not overtly, to disclaim responsibility for the subsequent decisions arrived at. A
semblance of collective responsibility is needed, however, as long as a cabinet
wants to rely on tight party discipline in parliamentary votes. It is clearly absurd
to discipline a back-bench MP for voting against a government policy if several
members of that government are publicly known to oppose it.
Similarly, by the late 1970s the doctrine of collective responsibility had been
modified by the willingness of cabinets to accept defeats on legislative measures
in the House of Commons without feeling obliged to resign; such defeats were
now assumed not to be votes of noconfidencein the government as a whole.
Collectivism
Collectivism can be, and often has been, given a complicated theoretical
meaning or meanings, but its normal use today is rather simple. Theoretically,
and the main work comes from the tradition ofanarchism, a collective is any
group of co-operating individuals who may produce or own goods together,
but which does not exercise coercive force on its members, and thus is not a
state or political system. Such voluntary associations are not, however, just
groups of individuals who retain their own shares and are tied by no bonds
other than individual self-interest, for collectivism is used as a theoretical
counter to rational individualism, as well as against statism or state socialism.
In practice collectivism has tended to take a much weaker meaning, so that a
society is collectivist if it departs in any important way at all from alaissez-
faireliberalism in terms of duties, obligations, property rights and economic
management. Under this weak sense it is common to describe Britain as a
collectivist society, or at least as having collectivist tendencies, since the mixed
economy andwelfare stateinvolve an acceptance of collective responsibilities
and rights of the individual against the collectivity (for welfare) which are,
nevertheless, not sensibly characterized as socialist. In some ways the notion of
‘the collectivity’ is useful in political discourse, because we need a way of
referring to the sum of the members of a society, against whom one may wish
to assert a right, or to whom one may wish to claim a duty lies, without
wishing to involve the notion of the state. As ‘society’ itself is an abstraction
clearly not capable of rights and obligations, the idea of the ‘collective’ can play
an analytic role.
Collectivization
Collectivization refers to the wholesale and drastic reorganization of the
agricultural sector of Soviet society carried out principally byStalinshortly
after the death ofLenin, at the Communist Party conference of 1923, though
much of it was not achieved until he launched his series of five-year plans in
Collectivization