Let bowling leagues run the show

"Functional representation" supports civic engagement

Alexis de Tocqueville is ambivalent about political associations. On the one hand, they draw people “out of their own circle” to meet and work with people of ages, mindsets and socioeconomic conditions different from their own.^¹ On the other hand, they may claim to represent a majority in a political jurisdiction and compete with governments “as the legislative and executive councils of the people.”^⁠² They may also foment revolution,^⁠³ about which Tocqueville is also ambivalent.^⁠⁴

But Tocqueville on balance favors political associations. If a government disallowed political associations, such as political parties, the people would be dissuaded from forming something very different—civil associations,^⁠⁵ which “are as necessary to the American people as [political associations], and perhaps more so.”^⁠⁶ Americans form civil associations “to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes,” among “a thousand other kinds,” Tocqueville reports to his French countrymen.^⁠⁷ In a democracy, these civil associations lift an impossible burden from the government, which could never “carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association.” Without associating, Americans would require governmental assistance for “even the commonest necessaries of life.”^⁠⁸ Government would grow uncontrollably.

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In order to keep the size, undertakings, and inefficiencies of its governments from swelling, Americans must be schooled in this principle of association so they’ll participate in civil associations. That’s where political associations come in. They encourage participation in these civil associations and train citizens in “the general theory of association.”^⁠⁹ How would political associations encourage participation in civil associations? Political associations are usually large and concern themselves with “important affairs” that draw adherents, Tocqueville believes:

In politics men combine for great undertakings; and the use they make of the principle of association in important affairs practically teaches them that it is their interest to help each other in those of less moment.^⁠¹⁰

Civil associations, usually of “less moment,” are often faced with a tough sell:

In civil life it seldom happens that any one interest draws a very large number of men to act in concert; much skill is required to bring such an interest into existence^⁠ . . .¹¹

The experience of political associations encourages and teaches those in civil associations, which are as difficult to start and maintain as they are necessary for limited government and for public freedom.

Since Tocqueville’s time, though, civil associations—unless one includes large (indeed, often global) corporations in the category of civil associations—have languished, the size and undertakings of governments have swelled, and citizens have mostly isolated themselves from public life. (Today, we generally use the term “civic associations” to refer to what Tocqueville referred to as “civil associations,” so henceforth I’ll use “civic associations,” too.)

This self-isolation gained national attention with the publication of Robert D. Putnam’s bestselling 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In addition, Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis in 2024 created the documentary movie Join or Die, which chronicles Putnam’s research and field studies. With interviews and its own, supplemental research, Join or Die, which is now available for streaming on Netflix, also amplifies Putnam’s claim of policy suggested by the movie’s title: to help save democracy and to become a happier, more civil society, we should get involved in civic associations.

Tocqueville’s thesis seems to modify Putnam’s thesis just a little: to help keep government decentralized, we should get involved in civic associations. But Tocqueville’s thesis requires Tocqueville’s first step, which seems to find in Putnam’s thesis a case of reverse causation. According to Tocqueville, to save civic associational life, we should get involved in politics—specifically in political associations.

A hundred years ago, the English pluralists seemed to accept Tocqueville’s chain of causation from political life to civic associational life. But this political movement went further than Tocqueville’s vision for increasing involvement in political associations in America’s one-person-one-vote representative government as a means of fostering civic life. The English pluralists argued that to save civic life—and to save democracy, too—civic associations should directly comprise much of national government.

To revive civic life, the United States should consider amending its Constitution by adopting the English pluralists’ proposals. These amendments would also help to revive the Constitution’s balance of powers by eliminating America’s growing executive sovereignty.

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English pluralism itself revives the associational life of the Middle Ages.^⁠ The English pluralists believe that the British Parliament’s modern sovereignty over churches, unions, and other associations is far less desirable than the “enormous development of corporate life in the Middle Ages, guilds of every kind, and the whole notion of the system of estates in the body politic,” according to John Neville Figgis, an English pluralist and an Anglican monk and priest.^⁠¹²

It’s no accident that the Middle Ages’ rich associational life came in the context of non-sovereign realms. States, particularly those with national assemblies that claim to represent “the people’s sovereign power contained a real threat to autonomous associations,” according to Paul Q. Hirst, because “the independent life of such associations challenges the principle of sovereignty.” English pluralists offer the same challenge to sovereignty.¹³

English pluralists challenge state sovereignty by challenging the widely unexamined notion of general representation. G. D. H. Cole, during his relatively short stint as an English pluralist, distinguished between the general representation found in most centralized governments and the functional and partial representation found in associations. He found that the “functional representation” practiced by associations made more sense than the theory of general representation that undergirds representative governments today:

It is impossible to represent human beings as selves or centres of consciousness; it is quite possible to represent . . . so much of human beings as they themselves put into associated effort for a specific purpose.¹⁴

True representatives, then, don’t represent people “but definite and particular purposes common to a number of persons.”¹⁵

At first glance, Cole’s understanding of functional representation seems to prioritize the association over the individual. However, it honors the individual by limiting individuals’ representatives to individuals’ specific interests and expertise. Hirst summarizes Cole’s take on the individual’s ability to be adequately represented in government:

Cole is the relentless opponent of any narrowly reductive and utilitarian individualism, but the whole ethical and analytic basis of his social theory is an exalted conception of the individual. Associations are necessarily specific to certain purposes, but “[e]very individual is in his nature universal . . .”¹⁶

This understanding of individualism and representation undermines the British Parliament’s claim to sovereignty and accounts for most modern legislatures’ reliance on lobbyists and degeneration into corruption:

Parliament professes to represent all the citizens in all things, and therefore as a rule represents none of them in anything. . . . It is, therefore, peculiarly subject to corrupt, and especially to plutocratic, influences, and does everything badly, because it is not chosen to do any definitive thing well.¹⁷

Cole purports to have found the root of modern representative democracies’ dysfunction. Our “dysfunction” is by design: our democracies aren’t organized around “the principle of function.” Cole, like Tocqueville before him, notes that we function in society through our interests, our vocations, and our care for our particular corner of the earth. Our representatives, Cole says, should represent the parts of us that associate around these functions and not represent us as individuals.

Cole would replace Parliament with “a system of co-ordinated functional representative bodies.” In Cole’s system, each body of functional representatives—those drawn from bowling leagues and those drawn from steelworkers’ unions, for instance—would have its own executive and legislative powers, breaking up the state’s monopoly in those areas. In this respect, these representative bodies would reflect the powers exercised by specific associations, which act as direct democracies, finding ways to decide what to do (the legislative power) and ways to do it (the executive power).

Consider how radically and effectively this associative rule would end sovereignty, according to Hirst, compared with most attempts at merely limiting sovereignty:

The widely canvassed measures of political reform such as proportional representation, a Bill of Rights, and a Freedom of Information Act, while desirable changes in themselves, do not fully touch the issue of centralized sovereign state power in a situation where there is no consensus as to how it shall be used. Such measures are restraints on state action rather than a change in state organization such that the state’s capacities for action are altered in a way that lessens the need for restraint.¹⁸

All of Cole’s representative bodies would have legislative and executive powers, and none of the representative bodies would exercise sovereignty. Even foreign policy—even any declarations of war—would be made by co-ordinated functional associations.

The English pluralists’ idea of associative rule resembles Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s notion of how communes would associate to form a polity’s government. The practical work of these associations and communes would legitimate them as participants in government, meeting Buber’s requirement that a community should “not be made into a principle; it, too, should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction.”^⁠¹⁹

Buber attacks the notion of one-person, one-vote representative government for a similar reason: it turns a community into an abstraction. A real community “declares itself primarily in the common and active management of what it has in common, and without this it cannot exist.” Buber’s notion of community seems to have arisen out of God’s covenant with the world’s first community of people in the Garden of Eden, a non-representational model. To Buber, “a state of practically unlimited representation” leads to “the reign of practically unlimited centralist accumulation of power” that would make such a community impossible.^⁠²⁰

But Cole’s functional representation would empower a community by conceivably giving each individual a practically unlimited involvement in democracy. By contrast, “one man, one vote,” Cole says, “is the cant of false democracy”:

The essence of functional democracy is that a man should count as many times over as there are functions in which he is interested. To count once is to count about nothing in particular . . .²¹

In this way, Cole and Buber would help solve one of Tocqueville’s dilemmas in Democracy in America. In part 1 of that work, Tocqueville celebrates representative government because it tends to “mitigate the excesses of political association”: political parties can’t claim to be majorities in a polity where everyone’s vote is counted.^⁠²² However, in part 2 of Democracy in America, published five years after part 1, Tocqueville dismisses representative government as a people’s means of choosing “their own guardians.” Each voter, Tocqueville ruefully points out, can take solace that “the people at large . . . holds the end of his chain.”^⁠²³ If Cole has his way, though, the representatives wouldn’t represent the people, of whom they would otherwise be guardians, but would represent the people’s associations in larger associations that share the same functions. As a result, each individual would be effectively represented by one or more persons who share their interests as expressed in their shared associational memberships.

Each representative also would bring their various expertise to a government of disparate associations, each with its own executive and legislative powers. As a result, America’s spirit of association, as well as its commitment to a truly representative government, would strengthen Americans’ political freedom and make its government more responsive and competent.

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How would English pluralism change the balance of powers that the American Constitution purports to achieve among its branches of government? It would, in a new way, restore American federalism to its ideal as a balance of legislative, executive, and judicial powers among different bodies.

Recall that the Constitution’s separation of powers is not a complete separation of functions. In medieval fashion, according to political theorist Samuel Huntington, the Constitution “perpetuated a fusion of functions and a division of power . . .”²⁴ Presidents, for instance, have a legislative veto. Likewise, the Supreme Court inherited “the [medieval] judicial power to declare what the law is,” but this power, Huntington says, “became the [American] mixed judicial-legislative power to tell the legislature what the law cannot be.”²⁵

Similarly, in Cole’s version of English pluralism, the separation of powers among the associations of functional associations would have a mix of functions. As I’ve described Cole’s thought, each of these larger, representative associations would have its own legislative and executive functions. This would make the judiciary the only centralized branch of government.

At the top of Cole’s organizational chart, Cole would have a “co-ordinating agency . . . a joint council or congress of the supreme bodies representing each of the main functions in society.” It would act more like a court than a legislative body:

It does not in the normal case initiate, it decides. It is not so much a legislature as a constitutional judiciary, or democratic Supreme Court of Functional Equity.^⁠²⁶

Today’s least powerful branch—the federal judiciary—would have the final say about disputes among these associations and their potentially overlapping functional domains.

This vision of Parliament’s replacement—and by extension of Congress’s and the presidency’s replacement in the United States’s federal system—is a vision of Parliament’s past, and it’s also a vision of the federal court system under the American Constitution. This history and this vision of a federal court system would help us to appreciate what many have long derided as courts’ tendency to “legislate from the bench.”

In 1910, a controversy surrounding American courts legislating from the bench was so pronounced that Charles McIlwain, an American historian and political scientist, wrote The High Court of Parliament to explain the medieval origins of the court’s legislative practice.^⁠²⁷ The idea of mixing legislation and adjudication comes from the feudal period.^⁠²⁸ Back then, the king’s Counsel, which was often called Parliament,^⁠²⁹ had three functions: “It was court of law, advisory council, and exchequer all in one.”^⁠³⁰

Part of the multiple roles of the various English courts had to do with the medieval conception of law. Legislation as we understand it today was virtually unknown in medieval England.^⁠³¹ Instead, courts were tasked with discovering and declaring existing law. The scandal in medieval times wouldn’t be that a court discovered law but that a body of men—whether termed a legislature, court, or an executive agency—would presume to legislate in the first place.

The Tudor era, which despite its earlier timeframe gives the American Constitution its notion of a balance of powers, was a time “when Parliament and King were joint organs of the commonwealth,” McIlwain says.^⁠³² It was only in response to the modern claim to sovereignty first made in England by James I, the first Stuart king, that the Long Parliament presented England with “a legislative assembly of the modern type—no longer a mere law-declaring, but a law-making machine,” McIlwain points out.^⁠³³

The civil wars between the Stuart kings and Parliament resulted in Parliament’s sovereignty in 1688, when Parliament’s gradual evolution from “high court to supreme legislature,” in Huntington’s words, was completed. From that point forward, with the English courts subordinate to a sovereign Parliament, “the supremacy of the law disappeared . . . and with it disappeared the mixture of judicial and political functions.”^⁠³⁴ In England, the courts’ mix of judicial and legislative functions was “checked by the growth in the seventeenth century of a new doctrine of parliamentary omnipotence.”^⁠³⁵

By contrast, the English pluralists, like America’s framers, advocate a kind of federalism. They wish specifically for a consociation, Luke Bretherton says,^⁠³⁶ which he defines as “a mutual fellowship between distant institutions or groups who are federated together for a common purpose.”^⁠³⁷ Federalism necessarily causes litigation and requires courts. (The United States Constitution, of course, gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction for litigation between states, jurisdiction that makes it “impossible not to feel that the Court . . . is no ordinary body,” Tocqueville says.³⁸) As Professor A. V. Dicey says, “federalism substitutes litigation for legislation.”^⁠³⁹

A true federalism achieves a balance of powers, and that balance in written constitutions involves the judicial authority ruling on constitutional matters. When we lament that American courts tend to legislate from the bench, we may be also pining after sovereignty. “Stop legislating from the bench” and “Give us a king” come from the same political impulse.

Tocqueville lauded and defended the power of America’s federal courts in maintaining a balance of powers and in keeping sovereignty at bay:

The peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the Union are vested in the hands of the [Supreme Court’s then] seven judges. Without their active co-operation the Constitution would be a dead letter: the Executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative powers; the Legislature demands their protection from the designs of the Executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against the interests of private citizens, and the conservative spirit of order against the fleeting innovations of democracy.⁴⁰

The United States Supreme Court would find its fulfillment in federalism as a separate branch of government and as an arbiter among associations and functions if the likes of bowling leagues constituted our legislative and executive authorities.

Discussion questions

1. In supporting Jefferson’s proposal to divide counties into little republics, Hannah Arendt admits that it would “spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today.” She doesn’t seem to mind, though, for reasons that may apply to English pluralism as well: “only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic.”^⁠⁴¹ Would you be concerned that both the English pluralists and Jefferson propose a direct democracy as opposed to voting, at least at the local level?

2. Think of today’s clubs, churches, and service organizations. What would they bring to a kind of consociation?^⁠⁴² How would you structure such a consociation? Would people who “care for more than their private happiness,” as Arendt puts it, but don’t want to join the Lion’s Club or the synagogue down the street, for instance, create their own associations? How might you structure the rest of the government?

3. Do you agree with G. D. H. Cole that an individual qua individual is too “universal” to be represented, and that representational government must arise from her involvement in associations and institutions, groups in which specific parts of her are engaged with a small portion of the polity? What would a representational government modeled after Cole’s thinking look like? How would it compare with representational government under the United States Constitution?

4. Do you agree with Martin Buber that a representational form of government leads to centralized power that destroys the community life it purports to serve?

5. Is representative government, as Tocqueville claims, a people’s means of choosing “their own guardians”? Does Cole offer a valid treatment for Tocqueville’s diagnosis?

6. Could English pluralism help to create a more unified federalism, one focused on healthy “vertical” relationships between local communities and their distant representatives?

7. Could English pluralism help to foster associational life?

8. Do you think with Putnam that joining civic organizations such as bowling leagues, Habitat for Humanity, and the Elks Club could help to strengthen democracy? Do you see Putnam and Cole coming at the same problem from opposite angles?

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 459.

2. Tocqueville, 160.

3. Tocqueville, 460-61.

4. Tocqueville, 448-49.

5. Tocqueville, 459-60.

6. Tocqueville, 455.

7. Tocqueville, 452.

8. Tocqueville, 453-54.

9. Tocqueville, 453-54.

10. Tocqueville, 459.

11. Tocqueville, 458.

12. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 76.

13. Paul Q. Hirst, “Introduction,” in Pluralist Theory of the State: Slected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N.Figgis, and H.J. Laski, ed. Paul Quentin Hirst (Routledge, 1993), 4.

14. Cole, Social Theory, 84.

15. Cole, 85.

16. Hirst, 31.

17. Cole, 85.

18. Hirst, 7.

19. Buber, Paths in Utopia, 134. Buber was not an English Pluralist, but his hope for a national government as a “community of communities” comes close to the English Pluralist model. 134-37.

20. Buber, 133.

21. Cole, 89-90.

22. Tocqueville, 159-60.

23. Tocqueville, 602-3.

24. Huntington, “Political Modernization,” 393.

25. Huntington, 393-94.

26. Cole, 103.

27. McIlwain, High Court of Parliament, viii-ix.

28. McIlwain, 16.

29. McIlwain, 19.

30. McIlwain, 16.

31. McIlwain, 42.

32. McIlwain, 76.

33. McIlwain, 93 (italics in the original).

34. Huntington, Political Order, 112.

35. McIlwain, viii-ix.

36. Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 235.

37. Bretherton, 6.

38. Tocqueville, 143.

39. Quoted in McIlwain, 3.

40. Tocqueville, 143.

41. Arendt, On Revolution, 271.

42. The Apple Dictionary defines “consociation” as “a political system formed by the cooperation of different, especially antagonistic, social groups on the basis of shared power.” Apple Dictionary, v. 2.3.0, s.v. “consociation.”