Associative Democracy: La "Terza Via" di Paul Q. Hirst

Between the late '80s and the mid-90s of last century Paul Q. Hirst tried to draw up a proposal for a “third way” different from the one which made the political fortune of Tony Blair. Associative Democracy isn't a systematic political theory. Rather it’s a set of institutional proposals inspired by two linked principles, pluralism and autonomy. The first part of the article analyses the pars destruens of Hirst’s work. Before the fall of the Wall Hirst stressed either the structural defects of Soviet socialism or the tendency of capitalism to centralize economic power in the hands of a few at the expense of the most. At the same time, the end of the “golden years” made the social-democratic "recipe" unsustainable and inefficient in a Western world economically less affluent, politically unstable, and socially more complex. In the face of these great changes, Hirst proposed to tackle new times using old ideas. According to the forgotten lesson of the English pluralist thought dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hirst considered association the core institution for contemporary society. Regarding the pars construens of the Associative Democracy, the author tries to critically evaluate the ways Hirst suggested combining traditional representative institutions and intermediate corporate bodies. In Hirst’s opinion, the functional and pluralistic criteria should be applied in several fields including local political decision processes, decentralized welfare services, industrial policy. It’s an appealing and problematic vision at the same time.