David Marquand and the Dilemmas of Political Organisation

David Marquand changed his party of support at least three times, representing a conflict of loyalty to a party versus loyalty to values. This conflict itself reflected an even deeper one between his felt need for society and politics to have a profound moral basis and his awareness that it was extremely difficult to give that aspiration a practical organisational form. I consider these two conflicts in turn.

Loyalty to an organisation versus loyalty to values

People who hold certain values and adhere to a particular organisation because it seems to embody them often face potential disillusion if the organisation departs from those values.

Firms and corporations sometimes talk as though they are driven by values, but it is not necessary. Political parties and religious organisations claim to stand for principles outside the humdrum issues of daily life, and therefore appeal to a loyalty among their active members that conflates the organisation with the values, imposing a double bind on their disillusioned adherents who defect.

This can be very powerful indeed. If the Roman Catholic Church is the sole channel for accessing salvation, then defecting from it is an awful decision. The old communist parties maintained a similar, if secularised, position representing the destiny of the working class.

If a political party purports to represent certain key values that one shares, then failure to support it in whatever it does can be presented as constituting a betrayal of those values, irrespective of how the organisation behaves. According to a party's gatekeepers, there can be no dilemma between loyalty to the organisation and loyalty to values: the latter are subsumed in the former.

Many political parties started life as essentially ethically motivated campaigns, but this initial moral charge became exhausted as the compromises of life and the need to win elections took over. However, that need to motivate the middle ranks of party hierarchies and active supporters, if not voters, endures. Ideas of moral purpose, therefore, have to be refurbished and reinvented. And thus, we arrive at the strange position whereby we look to politics as the point in our societies where large moral issues are debated, whereas in a deeper historical perspective this was the role of religion.

It was therefore rational for the young Marquand to look to practical politics as the place where a commitment to worthy actions might be concentrated. Eventually, he would come to look for the potential of other kinds of civil society organisations, but he never turned his back entirely on politics or the labour movement. Yet loyalty to an organisation would always be dependent on that organisation's fitness for moral purpose.

To understand his problem, one needs to grasp his idea of the ‘progressive dilemma’. I want to concentrate here on a different set of dilemmas. The relationship of values to the organisational forms that are needed to realise them, but at a deeper level than the obvious one of party loyalty.

Dilemmas of a value-oriented politics

Superficially, David Marquand was a perfect example of a scion of the British liberal establishment; and yet, in his deeply held sense of himself, he was not part of a national elite, but the ally of small groups of ordinary citizens, deeply critical of the coldness of official institutions and an enemy of the amoral centralisation of power—whether that proceeded from administrative technocracy or the neoliberalism that was increasingly his principal bête noire.

And yet, he was also deeply interested in national political institutions. The first dilemma confronted by his particular stance was, therefore, how to relate his intense localism and a certain sense of communitarianism to that larger view, and the kinds of organisation that might achieve that. A second dilemma stemmed from Marquand's profound belief that society needed to have a moral base. That involved confronting the dilemma that a morally based society can be intolerant or at least patronising.

Building solidarity from the base, but where to?

In the 1980s, one of Marquand's main concerns was what he saw as Britain's lack of a ‘developmental state’, something that he saw France, Germany and Japan, among others, as possessing. The developmental state was one where central government interacted intensively with firms, organisations of firms, trade unions and other relevant groups in society in establishing an economic strategy. He arrived at more general trenchant criticisms of both the neoliberalism of the 1980s and the socialism of the old Labour Party; both failed the test of capacity for dialogue with the rest of society. This concept of a dialogistic public realm eventually replaced his concern for the developmental state as such.

Already in The Unprincipled Society, David had shown a fondness for Edmund Burke's analogy of the ‘little platoon[s]’, the small collectivities and communities that were the essential building blocks of social life. Although David was essentially liberal, his liberalism did not stress the human individual as its base, but the dependence of individuals on each other. ‘Freedom as a source of human flourishing is one thing; freedom to ignore the common good and exploit or seek to dominate others is quite another’, he wrote. Parliament and government were nested in a rich structure of civil society, which both influenced policy making and contributed to binding government and citizens together. But its value was often disregarded.

Most of his criticism was reserved for the particularities of British (perhaps in particular English) society, because it was this country, and perhaps the US too, which had become obsessed with what Crawford Brough Macpherson had called ‘possessive individualism’. David added to that the ‘possessive collectivism’ that led British trade unions to concentrate on free collective bargaining for individual industries and groups and reject corporatist cooperation

The Thatcher years had left society weak. More optimistically, and seeking a reconciliation between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, he pointed to ‘communitarian, decentralist, participative radical strands’ within both liberal democrat and socialist traditions.

The ‘public realm’ concerns all those things that are outside our immediate private life. It is needed in order to make our ‘fragmented society whole’. The state does not cover it all. The market cannot address collective issues—like climate change—that it cannot embrace.

In Britain Since 1918, Marquand brought together what he considered to have been the four dominant traditions that had governed the country: Tory nationalism, Whig imperialism, democratic collectivism (that is, mainstream Labourism) and democratic republicanism. The fourth was where he would pin his attachment. Appropriately for a man who had problems with continuing party loyalty, this tradition was devoid of a party label.

In claiming the term ‘democratic republicanism’ for just his preferred one, he meant something more specific than parliamentary democracy—a form of political organisation that would integrate formal parliamentary and governmental institutions with that teeming life of informal civil society that he celebrated; and which could also embrace the latter's direct activities within the public realm.

Nearly all forms of democracy recognise that they have these two faces in their relations with citizens: precise, rule-bound mechanisms for electing members of parliaments, and very broad, informal processes whereby groups of citizens can talk to governments between elections. There is, however, considerable debate over the forms the latter will take and the relations between it and formal electoral democracy.

The ability to lobby governments to act in certain ways depends massively on the resources at the lobbyist's disposal. David was well aware of the political, as well as the socioeconomic, implications of material inequality.

He was also acutely aware of the damage done both to his vision of the public realm and to everyday human life itself by the inequalities being exacerbated by contemporary financial capitalism. This appears particularly strongly in Mammon's Kingdom.

A high level of inequality prevented people from sharing the common life that was necessary if they were all to be part of civil society. Even in the months since David died, the situation has worsened. When we no longer have shared standards of truth and fact to which we can appeal, we shall have lost our ability to communicate with each other about serious issues. The only voices that will be heard will be those who have the largest accumulations of wealth to devote to controlling social media and, soon, artificial intelligence.

As small organised groups expand, they inevitably lose the fluidity, spontaneity and closeness to the lives of citizens that David so treasured in the informal public realm. It is that same problem that dogged him in his own political life: without organisations, we cannot aggregate influence; but as they develop the logic of their own survival, they lose contact with the values that motivated them in the first place. He never really solved that conundrum.

Liberal tolerance in a moral society

For Marquand, society must have a moral basis. This must be rooted in local communities, but must be associated with openness and not intolerance. He required acceptance of two procedural principles: first, to participate in his republican democracy, one must accept the validity of a public realm. Second, one needs a willingness to engage in debate within the public realm and not simply to seek opportunities to impose one's will on it. This is a safeguard against intolerance and the imposition of authority, not an expression of it.

It seems to follow from Marquand's general arguments that, provided one accepts those two principles, one is at liberty to take up a wide range of positions.

David frequently spoke of his civil society or republican democracy as ‘educational’ and ‘preceptorial’. At one point, he said that society should work more like a ‘classroom’ than a ‘regiment of command’ [pace Burke's ‘platoon’] or ‘the bazaar of the market’. This might appear as patronising, calling on an educated elite to teach other citizens how to make a principled society. But this was not at all what he meant. He referred repeatedly to ‘mutual education’. We all had a responsibility to participate in helping each other understand issues.

Here, once again, the problem of organisation dogs Marquand's footsteps. How, in practice, would mutual didacticism be possible in complex mass democracies of the kind we know today? The idea of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries, readily embraced by Marquand, has recently made major progress.

Conclusion

David Marquand showed us what the public realm is about, during a period when the triumph of neoliberalism had denigrated the idea almost into non-existence.

But at nearly every step, he confronted the same problem that dogged him in his personal political journey: can there be structures that operate on the high and contested terrain of formal national politics without in the process killing the values that originally motivated them?

This may simply be the facts of the case: there may be no way of satisfactorily resolving the organisational dilemma. Far better to be aware of a permanently running sore in our democracy, try to mitigate its damage and constantly try to find partly successful approaches—like internet regulation and citizens’ juries—while knowing there will be no ultimate solution. David Marquand equipped us for those tasks, insisting that, despite all the barriers, his vision was an optimistic one.