Liberalism and ethnicity in South African politics, 1921–1948

Abstract

in the form of the community (3). Moreover, in terms of its -2 -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 (4). The most serious charge, then, against the liberal ideology in the twentieth century is that it has singularly failed to recognise the salience of group interests. This has had, in turn, serious implications for liberals in South Africa. Racial ideology, for example, has been explained away by liberals as autonomous to the rationality of the free-market and dysfunctional for the long-run maintenance of the economic system. In its most extreme form, this can be seen in Michael O'Dowd's "stages of v growth" theory which assumes that South Africa, through the logic of the free market, will emerge as a liberal-democracy by around 1980 (5). But similar assumptions are to be seen in a number of other works written in the liberal tradition. In the OxfordHistory of South Africa, for example, there has been an implicit assumption in a number of chapters, especially those by Francis Wilson and David Welsh (6), that the inherent rationality of the urbanisation process in the twentieth century has been distorted by the irrational nature of racial ideology. What has been -3 -overlooked is the possibility that the two may have been mutually re-inforcing and that urbanisation and industrialisation may have been actually promoted by an ideology of racial separatism.What liberalism in South Africa has ignored, therefore, is that the overall functioning of the economic system can be seen as rational, despite the continued prevalence of a racial ideology* *"'As Ruan Maud has argued, the economic-determinist model of the liberals ignores "the crucial intervening cultural variable which leads people from dissimilar backgrounds to interpret natural and social reality in a variety of different ways" (7) and that What is important in this process is that the rise of Afrikaner nationalism was not an atavistic and backward looking movement, rely-ing sol^el£ oil th'« myth, of the two Boer Republics, but was verymuch concerned with the economic regeneration of the Afrikaner within the new urban context. This concern with modernisation in turn explains the rise of the apartheid ideology by the middle 1940s•""'as the means by which Afrikaner nationalists could apply their ethnic model to the South African economic system.. Thus, instead of seeing apartheid, after Pierre van den Berghe, as an "anachronisti...