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Politics, capitalism and
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John Gray
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First published in 1996 by
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Paper No. 18
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Where we are now 4
What social democracy was 16
Right, left and globalisation 20
The diversity of market institutions 24
Welfare, local justice and complex fairness 31
What we can hope for 44
Notes 47
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Acknowledgements
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Introduction
This paper has been written to be entirely freestanding and fully acces-
sible to the reader in its own terms. But it can also be read as the third
in a trio of papers, the first of which is The moral foundations of mar-
ket institutions, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1992
and republished as chapter two of my book, Beyond the New Right:
market, government and the common environment, Routledge, 1993,
and the second of which was The undoing of conservatism, published
in 1994 by the Social Market Foundation and republished as chapter
six of my book, Enlightenment’s wake: politics and culture at the close of
the modern age, Routledge, 1995.
Like the two earlier papers, this Demos paper reflects my conviction
that the established traditions of British political thought; liberal, con-
servative, and socialist, cannot meet the challenges posed by the techno-
logical and cultural environment of Britain in the late modern period.
New thought is needed, in which debts to the past are light.
The object of this essay is to break new ground. Its starting point is
the belief that, though the emerging social-democratic consensus in
Britain represents a considerable advance on the formulaic debates of
the New Right and the Old Left, it nevertheless embodies assumptions
and modes of thought that belong to an historical context that has
vanished beyond recovery. That context has been destroyed partly by
neoliberal policy, and, more importantly, by global economic and tech-
nological developments. The risk is that, as policy framed in terms of
Demos 1
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
2 Demos
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Introduction
John Gray
Jesus College, Oxford
January 1996
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Where we are now
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Where we are now
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
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Where we are now
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
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Where we are now
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
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Where we are now
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
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Where we are now
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
14 Demos
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Where we are now
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What social
democracy was
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What social democracy was
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
to country and from time to time. For example, the relations with trade
unions were unique in Germany, partly because the institutional slate
was wiped clean after the Nazi period. Yet in general the social demo-
cratic ideal was a form of society-wide egalitarian community of which
the workplace community was conceived to be the germ. Without this
animating egalitarian political morality, social democracy is nothing.
Although many social-democratic parties in government were content
merely to contain or moderate the economic inequalities thrown up by
market capitalism, their ideal remained that of compressing income
and wealth inequalities.
They did not make much progress toward this egalitarian objective,
any more than they were successful in eradicating poverty, though
matters would arguably have been even worse in the absence of social-
democratic policies. In other areas, such as housing clearance pro-
grammes that shattered working class street communities and education
policies which prohibited meritocratic selection, social-democratic
policies probably worked against the values they were meant to serve.
It can be argued that social-democratic welfare institutions, like later
neoliberal policies, have had the effect of institutionalising poverty
rather than removing its causes. Many social-democratic policies to
promote equality have proved either futile or counterproductive. Not
only the historic policies but also the constitutive morality of social
democracy have been rendered utopian by the ruling forces of the age.
Social democrats and neoliberals share the weakness that they are
unwilling to admit the reality of conflicts between central goods and
values insofar as they limit the options for public policy. That the pro-
motion of a more mobile, less stratified and so more equal society
might conflict with egalitarian policies in state schools is a discomfort-
ing proposition few social democrats are willing to entertain. It implies
what is manifestly true, but also uncomfortable: that equality is not of
a piece but complex; worse, that one equality, one demand of justice,
may compete with another.
Britain’s position as an ill-equipped and deskilled country in a des-
perately competitive world market would make the political projects
of a less straitened past hopeless and unworkable, even if Thatcherism
18 Demos
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What social democracy was
had not already seen them off. It is this reality and the recognition by
the politically decisive voters in Middle England, that present and past
policies are leading them to not-so-genteel poverty, that rule out a
reversion to the policies of the post-war settlement, just as much as the
constraints of global bond and currency markets. Keynesian deficit
financing is interdicted by the bond markets and any attempt to shore
up the Beveridge settlement will be undone by voter resistance to
increased taxation. Higher public expenditure in certain welfare state
institutions, such as the NHS, is highly desirable, but it will be politi-
cally sustainable only if reforms in other areas allow it to be incurred
without a substantially higher tax burden. These are dilemmas with
which the social-democratic policies of a decade or a generation ago
cannot help us.
For these reasons, it is unlikely a future Labour government’s poli-
cies would resemble the One Nation Toryism of a generation ago, or
those of British Social Democrats in the 1980s. These are obsolete
positions, no more available to Labour than primitive neoliberalism is
now to the Conservatives. Labour is more likely to try to fuse the indi-
vidualist economic culture of liberal capitalism with communitarian
concerns about fairness and community. But can such a combination
be made stable? Just such a fusion was envisaged in the ‘New
Liberalism’ of J.A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse at the beginning of this
century. The goal of the New Liberalism was to harness the wealth-
creating dynamism of liberal capitalism while using the powers of the
sovereign state to constrain it and temper its impact on social cohe-
sion. It was this New Liberal vision, developed in the interwar period
in the Liberal Summer Schools, which informed the Beveridge-Keynes
settlement that emerged from the Second World War and endured for
a generation into the mid-1970s. At the century’s end, the global
mobility of capital, and its power to constrain the freedom of action of
sovereign states in economic policy, is vastly greater. Keynesian macro-
economic policies and the Beveridgean welfare state are pillars of a
status quo ante that has been destroyed irrecoverably. Can something
akin to the New Liberal vision be re-embodied in the fin de siecle con-
text of swiftly advancing globalisation?
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Right, left and
globalisation
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Right, left and globalisation
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
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Right, left and globalisation
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The diversity of market
institutions
Now that the rivalry between the market economy and central plan-
ning has been decisively settled, there is a common perception that
systemic competition now goes on between different forms of market
institutions, or between capitalisms. There is no single, ideal type of
market institution to which all market economies are evolving, but
rather a diversity of market institutions. Each has its own distinctive
achievements and hazards, but all are engaged in a global competition.
As far as it goes, this perception is well founded. It rightly rejects the
view that there is any model of market institutions, that of American
individualist market capitalism, say, to which the whole world is inex-
orably moving. In the end there is no such thing as the free market, but
rather a variety of cultural institutions and legal devices and instru-
ments through which economic life is mediated. This is indeed the
core of the theoretical insights preserved by the ‘social market’ tradi-
tion, for which I have myself in the past argued.6 The key proposition
of social market theory, that ‘the market’ is not a freestanding institu-
tion, the expression of unrestricted human freedom and rationality in
the economic realm, but instead an abstraction from an enormous
miscellany of practices and institutions having deep roots in social life,
remains valid and important.
The social market perspective expands our awareness of the range
of possibilities for market institutions and their associated economic
cultures. It becomes misleading when it is deployed to support policies
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The diversity of market institutions
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The diversity of market institutions
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
social-democratic belief that there is, or may yet be, a single European
model of market institutions, to which Britain could assimilate. French
and German capitalism are not subtypes of a single European model
with which Anglo-Saxon capitalism can be usefully contrasted. In
what respects are the economic cultures of Sweden and Austria, say,
similar to those of Greece and Portugal? The objective of ‘harmonis-
ing’ these market institutions is a rationalist utopia, since it involves
ironing out cultural differences of which diversity in market institu-
tions is a natural expression.
Of course, European capitalisms possess common features distin-
guishing them from American and East-Asian capitalisms and from
the anarcho-capitalisms that have emerged in post-communist Russia
and China. The manifest foundering of the European federalist project
should enable us to see that the future for distinctively European capi-
talism is in a diversity of market institutions and not in a single uni-
form pattern. The project of constructing federal institutions in
Europe, particularly a single European currency, will probably come to
shipwreck on conflicts of national interest, most crucially between
France and Germany. The wave of public sector strikes in France in
December 1995, though it has not yet produced a change of direction
within the French political elite, has shown how costly, in social as well
as economic terms, the Franco-German axis has already proven for
France. Once they are reflected in voting behaviour, it is more than
likely that these costs will delay, or even perhaps derail, the project of a
single currency. The reality is that the social costs of that project are
such that it cannot in the end be politically legitimated even in the
countries that are its core supporters. As yet, however, a post-federalist
project for Europe which recognises these realities has hardly begun to
be formulated.9
In the longer term, the Gaullist idea of a Europe des patries may
come to be as obsolete as European federalism is today, and there may
be a Europe of regions within a confederal framework. But for the
foreseeable future, the rock on which the European federalist project
will run aground is the reality of Europe’s sovereign nation-states,
and their conflicting interests. However enfeebled national political
28 Demos
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The diversity of market institutions
cultures and institutions have become in recent years, they remain the
central forum of democratic political participation. There is no trans-
national European political culture, and therefore attempts to plug the
‘democratic deficit’ in European institutions will come to nothing. The
only likely future for Europe is one of sometimes unstable sovereign
states having both common and conflicting interests, whose relations
with one another will be governed by the classical logic of the balance
of power.
Manifestly, a new European project would entail abandonment of
the core project of European federalism, the proposal for a single (as
opposed to a common) European currency. From the communitarian
standpoint advanced here, the chief argument against such a single
currency is that it would be deflationary and would lead to areas of
high unemployment. It would be tolerable and workable only if it was
combined with an EU-wide labour market with genuine mass labour
mobility. Such continental labour mobility will be rejected by most
Europeans, both electorally and in their own behaviour, because of its
social costs and disruptive consequences for local communities and
personal attachments. The social-democratic project of a single
European currency shares with neoliberal policies a rationalistic dis-
dain for such attachments and communities. Its practical results would
be indistinguishable from those associated in Britain with Thatcherite
policies. This is perceived by the Right every-where in Europe apart
from Britain. In Sweden, as in other European countries, the Right
supports the development of transnational European institutions
because they rightly believe that they will embody neoliberal policies.
Opposition to them is confined largely to left-wing communitarian
nationalists. It is a comment on the parochialism of British political
life that social democrats have accepted the Thatcherite claim that
opposition to European federalism is the prerogative of the Right.
The social-democratic project of extending the Rhine model of
capitalism across the European Union is as utopian as the neoliberal
one of harmonising European economies on an agenda of deregula-
tion and competition. Both evade the reality of diverse national eco-
nomic cultures in Europe. Both suppress the huge costs, large risks and
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30 Demos
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Welfare, local justice and
complex fairness
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
the family should persuade us that politics has not ended, and cannot
be ended by the liberal legalist attempt to resolve such disputed issues
by the entrenchment and interpretation of rights.
The most incongruous implication of local justice for conventional
liberals, however, is that fairness makes conflicting demands on us.
Sometimes we cannot avoid injustice. There is a sort of endemic moral
scarcity which runs parallel with the finitude of resources. This is an
implication – in my view a reality – that is deeply at odds with our
inherited traditions of moral and political thinking. Talk of trade-offs
and costs and benefits trivialises the fact that public policy inescapably
involves making hard collective choices among genuine goods. Both
welfare reform and tax reform encompass such choices. The distribu-
tional conflicts such choices entail are better understood in terms
of the conflicting demands of fairness. Some of these conflicts concern
intergenerational fairness – an issue I cannot discuss here, except in
passing, despite its clear and growing importance. all of them can be
resolved only by collective choices whose proper sphere is that of polit-
ical practice, not courts of law.16 And these are not policy decisions
which can be settled by appeal to the doctrines of political economy,
but political choices informed by ethical judgments.
The demands of fairness are most urgent in the central issue of the
post-social-democratic period: that of developing a policy for liveli-
hood when the post-war pursuit of full employment is no longer realis-
tic. Conventional social-democratic thought has relied upon ambitious
reskilling programmes with a resumption of rapid economic growth.
But today incessant change in the division of labour arising from new
information technologies is imposing on us not only recurrent changes
of job but also changes of occupation.17 In an age of unceasing techno-
logical innovation, a poor education system guarantees economic
failure. The idea that British economic culture can be renewed without
fundamental reform of education is plainly an exercise in fantasy. In all
these respects, the current social-democratic emphasis on reskilling is
entirely appropriate.
At the same time, it goes against all experience to suppose that even
lifetime reskilling programmes can move us back to something akin to
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Welfare, local justice and complex fairness
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40 Demos
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
have occurred over the past half century. The changed economic situa-
tion of women in particular makes any attempt at reconstituting
Beveridge undesirable as well as unfeasible. Whatever their structure,
welfare institutions in future must be minimally paternalist, and
friendly to diversity in forms of family life. It would be a fundamental
mistake for communitarians to follow the social engineers of the Right
or the Left,27 in viewing welfare policy as a device for the preservation
or revival of ‘the traditional family’. Its primary role in a liberal society
is not to promote or protect any particular form of family life. Instead
policy should enhance individual competences – the control over their
time and working conditions people need if they are to form families
of any enduring kinds – and so facilitate the formation of lasting per-
sonal relationships.
The view of welfare policy as an instrument for re-engineering
forms of long eroded family life is mistaken for another reason. Today’s
Britain, unlike Beveridge’s, harbours a considerable measure of cultural
diversity, which policy must respect. Recent immigrant communities,
in all their own diversity, do not necessarily elevate autonomy over all
other human interests, or revere it as an ideal. A welfare and social pol-
icy which aims to enhance individual autonomy cannot in such a mul-
ticultural setting be designed to secure the proliferation of liberal
individuals. That would be a policy of liberal cultural imperialism, an
assimilationist programme to impose the liberal ideal of autonomy on
diverse communities. Public policy in a pluralist state which respects
these traditions and communities rightly protects autonomous choice
of exit from them. We cannot restore a seamless monoculture animated
by the liberal ideal of autonomy.28
Our inherited welfare institutions and policies need radical revision
now that the paternalism and cultural consensus which the Beveridge
settlement expressed are unworkable and unacceptable. Economic
change has rendered earlier family forms unsustainable and indeed
redundant. Moreover, moral beliefs in the ‘traditional family’ are van-
ishingly remote from the lives of the great majority of the population.
They cannot be revived by any political project, whether traditionalist-
conservative or ethical-socialist in content. Yet welfare reform cannot
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Welfare, local justice and complex fairness
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What we can hope for
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What we can hope for
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
institutions and policies which moderate its risks for them, and which
make it easier for them to reconcile in their lives the need for enduring
relationships with the imperatives of economic survival.We will seek to
make the distribution of skills and opportunities fairer. In this way we
can hope to make our individualism less possessive and more convivial.
No single policy reform can be a panacea for our economic culture.
Many of the ills of our society can only be cured slowly and in part,
since they arise from sources in our culture which governments can cer-
tainly aggravate by their policies, but over which their leverage is other-
wise strictly limited. Our economic life is only an aspect of our flawed
and fractured late-modern culture.32 Yet unless they are reformed so as
to make their workings more humanly tolerable, liberal market institu-
tions will lose political legitimacy. This is no small point, since it is an
implication of the communitarian liberal view that, for us, as inheritors
of a late-modern individualist culture, there is no sustainable alternative
to the institutions of liberal capitalism, however reformed.
The first duty of political thought is to understand the present. The
danger of the new social-democratic consensus is that it tracks a world
which has now disappeared irretrievably. Would it not be another of
history’s ironies if we were to rid ourselves of the errors of the 1980s
without perceiving that, in concert with the silent forces that shape
events, they have transformed our world irreversibly?
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Notes
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Notes
17. I am well aware that on available 23. For a New Right defence of a Basic
evidence the extent of the growth of Income, see Duncan, A., and
job insecurity remains somewhat Hobson, D., 1995, Saturn’s children,
controversial. See on this Income data London, Sinclair Stevens.
services focus, Quarterly 74, March 24. It may be that limited and
1995,‘The jobs mythology’. What is conditional Basic Income schemes
less controversial is the expectation have an important role in any policy
that job security will decline in aiming to protect the human
future, and with it our inherited interests once promoted by full
culture of work which presupposes employment policy. I do not discuss
job-holding as its central institution. this possibility, since I am concerned
18. An example of such a place in to assess Basic Income schemes in
Britain may be Swindon, which is their most distinctive and radical
currently the subject of a research form.
project being conducted by Matthew 25. Of course, some welfare rights
D’Ancona. are properly recognised to be
19. Rifkin, J., 1995 The end of work: the unconditional, or, more precisely,
decline of the global labor force and to be owed independently of
the dawn of the post-market era, contribution to society. The welfare
New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons. rights created by some disabilities
20. Various schemes are discussed in may fall into this category. There
the Citizens’s income bulletin, is no single ethical justification for
particularly Nos. 18 (July 1994), 19 all forms of legitimate welfare
(February 1995) and 20 (July 1995). provision.
21. A comprehensive statement of 26. Obligations to accept reskilling were
Frank Field’s proposals can be found a key element in the immensely
in Field, F., 1995, Making welfare successful Swedish pro-active labour
work: reconstructing welfare for the policy, which still repays study
millennium, London, Institute of despite its collapse along with much
Community Studies. else in the Swedish social-
22. Not all forms of targeting involve democratic model.
means-testing. Some involve 27. For a nostalgist Left version of
categorisation by other factors such familial fundamentalism, whose
as age or disability, and do not implication for welfare policy is
necessarily carry the moral hazards large-scale social engineering, see
of means-testing. A comprehensive Dennis, N., and Erdos, G., 1993,
welfare reform of the sort we foreword by Halsey, A.H., Families
undoubtedly need must recognise without fatherhood, London,
that different forms of allocation of Institute for Economic Affairs,
benefits are appropriate, depending Health and Welfare Unit, Choice in
on the shared social understanding welfare series no 12.
of the goods concerned, and on the 28. I am aware that this is a great
consequences of their mode of simplification of complex issues.
allocation. Pluralism is unavoidable For a helpful critique of standard
here too. liberal views on multiculturalism,
Demos 49
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After social democracy: politics, capitalism and the common life
see Parekh, B.,‘Superior people: the 30. This is a point not sufficiently
narrowness of liberalism from Mill acknowledged in Fukuyama, F.,
to Rawls’, Times Literary Supplement, 1995, Trust: the social virtues and the
25 February 1994. See also, Raz, J., creation of prosperity, London,
1994,‘Multiculturalism: a liberal Hamish Hamilton.
perspective’, in his book, Ethics in 31. This is the hope of several
the public domain, Oxford, contributors to Crouch, C., and
Clarendon Press. Marquand, D., eds, 1995, Reinventing
29. Gray, J., 1989, Limited government: a collective action,
positive agenda, London, Institute Oxford, Blackwell.
for Economic Affairs. Reprinted as 32. Gray, J., 1995, Enlightenment’s
chapter one of Gray, J., 1993, Beyond wake: politics and culture at the close
the New Right, London, Routledge; of the modern age, London,
33–4. Routledge.
50 Demos
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Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess