Michael Walzer and university cuts

The lumping together of the US and Britain as a shared 'variety of capitalism', most famously by Hall and Soskice, has a certain analytical appeal, but necessarily papers over various cultural and historical differences.  Maybe times of crisis make this even harder to sustain. Looking at the direction of higher education funding in the UK, my anxiety is that the British are capable of uniquely bad variations on the 'American' model of capitalism, that the US itself does not have to tolerate.

Acccording to Hall and Soskice, both nations have Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) in contrast to European and Japanese Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs). But while the US has the diverse bookshops, boutiques and cafes of downtown Manhattan, we have Oxford Street, effectively Stanstead airport without the seating. When American neo-liberals sought to unleash market forces in the 1970s, they merely had to roll back Democrat legislation and wait for their capitalist friends to do the rest. We had to invent privatisation, PFIs and various new public management trickery in order to convince ourselves that we are an enterprising nation, when quite evidently we are not.

Now consider higher education. It can be argued that the US has long treated a university degree as a private good, associated in the mind of the student with large amounts of debt, and heavily subsidised for the poor through scholarships. If one couldn't be bothered to think for a moment, one might choose to describe this as 'fair'. The model is also associated with stronger university-business links, better practical application of science, and overall a comparatively high level of R&D spending as a proportion of GDP (though this fell under Bush).

Why would Britain not want this? The answer is that Britain could indeed want this, but may find it impossible to replicate for the following reasons.

Firstly, the fairness brigade might want to put down their John Rawls, and pick up Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice. This means dropping hallowed metaphors of 'level playing fields' and equality of opportunity (which don't seem to be having much effect in the first place), and considering how different sociological forms of inequality do or do not influence one another. Walzer's argument, very simply, is that there are multiple spheres of inequality in any society. The task is not to erradicate them, but to ensure that none trumps or determines all of the others. So, for example, political contests cannot become dictated by economic contests (which is where the US most conspicuously fails), or vice versa.

When looking at British and American neo-liberalism, the question is whether each society has robust enough non-economic forms of inequality to withstand the unleashing of capitalist relations of domination into more and more spheres of society. To put this another way, resistance to capital in the social, cultural and political spheres is dependent on non-capitalist elites and non-capitalist forms of competition, or alternatively aristocracy of some kind.

The LME/CME model is faintly Polanyian, issuing thoughts of 'disembedded' versus 'embedded' markets. What both Polanyi and the varieties of capitalism perspective miss is the Walzerian point, that market inequality is often best resisted not by 'equality', 'society' or being 'embedded', but by rival forms of inequality and by becoming disembedded from parallel social, cultural and political arenas of competition.

The anxiety regarding British neo-liberalism is that it has been used to subsume non-capitalist elites (academics, cultural elites, the BBC, the judiciary) within the logic of the market. Where the US has a fiercely competitive culture of scholarship, which is tinged by a mindset of enterprise but not remotely reducible to it, Britain has invented the Research Assessment Exercise to ensure that scholarly inequality is technically commensurable with the logic of economics.

The US university sector operates a bit like a market (there are various ways in which it self-evidently is a market, such as competing for top professors with offers of cash) but it is not the market. US universities are business-like (Weber noticed this over a century ago) but they are not businesses. The commitment to the public sphere as a non-market space of discovered inequality runs very deep, which admittedly has the side-effect of capital seeking to buy dominance of it via Fox News.

By contrast, my fear is that Britain in the future will become like a Gary Becker fantasy, in which 'human capital' is entirely governed by a logic of return on investment, of universities selling the humanities in the same way that Thomas Cook sells the Maldives, of MBA-style rankings (based on average salary after graduation) infecting undergraduate education to the point where campuses are over-run with law and marketing students, while scholarship and intellectualism simply appear like monopolies to be broken up. As Zizek argues in this piece, given Kant defined an Enlightened society as one where people had free use of "public reason" (i.e. separate from their occupations and professions), what is currently going on amounts to an attack on this use of reason, and thereby on Enlightenment.

What this all suggests is that any form of justice, from a Walzerian perspective, is extremely path dependent and fragile. Different spheres of inequality must be allowed to emerge organically, and then be kept strategically separate. Neo-liberalism may have been an Austro-German intellectual invention, but its applied form was entirely American - the Chicago School were offering a rationalisation of economic and political norms that were already present in American society. And because they were already present, they had emerged alongside rival forms of conduct that could potentially resist them. It is difficult to imagine even the most market-friendly American government managing to alter Harvard University's priorities or notion of value even slightly.

Britain, as has been our fate, was the great experiment in artificially generating US-style dynamism via government. The outcomes are potentially worse, given the lower levels of competition in non-market areas of society. Our elites are sleepier, less competitive and less assertive of their rights to remain separate from capitalism. A government-driven neo-liberalism, such as our's, is better able to bring all corners of society within a single logic. Hence the same model, same policies, that have emerged in a vaguely tolerable way in the US, are imposed without the necessary cultural checks and balances over here. Maybe, in the face of the marketization of everything, it's time to stop demanding less inequality, but more inequalities.

Comments

[Dick Pountain]

Wow, that's a *lot* to think about. I assume that you're using the term "inequalities" here in a non-moralised sense - any situation where people possess different quantities of some good/substance and may wish to exchange?

[Will Davies]

I mean that 'goods' (intellectual, monetary, social capital etc) are inevitably distributed unevenly. In the intellectual sphere, nobody would wish to have recognition and reputation to be distributed equally. The important thing, in academia, is that you cannot (most of the time) buy recognition and reputation.

So, yes, I'm referring to inequality in an empirical sociological sense, as something that characterises specific human qualities and quantities. There is no single 'inequality' (moral) but multiple 'inequalities'.

So even in the court of law, one side wins and the other loses. What we need to avoid is allowing this inequality to be determined by some other form (such as social capital or money). The rolling back of legal aid shows how little the Tories care for Walzerian justice.

[Ian Christie]

I agree with so much of this I nearly stood up and cheered.

But the question arises: just why have many diverse British elites, who would bridle at the suggestion that they have caved into neoliberal values or only care about money, in practice sold the pass? What was more robust in Germany, say, in the wake of the US-led neoliberal counter-revolution from 1980 ?
On the few occasions I come into extended contact with members of UK cultural elites, what is striking is the extent of doublethink: the self-image as liberal-left and 'edgy', and the reality of the enormous salary secured through surrender to the logic of the neoliberal market.

One interesting corner of intellectual life is the remnant of old-Tory true-conservative resistance to the march of the neoliberals in the Conservative Party and wider culture. I expected little when I picked up Peregrine Worsthorne's slim volume 'Democracy Needs Aristocracy', but in effect he makes the same case as you have for cultural checks and balances, and does it very well from an old Burkean perspective.

[Francis Barton]

Thanks for this Will, it all rings true, and makes me want to go and read Walzer.

I found your point about the way in which US universities resisted Chicago School values particularly interesting. Ian's comment on this is much more constructive than I can offer, I'm afraid. Thanks Will and Ian.

Also, it seems to me we (UK) are pretty close to your 'Gary Becker fantasy' already.

Final point, may be of interest... not a criticism at all... but I for some reason read 'papers' in your first sentence as a noun instead of a verb and couldn't work out why the sentence ended so abruptly!

[Will Davies]

Ian: the obvious answer would be that, helped on by forces of consumerism, the post-68 attacks on 'traditional' forms of authority belatedly caught up with Britain's elites.

In Germany, the 68ers were pitched against their parents' generation who they held culpable for serious crimes against humanity (or ignoring those crimes) and a genuine crisis of authority transpired. Britain's elites had long been too moderate, perceived to have been on the right side of many of the 20th century's battles, never explicitly oppressing their own people. So the pre-68 generation survived in power, right up until they were effectively forced out by the aftermath of Thatcherism (i.e. Blairism). The contradiction of conservative elites unleashing Thatcherite reforms have been well explored, by John Gray's False Dawn and elsewhere.

So maybe the argument would be that nations such as Germany had time (between 1968 and circa 1990) to reconstruct their elites, prior to the unleashing of global market forces. Meanwhile, the idea of ageing duffers standing up to Blairism was never very coherent, and we ended up only with lovable anachronistic rogues such as Tony Benn, making quite reasonable but politically implausible criticisms of the status quo.

I'm not sure quite how historically accurate the above is, but it might be pointing at something.

Francis: glad this chimes with your impressions as well.

[Ian Christie]

Thanks Will.

I also wonder whether there are other aspects to the overpowering of many of the elites by neoliberalism in USA and UK. One factor could be the brute fact of winner-take-all political institutions, especially in the UK. In the USA there remain enough checks and balances to keep neoliberalism from surging through every institutional channel. In the UK there simply were very few barriers to a determined ideological minority who'd managed to win the general election in 1979 and 1983 with absolute majorities and broke the only available countervailing force by the mid-80s. There just was not enough autonomy elsewhere in the constitutional set-up to allow for and demand compromise, as is found in much of the USA and certainly in continental EU coalition culture.

Another aspect is the loss of energy and self-confidence of elites who'd come out on top in World War 2 and not undergone trauma (military defeat, occupation, need for total reconstruction) and had presided over a long post-1945 period of influence if not always dominance in political office. The failures of social democracy/welfare-state consensus were therefore fully owned and experienced by these elites, in politics and the professions. There was not anything like enough confidence or energy with which to fight back against the neoliberal insurgency in the late 70s and 80s.