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Associative Principles and Democratic Reform 27

and to respect the degree of autonomy necessary to the function of those discrete units.

That art of govemment is never morę needed than at present, sińce with the relative decline of the nation State, the ‘appropriate’ distribution of power between different levels of administration is both complex and mutable. It is elear that an explicit theory of how this might be accomplished is now needed. For example, the European Community is seeking to find an adequate distribution of functions between federal, national and regional levels. It has used the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity as one of its means of doing so, emphasizing that a function should be per-formed at the lowest level consistent with competent administration. There is a strong interest in decentralization across the political spectrum: from conservatives who genuinely want to roli back the State in the interests of greater liberty, rather than to make an easy profit out of privatization; on the part of greens who want a less hierarchical and centralized, and therefore less en-vironmentally destructive, economic system; and from the prag-matic left who are desperately seeking some altemative to both big govemment and top-down planning. This aspiration toward decentralized power has lacked a coherent theory. As a result it is less effectively advocated, and the different parts of the old political spectrum committed to this idea are morę conscious of those things that divide them than of what they have in common. Decentralization and localism are strong and widely-shared value preferences, as responses to the remoteness and impersonality of big administrative machines, but they have tended to be dismissed because they have run counter to the apparent efficiency gains of the large-scale in organization. One must show that decentralization and de-bureaucratization can go together, that they are both possible and capable of efficiency (Rendell and Ward, 1989). There is little point in decentralizing if the result is what are still large and bureaucratically administered local authorities or, even worse, managerial quasi-governmental organizations. The pluralist theory of the State can provide the rationale for such decentralization.

Pluralism does so first by showing why centralized and concen-trated power is not efficient, in its critique of sovereignty. By sovereignty’ the English pluralists like Figgis and Laski meant that a particular political body, typically a legislature, claimed for itself