The classics of social democratic

thought
Antonio Gramscis Selections from the Prison
Notebooks
John Stuart Mills On Liberty
Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism
Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation
Anthony Giddens The Third Way: The Renewal of
Social Democracy

Robert Skidelsky on John Maynard Keynes

Patrick Diamond on Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Mitchell Cohen on T.H Marshall's Citizenship and
Social Class

Roger Liddle on The Blair Revolution: Can New

Labour Deliver?

Alain Bergounioux on Lon Blum's For all

Mankind ( l'chelle Humaine)
Iain McLean on Richard M. Titmuss' The Gift
Relationship

http://www.policynetwork.net/content/357/TheClassics-of-Social-Democracy
The classics of social democratic
thought
The landmarks of conservative thought, ranging from Friedriech Hayeks The Road to Serfdom to Milton
Friedmans Capitalism and Freedom, have served as powerful narratives for the politicians and
thinktanks of the right in the US and Europe. This ability to harness the work of prominent intellectuals
and to draw on a liberal tradition has offered some consistency to the political discourse of the right.
This consistency remains unmatched by the centre-left which finds it more difficult to lean on a coherent
body of discourse. As the centre-left wrestles with the tough questions of today, familiarity with both the
classics of social democratic thought and influential political tracts can play a significant role in kickingoff a sustained period of revisionism and revival.
In this series prominent thinkers and policymakers will revisit key texts and essays which have been
seminal to progressive thinking. From the early architects of Swedish social democracy to Karl Polanyis
analysis of the commodification of human relations brought about by capitalism or Tony Croslands
critique of social democrat's attachment to statism and public spending, high-level commentators will
revisit these works to stress their relevance in our collective attempt to close the current ideological
vacuum and renew social democratic thinking.

Sally Davison on Antonio Gramscis Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Gramscis notion of hegemony offers an indispensable way of thinking about creating the conditions for
political change.

John Skorupski on John Stuart Mills On Liberty

150 years after its publication J.S Mills On Liberty retains the radicalism with which it spoke to Victorian
Britain. What can it contribute to rethinking social democracy today?

Giles Radice on Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism

The enduring legacy of this classic text lies in the rich revisionist creed which drove Crosland to bring
social democracy up to date for his time.

Adrian Pabst on Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation

In rejecting both market liberalism and state socialism, Polanyis blend of political idealism and
economic realism offers some telling insights for the modern centre-left.

Anthony Giddens on The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy

The title was regrettable, misunderstood and misinterpreted yet the issues raised in the book
still have relevance for the renewal of social democracy today.

Sheri Berman on the early architects of Swedish social democracy: Ernst Wigforss, Nils Karleby
and Per Albin Hansson
The insights championed by these great thinkers are as relevant today as they were in the past:
capitalism is not a zero-sum game and it is the lefts role to develop programmes that promote growth
and social solidarity together.

Robert Skidelsky on John Maynard Keynes

The battle lines may have changed from the means of production to big finance but the state remains
the ultimate protector of the public good.

Patrick Diamond on Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In contrast to social democrats today, FDRs style of leadership empathised with the anxieties and
frustrations of the people and boldly seized the opportunity of a crisis for progressive ends.

Mitchell Cohen on T.H Marshall's Citizenship and Social Class

In speaking of the development of civil, political, and social citizenship as an evolutionary sequence,
Marhshall's elegant classic points to a vigorous concern for both liberty and equality.

Roger Liddle on The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver?

Setting out to build on the past, rather than destroy what previous governments did, this political tract
highlights both New Labours accomplishments and its systematic shortcomings.

Alain Bergounioux on Lon Blum's For all Mankind ( l'chelle Humaine)

At a time when the parties of the left in Europe are re-examining their identity, it is useful to draw on
Blums writings to remind us that socialism is first and foremost a humanist political culture.

Iain McLean on Richard M. Titmuss' The Gift Relationship

The implications of Titmuss study on human blood and social policy should not be forgotten as we
reconsider the core principles of our economy.

What Antonio Gramsci offers to social democracy

SALLY DAVISON - 10 OCTOBER 2011
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Gramscis notion of hegemony offers social democrats an

analytical framework within which to better understand and
challenge the entrenched interests of capital in society and a way of
thinking about creating the conditions for political change
A key dilemma for social democrats today is to find a way of challenging the
dominance of capital and business interests while remaining located within a
gradualist framework that does not envisage any immediate prospect of
fundamental change. If no serious alternative is on the cards, is there any
point in critiquing the way that capitalism functions? If the lefts influence
appears to be diminishing, why not accept that there is no alternative to the
market? Without contemporary answers to these questions, social democrats
face continuing decline: throughout the current financial crisis their
popularity has been plummeting, largely because they have been unable to
make a principled stand against those responsible for what has happened
for indeed many have largely embraced the same policies. Social democrats
lack a politics that can simultaneously both act as a critique of capitalism and
yet accept that it is the system in which they will continue to operate for the
foreseeable future.
I believe that Antonio Gramsci a man who endured bitter defeat, prison and

death in Mussolinis Italy continues to offer the best answers to these

questions, precisely because he was forced to confront the question of how
popular resistance could continue to be marshalled at a time of defeat, and
how to turn resistance into the kernel of a new society. His concept of
hegemony offers a way of thinking about creating the conditions for political
change while recognising that there is little immediate chance of a major
breakthrough. In fact Gramsci has been described by Stuart Hall as our
foremost theorist of defeat perhaps another reason to turn to him today!
Gramscis unrelenting realism, his pessimism of the intellect, did not prevent
him from continuing to maintain an optimism of the will throughout his
political life.1
Gramsci was a founding member and later leader of the Italian Communist
Party, and thus was on the revolutionary side of the split in the Second
International that took place after the first world war and the Bolshevik
revolution. Born in Sardinia, by the time of these events he was living in
Turin, the centre of industrial activity in Italy, and a city where at first there
appeared to be the chance for a Bolshevik-style popular uprising. However
after the defeat of the factory council movement and the rise of fascism,
Gramsci sought to analyse how those in power continued to find new ways of
maintaining their position. While he was in prison from 1926 to 1937, when
he died he set himself the task of understanding the causes of the defeats
suffered by the revolutionary left during the 1920s, and of theorising an
alternative path of action in Europe and America. The key selection of these
writings is Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated and published in
1971.2
Rather than a frontal war between dominant and subordinate classes, Gramsci
saw a more protracted struggle taking place in civil society, within all the
organisations of social and cultural life and between political alliances
around the fundamental classes. Each side in this war of position would seek
to attain hegemony, i.e. not just a temporary majority for a tactical
programme, but a position of intellectual and moral leadership that would
provide solutions to other classes and social groups, and unify them around a
strategic vision and programme.
This recognition that in countries with well developed civil societies the
political battle takes place across a very wide terrain and Gramscis unique
way of exploring this terrain in all its complex inter-relationships of economy,
politics and culture remains crucial for the left today, including for social
democrats (who remained in the Second International after the historic split,
but whose weakness, in contrast to the leftists, has often been an apparent
willingness to wait for ever for even the smallest of reformist gains, and not
to seek to grasp the essential contours of the battle). In his notions of a war of
position, and the battle for hegemonic leadership, Gramsci speaks both to
revolutionaries who long for change but recognise it is not on the horizon, and
social democrats who reject oppositionalism but want to make headway
against the political economic and cultural dominance of capital.
Gramscis notion of hegemony

Perhaps Gramscis most important concept for contemporary politics is his

notion of hegemony rule that is secured through the broad consent of the
population, rather than through domination. This is secured partly through
making concessions to subordinate groups, but most crucially through seeking
to make the ideas of the interests represented by the dominant classes appear
to be the obvious common sense of a whole society. (Common sense is
another key Gramscian term.) The idea of hegemonic rule helped to account
for the difficulties that had been faced by socialist parties of all kinds in the
1920s, but also, even more importantly, it opened up the possibility of
thinking about ways in which socialists could try to develop counterhegemonic strategies, to build alliances based on a different kind of common
sense. The working class needed to find a way of representing their interests in
terms of ideas that would strike a chord across society, to show that they could
represent the whole of society and not just their own sectional interest.
Capitalist hegemony which of course takes different forms in different times
and places was something that much work went into securing, work that
was carried out by the organic intellectuals (another key Gramscian term)
who do the cultural and ideological work that seeks to secure consent for the
class they serve for example priests or journalists. A contemporary example
would be those working in corporate PR. Hegemony is never stable, and this
means that, however strong it appears to be (however much, for example, the
market is presented as the only way of organising society), it is possible to
intervene to disrupt that hegemony and put forward an alternative way of
looking at the world, an alternative moral and political philosophy.
Gramsci understood that capitalism would always encounter crises of finance
and production (i.e. boom and bust can never be a thing of the past), and he
sought ways of understanding how the crises within hegemonic rule that are
possible consequences of such crises could be taken as opportunities for
counter-hegemonic forces to put forward their new solutions. He saw that
specific forms of hegemonic rule could be remade in such moments of crisis
so that either the existing dominant class would regroup to piece together a
new hegemonic strategy, or a new challenge could be made to their whole way
of thinking and doing. Thus fascism represented a new configuration of
alliances and ideology within Italy that allowed business interests to continue
to predominate after the battles of the first world war. (To be sure force was
also involved, but the support of large sections of the population was secured
through fascist rhetoric and social organisation, and a new articulation of
different interests and ideas.)
The concept of conjuncture was crucial in this analysis. Conjunctural analysis
is pitched at a level that looks at cultural, ideological and social forces, as well
as at the underlying economic structures, of any given moment. A conjuncture
is a coming together into a particular articulation of all the complex forces
operating in a society during a given period, to form a settlement that is able
hold for that period; and it can partly be characterised by the particular nature
of the common sense ideas that help hold together its specific hegemonic
alliance of dominant interests. When a crisis disrupts such a settlement such
as the recent financial crisis there may be an opportunity to intervene to put
forward a whole new way of thinking about and organising society. That is
clearly something that has not happened during the recent financial crisis

and one reason for this is the huge amount of work put in by organic
intellectuals of the corporate world in support of their way of making sense of
the world, and the lack of a parallel strategic vision by social democrats.
Stuart Hall and Gramsci
Stuart Hall, the intellectual who has most creatively deployed Gramscis
insights for the analysis of contemporary society, made one of his most
important contributions to British politics when he analysed Thatcherism in
these terms. He saw Thatcherism as a new hegemonic project, which
intervened in the stasis of the 1970s a time when the postwar social
consensus was no longer secure, and for a while no government appeared to
be able to solve Britains problems to redefine the political terrain and
secure consent for a new set of common sense ideas about how to run a
country. Drawing explicitly on Gramsci, he discussed the shift to the right
(the great moving right show) as a response to an organic phenomenon a
process of long-term deep structural changes and contradictions in economy
and society and argued that political forces in favour of the status quo had
intervened to create a new balance of forces a new historic block in order
to maintain their power. As he also argued: these new elements do not
emerge; they have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is
required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into
new ones. The swing to the right is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a
response to the crisis.3
As Hall notes, Thatcher succeeded in translating free market economics into:
the language of experience, moral imperative and common sense, thus
providing a philosophy in the broader sense an alternative ethic to that of
the caring society. He describes this as a translation of a theoretical
ideology into a popular idiom. Thatcherism articulated a new populist politics
through drawing attention to the weaknesses of the current settlement,
through addressing people as consumers rather than producers, and
articulating together a set of disparate ideas characterised by Hall as
authoritarian populism.4 None of this analysis would have been possible
without Gramscian concepts.
Stuart Hall also drew on Gramscis essay Americanism and Fordism as a
good starting place for analysing the new times that Thatcherism both
responded to and nurtured.5 In this essay Gramsci was trying to analyse a
new epoch Fordism and to assess the prospects for the left at that time. As
Hall points out, in his analysis Gramsci considers a broad range of issues, not
only new forms of capitalist accumulation and industrial production, but also
a very wide range of cultural issues, and a discussion about the kind of person
this epoch might produce. Hall takes this as an example of an approach that
attempts to deal with the complexity and over-determined nature of any
given historical conjuncture, and thereby meets the need for a corresponding
complexity of analysis.
Some critics have argued that Halls analysis was too pessimistic that he was
so attuned to the brilliance of the Thatcherite project that all he could do was
admire. This is to miss the point of the analysis. In understanding how

Thatcher was able to respond to the conjunctural crisis of the late 1970s, we
can see that Thatcherism was a political project that worked to secure consent
of popular forces for its particular aims. The lessons from this are, firstly that
hegemony was actively constructed it was not inevitable; and, secondly, that
that the left could also set about constructing a project that tapped into
popular thinking with a view to mobilising around a different set of aims. It is
important to note that this is not the same as listening to focus groups and
reflecting their views. The idea of a hegemonic project is to take the elements
of good sense that already exist (for example social aspirations already present
such as support for public services, or peoples sense of hospitality towards
strangers) and articulate them together to create new ways of making sense of
the present, embodied in a political programme.
Since these writings of the late 1970s and 1980s, Hall has revisited these
debates in terms of analysing Blairism and more recently Cameronism. He
argues that both these later political formations did not represent new
political conjunctures, but were phases within a wider settlement that can be
characterised as neoliberal the period of the resurgence of business and
finance interests after their temporary (slight) taming after the second world
war. The common sense of this whole period has been dominated by the idea
that there is no alternative to the market. As Hall argues, market forces can be
seen as a brilliant linguistic substitute for the capitalist system, in that it
erases so much of what capital actually does (summoning up as it does a
benign picture of colourful stallholders and vegetables). And:
since we all use the market every day, it suggests that we all somehow
already have a vested interest in conceding everything to it. It conscripted
us. Now, when you get to that point, the political forces associated with that
project, and the philosophical propositions that have won their way into
common sense, are very tough to dislodge.6
As the work of Stuart Hall as briefly outlined above clearly demonstrates,
thinking with Gramscian ideas allows us to get a much clearer understanding
of the complexities that make up the current political situation both in terms
of the underlying features and the more subjective elements. It also alerts us
to the need for intellectual work in countering the dominant current sense, but
at the same time affirms to us that it is possible to do so. And, not least, it
indicates that paying attention to cultural issues is a critical part of political
life.
This essay is a contribution to the Social Democracy Observatory
series on "The classics of social democratic thought"
Sally Davison is managing editor of Soundings
End notes
1. Im a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of
will, letter from prison 1929 this is one of the most famous quotations
from Gramsci, but its origin is also attributed to Romain Rolland.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence &
Wishart 1971.

3. Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show, Marxism Today, January
1979. Available at:
http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm.
4. For more discussion on authoritarian populism, see Stuart Hall et al,
Policing the Crisis, Mugging, the State and Law and Order, Macmillan
1979.
5. Americanism and Fordism, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
pp277-318.
6. Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, Interpreting the crisis, Soundings 44.

Image: Flickrenric 2011

This is a contribution to Policy Network's work on Globalisation and Governance.
Tags: Antonio Gramsci , social democracy , hegemony , social change , Sally Davison , Stuart
Hall , centre-left , Prison Notebooks

Comments
John_LA

06 September 2014 19:23

As a republican conservative, this is an eye-opening article! What we have here is an intellectual,

professor no less, confronting the reality that even a partial implementation of socialism, having brought
about continuing decline: throughout the financial crisis of their own making, has nothing to offer to
compete with capitalism in the way of recovery. Instead of admission of failure, she decides to put
forward a solution based on Gramscis principles,... like it was a fresh new approach. It has been a bitter
experience to watch Gramscis principles at work in America. Obama, the ideologue, as the cats-paw to
George Soros along with the far left cooption of the Democratic Party, judicial system, press, Hollywood,
educational system, etc. have followed Gramscis principles and demagogued Americas civil society
against itself. Social destruction, cultural Marxism, is firing on all cylinders. Although, if we look more
closely, we find the general population isnt buying it. That is why government popularity is at an all-time
low and I mean LOW. Government officials, Democrat and mainstream Republican, have the bit in
their teeth and are running amok expanding the government, violating the Constitution, implementing
illegal as well as unconstitutional programs, laws, and turning agencies of the government into coercive
entities against the people. Gee, sounds like the complete success of socialism, and if you mean
following the road to hell, we might even get there. However, even while the left is calling everybody
who disagrees with them a racist, unrepentant neocolonialist, greedy, squanderer of the worlds wealth
and resources, the proletariat is beginning to notice the persistence of the continuing economic decline.
Yes, the excrement Lenin referred to is beginning to wonder if socialism isnt what they vaguely
remember what they were told it was - utopia. Worse, the masterminds like Sally Davidson are
beginning to doubt not that socialism cant be crammed down the throat of an unwilling population, not
that the most prosperous successful government the world has ever produced cant be destroyed, not
that a civil society cant be unraveled with demagoguery, factionalism and class envy, and not that
recovery cant be blocked by the biggest Cloward-Piven strategy ever devised using the national debt to
drive the world practically into the second dark ages. No, they are beginning to doubt whether they and
all the other elitists can survive the coming planned calamity and still maintain their lifestyle at the
expense of the rest of the population the way all previous socialist tyrannies have. They are beginning to
doubt whether the new socialist order at its best would really be better than vulture capitalism at its
worst. However, the most interesting thing is that her reaction to this realization is to go from dispensing
the Kool-Aid to drinking it, and not only drinking it, but savoring each nuance as one is transformed from
lucid to delusional. First, begin with a lie throughout the current financial crisis their (socialist
democrats) popularity has been plummeting, largely because they have been unable to make a

principled stand against those responsible (she means capitalists here) for what has happened.
However, it is irrational, even for a socialist democrat, to take a stand or make an argument much less a
principled one against themselves. It is a triumph of Gramscian leftist strategy that perverted the entire
loan/mortgage industry into making loans to unqualified recipients that brought on the financial crisis.
This triumph consisted of dislodging common sense (making loans to qualified applicants) and replacing
it with a political program that mobilized a good social aspiration (more people owning their own home)
into a moral imperative by (disabling standards of financial qualification established by years of
experience) and in the name of a caring society making loans to unqualified applicants. The results of
which have been historical to say the least. Both Hall and Davison see the laws of economics as
simply a Gramscian hegemony project that can go either capitalist of socialist, and it is up to you which
you believe will work. What they dont see or wont tell you is that it is not. Free market economics is the
language of experience, moral imperative and common sense because it works, and statist utopian
socialism throughout all history and experience simply does not work. And no amount of Gramscian
mind games or self delusion will make it work or even let you think it is working, when it is not.
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Araceli
23 November 2012 22:06

All men are intellectuals, evreyone of us has the possibility, the rational ability to use his or her intellect
in a proper, useful way. Nevertheless, only few people are regarded, in our society, as intellectuals.
According to Gramsci being intellectual was, and to me still is, seen as a social status rather than being
seen as the fundamental precondition of every human being. According to Gramsci, the organic
intellectuals are not the solution for this problem; as a matter of fact, an organic intellectual is not a
simple, traditional intellectual that stands apart from society, but it is an intellectual extremely integrated
with it. An organic intellectual operate on a cultural, ideological and semiotics level, helping articulating a
specific hegemony with the aim to maintain the status quo. Gramsci believed that the only way
education could have use to criticize the hegemonic status quo was the creation of a working class
culture made by working-class intellectuals. In Gramsci opinions this is the only way in which education

can become popular, innovative and critical. Gramsci expressed these theories more than 50 years ago
and, unfortunately, I have to say that, nowadays, they are preeminently remaining theories rather than
practice. Having experienced both an Italian and an American university I have seen how the Italian
system still makes the gap professor-teacher much more clear than in the American system. In an
university like JCU this gap is less emphasized and less perceived by students, but, nevertheless, the
fact that professors are less seen as detached intellectual does not make JCU an anti or non
hegemonic university.
Vivek
23 November 2012 10:29

What I believe that Gramsci is syaing with the following quote is that all men are intellectuals however
most men don't have the capital to do what those in power can do because there is a distinction
between classes. In regards to education, it can be argued that it functions in the same way because it
divides us all into little departments of what we are good at and what we are meant to do, and like Marks
would state this is important for the capitalist system because it will only help to perpetuate capitalism
because good forbid that we have a holistic education and we are too smart to overthrow the capitalist
system. Also from an early age through standardized test, we are continually told what are our areas of
competence and then latter on we are told what major to choose for, like John Cabot, on the basis of
what is our area of strength according to the result of our standardized test. Also I think that another way
that capitalist and hegemony work together in the education system is through the idea of meritocracy
by perpetuating the myth that if you work hard one day you too will be able to get a certain kind of job
and when someone does make it that far you are told that the only reason you haven't been able to is
because you haven't worked hard enough. I think the best example of this is shown in the grading scale
of the school or universities like John Cabot where the student is predisposed to fail because there is a
50 percent chance that you will fail then succeed, and hopefully you will fail so that you can spend more
money making up the class and increase the profits of the University. Another example of this is the
Dean's List where only the hardest working and brightest students who passed all of their exams and
get good grade are shown to the whole student body that if you worked hard as these few students have
some day you too will be able to be part of this list. I think that Universities purposefully create a division
of major and etc because it helps the system of hegemony so that through separation so that like a
factory we all specialize on a certain area of work, because for example, if we all knew how to build a
car what would be the point of working in a factory. Its true that JCU and other facilities allow for critical
thinking, however, the student is indoctrinated to think critically in regards to one area of study which
cripple you if you don't know how to understand other areas of society. Also, JCU is part of the
hegemonic system because it allows you to think that you have a choice when you don't because in
order to attend this school you have to fit into their standards and they trick you into thinking that they
have your best interest and are giving you what you need through the wording of their catalog.

http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4064&title=+What+Antonio+Gramsci+offers+to+so
cial+democracy

John Stuart Mills On Liberty

JOHN SKORUPSKI - 23 MAY 2011
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150 years after its publication J.S Mills On Liberty retains the
radicalism with which it spoke to Victorian Britain, laying one of
the core foundations that would subsequently influence the social
democratic movement. But Mills essay does not belong exclusively
to the political left or right, and raises troubling questions about
the emergence of democracy itself what then, can it contribute to
rethinking social democracy?
A very simple principle
Mill's central theme in the essay is what he calls the very simple principle of
liberty. According to the principle of liberty, damage, or probability of
damage, to the interests of others, can alone justify the interference of society.
Mill offers greater protection still to expressions of opinion. Interference with
these, contrasted with actions in general, is legitimate only when the
circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their
expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. This is a stronger
criterion than the one provided by the main liberty principle for actions in
general.
There are important questions about how these principles should be
interpreted. While the very simple principle is indeed simple to the extent
that it is not complicated, its import is elusive. Conscious of this, Mill restates
it in a variety of ways through the essay and devotes the last chapter of the
essay to a series of applications intended to clarify its meaning and limits.
Overall, Mill's explanation of his principles is clear enough, but translating
them into detailed policy then raises new questions. Mills principles plainly
have some controversial implications. For example, they rule out appealing to
the addictive and self-injurious nature of drug use as an argument for (as
against drug dealing) illegalising it. Likewise, they permit freely agreed
assisted suicide, unless it could be shown that such suicide would be harmful
in some way to people other than those freely involved in the collaborative act.
Further, Mill would no doubt have opposed legislation against incitement to
racial and religious hatred as unacceptably diffuse, since he held that the law
should focus specifically on positive instigation to wrongful acts.
On the other hand, in some cases Mill is less permissive that we are. He
believed it to be, for example, a moral crime to bring into existence a child if
one is unable not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and
training for its mind. In each case Mills principles channel the burden of
argument in a healthy way. Nevertheless, even though Mills principles are
much clearer than some want to claim, arguments about their meaning
persist.
Mills principles make best sense from a liberal individualist standpoint. In
contrast, from the communitarian perspective distinctions between what
harms only me and what harms others becomes problematic, for the reason
that to the communitarian there is no deep way of demarcating where my
good ends and the good of another begins. Social policy must be founded on
the good of the community, and for the communitarian that good is not

reducible to particular individual goods in the way that the liberal

individualist is happy to admit.
This raises a problem as to which camp is being superficial. A liberal
individualist will say that a proper understanding of self and society does
nothing to undermine Mills distinctions. On the contrary, it is unrestrained
communitarian rhetoric about the social nature of the self that is superficial.
The real truth in the dictum that humans are essentially social is compatible
with Mills principles, whereas what lurks behind the communitarian
interpretation of that dictum is an incipiently authoritarian social ideal,
whether religious, socialist or merely conformist. Nor do liberal individualists
have to hold, and Mill did not, that the only entities that have ethical
significance are individuals. Social entities such as family, society, and nation
are ethically significant, and allegiance to such groupings is basic to the forms
of solidarity at the foundation of any decent, not least liberal, politics.
A thinker for the Left?
There are communitarian and individualist traditions at both poles of the
political spectrum, and for this reason philosophically interesting challenges
to Mills principles can come from the Right or the Left. By the same token,
these principles can appeal to individualist traditions on either side of this
spectrum. However, Mill had much more to say about society and politics than
is contained in the essay on Liberty, so taking his views as a whole, can we
place him on the Left or Right?
Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that it is no longer obvious
how this spectrum works, but two questions still seem important. Firstly, the
question of what justice requires. How far does it require the state to intervene
actively in redistributing resources, as against restricting itself to ruling out
unfair discrimination, or unfair inequality of opportunity? Second is the
question of state action versus individual action. Here we encounter a
philosophical issue that goes beyond economic questions of market or state
allocation of resources, or how far the state can beneficially engage in macroeconomic management the issue of ones ideal of life in society.
Again this problem is woven into disagreements between the liberal
individualist and the communitarian traditions. What are the good, decent,
life-enhancing ways of living together? Do they necessarily include collective
action through a democratic state, not merely as a functional necessity but as
an ideal? Alternatively, are they best embodied in a mix of self-reliance,
voluntary cooperation and competition open to all, with the state restricting
itself so far as possible to a regulatory role? As noted above, Mill's outlook
does not align perfectly with any current political package, but on these
questions it fits more easily with the Left than with the Right.
Mill favours free competition on efficiency grounds, but recognises a series of
cases in which regulation is in the public interest. For Mill, private property
derives its ultimate justification and limits from its usefulness for
guaranteeing to people the fruits of their own labour and abstinence. He infers
that tax on earned income (above an untaxed minimum that suffices for

security) should be at a constant not a progressive rate, but that wealth

acquired through gift, bequest or inheritance can be taxed intensively and
progressively enough to reduce large fortunes to the average over a few
generations. Furthermore, he strongly sympathises with collective ideals of
working together for the common good, and for that reason is supportive of
producer co-operatives, while presciently rejecting centralist versions of
socialism.
Policy in the spirit of Mill then, would be radically redistributive, while
simultaneously encouraging competitive markets among producers, including
workers co-operatives. It would be a programme which prioritised the
reduction of unearned wealth more strongly than anything available today.
However they rethink their views, social democrats will continue to hold an
ideal of living together that values especially what people do as citizens. To be
sure, individuals should also be self-reliant planners of their own life, and
generous private benefactors, but on the social democratic view there is value
inherent in collective action expressed through a democratic state, particularly
in the collective provision of social security. It is valuable because it develops a
distinct and important human virtue. One need not enter into debates
regarding individualism and collectivism at this point, and indeed Mill is a
valuable example of how one far one can go within an overall stance that
remains liberal and individualist.
Of course, the social democratic ideal is not the only ideal of social life.
Against it stands the libertarian ideal of self-reliance and purely voluntary cooperation. Its most attractive expression presents it as the ideal of a certain
kind of freedom an ethic of personal independence which insists that
contributions are always voluntary and never compelled. But this is not the
conception of liberty formulated in Mills essay on Liberty. On Liberty's
principles do not conflict with the libertarian ideal, but at least as understood
by Mill, they do not conflict with the social democratic ideal either.
Libertarians might argue the latter perspective does conflict with the Liberty
principle by arguing that failing to help others is not the same as actively
damaging their interests, and therefore imposing a scheme of aid on
individuals who have not freely agreed to it violates Mills principle of liberty.
However, Mill himself does not take the principle that way: he clearly thinks
that social obligations are legitimate if they have been imposed by a properly
democratic decision, so long as their content does not itself violate the Liberty
principle. Thus, a decision to level down all great fortunes, made by proper
democratic procedures, would not violate liberty, whatever other arguments
against it there might be.
On Liberty and the tyranny of the majority
These issues of debate are interesting from the Millian perspective, and he was
certainly exercised by them. Valuable discussions of competition and
cooperation, the principles of taxation, the green economy and so on can be
found in his other works, but most importantly On Liberty is about something
quite different, for which Mill felt more deeply than anything else the threat

of tyranny inherent in democracy of a mediocre conformism, capable of

enslaving the soul itself. It is precisely here, I would suggest, that social
democratic thinking has something important to learn from Mill.
Though Mill goes out of his way to highlight this theme in the introductory
chapter, it is often underplayed in analysis of his essay. On Liberty is the work
of an optimistic civic egalitarian, one who is also a passionate and anxious
liberal elitist. Now clearly Mill is a liberal rather than an authoritarian, and
the principles forwarded in On Liberty are one good way of characterising
what liberalism is. But he is no populist. He argues that after a level of security
and decent comfort have been reached (already reached, according to Mill, in
his own time), what really matters for human beings is not affluence but virtue
and insight into true value.
Yet while many have virtue, only a few have the moral creativity or the
independent insight into value that is required to invigorate social and
personal life. This leads to the claim that we have a duty to educate each other,
and those that enjoy insight into true value have a duty to take part. They
must not stand aside in an exclusive enclave, but lead others by example and
persuasion, rather than control. In order to do this they require the freedom to
develop themselves and their ideas.
Mill feels as strongly as he does about On Libertys principles because he
thinks that only they can protect the independence of such people against
democracys tendency to majoritarian despotism. What makes them especially
urgent for modern democracies is the protection they give to unpopular
criticism and unwelcome insight. This is an important insight for political
thinking, and not least social democratic thought. Yet what consequences
social democrats should draw from it is another matter.
Social democracy and the decay of the liberal republic the
relevance of Mill's essay today
Modern democracies insinuate, in more and less subtle ways, a compliant
egalitarianism of consumerist values. An exploitative culture of celebrity and
personal display dominates their common spaces, and increasingly their
politics. Meanwhile dissident elites withdraw into enclaves, or gated mental
communities.
This is a formula for the decay of the liberal republic. Today it is at least as
great an anxiety as Mill and other classical liberals foresaw, and if anything
the situation is accelerating. Are Mill's principles of liberty either a necessary
or a sufficient remedy? Or should social democrats think the problem through
afresh, and approach it in some different, perhaps stronger, way?
Social democrats should agree with Mill about an underlying premise: what is
best for us is virtue and insight, in which there is a duty to educate each other.
No liberal principle is infringed if that duty is pursued through the collective
action of a democratic state, and thus social democrats and classical liberals
may find common ground here. For social democrats this may involve a shift
in thinking from a conception of social justice that has always been unclear

 to a focus on civic equality as the foundation of the public good of a

democracy.
As Mill saw, however, civic equality is not the only element in a democracys
public good. In addition to the question of how to achieve and maintain civic
equality is that of how to invigorate the spirit of a liberal republic in an
undermining commercial environment. For example, Britain has a variety of
publicly funded educative institutions, originally founded in the classical spirit
of public liberalism that are now in decay. It has become obvious that the state
patronage on which they rely generates its own deep problems, but that does
not mean there is a better alternative.
I suggest that it is these issues, pertaining to the maintenance of public good
in a modern democracy, that Mills essay can alert social democrats to, and to
which in that traditions renewal it should attend.
John Skorupski is professor of moral philosophy at the University
of St Andrews. He is the author of John Stuart Mill, The Arguments
of the Philosophers, London: Routledge 1989
This essay is a contribution to Policy Networks series on The
classics of social democratic thought. Visit the Social Democracy
Observatory
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4003&title=John+Stuart+Mill%e2%80%99s+On+Li
berty

Crosland and The Future of Socialism

GILES RADICE - 30 JULY 2010
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The enduring legacy of this classic text lies in the rich revisionist
creed which drove Crosland to bring social democracy up to date
for his time
Anthony Croslands The Future of Socialism, published in October 1956, was
arguably the most important revisionist work of the post-war period. Crosland
was a leading Labour politician who became an innovative education secretary
under Harold Wilson and James Callaghans foreign secretary. But it was for
his book, The Future of Socialism, that he will be most remembered. It was
highly ambitious, but since his early twenties Crosland had wanted to emulate
the example of Eduard Bernstein, the German socialist democrat, and write
the definitive work on revisionist socialism for his generation.
Bernsteins Evolutionary Socialism, published at the end of the previous
century, had first refuted Marxs theory that capitalism was about to collapse.

Croslands aim was to bring social democracy up to date for his time. He told a
friend: I am revising Marxism and will emerge as the new Bernstein.
Drawing not only on economics but also on political theory, history, sociology
and industrial psychology, he covered the policy areas of education, social
welfare, industrial relations, as well as economic and fiscal theory. He saw
sociology as particularly important: I am convinced that this is the field,
rather than the traditional fields of politics and economics, in which the
significant issues for socialism and welfare will increasingly be found.
Croslands underlying thesis was that the harsh world of the 1930s had been
transformed by wartime changes and by the reforms of the post-war Labour
governments, led by Clement Attlee. The Marxist theory of capitalist collapse,
so firmly espoused by socialist intellectuals before the war, had, in Croslands
view, been clearly disproved. On the contrary, output and living standards
were rising steadily. At the same time, the commanding position of the
business class had been reduced by the increased powers of government and
the greater bargaining power of labour. Managers not owners now ran
industry. The combination of rising living standards, redistributive taxation
and welfare benefits had substantially reduced primary poverty.
He argued that, in the new situation, ownership of the means of production
was largely irrelevant. I conclude, he wrote, that the definition of capitalism
in terms of ownershiphas wholly lost its significance and interest now that
ownership is no longer the clue to the total picture of social relationships; and
that it would be more significant to define societies in terms of equality, or
class relationships, or their political systems.
One of the crucial points about The Future of Socialism was the distinction it
drew between ends and means. Ends were defined as basic values or
aspirations, means as describing the policy or institutional methods
required to promote these values in practice. According to Crosland, in
contrast to the ends, which remained constant, means were open to revision.
The revisionist task was to subject means to searching scrutiny in the light of
changing conditions. Indeed, uncomfortable as it might be to acknowledge,
the means (such as nationalisation) apparently most suitable in one
generation might be wholly inappropriate in another.
Modern socialism, Crosland argued, was not about public ownership but
concerned with improving welfare and providing social equality. The socialist
seeks a distribution of rewards, status and privileges egalitarian enough to
minimise social resentment, to secure justice between individuals and to
equalise opportunities; and he seeks to weaken the existing deep-seated class
stratification with its consistent feelings of envy and inferiority, and its
barriers to uninhibited mingling between the classes.
Over fifty years later, it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to criticise The
Future of Socialism. Crosland was too optimistic about economic growth. I
no longer regard questions of growth and efficiency as being, on a long view,
of primary importance to socialism, as he over-confidently proclaimed. His
definition of equality has been criticised as being too doctrinaire and rigid,

though Crosland sought not an unsustainable or undesirable equality of

outcome but to remove unfair and unnecessary barriers. He also ignored
racial and sexual equality. He appeared sometimes to be an uncritical
supporter of public expenditure (though he later made significant
qualifications). He was too complacent about conservative opposition to
socialist ideas and policies, ruling out a wholesale counter-revolution. Above
all, he had nothing to say about the international context in which Labour
governments had to operate. Croslandism was revisionism in one country.
Yet, accepting that it was a tract for its times, its authority, style and mode of
thinking have ensured that The Future of Socialism is still read today.
The crucial point about Crosland is that he was a revisionist. The revisionist
approach is made up of a number of crucial processes. Analysing what is
actually happening as opposed to what a particular dogma says ought to
happen; distinguishing clearly between values and methods; subjecting
methods above all to scrutiny and, if necessary, being prepared to modify
these in the light of changing conditions. In short revisionism is not a doctrine
but a radical cast of mind, a critical way of evaluating human affairs and
politics, in order to develop strategies and policies which are both informed by
values and, at the same time, take account of change. By definition, it is
provisional, always open to reappraisal.
The way of thinking behind The Future of Socialism is still crucial for us
today. Social democratic parties, under political pressure across Europe and
the world and faced by powerful forces, including globalisation, insecurity,
immigration, labour market instability, and climate change, need to
reappraise their strategies and policies in the light of change. Croslands basic
approach, if not his precise prescriptions, remain highly relevant to their task.
Giles Radice was Labour MP for Durham North and Chairman of the
powerful Treasury Committee until he became a life peer in 2001. His book,
"Trio: Inside the Blair, Brown,Mandelson Project," will be published by IB
Tauris on 14th of September 2010. His previous books includeFriends and
Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey and The Tortoise and the Hares:
Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison. He is a former chair of Policy
Network.
This is a contribution to Policy Networks series on The Classics of Social
Democratic Thought
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3881&title=Crosland+and+The+Future+of+Socialis
m

A paradoxical politics: The Great Transformation and

the future of social democracy
ADRIAN PABST - 25 JUNE 2010
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In rejecting both market liberalism and state socialism, Polanyis

blend of political idealism and economic realism offers some
telling insights for the modern centre-left
Twenty years after the collapse of state communism, the ongoing crisis of
free-market capitalism, which has plunged Europe into the worst economic
turmoil since the Great Depression of 1929-32, provides a unique opportunity
to chart an alternative path. Now that the dominant orthodoxy of
neoliberalism has been shown to be intellectually dead and morally bankrupt,
both left and right must look to genuinely fresh ideas and transformative
policies.
While in some European countries like the UK and France the centre-right has
switched from a neo-liberal to a more communitarian discourse, it is unclear
whether ruling parties have the political will to curb the power of global
finance or the determination to improve the lot of workers, families, local
communities and underdeveloped regions. Meanwhile, European social
democracy looks to Keynesianism and Green movements for new economic
and political inspiration. Notwithstanding the important insights which the
Keynesian and Green traditions offer, both remain in the end wedded to a
social-liberal, utilitarian creed that privileges personal choice and individual
emancipation at the expense of communal interest and the wider public good.
This ideology of social liberalism is entirely compatible with the ideology of
economic liberalism that has failed so spectacularly. Indeed, the dominant
language of choice legitimates the extension of free-market mechanisms
(aided and abetted by the regulatory state) into virtually all areas of socioeconomic and cultural life including education, health, the family and sex.
Todays scale and intensity of commodified labour and social relations is
beyond Marxs worst fears. Thus, much of the contemporary left and right
remains caught in a fundamental contradiction between calling for more
economic egalitarianism, on the one hand, and advocating ever-greater social
liberalisation, on the other hand.
Moreover, older civic virtues of justice, mutuality and reciprocity have been
sidelined and supplanted by the new economic values of fairness and
aspiration. Worse, these progressive values represent a new cosy consensus
that endorses the logic of capitalist democracy which tends towards an evergreater centralisation of power, concentration of wealth and financial
abstraction from the real economy and the shared natural world on which we
all depend.
On these and other issues, the significance of Karl Polanyis intellectual legacy
can hardly be overstated. In his seminal book The Great Transformation
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time published in 1944, he
combines a compelling critique of unbridled free-market capitalism with a
non-statist vision of socialism that is politically far more democratic and

economically much more egalitarian than the false third-way of Clinton and
Blair or the vapid communitarianism of the post-neoliberal centre-right.
Debunking the state versus market myth
First, Polanyi radicalises Marxs critique of capitalism. Since Marx, we know
that capitalism treats money as if it had a life of its own. As such, capitalism
views capital as a reality in its own right, with power and agency. And in order
to enhance the reach of money, the capitalist economy turns human labour
into a commodity whose value is determined exclusively by its market price
itself the product of the iron law of supply and demand.
The trouble is that the Marxist critique of capitalism does not go nearly far
enough. Left to itself, the capitalist economy also views land and human
relations as commodities that can be freely traded on the universal
marketplace. As such, the unfettered free market violates a universal ethical
principle that has governed virtually all cultures in the past: nature and
human life have almost always and everywhere been recognised as having a
sacred dimension. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath have
led to a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people a
satanic mill grinding men into masses, as Polanyi puts it. In thus
subordinating society and the environment to the self-regulating free market,
capitalism does not simply disrupt traditional cultures (as Marx already
remarked). It also causes widespread social disintegration and ecological
devastation. Long before the contemporary Green movement, Polanyi linked
the future of our common natural habitat to the forces of economic market
liberalisation.
Secondly, Polanyi repudiates centralised solutions like uniformly regulated
markets or nationalised industries in favour of pluralising the bureaucratic
state and strengthening the autonomy of civil society. Unlike most Marxists
and social-democrats, he argues that the conventional liberal opposition of
state and market is largely deluded. Just as the free market needs the state to
remove social barriers that hinder the free flow of capital, so the central state
needs the market to dissolve communal bonds that limit intrusive state
control. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi notes that the creation of freemarket exchange in labour, land and money in Britain in the 1830s coincided
with an unprecedented expansion of state power aimed at disciplining the
populace an account that precedes and in some measure surpasses Michel
Foucaults work on bio-politics and Giorgio Agambens writings on bare
individuality.
Moreover, the growing convergence of state and market mirrors the
increasing ambivalence of left and right Polanyis third argument. The
commonly held belief that the left protects the state against the market while
the right privileges the market over the state is economically false and
politically questionable, as Polanyis book intimates. Just as the left now views
the market as the most efficient delivery mechanism for private wealth and
public welfare, so the right has always relied on the state to secure the
property rights of the affluent and to turn small proprietors into cheap wage
labourers by stripping them of their land and traditional networks of support.

The latter were never perfect, and there is certainly no golden age that we
could or should return to. But the point is that such networks are based on the
principles of reciprocity and mutuality. Here Polanyi draws on the important
anthropological insight that human beings desire social recognition more than
material wealth and that culture restricts commercial exchange: pace Adam
Smith, not the propensity to barter, but reciprocity in social behaviour
dominates. As a result, the economic system should be a function of social
organisation, not vice-versa. In turn, thats the reason for Polanyis imperative
to re-embed both state and market within social relations.
Some uncomfortable truths for contemporary social democracy
Taken together, Polanyis three arguments about the nature of capitalism and
the nexus between state and market confront social-democracy with some
uncomfortable truths about appealing to the central state as a bulwark against
the free market. First of all, Polanyis book is a call to uphold the sanctity of
life and land against the commodification by the market-state. In this
respect, social-democracy must denounce not just Thatchers disastrous policy
of financial liberalisation and deregulation but equally Blairs and Browns
support for the privatisation of the public sector as well as New Labours
shameless attack on civil liberties and its mindless promotion of equality and
other social legislation. In reality, equality laws do not simply protect
individuals from unjust privilege or unfair discrimination though they can
correct some scandalous instances of injustice. The trouble is that such laws
also mark the central imposition of sameness on all sorts of different groups
and intermediary bodies by enforcing monolithic norms and standards upon
social actors who should benefit from exemptions based on freedom of
conscience.
All this has brought about a historically unprecedented situation where
universal liberty and happiness are equated with personal choice and comfort
an impoverished utilitarianism of which Jeremy Bentham would have been
proud. Likewise, decisions over life and death are reduced to matters of
individual will and negative freedom. By thus removing legal and moral
provisions to defend the inviolability of human (and other animal) life, the
Thatcherite-Blairite settlement betrays the humanist legacy that many
progressives purport to uphold but in reality betray.
Linked to the convergence of state and market is the second lesson of
Polanyis book for social democracy today, namely that the centralisation of
political and bureaucratic power has also facilitated a concentration of
financial and property wealth at the expense of real wage growth, thus
producing soaring income and asset inequality. For the extended reach of
markets creates economies of scale that favour the sort of consolidation that
can only be described as cartel capitalism. Unlike statist socialists, Polanyi
argues for the decentralisation of power and the localisation of wealth, reembedding political and economic processes in social relations. Far from
advocating a nave communitarianism that masks the retrenchment of the
state, Polanyis thinking gestures in the direction of a guild socialism as
envisioned by G.D.H. Cole and others, whereby both workers and consumers
would co-own capital and receive assets as part of elected councils or guilds.

The third lesson that Polanyis Great Transformation holds for contemporary
European social democracy relates to welfare reform. Centralised statist
welfare plays at best a compensatory role in relation to laissez-faire economics
and at worst is secretly complicit with the extension of the market into
hitherto largely self-regulating areas of the economy and society. Indeed, the
welfare state merely regulates the conflict between capital owners and wage
labourers without fundamentally altering relations between capital and
labour. Whilst it does provide some much-needed minimum standards, statist
welfare subsidises the affluent middle classes and undermines (traditional or
new) networks of mutual assistance and reciprocal help amongst workers and
within local economies. Today, a renewed emphasis on the principles of
reciprocity and mutuality translates into policies that incentivise the creation
of mutualised banks, local credit unions and community-based investment
trusts.
Thus, Polanyi warns against the fallacy of appealing to a welfare model that
traps the poor in dependency and redistributes income to the wealthy. At the
hands of Thatcher and New Labour, the welfare state was first rationalised
and then deployed to fashion the freely-choosing reflexive and risking
individual removed from the relational constraints of nature, family and
tradition, as John Milbank has rightly remarked. At a time of fiscal austerity,
ageing populations and the ballooning deficits of social security and pension
systems, the social-democratic left must look beyond redistributive policies to
asset-based welfare and decentralised models that foster human relationships
of communal care and mutual help rather than state paternalism or private
contract delivery. For example, social democrats could advocate a system that
combines universal entitlement with localised and personalised provision, e.g.
by fostering and extending grassroots initiatives like Get Together or
Southwark Circle in London that blend individual, group and state action.
Both initiatives reject old schemes such as befriending or uniform benefits in
favour of citizens activity and community-organising supported by local
council instead of being determined by central target and standards.
Nurturing the social bonds of trust and reciprocity
The fourth set of lessons for contemporary social democracy concerns a series
of economic reforms. Polanyis vision for an alternative economy, which is reembedded in politics and social relations, offers a refreshing alternative to the
residual market liberalism of both left and right. In practice, an embedded
model means that elected governments restrict the free flow of capital and
create the civic space in which workers, businesses and communities can
regulate economic activity. Instead of free-market self-interest or central state
paternalism, it is the individual and corporate members of civil society who
collectively determine the norms and institutions governing production and
exchange.
Specific measures include, first of all, extending fair-trade prices and
standards from agriculture and the food industry to other parts of the
economy. This could be done by strengthening the associative framework and
giving different sectors more autonomy in determining how to implement a

set of desirable goals debated and voted upon by national parliament, regional
assemblies or city halls.
Second, replacing the minimum wage with a just, living wage that reflects the
true value of labour. Here the example of London Citizens is very instructive
a network of different local communities and faith groups that has persuaded
City Hall and a growing number of corporate businesses to sign up voluntarily
and pay their staff the living wage. Third, at the level of the G20 and the EU
pushing for global capital controls in the form of the Tobin tax and bank levies
(including voluntary caps on interest rates), coupled with new incentives to
reconnect finance to the real economy, by promoting investment in
productive, human and social investment. The overriding aim must be to
preserve the sanctity of natural and human life and to promote human
associations that nurture the social bonds of trust and reciprocity on which
both democracy and markets depend.
Finally, Polanyi debunks the dominant anthropological myth since Adam
Smiths Wealth of Nations that we are economic, trading animals with diffuse
moral sentiments who follow their propensity to truck, barter and exchange
one thing for another, as I have already indicated. Instead, Polanyi contends
that we are fundamentally gift-exchanging animals who primarily seek mutual
social recognition instead of merely individual material gain. Throughout The
Great Transformation, he contrasts the modern, secular idea of a universal
commercial society dominated by abstract formal contracts and proprietary
relations with a more Romantic vision that is neither nostalgic nor utopian but
blends political idealism with economic realism. Fundamentally, he rejects
both market liberalism and state socialism, arguing that both destroy the
autonomy of civic culture and the freedom of civil society. By calling for
radical political and economic decentralisation, Polanyis guild socialism is far
more radical than left-wing communitarians.
Thus, Polanyis contribution to twentieth-century political thought is to show
that socialisms statist turn inaugurated either the collectivist statism of the
Marxist-Leninist tradition or the complicit collusion of state and market in
much of twentieth- and early twenty-first century social democracy. As a
European thinker of Hungarian origin who resisted fascism in Austria and
Germany, Polanyi is uniquely positioned to help Europes social-democrats
develop alternatives to neo-liberalism and to the incoherent, liberal
communitarianism of the contemporary centre-right.
Adrian Pabst is a lecturer in politics in the University of Kent at
Canterbury. He writes frequently on political economy, geopolitics
and Europe for the comment pages of International Herald
Tribune, The Guardian and The Moscow Times. Currently, he is
writing The Politics of Paradox, a book about alternative to
capitalist democracy
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3867&title=A+paradoxical+politics%3a+The+Great
+Transformation+and+the+future+of+social+democracy

The Third Way revisited

ANTHONY GIDDENS - 28 JUNE 2010
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The title was regrettable, misunderstood and misinterpreted yet

the issues raised in the book still have relevance for the renewal of
social democracy today
My book The Third Way was first published in 1998. I first of all planned to
call it The Renewal of Social Democracy (which eventually I relegated to the
status of sub-title). If I had published the book under the original title, it
would have been clear that it was rooted firmly in social democratic traditions.
However, it would probably have reached only a limited audience of
academics and policy specialists and I wanted to attract a wider readership. I
wasnt by any means the first to use the term third way itself, which crops
up recurrently in the history of political thought used most often by authors
on the left but also occasionally by those on the right. The phrase was
resurrected by the Swedish Social Democrats in the late 1980s, but its return
to popularity came mainly from its adoption at roughly the same time by Bill
Clinton and the thinktank to which he was closely connected, the Democratic
Leadership Council. The third way was self-consciously associated with the
invention of the term the New Democrats in the US and later with New
Labour in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair. I wrote the book
initially in part as a result of taking part in dialogues which Bill and Hillary
Clinton had established with Tony Blair in 1997 and which continued in
expanded form for some years afterwards.
On its appearance The Third Way did in fact spark a lot of attention in the
Anglo-Saxon world. What I didnt anticipate was just how great an impact the
book would have in a diversity of other countries around the globe. Its success
allowed me to meet and talk at first hand with a large number of centre-left
leaders in those countries. At that point there was world-wide interest in
Clinton and Blair, who had led their respective parties out of a long period in
the electoral wilderness. Yet in the end I came to regret having chosen the title
The Third Way, even if it did bring the book so much attention. The reason
was precisely that the third way became so widely associated specifically
with the New Democrats and New Labour. Although I was sympathetic to
some of the core policies of both I had a lot of reservations too, especially as
the years passed. The third way became a corrupted term, not just because
of some of the policies followed by the two parties but because of the attacks
on them by critics, especially from the left. Some of these seemed to me
misinterpretations such as the idea that New Labour was ideologically
empty, had abandoned the ideals of the left, or was a continuation of
Thatcherism with a softer face. But these misinterpretations increasingly came
to be how the third way was seen, as a weak, poorly-developed substitute for
left-of-centre thinking, rather than, as I intended, a means of promoting its
revival.

So let me reassert what in my terms the third way (tw) was about, and what
it was not. The tw for me was NOT a middle way between left and right,
socialism and capitalism, or anything else, but a left-of-centre political
philosophy, concerned with exactly what was stated in my original title, the
renewal of social democracy. It was NOT a succumbing to neo-liberalism or
market fundamentalism. On the contrary, I argued that social democrats had
to move beyond two failed, or compromised, philosophies of the past, one
being neo-liberalism, the other being old-style social democracy,
characterised by a top-down state ownership of the commanding heights of
the economy and Keynesian national demand management. The tw was NOT
merely some sort of pragmatism. On the contrary, the values of the left retain
their essential relevance, but as I saw it far-reaching policy innovation was
needed to realise them in a world experiencing major social and economic
changes. I identified these changes as the intensifying of globalisation;
expanding individualism; the growth of reflexivity; and the increasing
intrusion of ecological risk into the political field.
So far as globalisation is concerned, some more nots are in order, given the
misunderstandings of the notion that abound. Globalisation, I argued, is NOT
a single force, but a complex set of influences. It is NOT to be identified solely
with the global marketplace the communications revolution is at least
equally important as a driving influence. Nor is it an implacable power before
which we must all bow down. Rather it is a fractured and contradictory one
in the emerging global age, although we are all far more interdependent than
ever before, nation-states retain a great deal of influence because they are the
prime source of political legitimacy, and of legal and military authority.
Individualism, I asserted, operates at the opposite pole from globalisation but
is deeply influenced by and at the same time influences it in return. The rise of
individualism remains as contentious as when I first wrote the book. Many see
it as essentially noxious, as undermining social solidarity and common moral
commitments, but for me important elements of emancipation are involved the capacity for self-determination and an escape from the fixities of tradition
and habit. Individualism isnt intrinsically the enemy of social cohesion or
common morality; rather, these have to be recast in terms of more active
forms of mutual obligation and personal responsibility than in the past.
When I wrote The Third Way the internet was in its infancy. Yet for the most
part the internet has deepened and extended processes that were already
visible at that time. I referred to these generically as the increasing reflexivity
of modern social life. Reflexivity means that individuals and groups have
regularly to decide how to act in relation to a flow of incoming information
relevant to those decisions; its advance fundamentally alters the nature of
politics and government. Political support becomes more de-aligned than in
the past and levels of party membership start to plummet. Attitudes of
deference to authority figures, and established institutions, including
politicians and parliaments, decline. The consequences are multiple and
shifting. Activism can increase, but often operates outside the orthodox sphere
of parliamentary government. At the same time, disillusionment with
politicians and the orthodox parliamentary process can produce periods of
widespread apathy.

Finally, there is the increasing intrusion of ecological risk into the mainstream
of political life. We are living after the end of nature in the sense that many
formerly natural processes have become anthropogenic they are influenced,
sometimes even determined, by human intervention. Climate change is the
most significant and far-reaching expression of this process, but its impact
stretches much more widely. I would have included a more extensive
discussion of climate change had I been writing the book today. The crucial
theme I introduced, however the penetration of outer and inner nature
(the human body and even mind) by science and technology remains intact.
The opportunities this circumstance produces are dramatic and far-reaching.
Yet they are accompanied by risks quite different from any we have had to face
in the past, because we can only to some extent use past experience to guide
us.
The point of the book, to repeat, was to find a way beyond market
fundamentalism on the one hand and old-style social democracy on the other,
and to apply this framework to political problems ranging from those of
everyday life (such as the future of the family) through to issues of a global
scale. The core preoccupation of social democrats should be with the reestablishment of the public realm, public institutions and public goods,
following the long period in which market-based philosophies ruled the roost.
The public sphere is not the same as the state; reform of the state has to be
high on the agenda, wherever it is unresponsive to citizens concerns, captured
by producer interests or has become overly bureaucratic. Markets have their
distinctive qualities chief among them their fluidity, capacity to respond to a
multitude of pricing signals and to stimulate innovation - and social
democrats should recognise and help deploy these. However, markets need
regulation to shape them to the public purpose. In the book I picked out
especially the need to regulate world financial markets, which I identified, to
quote from The Third Way, as the single most pressing issue in the world
economy.
In the work I gave a lot of attention to civil society the Big Society, as the
Tories now call it. Yet civil society will not flourish if the state is pared back.
Public goals can best be achieved if there is an effective and dynamic balance
between the state, marketplace and the civic order. Each acts as a check on the
other and also provides a stimulus and challenge to them. The recovery of
community, civic pride and local cohesion should be a major concern of social
democratic politics. These cant be founded (Tories take note) upon nostalgia
for a disappeared - and often imaginary - past of social harmony but have to
be achieved through new mechanisms. This theorem applies to the family as
well as other areas.
Because it was so widely misinterpreted I gave up using the term the third
way itself some years ago. Yet, as I hope I have shown, most of the issues that
I raised in the book are still with us.
Anthony Giddens is a former director of the London School of
Economics and a Labour peer. His most recent book is "The
Politics of Climate Change"

This piece is a contribution to the Policy Network series on The Classics of

Social Democratic Thought
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3868&title=The+Third+Way+revisited

Keynes and social democracy today

ROBERT SKIDELSKY - 28 JULY 2010

The battle lines may have changed from the means of production
to big finance but the state remains the ultimate protector of the
public good
For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic biggovernment policies. But John Maynard Keyness relationship with social
democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of
social democratic policy particularly its emphasis on maintaining full
employment he did not subscribe to other key social democratic objectives,
such as public ownership or massive expansion of the welfare state.
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes ends by
summarising the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system. On one
hand, capitalism offers the best safeguard of individual freedom, choice, and
entrepreneurial initiative. On the other hand, unregulated markets fail to
achieve two central goals of any civilized society: The outstanding faults of
the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full
employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and
incomes. This suggested an active role for government, which dovetailed with
important strands of left-wing thought.
Until The General Theory was published in 1936, social democrats did not
know how to go about achieving full employment. Their policies were directed
at depriving capitalists of the ownership of the means of production. How this
was to produce full employment was never worked out.
There was an idea, originally derived from Ricardo and Marx, that the
capitalist class needed a reserve army of the unemployed to maintain its
profit share. If profits were eliminated, the need for that reserve army would
disappear. Labour would be paid what it was worth, and everyone willing to
work would be able to find a job.
But, apart from the political impossibility of nationalising the whole economy
peacefully, this approach suffered from the fatal flaw of ignoring the role of
aggregate demand. It assumed that demand would always be sufficient if
profits were eliminated.

Keynes demonstrated that the main cause of bouts of heavy and prolonged
unemployment was not worker encroachment on profits, but the fluctuating
prospects of private investment in an uncertain world. Nearly all
unemployment in a cyclical downturn was the result of the failure of
investment demand.
Thus, the important thing was not to nationalise the capital stock, but to
socialise investment. Industry could be safely left in private hands, provided
the state guaranteed enough spending power in the economy to maintain a
full-employment level of investment. This could be achieved by monetary and
fiscal policy: low interest rates and large state investment programmes.
In short, Keynes aimed to achieve a key social democratic objective without
changing the ownership of industry. Nevertheless, he did think that
redistribution would help secure full employment. A greater tendency to
consume would serve to increase at the same time the inducement to invest.
And the low interest rates needed to maintain full employment would lead in
time to the euthanasia of the rentier of those who live off the rents of
capital.
Moderate re-distribution was the more politically radical implication of
Keyness economic theory, but the measures outlined above were also the
limits of state intervention for him. As long as the state is able to determine
the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments
[i.e., the capital base] and the basic reward to those who own them, there is
no obvious case for further involvement. The public was never to substitute
for the private, but merely to complement it.
Today, ideas about full employment and equality remain at the heart of social
democracy. But the political struggle needs to be conducted along new battle
lines. Whereas the front used to run between government and the owners of
the means of production the industrialists, the rentiers now, it runs
between governments and finance. Such measures as the efforts by the
European Parliament to regulate the derivatives market or the British
governments ban on short selling in the wake of the financial crisis or the
demand to caps bankers bonuses are contemporary expressions of the wish to
reduce the power of financial speculation to damage the economy.
The new focus on the need to tame the power of finance is largely a
consequence of globalisation. Capital moves across borders more freely and
more quickly than goods or people do. Yet, while large global firms habitually
use their high concentration of financial resources to press for further deregulation (or we will go somewhere else), the crisis has turned their size
into a liability.
Being too big to fail simply means being too big. Keynes saw that it is the
financial markets precariousness which creates no small part of our
contemporary problem of securing sufficient investment. That rings truer
today more than 70 years later than in his own day. Rather than securing
investment for productive sectors of the economy, the financial industry has

become adept at securing investment in itself.

This, once again, calls for an activist government policy. Yet, as Keynes would
have argued, it is important that the expansion of government involvement is
informed by sound economics rather than political ideology, social democratic
or otherwise.
State intervention needs to bridge gaps that the private sector cannot
reasonably be expected to do on its own. The current crisis has shown with
utmost clarity that private markets are unable to self-regulate; domestic
regulation is therefore a key area in which government has a role to play.
Similarly, time-inconsistency issues prevent large international firms from
compartmentalising their markets. Re-erecting barriers to capital flows in the
form of international taxes, thereby cordoning off crises before they turn
global, is therefore another task for government.
Keyness main contribution to social democracy, however, does not lie in the
specifics of policy, but in his insistence that the state as ultimate protector of
the public good has a duty to supplement and regulate market forces. If we
need markets to stop the state from behaving badly, we need the state to stop
markets from behaving badly. Nowadays, that means stopping financial
markets from behaving badly. That means limiting their power, and their
profits.
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is
professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University,
author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John
Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of
Political Studies.
This article is a contribution to Policy Networks series on The classics of
social democratic thought. Project Syndicate
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3883&title=Keynes+and+social+democracy+today

FDR: The progressive as hero

PATRICK DIAMOND - 27 JULY 2010
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In contrast to social democrats today, FDRs style of leadership

empathised with the anxieties and frustrations of the people and
boldly seized the opportunity of a crisis for progressive ends
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the worlds first great crisis leader, and
arguably the first great politician of the television age. As well as an
astonishingly adept communicator, FDR remains an important ideological

antecedent for modern progressivism and social democracy, particularly in

the current climate of capitalist crisis and the global politics of recession.
Roosevelt was a dominant leader because he appeared to have the answers to
peoples problems during a period of extraordinary turmoil and uncertainty in
American life, a nation that, as he put it, was by the early 1930s, frozen by a
fatalistic terror. The United States was gripped by paralysis and self-doubt in
the face of a severe economic depression and stock market collapse. FDR rose
to the occasion, speaking directly to people and energising the nation behind
the drive for recovery. He understood that recessions are moments of
opportunity as well as crisis, but only if politicians are very bold in seizing
them, as Andrew Gamble has recently reminded us.1 They have to frame
narratives that are popular and credible, accompanied by radical solutions
that are capable of unifying the country. And they have to be prepared to face
great opposition, just as FDR did.
In contrast to Roosevelts victories, parties of the right historically have
proved themselves to be more adept at seizing the advantage and framing the
narrative. This is exactly what has occurred in Western Europe since the first
banking crisis in August 2007, where Christian democracy has dominated the
political landscape at the expense of the centre-left, which has suffered a
succession of serious reversals and defeats. Social democracy has relatively
little idea about how to protect people from global storms. First, it has allowed
the crisis to be redefined as a crisis of debt, rather than a crisis of financial
market failure. Second, the left has flirted with the rhetoric of capitalist
collapse, when it is more likely that the crisis will lead to the rebirth and
renewal of capitalism. The issue will be how to better protect people by
promoting the resilience both of institutions and the population at large
through a new social compact.
In Britain, before the financial crisis took hold, Labour promised British jobs
for British workers, but this did not appear plausible or credible, particularly
to skilled, blue-collar voters. After the collapse of the banks it acted decisively
to prevent widespread financial failure, but it had no long-term plan for
institutional reform to rebalance the economy away from overdependence on
financial services, hedge funds and derivatives. Arguably, social democratic
governments have been insufficiently bold in challenging the vested interests
of the markets. In the face of neo-liberal orthodoxy, they have been reluctant
to position themselves as reformers of financial market capitalism, contesting
the excesses of bankers and financiers. Yet this is exactly what the public have
been demanding as a pragmatic response to systemic failure and unjustified
reward in the financial sector.
It was precisely this error that FDR battled to avoid. He served as President
from March 1933 to April 1945, the longest tenure in American history. FDR
may have done more to alter the course of American society and politics than
any president before or since. Roosevelt was a defining figure who understood
the importance of the politics of security, in which governments strive to
protect ordinary citizens in dark and dangerous times. In his second inaugural
address in 1937, he took stock of what had changed in America since he
assumed the presidency: We refused to leave the problems of our common

welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.

Under FDR, the federal government assumed a new and powerful role in the
nations economy, and in the health, welfare and well-being of its citizens.
Trade unions were granted the right to organise and bargain collectively, and
the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938 put a floor under wages and a ceiling on
hours. Financial aid was provided to the sick, elderly and unemployed who
could not provide for themselves, and special assistance was granted to
agricultural and rural America through price supports and development
programmes. By embracing an activist fiscal policy in the late 1930s, the
government took on responsibility for managing monetary and financial
shocks. The New Deal programme as a whole ensured that the economic and
political benefits of American capitalism were distributed more equally among
the population.
All of this was achieved at some political cost, despite Roosevelts landslide
victory in 1936 with 61 per cent of the popular vote. Many wealthy Americans
could not even bear to utter Roosevelts name and he was commonly referred
to by the rich as that man in the White House. But he was unwavering in his
revolve to carry through a great programme of economic and social reform,
declaring: The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of
those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have too
little.
FDR was a heroic progressive president, but of course his record should not be
exempt from criticism. At the end of the 1930s, unemployment remained at
very high levels; while weak purchasing power meant that without the
outbreak of the Second World War, stagnation may have engulfed the
American economy. The New Deal propped up many failing industries and
sectors, and opportunities for innovation and the renewal of Americas
infrastructure were missed. That said, Roosevelts triumph was in seizing the
opportunity of the crisis and redefining it for progressive ends, transforming
American society and politics and emerging as a defining figure in American
history.
Patrick Diamond is a senior research fellow at Policy Network,
Gwilym Gibbon fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and a visiting
fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Oxford
This is a contribution to Policy Network's series on The Classics of Social
Democratic Thought
1. See Andrew Gamble, Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3880&title=FDR%3a+The+progressive+as+hero

Reconsidering Citizenship and Social Class

MITCHELL COHEN - 28 JUNE 2010
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In speaking of the development of civil, political, and social

citizenship as an evolutionary sequence, Marhshall's elegant
classic points to a vigorous concern for both liberty and equality
An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: start with an
egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. Its a slippery slope
to the end of individuality.
This was not simply a social or economic claim. Once upon a time, this
attitude stymied equality before the law, a liberal norm most of us would now
take for granted. Once upon another time, it was used to forestall universal
suffrage, now a democratic norm in any decent political order.
Foes at least many early ones -- of equality before the law or universal
suffrage supposed that a society ought to be governed by natural aristocracy.
This later became meritocracy for many of them. Surely, this marked
considerable improvement, yet meritocracy was often conceived narrowly,
evading consideration of how unearned social advantages or disadvantages
shape life chances of most people.
Let me pose this in a way that is not original yet, I think, revealing. Imagine
two girls, both age five, with pneumonia. One, the daughter of well-off
parents, lives in a well-to-do neighborhood. The other, daughter of a poorly or
modestly paid working family, lives in outer boroughs. Why should the first
girl receive better medical attention than the second? Does she merit it more
than her counterpart? But how can she if you must do something in order to
merit something else? Neither girl can be said to merit her mother and father
or to have chosen them. Parents, whether good or bad, rich or poor, do not,
after all, issue from a childs free choice any more than, say, her IQ. Should
both girls be told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or should both
simply have access to equally good care?
And what, then, of their possibilities for schooling? No, that is not a leap from
one matter to another. There is I borrow from philosopher John Rawls and
his followers -- a kind of birth lottery with enormous, unavoidable social
consequences. Unavoidable? Not exactly. The two girls may not have chosen
their parents, but the society into which they are born is, like all societies, a
matter of many human choices. Priorities are set by them, and these embody
or are shaped by a range of values; they can be sustained or changed
politically.
For instance, a government led by the British Labour party instituted a
National Health Service after World War II. This transformed the citizenrys
access to medical care by making it a social right. For another, more recent
example, Democrats recently legislated important if more narrow reform of
the American health system. This came over objections of a Republican
minority that hoped to impose its own priorities; and some conservative

politicians and pundits warned how this really every -- social reform
encumbers free choice and skids towards nothing less than
totalitarianism.
By now you are wondering: why this prelude to address the essay in the title of
this article, Citizenship and Social Class by T. H. Marshall (1893-1981)? But
consider the conceptual terrain touched so far: civil citizenship (particularly
the ideas of equality before the law and individual rights), political citizenship
(particularly universal suffrage), and social citizenship (the notion that all
members of a polity ought to enjoy and to share at least a basic level of socialeconomic, and cultural well-being).
Think now of the institutions and some of the rights linked to each dimension
of citizenship: courts (to secure civil liberties); elections to a legislature
(political rights); welfare systems (public education and health care). In fact,
weve arrived at Marshalls principle concerns. They were presented with
Britain in mind, first as a lecture in 1949 and then in published form in 1950
by this professor of sociology at the London School of Economics (and later
head of social sciences for UNESCO). The context is evident: the post-war
creation of a welfare state.
Marshall spoke of the development of civil, political, and social citizenship as
an evolutionary sequence. The rights embodied in the first pointed to those of
the second, and the second to the third. Each, in succession, was secured over
the three centuries following the 1688 Revolution. Some scholars challenge
dimensions of Marshalls progression. I wont dwell on these debates, in part
because I am not an historian of Britain, and partly because my primary
concerns here are the social democratic implications of his argument (which I
will present in broad strokes and occasional paraphrase, and on which I will
somewhat elaborate).
Those social democratic implications derive from Marshalls proposition that
the very concept of modern citizenship is at odds with unmerited inequalities,
and should be deployed to abate them. Citizenship, he explained, is a status
bestowed on all those who are full members of a community. Those members
share rights, duties and the protections of a common law. The bonds of
modern citizenship grow among them first through the struggle to win those
rights, and then, once gained, by their enjoyment. And so, modern
citizenship is born also of loyalty to a civilization which is a common
possession.
Common: Marshall assumes that people are not simply egos batting about in
artificially framed spaces that they happen to call nations or states. There is
such a thing as society; the social individuals who comprise it ought to share
a basic notion and system -- of fairness rooted in mutuality. The kind of
market fundamentalism that was rehabilitated closer to our times (in the
Thatcher-Reagan era) is obviously at odds with this way of thinking.
This thinking does not entail a simplistic negation of the positive
accomplishments of classical liberalism or markets; it does propose that
modern citizenship, as a status held by all, expands the domains of equality at

the expense of social class, with its vestiges of a pre-modern hierarchy of

privileged estates. The persistent enrichment of citizenship rights, thought
Marshall, ought to render important powers associated with social
differences...increasingly less powerful. (This has been challenged from the
left on the grounds that economic inequalities too easily, even inevitably
translate into undue political influence).
But lets follow Marshalls presentation in a little more detail.
Civil Citizenship
Civil Citizenship came first and consolidated the rule of law and equality
before the law. Its rights are those necessary to individual freedom liberty
of the person, freedom of thought, speech and faith, the right to own property
and to conclude valid contracts and the right to justice. Individual civil rights
also undid statutes and customs that constricted the right to work; working
people could now, in principle, move about legally in pursuit of employment.
It is a right that also corresponded to capitalisms need for labor markets.
Citizenship and freedom, at least individual freedom, appear to have
become interchangeable terms, Marshall noted. Yet a problem becomes
obvious. If you accept equality before the law, must you not also accept
equality in choosing lawmakers? In other words, the principle of civil
citizenship contains within itself what Marshall calls a drive towards further
equality -- political equality. The logic of civil rights subverts the idea that
political rights should be restricted on account of social class.
Political citizenship
Political citizenship progresses in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The
Reform of 1832, with its limited expansion of the franchise, was the first
infantile attempt by political rights to walk. Steps, then strides, led
eventually to universal suffrage. Political rights caught up with civil rights.
Alongside these, a labour movement grew and a Labour party went into
parliament.
The results of this trajectory are uncontroversial by the standards of liberal
democracy. The same is not so for Marshalls next move, which was to assert
that social rights must follow from political and civil ones.
Social citizenship
Social citizenship encompasses a whole range of rights, says Marshall, from
a modicum of welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social
heritage and live the life of a civilized being according to the standards
prevailing in society. These rights find their institutional home in what, with
some variation, has now been characterized as a welfare state. (The term in
English seems to have originated with Archbishop William Temple, who
meant it to contrast with the warfare states of World War II). Social rights
mitigate inequalities generated by market economies without abolishing
markets.

Here, again, one principle implies another: if every citizen is equal before the
law and should therefore be able to choose those who make laws, shouldnt
every citizen also be equipped, knowledgeable, and secure enough to enjoy
their civil and political rights, and fulfill responsibilities that come with them?
If yes, then decent education and living conditions must be aspects of
citizenship. Without education, a citizen cannot make intelligent choices at the
ballot box, and an uneducated citizenry also cannot sustain a minimally
sophisticated economy. An educated citizen will be better able to exercise a
civil right like free speech. And so we begin to perceive that social citizenship
does not quash individuality, but together with the other aspects of
citizenship, fortifies the foundations on which it may flourish democratically;
it enables individual citizens to fare well.
How shall we think about Marshalls claims sixty years after they were made?
One thing to note is that the slippery slope argument against thinkers like
Marshall is obviously tendentious. Whatever the problems or weaknesses or
costs of welfare states, whatever the difficulties in finding equilibrium between
political community and markets, or between the state and civil society, or
between public initiative and private innovation, this is evident: social
citizenship did not abolish political citizenship in liberal democracies. Political
citizenship did not extinguish civil citizenship.
Note, too, that citizenships egalitarian drive does not make everyone the
same. It can, Marshall points out, even increase economic inequalities. If
health services are available to all citizens as a social right, members of betteroff classes will find their disposable income increased; they can spend
otherwise fees they once paid private doctors. The advantages obtained by
having a larger money income do not disappear, remarked Marshall, but they
are limited to consumption. This means that powers derived from economic
disparities are undercut. (Again, critics on Marshalls left would question the
political efficacy of this claim). Neither would markets disappear, but social
logic complimentary to Marshalls would suggest that they be regarded as
means rather than ends.
Critics from the right often insist that expenditures on social citizenship are
inevitably too costly. This claim seems to me to slope in another, slippery and
dangerous direction. What if someone claimed that fair court systems (and
thus civil rights) were becoming too expensive? He or she would quite
justly -- be treated with scorn. There are, however, untoward occasions when
civil liberties are temporarily compromised to a degree in a liberal democratic
society wartime, for instance. So these rights are also not always considered
absolute. Concessions are demanded occasionally in less exacting
circumstances too if, say, one legitimate civil liberty conflicts with another
legitimate civil liberty. It might well be that a free press has to be restricted
sometimes in some degree to guarantee that an individual has a fair jury
trial.(1) But these examples differ qualitatively from calculation by nothing
but financial cost.
Marshalls case, finally, is that each of the three aspects of citizenship can
indeed should bolster the others in a decent society. Each may modify the

others, but they dont pile atop or fuse with each other. If they did, the distinct
concerns of their specific domains civil, political, social -- would dissolve.
Guaranteeing freedom of conscience is not the same as guaranteeing a fair
vote or as making sure that a sick five year old member of your political
community gets proper attention (or insuring that her family will not be
ruined financially to obtain it for her).
The point is not to be blithe about expenditures on social citizenship; they are
real as real as, say, taxes. But I do mean to suggest the need for moral
wariness, indeed unease, when financial claims are advanced simplistically
against the basics of social citizenship. After all, why should a citizenry be any
less derisive of the idea that costs should curtail civil liberties than of the idea
that social rights -- say, those of our five year old -- are too costly?
Nonetheless, a weakness in Marshalls essay, concerned as it is to show how
rights progress from other rights, is its insufficient consideration of conflicts
among rights.
If conflicts like these arise, then the world-view of those who grapples with
them becomes an urgent matter. Will it be public servants who fret greatly, are
even sleepless about such trade-offs? Or will they be like those (on the right)
who imagine that they have an all-solving paradigm in The Market? Or like
those (on the hard left) who care little about civil and political rights because
they possess the scientific plan for the end of days (rendering bourgeois
rights uninteresting, even for socially disadvantaged people who might be
struggling for social rights).
Where shall we place Marshalls essay in the intellectual history of the left?
Most obviously his arguments have their lineage in a tradition associated with
late 19th and early 20th century English lib-labism. This reformism looked
to reconciliations between liberal and labour-oriented (or socialist) ideas, and
contrasts to Marxism and its offshoots. Marshalls argument is best situated in
a space call it indeterminate or open-ended -- between a liberalised
socialism and a socialised liberalism, and this is, I think, as useful a location of
social democratic thinking as can be found. It points to the vigorous concern
for both liberty and equality that marks an intelligent left for today a left
that has learned from disasters done in its own name in the twentieth century,
and which conceives itself as heir to what was best or useful in liberalism,
rather than its negation.
Marshalls approach must be marked off in at least one additional way in our
uncertain age of globalisation. Marx proposed that the urban, industrial
proletariat was the universal class of history -- its interests those of
humanity, its members foreseen to be the overwhelming preponderance of the
worlds population. Nations, Marx imagined, would dissolve as capitalism
propelled itself worldwide, class struggle intensified and revolution brought a
utopian future free of states and classes.
In contrast, revisionists, even the Marxist kind like Eduard Bernstein at the
end of the 19th century, were skeptical of this prognosis. They doubted that
social structures would relentlessly and simply bifurcate, yielding a
reactionary minority and a radicalized, homogenous majority. Some

orthodox Marxists, especially in Leninist and Trotskyist mutations, later

found a substitute for their vision of the proletariat in one of the Third World.
Since orthodoxy is, well, orthodoxy, this allowed dogma to remain in tact even
if its historical protagonist changed.
In contrast, revisionists looked to the extension of democracy and reform to
address social suffering, especially that of workers. Seen in this light,
Marshalls essay effectively turns Marxism on its head by making citizenship
rather than a class into the universalizing medium. In fact, he presumes a
national context. The state is, in his essay, is an expanding vehicle of rights
and self-government, and [T]he social health of a society depends upon the
civilization of its members.
The state has undergone considerable transformations since Marshall wrote
his essay. Those whom the birth lottery has placed in the 21st century are in
circumstances that differ from his in various ways. Among other things, a
governments room to maneuver is narrower due diverse processes such as
globalisation and regionalisation (Europeanisation is one example).
When Marshall wrote of the civilization of a citizenry, he thought mostly of
his own; it was decades before immigration and multi-culturalism posed new
questions about what citizens hold or should hold -- in common. (This ought
also to make us think about the fact that it is a birth lottery that gives most
people automatic citizenship in this or that country).
Challenges are also raised by these same processes to democracy itself; might
it not weaken increasingly if political parties run for office advocating a set of
policies but, on winning, lack sufficient fiscal tools to implement them? Social
democracys most important achievements in the 20th century required the
framework of a national state, one which also functioned as a kind of mediator
between citizens and the world.
Some contemporary thinkers offer concepts of global or cosmopolitan
citizenship in response to changes of the last decades. These are often as
appealing as they are abstract. It is difficult they can take meaningful,
practical form -- especially if we value self-government and are concerned to
secure civil, political, and social rights. It is with these in mind that we ought
to reread and reconsider and still value T.H. Marshalls elegant, short
classic.
Mitchell Cohen is professor of political science at Bernard Baruch
College and the Graduate School of the City University of New
York. He was co-editor of Dissent magazine (1991-2009) and will,
in 2010-11, be CUNY Writing Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for
Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York
This essay is a contribution to Policy Network's series on The Classics of
Social Democratic Thought

1. In this article I borrow some notions from John Rawlss A

Theory of Justice even though he advocated a property-

owning democracy rather than a welfare state, and would

have had some differences with Marshall. Still, I think they
would be in the same trans-Atlantic party, together with
people somewhat to the left and somewhat to the right of
them.
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3869&title=Reconsidering+%e2%80%9cCitizenship
+and+Social+Class%e2%80%9d

A retrospective on The Blair Revolution

ROGER LIDDLE - 20 JULY 2010
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Setting out to build on the past, rather than destroy what previous
governments did, this political tract highlights both New Labours
accomplishments and its systematic shortcomings
The Blair Revolution was published in early 1996, mere months before New
Labours astonishing landslide victory in the May 1997 general election. The
book was conceived to attain two entwined goals in order to prepare New
Labour for government. First, it sought to create a new intellectual identity for
New Labour, one which drew on Labours rich history of revisionism but also
illustrated how the party had irrevocably evolved since it plumbed the depths
of internal crisis in the 1980s by outlining the political principles and style of
leadership that would characterise the prospective Blair government. Second,
it attempted to convey a sense of New Labours policy agenda for reforming
Britain, not least in terms of our economic priorities, efforts to rebuild a spirit
of society and community, plans for constitutional reform and commitment to
pro-Europeanism.
But I would hesitate to describe it as a classic of social democratic thought.
We the authors, Peter Mandelson and I saw ourselves as thoughtful
political practitioners, not theoretical thinkers. The books model was,
therefore, not Anthony Croslands Future of Socialism; rather, we hoped to
match the model of a quality political tract, much like Roy Jenkins Why Vote
Labour in 1959.
However, in many respects, the books political credence was ambiguous,
perhaps typically so for how New Labour conducted itself. It certainly was not
an official statement of party policy, yet because Peter Mandelson was the
books principal author, famed for his closeness to Tony Blair, its arguments
were deemed to be very influential. The ambiguity of the whole exercise was
summed up for me in two episodes: Tony Blair personally dictating to Peter
over the telephone what he wanted us to say in the opening paragraphs; and
then Tonys failure to show up at the books launch party, because of fears that
too close an association with it might be damaging to him.

Given the books prominence, one of its most surprising features was how it
came to be co-authored by us. For Peter it was an important stage in his
unnecessarily long and painful development from Britains first ever spin
doctor to his pivotal role as first secretary of state and lord president of the
council in Gordon Browns government; or, to phrase it in the language of
contemporary political gossip, an essential part of his transition from Blairs
clandestine Bobby in his leadership campaign to emerging as serious
political player in his own right, one with a indisputable claim on high
ministerial office in the prospective Labour government. The book also gave
Peter the opportunity to inject some ideological substance into the New
Labour project to supplement the more public relations-orientated reforms he
had overseen in various guises since first becoming the partys director of
communications under Neil Kinnock in 1985.
Yet, while Peters friends understood this rationale for him writing the book,
they were somewhat taken aback by his choice of me as co-author. We both
had Labour in our genes but in the political mythology of the 1980s I had
been an SDP traitor. Peter, of course, had remained in the party.
Nonetheless, the late 1970s and early 1980s had been mutually traumatic: we
both felt that the party we had grown up in was being destroyed; we both
shared a deep commitment to the trade unions but the Winter of Discontent
left us both feeling badly let down by their political manoeuvring; we both
hated what the Hard Left was doing to Labour; and, as local councillors in Ted
Knights Lambeth, we both witnessed at first hand the damage he inflicted on
the party. I had as deep a sense as Peter of the emotional and ideological
journey Labour had undertaken to present itself once again as a credible party
of government but it was still characteristically bold for him to want to write
the book with me.
Many people at the time presumed he had done this because I would draft the
manuscript and he would simply amend and sign it off. This, however, was not
our working method. Peter drafted a third of the book including the
chapters on Blair as a leader; the importance of British-EU relations; and New
Labours governing strategy and we jointly co-authored a further fifth of the
text, while I focused on the socio-economic content. We then swapped drafts
and did revisions of each others work. At proof stage we spent a whole three
days going through every chapter, reading it aloud and amending any phrases
that could conceivably be subjected to media distortion this was an example
of the Mandelson thoroughness I would witness on many occasions in
subsequent years.
The Blair Revolution did not say everything I wanted it to but, at the same
time, it did not say anything to which I objected. Inevitably, given the context
in which it was written a general election in prospect and Peters presumed
influence on the manifesto, the book was an amalgam of intellectually sound
and politically feasible arguments. As a result, the book was not sufficiently
specific about the future of public services, an independence of the Bank of
England, the putative architecture of financial regulation, and the euro, as well
as our political and constitutional reform programmes. Yet, in many respects,
this was not the books purpose; instead, it set out a framework for the

governing principles and political goals of Blairs new, modern social

democratic party and distinguished them from those of past Labour
governments.
Nevertheless, the difficulties and anxieties we encountered in the process of
writing the book were instructive of the some of New Labours systemic
shortcomings. My initial draft of the section on public service reform was, for
instance, gutted after it was deemed to present the party with as yet
unpalatable choices vis--vis the means of pursuing reform we were to waste
a great deal of time in our first term before some of these truths were
acknowledged. Unsurprisingly, Gordon Brown did not want Peter Mandelson
pre-empting his decision to make the Bank of England independent. More
surprisingly, the issue that most exercised Tony Blair was our specific
commitment to fiscal funding of mainstream political parties; he thought the
prospect of higher taxes for politics could be immensely damaging to Labour.
The shame is that he held to that view very strongly in government with
ultimately disastrous consequences for both his premiership and personal
reputation as a result of the (unfounded) allegations of the cash for honours
crisis.
However, when I look back at New Labours record in government I believe
The Blair Revolution was a pretty fair forecast of our political priorities,
central policy reforms and governing strategy. Indeed, as the second
paragraph of the book intimates: New Labour has set itself a bold task: to
modernise Britain socially, economically and politically. In doing so it aims to
build on Britains strengths. Its mission is to create not destroy. Its strategy is
to move forward from where Margaret Thatcher left off, rather than to
dismantle every single thing she did.
This is indeed what New Labour accomplished; as a political movement, it
accepted that successful governments built on the cumulative foundations of
those which precede them and, as such, a large and significant section of the
Thatcherite settlement we inherited in office was incorporated into our
framework for governance. Thus, until the global financial crisis of the current
juncture, Labour stuck with the Tory reforms to industrial relations,
privatisation, and secured the ceiling on top tax rates. At the same time,
however, New Labour adamantly rejected the Thatcherite conceit that society
no longer existed. Today, the National Health Service is a resurrected goliath
of universal high quality healthcare; educational standards and opportunities
have radically increased; higher education and research received
unprecedented investment; cities and regions were rebuilt from the embers of
Thatcherite destruction; abhorrent levels of child poverty have been
alleviated; and our society is more tolerant, open, free, fair and liberal than
before.
But, of course, we should have achieved more and made far too many
mistakes some of those were evident in the omissions and evasions of The
Blair Revolution. We were over-complacent about Britains economic
strengths, not least in unbridled over-reliance on the financial services sector,
and the long-term damage Thatcherism inflicted on the countrys productive
and manufacturing base has left the British economy looking dangerously

unbalanced. We thought we could narrow inequality by focusing our efforts on

poverty: it is now clear that the global forces driving inequality are much more
powerful and that the 1980s and 1990s mantras of labour market flexibility
will have to change. We also did not have a clear enough conception of the
balance to be struck between centralism and localism, state provision and
third sector innovation.
This requires a new process of revisionism, one which learns from New
Labours mistakes, builds upon its many successes and and prepares us once
again for government.
Roger Liddle is chair of Policy Network and a Labour member of
the House of Lords. He is a former adviser to Tony Blair, Peter
Mandelson and Jose Manuel Barroso
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3879&title=A+retrospective+on+The+Blair+Revolu
tion

For all mankind

ALAIN BERGOUNIOUX - 28 JUNE 2010

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At a time when the parties of the left in Europe are re-examining

their identity, it is useful to draw on Blums writings to remind us
that socialism is first and foremost a humanist political culture
Lon Blums essay For All Mankind, written in 1941 while in jail and published
in 1945 upon his release from a concentration camp, plays a distinctive role in
the history of French socialism. It is not a book about theory and it does not
make any definitive statements about socialist doctrine or principles. Arguably
it does more than this: it offers a defining insight into what humanism should
mean for socialists.
The essay is set against a backdrop of dreadful hardship. Blum, who
dominated French socialism for thirty years, was incarcerated and deported to
Buchenwald for his resistance to Nazism. Prior to the fall of France in 1940 he
had become a figure who passionately embodied the errors of communism. He
was the first socialist to lead the Third Republic in 1936, using his leadership
of the Popular Front to dramatically reduce the gap between ideals and
practice. The inner strength which enabled him to resist and carry on fighting
was his belief in a humanist value set which binds together justice, reason and
wisdom.
Blums optimism, even his naivety, took its fair share of criticism. He was
often satirised, in particular by Marxists, for playing by the rules and for his
reluctance to commit wholeheartedly to political struggle. Yet, what his
insights into the Nazi-led defeat that swept France show us is that the nations

surrender stemmed from its leaders oblivion to the interests of its people; first
and foremost on the part of the ruling class but also by the labour movement.
We became too strong, too cautious. We were progressively cast in the mould
of everyday life. We became complacent. At a time when the nation was
expecting a rallying cry from our ranks, no strong voice could be heard, he
wrote in reference to himself and other socialist leaders. His generation had
failed their self appointed task.
The essay argues that our representatives and leaders must remain closely in
tune with the interests and needs of the people they are elected to serve. It
shows that in pursuing their own self interest, the leaders of the left in France
at that time had allowed a divide to develop which forbade them from stirring
up the nation in times of hardship. In essence the ruling class had lost its
virtue.
At a time when the parties of the left in Europe are re-examining their identity
and the crisis of representation they face, it is useful to draw on Blums
writings to remind us that socialism is first and foremost a humanist political
culture. Men of Lon Blums generation, and even more so in the generation
previous to his, dared to speak of spirituality. Nowadays, this would cause a
shock in modern socialist parties where cold reason and the interplay of
interests dominate. Blum rejected such an approach: all that is inescapable is
not necessarily fair. He passionately believed that people possess the instinct
of justice and that moral choice can and should trump a narrow definition of
self-interest.
For Blum, democracy and socialism are absolutely interdependent and thus
socialism could not exist if it did not adhere to the fundamentals of democracy
and fairness. Herein lay his vision; a synthesis between socialism and
democracy that would only materialise when the political class realised that
their core mandate was not to impose their own interests upon the people, but
to give people the skills and values to make their own democratic and ethical
choices. It is a demanding view of political organisation. To avoid falling into
the traps of avant-gardes who pretend to hold the truth, or of new oligarchies
who use the people to serve their own interests, strong moral standards need
to permeate socialism.
Obviously, Lon Blum does not have the lexicon of our times; his concepts
were devised within the framework of republican and Marxist traditions. Yet,
the fundamental belief underpinning his reflection and this is why his essay
stands the test of time is that democracy is the first and permanent resource
of socialists. Social democracy should continue to confront itself with the
ethical implications of its political choices. The quest for adequate means is
obviously essential. The current crisis of capitalism demands new economic
thinking. Yet a social democratic answer has to take the form of a moral
critique of the limits and weaknesses of markets. In this respect, reading For
All Mankind still proves incredibly pertinent as it reminds us never to forget
our true aims.
Alain Bergounioux is a French historian and director of the Revue
Socialiste. He is the author of Le rgime social-dmocrate (1989),

Lon Blum: discours politiques (1997) and Les socialistes franais

et le pouvoir. Lambition et le remords (2007)
This is a contribution to Policy Network's work on Globalisation and Governance.

http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3871&title=For+all+mankind+++

The Gift Relationship

IAIN MCLEAN - 28 JUNE 2010
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The implications of Titmuss study on human blood and social

policy should not be forgotten as we reconsider the core principles
of our economy
His socialism was as English as his patriotismethical and non-Marxist,
insisting that capitalism was not only economically but socially wasteful, in
failing to harness individual altruism to the common good (A.H. Halsey,
2004).
For my money, The Gift Relationship is the only socialist classic of the last
fifty years. Richard Titmuss (1907-73), the founder of the LSE school of social
administration scholars (Titmice), never went to university. His only further
education was a 6-month course in bookkeeping, and he worked for 18 years
in an insurance office. He refused a peerage from Harold Wilson. His last
book succeeded in showing that in one arena capitalism is socially wasteful,
where thousands of academic tomes before and since have failed to.
The subtitle of The Gift Relationship is From human blood to social policy.
Titmuss central finding was that both the quality and quantity of blood for
transfusion in the UK, donated through what is now the National Blood
Service, were higher than in the US, where most blood at the time was
supplied by the market. He showed that both the classic problems of
insurance applied to blood supply: moral hazard and adverse selection. He did
not use either term, but his evidence was clear-cut. In a market for blood,
those with the unhealthiest blood especially drug and alcohol abusers had
the strongest motivation both to supply it and to lie about their medical
conditions. Hence, US supplied blood was more likely to give hepatitis to the
recipient than was UK donated blood. Titmuss wrote before AIDScontaminated blood laid waste to a generation of haemophiliacs in the 1980s,
but that disaster showed how right he was.
He conducted a survey of British blood donors. Some of their answers make
up the most moving part of the book: My husband aged 41, collapsed and died,
without whom life is very lonely so I thought my blood may help to save

some-one the heart ache Ive had. Or 1941. War. Blood needed. I had some.
Why not? Or I thought it just a small way to help people as a blind person
other opportunities are limited.
There is, I admit, a lot wrong with The Gift Relationship. The section on the
social anthropology of giving adds nothing, and the section on apartheid
South Africa is a curiosity. By modern standards the survey was slapdash and
it commits the cardinal sin of selection on the dependent variable i.e., of
failing to survey non-donors. Titmuss wrongly says that his findings condemn
the whole discipline of economics. But they go deeper than he realised
himself. They led some of the best social scientists in the world (including
Kenneth Arrow and Peter Singer) to clarify his findings and their implications.
In essence, Arrow said: Adding a market mechanism to a donor mechanism
restricts nobodys freedom and increases supply; so what can be wrong with
that? Singer retorted: The market does restrict freedom because it crowds out
altruism. Fewer people would give blood for a small money reward than are
prepared to give it for nothing.
Titmusss findings have also protected the principle of non-market blood
supply in the UK throughout all changes of government since he wrote; and
induced US Administrations to encourage donation and discourage market
supply of blood. The Gift Relationship is as relevant today as the day it was
written.
Iain McLean is Professor of Politics, Oxford University and a fellow
of Nuffield College. His publications include Good blood, bad
blood, and the market: The Gift Relationship revisited, Journal of
Public Policy 6 1987 pp 431-45 (with J. Poulton), and, Regulating
Gifts of Generosity: the Aberfan Disaster Fund and the Charity
Commission, Legal Studies 19, 1999, pp. 380--96 (with M. Johnes)
http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3872&title=The+Gift+Relationship

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http://www.toxotis.se/politika/artiklar_blogs/politika/socialdimokratia.html