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Associative Principles and Democratic Reform 17

seen as a substitute for representative democracy, but as a supple-ment to it. Emile Durkheim’s work is especially relevant in this respect, not least because he redefined and extended what democracy was. In his The Division of Labour in Society (1964), published in 1893, he offered a non-socialist critiąue of the laissez faire principles of economic liberalism, arguing that the idea of a socially-disembedded, purely economic market mechanism was unsustainable. Durkheim rejected socialism as giving all power to the state, and argued that the economy could be regulated by less draconian means. In his Lectures on Civic Morals (collected in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1957)) he argued for corporatist representation as a new form of democratic com-munication between the state and the key professional groups in the economy.

Associationalism never congealed to form a coherent ideology.

It never became a political movement capable of exercising power. It did not lack powerful ideas, but they madę little head-way against the notions that centralization and the large-scale are the most efficient and historically inevitable ways of organizing social relations. Marx has much to answer for in this respect. Maxists, like other collectivists and unlike most associational-ists, were successful because they realized the need to compete for, and capture, state power by parliamentary or revolutionary means.

Imagine, however, that Marx and Proudhon had had a better relationship in Paris in the early 1840s, that Marx had accepted that comprehensive state collectivism must ruin liberty and that Proudhon had accepted greater pragmatism about the need to control political power. Or imagine that Beatrice Webb had been ag convinced by J.N. Figgis of the virtues of the pluralist state. In that © case socialists might have tried to build their socialism in civil society, whilst ensuring, through seeking politically appropriate III representation, a state at least not hostile to this enterprise. Such a socialism would have been based on mutual welfare through organizations like the Friendly Societies, on the organization of 5|    distribution through non-profitmaking Stores like those of the

d d    English Cooperative Movement, and on the organization of pro-

[§j duction either through worker-owned cooperatives or labour-capital partnerships, in which workers took a part of their income through eąuity.