The first edition of this book came at the end of an epoch of radicalism. The audience to which it was addressed had already lost interest in revolutionary change. Classical socialist assumptions were largely discredited and the spectacular collapse of the eastern European regimes was not far off. Libertarian, Thatcherite and managerial prescriptions for dealing with social, political and economic problems were in the ascendent. My preoccupation with participatory democracy seemed a hangover from the sixties and seventies and my attempts to address Marxist concerns were further evidence of the irrelevance of what I had to say.

A generation later those changes seem to have run their course and many of the problems that concerned me remain unsolved. In particular, much thinking on the left seems bogged down in nostalgic recall of the great days of the welfare state. I am not enamoured of either the state or bureaucracy. So I see the welfare state as at best an interim form of provision of public goods until we can develop a more flexible and genuinely participatory alternative. In note 8 of the last chapter I suggested that this book “can be read as an attempt at a radical rethinking of socialism in reply to Hayek’s rethinking of liberalism”. In particular I wanted a way of providing public goods that would have the flexibility and responsiveness of the market. What it retains from the original preoccupations of socialist thinking are concerns about participatory democracy and about the importance of public goods. I believe it has a lot to offer those who are dismayed by the way neo-liberalism has sacrificed participation to efficiency and public to private goods. At the same time I have to plead for a certain tolerance of the books faults.

The summary and rather dogmatic form in which the argument is presented was intended to provoke a lively debate by providing obvious targets for objections. My hope was that such objections would enable me to refine and clarify my positions in response to them. It had the opposite result, being dismissed as irrelevant, hubristic speculation. It offered no program for action and no concrete suggestions about how any specific contemporary problems might be tackled. Nothing for the activist and very little for the serious critic of contemporary politics.

As the product of a philosopher trespassing into political theory the book failed to articulate its theses adequately as a contribution to either discipline. In part this reflected my scepticism about most of what passed for theory in both disciplines. In philosophy I came to agree with Wittgenstein that philosophy is a matter of “assembling reminders for a purpose”, mainly to free ourselves from the tyranny of entrenched forms of discourse. In political theory I was influenced by the historical readings of political theory by ivQuentin Skinner and others. I saw myself as offering suggestions for possible procedures and practices rather than a theory.

Having given some thought to the question of rewriting the book, I have decided against doing so. I have been retired from academic life for many years and no longer have a close acquaintance with much of what has been written since about 1990. I still like the introduction, but the first two chapters on the state and bureaucracy now seem too schematic. Their general thrust seems to me still apposite, but to be adequate to their role in the argument they would need to be filled out with a lot of contemporary material. They reflect preoccupations that relate to the Cold War and to political and economic situations and practices that have changed very substantially. In some ways, I believe subsequent developments have vindicated my contentions, but to recast these chapters in the light of current developments would be to put too much emphasis on dealing with present problems. My perspective, which I hope the reader will indulge for the sake of argument, is a long-term one.

The third chapter is the core of the book. It attempts to show that it is conceivable that a polity organised by negotiation between specialised authorities would work much better than on based on centralised authority. It is inevitably speculative. On the other hand, it does have the advantage of not resting on predictions about the future. My concern throughout is with procedures, the conditions in which they can work and the kinds of results they tend to produce if they work effectively. Inevitably, since the procedures I advocate have not been tried, there is no empirical evidence to back up the claims made for them. What I am urging is that this new social technology is worth trying out.

Chapter four introduces some neglected considerations, but as an argument it is the weakest section of the book and its suggestions about what needs to be done are particularly sketchy, speculative and inadequate.

Why read it?

In the light of these admissions what inducement can I offer to anybody to read this text a generation after it was written?

As far as I know it still offers an approach to the problems of political authority and political organisation that is unique in several respects. However sketchily, it offers a practical solution to the problems of authority and decision-making that incorporates the best of each of the major twentieth century solutions while avoiding their characteristic vices. From the free-market liberals it takes an appreciation of the strengths of the market, its efficiency, flexibility and the opportunities it offers for initiative. From socialism it takes its concern with public goods, social relationships and veffective access to political power. It claims to show how these socialist goals might be achieved in a market economy through new ways of structuring political decision and representation, avoiding the concentration of power and bureaucracy that vitiated socialist regimes.

At a theoretical level it is a set of reflections on the claim that the authority of individuals and groups should be limited to those matters that affect them substantially and directly. In this context it challenges all claims to sovereignty, not only totalitarian ones, but also those characteristic of contemporary democratic nation-states. In part this view rests on a claim about the structuring identities. We each belong to many partial, overlapping communities in virtue of our work, our residence, our recreations and a host of shared needs. In every aspect of our lives we are offered choices between alternatives that are constituted and linked in pre-established forms, sometimes by various markets, sometimes by the means at our disposal, our talents, inclinations, education and family, and sometimes by legal and institutional constraints and opportunities.

Politics is concerned with preserving, developing or changing the alternatives open to us. Traditionally all political jurisdiction has been based on territorial boundaries. These in turn were based on various titles of ownership of land. Nearly everybody made a living from the land to which they belonged. Most relationships were fairly simple and confined to a small area. Nation-states were formed out of wars over jurisdiction based on domination of a piece of land by force. National concerns were seen as nobler than merely local ones. Nationalism in many of its variants became a religion.

In such a context the state strove to secure the identification of its scattered subjects with the institutions through which they were to be turned into citizens. The same laws and legal institutions must apply to all. The law defined status, ownership, binding relationships and the limits of acceptable behaviour. The economy must be regulated in the national interest, especially the interest of the sovereign. The same religion and culture should be shared by all citizens and all divisive foci of identity suppressed or coopted into the national identity. The state required its citizens not only to be loyal but to be ready kill others and risk their very lives in order to preserve it from domination by other states. The state thrived on demonising its enemies, internal and external.

The folly and futility of this way of ordering things is widely recognised, but the alternatives, devolving power to smaller geographic communities and to international authorities, are seen as unsatisfactory because of the dangers of local chauvinism on the one hand and the difficulties of controlling international bodies democratically on the other. What this book suggests viis that in general the solution to the inadequacies of the nation-state is to recognise the specific authority of committees representative of the various overlapping partial communities to which each of us belong through our relationships, activities and needs. Some of these will be very local, but many will be global in their scope. How they are to be constituted and controlled is spelled out in what follows.

One of my hopes in writing the book was that its proposals might appeal to reformers in socialist states who wanted to introduce a market economy while still retaining some traditional socialist concerns about public goods. So I was heartened to receive a letter, posted in Norway, from a young activist in Archangel, who wanted to translate the book into Russian. I agreed enthusiastically, and he put a good deal of work into the project. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union collapsed and I received a forlorn letter saying that in the new Russia there was little prospect of its being published and less of it receiving serious attention.

I still have some hopes that Chinese reformists may find it interesting. My main hope remains that people of all sorts who are concerned about the problems that face our contemporary democracies may find it stimulating to step back from the plethora of current policy questions and devote more attention to questions of procedures of representation and decision-making. The basic conviction underlying my approach to our problems is that social relationships and structures are built up out of our social practices, our ways of doing things. In our social lives we can do individually and collectively only those things we have a way of doing, a set of steps that we can take that have a definite meaning and effect in virtue of the conventions governing them.

It is useless to expect an autocrat, however benevolent, to recognise political rights. The practices and institutions that could guarantee such rights simply do not exist in an autocracy. In Socialist Eastern Europe the joke used to be: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. The arrangements mimicked a labour market, but it could not work as one because the essential procedures and structures were missing. Nearer home we are all aware how legal and bureaucratic solutions to problems so often fail simply because legal and bureaucratic procedures are inappropriate to dealing with them. “Treat everybody the same” is an excellent way of proceeding in some contexts, but disastrous in others. So often it ends up treating badly just those who most need consideration.

There is an enormous literature about what “we” need to do to deal with the various problems that face us. Much of this literature is entirely ineffectual, even when there is a great deal of agreement about what needs to be done, because the institutions that might give effect to many of its recommendations viido not exist. “We” are impotent. Bodies that depend on agreements between sovereign states are always going to be at the mercy of the internal politics of each state, particularly of the most powerful states, which always have veto, if only because nothing much can be done without their active cooperation. In the arenas of domestic power politics considerations about global problems are just one among many items that enter into the game of power trading. They have no clear constituency. So they lose out. Genuinely international authorities must rest on a firmer basis. How they might be constituted is one of the themes of this book.

A Major change of view

At various places in the text I endorse Marxist1 analyses of class conflict, without ever conceding the claim that the only solution to these conflicts is a classless society to be achieved by a proletarian revolution. I have always thought that that claim rests on a number of errors, notably about the ultimate possibility of a complex economy without market exchange and about the desirability of change by violent revolution.

However, I have continued to recognise that there is an inevitable conflict of interest between capital and labour, employer and employee, both at the level of the particular firm and at the level of the economic system. What I now reject is a class analysis of these conflicts. Instead, I want to emphasise how these conflicts are entwined with other conflicts of interest and how they are instantiated in the lives of most individuals and groups.

As consumers we all want cheaply priced products, produced by low wage labour. We support the firms that extract the most productivity. We may react against particular instances of gross exploitation, but ordinarily we look for value for our money. Similarly, as contributors to - funds or investors most of us are in the position of having to look for profitable capital investment. In effect, we want to be paid well while others are paid as little as possible.

At the level of the national economy we are concerned about its “competitiveness” internationally and about efficiency in the use of capital and labour quite as much as about social justice. In the short run at least the capacity of the economy to finance social programs to redress the market’s failure to provide for the disadvantaged depends on the prosperity of the economy. And so on.

These conflicts are inherent in the system of a labour market, which we have no prospect of abolishing. To portray them as a matter of conflict between distinct classes of “haves” and “have-nots” is to falsify the problems they pose. Obviously they impact on different individuals and groups quite differently. Very many people get a big share of the disadvantages of the viiisystem as compared with the number of those who benefit most from it. Nevertheless it is wrong to see their disadvantages as springing crucially from the capitalist system. Often those disadvantaged by capitalism would be disadvantaged in almost any arrangement. Their disabilities come from historical, environmental and genetic sources, though those disabilities are aggravated by any competitive context. They need help and the problem of providing that help is not just a question of “charity”. The doctrine that people do not have a right to a decent life, but only a right to compete for it is inhuman.

There is no reason to conceive all the ills that afflict so many people under capitalism as a matter of exploitation. The worst aspect of our present system is the gross inequality between nations. In the case of Third World countries the major problems arise from their having little to sell that will sell in the international market. Their natural resources are poor, they lack both capital and managerial skills and their labour is not needed by those who have the resources to make use of it. The idea that there is a clear, objective, supremely important interest in expropriating the capitalists that is common to the majority of people in all countries rests on a simplistic analysis. The idea that this should lead to politico-military revolution is a disastrously illusory objective.

More generally, the procedure of attributing conflicts of interest to conflicts between social classes or other groupings is rarely useful in understanding these conflicts or dealing with their effects. In a modern complex society most people belong to very many interest groups, occupational, educational, aspirational, geographic, cultural, political, recreational, religious and so on.2 The relations they establish in each field of interest may be of greater or lesser importance to different individuals and groupings both in their own estimation and in their actual outcomes. What turns out to be decisive in any given conjuncture is a matter of historical contingencies.

Violence

Human history has been a history of organised violence based on religious, cultural, political and economic conflicts. People have seen violence as the only means of bringing about a definitive resolution of major conflicts because if successful it destroys the power of the enemy, it is hoped, permanently. It rarely succeeds, instead breeding a desire for revenge that perpetuates violent conflict. That organised violence has been so intractable is not just a matter of the violent propensities of individuals. Most people most of the time have seen social relations as ultimately a matter of dominating or being dominated, in a Hobbesian state of nature. ix

It is only very recently and hesitatingly that we have come to grasp the possibility of a consensual order based not on agreement about what is true and important but on agreement about procedures for making decisions about what needs to be done by collective action.

There are two sides to this possibility. The first is agreement not to pursue a resolution of most conflicts through coercive social organisation but through social interactions that use non-coercive means. All the questions traditionally regarded as of supreme importance, about what is true and ennobling, about our ultimate personal and communal purposes are to be excluded from the field of violent conflict. Many different reasons may be given for this policy, ranging from extreme scepticism or extreme individualism to a hatred of violence or the celebration of diversity. In any case, on most matters if we cannot reach agreement we agree to differ, if only for practical reasons.

This side of the possibility of a consensual order seems fairly secure, in spite of the resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Even extreme fundamentalists are reluctant to admit to imposing their religious views on others, even when they in fact do so. It is true that we have become increasingly aware that very significant power is exercised by non-coercive means. Renunciation of threats of force is not sufficient to guarantee a social order without oppression. The enlightenment confidence in the capacity of reason to liberate people from fear, subjection and falsehood has been profoundly shaken. Still hardly anybody now believes that authoritative imposition of a religious, cultural or philosophical answers to social problems is either possible or desirable.

The other side is more problematical. Recourse to violence as the necessary means of confronting violence continues to be accepted in theory and in practice even by states that are committed to freedom and peace as supremely valuable. The idea that only violent action can defeat entrenched repression continues to be accepted not only by extremists but by most people, albeit reluctantly, in the name of realism. In this book I have argued that this orientation to violence as the ultimate decision procedure can be reversed only when the concentration of all legitimate power in the state is radically eroded by establishing a network of authoritative institutions that are quite independent of the state or anything like it.

A Darwinian Perspective

We are only gradually coming to accept the overwhelming evidence that order of a very efficient and effective kind can grow out of adaptation by organisms to changes in the conditions under which they strive to survive and reproduce themselves, without any plan or guiding hand. Again we have had striking evidence of the capacity of a free-market economic system to produce an abundance of goods and services very efficiently. The astounding successes xof modern science have likewise come about in spite of the utter inadequacy of all the philosophies that have prescribed what science should be doing.

At first sight all of these endeavours are extremely wasteful. In each case success emerges unpredictably from an enormous mass of failures that in retrospect appear to have served no useful purpose. Indeed, in many respects each process is a history of destruction of projects that might well have flourished if only various extraneous events had been different or had occurred at a different time. The contrast between the processes of evolution and our utilitarian models of instrumental rationality could hardly be more complete. In our system of production it is institutionalised in the contrast between the anarchy of the stock market and the tightly disciplined organisation of the factory.

One way of describing what is being attempted in this book is to displace the model of the factory or the tightly organised firm as the paradigm of rational social organisation in favour of the unorganised adaptive rationality of an open-ended evolutionary process. If it is looked at as simply a means to an end such a process will inevitably appear extremely wasteful. The apparent waste is inevitable. Even in intellectual enquiries we usually do not know what we have been looking for until we find it. We only learn what questions we should have been asking when we find the answers. Living is mostly blind experimentation and success a matter of happy accident. What we come to see as success is what survives amid the scramble of competition.

In the context of competition, what does not survive is seen as failure, wasted effort. It is only when the particular components of the process are seen as being worthwhile, in spite of their ultimate failure, that we can see the whole as worth all the fuss. We need to cherish the dinosaurs and the dodos, the phlogistons and the utopias. What appears as waste by the standards of means-ends rationality is in fact the substance of life. Its value is not to be measured exclusively by some retrospectively imposed teleology but in terms of its own context, objectives and striving. Dinosaurs are not just failed mammals, nomads not just people who did not discover agriculture, discarded ideas not just mistakes.

More fundamentally, we have to recognise that in every kind of progress something is lost. There is no philosophical measure of progress that can stand outside the process and decide what constitutes genuine progress and what is a departure from the right order of things. The fact is that we can come to envisage certain possibilities only when they emerge from a process of change that was not directed to bringing them about. Our assessment of progress involves our relative assessments of unexpected new possibilities and the expectations and preferences derived from the old context that the new is disrupting. Against both instrumental rationality and xiadaptive rationality, traditionalisms of all sorts deplore the destructive effects of both uncontrolled change and over-controlled change. But traditionalist orthodoxies inevitably collapse as their idealised referents vanish into contingent historical particulars. Even the fundamentalists find that their sacred texts refuse to stand still.

The frightening image that emerges is of our being adrift without rudder or compass at the mercy of the viewless winds and waves. But the fear is misplaced. We do have the means to adapt to our situation, to make the most of the opportunities it offers, to construct institutions and practices that instantiate values and concerns that are genuine, even if their value is limited to a certain historical context. Once we accept not only our personal limitations, but the finitude and contingency of our best aspirations, we will not devalue our particular efforts and achievements simply because they share our limitations. If we are adrift we can improvise a paddle and by dint of paddling and good luck eventually reach a shore. The shore we reach may not be where we wanted to go, but perhaps we can negotiate some acceptable arrangement with the natives until we find something better. In doing what we can to make the best of our situation we will quite probably be making our small contribution to the emergence of a new order that in some respects at least and by some relevant measures is an improvement on the old.

The process involves a lot of efforts that fail in the tasks they set out to perform. That may well turn out to be the case with this book. It will still have been worth the effort of writing it, and perhaps even of reading it.

John Burnheim

Sydney, Australia 1 May 2006