections partake in the formation of political power; in the latter case they merely serve to manifest it. Elections as a conceptual component of socialist democracy are necessarily political elections, since they articulate the confrontation of interests. Politics starts wherever and whenever confrontation starts. . . . In the command model of politics elections change into plebiscites. Although plebiscites share with elections the idea of voting, they radically differ from them in offering no real choice. The voter merely decides whether to say "yes" or "no," as distinct from deciding with whom he agrees on what. In a plebiscite the choice has been made before the voter comes in; he only decides whether he agrees with it he votes, but he does not elect. This is not to deny that plebiscites may under certain conditions assist in determining the direction of major political currents in a country, especially where they are the product of a natural development of its political structure and public opinion. But a socialist democracy must categorically reject the replacement of elections with plebiscites. For what is involved in such a replacement is the substitution of monopoly for competition; the process of natural integration is replaced with directives from a privileged power center, which monopolizes the nomination of candidates and the choice of electoral alternatives. Not surprisingly, therefore, monopolistically organized plebiscites characterize all modern autocracies. . . . One conclusion is incontestable if we consider the whole state as the political forum: It is both intrinsically untenable and a complete denial of every principle of socialist democracy that the subject of an electoral confrontation is a single political party, endowed with a mo-

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nopoly of leadership, surrounded by satellite pseudoparties who in theory form the national front and in practice glorify the supremacy of the mother party. . . . It is necessary to realize that the leadership role of any party does not imply its monopoly of political leadership in society. Two different questions must, accordingly, be clearly distinguished: the question of guarantees for the maintenance of a socialist order (as a constitutive element of socialist democracy), and the question of the monopoly status of a single party in respect of political leadership. A socialist system cannot be effectively guaranteed by claiming for a single political party a monopoly of leadership, for political leadership has to be sought and won, and not once and for all bur recurrently. Without recognition of this fundamental principle, reforms will get no farther, either in Czechoslovakia or in any of the other socialist countries. In its absence, these countries will fail to attain the intellectual peak of Western communist parties and will remain unable to work out a model of socialism that could attract industrially developed societies. Clearly, the abolition of the one-party monopoly is of utmost importance and the key to electoral reforms. Whatever new institutions might be created in the wake of reform proposals would soon be discredited if this was not done. A monopolized right to leadership does not require electoral decisions; it anticipates them. . . . In any consideration of elections and electoral campaigns, the nature of the electoral confrontation itself needs to be borne in mind. We can hardly expect an advanced socialist society to afford room for exactly the same type of political opposition as a capitalist system. A constitutionally anchored socialist regime simply cannot tolerate the existence of an extreme antisocialist opposition. It has the merit, however, of justifying this exclusion publicly and by giving reasons. On the other hand, there is a pressing need for setting "opposition" free from its common association with "antistate" activity. Once the parties now forming the national-front coalitions become equal partners, it is unlikely that they will always share the same views. There will be situations from time to time in which a majority view will be opposed by a minority view. Whether we call such occurrences instances of opponency or opposition in no way alters the fact that, provided we adhere to sound political principles, those parties within the national front that express in their political programs the will of the political majority should in a given situation form the government,

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whereas those parties that express the views of the minority should form the opposition. Tolerance toward opposition parties derives from the realization that the elimination of opposition and the enforced conformity of a society creates a merely illusory form of unity, a decorative screen that can hide conflicts only until they explode from an excess of political pressure. Paradoxically, perhaps, an opposition is in a certain sense an indispensable factor in the state-forming process in that it at once promotes the integration of society and acts as a check on political power by controlling the ruling majority. T h e critical mirror that an opposition provides benefits in principle the ruling majority itself. It helps to create a space for political action capable of breaking the power of party apparatuses of the type that generate the Stalinist kind of unity and of promoting the replacement of the "political class" within a command system of politics with a system of genuine party government. . . . However, an electoral system will exercise a beneficial influence upon integration only if political life as a whole acquires a measure of stability; electoral reforms, by themselves, cannot achieve this. T h e process of political differentiation must take its time to mature to a stage when it can begin to act as an effective agent in the integration and consolidation of a country's political structure. . . . For it is perfectly true that after a period of total unification democracy means first and foremost differentiation. . . . But elections are never entirely without risks. Electoral risks are a prerequisite for genuine elections since they impose on political contestants the need to take heed of the voter and his wishes. Without risks, elections turn into manipulation and the mere pretense of voting. T h e proposals that have been advanced here go some way toward meeting existing conditions in various socialist states. Their chief aim is to reduce the dangers of the abuse of political power to a minimum. Given a suitable development of politics in the direction indicated, these dangers might conceivably be excluded altogether. Much depends, however, on success in creating greater political selfconfidence and, through it, renewal of moral and political values.

Index

Action Programme. See Czechoslovak Communist Party Arendt, Hannah, 66n Aron, Raymond, 46 Austin, John, 49 Austria, 85 Austro-Marxists, 80 Autonomies, 48-9, 133, 140 segmental a., 9, 50-3, 63-4, 160, 162, 170, 178-9 Barth, Hans, 67n Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 130-1 Bolshevik Revolution, xi, 11, 126 Braybrooke, David, 98 nl4 Capitalism, x-xi, 132, 137, 168 Charter 77, 147 Citizenship, 1, 2, 23-5, 26, 84-6, 94, 100-1, 118, 123, 135-6, 142, 148 and party ism, 149 Civic choice, 14, 20, 24, 119, 122, 126, 138, 150 Civil rights, 10, 12, 54, 89, 98, 170-1 Cole, George Douglas Howard, 7, 47-9, 52-3, 56, 59, 64 Common purposes and public objects, 20, 95-6, 107, 111, 114, 149 Communism leading role principle, 54-5, 133, 137, 140, 160-1, 174, 181-2 opening up of, x-xi, 122, 139-40, 141, 148-9 Communist party mode of operation, 161-5. See also socialism Communist regime, x-xi, 2, 50, 101, 151

185

and governmental monopoly, 46, 116-17, 128, 131, 145-6, 161-4, 173-4, 180, 181-2 and sham democracy, 164-5, 170 Community, 89, 93-4, 101 and citizenship, 94-7, 98-100 and competition, 89-91 and polity, 97, 99-100 Connolly, William, 8In, 93, 104 n3 Consensus. See also political dissensus and credal c. and cooperation, 141, 142-3 Constitutionalism, 53-5, 83, 126, 132, 163, 171-2, 175-6 Czechoslovak Communist Party, 29-30, 33-4 Action Programme, 38-9, 40 and contestation, 54-6 its leading role, 34-8. See also communism Party Statutes of 1968, 38-9 Czechoslovak Writers' Congress, 28 Czechoslovakia, ix, x, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 43-4, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 56, 60, 66, 73, 81-2, 92, 95, 101, 108, 115, 118, 121, 135, 140, 144, 152, 161, 182 democratic traditions of, 21-2, 127, 132, 146 Dahl, Robert, 48 Democracy, 35-6, 39, 86, 148-9, 151-2 adversary d., 4, 128 bourgeois d., 27, 132, 178 civic d., 20, 114, 117 direct d., 55, 121, 177-8 liberal d., 61-2, 101, 112, 132-3 political d., 13, 83-5, 149-50, 165, 175

186

Index

Democracy (cont.) representative d., 41, 55-7, 121, 17880 socialist d. See socialism Democratic centralism, 38, 56, 57, 125, 134 Diderot, Denis, 67 Diversity and unity, 3-5, 16-17, 55, 59, 100-1, 123, 130-1, 136, 140-4 Dubcek, Alexander, 22, 30 nl7, 53n, 153 Duguit, Leon, 49 Durkheim, Emile, 49, 179 Dutschke, Rudi, 40 East Germany, 82 Ehrlich, Stanislaw, 83n Elections, 127-8, 153, 155-6, 158. See also socialism and e. and confrontation, 182 and plebiscites, 122, 156, 181 and risks, 122, 183 Engels, Friedrich, 66n, 74, 94, 124, 178 Enlightenment, 23-4 Ethic of faith and responsibility, 141, 143 Eurocommunism, 28 False consciousness, 74-5, 83 Figgis, John N., 49

Hitler, Adolf, 25, 34, 116 Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 141 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Baron de, 67 Hollis, Martin, 108 Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm von, 143 Hume, David, 16-17, 18, 67-70, 80 Hungarian revolt, 28, 31 Husak, Gustav, 24 Ideal speech situation, 2, 96, 133-5, 137 Ideological divergence, 8, 17-19, 60, 66, 72-3, 83-4 Ideology, 67-71,79, 167 and belief system, 60, 66, 69-71, 72, 78 and deception, 70, 74, 79, 83 and joint commitments, 79-80 limits of, 80-1,85 Marxian theory of, 73-5 nonpejorative interpretation of, 66-8, 76-81 and philosophical discourse, 67-72 and pluralism. See pluralism as openness and politics, 76-81 and rationality. See rationality redefining i., 76, 81-4 word and concept, 67-72 Irreversibility theory, 43-4, 147 Jancar, Barbara, 30 nl6, 42

Geertz, Clifford, 67n General standards, 128 and common ends, 96-7 Gierke, Otto von, 49 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 153 Gottwald, Klement, 34 Gramsci, Antonio, 177 Guild socialism, 1, 20, 47, 48-53 Habermas, Jurgen, 108-9, 133-5 Havel, Vaclav, 27 nl2, 39, 53n, 141, 147, 152n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 43 n48, 61 nl8, 104, 107, 116 Hegemonic party system, 7, 32, 33-4, 35 n22, 36 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 67 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 67, 143

Kant, Immanuel, 72 n8, 91, 108 Kautsky, Karl, 139 Keohane, Nannerl, 78 nil Khrushchev, Nikita, 28 Kliment, Alexander, 27 nl2, 36 n25, 56 nil Klokocka, Vladimir, ix, xi, 2-3, 17-18, 27 nl2, 53n, 73, 122-7, 128-33, 134, 135, 136, 153 Kohout, Pavel, 38-9, 53n Kolakowski, Leszek, 66n Kosik, Karel, 53n, 132 LakatoS, Michal, 27 nl2, 37 n28 Lane, David, 116n Laski, Harold Joseph, 7, 47, 48, 49-50, 51, 59, 64

Index Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 18, 124, 125, 139, 178 LombardoRadice, Lucio, 161 Lukacz, Georg, 61 nl8 Machovec, Milan, 27 Macpherson, Crawford Brough, 11 On Madison, James, 16 Maitland, Frederic William, 49 Mansbridge, Jane J., 4 n5, 98 nl4, 128n Marx, Karl, xi, 5, 21-2, 23, 24, 26, 45, 50, 56, 59-60, 61 nl8, 63, 66, 735, 94-5, 96, 99, 104, 116, 118, 178 and "alienation," 1, 11 and his political understanding of socialism, 123-4, 139, 173 and "praxis," 106-7 Marxism, 45, 78, 101, 123, 148-9, 15960 and democracy, 177—8 Marxism-Leninism, x, 9, 48, 128, 151, 161-4 Marxists, xi, 57, 130, 132, 133, 161 Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue, ix, 22-3, 27, 147 Masarykism, 21, 23, 34 Michels, Robert, 79, 81 n Mill, John Stuart, 18, 143 Mlynaf, Zdendk, 28n, 35 n24, 36 n26, 37 n27, 42, 44 n49, 53n, 60n Moser, Justus, 62 Multipartyism, 58, 123, 140-1 "National front," 34, 38 Norms, 20, 112, 113-14 political v. extrapolitical n., 95-6, 105, 114-15, 117-18 self-limiting political n., 120-1, 136, 151 shared political n., 166, 169, 170-2, 174-6 Novotny, Antonin, 22, 29, 30, 31, 137 n23 Oakeshott, Michael, 95n Opposition, 29, 31-2, 33-4, 35, 38, 41, 42 and civic coexistence, 136 "factional" v. "integral" o., 34-5 and political o., 31-2, 42-3, 44, 122, 132, 148, 182-3

187 Paris Commune, 6, 123 Parliamentarianism, 53, 55-7, 83, 1212, 126-7, 130, 177-80 Performative principles, 8, 18—19, 66, 69-73, 78, 135, 145-6, 149 Pithart, Petr, 28n, 141 Pluralism, 1, 3-9, 60-1, 139-41, 144, 151, 52 American p., 4, 7, 18n civic p., 1, 2-3, 4-5, 136, 140-1, 142-3, 147 Czechoslovak p., 4-8, 12-13, 19-20, 47, 70, 72, 75, 77, 81-2, 86, 93, 100, 105, 109, 113, 134, 136 English p., 1, 7, 82, 123, 144-5. See also guild socialism and fragmentation, 3, 14, 136, 151 functional and causal requirements of p., 82-3 and industrial complexity, 6-7, 14 interest group p., 4, 7, 9, 13, 61, 1267, 128 and law, 49-50 and liberalism, 8, 15-17, 48, 61-4, 101, 130-3, 144-5 as openness, 13-15, 20, 42, 61, 81, 113, 117, 126, 133, 143, 144, 1456, 149 philosophical p., 8, 15-17, 19 Polish p., 6-7, 20, 100 and politics, 2-6, 9, 14-15, 19-20, 48-9, 51-2, 61, 63-4, 82-4, 126-7, 133, 150, 167-70, 176 pseudo-p., 133, 140 and socialism. See socialism varieties of p., 3—9 vertical and horizontal p., 8-9, 51 Yugoslav p., 5-6, 11-13, 20, 42, 82, 100 Poland, 30, 44, 100 Polish revolt, 28 Political accountability, 121, 126, 143, 149, 176-7 Political concurrence, 113-14, 151 Political contestation, 5, 15, 17-19, 27, 41, 120-1, 148-9, 168-70, 172-4, 180-1. See also under socialism Political "conversion," xii, 19, 64-5, 6971,81,95-6, 114, 144-6 Political differentiation, 40-2, 64, 125, 126-7, 130-1, 136, 145, 150, 183

188

Index

Political dissensus and credal consensus, xii, 5, 19-20, 65, 72-3, 84-5, 112-13, 115, 1267, 130-1, 144-6, 150 Political legitimation, 20, 87-8, 112-13, 117-18, 124-5, 126, 138, 145, 14950, 173. See also p. validation and socialism, p. 1. of approaches to p. 1., 86-8, 108 and democracy, 96, 149-50 images of p. L, 84, 86, 89-91, 116, 118, 124, 135-6 procedural v. substantive p. 1., 20, 27-8, 86-8, 104-5, 121, 129-30, 168-70 Political mediation, 95, 124-5 and philosophical disputation, 68—71, 113 nl2, 134-5, 146 Political participation, 14, 25-6, 52, 170-1, 179-80 Political principles, 69-71, 72-3, 95-6, 124-5 Political rationality, 20, 68, 70-2, 75, 76, 83, 85, 105. See also rationality and state and rationality Political representatoin, 52-3, 56-7, 59-60, 177-80. See also representative democracy depersonalization of p.r., 127—8, 179— 80 Political Tightness, 71, 120-1, 124-5, 129-30, 167-8, 173 Political validation, 95-7, 145-6 Politics and contingency, 122, 129-30, 142 deconsecration of p., 59-60, 110, 125, 162-5, 167 demise of p., 1-2, 10,99-100, 103-4, 161-2 deprofessionalization of p., 11, 56-7, 179-80 as epiphenomenon, 82-3, 121-2 and friendship, 97-100, 124 majoritarian p., 72, 125, 159-61, 163, 165, 169-70, 173-5 of opinion, 20, 76, 79, 102, 118, 1289, 143 and socialism. See socialism Prague Spring, ix, xii, 1, 7, 28, 44, 135, 141, 147-8 parenthood of P.S., 28-9 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 7, 51, 62, 123

Rational and genetic sanctions, 69-70, 78, 84, 85, 145 Rationality, 68, 75-6, 78-9, 105-8, 109-13, 118, 134, 135, 173 and democratic politics, 112-14 and ideology, 70-6, 78, 79, 85 Revisionism, x, 31, 34, 94, 135 Ricoeur, Paul, 81, 100 n 17, 104 nl Rorty, Richard, 8In Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10, 26, 49, 67 on debate, 109 on fraudulent contracts, 66n, 74 on "general will," 59, 72, 87-8, 101, 128-30 on universality, 96—7, 116 Russia, 85, 159 Sartori, Giovani, 44-5, 61 nl7, 74n Schaff, Adam, 45 Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 62 Self-management, 11-12, 15, 50-2 Selucky, Radoslav, 37 n29, 44 n49, 53n, 62n Shaw, George Bernard, 97 Skilling, H. Gordon, x, 29 nl4, 31 nl8, 35 n23, 42 Smith, Adam, 90-1 Socialism, x-xi, 1-2, 9-10, 89-91, 126, 137-8 and anarchism, 3-4, 50 and citizenship, 119, 135-6 as civic order, 23-4, 64-5, 86, 100, 118, 122-6, 147-8 command system of s., 4, 6, 11, 12, 14, 32, 55, 112, 119-20, 137-8, 161-4, 166, 168, 178, 180-1, 183 and competition, 89-91, 97, 98-9, 181-2 and constitutionalism, 38, 41, 53-5, 126, 136, 163, 168, 170-2 content of s., 6, 9-12, 89-90, 166-72 contestation under s., 40-3, 51, 61, 63-5, 100-1, 122, 136-7, 140-1, 150-1, 167-70, 175 and democracy, xi, 22-5, 41, 55-6, 83-5, 121, 149-50, 153-6, 159-61, 163, 166-7, 170-5, 178-83 and depoliticization, 2, 3, 5-6, 10-12, 50-1, 100, 120, 151, 156, 161-4 and educational dictatorship, 137-8, 173

Index and elections, 40-1, 51-3, 57-8, 83, 119-20, 122, 126-7, 150, 153, 1557, 158, 164-5, 173-4, 179-83 with human face, 12, 21, 22-4, 42, 147 markets., 12-13,42, 90-1 monistic s., 4, 6, 15, 31-2, 54, 82, 8 3 4, 88, 93, 112, 119-20, 121, 12930, 135, 137, 141-3, 159-61, 1635, 180 parliamentary s., 27, 40, 55-7, 77, 121-2, 177-80 and pluralism, 7, 15, 47-8, 61, 64, 140-2, 166-70 pluralist s., 4, 5-8, 19-20, 32-3, 5 3 4, 59, 64-5, 136, 141, 143-4, 1501, 167 political legitimation of s. 20, 40— 1, 58, 84-5, 95-6, 112-13, 116-17, 119, 124-5, 133, 173-4 and politics, xi, 2, 6-7, 40, 42, 51-3, 55_6, 64-5, 93-7, 99-101, 117, 118, 120-5, 145-6, 150, 159-60, 163-4, 166-7 and rationality, 106-9, 110, 117. See also political rationality "scientific" s., 114-15, 135 tradition of s., 1, 47-8 and societal unity, 5, 100-1, 134-5, 141-3, 159-62, 164-5, 166, 183 Socialist democracy, 22, 132-3, 159-60, 163, 166-7, 169-72, 173-6, 177-8, 181-2 Socialist legality, 10, 49-50, 88-9, 1712, 176 Society bourgeois s., 90-1, 93-5, 132-3 and friendship, 90-3, 98-100, 102, 110, 124 and state, 3-5, 6, 10-12, 51-2, 53, 90-1,97-8, 135-6 Spinoza, Baruch, 141 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, 28, 140, 160 Stalinism, 134, 141, 159-60, 162-4, 173-4, 183

189 State, 110-11, 181-2 capitalists., 110, 116, 132 "double" s., 173-4 formation of supreme will of s., 164, 172-4, 176-7, 178, 183 idea of s., 94-5, 111, 171-2 neutrality of s., 15, 115-17 and rationality, 104-6, 107-8, 110I1. See also political rationality socialist s., 10-12, 27-8, 100, 103-5, 107-8, 112-13, 115-17, 135 and society, 159-61, 171-2, 180-1. See also society and s. universality of s., I l l , 116—17 withering away of s., 2, 5-6, 99-100, 121-2 Stojanovic, Svetozar, 132 Svitak, Ivan, 27 nl2, 39, 53n, 60n, 141 Thomas Aquinas, St., 142 Tito, Josip Broz, 28 Tocqueville, Alexis, Comte de, 17-18, 68-71,73,76,77, 113, 115 Togliatti, Palmiro, 177-8 Trollope, Anthony, 127 Unfalsified consciousness, 2, 99, 109, III, 134-5, 137 Vaculik, Ludvik, 26-7, 53n, 137 Vernon, Richard A., ix, 18n Walzer, Michael, 104 nl Weber, Max, 72, 143 White, Hayden, 101 n22 Wholes accidental v. substantive, 141—2, 149, 151 Wiatr, Jerzy, 8n, 35 n22, 83n Williams, Raymond, 97 Winch, Peter, 92 Winters, Stanley B., x Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79 Wolin, Sheldon, 108 n8 Yugoslavia, 11, 30, 44, 82, 132