activity, public expenditure and taxation at a minimum, thereby maximizing
the level of private incomes. But even though there might be considerable
state intervention, even including elements of public ownership, polity and
economy are seen as separate and independent spheres of social action.
Another feature of the pluralist state is to play down the significance of
class divisions in society. Liberal democratic and pluralist assumptions about
society are that it may be disaggregated along occupational, gender, ethnic,
or religious lines, but not into classes. Class may be used as a summation of
some of those other more significant factors indicating occupation, income
and lifestyle, but class is not seen as an identity around which people form
alliances in order to compete for scarce resources politically. If a concentra-
tion of power is found, as in some undeveloped political systems, it is
assigned to particular groups or élites, such as the executive and bureaucracy
in a ‘tutelary democracy’, the military in a ‘modernizing oligarchy’, or a
dynasty in a ‘traditional oligarchy’ (Almond, 1960). But a notion of class that
involves mutual antagonism and irreconcilable economic and political inter-
ests is rejected. So there is no sense in the pluralist model of the state of
diametrically opposed interests, one gaining only if another suffers.
This view of the state, though not particularly well-articulated, was
adopted by some of the imperial powers in their attempts – often hesitant,
partial and delayed – to prepare colonies for independence. These were the
assumptions of the constitution-builders when independence seemed
inevitable and even desirable. They were also the assumptions of many
within colonial society who collaborated with the processes of constitu-
tional design. The leaders of some nationalist movements had similar views
about the nature of the state. Many had, after all, been educated in the pris-
ons and universities of the British Empire. Where they departed from it was
less in the direction of Marxism than in the direction of some indigenous
modification such as African socialism or the traditions of Indian village
communities. Nationalist leaders such as Nyerere and Gandhi harkened
back to what they regarded as a golden era preceding European intervention
and while not being so romantic as to think that the clock could be turned
back, nevertheless advocating that there were values which had been lost
and which could be retrieved to the advantage of a society that would hence-
forth be developing according to its own prescription.
Class and the post-colonial state
The pluralist view of the state has been challenged by approaches which
focused on the state as a potentially autonomous and dominant actor in the
The State in the Third World 111