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Essay - Page Three |
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by Mortimer J.
Adler
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[Political] Parties and the Common Good, by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. (Continued) III. THE PROBLEM OF PARTIES 1. In order to answer the questions raised about parties, let us proceed to review the arguments for and against the role of parties in political democracy. a. The case for parties is so well-known that it can be briefly summarized.[20] (1) According to Lord Bryce, political parties have three main functions: first, the promotion of party principles; secondly, the carrying of elections; and thirdly, the holding together of members in the assembly who profess homogeneous political opinions upon certain general issues. Parties, therefore, act as a sort of connecting link between the two sides of representative government: on the one hand, they afford an effective machinery to help the people in national elections, and, on the other hand, provide a means to organize the delegates in the assembly, so that public opinion may receive a further definite form.[21] (2) Political parties are also justified as generally facilitating the free debate of public issues and as providing popular political education for the masses. (3) Furthermore, it is said, that the party system, bad as it may be, permits a choice of policies, "though the alternatives offered may seem to be arbitrary when the issues are forced into the Procustean bed of party platforms."[22] (4) In short, parties are viewed as indispensable to any parliamentary form of government, and that form of government is considered essential to democracy.[23] (5) This view is supported by considering the alternatives to the parry system. (a) The abolition of parties, in the plural, leads either to the dominance of one party, which is the case in all antidemocratic totalitarian regimes, or to government without parties, which must then be some form of nonrepresentative government, and hence also inimical to democracy. We must remember that the question is not, absolutely speaking, whether government without any parties is better than some form of party government; rather we are considering parties relative to forms of government appropriate to democratic life. (b) It has been suggested by certain political pluralists that parties can be abolished when society is explicitly organized along vocational lines. I need not expound the general view of political pluralism, to present the notion of vocational representation, that is, the substitution of a vocational parliament for the present political parliament constituted along party lines. According to this view of functional democracy, in which the state is constituted by a hierarchy of minor associations rather than by otherwise unassociated citizens, the various vocational groups or corporations can become the medium of representative government to replace parties.[24] But this alternative is also rejected by the proponents of the party system, on two grounds: (i) In the first place, it is pointed out and must be generally admitted that no working scheme of representation by vocations has been devised, because of the difficulty of distributing the voting strength among the various vocations. Nor has any satisfactory method been found for combining vocational with popular representation.[25] (ii) In the second place, there is the basic objection that questions of policy, whether they be economic policy or social policy or international policy, are ultimately political questions and must be solved by political means, i.e. a political power which is superior to all the subordinate vocations and corporations in the state. "Therefore," Professor Feiler insists, "they must remain with the political parliament as the sovereign representative body of political democracy."[26] And the indispensability of a political, as opposed to a vocational, parliament carries with it, inevitably, the instrumentality of political parties. (iii) These objections are not objections to the pluralistic conception of democratic society. M. Maritain who sees in the pluralistic conception of the functional or corporative state the rectification of democracy in the line of its own ideals, nevertheless would retain political parties as media of political thought and education. The existence of political parties is necessary for the supremacy of the political principle over economic or professional principles in terms of which the various subordinate corporations are organized. But M. Maritain admits that he does not know how to retain parties and yet make government independent of their influence, since that requires the invention of a system of representation which is neither simply vocational nor purely political along present party lines.[27] (1) It would be a fair summary to say that those who defend parties as the instruments of democratic government, in which a vast electorate is given parliamentary representation, are not blind to the abuses and corruptions of the party system. They argue either (1) that the party system with all its irremediable faults and vices is the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the loss of democracy through the abolition of parties;[28] or (2) that the party system as such does not have irremediable faults, in which case they propose to retain parties but to reform them. I shall try to show in what follows that only the first position is really a defense of parties. The second position necessarily leads to the abolition of parties as they are now constituted and now function in representative government. The issue is sharpened thus if we do not permit ourselves to use the word 'party' ambiguously. What the word 'party' now designates is a political institution which is vicious essentially, or in other words has irremediable faults. If those faults were removed, the reformed institution could not be called a 'party' in a strictly univocal use of the word. Furthermore, I shall try to show that the pluralistic position is incompatible with the party system as it now exists. M. Maritain and other pluralists may retain the name 'party,' but they cannot retain the essential nature of the institution which now functions in representative democracy as we know it. a. In the light of the foregoing, I shall state the case against parties, first, by arguing that the institution is essentially vicious, which means contrary to the common good, and second, by attempting to show that it is incompatible with the fundamental principles of political pluralism. In so doing, I shall, of course, use the word 'party' univocally to name the existing institution, the essential nature of which will be defined in the course of the discussion. And, let me add, I am so using the word as to exclude from consideration such revolutionary movements as communism, which are more properly regarded as factions, right or wrong, than as political parties.[29] (1) The root notion in the concept of the party is that of partisanship, as opposed to impartiality. Thus, in the legal process litigants are parties to an issue, and it is the issue, a two-sided question, which makes partisanship possible. And the litigants can remain opposed parties only so long as the law will recognize an issue between them. In the order of legality, though not the temporal order, the issue makes parties, not the parties the issue. Only if the court sustains the issue as a legally debatable one, as against the demurrer of either litigant, can the litigants retain their status as parties. In short, the issue must be a two-sided question; within the law of the realm, not all questions which can possibly be raised have two sides; there is thus a limit to litigation, to the opposition of parties in judicial controversies. Now it will be admitted that, if the judicial process is itself not corrupt, litigation serves the end of justice as between the parties bringing or defending suits. The arbitration of the dispute by a tribunal of one sort or another is a better way of settling an issue than force or fraud. But it must be added that this is so only if the partisanship of the litigants is supplemented by the impartiality of the arbitrator. (a) Let us use this fundamental type of partisanship for the solution of practical questions, as a standard to measure the justifiability of political partisanship in the processes of representative government. As litigants are not just men unless they both seek a just decision from the court, so political parties are not just unless they severally seek the common good. Not only must all just political parties have the same ultimate end in view, but since there can be no tenable or reasonable difference of opinion concerning the proximate and constitutive means to the common good, they must all agree in seeking peace, order and economic justice. What, then, remains as the source of their differentiation into opposed political groups? They must divide on questions of policy concerning remote and contingent means, and they can justifiably divide only if the question has sides, that is, if the several conflicting opinions are each tenable and reasonable. (b) A number of things follow from this view of the matter. First, since in political affairs there are always debatable issues concerning remote and contingent means to the common good, there is justification for partisanship both before the electorate and in legislative assemblies. Parties taking sides on such issues serve the commonweal by causing effective debate and, hence, deliberation prior to action. But, in the second place, it would seem to follow that once action is taken, the parties which are specifically responsive to a given issue, should completely dissolve, their several members free to enter into other alignments on any other issue. This would mean that an issue or a group of issues would be the principle of temporary party formations in the electorate or legislature. And, in the third place, since some element of impartiality is needed to supplement partisanship if the ultimate decision is to be just, and since the really debatable issues deal with contingent matters that are qualified by many circumstances subject to change, it is necessary for the electorate or legislature to have a unity which transcends party divisions, for the sake of impartiality, and a flexibility of deliberation, which can shift from one side to another, for the sake of adaptation to changing circumstances. These requirements reinforce the point that political parties can serve the common good only if they are utterly transitory, formed to debate an issue and dissolved by its solution.[30] (c) If these are the criteria by which party division are justifiable, in terms of serving the common good, then it must follow that permanent party organizations, which seek to endure regardless of the solution of specific issues, are contrary to the common good. For what end do they obviously serve by seeking to endure regardless of specific issues? The end of power, not justice; the end of dominating the electorate or legislature. Instead of real issues causing partisanship specifically responsive to them, permanent party organizations cause political issues, which, as a consequence, are often unreal and merely pretexts in the struggle for power. I do not mean to say that permanent parties are totally vicious. They serve the common good in so far as they are instruments of debate and deliberation, and in so far as they are necessary to the machinery of representation. I am saying only that in so far as they are permanent, parties are organized and operate for another end, namely, their exclusive power, power as such divorced from authority, and, therefore, that permanent party organizations are inimical to the common good which, in some part, they may serve. Since the existing party system, whether it involves two major parties or a larger plurality, is comprised by permanent parties which in every case seek to endure, I say that there is an essentially vicious element in that system. I am only saying what Lord Halifax said several hundred years ago: "The best kind of party is in some sort of conspiracy against the nation."[31] (d) The foregoing analysis of the nature of party organizations is fully supported by the history of the development of parties and the account given of their operation. They may be in origin genuine movements of partisanship, but once organized and striving for endurance they become involved in the conquest of power. Within the party itself, there is a tendency either to autocratic leadership or oligarchical domination,[32] for just as nations find true democracy incompatible with war and aggression, so parties struggling for power, even in a democracy, soon become undemocratic in their own constitution for the sake of efficiency in the struggle. All this is admitted by those who defend parties as the indispensable instrument of representative government. They call upon us to accept the evil with the good, holding them to be inextricably connected. It may be supposed by some that the evil can be minimized by such devices as proportional representation, but others maintain that the resulting plurification of parties creates a situation which, under present conditions of nationalism and imperialism, soon ends in the rise of one strong party and totalitarianism.[33] (e) Unless we can find, then, some workable substitute for the party system, representative democracy is doomed to achieve, not the common good, but that counterfeit of it which is a compromise between many conflicting interests, each organized for the seizure of power. (1) My second point is that party organizations, as permanent associations within a society, are incompatible with the sound principles of political pluralism. I shall try to show this briefly as follows: (a) Within the practical order, men can be associated cooperatively for either a political or an artistic end. The political end is the common good. The artistic ends include all the good products and services which men can make or perform. Let us use the words 'economic' or 'technical' to name all associations of men directed to such goods. Each such association is a vocational group or economic corporation which has a place in the hierarchical order of society by virtue of the function it performs. A pluralistic society is thus a functionally organized society, and since every individual, except the worthless, performs one or more functions, he is not only a member of the all-inclusive political society, but also of one or more subordinate corporations. Furthermore, these functions cannot be antagonistic essentially, though they may need regulation from without if the total collection of corporations is to be well ordered and harmoniously disposed in operation. (b) The economic or technical function is, thus, the government of things, making products or performing services, and such government is achieved within the several corporations and vocations. But the government of the vocations themselves for the sake of the common good is a government of men, though not of men in a nude relation to the state as individuals, but men clothed with functional responsibility as members of subordinate economic or technical associations.[34] Thus, political government or the government of men is seen to be supreme in the hierarchy of human associations, because it serves the paramount good. Political government consists of those offices of authority which are constituted in the organization of the political community as a whole. (c) The question, therefore, is, what place has a permanent political party as a corporation within a functionally organized society? On the one hand, it is not an economic or technical group. On the other hand, it has no political authority and is no part of the government. Between the supreme political association, which wields political authority, and the various corporations which have economic or technical functions, there seems to be no place for the kind of association which is a permanent political party. This seems to indicate that permanent parties are interlopers or foreign bodies in a well planned society. Where everything else works for the good of the whole, either directly or by some partial contribution, the political party seeking to endure works for its own good primarily, the good of success in the struggle for power. Parties as they are now known in representative government can have no place in the embodiment of the corporative state.[35] (d) It may be objected that political parties do serve a function which justifies them in the corporative order, namely, the function of political education through debate and deliberation. This objection is answered by our previous analysis of political partisanship which showed that debate and deliberation are facilitated only by flexible and shifting alignments, and are either impeded or corrupted by strong, permanent party organizations, which make issues rather than respond to them. Furthermore, those who assign only this function to political parties are, in fact, denying parties as they now exist and operate. Thus, M. Maritain, in a recent paper, said: "Parties, on condition that they are not reduced to vast coalitions of interests, from which all political thought is absent, furnish the scheme of a certain political education of men....It is important not to suppress parties, but that which corrupts them, and makes them instruments of corruption of the public good. And to achieve this aim, it is necessary to render the State and the government itself independent from these political parties."[36] But this, it seems to me, is tantamount to calling for the abolition of political parties, for that which corrupts them is their permanence, and as they now operate the State and government are not independent of them. M. Maritain recognizes this when he adds that a radically different, and as yet unconceived, system of representative government must replace the existing type, if parties are to be thus reformed and take their place in the organic democracy of the corporative state. Political pluralism can say it is not opposed to parties only by using the word to name an institution which does not yet exist, and which will be as essentially different from the parties of today, as the representative government of a truly corporative state will be different from institutions of the sort which are used by individualistic democracy as it exists today. (Here, again, the point is analogy.)[37] 1. The problem can, in summary, be reduced to a few basic propositions which indicate the alternatives: a. It is held by all that political democracy under modern conditions require the maximizing of suffrage and adequate representation, that the essential principles of democracy under such conditions call for an effective electorate and parliamentary legislation. b. Some hold that the party system as presently constituted is an indispensable instrument of modern political democracy. To agree to this proposition is to concede irreducible weaknesses in the embodiment of democratic principles, contrary tendencies which impair and weaken the fabric of democratic life. To agree here is to admit that nations which call themselves democratic are in fact oligarchies, that the common good is remotely approximated by the compromise of powerful conflicting interests, and that the spectre of totalitarianism must continue to threaten democracy because of its own incurable weaknesses and inefficiencies. c. Others hold that the essential principles of democracy are not only preserved but better realized in a corporative state. But there are difficulties in this position in view of what all agree to, namely that under modern, in contrast to mediaeval, conditions, the government of a corporative society, if it is to be democratic, must include the principles of universal suffrage and representative parliaments. These difficulties can be summarized by the following dilemma: either the party system as presently operative is the only way in which such government can be implemented, or there is some other way of securing genuinely representative government. In the first alternative, there is a genuine incompatibility between the corporative principle of social organization and the democratic principle of representative government. In which case, one may be faced with the choice between a corporative state without democratic, that is, representative government, and individualistic democracy retaining representative processes. In the second alternative, it will be possible for democracy to come to its full fruition in a harmonious union of social and political principles that are essentially democratic. d. If we are to avoid alternatives which offer us choices between evils, we must try to invent a workable substitute for the present type of representative government with its dependence on the system of permanent party organizations. Those who claim that parties are indispensable are merely confessing that they cannot imagine the institutions which will transform representative government and make it appropriate for the organic democracy of the corporative order. Those who call for the abolition of parties or speak of their transformation under a different sort of parliamentary regime than now exists will be regarded as utopian rather than practical politicians until they can draft the constitutional provisions for bringing the change about.
Footnotes: 20. Vd. James Bryce, Modern Democracies, London, 1921; A. Lawrence Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston, 1896; H. Finer, The Theory and Practice of Modern Governments, London, 1932; A. N. Holcombe, The New Party Politics, New York, 1933; M. Ostrogorskii, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, New York, 1922. 21. Burke defined a party as "a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they all agreed;" and Bagehot declared that "party organization is the vital principle of representative government." 22. H. Simons, "Parliamentarism," in Political and Economic Democracy: p. 202. 23. Vd. A. Feiler, "Democracy by Class and Occupational Representations," and M. Ascoli, "Political Parties," in Political and Economic Democracy. Professor Ascoli's article is the most original defense of the party system in terms of the double function of parties to link society and state and also to maintain a certain distance between them. Vd. op. cit., p. 210. 24. Vd. Hsiao, Political Pluralism, esp. pp. 58-90, 115-125; A. Feiler, "Democracy by Class and Occupational Representation" in Political and Economic Democracy; G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory, London, 1920; H. J. Laski and others, The Development of the Representative System in our Times, Lausanne, 1928. 25. Vd. F. W. Coker and C. C. Rodee, article on Representation in the Social Science Encyclopedia, Vol. V, pp. 314-315; A. Feiler, op. cit., p. 184; H. Simons, op. cit., p. 195; Hsiao, op. cit., pp. 82-90. 26. Op. cit., p. 188. Vd. also pp. 186-7. The arguments for the ultimate supremacy of the political regime operate alike against the notion of purely vocational representation advanced by the guild socialists, and against the Marxist hope for the withering away of the state. Cf. Note 9 supra. 27. The views here cited were expressed in a lecture an Democracy and Authority delivered at the University of Chicago in October, 1938, and not yet published. For M. Maritain's espousal of political pluralism, vd. Humanisme Intégral, pp. 175 ff; Freedom in the Modern World, pp. 55 ff. 28. Vd. James Madison's arguments for a large plurality of parties in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers. It is not democracy, however, which Mr. Madison wishes to save. He argues that the causes of party oppositions cannot be removed; that, at best, relief can be obtained by mitigating their effects. He fears, most of all, the mob-like action of the multitude. Hence he seeks a plurification of parties to protect the ruling oligarchy from being submerged by a popular majority. Washington's counsel against parties, -- as essentially factious, -- in his Farewell Address appears, in contrast, to spring from a genuine concern for the common good. 29. If there is a just cause of action against the iniquities of the capitalistic economy, the communist "party" is justified as a permanent organization devoted to promoting this cause by revolutionary measures but not otherwise. This "party," in so far as it employs revolutionary tactics, does not operate as a medium of representative government, and hence is not a party, in the primary sense of that word. In so far as the communists support candidates for elective offices, "the party" functions as an ordinary party. The arguments against parties apply to communism only in the latter case. 30. It may be objected that as lawyers perform the function of serving the ends of justifiable litigation, so parties can perform the function of serving the ends of political controversy. But lawyers are not permanently associated with one set of clients, prosecuting or defending a single line of action; or, if they are, they are open to suspicion of serving the litigant in preference to the law. Their professional status has been subordinated to the partisan interests of their clients, in which they may even share. Therefore, this analogy permits the conclusion that parties can be permanently organized to perform a recognized political function, namely, facilitating debate, but only on the condition that they perform that function and do not become involved in the activities of government itself through the partisan occupation of public offices. This argument does not, therefore, justify the permanence of parties as they now exist and function. And it is certainly a question whether a party, thus reduced to the office of a debating society, could receive that name univocally with parties as they now exist. 31. Another way of seeing that parties are essentially perverse, -- that there cannot be parties to the common good, -- is in terms of unity as an essential note of the common good. The community has only so much being as it has unity, and its goodness is proportionate thereto. But parties are essentially divisive in their operation. They fractionalize rather than integrate. It should be added that the unity which constitutes the common good is not a simply unity. That is the error of the totalitarianisms seeking, as they do, to wipe out all differences by an enforced homogeneity. That is the error of one-party-rule as a cure for the defects of the party system. No, the unity of the state is complex and must be achieved by the organization of differences and not by their annihilation. "Is it not obvious," says Aristotle, "that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, since the nature of a state is to be a plurality" (Politics, II, 2, 1261a 17-9). Cf. ibid., II, 5, 1263b 30-38. But it does not follow that the pluralistic unity of the state requires a plurality of political parties. Just as one-party-rule tends toward a false unity, so the system of parties in opposition tends to create, not an organic heterogeneity, but divisions which thrive for their own sake and hence a false plurality. For the dissenting opinion of Professor Ascoli, see his article on "Political Parties" in Political and Economic Democracy. 32. Vd. R. Michels, Political Parties, a Sociological Study of Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, New York, 1915. 33. F. A. Hermens, "The Trojan Horse of Democracy" in Social Research, Nov., 1938: pp. 379-423. 34. Vd. Dom Virgil Michel, The Theory of State, St. Paul, 1936: pp.21-24. 35. The phrase "corporative state" is here used to refer to a pluralistic society with a corporative economy. It must not be understood as denying the supremacy or the unity of the political regime over the plurality of vocations operating on the economic level. Some writers, such as Feiler, prefer to speak of functional democracy; others, as Maritain, speak of organic democracy; and still others, such as Hsiao insist that corporative pluralism on the economic plane requires political monism. What is generally agreed on throughout, except by such extremists in pluralism as Laski and Cole, is that a truly pluralistic conception of the state as an order of corporations or vocations does not, in fact cannot, dispense with the supreme unity of political government, the government of men, not things. Fascism caricatures the corporative order, on the one hand, by assimilating the corporations into the governmental bureaucracy, instead of regulating them as quasi-autonomous functions; and socialism, on the other hand, goes to the opposite extreme of an unregulated plurality of economic functions, the corporations being vested with the autonomy of the state which has withered away. (Laski admits that his notion of a functional society is quasi-Marxian. Vd. Social Science Encyclopedia, Vol. V. pp. 83-84.) 37. The emphasis throughout this paper has been upon the role of analogy in political science. If the political philosophy of the ancients is inadequate in principle for solving modem problems, it is nevertheless rich in analogies which, if properly seen, may help us to invent new institutions or adapt old ones. To this end, we must avoid the stultifying error of using basic political terms as if they were univocal.
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