Hacker's Liberal Democracy and Social Control: A Critique

The essence of Hacker's construction is the theory of the ruling class. Immediately, one thinks of Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, and several Americans who have espoused, in one form or another, oligarchic doctrines. What most sharply distinguishes Hacker from most theorists of this persuasion is the absence of presuppositions of historical inevitability. Seeking only to describe sequences and relations of the past and present, he makes no claims of omniscience, of knowing what the social process must unfold. Neither is his theory normative.Yet, apart from details and variations, there is a crucial framework of meaning which discloses Hacker's close affinity with the essence of conventional oligarchic doctrines: the few rule, the many simply obey; the governors, in substance if not in form, are free from compulsion to answer to the governed. Historically, and indeed currently, Hacker asserts, genuine power has been and is the exclusive or, at least, the primary possession of a privileged few. True, the composition and foundation of the governing class have changed, but this change, he continues, did not bring in its wake a widening or deepening of the structure of power in American culture. It merely means the substitution of one set of masters or controllers for another. After all, a monopoly of power is a monopoly, whether its source be deference or manipulation. Both, he avers, “permit a few men to rule many men.” Neither system of power allows the personnel and the general policies of government to be the product of voluntary and active consent. In both contexts, the ruled, not the rulers, are the object of control. “Both deference and manipulation are similar in that they are control.” Such, then, is Hacker's relation to the essence of oligarchic thought. What can be said of the validity of his formulation?