understanding that diVerence will never come together into a single coherent
unity, as the philosophical absolutists desired. According to James, the plur-
alist view ‘‘is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form
at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of
it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a
disruptive form of reality, theeach-formis logically as acceptable and empir-
ically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the
self-evident thing’’ (James 1976 [ 1912 ], 14 – 15 ). Incommensurability—of val-
ues, visions, and reality itself—was central to James’ explication of pluralism;
he simply wanted philosophy to recognize and embrace the real world of
diVerence and disunity.
Early political pluralists such as Arthur Bentley ( 1908 ), Ernest Barker ( 1957
[ 1915 ]), Harold Laski ( 1917 , 1921 ), and Mary Parker Follett ( 1918 ) were united
against absolutist unity on both philosophical and political grounds. While
often basing their philosophical justiWcation for pluralist concerns on James,
their target was the overriding concern of political theorists with the singular
sovereignty and unity of the state. ‘‘What the Absolute is to metaphysics, that is
the state to political theory’’ (Laski 1917 , 6 ). While Laski insisted that political
theory come to grips with the ‘‘plurality of reals’’ and accept that ‘‘the parts are as
real and as self-suYcient as the whole’’ ( 1917 , 9 ), Follett ( 1918 , 291 ) insisted that
‘‘[l]ife is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity. Politics must be shaped
for that.’’ A focus on unity, in particular the uniWed state, they argued, came only
at the expense of the diversity of individual and group experiences. These early
pluralists argued for this plurality of experiences, manifest in groups in civil
society, as the center of political life—and they used that diversity of group
experiences to break the monopoly of the state in political theorizing.
The acknowledgment of plurality, diVerence, and incommensurability in
values and experiences led directly to pluralist attempts to redesign political
institutions that recognized diVerence in civil society and avoided uniWed
singularity at the level of the state. As Hirst ( 1989 , 3 ) has written, pluralism
was about a ‘‘critique of state structure and of the basis of the authority of the
state.’’ It challenged the idea of unlimited sovereignty and the unitary cen-
tralized state, and argued that it was unrealistic and intolerable to have no
layer of autonomy, authority, and sovereignty between individual citizens and
the singular state. 1 While this early generation of pluralists may have been
1 Hirst attributes this position only to the English pluralists, but he unfairly compares the early
English pluralists with the later, postwar Americans. There were, however, American pluralists, such as
Follett, making similar claims at the time.
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