Re: Dreams of England: civilisation gained... and lost

Oh but there is. You see, people quickly realise that they have more to gain from cooperation than competition. Workers form unions, businesses realise that unlimited price competition will only drive down their profits, everywhere groups come together to advance their interests, drawn together in trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. And this is the normal state of healthy human society. In a pluralist society, these groups then negotiate and compromise, and a public good emerges from this process. The process is bottom-up rather than top-down, and the state's role is more to hold the ring. Americans are brought up to believe that their peculiar set-up is the model for all human society, but this is just the solipsism of the imperial power. Hence, all the pseudoscientific Social Darwinist guff about everyone being out to dominate and destroy everyone else and suchlike, as though this is the inevitable result of human association. I do understand that you yanks can't help it, but still. In an organic society, competition, including market competition, exists, but it is confined to those areas where it is not socially destructive; so in order to get people to compete in every area of economic life, one must first suppress cooperation, erode trust, and dissolve solidarity. Look at the way Thatcher dealt with the unions, with the miners, for example. Does this strike you as voluntaristic, as simply removing obstacles to what people wanted to do anyway? No, this was Thatcher's class war, labour had to be crushed, the "free market" imposed, and in order to accomplish this, the state had to become increasingly centralised, coercive, and authoritarian. This exchange is now operating on a high level of political theory, and I shall not extend this thread further because I don't think that either of us are likely to persuade the other about anything this fundamental. For anyone interested in Pluralist theory I would recommend The Pluralist Theory of the State (Routledge, 1993), edited by Paul Hirst, who has also supplied a very illuminating introduction.