potlatch

who will defend liberalism?

People will always round on 'liberalism' (in the European, not American, sense of the word) at times of perceived crisis. Opponents of liberalism will even seek to engineer crises in order to attack it. New Labour was blessed with one of those rare periods of human history, when military conflict is minimal and wealth seems to grow almost naturally. In response, Tony Blair and John Reid invented a fantasy of ubiquitous Arab terror, so as to advance their instinctive political assault on liberalism. This had the no-doubt-anticipated consequence of re-framing 'liberals' as a special interest group, obsessed with human rights law, magna carta, old men in grey wigs and Europe. Even the Liberal Democrats no longer want anything to do with that kind of liberalism.

That those in the executive branch of government like to hurl rocks at the judicial branch is not so surprising. Even in the US, Presidents simply have to refer to something as a 'war' (on terror, on drugs) to know that they are then virtually free from judicial interference. But it bothers me when the Left starts to beat up on liberalism. The leftwing New Statesman's editorial this week argues that "with its emphasis on abstract individualism, liberalism, the great driver of social emancipation and economic prosperity, now feels inadequate to this new age of insecurity." This repeats the line espoused by Blue Labour and Red Toryism, that both the 'social liberalism' of the 1960s and the 'economic liberalism' of the 1980s have now reached their limit, and some sort of more substantive, collectivist communitarianism is needed.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own definition of 'liberalism'. But allow me to offer my own interpretation of the term, and question what on earth the Left would be left with, if it became genuinely 'post-liberal', as for instance the think tank Demos has been recently proposing. Liberalism doesn't favour 'abstract individualism', because it doesn't want to get entangled in culture or history. What it favours is identifying a common and stable basis on which to judge people, actions, institutions and economic distributions, that is robust enough to survive inspite of cultural or historical contingency.

This is, admittedly, partly a search for principles, giving it a necessarily philosophical and discursive dimension. Certain ideas are at work, especially regarding what it means to be a human being. But this is an open philosophical or anthropological debate. 'Deontological' liberals, such as Kant and Rawls, view humans as reasoning creatures. But there are more materialist answers to this question, including those provided by Marxists, which represent human beings as productive creatures. Hayek, if he believed anything at all about humanity, probably believed that we're all equally prone to be wrong about the world. There is no reason whatsoever why liberal debates about common humanness couldn't now be entered by neuroscientists or neo-Darwinists, if they weren't so busy re-categorising details of the pope's religious affiliation or the sylvanian geography of bear's toilet habits.

But it is never only about principles. It is also about the material, technical and institutional means by which equal judgement on people is to be enacted. For neoliberals, this is some notion of price (often mutating into an audit of competitive performance). As Stuart White's fascinating article, Revolutionary Liberalism, details, liberals of the early 20th century saw worker ownership and profit-sharing as the institutional basis on which to ensure individuals could attain equality in the public and political realm. There is a long tradition of liberal socialism, now exemplified by people such as Robin Blackburn and Erik Olin Wright, who would view capitalism as the main enemy of liberalism.

There are multiple philosophical liberalisms, and even more technical or practical manifestations of liberalism. All that they essentially share is a vain Enlightenment hope, that there might be some basis on which to govern people, that does not discriminate according to contingency. Or rather, to flip that round, they are explicit about which element of contingency they are using as the basis for discrimination. For judges, it is the contingent fact that one is guilty of something. For neoliberals, it is the contingent fact of being able to pay for something. For republican liberals, it is the contingent fact of being a skilled orator. And so on. But there must be a criterion, it must be named in advance, and there must be some publicity surrounding how it is employed. That is all liberalism necessarily means.

Abandon this in favour of what? I can at least understand the catholic theological critique of liberalism, that underpins John Milbank's theological critique of modernity, Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, possibly John Cruddas's Blue Labourism, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor's communitarianism. The basis for political judgement ceases to be purely institutional and philosophical, and attains an element of divinity. Ordinary people may not understand how judgement is meted out, but they can believe that it is good nevertheless. But what do we secularists have? There are some answers to this question, and some of them are hideous.

The other question I would put to 'post-liberals' is this. Why do you automatically assume that liberalism is a watchword for elitism, technocracy and establishment, whereas post-liberalism will usher in community, organic relations and rekindled tradition? Isn't that the same lie that Karl Rove based George W Bush's political career on, whereby working class anger with judicial rule (in the US case, Roe v Wade) is channelled to facilitate a cynical extension of power by existing elites? Surely elites are often delighted to see liberalism diminished. Remove rule of law or rule of market, and elites - including technocratic ones - simply acquire new freedoms to meddle and rearrange institutions in their own interests.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses a horribly simple ethical question: do we side with Nietzsche or Aristotle? Or to put that another way, do we abandon morality altogether, or sign up to virtue ethics? MacIntyre opts for the latter. But when a choice is put this starkly, there is a dangerous tendency of people to flip from one to the other, or even dwell in both realms simultaneously. The only solution to nihilism is the church. The only freedom from moral repression is a form of hedonistic nihilism. MacIntyre's dilemma works very well for many cynical elites, who talk Aristotle, but act Nietzsche. The post-liberals are naive about politics, if they think that the rhetoric of 'faith, flag and family', as Maurice Glasman likes to put it, will actually install virtue ethics into modern public life. The abandonment of liberalism can create a polarity, in which some select substantively meaningful rituals (as Blue Labour and Red Tories hope), while others enjoy an even greater form of hedonism.

Neoliberalism, of a certain variety, is able to proceed without having much of a liberal component, other than a basic common recognition of money (but even money is now constantly propped up by the executive branch of government, via central banks). The neoliberal tradition had thrown off much of its 'liberal' heritage (such as the ordoliberals and Henry Simons) by the time it achieved its political takeover in the 1970s. The effect of the financial crisis on neoliberalism was to shed the remnants of its claim to treat all market actors equally. Today, the poor aren't even trusted with money...

I've written a couple of papers on what 'post-liberal' neoliberalism looks like, and I'm not convinced that it involves morris dancers swilling warm beer on the white cliffs of Dover. As I argued here, a version of technocratic communitarianism is now increasingly plausible, to replace technocratic liberalism. And as I argued here, a type of Schmittian market exception, in which the market is sustained only through periodic acts of extra-legal emergency measures, may be what we're left with, post-2008. These are examples of 'post-liberalism', in which the status quo is defended out of fear, but not on the basis that it serves the common good.

Maybe this is all a problem of definitions. If the issue is, how can secular, modern societies find a basis on which to sort 'good' from 'bad', then I'm sure that I would find far more common cause with a catholic communitarian like John Cruddas than with a neoliberal such as Larry Summers or a legal liberal such as Shami Chakrabarti. But why is liberalism the problem, and not, say, utilitarianism, with its brutal statistics, expert weightings and clinical interventions? Or why not defend democracy, with its specification of voice, rather than community, with its darker implications of exclusion and suppression? Somebody other than just the liberty 'lobby' needs to defend liberalism, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the secular left.

For what it's worth, I would view the present as the moment to do neoliberalism all over again, though this time with a sociologically coherent notion of what economic freedom (and domination) means, where it is likely to arise, and the types of institutions and public policies that are likely to support it. Thatcherite belief in 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurship' was never liberal in the first place, because it treated some individuals (the 'talented', the 'leaders', the 'innovators') according to a different set of standards from everybody else. That's the opposite of liberalism. Real economic liberalism would be a monumental achievement. Whether it's compatible with capitalism is another question altogether.

the problem of 'evidence centres'

Reading the news this week that the government is to set up new 'evidence centres' to inform, criticise and influence £200bn-worth of public policy, my immediate thought was - why now? New Labour came into power singing the praises of 'evidence-based policy' in 1997, and became widely celebrated for its ability to bring new insights from economics, psychology and sociology straight into Downing Street, via the Strategy Unit and academic-wonks such as Geoff Mulgan and David Halpern. Even before then, the relentless auditing and measuring of public services was introduced under the guise of 'new public management' (though new research by Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon shows that this never achieved great savings). And the Treasury's Green Book has offered a set of techniques for policy evaluation and appraisal for decades.

It seems now that policy is undergoing quite a rapid shift from treating economics as the standard for policy knowledge to treating medical research as the standard. This is clear from the fact that the evidence centre idea arose initially from the proposal of creating a 'NICE for social policy', to find out 'what works'. Economics itself is undergoing a much slower mutation, from aspiring to the status of physics to aspiring to that of biology. The infrastructucture of government that is needed to facilitate these shifts is quite different and far more extensive.

The key thing here, epistemologically, is that the state is trying to relinquish an a priori account of causality. The methodology of neo-classical economics has a very particular theory of causality, which it packages up within its assumed psychological theory of preference satisfaction. This theory then structures what types of evidence are collected, how they are interpreted, the political uses to which they are put. Inevitably, like any useful scientific framework, it also limits what types of conclusions might be drawn and the types of knowledge that might arise. A scientific framework that presupposed nothing about the world - or in this case, society - wouldn't be able to make any sense of the world.

Yet the spread of medical epistemology into public policy is strangely anti-theoretical, thanks to a somewhat naively optimistic view of a single technique: the randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCTs operate according to induction. The facts are meant to speak for themselves; the data and the theory are kept neatly and self-consciously separate from each other. A medic, Ben Goldacre, has co-authored a paper on the policy applications of RCTs for the British government, which opens with the line 'RCTs are the best way of determining whether a policy is working'. Elsewhere, RCTs are often referred to as the 'gold standard' for scientific testing, a term that confirms the dangers of metaphorical tourism, given that, while economists are happy to speak biologically of 'toxicity' and 'contagion' in the financial system, only the crankiest libertarians amongst them would countenance a return to the actual gold standard.

This is supplemented epistemologically by the rise of Big Data, which no doubt is already on the minds of forward-thinking policy experts, especially in the domain of health behaviours. The very character of Big Data is that it is collected with no particular purpose or theory in mind; it arises as a side-effect of other transactions and activities. It is, supposedly, 'theory neutral', like RCTs, indeed the techno-utopians have already argued that it can ultimately replace scientific theory altogether. Hence the facts that arise from big data are somehow self-validating; they simply emerge, thanks to mathematical analysis of patterns, meaning that there is no limit to the number of type of facts that can emerge. There's almost no need for human cognition at all!

The problem with all of this, politically, is that causal theories and methodologies aren't simply clumsy ways of interfering with empirical data, but also provide (wittingly or otherwise) standards of valuation. The reason economics has proved so powerful as a governmental tool is not because it is empirically correct about the drivers of human behaviour (no economist since Jevons has really claimed this; sociologists are barking up the wrong tree in this particular indictment) but because it provides a very clear idea of what a 'good' or 'bad' outcome would look like, in a particular situation. Pragmatically speaking, it saves decision-makers from having to have moral arguments about things, by placing numerical values on them instead.

Health policy is one area where this type of simplification is hardest to achieve, because moral trade-offs are often impossible to keep at bay. From the little I know of NICE and health economics, a great deal of what they wrestle with is not establishing 'facts' or 'evidence', but coming up with incredibly convoluted ways of agreeing what the standards of evaluation should be in the first place. QALYs are the most obvious example of this, but philosophical arguments about 'experienced utility' versus 'reported utility' and so on rage on in health economics, because pain, suffering and life itself are at stake, which can't be easily subjected to an efficiency analysis. As a goal, 'health' or 'wellness' lacks the finality of 'efficiency' or 'consumer welfare', meaning that there is a risk that health and wellbeing policies can never truly 'work'.

It is therefore a little ironic that NICE has become the model for social policy evaluation, given that social policy-makers already have a very clear toolkit for how to evaluate policies for over 40 years (the Green Book), whereas health policy evaluation is in a permanent - and necessary - state of philosophical self-doubt. By adopting the inductivist epistemology associated with RCTs and Big Data, social policy-makers may learn a great deal more about the world, but may also become commensurately less sure of what it even means for a policy to work in the first place.

For those of us with an innate suspicion of government positivists, this should be a good thing. Government might become more humble in its ambitions, cancel policies more readily, recognise the complexity of society. On the other hand, there is a risk that, as with RCTs in psycho-pharmaceuticals, diagnoses of social pathologies might start to spiral. Whole new problematic demographic sub-groups will start to appear to the gaze of the data analyst; new correlations of behavioural problems will be spotted; the perceived sources of our social, psychological and neurological malaises will simply multiply, and we'll long for an age when it was all just a problem of the wrong 'incentives'. Tesco's Club Card is rumoured to produce 18,000 sub-groups of customer; the equivalent for the state would be 18,000 sub-groups of pathological behaviour to be nudged back into line. Without the extreme simplifications of rationalist theories, society would appear too complex to be governed at all. The empiricist response to the government's paper title, 'What Works', might end up being 'very little', unless government becomes frighteningly 'smart'. Alternatively, if theory no longer provides the procedures of evaluation, there is a risk that private backroom politics will do so instead.

I exaggerate, of course. But the political issue is really this. Where clunky-old economics, with its unrealistic models, is used to deliver 'evidence-based policy', political and moral debate can be sidelined; yet the standard by which things are being judged is not difficult to discern. There is some publicness about this (I did some interviews with government economists a couple of years ago, and they couldn't understand why journalists never dipped into departmental policy evaluations, which are all published, and many are quite politically problematic). But where the state becomes a theory-less, inductivist, RCT-ing, data-analytical state, accumulating more and more data to find out 'what works', we are entitled to ask what working might actually mean. A clear and transparent utilitarianism, oriented around efficency, may be preferable to a vague and opaque utilitarianism, oriented around some metaphor of systemic 'wellness'.

Nothing simply works unambiguously in social policy, gold standard or no gold standard. No policy delivers benefits without any 'side-effects' (to play along with the game of policy doctors and nurses). A policy might 'work' in terms of reducing unemployment, but lead to an increase in family break-down. The inductivists response would be - yes, and that's precisely the type of pattern that our new evidence centres will detect! So why use the rhetoric of 'what works', when it is plain that nothing unambiguously works, at least without also offering the standard (the QALY for social policy, if you like) through which ethical dilemmas and trade-offs will be addressed? If all of this opens up space for non-utilitarian political debate about the multiple, competing purposes of social policies, and the types of procedures and authority that might be used to navigate between them, then that would be welcome. But the alternative is a Tesco Clubcard-state, which gets smarter and smarter, and more and more opaque as to whom its interventions are targeted at and why.

article published in Theory Culture & Society

My article, 'When is a market not a market?: 'Exemption', 'externality' and 'exception' in the case of European State Aid rules' has now appeared online at Theory Culture & Society (I assume this means it will be in the March issue). I probably blogged about this when the article was originally accepted back in 1934 on whenever it was. Anyway, here is the preprint version, below is the abstract, or email me if you'd like the actual published pdf version.

The reach of markets and market-based forms of valuation is never unlimited in any society, which invites empirical and political questions regarding how limits to markets are instituted, justified and enforced. Under neoliberalism, the state performs a key role in expanding the reach of markets and associated principles and techniques of valuation, using law and governmental techniques. But this then poses a question of the relationship between the neoliberal state and the market that it endorses and enforces: is the state internal or external to the market order that it helps to construct? European Union state aid rules provide an empirical entry point to consider such questions, providing a combination of normative, technical and sovereign principles, via which the division between state and market can be justified, tested and enacted. The article identifies three separate though overlapping logics within state aid documents, each of which offers the state a justification for suspending the competitive market order: exemptions, in which non-market values are upheld, externalities, in which markets are shown to be technically inefficient, and exceptions – such as the 2008 financial crisis – in which the state abandons the market to save the market.

the problem with clever people

Flicking through my Guardian app on my way to work today, I came across David Mitchell's Sunday column, which opened with the following vignette:

My old flatmate, as I've mentioned here before, was fascinated by the question: "Which would you choose, the washing machine or the vote?"... To clarify, I don't mean a washing machine. It's not just swapping your vote for a free washing machine – not many of us would do that. And neither is it the invention of the washing machine. You're not being asked merely to live washing machineless in a world where such things don't exist so you couldn't miss them. No, you stand to permanently lose access to a labour-saving technology, which you will still observe everywhere, in exchange for a continued ability to minutely influence the democratic process.

Mitchell's old flatmate is clearly a 'clever' man (don't try and tell me that kind of smart-ass clever question didn't come from a bloke). Maybe he met Mitchell at Cambridge. He probably studied a difficult subject, like mathematics, or one of those subjects that requires lots of memorising, like law. Something tells me he didn't study politics though. And reading the opening of Mitchell's article, I immediately wanted to punch Mitchell's old flatmate, mostly in the face.

The main reason why I felt this way was that David Mitchell's old flatmate (DMOF heareafter) had successfully planted this thought in my head, like an irritating sonic logo, from where it then refused to budge. If his task was to pollute perfectly good minds with irritating problems that might have fallen out of MENSA-branded fortune cookies, he had delivered on it with gusto. Faced with DMOF's challenge, my instinctive response was to put my head in my hands and wish it would go away. How can I possibly know which I'd choose, the washing machine or the vote you bastard? But what made it worse was the image of the glee that would come over DMOF's clever face, as he witnessed another victim snared in his clever net. Clever old DMOF.

One of the problems with clever people is that they transport their cleverness around like confetti, to chuck at people whether its wanted or not. They turn up at perfectly pleasant parties and events, with pre-prepared conversational gambits and questions, aimed at unsettling people and putting them to the test. They only start cleverness contests that they suspect they will win. They sit at the interface of computer science and bad political philosophy, offering Nietzschean interpretations of the Starwars trilogy, and then changing the subject once somebody starts actually talking about Nietzsche's writing. I suspect that DMOF has already worked out his answer to his own challenge, and that his answer is 'washing machine', for cleverly nihilistic-mathematical reasons that he will explain to an attentive audience, if only he can get one.

But lets suppose, for DMOF's sake, he actually has a background in political philosophy. Then what is he doing? Presumably he is helping us to interrogate many of our most deeply held beliefs, illuminating what is at stake when we claim to be 'in favour' of something. He is using his clever device to put history and social reality on hold for a moment, and helping us explore our priorities. He is doing so for 'heuristic' purposes, maybe even for our benefit. He means to help us, does that generous DMOF!

Or perhaps DMOF has some neo-conservative or neo-liberal sympathies. His games are less innocent than they appear, seeing as they force us to admit how perillous our 'Western' luxuries are. Only through intense work in securing the pillars of Western civilisation might we have either a vote or a washing machine, and we should be damned happy with either. One can imagine Milton Friedman pointing to a 1960s socialist nation, and arguing that we liberals patronise them with our assumption that it is votes that they most want, and not washing machines. DMOF's little games are a reminder of so much that we 'Westerners' take for granted, the 'killer apps' which keep tyranny and hand-washing at bay. Hang on a minute... did David Mitchell once share a flat with Niall Ferguson??

Yet while DMOF can doubtless give endless ingenious explorations of what his choice means, would he have anything to say about the world he has completely erradicated from his clever little trope? If he is interested in the choice between political and economic values, does he then explore ways in which the two are in fact traded off, the policies which promote one over the other, the intellectual shifts through which one colonises the other? I fear not. And yet through his sheer cleverness, he has made political philosophising his own personal terrain, and struck depression into the heart of all those who once aspired to practice it.

One of the reasons I've ended up doing sociology is because it's a good way to avoid people like DMOF. The fact that they no doubt view the feeling as mutual only strengthens that view.

after neoliberalism article

This article on 'neo-communitarianism' is due to appear in the next edition of Political Quarterly. In the meantime, I've tried to outline the argument in a shorter piece, for an interesting new online magazine, Aeon. You can read the article here.

equality of opportunity has not existed

Like the Judaic idea of God, ‘equality of opportunity’ is something that is only ever spoken of as a perpetual absence. Those who profess to be in favour of it are sometimes able to point to examples of it in the distant past, or imagine it in the future, but it’s difficult to imagine someone pointing at a concrete sociological occurrence and saying – there, that’s equality of opportunity. In fact, when something happens that quickens the pulse of the self-described ‘meritocrats’ and ‘level playing field’ morons, such as Mo Farah winning an athletics gold medal for Britain or Colin Powell rising to become US Secretary of State, the excitement is underscored by a sense that this triumph was radically, statistically unlikely.

Absent the inanity of sporting contest – where the rules of the individual contest are specifically designed to produce the most localised and irrelevant equality of opportunity – and you are left with false memories of the American settlers and of Victorian entrepreneurs. The rest is guff, or ideology as some people prefer to call it. Equality of opportunity simply doesn’t and never has existed.

But I don’t simply mean this in the critical sense, that life or capitalism is intrinsically unfair. I mean it in an ontological, existential sense, that ‘equality of opportunity’ refers to something that has no substance or content; it cannot exist. The notion is entirely formal and abstract, and therefore it is impossible for it to be realised in any set of concrete political or sociological institutions. It is in its nature not to exist.

From a liberal perspective, this is a feature not a bug. In pursuit of something like ‘equality of opportunity’, John Rawls specifically sought to ignore contingent and empirical features of society, and work only with abstract principles, thereby ensuring that his mode of reasoning was consistent with ‘fairness’. Introduce institutions or history, and fairness is lost. But by the same token, it is impossible to then say whether a given economic distribution (as opposed to a legal system) is consistent with Rawls’ definition of justice, precisely because that definition is emptied of any content.

When ‘equality of opportunity’ comes close to actually existing, we cease to call it ‘equality of opportunity’ and it ceases to look like ‘equality of opportunity’. Instead, it looks like the sort of liberal society envisaged by Michael Walzer, in which multiple spheres of inequality exist side by side, separate from one another, with none dominating any other. Hence educational attainment and monetary income have little bearing on each other; the electoral system and the media are mutually resistant to the influence of the other; the judiciary and the executive are genuinely separate. It is the separation of spheres in the present that has bite, and not some abstract set of possibilities for each individual’s future.

To some extent, separation of institutions may have the statistical effect of ‘equality of opportunity’, or what is often referred to as ‘social mobility’. Hence social democratic societies in which state institutions, markets and public debate all have their own legitimate but separate space are likely to have higher levels of social mobility (not to mention higher levels of economic equality). But that is something for the statisticians and wonks. It is not what is actually going on from the pragmatic perspective of individuals and institutions themselves. Nations with high levels of ‘social mobility’ are nations with a distaste for allowing private income to pollute their politics or their education systems. So why not recognise the significance of this distaste?

The liberal left can achieve far more political traction by pursuing a Walzerian separation of rival institutional spheres (primarily putting financial capital back in its box) than in pursuing some abstract or statistical imaginary of a ‘level playing field’. This separation can be pursued as a good, in and of itself, and not merely for the instrumental reason that it impacts upon statistical outcomes. In the process, liberal critique operates in sociologically extant institutional territory, rather than in analytical Rawlsian diagrams or econometric models. There are at least three advantages to this.

Firstly, the critique of excessive institutional integration is also a critique of capitalism, inasmuch as ‘capitalism’ refers to the political rights of capital to dominate people. First and foremost, as Marx argued, capital constantly needs new social spheres into which to expand, and a capitalist society is one in which business and government are constantly seeking to dissolve institutional boundaries, so as to make new spheres available to profit-seeking exploitation. Reinforcing those boundaries, on the basis that boundaries are good in and of themselves, represents a denial of capital’s demand to expand into new territories.

Secondly, this critique is also a critique of neoliberalism, inasmuch as ‘neoliberalism’ refers to the expansion of market-based modes of valuation into more and more non-market economic spheres. As Foucault and some Polanyians have noted, a key distinction between 19th century liberalism and 20th century neoliberalism was that the former was characterised by a logic of separation of state, society and market, whereas the latter is/was characterised by a logic of re-integration, fuelled by economistic measurement (I address this contrast in this paper [pdf]). Examples of this are all over the public sector, in the form of ‘new public management’, or in the third sector in the form of ‘social valuation’. And as Foucault identifies, the metaphor of 'human capital' performs a crucial role in subsuming non-market spheres (school, family, doctor's surgery) within an economising logic. I suspect that 'wellbeing' is now taking a similar logic of integration in a subtly different direction.

The ‘equality of opportunity’ mantra seeks to work with the grain of neoliberalism, by taking the all-encompassing competitive game, and making it fair. Yet, until that game is subdivided into separate games, and until that monolithic culture of economic valuation is replaced by plural (and incommensurable) cultures of valuation, it’s impossible to conceive of what fairness might even look like. Pluralism of measurement systems (for example, restoring some autonomy of judgement and measurement to critics, professions and scholars) is a necessary liberal left response to neoliberalism.

Thirdly, with the focus upon separation of different forms of inequality, and not on equality of opportunity, policy-making no longer runs up against thorny problems of informal conduct. For example, there will always be a variations in how much parents choose to read to their children. This has always been there; it will never go away. Equality of reading-to-children cannot exist. If it transpires that this passes on advantages to children, the only egalitarian response is to ensure that society doesn’t become entirely dominated by a particular type of ability, namely one that depends on being read to as a child. Yes, middle class parents pass on advantages, and yes, many of those advantages are informal and cultural. But if literacy, money, political voice, self-respect and academic achievement do not convert cleanly into one another, this acts as the only possible check on the uses of cultural and informal advantage.

In short, pursuing the separation of rival institutional spheres is also a way of keeping the state out of our domestic and personal lives. Surely it has to be a matter of regret for the Left, if the only way it knows of pursuing equality involves lecturing and interfering in the lives of deprived people. For that reason, other definitions of equality can at least be countenanced.

A liberal re-separation of institutional spheres is a fiercely difficult thing to achieve, in capitalist and neoliberal societies. On the other hand, contemporary crises demonstrate the sense of disgust that results, when excessive integration of power, voice and money comes to light (yes, you, Jeremy Hunt). But then if we also adopt Amartya Sen’s critique of Rawls, and recognise that justice can be pursued incrementally (and not only as an all-or-nothing state of affairs) then perhaps there can be a politics of gradually crow-barring spheres apart. One place to start would be to divert attention away from the interview techniques of Oxbridge, and how to make them ‘inclusive’, start slowly to reduce the freedoms of private schools.

inverted crises

I'm currently reading Andy Beckett's excellent When the Lights Went Out: What really happened to Britain in the seventies, and have just got to the economic woes of Harold Wilson's government. Although the story of stagflation is a familiar one, and neoliberalism is often interpreted as a deliberate strategy to restore profitability at the expense of labour, it is striking quite how differently that crisis was experienced, compared to our present one. In fact, politically, the two are direct inverses of each other, making a class-based analysis almost impossible to resist, even for non-Marxists. Consider the following:

Very significantly for the direction of British politics during the rest of the seventies and beyond, some Britons were affected by the bad times more quickly, and with more sense of shock, than others. Between 1974 and 1976, it was the comfortably off who suffered. High inflation ate their savings. The low pound spoiled their holidays. A property crash - house prices fell 13 per cent in 1974, 16 per cent in 1975 and 8 per cent in 1976 - devalued their homes. The stock-market slump did the same for their shareholdings. Share dividends shrank or were not paid at all. During these years, disposable income fell considerably faster for the richest tenth of British households than for everyone else, and by larger and larger amounts the further you were up the financial scale. Even in severe recession, this was not a familiar situation...

This sense of a world being turned upside down was sharpened by the fact that other categories of Britons, traditionally not as well-off or secure, were, at least at first, less affected by the crisis. Trade unionists' wages were protected from inflation by their readiness to strike and by the political leverage of their leaders. The jobs of public sector workers were protected by the continuing increase in government spending.

Of course we know where this all ended, and it was a Labour government that first experimented with monetarism, and effectively started reversing these trends. But reading this passage, one thing that struck me was that these symptoms of crisis now appear remarkably attractive to us, in a crisis that is having the very opposite effect on class stratification. In fact, many mainstream economists would love to see companies hording less cash or distributing it as dividends, and putting it into employees pockets. The once-monetarist Bank of England has stood by and allowed the pound to fall by an astonishing 30%, while inflation may now be George Osborne's only hope of retaining any macro-economic credibility whatsoever. Many in the political centre-ground are desparately looking for ways of mitigating the extreme effects of financialisation, whereby the rich appear unscathed by this crisis. And if that meant house prices falling to a level where a new generation of 'hard-working families' could afford homes, then that might be a thoroughly democratic outcome. But by and large, if policy-makers decided that the seventies really weren't so bad after all, the strange truth is that there's no plausible way that the course of the current crisis could be diverted towards a more egalitarian path (at least not without some sort of implausibly radical reinvention of regulation, such as imposing capital controls).

Such is the extraordinary power of capitalism to remake both itself and society. In the space of half a lifetime, the experience of capitalist crisis has been entirely stood upside down, from being something that the great unwashed visit upon the wealthy, to vice versa. In our current financialised period of capitalism, we assume that the wealthy will always benefit from upheaval, but how short our memories are. Who is to say that the crisis of the 2030s - or sooner - won't be far more fearsome for elites than for everyone else? Unless one buys into the headier forms of world systems theory, it is entirely impossible to say.

an open letter to the Prime Minister

Dear David

How are you? The question is genuine. I’ve been wondering for a while how you felt you were getting on, and thought I’d write to enquire. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really enjoying yourself, despite the tales of ‘chillaxing’ and your obviously sociable, family-oriented demeanour. Legend has it that you wanted to become Prime Minister because you thought you’d “be good at it”, and for about eighteen months, many thought you might be right. Do you still think you’re good at it? Legend also has it that your wife wants you out of there before too long, and you might give your friend in Number Eleven a go. Quite the reverse of how things were under Tony Blair.

Aah, Tony Blair. The man whose psychotic memoirs were apparently bandied around by the neo-con end of your Cabinet, as a manual for how to run a government. The man who introduced denim to Downing Street. The man who so bewitched the Conservative Party – seeing off opposition leaders like Graeme Smith sees off England cricket captains -  that eventually they scrabbled around in search of their own version. If you hadn’t existed, William Hague and Michael Gove would have sought to invent you, in a grizzly Frankensteinian experiment in a basement somewhere under Notting Hill.

You looked the part at your famous 2005 Conference speech, where you spoke informally without notes or teleprompter. It was meant to signal a new style of Tory politics, relaxed and unthreatening. You sought to make a spectacle of your own nervelessness, and it worked. Seven years on, though, one wonders whether this is enough. Tony Blair had that very rare, Clinton-esque ability to put others at ease. You have a somewhat less rare, Eton-esque ability to put yourself at ease. To start with we probably conflated the two, but the difference becomes more apparent as your government stumbles its way to the finish line.

Let me ask you this: do you really believe in what you’re doing? Blair did (that was part of the problem). Do you even believe, for example, that the poor and sick are as feckless as your government is increasingly implying? Blair may have been many things, but he was not a flip-flopper, as Americans like to say. I wonder if you’re even all that rightwing. Your most severe shortcoming, I suggest, is that you lack imagination.

You have said in the past that your support for the NHS was nurtured over the course of the life and death of your disabled son. You saw at first-hand what the NHS did, how valuable it is, and the humanity it offers. What you said was touching and no doubt honest. But is that how your politics works? Do you need to be personally affected by an institution, before you can understand its value? If so, you have entirely misunderstood the nature of public life. This isn’t about being leftwing or rightwing. Thatcher’s hatred for the trade unions was not forged as a result of her rubbish going uncollected or her train being cancelled. It was more visceral, ideological and universal than that. Privilege may not have made you selfish or conservative, but it may have made you myopic.

The early years of your leadership were spent trying to ‘de-toxify’ the brand of the Conservative Party, to break the mental association between ‘Tory’ and images of Peter Lilley and John Redwood clapping through another brutally misanthropic policy. This took a degree of guts on your part, given how toxic the ‘brand’ had become, and how silly William Hague had looked wandering around the Notting Hill Carnival in a baseball cap. You clearly knew that your chutzpah was up to the job, and that your judgement regarding informal mores wouldn’t let you down. Cultural sociology was on your side in this respect: West London Etonians are now comfortable amidst celebrity and narcotic culture, probably more so than they are in the traditional bastions of the establishment (see how Eton now churns out more famous actors than Cabinet Ministers).

But if you can, try and think about this. The Conservative Party is not just a ‘brand’, but a powerful political institution which has often sought to use that power in a vicious and hateful way over decades. The reason (in your parlance) that this sort of ‘brand’ becomes ‘toxic’ is that the collective memory of suffering is more powerful than anything a branding consultant or, for that matter, a policy programme is able to shift. Collective memory of suffering is the last bastion of political resistance, and is never given up for nothing, as Blair and Mandelson understood with respect to Northern Ireland. In 1980-81, two million manufacturing jobs were lost in Britain, in around eighteen months. The personal, local and family consequences of that - quite deliberate - political strategy are difficult for you or I to fathom, but they haven't disappeared. I don’t pretend to be some empathy master, but I’m not the one demanding that people give more of their energies, time and money away to recreate some fictitious Tocquevillian Albion called ‘the Big Society’. The ‘Big Society’ is a laudable thing, but, as I’ve written once or twice before, it is frustratingly supplementary to economic security, and not substitutive.

People remember things that the Conservative Party has done and stood for. They suspect that the Conservative Party still does and stands for them. If they’re wrong, then you have to act differently. But how dare you suggest that people’s memories of the past can be re-shaped through a re-branding exercise. How far back does your political and cultural memory go precisely? Does it not extend any further back than Euro96? Shame on you. A Conservative without a sense of history is just a whining, pleading bully with a victim complex, refusing to travel and refusing to see, demanding that everyone else behave differently except themselves. If you want examples, take a look at the new generation of Tory MPs behind you, each one blissed out on their own private rage, grabbing randomly at Victorian moral agendas as if playing supermarket sweep in a fancy dress store. Their kitsch pomposity makes a mockery of Parliament, reducing representative democracy to a form of live blogging, where everyone competes to complain and cackle the loudest. Their choice of politics as a basis on which to experiment with their own affected identities is entirely arbitrary. On this, at least, you must agree with me.

Maybe history will be kind to you, David, if it recognises quite what an appalling pool of political possibilities your Party offered to you. Maybe this is what you will reflect on in the long decades after you have left power. I hope you use those years to read heavily and, eventually, to write. A sixty-year-old David Cameron will have fascinating things to say about the sad times we now live through, and the sidings that our political classes have gone down. You’ll have better insights into your forty-something self by then, what led you into politics in the first place, and whether you really did have a vision of a better (you’ll have long dropped the ‘bigger’) society after all. I hope so.

Good luck with the last two years.

Yours,

Will

 

Thatcherism: a red herring?

I am impatient to know how history is going to judge the multiple institutional and moral collapses of the past five years. Specifically, the interesting question is: what exactly is coming to an end? It could, of course, be various things, operating with various historical rhythms, as I suggested here. But here's a brief thought: what if the entire idea of 'Thatcherism' turns out to be a red herring? Or, at any rate, what if we were so distracted by all the conservative rhetoric of markets and entrepreneurship, that we entirely failed to see what was really going on?

The unfolding Barclays scandal forces the left and the right to wake up to the reality of what's been going on. Specifically, when we thought we were placing our trust in 'markets', we were actually placing our trust in highly complex firms and exotic cultures of individual expression, that are largely opaque to the outside world. When the rhetoric was of 'market freedom', it actually meant an abnegation of public responsibility on the part of firms and individuals. The term 'market' did for banks what the term 'God' does for Catholic Priests, in keeping government and public at bay (for a while I've had an idea for a comparative sociological research project, looking at banks and psychoanalysts side by side, to identify common strategies for achieving non-regulation; not that I want to see the entire world regulated, far from it, but it is interesting to consider what rhetorical strategies are used to avoid formal accountability). Understanding what precisely we have been placing our faith in, and accepting it isn't quite what we thought we were placing our faith in (for better or worse), is the first step to removing our faith from it. This is more of a challenge for the Left than the Right, seeing as the former still have their opponents' word 'market' echoing in their ears, whereas the latter have realised their own error.

When did this now-crumbling era begin? We (and I'm as guilty of this as anyone) like to pinpoint the late 1970s as the moment when neoliberalism emerged. It was then that the crisis of Keynesianism was completed, and a new paradigm for economic policy-making began. But this may reveal something of the narcissism of liberal elites, who like to believe that intellectuals and ideas are central to historical and economic periodization. (One might also characterise it as bloody-minded Hegelianism or conservatism, which insists that reason drives history, and not vice versa). A more pragmatist approach would recognise that ideas simply help to stabilise and legitimise forms of behaviour that have already emerged.

If the Barclays scandal proves to be decisive and telling, then we will need to shift our periodisation, such that 1968-71 becomes the key transition point in the formation of neoliberalism (or whatever we might call it instead). Two things took place during these turbulent years.

Firstly, '68 and its aftermath generated a new ethos of anti-moralism, that might have appeared heroically Nietzschean or Freudian in its more explosive and exciting moments, but could only translate into a dull masturbational culture of pleasure-seeking and deceit, as it permeated beyond the intellectual world of Guy Debord et al. Rooseveltian liberals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell, spotted this immediately, leading to a form of Left Neo-conservatism (which Britain seems only now to be developing in the form of Blue Labour). By the late 1970s, even younger cultural critics, such as Richard Sennett, had cottoned on to what their generation had done. The 'great refusal', advocated by Marcuse, had its noble elements, but these have eventually be vastly out-numbered by its depressingly adolescent ones.

Secondly, 1971 was when paper money was divorced from reality, following Nixon's decision to disconnect dollars from gold. Admittedly, faster telecommunications and offshore trading had been placing tremendous strains on the dollar since the late 1960s, so no doubt there is some telecoms satellite launched around this time that could claim to be even more decisive. From this point forward, the monetary system became a battle between rival symbolic codes, with the symbolic code of '$$' enforced upon the world through the alliance of Wall Street and Washington DC (see Peter Gowan's The Global Gamble). Disconnected from any tangible or material notion of value, the monetary system became a game of dictating perceptions and propping up linguistic rules.

In the broader sweep of history - as, for example, portrayed in Giovanni Arrighi's 700-year history of capitalism - it is unsurprising that a combination of these two occurences would end in political and economic disaster. The divorce of ethics from normativity ('68) combined with the divorce of money from material reality ('71) creates the conditions for a frictionless financial culture, in which critics conspired by coining the term 'postmodernism', and in which lying about the price of money is an entirely reasonable and legitimate thing to do. Taking a longer sociological view of the Barclays scandal, the question is not 'why did they do it?', but really, 'why wouldn't they do it?' On what basis, really, did any of us expect pleasure-seeking individuals, far from the disciplining reach of any market, trading paper whose value had nothing to do with utility or human need, to do anything other than manipulate perceptions of that paper's value? How else does paper attain any value, without perceptions being manipulated to some extent? And why, honestly, did anyone believe that individuals, high on the legacy of '68, would manipulate that value for the benefit of the public or mortgage-holders, and not for themselves?

Thatcherism was therefore a late-comer, providing post hoc rationalisation for a surge of egoism and monetary game-playing that was probably unstoppable by 1979 anyhow. Thatcherism provided a new paradigm for the state's role in this, to tackle inflation rather than unemployment and build sufficient prisons to make such a policy practicable, but in this it was reacting not proscribing. Perhaps Thatcherism's one stroke of courage was to dress this elite decadence up, quite preposterously, as a return to conservative Victorian England. For some reason, it is only now that Tories such as Peter Oborne and Ferdinand Mount appear to have spotted that this, like Libor, was another audacious fix. Bob Diamond, born 1951 and reaching adulthood as Nixon was sworn in, was less naive, and continues to exhibit his own 'great refusal' to accept any public judgement placed upon him.

spheres of justice

A political discourse analyst, such as Frank Fischer or Alan Finlayson, might have interesting things to say about what's happened to the word 'justice' in Britain in recent years. Two things in particular stand out.

Firstly, 'justice' has become partly managerialised, rendering it just another public service. This is manifest in the creation of a Justice Department (oh, sorry, should that just be 'Justice'? The 'D' word has been weirdly erradicated from many Whitehall, err, institutions, such as CLG. For some reason this capitalised, non-departmental 'Justice' brings to mind this piece of Day Today genius). As a form of public service, 'justice' has to 'deliver' to the victim and the public, while also being reasonably efficient for the taxpayer. This needn't be especially sinister, as judges are a bolshy lot who have seen off some far more frightening enemies than McKinseys over the years. As things like the Bloody Sunday enquiry demonstrate, even Blairism was prepared to ignore cost-benefit analysis when the moral symbolism was powerful enough. But the project of containing justice within a particular strand of policy 'delivery' is notable nevertheless.

Secondly, 'justice' has been softened, with the introduction of the enigmatic prefix 'social' (what Hayek termed "that weazel word"). 'Social justice' means something other than 'justice', permeating the economy, welfare system, family and civil society. It is both more than 'justice', as it extends beyond the realms of classical liberalism; and less than 'justice', seeing as it has no aspiration to finality. I am unsure of the genealogy of the term 'social justice', although in Britain its contemporary resonance must surely owe a great deal to John Smith's 1992 Commission on Social Justice. For anyone interested in the genealogy of the 'social', Jacques Donzelot, Alain Desrosieres and Nikolas Rose have all written interesting papers on the emergence of this category or problem from the mid-19th century onwards.

But how about this for a goal: economic justice. Isn't that what most of us are demanding at the moment? Not justice as an output of the economy or an externality to the economy (like 'social justice'), or independent of economy (like legal 'justice') but at the heart of economic institutions. And not economic fairness either, but economic justice. This is what has concerned the ordo-liberals, radical liberals (such as Mill) and Marxists alike. It is what drives the critique of corporate governance structures and what underpins the political and moral case for co-operatives. It is concerned with frameworks and principles, rather than outcomes or utility. It is manifest in the argument for asset-based welfare, that produced the Child Trust Fund. One could argue that John Rawls was one of the most articulate proponents of 'economic justice', but the grand architectonics of his system meant that he would never allow such a notion to be split off from the larger project of Justice (sans prefix).

One test case would be the productive enterprise. 'Social enterprise' has been on the rise for the past fifteen years, not least because it slotted tidily into a utilitarian policy view of the world. What makes an enterprise 'social' is its purpose, goal or output, which is something other than profit maximisation. In the context of the economy, the term 'social' seems to imply a consequentialist ethics: if an entrepreneur, business or market results in sufficient positive externalities, then we introduce the prefix 'social'.

By contrast, part of the moral appeal of employee-owned businesses, for example, is that their telos is an open question. If they are more ethical than other models of business, this is to do with their structure and a priori form, not their output or the moral virtues of their decision-makers. The advantage of talking about 'economic justice' is that it takes us directly into political issues of where power and freedom lie in the economy, quite aside from how they happen to be exercised. By contrast, the term 'social justice' would seem to be something that could be produced as an act of will, no matter how structurally unjust the institutions concerned. 'Economic justice', on the other hand, signifies a limit to pragmatic utilitarianism, seeking out rules, principles and structures that defend people from exploitation. Civic republicans, such as Philip Pettit and Stuart White, and 'real utopians', following Erik Olin Wright, are in this camp. Given that, firstly, economic outputs are so woeful anyway right now, and, secondly, there is growing popular resentment for capitalist corruption, it seems that 'economic justice' may have become a more appropriate goal than 'social justice'.