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nostrums to bemused elected officials and senior managers alike.

English political pluralist thinking anticipated these dangers and argued that the only solution to pathological minorities’ rule and to creeping bureaucratization was to change the form of the State. Proudhon, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, argued that the contest for sovereign power between the newly enfran-chised masses and the bourgeois strata must lead to an unstable and oscillating contest, but in which the two forces adopted para-doxical political positions. Proudhon argued that all govemment involves a balance between liberty and authority, and that ideo-logically the masses are the advocates of freedom and the estab-lished strata the defenders of order. However, in the course of their political conflict the masses supported strong rulers who would centralize the State and impose their will, mass political participation led to plebiscitarian leader democracy, whilst the bourgeoisie sought the liberał defence of the private sphere and hence of rights to property.

In The Principle of Federation (1863) Proudhon proposed a radically decentralized State that would avoid these conflicts for concentrated power. Proudhon’s scheme is not for anarchy, but for a loose confederal State in which communes and counties would retain the basie political powers and would cede less power to ‘higher’ bodies. The higher bodies would be limited by existing only on the basis of specific contractual relations with the basie communities, and being subject to the assent of the delegates of those communities to any policy. The federal public power would neither possess unlimited legislative sovereignty, nor would it be an administrative machinę. It would have no courts and no stand-ing army, rather it would exist merely to link the communities and to provide a means of dealing with particular problems by the decision of delegates from the communes. Proudhon’s federation is quite unlike Marx’s commune State in which legislative and executive power are fused. Proudhon envisages a decentralized economy based upon contractural relations between free in-dividuals, not the dictatorship of the proletariat to impose social-ism through class war. As is so often the case with Proudhon, his arguments against the centralized administrative State are morę developed than his own institutional proposals. His federation is a sort of super Swiss Confederation that compliments a decentralized mutualist economy.