lawlessness and corruption. Clearly, this department of life is in fundamental
antagonism with the sphere of autonomy as expressed in the market. On
account of that antagonism, this department of life forebears to be ambitious
of the material prizes of that sphere, without unnecessarily sacrificing any
corporeal satisfactions. As it has no truck with that sphere’s justifying premise
of self-determination, it is consequently acquiescent to the rule of‘time and
chance’.
Not surprisingly, political expressions of fraternity have appeared under the
banner of‘socialism’. But, for all the company it keeps with philosophers of
brotherhood, the province in no way amounts to some ethic of indefinitely
diffuse sociality; to be everyone’s ally is to be no one’s ally; and fraternity to
some ends in enmity to others—and, as sociologists repeatedly stress, fans the
flames of partisanship, sectarianism, and racism.‘Community’becomes tribe;
cooperation is collusion; the seemingly social ends in the truly anti-social.
For‘fraternity’may be read‘mateship’, and this realm looms so large in the
definition of Australianness it might seem to explain all of the Australian
difference. It can certainly explain the permeation of life by the state: a
sense of solidarity goes some distance to solving the‘collective action prob-
lem’of any group (Olson 1965), and such a solution will spawn in its wake the
creations of law to advance that group. Whether it issues in an extensive ethos
of equality—let alone equalizing policies—is not so clear: every fraternity has
boundaries, and dispenses disregard, contempt, and even oppression towards
those beyond them. Yet the fact that a fraternity will have boundaries doesn’t
reduce its strength within these boundaries.
The fact and import of fraternity seems so obvious that the brilliant theorists
of fraternity, Russel Ward (1914–1995) and Louis Hartz (1919–1986), took its
significance for granted, and instead devoted their energies to explaining its
strength.
3.2.1Russel Ward
In theAustralian LegendWard (1958) unhesitatingly traced one source of the
strength of fraternity to Australia’s convict population. They constituted a
ready-made‘compulsory fraternity’, which, in Ward’s telling, grew old educat-
ing, by example and instruction, the freeborn out of any bourgeois notions.^11
But thiscontention is dubious.Convicts under‘tickets ofleave’(or parole)were
notoriously shunning of the free (Harris [1847] 1953, p. 87; Smith 2010). And
on the expiration of their sentence they appear not have formed the proper-
tyless throng of Ward’s perception. The telling fact is that most convicts
(^11) A common conservative complaint: Martineau (1869, p. 67).
William O. Coleman