1 wilson, John, “Towards a Society of Friends: Some Reflections on the Meaning of Democratic Socialism,” this JOURNAL 3 (1970), 628.Google Scholar

2 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1910), 12.Google Scholar

3 See Hayek's, F. A., discussions of this topic, especially New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 267,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 35–57.Google Scholar

4 See Miller, David, “Socialism and the Market,” Political Theory 5 (1977), 473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961);Google Scholar also Plant, Raymond, “Community: Concept, Conception and Ideology,” Politics and Society 8 (1978), 79–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Wilson, , “Towards a Society of Friends,” 640.Google Scholar

7 Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge. 1958), 123.Google Scholar

8 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 53–61.Google Scholar

9 Connolly, William, “A Note on Freedom under Socialism,” Political Theory 5 (1977). 461.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 We agree on this point with Oakeshott, Michael, 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], 97; see also, similarly. 112)Google Scholar. It is the balancing—and frequently very fine balancing—that we wish to bring out in “mediation”: the balancing between diverse purposes being turned into “public objects” and the balancing of justificatory reasons that are meant to sustain them.

11 for a somewhat parallel argument see Newman, J. H., An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, 1909), 34.Google Scholar

12 Quoted in Williams, , Culture and Society, 182.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 183.

14 Hutter, Horst, Politics as Friendship (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 2.Google Scholar The idea of politics as friendship is pursued in some depth in Mansbridge, Jane J., Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980).Google Scholar What she calls “unitary” democracy—because it is “like friendship” —is said to be distinguished by consensus, and favourably, 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.” We Lie indebted to Professor David Braybrooke for having drawn our attention to this careful study.

15 Wilson, , “Towards a Society of Friends,” 654.Google Scholar

16 See On the Jewish Question, the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and, above all, the Third Manuscript in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

17 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 Howe, Irving, [ed.], Essential Works of Socialism [New York: Bantam Books, 1971], 738).Google Scholar

18 Although pluralist socialist writers do not represent a single school of thought, they agree in regarding “monistic” socialism as a threat to meaningful citizenship. For an extensive bibliography on pluralist socialism see Bermbach, UdoNuscheler, franz (eds.), Sozialistischer Pluralismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1973)Google Scholar. On pluralist socialists in Czechoslovakia, the most exhaustive bibliography will be found in Gordon Skilling's Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 893.Google Scholar. See also Barnard, F. M., “Between Opposition and Political Opposition: The Search for Competitive Politics in Czechoslovakia,” this JOURNAL 5 (1972), 533Google Scholar, Socialism with a Human Face: Slogan and Substance (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1973),Google Scholar and (with R. A. Vemon), “Socialist Pluralism and Pluralist Socialism, ” Political Studies 25 (1977), 474–90. On the ideational links between Czech pluralist socialism and the political philosophy of see Masaryk, ThomasBarnard, F. M.“The Prague Spring and Masaryk's Humanism, ” East Central Europe 5, part 2 (1978), 215.Google Scholar

19 Klokočka, Vladimír, Volby v Pluralitních Democraciích (Prague: Svoboda, 1968). 243.Google Scholar

20 Social Contract, Bk. 4, chap. 1.

21 Kosing, Alfred, “Die Verfalschung und Preisgabe der materialistischen Dialektik durch den modernen Revisionismus,” Deutsche Zeitschriftfiir Philosophic 20 (1972), 211.Google Scholar

22 Barnard, Vernon, , Barnard and Vernon, “Socialist Pluralism and Pluralist Socialism,” 488.Google Scholar

23 See, for example, Selucký, Radosláv, Reform-Modell CSSR (Hamburg: Rowolth, 1969), 77–79;Google ScholarKosí, karelLiehm, Antonín, (ed.), Gespäche an der Moldau (Vienna: Molden, 1968), 341;Google ScholarStojanovic, Svetozar, Between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and its Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 101.Google Scholar

24 For example, the idea of a total transformation of socialist man is described as a “corrupt fantasy” and the political economy of Communist regimes as forced modernization rather than as the liberation of a society , (Irving Howe's “Introduction,” in his Essential Works of Socialism, 18.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as EWS). The saliency of politics as “a vital and exciting world of work and struggle” is insisted on by Walzer, Michael, (“Politics in the Welfare State,” EWS, 824)Google Scholar and that of the state as the expression of collective freedom through its “rational” universality over and above any particular interest is affirmed by Ricoeur (“Power and State, ” EWS, 736). That a state, simply by becoming socialist ceases to be a threat to human liberty, is dismissed as “sheer fatuity” by Howe and Lewis Coser (“Images of Socialism, ” EWS, 845).

25 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, by Easton, Loyd D.Guddat, Kurt H. (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 130.Google Scholar

26 Connolly, “A Note on Freedom under Socialism,” Political Theory 5 (1977), 466–67; “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 (469–71, emphasis in original). See also Ricoeur, , “Power and the State, ” EWS, 736:Google ScholarRicoeur, , is perhaps the most explicit of these writers in insisting on the autonomy of politics.Google Scholar

27 Evidently it is not the collectivist ethos of Marxism that is objected to. If Connolly and the other socialist writers cited are critical of the downplaying of the state by Marxist socialists of the orthodox variety, they are no less critical of the “individualism” and “interest pluralism” of American politics.

28 For a most useful analysis of the distinction between individual and social rationality, see Benn, S. I.Mortimore, G. W. (eds.), Rationality and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1976), chap. 14.Google ScholarBurke, Edmand is, of course, the best-known advocate of the third interpretation.Google Scholar

29 Most recently, for example, Hollis, Martin, takes this line, in his Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

30 We are thinking here of some of the German political romantics rather than Burke. Adam Miiller exemplifies this position perhaps most uncompromisingly. He “outdoes” Burke whom he deeply venerated. He called him the last prophet who had come to this disenchanted earth: but, it seems, he did not truly understand him.

31 This appears to be Sheldon S. Wolin', way out in “Weber, MaxLegitimation, Method and the Politics of Theory,” Political Theory 9 (1981), 402.Google Scholar Clearly, the “context” could include all kinds of norms, customs, habits and traditional ways of going about things. So broad an answer tells us nothing about the autonomy of political norms.

32 For a recent exposition of this counterfactual condition, see Habermas, Jürgen, “Aspects of the Rationality of Action,”Google Scholar in Geraets, Theodore F., (ed.), Rationality Today (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 1979), 195.Google Scholar Its most detailed elaboration so far will be found in Habermas, JürgenLuhmann, Niklas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).Google Scholar

33 This is a widely shared view with strong Romantic overtones that can be traced in modem political and sociological writings to Rousseau. Herder, English, French, and German Romantics (and chiefly conservative political romantics) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more recently to the influence of Ferdinand Tönnies' Community and Society and Robert Nisbet's Community and Power. For a critique of the emergence of modem “community” language, see Barnard, F. M., “Metaphors, Laments, and the Organic Community,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 22 (1966), 281–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Equally widespread is the idea that it is the economic market of a capitalist economy which is the source of human alienation, and that it is through the emergence of this market that liberal (individualist) doctrines of politics assumed dominance. This idea has considerably gained in academic popularity since the publication of Macpherson's Possessive Individualism. The long-entrenched view about the incompatibility of socialism with a market economy has been challenged by a number of economists within Communist states, including some pluralist socialists. For a recent “Western” exposition of this challenge, see Miller, “Socialism and the Market. ”

34 For a brief and lucid discussion of polítical norms and political action, see Nettl, J. P., “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968), 588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 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: Doubleday, 1955), 138.Google Scholar The rationalist does not easily understand that a political society, unlike an intellectual product, is not shaped by reason but by the concurrence of its inhabitants: hence “what is a merit in the writer may well be a vice in the statesman” (147).

36 See, for example, Von Wright, Georg Henrik, Norm and Action (London: Routledge 1963), esp. 11–15.Google Scholar

37 For an even-handed treatment of orthodox Communist (chiefly Soviet) condemnations of pluralist-socialist reform proposals, see Lane, David, The Socialist Industrial Slate: Towards a Political Sociology of State Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 143.Google Scholar

38 Since the point of the essay is a juxtaposition of two “typological” approaches to socialist politics, it unavoidably involves generalizations which individual writers may variously endorse or not wholly accept. Moreover, our focus of interest, the relations between political norms and political action, was not necessarily theirs too.