The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

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Anthony Seldon. The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. Ideas and Policy

CHAPTER 1. Moralists and Hedonists1

CHAPTER 2. Politics

CHAPTER 3. The Fall of Keynesianism. A Historian’s View

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 4. The Keynesian Consensus and its Enemies. The Argument over Macroeconomic Policy in Britain since the Second World War

CHAPTER 5. Industrial Relations. Regulation Against Voluntarism

CHAPTER 6 ‘Contract’ and ‘Citizenship’1

CHAPTER 7. Social Policy

‘IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS BEVERIDGE …’

THE COMING OF CONSENSUS

THIRTY WASTED YEARS?

‘THE WELFARE STATE IN CRISIS’: A LONG CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

BRINGING THE MARKET TO THE STATE

CHAPTER 8. Social Democracy

CHAPTER 9. Culture. The Problem With Being Public

CHAPTER 10. The European Question. Rules, National Modernisation and the ambiguities of Primat der Innenpolitik

PROBLEMS AND ASSUMPTIONS

The Concepts Jungle

The Calculation of Advantage

Principal Actor Designation

Rationality in Context: Statecraft

L’ANCIEN RÉGIME

BRITAIN AND EUROPE SINCE 1961

Great Reversals, 1961–63

Engagement and Containment, 1964–79

Thatcherism and Europe, 1979–90

Enigma Variations: The Major Governments and Europe

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 11. Ideas are not Enough

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 12. The Stakeholder Society

THE STAKEHOLDING PERSPECTIVE

Three models of capitalist society

British is not best

Conservative Britain has followed the wrong track …

… and created a new world of them and us

… because it has followed bizarre economic doctrines

Britain should adopt the concept of stakeholding

The welfare state should be restructured

Stakeholding means a written constitution too …

… and engagement with foreign affairs

ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCES

THE PROSPECTS FOR SUCCESS

CONTRIBUTORS

NOTES

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Отрывок из книги

MORE YEARS have passed since 1945 than from the beginning of the century to that date. The major issues and questions in British history from 1900–45 are now fairly well established and there have been authoritative responses in many areas. In contrast, the historiography of the last fifty years is still in flux. A mass of scholarly literature has been written on particular policy areas, institutions and individuals. But the pattern and contours of post-war British history have been strangely hard to define. This is particularly true of the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the world of action. Some of the published literature refers in passing to the role of ideas, but for most authors it is very much a secondary concern.

Yet it is clear that the fifty years since the end of the Second World War have seen dramatic changes in the intellectual and cultural framework within which policy is made and implemented. The details of policy change, as well as the fluctuating fortunes of the political parties, reflect these broad changes in the subconscious of the nation and cannot be understood in isolation from them. The object of this book is to tease out the relationships between these dimensions of change. It explores the impact of transformations in the intellectual and cultural climate on the thinking and assumptions of policy makers, seeks to explain why ideas (such as privatisation or monetarism) which seemed beyond the pale in one period became the orthodoxy of another, and analyses the relationship between changing policy approaches and changes in the content of policy.

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Unfortunately, there are at least two weaknesses in this answer. In the first place, its claims are too universal. The information revolution and its accompanying economic fluidity have affected the entire globe. The moral and intellectual victory of the British New Right was peculiar to Britain, or at most to the English-speaking world. If the demise of Keynesian social democracy and the rise of the New Right were the products of some inexorable technological imperative, continental Europe and Japan would have seen something similar. But although the forms of economic regulation and the rhetoric of political and intellectual leaders have changed in both, neither has experienced anything remotely comparable to the New Right ascendancy in Britain. Technological imperatives that manage to produce Margaret Thatcher in Britain, but François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany, cannot be as imperious as all that.

Much the same applies to the suggestion that inexorable tides of change have disempowered the state. No one can dispute that the British state is less effective, less respected and, in important ways, less powerful today than it was in 1945. This is scarcely surprising. In 1945, it had just emerged triumphant from the most terrible test in its entire history. It had nowhere to go but down. The same is true, in varying degrees, of the other victor states of the Second World War. The Soviet Union has disappeared altogether, while the United States has suffered a decline almost as marked as that of the British state. But it is not true of the defeated states of the Second World War or, for that matter, of the other major states of western Europe. As Alan Milward has argued, the post-war history of western Europe is a history of the revival and reconstruction of the nation-state, not of its decline.25 The German, French, Spanish and even Italian states are, by any reasonable definition, more powerful, more efficacious and more respected in the 1990s than they were in the 1940s. Indeed, most modern states have far more power over their citizens than Napoleon, Louis XIV or, for that matter, Bismarck or Nicholas II could have dreamed of. Of course, there is much that they cannot do. In capitalist market economies, they cannot force up the long-term rate of growth by expanding demand, successfully defy the world’s currency markets or make much difference to pre-tax income differentials. But they never could.

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