Thoughts on Reinventing the State

I have written for the first time on LibDem Voice. 'Commissioned', indeed, to write 500 words on the new Liberal book, Reinventing the State. I'll wait for the cheque. As the book's nearing 400 pages, that means I had to write the equivalent of no more than 1.25 words per page. And, of course, I had far too much to say. In fact, I found it stimulating to the extent that I came up with various different reviews, plus my own reflections on some of the ideas in the book. What I post here are not the 'out-takes', but my own personal view on the ideological issues the book raises. Here's what I typed:

Perhaps the most effective virtue for a liberal is inconsistency. We do not believe that the state is always the right solution, or that the market invariably has the answer. We know it depends on circumstance. And – this is the crucial point – circumstances change. There are times when the state needs to intervene, and there are periods when its power needs to be constrained. If we ask when intervention is necessary, the simple response is when our society is in crisis – when inequality is so stark that local or charitable solutions can not be sufficient. The contention of Reinventing the State is that we are at one of those moments of crisis. And, what is more, we have to battle not only with the old enemies of poverty, lack of opportunity, unequal life expectancy but also with a new foe: climate change and the destruction of our planet. To my mind, this challenge is also the impetus to a new perspective on our ideology.

Liberals have in their mind a concept of the individual, the essential, irreducible unit of society. When we think of individuals, we do not imagine each of them to be isolated. In each person clusters various communities, of which they are member by birth (gender, race, for instance), by circumstance (physical inhabitance, career) and by inclination (sexual orientation, political persuasion). So many communities that the individual naturally has to choose which of those to privilege in their own self-definition. Those choices and some of the communities themselves will change over a person’s lifetime. This is a liberalism with which we might be familiar. But it is not enough, as the challenge of the environment should remind us. That is a challenge which we have to tackle for our own generation but all the more for future ones – not just for today’s children, but for theirs in turn. In other words, the individual of whom the liberal conceives is a member of the various communities already mentioned, and of a community which includes the not-yet-living.

Does this matter? I think it does, for two reasons. First, because it has relevance beyond that of the environment, providing a longer-term perspective on some of the other issues that we face. Previous generations of liberals, including the New Liberal thinkers of the early twentieth century, had confidence in a concept of progress. In that mindset, future generations could be expected to enjoy an ever better existence which, perhaps, meant that their welfare did not have to be of concern now. Progress is the god that died; we think beyond our own graves with a sense of anxiety, not confidence. But in protecting the heritage we leave, we face another problem and that is the second reason why this matters. We have to ask ourselves how far the ‘not-yet-living’ can be used as a trump card? How do we ensure that our stewardship for future generations does not create unacceptable brakes on our freedom in our own lifetimes?

I don’t pretend I have the answers to those questions yet. But we should be asking the questions.

What sort of Liberal are you? A simple test

Committed as this blog is to encouraging the intellectual wanderlust of the discerning liberal, we present to you today a simple test. It comprises one question only and it's purpose is for you to consider how you would define yourself among the embarras de richesse which is the welter of liberal traditions.

We are what we inwardly digest; we are what read. So, imagine that on your enforced sojourn marooned on a desert island, you have been allowed the company of only one political tract. You would choose, naturally, a work which reflected your own political make-up, even though in the sweltering heat and arid landscape, there is no chance of constructing a liberal society. Which book would it be? The poll to the right lists the main possibilities -- click away.

If there are alternatives that you think should be included, do begin a write-in campaign. Or, if there are works there are worthy only to kindle fire, tell me which one was not even worthy of this desert-island jaunt. Results next week.

Milton's paradise where there's no such thing as society

Being new to this game – actually, I see that I’m not yet twenty days old in blogworld – I’m not yet clear about the rules. What counts as success? I wonder whether it’s about how many comments get posted. If so, after the initial kind words, my postings have bombed. Though, in defence, I could say look at the quality not the quantity. That’s particularly the case for the intelligent responses to my explanation.

Tristan took exception to my side-swipe at Milton Friedman, and then he had heavy-weight backing from Oxford's own liberal socialist. They really do deserve a response. What’s at issue is whether the Nobel Prize winner for Economics (1977) can be considered a liberal. He certainly would self-identity as one of us liberals, but many have taken that claim as rhetorical positioning. And after all, if we accepted what people say about themselves, we’d have accepted Vladimir Zhirinovsky as a true Liberal Democrat. But let’s give the suggestion a bit more thought.

You could construct a radical revisionist reading of Friedman which would allow us to adopt him into the liberal family. In Capitalism and Freedom, he claimed to be wanting to reduce government interference in the economy, but he did see an important role for the state. It was the government which must regulate businesses and that could be a very large job in Milton’s paradise. For, as Friedman notoriously asserted the social responsibility of a company is to maximise profits. If that's all businesses have to think about, the state is going to have a time-consuming task on its hands keeping the corporations on the straight and narrow.

But Friedman's claim is one that more enlightened business-leaders would now reject. After all, a company’s reputation affects its profits, and that reputation isn’t defined only by the hard skills of selling goods and taking over rivals. It’s also about what the experts call either social capital or goodwill. Down the road from Oxford, at Henley Management College – the oldest business school in Britain – there’s a research centre devoted to the issue.

What, in a nutshell, happens is that, in arguing for a balance between small government and free individuals, Friedman forgets about society. He doesn’t reject the concept entirely, but it’s an impoverished version of society where the only meaning of ‘value’ is the price you see on the packet.

It’s ideas like Friedman’s which are behind that most infamous political statement of the Eighties: Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society.’ To be fair to her (and I’m not sure why we should considering the damage she did to Britain), the context of what she said suggests she was a victim of bad phrasing. The surviving devotees over at the Thatcher Foundation have generously allowed you to judge for yourself. What she was actually attacking was reliance on state intervention, but the force of her phrase seemed to sum up the soullessness of her brand of Conservatism: what was lacking – as in Friedman’s writings – is an understanding of the social context in which each individual exists and constructs their personality.

So, no, I can’t be persuaded to imagine Friedman is an honest liberal, no more than I would grace Margaret Thatcher with that accolade.

An explanation, at last

The time has come to explain this blog's name. Some, I’m sure, have been waiting with bated breath. I should start by saying the my first idea was mores liberales. But that looks on screen like a case of Manuel’s Fawlty English. There are certainly mores liberales in heaven and earth than some would credit. But the Latin noun ‘mores’ is also an English noun which you’ll recognise – customs or habits. And so, with a slight change of case in order to avoid confusion (for that we would not want, would we?), we have: ‘about liberal habits.’

I see at the back of the class an objection from our Blairite friend in Liverpool. He’s waving his arm about, eager to make his point –‘but liberalis isn’t the same as liberal.’ Thank you for that intervention and it is a point well-made. It is here that the dread e-acute word makes a re-appearance.

For, the term liberalis comes from a time when there were free men and those not so free. A liber was a free man in contrast to a slave. ‘Liberalis’ and thus liberal is merely the adjective which derives from that. Even in the classical world, however, a ‘liberal custom’ was not just what a free man would do, but what he (excuse the gender imbalance for the moment) should do. It was implied that a free man should act in certain ways and, most particularly, be educated in certain skills. The concept is still with us or, at least, with our American cousins when they talk of the liberal arts (which we call the humanities, as in those skills which are needed to achieve the full potential of a human – a very Renaissance concept).

But, as everyone is now free, what is liberal is what is suitable for every individual. Quite so, but let’s not lose sight of how recent that insight is. And here’s the point: go back to John Stuart Mill, writing On Liberty in the 1850s, and you’re in an era where the majority still lacked the vote. He might have wanted to alter the gender imbalance by ensuring both sexes had the vote, and he might have been in favour of universal suffrage but he wrote in an age where only the few were ‘citizens.’ And all citizens, he said, should be entitled to debate any issue, as long as they had informed themselves. That is, all citizens should be educated – and the State should compel that education but not be, he suggests, the main provider of it.

So, this brings us back to that feared e-acute: if those who can (and should) be fully involved in political society are the ones who are informed enough to add to the debate, then few would be allowed. Mill was the voice of a liberalism before democracy was achieved. Half a century later and the debate had moved on: the issue becomes how to ensure that everyone can engage in political society, irrespective of their background. Liberals recognised that, at times, that could only be achieved by the intervention of the state. Liberalism, in other words, is about achieving an equality of opportunity and striving for social justice through all the means available.

The reason for this long posting may now be clear: it’s to make it clear, early in my time here, where I stand politically. Mill is a formative influence on Liberalism, but he can not be its guiding light. Later thinkers from T. H. Green to L. T. Hobhouse should take the credit. When the Adam Smith Institute praises my ward colleague, he’s right to take umbrage at having given succour to the suckers. Their idea of ‘classical liberals’ [sic] is an impoverished concept, still-born when the term was invented. They talk of liberals when they actually mean libertarians. But, as we accept, ‘liberal’ has historical resonances of freemen, but certainly not of Friedman.