Читать книгу The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain - Anthony Seldon - Страница 7

Albert Hirschman

WHEN David Marquand asked me to write about the relevance to British post-war politics of two relatively recent books of mine, Shifting Involvements (1981) and The Rhetoric of Reaction (1992), I accepted rather too readily. I did have a number of points to make, or afterthoughts to formulate, about the latter book; but with respect to the former, I soon realised that some of its major propositions fitted the British case rather less well than the countries – the United States, France, and Germany – which I had primarily in mind when I wrote it. Perhaps, however, I can draw strength from this weakness: it may be of interest to present here, in a comparative vein, the quandaries and perplexities I encountered.

Let me start from the beginning. The writing of Shifting Involvements, so I say in my first paragraph, got underway,

… in June 1978 and in Paris, where a spate of articles and even books marked the tenth anniversary of the demonstrations, student uprisings, strikes and other public actions in which large masses of citizens in Western Europe, North and South America, and Japan had participated in 1968. Many commentators noted how remote this phenomenon seemed already. Indeed, the change in mood that has taken place within so short a span of time is remarkable. An important ingredient of the ‘spirit of 1968’ was a sudden and overwhelming concern with public issues – of war and peace, of greater equality, of participating in decision-making. This concern arose after a long period of individual economic improvement and apparent full dedication thereto on the part of large masses of people in all of the countries where these ‘puzzling’ outbreaks occurred. While poorly understood at the time they took place, those outbreaks are today classed as abnormal and quixotic episodes; in the course of the seventies, people returned to worry primarily about their private interests, the more so as the easy forward movement that had marked the earlier period gave place almost everywhere to uncertainty and crisis. Thus, the change from the fifties to the sixties and then to the seventies and other such alternations in earlier periods raises the question whether our societies are in some way predisposed toward oscillations between periods of intense preoccupation with public issues and almost total concentration on individual improvement and private welfare goals.

I am still rather satisfied with the way I laid out my topic in this paragraph, but upon re-reading it I immediately realised that I could never have written it in London (or Sheffield). The reason is simple: the ‘1968 Revolution’ never took place in this country. With the exception of some minor commotions at the London School of Economics and a few anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, mostly by American students (such as Bill Clinton) at Oxford and Cambridge, the British student scene remained quiescent and there was no outbreak of any ‘sudden and overwhelming concern with public issues’.

I am sure that this particular instance of British ‘exceptionalism’ has been closely studied by social scientists here. We know today that the 1968 uprisings were far less unitary than they appeared at the time and had very different specific motivations in different countries. In the United States, for example, the opposition to the Vietnam War was of course a crucial factor, whereas in Germany the students’ protests were directed in part against their parents and the newly perceived responsibility of that older generation for bringing to power and supporting the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, in the background of the 1968 protests there was still a common experience: the end of the war had brought the most sustained experience on historical record of vigorous economic growth and, in particular, of the ‘rise in mass consumption’, so much celebrated by Walt Rostow in the fifties. This rise took place primarily in the area of durable consumer goods – automobiles, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and so on. In my book I argued that these famous durables have a hidden drawback: in contrast to what I called ‘truly non-durables’ (things such as food and fuel that actually disappear in the process of being consumed), durables are particularly good at generating waves of consumer disappointment. This view provided me with a rather novel interpretation of the events of 1968: the durables bonanza of the post-war period had exacted a delayed retribution.

Can this theory – or conjecture – be invoked to account for the ‘failure’ of the English students to participate in the 1968 uprisings? No doubt the growth of the English economy, while passable in the first two post-war decades, was not nearly as vigorous and sustained as in the rest of the Western world, particularly on the Continent. Could it be then that the comparatively modest expansion in the availability of durables during that period kept consumer disappointment within bounds and therefore made English society less receptive to the viruses that attacked other societies in the late sixties?

This application of my conjecture about consumer disappointment strikes me as a bit mechanical, but it does lead to a deeper question. I wonder whether British society is simply equipped with some special cultural resistance against the passion for ever more and new consumer goods that so grips other societies. Observers from the United States and the Continent have often criticised Britain or poured ridicule on it for this very reason, for its clinging, not just to traditional ways and customs, but even to traditional and ‘old-fashioned’ product designs, from taxis to plumbing fixtures! In Shifting Involvements, I pointed out at some length how Adam Smith celebrated ‘opulence’ and the Wealth of Nations, on the one hand, and denounced, on the other, in this very book and elsewhere, a whole range of consumer goods as frivolous and contemptible ‘trinkets and baubles’. It looks as though this strange ambivalence is or has become a characteristic mood of the nation as a whole. In some unconscious wisdom, Britain may have acquired a resistance against the onrush of innovation, born perhaps from the hunch that various types of disappointment invariably accompany novelty.

So much for the portion of my book where I attempt to account for the movement of citizens from the pursuit of their private happiness to a sudden and intensive concern for the public interest. Let me now look at the opposite movement, the withdrawal from public affairs back to concentration on the private life and its activities. Once again, I am struck by the fact that, in this country, that movement, if it exists at all, takes a rather different shape from the one I had outlined in my book.

When I turned to the movement from the public to the private domain, one of my basic texts was Benjamin Constant’s famous and luminous speech of 1820: ‘De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes’ (On the Liberty of the Ancients as Compared to that of the Moderns). Here Constant criticised Rousseau (and implicitly the French Revolution) for conceiving liberty and democracy in line with the Athenian model which was premised on the citizens’ full dedication to, and participation in, public affairs. Nowadays, Constant asserted, things are very different:

every individual is occupied by his speculations, his enterprises, and the pleasures he obtains or hopes for, so that he wishes to be distracted from these matters only for short periods and as infrequently as possible. (Cited in Shifting Involvements, p. 98.)

For Constant, the basic problem of securing liberty and democracy under modern conditions lies in the tension between the desire to participate in public affairs and the pull of other affairs (or rather affaires – when used in French without a qualifying adjective, this term stands simply for economic interests and business operations). Constant, a perceptive observer of the contemporary French scene, saw this tension as a fact of life in post-Napoleonic France, and extrapolated this observation to ‘modern society’ in general. But perhaps France was actually an exception at the time: its traditional upper class, the nobility, had been decimated as a result of the Revolution, and the new ruling groups, being drawn largely from the bourgeoisie and non-aristocratic circles, may indeed have experienced the tension described by Constant. His strictures against the ‘Athenian’ model may apply much less to other contemporary European societies whose traditional ruling groups had not suffered any substantial depletion and displacement.

In Britain, in particular, the continuity in power of the ruling gentry was not only a fact while that country passed through its Revolution (I mean the Industrial one), but to assure this continuity was sensed by the gentry as both a right and even more as a civic duty. I am thus curious to raise the question: did any substantial voices come forward in England during the first half of the nineteenth century, to argue, like Constant did in France, that upper-class people were routinely torn between their private, commercial and money-making pursuits and their dedication to public affairs? From what little I know I doubt that this was the case. In his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, the American historian Martin Wiener describes at great length the predominance of ‘gentry values’ throughout the Victorian age (and beyond). The supreme value traditionally attached by the gentry to public service is impressively described by Trollope in 1864 in Can You Forgive Her?, the first of his Palliser novels. At the opening of a chapter he introduces Plantagenet Palliser to the reader with unusual solemnity and generality:

Mr Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future. He could afford to learn to be a statesman, and had the industry wanted for such training. He was born in the purple, noble himself, and heir to the highest rank as well as one of the greatest fortunes of the country, already very rich, surrounded by all the temptations of luxury and pleasure; and yet he devoted himself to work with the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife, and did so without any motive more selfish than that of being counted in the roll of the public servants of England. (p. 267.)

The devotion to public service is described here, with a good deal of irony, as a quirk of the upper class – but one that is presented as being quite firmly rooted just because it is a quirk or a ‘prejudice’, as Burke had put it in his Reflections. No trace is to be found in the novel of any concern Palliser might have over a possible neglect of business matters. Interestingly, when he is driven in the course of the plot to abandon – temporarily – his highest public ambition, which is to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, he does do so for a reason related to his private life. But this is his determination to save his marriage to Lady Glencora, rather than the pursuit of any ‘base’ business venture. Moreover, in the same novel, the difficult conquest of the hesitant and mercurial Alice Vavasor by John Grey is fully accomplished only when John mentions to Alice that he too may wish to move from leading the life of a country squire to becoming a Member of Parliament (p. 795).

The counterpart to this paramount value attached by both genders of the upper strata to public service (though rendered by men only, of course) is the remarkable ‘deference’ to the governing class on the part of the rest of the population, as famously described around the same time by Walter Bagehot (see his Introduction to the 1872 edition of The English Constitution, first published in 1867).

In Shifting Involvements I had assembled various reasons why citizens in modern democracies often move from considerable absorption in private pursuits to throwing themselves ‘body and soul’ into public affairs and would then, after due disappointment with the public sphere, withdraw back to the private life. I have just shown that some major arguments for these moves – one for that from the private to the public domain and one for the opposite move – have actually not been much present in Great Britain. At the end of my book, I affirmed that the oscillations between private and public involvement have been overdone in Western societies, that these societies ‘appear to to be condemned to long periods of privatisation during which they live through an impoverishing “atrophy of public meanings,” followed by spasmodic outbursts of “publicness” that are hardly likely to be constructive’ (p. 132). But perhaps this lament is simply not applicable to the political history of England. From the nineteenth century well into the second half of the twentieth century, this country was indeed widely considered a model of political stability, particularly in comparison to the major countries on the Continent.

The sudden outbreak of ‘Thatcherism’ in the not so recent past actually suggests a very different explanation: Britain may have overdone its vaunted stability. Perhaps as a result of the enormous effort furnished in the Second World War, there emerged a remarkable post-war consensus on economic and social policy based on the combined legacy and the enormous intellectual influence of Keynes and Beveridge. Eventually the consensus received a name: ‘Butskellism’ – a clever, slightly mocking term intimating that there was no real, deep difference any more that was separating the policy makers of the two principal parties, R. A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. But this convergence had a real cost which consisted in the loss of politics as ‘spectacle’ (if I may use a category whose importance has been stressed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz). Just because of the ‘deference’ factor, politics had long been of considerable value in England as a spectacle. Coming on top of the loss of Empire which was another splendid spectacle – quite apart from its profitability, so long debated by economists – these losses were perhaps too much to bear: eventually they ushered into ‘Thatcherism’, a new spectacle of highly partisan, ‘creedal (to use Samuel Huntington’s recent term), and ideology-driven politics.

Let me now briefly turn to my other, more recent book, The Rhetoric of Reaction. This book received its initial impetus from the appearance of a new kind of ideology-driven politics on the American scene in the 1980s. My reaction to the Reagan era and to its intellectual spokesmen was an attempt to present and dissect the key, invariant, and archetypal arguments used by conservatives and ‘neoconservatives’ in their advocacies and polemics. The original intent of this procedure was of course to expose and mock the repetitious and simplistic nature of conservative positions. But a side-effect was to strip the basic arguments of the reactionaries – the arguments of perversity, futility, and jeopardy – down to so transparent a form that I became aware of their structural similarity to the principal arguments used, with the same monotony and exaggerations, by their traditional adversaries, the ‘progressives’.

I have recently recounted how this extension of my argument to the ‘progressive’ side came to me as an unintended – and originally somewhat embarrassing – afterthought. But later on I saw that afterthought as a windfall as it gave me the chance to formulate some propositions about the desirable shape of the progressive argument in the post-Reagan-Bush and post-Cold-War era. Perhaps these propositions have also some relevance for this country in its post-Thatcherite phase. (The following paragraphs are largely taken from my article ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction – Two Years Later’, Government and Opposition, 28, 3, Summer 1993, pp 310–14.)

The three archetypal reactionary positions I identify are:

  the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve the political, social or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what is intended;

  the futility thesis, which holds that attempts at social transformation will produce no effect whatsoever and will be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; and

  the jeopardy thesis, which holds that the cost of a proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous, hard-won accomplishments.

The arguments which I then show to be progressive counterparts or equivalents of the ‘reactionary’ perversity, futility and jeopardy theses are essentially the following:

  We should adopt a certain reform or policy because as things are we are caught, or will shortly land in, a desperate predicament that makes immediate action imperative regardless of the consequences. This argument attempts to deflect the perversity thesis.

  We should adopt a certain reform or policy because such is the ‘law’ or ‘tide’ of history – this argument is the counterpart of the futility thesis, according to which attempts at change will come to naught because of various ‘iron laws’.

  We should adopt a certain reform or policy because it will solidify earlier accomplishments – this is the progressive’s retort to the jeopardy claim that the reform is bound to wreck some earlier progress.

How difficult would it be for reformers to give up this kind of rhetoric, which tends to turn the debate with their opponents into a ‘dialogue of the deaf’? I believe I have just listed the arguments in decreasing order of dispensability.

The most dispensable of the three arguments is, to my mind, the alarmist claim that disaster is upon us if we fail to take this or that progressive step. This way of arguing might be called ‘impending-disaster’ or ‘impending-revolution’ blackmail. It has been a common way for various Western progressives or reformers to present their programmes, particularly since 1917, when the threat of social revolution re-appeared on the horizon of Western societies. An important variant of this way of arguing became current after the Second World War in discussions on aid for the countries of the Third World: here the disaster to be fought off – by extending generous financial aid – was revolution and the prospect of these countries being ‘lost’ to the Soviet zone of influence.

For some time, these ways of arguing for national or international redistribution of income have been stale from overuse. Since the events of 1989–91, they have become largely unusable as a result of the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. As Gunnar Myrdal argued long ago, progressives can and should make a convincing case for the policies they advocate on the grounds that they are right and just, rather than by alleging that they are needed to stave off some impending imaginary disaster.

What about the argument that a certain progressive policy should be adopted because to do otherwise would be to oppose the ‘tide’ of history, the ‘wave of the future’, a futile position? This argument should also not be too difficult to discard, in part, I will admit, because, with the recent upheavals and pace Fukuyama, the tide of history appears to run quite strongly against the tide-of-history view of things!

Things are rather different in the case of another typical ‘progressive’ argument which I implicitly ask my progressive friends to use sparingly. It is the argument that a proposed reform is not only compatible with previous progressive achievements, but will actually strengthen them and will be strengthened by them. Progressives will often argue that ‘all good things go together’ or that there is no conceivable area of conflict between two desirable objectives (e.g. ‘the choice between environmental protection and economic growth is a false one’). In itself, this is an attractive and seemingly innocuous way of arguing and my advice to reformers cannot be never to use this argument. Given their considerable interest in arguing along mutual support, rather than jeopardy lines, reformers may actually come upon, and will obviously then want to invoke, various obvious and non-obvious reasons why ‘synergy’ between two reforms exists or can be expected to come into being.

My point is rather that reformers should not leave it to their opponents, but should themselves make an effort to explore also the opposite possibility: that of some conflict or friction existing or arising between a proposed and a past reform or between two currently proposed programmes. If reformers fail to look in this direction and, in general, are not prepared to entertain the notion that any reform is likely to have some costs, then they will be ill-equipped for useful discussions with their conservative opponents.

For example, it would be disingenuous to pretend that stimulating economic growth and correcting or attenuating inequalities that arise in the course of growth require exactly the same policies. The problem rather consists in finding an optimal combination of policies that does as little damage as possible to either objective. We are more likely to find something close to this optimum if we admit from the outset that we are in the presence of two objectives between which there exists normally a good deal of tension and conflict.