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Liberals, radicals and the politics of black consciousness, 1969-1976
(1989-07-24) Rich, Paul
The period from the demise of the Liberal Party in 1968, following the introduction of the Prohibition of Political Interference Act, to the 1976 Soweto students revolt can be seen as an important transitional period in South African politics that requires re-evaluation by students of contemporary history. These years mark in particular the eclipse of a tradition of paternalistic welfare liberalism in South Africa stretching back to the inter-war years and the foundation of the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1929. At the same time they also pinpoint the re-emergence of a tradition of democratic radicalism anchored around the Freedom Charter after its initial suppression at the time of the State of Emergency in 1960 and the banning of the P.A.C. and A.N.C. These two traditions have often confused in the minds of some analysts and a recent volume of essays has effectively sought to claim most of the recent phase of liberalism in South Africa in terms of a programme of democratic participation, despite the refusal of the Liberal party to take part in the organisation behind the freedom Charter in 1955.
Liberalism and ethnicity in South African politics, 1921-1948
(1976-03) Rich, Paul
One of the main problems confronting liberal ideology in the South African context is the nature and role of group identities. This has been no small question because liberal theorists have tended to be hide-bound by a reliance on the inherent rationality of a free market that specifically excludes the role of group interests from its sphere of operations. Thus, while twentieth century liberalism has made a number of important revisions in the classical laissez-faire model of the nineteenth century, it still places a considerable emphasis on the free market sector even though, as Professor John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, this now typifies only a minority sector in western capitalist economies. It is this dependency on the free-market model, however, that restricts the liberal view of rationality to one of economics. The most rational figure in this view remains the classic homo economicus, the child of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, who buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest. The implications of this model are far-reaching in terms of social values. If the basis of society is seen to rest on free-floating individuals motivated by a high degree of psychological hedonism then the basis of society's values rests on individual ones to the neglect of the wider community. This is perhaps one reason why capitalist societies in the west have had such difficulty, for example, in regulating and controlling firms involved in spreading pollution: the traditional free-market model only assumes a relationship between buyer and seller and cannot account for a third party involved in the transaction in the form of the community. Moreover, in terms of its system of morality, liberalism relies on a general public good accruing from the actions of individuals: by some mysterious hidden hand, "public good" is assumed to emerge from "private vices". As Robert Paul Wolff has argued, liberalism is unable to make the jump, short of radical revision, from the notion of a private value to one of community. Utilitarianism, he argues, in its concern for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, rests only on private values and a development of liberalism towards the direction of interpersonal values is the only way of resolving this problem and developing a liberal morality that recognises the existence of a wider community.
Democratic theory and constitutional change in South Africa
(1990) Rich, Paul
In the last two years the debate on democracy in South Africa has reached a new intensity. The unbanning of the ANC and other opposition movements occurred at the same time as the Cold War in Europe came to an end. Countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that had for decades been ruled by totalitarian regimes began to be transformed by popular political pressure. Demands for democratic change also escalated in South Africa during the 1980s. It finally lead the South African government of F.W. De Klerk to announce in February 1990 the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and other opposition liberation movements and the release of Nelson Mandela from jail. The following year the government established the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in order to negotiate a new constitution. The pace of the changes has caught many political analysts unawares. Craig Charney has suggested that the failure of political scientists to predict the new turn of events indicated wider methodological shortcomings. Much political science analysis of South Africa in the 1980s was still dominated, Charney has argued, by a failure to see politics as an autonomous activity rather than as simply a receptacle for social groups. This often results in crude theories of the state that fail to consider it as an actor in its own right. Moreover many political scientists still have an overly-simplistic view of model building that depend more on comparisons with the metropolitan core of Europe and North American than other developing regimes in Latin American and Asia. These criticisms suggest that new approaches are needed to explain South African political changes. The role of democracy in South African politics especially is still rather poorly understood by analysts despite the fact that it has played a prominent role in political discourse since at least the 1950s. Building a democratic state and society in South Africa is now central, to the current South African political agenda, though so far little work has been done to explore this in a comparative perspective. This paper will therefore examine the state of democratic thinking in South Africa and the conditions that could lead to the creation of some form of democratic regime. In the first part, it will examine the current state of theoretical debate over what democracy is both as an ideology and as a description of a particular kind of political regime. The second part of the paper will then discuss the evolution of debate over democracy in South African politics. Finally, the third part of the paper will look at how a South African democratic transition might occur through a process of political bargaining, taking into consideration similar processes in other regimes moving out of political authoritarianism. The methodological approach of this paper is one that seeks to learn from the past both in terms of the general formulation of democratic theory and its application to South African conditions. Hitherto social analysts and historians have tended to be preoccupied with the genesis and development of different concepts in South African politics such as segregation, liberalism, apartheid and nationalism. Democracy has frequently been seen as tangential to these other doctrines despite its considerable impact on political debate. The emergence of a new international climate favourable to democratisation following the end of the Cold War offers up the opportunity for a re-evaluation of the South African past in terms of democratic ideas and values.
Apartheid and the decline of the civilisation idea: an essay on Nadine Gordimer's July's people and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the barbarians
(1983-06) Rich, Paul
White settler political ideology in South Africa has traditionally seen itself as the embodiment of some form of "civilisation" against the threatened "barbarism" of African majority rule. The term has a significance both in its Victorian imperial roots and its facility for acting as a kind of common ideological denominator binding the political discourse of both Afrikaner and English settlers into a common defence of "white civilisation". Moreover, it reflects the essentially urban nature of white South African society and thus reinforces the apartheid notion of territorial separation between the white urban race in the city areas and the rural abodes of the African majority in the ("precivilised") tribal "Homelands", though limited economic development in certain sections of these rural slums has brought urban aspects even to this originally pastoral vision. The "civilisation" idea, however extends in some respects beyond the simple assertion of white racial ideology in South Africa politics, for it has structured a fair degree of liberal political discourse in the post-war years as well. It was the hope of South African liberals in the churches, the Institute of Race Relations and the Liberal Party itself between 1953 and 1968 that a specifically non-racial "civilisation" could be created in South Africa on the basis of western political and cultural values. This view was influenced both by the perceptions of external views of South Africa politics in the years after 1948 and the equation of the Nationalists' policy of apartheid with many aspects of the Nazi "barbarism" which had been defeated in the second world war. "The rest of the world well understand", wrote the historian Arthur Keppel Jones in a pamphlet What is Destroying Civilisation in South Africa?, "as too few South Africans do, that civilisation is not defined by the colour bar" Unless, however, a shift in policy occurred to admit "non whites" into this "civilisation" then the conclusion emerged that "the verdict of history on the evanescent European civilisation in Southern Africa would be that it was a flame that flickered for only a few generations, and then became a mere historical interlude between two Dark Ages". There was thus an underlying cultural pessimism at the core of the liberal view of protecting the values of a non-racial "civilisation" in the South African context that has deepened in more recent years into one of despair. This cultural Angst has been reflected in two important recent novels by white South African writers that have pinpointed how far liberal or radical white intellectuals in this society have become cut off from the main tenets of western liberal thinking. The burden of this paper is to discuss the cultural and political significance of these two works, Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981) and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) in the context of the historical meaning of the western notion of "civilisation" and the decline of this idea in the era of apartheid ideology in modern South Africa. As the first section of this paper will show, the western "civilisation" idea has been closely linked to an historical and teleological notion of progress allied to imperial expansion since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While in many respects the apartheid conception of racial separation was the fulfillment of many of these precepts, especially in so far as it was allied to the continuation and entrenchment of capitalist economic expansion in Southern Africa, it has been accompanied by a growing loss of faith by liberal intellectuals in the continued progress and extension of western humanistic values. The second section of this paper will thus analyse this clutural Angst among South African liberals before discussing the significance of the two recent works of Gordimer and Coetzee. Novels in the South African context probably have a greater political and ideological significance than most of those written in the metropolitan societies of Western Europe and North America, for the distinction between artistic imagination and political activity is so much thinner.4 To the degree, therefore, that many modern novels can be seen as an extension of more common political and ideological discourse, even if it be that of some form of liberal intellectual salon culture, then they throw some light on the ideological climate of the society concerned. The main test of this, though, must be historical and the centreal thrust of this paper will be to see modern novel writing in South Africa in terms of a set of ideas about both progress and "civilisation" that have become sharply undermined in South Africa's mounting political and ideological crisis of legitimacy.
The Agrarian counter-revolution in the Transvaal and the origins of segregation: 1902-1913
(1975-06) Rich, Paul
This paper seeks to examine the circumstances surrounding the rise of a segregationist ideology in South Africa during the decade after the Boer War, culminating in the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. In tracing this development, the approach is essentially one of establishing a relationship between the underlying structures that made segregation materially possible and the cleavages within the white political system that increasingly drove the polity towards an ideology of segregation.

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