Pluralism’s political conditions: Social realism and the revolutionary tradition in Pierre Leroux, P.-J. Proudhon and Alfred Fouillée

Abstract

British and German pluralists have, throughout the last hundred and fifty years, posited a series of closely connected claims concerning the nature of the political order. In the first place, they have rejected the central role that political philosophers have traditionally attributed to the sovereign state. Instead, pluralists have emphasized the political significance of groups that are independent of and even prior to the state - associations, guilds, churches, corporations, trusts, and Genossenschaften (the fellowships analysed by the German pluralist Otto Gierke). The pluralist understanding of political institutions rests, moreover, on a well-defined social ontology. If non-state associations can assume political roles, it is because they are, in a meaningful sense, ‘real’: they possess a ‘group personality’ existing over and above the personalities of their constituent members. But it is not only in their multiplicity that associations are real: the totality of associations as such - i.e. society itself - must also be grasped as a sui generis entity, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Gierke contended, for instance, that the dense patchwork of corporate bodies that made up medieval society was understood as partaking in a ‘divinely instituted Harmony’ that pervaded ‘the Universal Whole’ as well as ‘every part thereof’.1 It is, in short, the very reality of non-state associations, pluralists have argued, that makes the state’s claim to be preeminently sovereign objectionable and problematic.