Associations and groups that are substantial enough to fulfill needs for belonging and meaning, powerful enough to check the power of the state or to organize democratic life, or institutionally complete enough to offer authoritative norm-generation for their members, are also substantial, powerful, and authoritative enough to potentially threaten the freedom of their members. That is, it is not just an unfortunate accident that groups come with features that, from a liberal perspective, are both good and bad.
The point is partly an intergenerational one. Recall from the previous chapter the idea that inequalities of outcomes in one generation becomes inequalities of opportunity in the next and its analog: free associations in one generation become inherited ways of life in the next. This is a necessary truth; children are born into particular times and places and social worlds that have been shaped by the choices their parents have made. This does not simply mean that the parents were free and the children were not; it was also true of the parents that they were born into particular times and places and social worlds. If the parents had some freedom to reshape their worlds in partially original ways, to join or form groups into which they were not born, then the children also have some such freedom. But there could be a narrowing over time; parents can join groups or adopt ways of life that leave their children with fewer choices than they themselves had.
But the point is only partly intergenerational. It is, more simply, a point about power, even within one generation. Robert Michels taught us that ‘who says organization, says oligarchy’. That could suffice as a statement of the problem, but I propose to instead frame it as: whoever says authority, says power – and whoever says organization, says authority.
Jacob Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom, p. 71