Reginald James Harrison - Pluralism and Corporatism: The Political Evolution of Modern Democracies

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Volume 27

PLURALISM AND CORPORATISM

PLURALISM AND
CORPORATISM

The Political Evolution of
Modern Democracies

REGINALD J. HARRISON

First published in 1980 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

This edition first published in 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1980 George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-21961-1 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35434-2 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-22100-3 (Volume 27) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27324-7 (Volume 27) (ebk)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Pluralism and
Corporatism

The political evolution of
modern democracies

Reginald J. Harrison

First published in 1980

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
40 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LU

George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1980

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Harrison, Reginald James

Pluralism and corporatism.
1. Pluralism (Social sciences)
2. Corporate state 3. Democracy
I. Title

321.8 JC330

ISBN 0-04-321024-4
ISBN 0-04-321025-2 Pbk

Typeset in 10 on 11 point Plantin by Trade Linotype Ltd., Birmingham.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
William Clowes (Beccles) Limited, Beccles and London.

This work was started in a spirit of discontent with the prevailing pluralist model of the advanced, democratic and industrial society. It reviews some of what have seemed to me to be the outstanding implicit and occasionally explicit criticisms of the model in the recent literature of the social sciences. The review does not pretend to. be comprehensive it selects what is most effectively and objectively critical. Furthermore, in drawing the empirical support for the critique from various countries the first priority has not been to achieve the country-to-country balance of a straightforward text in comparative politics, but to dwell on the most appropriate illustrations of a theme. For a positive theme does, indeed, emerge from the critique an alternative conception of the advanced democratic society for which the label corporatist seems temporarily appropriate, particularly as it has been increasingly used, during the period of writing, by a number of other critics of the pluralist model.

Without wishing to associate them in any way with the failings, or for that matter the merits, of the book, I would like to express my thanks to colleagues at Lancaster who have read parts of the work and commented on them; to Vincent Wright and Gordon Smith who were encouraging about a preliminary paper I read to an LSE seminar, and finally to my colleagues of the Workshop on Corporatism at Grenoble, in April 1978.

Contents

Political change is one of the most elusive of the phenomena which challenge the contemporary social scientist. It is, therefore, a somewhat tentative contention of this work that elements of corporatism can be discerned in the political evolution of advanced industrial democratic societies. That is to say, there are tendencies towards the fragmentation of government responsibility and its joint assumption by governmental and organised group bureaucracies making an often dubious claim to exclusive representation of class and other interests in the various functional sectors.

However, in such societies, the complexity of change, its variety, its pace, and the difficulty of producing tangible, measurable evidence of many of its aspects have taxed the analytical ingenuity of scholars. The difficulties emerge as soon as any attempt is made to answer the immediate questions posed by the proposal to examine such societies. What are the advanced industrial societies? Why study them? How shall they be studied?

Some of the possible, varying answers to the first of these three questions are indicated by the significantly different descriptive labels which have been attached to them by recent writers : the technetronic society (Zbigniew Brzezinski), the post-industrial society (David Bell and Christopher Lasch), post-capitalist society (Ralph Dahrendorf), the new industrial state, or the affluent society (J. K. Galbraith), corporate society (Robin Marris, Nigel Harris), industrial technological society (Ghita Ionescu), the post-welfare state (Hancock and Sjoberg). These all indicate a somewhat different perspective and emphasis on the same actual phenomena: the leading states of Western Europe, Japan and the United States.

Succinctly, and with more concern for measurability than obvious political significance, advanced industrial societies might be identified as those which, today, like Britain, have an overwhelmingly urban industrial population. They are countries in which agriculture accounts for 10 per cent or less of the gross domestic product. They are, also, countries in which the value of the product of manufacturing industry plus service industries does not fall below 55 per cent of the value of the gross domestic product. Another marked measurable characteristic of such societies is that they do show a high degree of export diversification.

Taken together, these can serve as concrete defining characteristics. They successfully exclude countries which are outside the general, impressionistic conception of the advanced industrial society of which Britain, from the present authors standpoint, is the key example.

The identification is expressed entirely in economic terms, but these, in 1978, exclude the countries of Eastern Europe and the Third World and serve to identify a group of countries governed, at least prima facie, by elected representatives.

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