134 Stories of Cbange
tionism. Here is Waltzer's American 'democratic socialist' alternative:
politics can be opened up. rates of participation significantly increased,
decision-making really shared, without a full scale attack on private life
and liberal values, without a religious revival or a cultural revolution.
What is necessary is an expansion of the public sphere. I don 't mean by
that the growing of state power - which will come anyway, for a strong
state is the necessary and natural antidote to liberal disintegration -
but a new politicising of the state, a devolution of state power into the
hands of ordinary citizens.29
This is an appealing ideal of community - though its vision of a
strong state which simultaneously allows power to devolve to
ordinary citizens, raises some familiar problems.
Public and private domains It is the contrast between the public
and private sphere, though, which leads to the second of my contradictions
in minimum statism. What does it mean to call for the
modern state to reduce its 'public' reach and interfere less in the
private?
In the classic political philosophies of Western democracies, the
public/private distinction appears to be clear. The state is seen as
creating and managing the public sphere and the emergence of the
idea of civil society strongly depends on the separation of politics
from private and social life. 3 0 In its classic nineteenth-century
form, the liberal democratic state was liberal in the sense of being
limited: a public device to protect and foster individual liberry
based on private property. The notion of a self-regulating market
which state power merely protects, is a model for the limited role
of the state elsewhere. The private sphere is also to be protected:
the family, and even the school are merely intermediary agencies,
'buffers' between the public and the private.
This vision, with its dual insistence on the limitations of state
power and the separation between public and private, is invariably
contrasted with totalitarianism or fascism. Here, the ideological
function of the state is precisely to unify public and private. The
nightmare of fascism, and of all science-fiction dystopias, is the
total fusion of the public and private - the child informing on
his parents. 'A functioning police state,' Dr. Benway reminds us,
'needs no police.'3! This is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Back to reality. Whether the modern bourgeois state ever achieved
either strict limitation or radical separation of public and private is
another matter. For at least this century, economic and social