Ideologies and Political Theories: A Conceptual Approach

IDEOLOGIES AND POLITICAL THEORY

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Ideologies

and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach

MICHAEL FREEDEN

CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD

This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuaia Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Michael Freeden 1996 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-827532-3

To Irene

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T WOULD like to thank the British Academy for supporting this JL project by awarding me a two-year Research Readership, and enabling me to rethink my relationship with political theory. Many friends and colleagues have helped me to sharpen my focus by commenting on aspects of the written text, on papers I have given, or by discussing various issues with me. Among them are Terence Ball, Ros Ballaster, Richard Bellamy, Margaret Canovan, G. A. Cohen, Elizabeth Frazer, Robert Goodin, Jose Harris, Martin Hollis, Alison Jeffries, Ernesto Laclau, David Leopold, Colin Matthew, James Meadowcroft, {Catherine Morris, Noel O'Sullivan, Paolo Pombeni, Luanda Rumsey, Bhaskar Vira, and Albert Weak. More generally, I owe a debt to organizers of and participants in seminars and conferences on political thought and modern history I have addressed, to graduate students whose critical acumen and freshness sparked off new trains of thought, to undergraduates who posed questions requiring me to clarify my presentation, and to other individuals who have patiently reacted to my views as they developed over time. All testify to the fact that thinking about politics, even when channelled through a single individual, is a collective act. I have been fortunate in the great capability and understanding of my editor at Oxford University Press—Tim Barton—who philosophically took in his stride both the increasing length of the book and the time it took to complete, I thank Mansfield College for providing an environment as congenial as any to be found in the academic world. A shortened version of Chapter 2 previously appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy, My family have, as always, been the mainstay of my work and, in particular, of my life beyond it, M.F. Mansfield College, Oxford

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

PART I: THEORIZING ABOUT IDEOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGY 1. Staking Out: The Distinctiveness of Analysing Ideologies (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

The Conceptual Histories of Ideology In Search of a Single Concept Analytical Misconceptions Rival Epistemologies Philosophy and Ideology: The Unholy Alliance Unconscious and Rhetorical Components of Ideology Ideology and the Limits on Logic The Ubiquity and Specificity of Ideology

2. Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

Political Words and Political Concepts Reassessing Essential Contestability The Morphology of Political Concepts Logical and Cultural Adjacency The Morphology of Ideologies The Escape from Strong Relativism

3. Applying: The Contexts of Ideological Meaning (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f} (g) (h)

The Inevitability of History Contextual History and Intentionality Ideology and Herrneneutics The Contribution of Regriffsgeschichte Competing Viewpoints and the Path to Integration Structure and Morphology Meeting Some Objections Ideologies as Vehicles of Political Theory

13 14 19 23 25 27 33 36 40

47 48 55 60 68 75 91

96 97 100 111 117 123 124 127 131

viii

Contents PART II; LIBERALISM: THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY

Preliminary Observations 4. The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism (a) (b) (c) (d)

Identifying the Millite Core Democracy and Other Adjacencies Peripheral Permutations French Connections and Disconnections

5. New Liberal Successions: The Modernization of an Ideology (a) (b} (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

The Idealist Liberalism of T. H. Green Perimeter Practices and Adjacent Aftermaths The New Liberalism: The Evolution of an Ideology The Changing Adjacencies of Liberty The Organic Analogy Fleshing Out the New Liberal Morphology State, Group, and Society: The German Case State, Group, and Society: The French Case

6. The Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism: ContextuaEzing the Contemporary American Variant (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

139 141 144 154 165 168

178 178 189 194 201 203 206 210 215

226

Political Liberalism and its Constraints Carving Out the Political? Trie Kantian Horizon Is Equality a Liberal Core Concept? Liberalism and Community Liberal Neutrality

228 233 236 241 247 259

7. Mistaken Identities and Other Anomalies: The Liberal Pretenders

276

(a) Libertarianism: An Attenuated Ideology (b) The Individual and Liberty: The Retreat to Non-Constraint (c) In Defence of Property (d) The Break with Liberalism (e) Hayek: An Appeal to the Old Liberals (f) Anarchism: The View from Liberty

276 279 285 288 298 311

Contents

ix

PART III: THE ADAPTABILITY OF CONSERVATISM 8. Theorizing about Conservative Ideology

317

(a) Oakeshott: Conservatism a la Carte 320 (b) The Chameleon Contra the Status Quo: Two Discarded Theories 329 (c) The Conservative Core: Resolving a Morphological Puzzle 332

9. The Chimera of Conservative Dualism (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

The Multiple Counter-Defences of British Conservatism The Cases against Socialism Parrying Liberal Advances Cecil's Conservatism American Conservatism: Parallel Thoughts Libertarianism Reappraised Conservatism and Public Debate

10. Forward to the Past—The Conservative Revival (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Thatcherism as Conservatism The Subservience of Economics 'Who is the Fiercest of Them All?' Recent American Conservatisms The Unity of Thatcherite Ideology

348 348 354 360 362 369 373 378

384 385 393 397 399 408

PART IV: SOCIALISM: THE CONTAINMENT OF TRANSCENDENCE 11. The Congruence of Socialist Diversity (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

Pre- and Proto Socialisms The Socialist Core History: The Fifth Core Concept Socialism and Democracy Socialism and Power The 'Socialist Clause' and the State Class and Property The Socialist Periphery

12. Socialism, Liberty, and Choice (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

The Pursuit of Liberalism by Other Means Equality and Liberty: A Partnership of Equals? The Fundamental Nature of Revisionism Continental Comparisons The Perimeter Problem of Market Socialism A Note on Other Socialisms

417 420 425 433 438 442 446 448 450

456 456 464 469 472 477 480

x

Contents PART V: TRANSFORMATION AND DILUTION: THE ASSAULT ON IDEOLOGICAL CONVENTION

Preliminary Observations

485

13. Feminism: The Recasting of Political Language

488

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

The Feminist Core: Between Critique and Prescription Gender and Power The Political Domain Paradigms Lost and Regained Postmodernism: An Alliance of Convenience? Equality and the Feminist Traditions An Ideological Reading of Ideologies The Role of the Concrete

14. Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

The Core Concepts of Green Discourse Deficient Dichotomies Conservative Components? The Individualist Ingredient The Ambivalence of Power The Green Perimeter Eco-feminism: A Distinct Position?

491 492 497 501 506 508 515 520

526 527 530 535 537 540 544 548

Epilogue

551

Bibliography

555

Name Index

575

Subject Index

583

INTRODUCTION

HE study of ideologies is torn between various approaches that Thave emerged out of different conceptualizations of ideology,

causing disarray and confusion among scholars. Appearing mainly as a peculiar and frequently unsavoury expression of distorted and power-serving political thinking, and thus as a point d'appui from which a transformative exposition of social thought and practice can be launched, or as a simplistic classificatory label for broadly based political belief-systems and the historical traditions in which they unfold, ideologies lag in the status stakes behind the high prestige of political philosophy, whether analytical or critical. A central aim of this book is to challenge the current predominant attitudes to ideologies and their scholarly analysis. Its argument will not follow Marxisant schools whose critical notions of ideology constitute attempts to transcend its illusory nature. To adopt that critical disposition is to deflect attention from the product itself and to deflate its status and value both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a means through which social understanding may be attained directly. The thinking encapsulated in ideologies deserves examination in its own right, not merely for what it masks. It should no longer be pigeon-holed as an impoverished and inferior relation of analytical and normative political philosophies. Rather, ideologies are forms of political thought that provide important direct access to comprehending the formation and nature of political theory, its richness, varieties, and subtlety. The academic investigation of ideologies, it will be claimed, must be accorded equal ranking with the study of political philosophy. The current state of affairs, with its exaggerated disjunctive between the two, gives rise to concern. As products, both political philosophy and ideology are genres of political thought that display strong similarities in their morphology and that may overlap considerably in many of their normative and recommendatory features. As academic modes of construing the social world, the current distanciation of political philosophy as a subdiscipline— in particular, its Anglo-American varieties—from a serious consideration of concrete ideologies has significantly depleted the

2 Introduction methodological tools at the disposal of political theorists. This neglect of ideologies has weakened our comprehension of political thought as a phenomenon reflecting cultural as well as logical constraints. Those constraints operate on the building blocks of political thought, its political concepts. It is all the more perturbing because, as a consequence, the signal capacities of reflectiveness and analytical precision displayed by contemporary political philosophers are channelled—in most individual cases—towards some features of political thought at the expense of others. The following inquiry offers a series of first steps to redress the balance. Traditionally, the exploration of political thought has been organized around the persons who have best expressed coherent political thinking, around the main overarching themes with which it has been concerned, around the formulation of philosophically valid political utterances, or around particular historical periods. But the basic units of thinking about politics are the concepts that constitute its main foci, just as words are the basic units of language, and in this book the argument is put forward that the analysis of political thought, as a scholarly enterprise related to the methodological interests of students of social phenomena, is most usefully promoted by proceeding from the conceptual morphologies it displays. Those internal configurations are detectable embodiments of the political beliefs of political actors, but with some important qualifications. The approach proffered here is not narrowly 'empiricist', in the sense of allowing particular data to dictate an inductivist general theory, as advocated by nineteenth-century positivists. It recognizes that the meaning of such data depends on frameworks of interpretation. Assigning meaning through such frameworks is a very different process from the reflective yet imaginative creations and speculations of many political theorists and philosophers, conducted at some distance from the manifestations of political thinking they experience around them. It refers to human thoughtbehaviour that is empirically but indirectly ascertainable to the1 scholar, through its expression in spoken and written language. Such thought-behaviour invariably includes, but is not identical with, the reflections and conjectures of political philosophers. This study is 'empirical' in that specific sense, while accepting both that the observations required must trace patterns not always discernible to the actors themselves, and that researchers cannot avoid imposing classifications on the subject-matter they 1

On the use of the term 'thought-behaviour' see Ch. 1.

Introduction

3

investigate, or shaping aspects of the reality under investigation. Ideologies, it is contended, may be subject to three scholarly perspectives. The first is genetic, in answer to the question: how did a particular set of political views come about? History and evolution are central to this mode of understanding. The second is broadly functional, in answer to the question: what is the purpose, or role (if unintended), of a particular set of political views? The third is semantic, in answer to the question: what are the implications and the insights of a particular set of political views, in terms of the conceptual connections it forms? Which universe of meaning—deliberate as well as unintentional—is constructed by its conceptual configurations? This latter perspective is the one that informs this book, engaged as it is not in the causal or functional explanation of ideologies but in offering an interpretative framework through which to comprehend their concrete manifestations. Such interpretations and understandings, however, must retain links with the perceived historical and sociological realities within which political thinkers, grand and modest, employ the copious range of political concepts that human cultures have put at their disposal. The analysis of political concepts is not, on this understanding, most usefully pursued by projecting their logical permutations and ethical possibilities in the abstract, often attached to universalizable models—currently the most common method of exploring them—but through locating them within the patterns in which they actually appear. Such patterns are most conveniently known as ideologies, those systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended, through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding.2 Those 'perceived realities' need not constitute the real world, for the reality of that world is only partly germane to the understanding of ideologies. The conscious perceptions, and conscious and unconscious conceptions, of the participants in the social world are the object of our concern and a major, if indeterminate, cause of human conduct, and it is at that level that ideologies operate. In addition the social world is itself, contra the positivists, the 2 The terminology adopted here designates ideologies as political; hence there is no need for the tautology 'political ideology'. There are two reasons for this. First, it is accepted usage among students of politics and political science. Second, cultural and sociological uses of 'ideology', ostensibly removed from the sphere of politics, specify power relationships as central to the concept, and power is a key, if insufficient, identifying feature of politics.

4 Introduction consequence of such perceptions and conceptions and cannot be said to exist entirely independently and objectively of them. The nature of society and its structures, supposedly reflected in ideologies, are themselves partly the product of those ideologies, operating as ways of organizing social reality. One caveat must immediately be registered. True to the above, the views of this scholar cannot be absolved from the limitations of perception and comprehension that apply to all human thought-processes. The test of this study will have to be not in the objective truth of its analysis and methods but in whatever intellectual appeal and utility of perspective it may be deemed to have. Proceeding from the political concept as the unit of analysis in political thought, it is the main thesis of this book that ideologies are distinctive configurations of political concepts, and that they create specific conceptual patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations. That indeterminate range is the product of the essential contestability of political concepts, and essential contestability provides the manifold flexibility out of which ideological families and their subvariants are constructed. It is a parallel thesis that the furtherance of our understanding of political thinking will be best assisted through comprehending political concepts as obtaining meaning on three dimensions: time, space, and the morphology of their interlinkages, and that these three dimensions have to be integrated in an overarching analytical perspective. While the first two dimensions are commonly used in interpreting political thought, the addition of the third dimension of morphology is a special, though not exclusive, aspect of the approach offered in the following pages. Political concepts acquire meaning not only through accumulative traditions of discourse, and not only through diverse cultural contexts, but also by means of their particular structural position within a configuration of other political concepts. Hence ideologies are none other than the inevitable macroscopic consequence of attributing such meanings to a range of interrelated political concepts. Specific structures of political thinking do not exist prior to meaning but are themselves formed by permissible and legitimated codes and norms at the disposal of a given society, or by challenges to those prevailing codes and norms. Put differently, while the prevailing traditions of studying political thought have focused on truth and epistemology, ethical Tightness, logical clarity, origins and causes, prescriptions, purposes and intentions—to name the more salient issues—political thought in its ideological manifestations can more fruitfully be

Introduction

5

regarded as a conflation of form and meaning, of the patterns that political thinking displays as a crucial facet of the interpretation and elucidation of its concepts. Those patterns are to be found in the thought-processes that produce political thinking, in its historical instances, in its cultural representations, and to a lesser extent in its internal logical relations.3 In contradistinction to preeminent structuralist positions, however, the history of an ideological tradition, the conventions through which it is understood and perceived, and its spatial diversities, must also play a central role in attributing meaning to the ideology in question. This entails superimposing diachronic on synchronic analysis and multiple synchrony on the examination of a single system, as well as appreciating that political concepts combine the contingent and the quasi-contingent.4 This study does not profess to offer a complete analytical approach to ideologies. It will not, for example, directly emphasize narratives, myths, symbols, idioms, or the affectivity of language—all additional dimensions that can be superimposed on the ideological product. Its main concern is to focus on political concepts and examine how they can illuminate an understanding of ideologies. Because the construction and employment of ideologies are an aspect of political conduct, and the nature of politics is centrally linked to decision-making, the meanings ideologies convey are of a distinct type. From the perspective of conceptual analysis, making a decision relates crucially to bestowing a decontested meaning on a political term. The nature of political thinking is such that any of its instances invokes, intentionally or otherwise, a very large number of the most common political concepts. Thus configurations of necessarily decontested concepts are the sine qua nan of thinking rationally about politics—that is, in a minimally organized and purposive way—with a view to political action. Those configurations, or clusters, are ideologies, a term employed irrespective of any pejorative or laudatory connotation it may have acquired, and without pre-empting any possible form that combinations of political concepts may exhibit. Monolithic ideal-types or Utopias pursued to their logical conclusions are distinguished by the presence or absence of some fundamental political concepts— a distinction then employed as a taxonomic device. However, temporally and spatially determinate arenas of political thought * The relatively subordinate role of logical cohesion in the analysis of ideology, as 4distinct from political philosophy, will be discussed in the first two chapters. See Ch. 2.

6 Introduction display the presence of most fundamental political concepts, while exhibiting variation and contention—and hence differentiating possibilities—over the specific mixture of the conceptual ingredients, and over their positioning vis-a-vis each other. The choice among political concepts and ideas is hence not necessarily mutually exclusive. Their compatibility depends entirely on the interpretation attached to each concept and the resultant composite structures. Competition over legitimacy is hence not among concepts but among meanings and structures. Nor is it sufficient to approach boundary problems between ideologies as a question of the one 'shading off' into the other. In the course of 'shading-off' important changes take place with respect to the decontestations of, and mutual relationships among, the political concepts in play. It is on this macro-process that analytical scrutiny should focus. While the function of ideologies is to guide practical political conduct the analysis of ideologies (as distinct from the role assumed by some political philosophers) is not geared to directing or recommending political action. Its purpose is to explain, to interpret, to decode, and to categorize. In so doing it does not claim to offer a correct description of the world of ideologies, nor a complete account of the patterns of political thinking that world incorporates, nor the promise of an archimedal vista of social relations beyond the tarnished sphere of ideologies. It must rest content with holding out the possibility of a plausible, generally applicable, and reasonably comprehensive framework of analysis that is both intellectually and culturally satisfying, but that acknowledges the multiplicity of available perspectives on ideological thought as well as the inevitable gaps in recreating so intricate a phenomenon,5 The readiness to accept manifold methodological approaches6 need not result in fragmentation, for they are united by the same research objective and by the desire to illuminate it with optimal interpretative light. These central characteristics of ideological analysis must not be seen as disadvantages. The following chapters air the proposition that, outside the sphere of political philosophy, which in its AngloAmerican versions is engaged primarily in clarifying the consistency and logicality of political thought, in evaluating its validity, and in offering ethical prescriptions, the study of political theory 5 It is of course possible, as will be noted in Ch, 1, that even the analysis of ideologies may cause the world to be interpreted in such a way as to promote certain practices over others. 6 See J. Bohman, New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy (Oxford, 1991), 39.

Introduction

7

would attain invigorating impetus and methodological refinement, were it to focus on the interrelationships of its basic concepts as a major clue to their decoding, and were that to be accomplished both while borrowing from philosophers and linguists some of their analytical rigour with respect to words and concepts, and from historians, cultural sociologists, and anthropologists the ability to situate those words and concepts temporally and spatially. In so doing we may also be able to cast new light on the complex nature of modern ideologies and attempt to reintegrate their investigation into the mainstream of political theory rather than, as so frequently is the case, regard them as a dubious and imperfect adjunct to a discipline that supposedly can exist independently of them. A political theorist is currently understood by many users of the term to be a creator of political theories. That usage need not be accorded monopoly status in establishing what political theory is. The aim of these pages is to promote another, parallel, political theory: the analysis of the 'behavioural' and structural properties of political concepts as reflecting concrete political language and debate, without which a full ability to formulate new theories will be deficient. It will also become evident that within AngloAmerican and Continental scholarship there is enough common ground to allow for converging routes, traceable from different premisses and interests, which can sustain such a venture. In organizing this book, I have adopted different strategies to illustrate the range of possibilities immanent in the analysis of ideologies, qualified by a lack of space in what had already become a long script. I have concentrated on the major ideological families of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, and have in addition discussed two relative newcomers, feminism and green ideology. It is not my intention to provide a primer survey or an exhaustive description of what the world of ideologies has to offer. Hence, for example, the absence of nationalism as a separate subject in the following pages: the addition of the suffix 'ism' does not automatically transform a term into an ideology. My purpose, rather, is to promote a particular approach to the study of political thought, and to resuscitate the analysis of ideologies as a major branch of knowledge about politics. I have therefore preferred throughout to employ different techniques and strategies as representative of modes of analysis, while trying to preserve the broader picture of the features of ideological families. Following on Part I, which introduces a theoretical apparatus through which ideologies may be interpreted and investigated, some of the casestudies constitute detailed examinations of political thinkers whose

8 Introduction contributions to specific ideologies have been exemplary, while others present instances of group thinking. Some case-studies are contemporary, others historical. Some are based on a specific national ideological tradition, and are then accompanied with broader comparative explorations. Some are compressed into adumbrating their basis morphology; others are detailed, in order to proffer a sampling of their internal complexity. At all times these studies are related to the ideological family under discussion, and at all times the intention is to illuminate the multiple research paths available to the scholarly understanding of ideologies. To have explored all these possibilities in every instance would have taken a lifetime of research and would have resulted in an unreadable opus. Hence also the (arbitrary) decision to exclude fascism and communism, let alone non-Western ideologies; and the decision not to explore examples of common-language discourse, or literary expressions of political ideologies, or mass ideological thinking—the latter deserving of more serious consideration than currently accorded by some academics. For reasons of space, comprehensiveness is merely secondary to the attempt to demonstrate the link between ideologies and political concepts and the significance of this link as a framework for scholarly inquiry. In sum, this book modestly offers an invitation to a tasting, which further scholarship may yet assist in transforming into a feast There exists a rich world of intellectual and cultural behaviour which revolves round the mental activity of human beings engaged in constructing edifices of political ideas. That world has been explored from one perspective, that of the historian of ideas, interested in the evolution of chains of thinking, of themes, and of traditions. But imagine the undertaking presented here as equivalent to that of the anthropologist, examining not the history of practices over time but, rather, both their perennial and transient features, and concerned not with recommending practices or inventing new ones but with analysing them as windows into the human mind and the social institutions that derive therefrom. If we extend the notion of 'practices' to include patterns of political concepts, as a raw material pregnant with scholarly promise, an extraordinary creation of human mental ingenuity, appreciable both on its own and because it holds the key to the all-important political environments people inhabit, we may point the way towards introducing analytical rigour into a major aspect of human (thought) behaviour. That aspect has not been given sufficient attention by the various schools that have deliberated political theory. Without wishing in any respect to diminish the importance

Introduction

9

and attractions of both political philosophy and the history of ideas, the understanding of the politico-conceptual structures of the human mind is as vital to their pursuit as is their inspiration to this enterprise. The third angle of a triangle of thinking about politics needs to be etched in as firm a hand as the other two. The introduction of a morphological perspective into the examination of political thought is long overdue. It is essential to the extent that for quite a few centuries political theory has been pivotally concerned with political concepts. It could conceivably be the case that the political concept as a central analytical unit will eventually give way to some other entity. When that happens, the study of political thought will have changed beyond recognition and its analysis may require different heuristic tools. But that is some way into the future. At this stage we still need to catch up with its past and present.

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I

Theorizing About Ideological Morphology

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1

Staking Out: The Distinctiveness of Analysing Ideologies

... there exists a definite prejudice... which regards the constituents and relations of the ideological domain as 1intrinsically capricious and chaotic in their essential nature. half-century the concept of ideology has emerged O asVERonetheofpast the most complex and debatable political ideas. It is remarkable for being discussed on levels that seemingly do not intersect, for attempting to organize phenomena that appear unrelated, and for causing confusion among scholars and political commentators. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, linguists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have all grappled with the notion of ideology. They are all aware that problems of definition and of approach are high on the agenda of students of ideology, yet movement towards accepted parameters has not been forthcoming. The result is a polysemic word which for some even connotes more than one concept, bound in various ways to different disciplines. Both scholars and non-scholars have invested in it not only purposive, reflective, and critical thought but strong emotions. Yet it is also the case that the very existence of the facts to which ideology purportedly refers has frequently been denied. What, then, is the place of this study in the literature on ideology? What needs to be said that has not already been stated emphatically, repetitively, and even authoritatively? To pre-empt the argument that I will later present in detail, these pages are informed by a number of fundamental contentions. First, a central thesis of this book is that ideologies can fruitfully be approached as a major genre of political thought rather than—at least within the discipline of political theory—as poor relations of political 1

H. Walsby, The Domain of Ideologies (Glasgow, 1947), 138,

14 Ideological Morphology philosophies. Through ideologies access can be provided to a close study and comprehension of the units of political thinking—those fundamental political concepts which shape political argument. Second, ideologies constitute a product of the human mind that can be ascertained through a threefold process: employing the conceptual analysis that political theorists have been trained to handle; utilizing the type of empirical and contextual inquiry in which historians are versed; and appreciating the morphological patterns which contribute to the determination of ideological meaning. The result is the study of political ideas and utterances within frameworks of cultural, temporal, spatial, and logical constraints, frameworks that optimize the richness of information and the depth of understanding that can be elicited from political thought. Such a perspective on ideology is still considerably underdeveloped. This, however, puts the cart before the horse. To begin with, we need to appreciate the challenges awaiting the student of ideology, what can be gleaned from the most salient theories and views currently in circulation, and where the present state of the art raises questions and leaves gaps to be filled. 00 THE CONCEPTUAL HISTORIES OF IDEOLOGY

Most surveys of the genesis of ideology hark back to Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the progenitor of 'ideology' as an aspiring scientific term indicating the study of ideas, and to its almost immediate demotion by the Napoleonic detractors of positivism as a pompous attempt to build castles in the air.2 That meaning of ideology, though not the debate surrounding it, is now of little significance. Instead, modern scholarship pertaining to ideology still labours heavily under the mid-nineteenth-century shadow of Marx and Engels. This is by no means entirely a bad thing, for the Marxist approach to ideology has sensitized us to crucial aspects of human thinking in societies and about societies, and to the sources, limitations, and imperfections of such thinking. It has, above all, provided political philosophers and practitioners with critical vistas from which to assess, interpret, and attempt to transcend existing forms of social, economic, and political thought. The notion that human thinking reflects socio-economic practices is now virtually a truism, though not always in the specific Marxist garb which related ideology to the capitalist mode of production and its 2

See e.g. G. Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology (London, 1967), 4-6.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 15 3 material contradictions. The suggestion that types of thought perform concealing and dissimulative roles is likewise one widely adopted by psychologists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists as well as social theorists. The assigning to ideology of significant functions of power, domination, and exploitation in the political and economic realms is another pervasive feature in understandings of the phenomenon.4 But the Marxist conception of ideology has also placed scholarly blinkers on the variegated nature of ideology by encouraging certain analytical directions and readings rattier than others. It ascribes a pejorative meaning to ideology, exposing it as a distorted or inverted reflection of alienated socially produced thought, and opposing it to true consciousness,5 Marx indeed often presented it in a double role, as an inversion of a distortion.6 It identifies a particular historically situated epistemology which gives rise to ideology, tihus implying its ephemerality rather than ubiquity. It presents ideology as a product of class and associates it primarily with a ruling class, so that each society develops only one ideology serving the interests of the rulers. It concentrates on the domination and control aspects of ideology at the expense of other features and functions. The critical vistas it purports to offer have as yet to convince many that they are also archirnedal points from which to establish truth and transform societies. Alongside this coherent and influential theory of ideology another contemporary version is positioned, so different in its focus and characteristics as to confound the scholar seeking some common ground. The product of a research culture centring on American political science, it concentrates on the concrete phenomenon of ideologies rather than the category of ideology. That is a significant shift. No longer is ideology regarded as an aberration of perception or of understanding; instead, a positivist empiricism is harnessed to identify and investigate a widespread social phenomenon: the existence of organized, articulated, and consciously held systems of political ideas incorporating beliefs, attitudes, and opinions, though latent beliefs are also included.7 The study of this 3 See K. Marx and F. Engels, Tie German Ideology, ed. C, J. Arthur (London, 1974), 4 The three concepts are of course not identical For a comprehensive analysis of the Marxist conception of ideology see J. Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (London, 1983). 5 See R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981), 1-44. 6 Cp, Larrain, Marxism and Ideology, 13-15. 7 Cp. R. E. Lane, Political Ideology (New York, 1962), 3, 14-16.

16 Ideological Morphology phenomenon is seen to involve the properties of a value-free social science. In countless textbooks, classificatory schemes are provided utilizing a left-right spectrum, or variations on that theme, to unfold the full range of the most salient ideological traditions. While such contemporary analysis looks at ideologies as ubiquitous forms of political thinking,8 it does not, nor should it, consider them as identical with political thought. Instead, it employs a strongly functionalist approach that examines the purposes and contributions of ideologies to social and political life. They are identified as ideacomplexes containing beliefs—encompassing consciously or unconsciously held values, understandings, interpretations, myths, and preferences—which support or contest political arrangements and processes, as well as providing plans of action for public political institutions; and in9 doing so they act as devices for mobilizing mass political activity. Conservative sociologists in the Parsonian school have also demonstrated the integrative role of ideology in symbolically binding individuals to their societies, though that role is identified by nonconservatives as well. As Gouldner has put it, ideology 'links individual to society, person to group, by allowing certain selected components of individual consciousness to be shared with other persons... in public discourse'.10 A similar analysis, joining the sociological and the psychological, had been proffered by Apter in the pioneering volume, Ideology and Discontent, The dual functions of ideology—'binding the community together' and 'organizing the role personalities of the maturing individual'—generate a byproduct, the legitimation of authority." This contemporary version itself has a deviant form, which has more in common with popular perceptions of the nature of 'isms', but which complicates even further the task of explaining the nature of ideologies. It reflects the legacy of the French Revolution; specifically, the hostile reception of its slogans and principles, denigrated as abstract, a priori, and artificial. Its main features have been to denote ideology as a dogmatic, doctrinaire, and closed 8

See M, Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London, 1976), on the preference for inclusive over exclusive nations of ideology. * For two excellent appraisals of contemporary understandings of ideology see W. A. Muffins, 'On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science', American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 498-510; and M. B. Hamilton, "The Elements of the10 Concept of Ideology', Political Studies, 35 (1987), 18-38. A. W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (London, 1976), 82. 11 D. E. Apter, 'Introduction', in D. E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964), 18-21.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies

17

system of thought, removed from observed reality, manifesting both a high level of internal consistency which is the product of a deductive rationalism, and supported, in Daniel Bell's words, by a 'passionate' or emotional commitment which provides social levers for action,12 This conception also attaches ideology to radical, non-democratic, frequently totalitarian,13 political views of the left or the right that are usually superimposed by their promoters on a pluralist 'grass-roots' population, against the desires and interests of the latter. Cautioning against ideologies, theorists such as Sartori have instead commended political belief-systems as looser, more open, and pragmatic sets of ideas which are appropriate for, and responsive to, a democratic environment.14 This view of ideology conforms to the pejorative connotation of its Marxist co-variant,15 but abandons it as a route to a critical demystification of social practices and thinking. It is deviant merely because it has not exhibited the staying power or the logical consistency characteristic of the other uses of ideology, and not because it fails to conform to a definitional norm, the existence of which would be alien to the methodology employed in this study. Not unexpectedly, such scholarly treatments of ideology both reinforce and reflect ordinary language usage. A case in point is the ill-fated 'end of ideology' thesis of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which claimed that a growing intra- and international consensus would attenuate ideological controversy and ultimately purge the world of it. As monolithic passion gave way to pragmatic pluralism, an exhaustion with the great 'isms' would diminish the impact of ideology on modern life. There is a striking irony in the affinity between that capitalist vision, announcing the convergence of life styles across the face of the globe which would result in the disappearance of conflicting Weltanschauungen, and the Marxist prediction of the withering away of ideology consequent upon the march of historical materialism. But if ideology patently is not dead, and verily burst into a new lease of life in the 1960s, some of the premisses that accounted for the 'end of 12

See D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1962), 393-407. 13 See e.g. L. Halle, The Ideological Imagination (London, 1972), 6. 14 G. Sartori, 'Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems', American Political Science Review, 63 (1969), 398-411. 15 Cp. K. Mtrtogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (London, 1985), which identifies ideology with its Marxist conception and criticizes its dogmatism and its critical view of societies as requiring liberation from oppression.

18 Ideological Morphology ideology' thesis survived its demise, too,16 In the language of the mass media, ideology is all too often vulgarized as the artificial and deliberate construction by misguided individuals, or elites, of systems of thought which have no bearing on human and political experience, or which aim to force such experience into a neat and orderly bed that distorts the naturally unshapely frame of its occupiers, 'The end of an age of ideology', exulted the press yet again when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990, What the student of ideologies can make of that will be assessed in later chapters. It is because scholars such as Bell and Sartori defined and popularized ideology in the limited terms they did, that the possibility of its passing could be entertained and a non-ideological politics envisaged. In effect, Sartori's more extensive category of 'belief-system' performs much the same role as ideology does in mainstream political science, his version of ideology being thus reduced to one of its manifestations, rather than excluded altogether. On the more general understanding of ideologies mooted by that mainstream, there is no reason to suggest that extreme, closed ideologies differ in their general features and functions from moderate, flexible, or broadly endorsed ones. Pragmatism, too, represents a point of view and conceals principled positions often unintelligible to their promoters. After all, the overused pragmatist injunction to judge something 'on its merits' implies preposterously that self-evident merits simply leap out of concrete cases for all to see, rather than that they are read into those cases by the so-called pragmatists themselves. The end-of-ideology thesis conflated a number of issues. In subscribing to closure versus openness, to abstract rationalism versus pragmatism, and to passion versus political disillusionment, it overlooked the possibility that closure was a matter of degree rather than a dichotomous distinction. It disregarded the area most ideologies occupy, somewhere between a deductive rationalism and an ad hoc empiricism. It underestimated the role of emotion in all ideological systems. It implied that tihe above categories overlapped, so that ideologies could only be closed and abstract and passionate and not, for example, open and passionately committed, as is liberalism, or dogmatically self-styledly 'pragmatic' and closed, as are some types of conservatism. In addition it advocated a consensus/convergence theory concerning the general acceptance 16

See A, Shtromas (ed,), 'The End of "Isms"?', Political Studks, specia! issue (1993), esp. K. Mtaogue, 'Ideology after the Collapse of Communism', pp. 4-20, which perpetuates, on the basis of internal logic and passion, the distinction between ideologies and liberal democratic political doctrines.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 19 of the welfare state and a mixed economy, based on a patently mistaken premiss. Even had such a full consensus existed, which was never the case, this would hardly indicate the end of ideology; rather, it would suggest the reduction of many ideologies into one, to which all assented. Plainly, the complexities involved in analysing ideologies had not yet begun to be considered. If ideology is, as will be suggested here, a permanent and ubiquitous phenomenon, the end of ideology would signal the end of society itself, a world in which strong and cohesive political beliefs would neither be held nor acted upon. (b) IN SEARCH OF A SINGLE CONCEPT

The debates within the positivist-empiricist tradition of recent political science allow little, if any, space for class, for immanent views of the world, or for concealed domination structures. But can the Marxist and political-science perspectives on ideology be bridged? The answer is that this has already been happening in part, even within the Marxist tradition itself. The first assumption to be queried was the ephemeraBty of ideology and its link to a specific set of historical circumstances, Antonio Gramsci retained through his notion of hegemony a conception of ideology preeminently serving to safeguard the power of a dominant class over the masses. But he allowed for a phenomenon corresponding to that identified by political scientists, one of indefinite duration, performing integrative functions, and fashioned consciously by intellectual elites.17 Louis Althusser similarly saw ideology as possessing on the one hand Marxist dissimulative and dominatory roles, but presenting itself on the other as a permanent objective phenomenon produced by all classes. It was both an 'imaginary' representation of the real and a 'lived' relation between individuals and their conditions of existence. Ideology was thus deserving of comprehension on its own terms, as a cultural apparatus existing in social practices 'interpellating' individuals and integrating them into their societies, though hardly as free agents and generally in the service of the state.18 This led some Marxists to comprehend ideology as an autonomous determiner of practices,19 while others 17 A. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. NewellSmith, (London, 1971), 12-13, 376-7, w L. Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in L, Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, 1984), 39 and passim, 19 Cp. N, Aberorombie, S. Hill, and B, S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London, 1980), 7-29.

20 Ideological Morphology denied that ideology was absolutely constitutive of reality and proposed a reciprocal relationship between the ideological and the material. The representational and discursive function of ideology was combined with the concrete practices embodying it.20 Castoriadis likewise evoked the notion of I'imaginaire social, the creativity of the human mind in conjuring up ideas that enable reflection on, and thus the meaningful existence of, the social and historical worlds.21 Some post-Marxist understandings of ideology, following Lacan, offer it as a symbolic and fantasmic, rather than representational, discourse of domination which unconsciously structures a social reality.22 The systemic and interconnected structures of ideologies have been increasingly emphasized, encompassing complex interrelationships between politics, economics, literature, law, religion, and art. These developments were paralleled in the field of structural and cultural anthropology. Most anthropological research has not focused directly on ideology, inasmuch as non-literate societies do not exhibit the typical ideological phenomena extant in modern or modernizing societies. Nevertheless, social anthropologists have contributed vitally to current thinking on ideology. Claude Levi-Strauss focused on cultural symbols such as myths, and by extension on ideology as modern myth possessing an internal, self-contained logic. Unlike Althusser, he regarded ideology as a 'thought-of order external to objective reality (a 'lived-in' order) and more akin to the supernatural. However, 'thought-of orders could only be understood in relation to 'lived-in' orders and were part of the experience to which they referred.23 Meaning is hence not provided deliberately through ideology, much as supernatural beliefs in undeveloped societies are there from the participants' viewpoint, rather than concocted by them. The function of ideology is therefore to join together with other mechanisms in imposing, unconsciously from the perspective of the participants, significant logical forms on content. Clifford Geertz's seminal paper proffered ideology as an ordered system of cultural symbols organizing and integrating social and psychological processes into meaningful patterns, enabling purposive action. In contrast to LeviStrauss, Geerfz emphasized the cognitive and expressive features of ideology, providing 'maps of problematic social reality' rather than opaque constructs requiring decoding by the observer. m

See M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (London, 1988), 84-93, 252-3. See J. B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Oxford, 1984), 21-4. 22 S, Zizek, 'The Spectre of Ideology', in S. 2izek (ed.). Mapping Ideology (London, 1994), 1-33. 23 C. L6vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, i (Harmondsworth, 1977), 312-13. Z1

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 21 Significantly, Geertz saw ideologies as 'matrices for the creation of collective conscience', externally superimposed when institutionalized guides for conduct are weak,24 The tension between the conscious and the unconscious emerges as a central facet of the analysis of ideologies. Indeed, it is a salient divide when the study of ideology moves to the individual level, Both psychoanalysis and psychological theory have developed further lines of enquiry of their own, establishing promising subgenres of ideological investigation that frequently move off in different directions. Psychoanalysis has had a notable influence on the study of ideology. It has identified personality types (authoritarian or democratic) and pathologies, uncovered the role of the unconscious within each individual (which has, from a very different conception of the unconscious, intriguingly coalesced both with anthropological assumptions about latent cultural symbolism and Marxist premisses concerning the unwitting distortion of truths), submitted the genre of the psycho-biography as an explanation of ideological tendencies, and presented ideo-cultural structures as a necessary constraint on human impulses.25 Psychologists have concentrated on different areas, paralleling the main focus of political science on the cognitive aspects of ideology. As Brown has suggested, 'in a psychological analysis of ideology, the main concepts are,.. attitudes and beliefs, social and cultural influences, socialization and learning and the personality processes that mediate and actualize social relationships'. Crucially, ideology is merely the dependent variable, the focus being 'on individuals and their behavioural consistencies, and not on ideologies as philosophies or systems of ideas'.26 In parallel with some psychological concerns, the study of generally unstructured and unsystematic attitudes gained impetus from the work of Converse and other political scientists.27 Recently, social psychologists have reapproached ideology as a process of reasoned thinking.28 A distinctive image of ideology emerges from psychological explorations. It emphasizes cognition, choice, and the deliberate 24

C. Geertz, 'Ideology as a Cultural System', in Apter (ed.). Ideology and Discontent, 47-76, esp. p, 64. 25 S. Freud, 'Civilization and its Discontents', in The Complete Psychological Works o/Sigmund Freud, ed, J. Stratchey, xxi (London, 1961), 64-145; T. W. Adomo et at., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950); E. H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (London, 1977). ^ L. B. Brown, Ideology (Harmondsworth, 1973), 14, 171. 27 P. E. Converse, 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics', in Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, 206-61. 28 See S. W. Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology and Politics (Oxford, 1988), esp. pp. 200-27.

22 Ideological Morphology formation of shared patterns of belief, that is, cognitive selection in place of illusion. The conscious rather than the hidden thoughtprocesses of individuals, processes that both emanate from the backdrop of social values and contribute to the assessment of those values, are subject to detailed scrutiny.29 Those psychologists who use measurement devices such as scaling further imply that ideologies move along a single dimension—Rokeach's open and closed personality,30 or conservative and radical attitudes—rather than allowing for multi-variance. Also, though psychoanalysis tends to focus on the individual, social psychology has highlighted ideology both as a framework within which all individuals operate and as a mass phenomenon. It also upholds the important distinction between qualitatively elitist and popular ideologies or, in Billig's redirection of earlier terminology, between intellectual and lived ideology.31 Hence, despite micro-functions on the individual level, ideologies are primarily linked to central political structures, the latter seen to be both the objects and the disseminators of ideological activity. Like any discipline, psychology introduces perspectives, biases, and preferred positions which both enrich the understanding of ideology in other fields of knowledge and impede the cross-disciplinary utility of the concept. Piecing some of these perspectives together equips the student of ideologies with some valuable insights which will inform the analysis employed in this book. First, ideologies are importantly attached to social groups, not necessarily classes. Ideologies are produced by, directed at, and consumed by groups. Second, ideologies perform a range of services, such as legitimation, integration, socialization, ordering, simplification, and action-orientation, without which societies could not function adequately, if at all. Third, ideologies are ubiquitous forms of political thinking, reflecting as they do variegated perceptions, rnisperceptions, and conceptualizations of existing or imagined social worlds. Consequently, though the phenomenon can and must be referred to in the singular as 'ideology', if the word is to indicate an identifiable concept, its plural forms—ideologies—are of abiding and central interest. The many theorists who concentrate on the generic term 'ideology' are largely conducting a debate about a particular perspective on the social and political world, and not a debate about a phenomenon within that world, or one helping concretely to constitute that world. Fourth, ideologies are inevitably associated 29 30 31

See M. Biffig et A,, Ideological Dilemmas (London, 1988), M. Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York, I960). Billig, Ideological Dilemmas, 28.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 23 with power, though not invariably with the threatening or exploitative version of power. For inasmuch as ideologies justify certain political decisions and encourage political action, they evoke power as the influence and direction of human beings. In that sense they are sometimes alluded to as 'neutral' analytical devices, though the strategy adopted here will have to qualify that neutrality heavily. Fifth, ideologies are distinct thought-products that invite careful investigation in their own right. In the final count, it is vital to recognize that in studying ideologies we are directing our analyses at actual arrangements of political thinking. The school of ideology as dogma, as a closed and abstract 'ism', is wishful thinking, a streamlined generalization which is itself a highly ideological product of the cold war. Even the so-called closed ideologies on which it concentrates are far more elaborate, more concrete and historically situated, than their portrayal by the pragmatist suggests.32 True, we may never be able to detach completely the thought-products we examine from our own values and interpretative frameworks, but at least we should try to represent and discuss the features of ideologies that can be shown to exist. We need to do so while remembering also—in the pursuit of questions of function—not to neglect their wealth of detail, intricacy of structure, and complexity of argument. This can only be achieved through employing interpretative methods of greater sensitivity than those available through the simple cognitive approaches applied to the study of ideologies by much existing political science. To date, theoretical treatments of ideology have been largely silent on the nature, forms of, and differences among, concrete ideologies and have adopted far too unitary an approach. On the other hand, the explorations of concrete ideologies have been insufficiently analytical with regard to the concept of ideology, frequently limiting their efforts to classifying attitudes. A main objective of this book is to bridge that gap. (c) ANALYTICAL MISCONCEPTIONS

Even after a partial reconciliation has been effected between different schools and subschools engaged in ideology, many problems still abound. They concern both substantive and methodological 32

See e.g. A. Brown and J. Gray (eds.). Political Culture and Political Change in Communist Systems, 2nd edn, (London, 1979); A. Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies (London, 1984).

24 Ideological Morphology weaknesses in their existing arguments and the eschewal of aspects of ideologies and their analysis which demand urgent attention. In particular, we need to decide what we still do not know about ideologies and what else is worth knowing. Part of the problem with what we do not know about ideologies is that we also 'know' or assume things for which there is no evidence, advertised aspects which lead on to false trails. One such unwarranted assumption is that concrete ideologies consist of mutually exclusive systems of ideas. Conservatism and socialism, for example, are presented as opposed to each other on most political questions; to subscribe to the tenets of the one creed would necessarily rule out endorsement of the beliefs of the other. People either support the institution of private property or challenge it; they either want greater equalization or resist it. For that assumption to hold, ideologies would indeed have to be utterly closed, and arguments would have to be tight and coherent. Yet both conservatives and socialists will be found to argue for individual liberty; both may entertain a notion of an organic community whose values and purposes must be preserved. The reasons for this will be discussed in Chapter 2, but whatever they are, the notion of mutual exclusiveness cannot account for such ostensible overlaps. Its view of ideological space is not only systemic but oversystematic, one of clear boundaries, without shadings off, without a terra incognita, employing instead dichotomous relationships among idea-systems. It has consequently great difficulty in categorizing ideas and programmes, such as market socialism or an enforced laissez-faire system, which fail to slot neatly into preconceived groupings. This is one example arising from the predilections of cognitive political science. A second, not unrelated, assumption of dubious standing is the correlation of ideology and political movement or party, so that a particular ideology, say liberalism, is defined as the set of beliefs of members and adherents of the Liberal party. The posrulation of a one-to-one relationship between ideology and institution has long bedevilled political and historical analysis, and produced considerable blindness to the multiplicity of ideologies espoused within each such grouping, as well as the large number of groups which entertain partially similar views. One of the many contributions of the French to political culture has been the ordering of political parties on a spectrum from left to right. The implicit supposition, concerning the unidimensionality of gradience between one ideology and the next—as, typically, from the extreme left, through a moderate centre to the extreme right—conceals the possibility that ideologies relate to each other on a number

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies

25

of idea-dimensions, and that their relative positions may change depending on the dimension selected: say, attitudes to central intervention, or views on national independence. It may well be that a multi-dimensional model is more appropriate to conceptualizing the interrelationships among ideologies, even if less amenable to graphic illustration or to marketing in terms of the requirements (as distinct from the actual belief-components) of political parties.33 (d) RIVAL EPISTEMOLOGIES

Apart from errors of cognition, classification, and conceptualization, the question concerning what we know and do not know relates to the epistemological status of ideology. Frequently, different issues are run together in scholarly exchange. The debate over ideology has been made to refer to what we can know about our social and political life; to what we actually do know, but in a distorted fashion; to what we think we know but actually do not; or to the impossibility of knowing for certain. For Marx and Engels, the phenomenon of ideology rested on the ontological premiss that being conditions consciousness. But, as has been astutely noted, 'when seemingly ontological conditions are challenged from the collective viewpoint of a dissident reality, they become visible as epistemological'.34 Epistemologically, the Marxist conception emerged out of a particular set of conditions under which human consciousness reflected the dehumanized and alienated existence of human beings. This reflection was itself distorted, reinterpreting negative aspects of human existence, such as exploitation, in positive language such as that of rights. Consequently, ideology came to be seen as inextricably connected to issues of truth and falsehood or distortion, to misperceptions and dissimulations with respect to an objective reality. In particular, the study of ideology pertained to determining and explaining the impediments, both deliberate and, more intriguingly, unintentional or unconscious, placed in the path of uncovering truth and reality, a task associated by many Marxists with the establishing of scientific knowledge. 33

For an example of recent recognition of the multidimensional nature of ideologies employing factor analysis see M. J- Hinich and M. C. Munger, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994). See, however, P, L, Beardsley, Redefining Rigor. Ideology and Statistics in Political Inquiry (Beverly Hills, Calif,, and London, 1980). 34 C, A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 240.

26

Ideological Morphology Karl Mannheim's contribution to the inquiry into ideology was thus decisive both in heightening awareness of its epistemological pitfalls, and in rescuing ideology from some of the dead ends of Marxist analysis. Mannheim continued the Marxist tradition of linking ideology with its social genesis, but detached it from a particular social and historical group. By proposing to view ideology as the pluralistic product of diverse social groups undergoing common formative experiences, Mannheim paved the way towards generalizing ideology as a omnipresent social phenomenon as well as a group product, to include Marxism itself. This was attained at the cost of undermining the universalist aspirations that ideologies tend to have, by relativizing them as situationally motivated. Indeed, whereas Mannheim's particular conception of ideology was a matter of error or lie, his total conception, as Wettansdwuung, required unmasking as the interest-bound expression of a collective unconscious. Mannheim abandoned the prospect of ultimately unfolding a Marxist true consciousness, while becoming equally dissatisfied with the ensuing subjectivization of social knowledge.35 Mannheim hence attempted to introduce a new epistemology by suggesting that 'all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer'. His alternative to treading the tightrope between the transcending of ideological relativism and the eschewing of ultimate values was to advance the notion of relationism, the balancing of multiple and conflicting social viewpoints which would be undertaken by the intellectuals, whose defining feature was their ability to cut loose from their social and historical roots.36 Mannheim's sociology of knowledge thus restored to social thought the critical and evaluative dimensions it assumed upon encountering ideology. However, his version of intersubjective and approximate truth could not come to grips with accepting ideology (and its progressive counterpart, Utopia) as a normal, rather than pathological or narrowly partial, manifestation of indeterminate social thought. Discounting the weaknesses both of the Mannheimian view of ideology and of Mannheim's solution to its existence, it expedited consideration of the relationship between political thinking and the external world and, within political thought, of the connections between the abnormal, the normal, and the normative. For ultimately the question that must be asked, as a preliminary to an 35 36

K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, n.d.; 1st publ. 1936). Ibid. 79, 8.5-7, 153-64.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 27 adequate and effective analysis of ideologies as actual thoughtpractices, is; what kind of political thinking is the thinking reflected in ideologizing? To answer that, some idea must be available about the boundaries between ideology and its prestigious counterpart, political philosophy,37 We will find epistemological issues closely associated with this question, but also substantive issues which involve the nature and ends of political thought. (e) PHILOSOPHY AND IDEOLOGY: THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE . . . a political philosophy is itself a social reality: it is an ideology in terms of which certain institutions and practices are justified and others attacked; it provides the phrases in which demands are raised, criticisms made, exhortations delivered, proclamations formulated, and, at times, policies determined.38

From the outset it must be emphasized that political philosophy is not in a mutually exclusive relationship with ideology. Whatever the distinctions between them are, and whatever else can be said about them, both are, as forms of political thinking, shaped from political concepts and their interrelationships. That premiss informs the approach adopted in this study and it will legitimate the assertion developed in Chapter 2 that ideologies offer crucial scholarly access to the forms and substance of political thought. Nevertheless, many political theorists who are guided by the views and methods of political philosophy, particularly of the AngloAmerican variety, have been known to open up an exaggerated 'chasm' between philosophy and ideology. A major source of confusion derives from the accepted understanding of political philosophy as concerned both with the direct production and with the evaluation of political thought. For a correct assessment of its boundaries with ideology to follow, it should therefore be contrasted with two different phenomena: on the one hand with ideologizing on the dimension of producing political thought; on the other with the analysis of ideology on the dimension of a 37

In the not-too-distant past, it seemed equally important to determine the boundaries between ideology and science. If, however, the nature of the ideological enterprise is shown to have strong non-scientific components or, alternatively, the very divide between science, philosophy, and ideology may be queried in epistemological terms (see G. W, Mortimore and J. B. Maund, 'Rationality in Belief, in S. I. Benn and G. W, Mortimore (eds.), Rationality and the Social Sciences (London, 1976), 11-33) then the boundary problem loses in significance. 38 C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (Harmondsworth, 1962), 14.

28 Ideological Morphology reflective, evaluative investigation into the nature of political thought,39 This complex distinction is rarely made, at the cost of a considerable diminution in the understanding of the nature of the different forms of political thinking. On the first dimension of analysis, those engaged in ideological discourse make, as we have seen, stipulative assertions about the truth or correctness of their views. In so doing, they seek to legitimate interpretations and courses of political action in competition with other ideologies. Political philosophers, it would appear, are committed to different enterprises. Some are concerned with the truth-falsehood attributes of arguments, but they may be so while critically applying the notion of falsifiability and testing the validity of their beliefs and those of others. Political philosophers who hold to truths often adopt perfectionist perspectives and fault ethical arguments which fail to meet the foundational value-standards they set internally. Demonstration rather than assertion is the method adopted. Continuous reflection and self-criticism are de rigueur. Naturally, those distinctions are far from clear nor, taken on their own, are they sufficient to separate political philosophy and ideology categorically. Indeed, the methodological adherence to dichotomous presentation is itself a common weakness of political philosophers and of limited utility in this case. Liberal ideologists, in particular, may appear indistinguishable from their philosophical counterparts: the former may devote much effort to 'philosophizing' and engaging in self-reflection, and the latter to 'ideologizing' and opting for ineliminable value-preferences, in the above manner. This problem will attract consideration in later chapters. Political philosophers also lay great emphasis on the rational and logical aspects of their thought. Rational thought may itself be defined as logically entailed or inferred, but we may then simply be moving in the realm of truths designated as self-evident or internally consistent, in which case the coherence theory of truth is invoked. Alternatively, in the correspondence theory of truth rationality requires sensitivity to refutable evidence and susceptibility to change once evidence for a particular argument is not forthcoming. Political philosophers may employ rationality to denote reflective, contemplative assessment of political beliefs on 39 I prefer to present the distinction between production of ideas and their analysis or evaluation as one involving two dimensions, to avoid the conventional employment of the phrases 'first order' and 'second order' analysis, which seem to convey an order of importance as well as implying that the analysis and evaluation of ideas is not itself a productive or creative process.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 29 0 the grounds of good, justifiable reasons,* or of particular styles of truth-and-falsehood reasoning41 or, borrowing from economics, to denote instrumental efficiency in attaining ends. On the first dimension of analysis, rationality may be contrasted either with irrationality or with emotion. Irrationality is often raised in relation to studies of mass ideology, which have shown how it is frequently characterized by non sequiturs and how incompatible beliefs can be held simultaneously. Fascism, for instance, is depicted as an ideology with strong irrational components. However, total irrationality is inconceivable in political thinking, as it would reduce debate to unintelligibility. More interestingly, rationality is contrasted with different degrees of emotive support displayed by ideologies for their propositions and values. We do not have to go all the way with Bell when he asserts that 'what gives ideology its force is its passion... the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion'.42 Nor do we have to condone Feuer's fantasy of ideologists surrendering their 'rational, independent response' and giving in to 'an emotional need'—a myth of a mission and the validation of a claim to rule.43 Ideologies do not dispense with reason. All major ideologies, bar the extreme right and even then not entirely, require some degree of reflectiveness and internal coherence. The findings of social psychologists support this case. There exists evidence to confirm the hypothesis that all individuals are rational, though in varying degrees, rather than rationality being a constant.44 If this is so, it is inevitable that ideologies, like other forms of human thinking, will exhibit combinations of rational and non-rational components. It is also conceivable that ideologies may vary among themselves in respect of the emotive force attached to their principles, and they no doubt differ in the degree of care or consideration devoted to their integration with scientific knowledge and culturally accepted modes of understanding and argument. Liberalism, for example, may be more open to change and to validation, and evince greater rationality in the sense of conforming to accepted methods of presenting evidence. If, however, liberal rationality leads to a single conception of rationality in the sense of advancing good reasons, it could conflict with the 40 See 'Introduction' (esp. pp. 10-11) and C, Taylor, 'Rationality' (pp. 87-105), in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982), 41 See I. Hacking, 'Language, Truth and Reason', in ibid. 48-66. 42 D. Bell, The End of Ideology (New York, 1962), 400. 43 L. S. Feuer, Ideology and the Ideologists (New York, 1975), 75, 79. 44 Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology and Politics, 96-157.

30 Ideological Morphology pluralist strain within liberalism.45 Were indeed the boundaries between ideology and philosophy to stand or fall on the basis of plausible distinctions between different types of rational justification, it would call for an intellectual enterprise that would surely strain the resources of current liberal thinking. In sum, ideologies mix rational and emotive debate freely. They will be more hasty in ending discussion if rational persuasion proves inconclusive. They will be less thorough in pursuing the detailed implications of their arguments. After all, ideologies have to deliver conceptual social maps and political decisions, and they have to do so in language accessible to the masses as well as the intellectuals, to amateur as well as professional thinkers. This free mix of reason and emotion is intolerable to many philosophers, who do not regard emotive reasons for an argument as good ones.46 Put plainly, for them a non-reflective argument is not an argument. The employment of rationality by philosophers, as well as social scientists, does however not clearly distinguish them from ideologists. For when rationality is conflated with truth, the beliefs to which it attaches adopt the distinct systemic and assertive features of ideology. Take Weberian Wertrationalitiit, according to which the pursuit of certain values may be considered rational irrespective of their instrumental cost.47 Rational arguments are frequently characterized by those non-negotiable foundational beliefs, such as 'autonomy is a good', presented in an uncritical form. This is of course a feature typical of 'open' as well as 'closed' ideological debate. Liberalism and socialism endorse deeply felt and broadly supported values. The reasons for supporting such values are never clearly set out. All belief-systems, even the most rationally inclined, contain components based on extra-rational preferences. It is quite plausible to view our attachment to democracy as a question of sentiment as much as of intellect. To be specific, the notion of democracy contains instrumentally rational preferences for certain decision-making processes (by comparing them to others in terms of outcomes, for instance), but it also contains non- or pre-rational preferences for weighting all individuals equally, based on cultural predilections and on social myths, not merely on moral 45 46

Cp. M. Billig, Ideology and Social Psychology (Oxford, 1982), 177. See the attack on emotivism by A. Madntyre, After Virtue (London, 1981), though that emotivism should not be confused with the emotive component of ideologies. 47 M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), i. 24-5.

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considerations. It may of course be the case that the belief in those pre-rational assumptions itself has rational outcomes, but that is different from arguing that they are themselves totally rational. Political philosophers may refuse to employ non-rational argument deliberately and saliently, but they can rarely avoid a degree of emotional appeal built in to the advocacy and promotion of their moral positions. Beyond that there is also another problem, to which we shall return in Chapter 3, concerning the role political concepts and ideologies play in constructing social reality, so that their rational significance may be secured through their place in such a discourse or language game. On the second dimension—the evaluation of the nature of political thought—a gap may open up between some versions of political philosophy and the analysis of ideologies with respect to rationality. For in contrasting rationality with either emotion or irrationality, we neglect some further attributes of rationality, in particular its common association by Western political philosophers with urdversalism. In contradistinction, as we have seen, ideologies are presented epistemologically as time and space bound, often located in very specific historical and social circumstances. Yet it need not be the case that ideologies fail to provide universal standards. It is quite possible to argue that they may incorporate methods of justification which are intelligible to right-thinking people across time and space/8 and thus to allow for their investigation in terms of universality or, at least, 'valid trans-cultural judgements of superiority'.49 Sociologists, for instance, have illuminated the rationality of ideologies as manifestations of variegated cultural relations.50 Ideologies are designed to be communicable and are by no means idiosyncratically subjective. Furthermore, on the first dimension all ideologies present themselves as espousing universal rules which, on due consideration, people ought to adopt (failing that, it is frequently argued that those rules should be superimposed on people for their own good, to safeguard that rationality). But some relativist-inclined views challenge the link 48

See H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, 1981), 110.1. Adams (The Logic of Political Belief (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), 98) observes that ideologies fuse facts and values and justify them, but that is not a dear demarcation between ideologies and philosophies. Whether or not the union of fact and value is 'illicit' (p. 137), it is a feature common to most kinds of political thinking. 4 * Taylor, 'Rationality', in Hollis and Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, 103. 50 N. Abercrombie, S. Hill, and B, S. Turner (eds.), Dominant Ideologies (London, 1990), esp. pp. 2, 231-2.

32 Ideological Morphology itself between rational argument and universalism. They posit instead that rationality relates to institutional norms that are 'internal to given societies'.51 Ideologies may thus be conceived as congruent with, and dependent upon, general moral standards and cultural values pertaining to a specific society, though the possibility that those standards spread to most societies cannot be ruled out. Far from separating ideologies from philosophical and rational inquiry, they are now construed as displaying the very tendencies thought to characterize all social thought. Similar views are notably advanced by some historians of ideas, who contend that beliefs currently repudiated as untrue may not have been irrational according to the criteria employed by their advocates at the time.52 Those views are also endorsed by political theorists who dismiss rationality as a natural or transcendental conception and regard it rather as a cultural capacity.53 One way or another, the space between particular ideologies and universal rational philosophies begins to shrink conspicuously. It is of considerable relevance to the aims of this study to distinguish between the question 'does a universal rationality exist?' and the question 'what is to be gained when someone assumes, knowingly or not, that the answer to the previous question is positive?' This latter question and its investigation is an instance of the domain of the analysis of ideology. Whoever invests moral or political values or beliefs with universal rationality is implying that they deserve to be scrutinized in a certain manner, and that every right-thinking person should, and would, adopt them. The claim of universalism promotes the assertions that the precepts be taken very seriously, that they are capable of transcending particular boundaries, that deviation from them is wrong and possibly dangerous, and that discourse about them can be discontinued. There is no reason why a relativist cannot accept the rationale behind universalism, if not its episterrtology, its dressing up of an appeal to critical assessment as a statement about validity. In other words, to couch deliberately one's political language in universal terms (even if one denies the validity of universal assumptions, as 51 'Introduction', in Hollis and Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, 13. Feminists, as will be noted in Ch. 13, may argue this from an association between rationality and male-dominated epistemologies, 52 Q. Skinner, 'A Reply to My Critics', in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 239-45, 53 Cp. B. Parekh, 'Social and Political Thought and the Problem of Ideology', in R. Benewick, R, N. Berki, and B, Parekh (eds,), Knowledge and Beliefs in Politics: The Problem of Ideology (London, 1973), 74.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 33 for example a hermeneutically inclined liberal might) is intentionally to send a message that one is seeking to engage the attention, evaluation, and possibly the commitment of others to one's own political values, and that one regards those values as having a wider appeal than merely to the cultures and subgroups in which they are already held in respect. However, to convey the same message while using universalist language unintentionally is to indicate a belief in the overriding validity of intuitions and to make assumptions about human similarity, even identity, with particular repercussions concerning political conduct and its conceptualization.54 Those may well relate to myths concerning the rationality of foundational values such as, to cite an example addressed in Chapter 6, the neutrality of democratic constitutions. (/) UNCONSCIOUS AND RHETORICAL COMPONENTS OF IDEOLOGY

On the first dimension identified above—the production of thoughtpractices—there also appears to be a divide between philosophy as a reflective, intentional, conscious enterprise, and ideology as a compound of genuinely conscious beliefs, of unconscious assumptions, and of dissimulatively rhetorical statements. We learn from anthropology and from psychoanalysis about the importance of accounting for unconsciously held beliefs. But this requires more than the unmasking activity of a Marx or a Mannheim. The choice is not between the mask and the face. Both tell us complementary stories; both are there to stay. Once we abandon the doctrinaire adherence to truth and falsehood as an epistemological approach to ideology, the problem becomes one of interpreting and decoding, of trying to reconstruct the face we will never entirely see. Nor need this entail the further premisses that truth statements are impossible, or that there are no truth-falsehood statements within ideologies; simply that ideologies cannot be contained within a system of truth-falsehood statements. Suffice it to say that there is a disjuncture here between the scholarly analysis of ideology and much Anglo-American political philosophy. It is an asymmetrical divide. The latter is restricted to the analysis of intentional meaning. It attributes responsibility to individuals for composing deliberate thought-formations. It assumes that the mask reflects the face. 54

This latter message may be sent intentionally as well, but it is unlikely that most of its conveyers will be reflectively conscious of these substantive implications.

34 Ideological Morphology The former regards political texts as capable of interpretation on more than one level, incorporating different methods that, in turn, apply both to the intentional and the unconscious, A conscious system of ideas implies also that the holder's beliefs are under his or her control, possibly subject to re-evaluation and modification, and directed towards the attainment of personal or social ends. Lacking that consciousness, the holder may be subject to social forces or deliberate manipulation. Once the Mannheimian hope in transcending those limitations through a sociology of knowledge is abandoned, the analyst is confronted with the task of uncovering or decoding patterns of thought unknown, or meaningless, to the holder, yet of vital explanatory power. This linkage between symbol and signified is typical of much linguistic as well as anthropological work.55 Some of those meanings are intended but badly articulated and some are implicit (they would have been intended had the thinker been made aware of their connection to what he or she meant to say). These meanings may be retrievable through additional prompting, if the author is still available, or through scholarly extrapolation, though some layers of meaning may equally be lost in the process of translation and reformulation by external and future analysts. But other thought-patterns are underloaded with meaning for their holders, and such wholly unconscious meanings are explicable only in frameworks applied by their consumers (members of the thinker's society and of later/other societies) or possibly by psychoanalysts, to take an example outside the ambit of this study, While duly and centrally concerned with the face value of political pronouncements, the study of ideologies cannot detach them from the implicit meanings they carry and the unintended patterns they form. Because concepts and ideas exist that are at best semi-articulated in people's minds, and for which they lack adequate words, the role of the analyst is to reconstruct and amplify those concepts by inferring them from other aspects of speech-acts of such individuals and the contexts of those acts. Moreover, because these patterns and the concepts which fashion them transcend the creative power of any one individual, ideologies being the products of groups, we may not be able to attribute authorship, and hence individual responsibility for thought-production, at all. Ideologies incorporate beliefs that are widely spread and 55 On some parallel problems of decoding in social anthropology see Lukes, 'Relativism in its Place', in Hoilis and Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, 27592. On linguistics, see Ch. 2 below.

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held, but they may have no identifiable makers, or many makers. These issues will preoccupy us in Chapter 3. Of course, not all unconscious meanings are means of controlling other individuals and groups, of wielding exploitative or dominating power. The unconscious messages may, for all we know, permit the increase of individual choice, or further values which socialist as well as liberal societies may regard as liberating. Respect for democratic voting procedures, for example, may be furthered through a culture in which communal games and sports, in families, schools, and youth clubs, socialize individuals to accept losing as well as winning, so that defeat in an election will be generally accepted, even by the power holders, as a signal to relinquish power. Emphasis on welfare rights need not imply paternalism, but a developmental view of human nature which encourages open-ended solutions to catering to human needs and a built-in critical revisionist perspective with respect to the law. As for rhetoric, is it often used in a similar sense to Mannheim's deliberate deceptions or half-truths, 'more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of a situation'.56 The producers of ideology are assumed to use rhetoric as an inauthentic rendering of beliefs to which they subscribe cynically or not at all. Rhetoric is the weaving of a narrative tale deliberately employed as a. persuasive device, much as Plato did in justifying his magnificent myth concerning the different metals from which people were composed. In politics, rhetoric may in addition involve simplification of complex ideological patterns for the sake of public presentation, either for electoral and mobilization purposes, or because its opponents paint a caricature of that ideology, aspects of which are even grafted on to its supporters' understandings. These pitfalls of public perceptions often percolate into scholarship itself. How can the researcher distinguish 'genuine' ideological assertions from these dissimulative exercises in rhetoric? There are four possible responses to this problem. First, we may contend that careful contextual analysis will assist in determining whether the beliefs expressed are indeed held. An acquaintance with prevailing patterns of discourse in a given society will place any particular act of 'rhetoric' in a set of comparative parameters. Second, ideologies are not only produced but consumed. If the audiences towards whom rhetoric is directed find it indistinguishable from genuine political beliefs, it wiE have the same effect on the formation of their opinions, on their 56

Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 55-64.

36 Ideological Morphology judgements and actions. Rhetoric will then enter the plural world of ideological debate as a serious contender for the legitimacy of its utterances. The mass consumption of ideologies is of equal importance when analysing fields of social meaning as is their production—to a large extent—by social and cultural elites. Hence the question of the sincerity of those beliefs, the motives and intentions behind their enunciation, the propaganda roles they are designed to play, are not directly pertinent to comprehending their effective function. Third, rhetoric (as metaphor, irony, hyperbole, and so on) may be inextricable as stylistic device from language in general and ideological language in particular.57 In that capacity it will serve to highlight the meanings attached to political concepts and to emphasize specific interpretations. Fourth, even insincere rhetoric will display many of the features of genuine beliefsystems. In order to be comprehensible it will exhibit logical and cultural patterns that may be highly informative to the analyst. It will also, like any articulated statement, be separately decodable on the unconscious level—a level underrated by students of rhetoric—and serve as a clue to more deeply held, and occasionally more complex, beliefs. (g) IDEOLOGY AND THE LIMITS ON LOGIC

We still need to assess the place of logic in political philosophy and in ideology. Logic unquestionably plays a key role both in the philosophical formation of an argument and in the evaluation of its validity and persuasive power. In the composition of ideological arguments logic may not always be the most conspicuous attribute, and it may well be that mass belief-systems display low degrees of logical constraint,58 It is also plausible that many ideologists will not be deterred by anything other than a demonstration of blatant illogic from holding to their positions. But logic must be evident in any articulate presentation of beliefs, and ideologies— because they are communicative as well as persuasive devices— will have recourse to some measure of logical consistency. The problem arises, rather, in sanctioning ideology as a valid form of political thinking that meets the qualitative standards which philosophers expect of such thinking. In particular, leading lights in 57

See P, Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1986), 257-9, See Converse, 'Nature of Belief Systems', in Apter (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, 209-10 and passim. 58

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the Anglo-American schools of philosophy wish to maximize logical consistency in addition to endorsing critically perfectionist views of their normative arguments, and they may insist on employing rules of admissible evidence.59 But the failure of most ideologies, even liberalism, that favourite child of Anglo-American philosophers, to satisfy such criteria is no reason for dismissing them as bad or inferior political thought. Logical analysis in this context can take one of two forms. It can insist on subjecting existing political debate to probing tests of reasoning, inference, and consistency. Or it can apply those to constructing models of arguments, abstracted from existing political debate, which form the basis of analysis, deduction, interpretation, and contention. In the first case, political theories as well as ideologies simply cannot bear the full weight of the meticulous logical analysis directed at them by some philosophers. It is not only that many of the most influential arguments, such as Rousseau's, would never have seen the light of day had a strict logician been set loose on them, but also that the most elaborate political theory must necessarily contain extra-logical value-preferences and conceptualizations. Logic and consistency must remain important, but not overwhelming, criteria for the assessment of arguments. Logical perfectionism can be detrimental to the optimalization of analytical insight. Furthermore, increasingly detailed chains of logic need to be curtailed arbitrarily from the logical viewpoint—that is, again by using extra-logical considerations—otherwise the ramifications of a particular argument will become unmanageable because potentially infinite. As for ideologies, it is precisely because the interpretative insights they will yield on the basis of logic alone are comparatively inadequate that we need to change our analytical strategy if we wish for something to emerge that has significance for the pursuit of scholarship and knowledge. We will need to readmit the role of the emotional as well as the intellectual attractiveness of arguments, and we will have to examine cultural as well as logical validations of political thinking. Above all, the following chapters will argue that the morphology of ideologies affords insights into the nature of political thought that neither purist logical nor perfectionist analysis can provide. In the second case it is all too easy to dismiss certain theories as leading logically to morally unacceptable positions. Utilitarianism, for example, is frequently repudiated as a theory that condones "* On the latter point see the discussion on the limits of freely accepting public reason in J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), 218-22.

38 Ideological Morphology the sacrifice of individual rights to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.60 But in so doing, philosophical critiques of utilitarianism often indulge in a caricaturizing oversimplification of utilitarian precepts in order to demolish them comprehensively, while ignoring the complex versions of utilitarianism which nineteenth-century thinkers such as Bentham and J. S, Mill have authored. The reason for this lies in a disposition among such philosophers to treat utilitarianism as a model proposition with all the features of a streamlined one-dimensional representation, rather than as a historically grounded intellectual doctrine. The weaknesses of some philosophical investigations, as far as the study of ideologies is concerned, may be illustrated through some typical devices they employ. The above example is an instance of the Aunt Sally or straw man syndrome, in which a particular model is postulated in order to destroy it through an immediate knock-out effect. An abstract and pure version of a theory is contrasted with highly sophisticated and complex alternative theories—in this case contained in contemporary rights discourses—and the contest can thus be won with a minimum of intellectual effort. Another device is the slippery-slope syndrome, in which a certain (often desirable) position is established, which through the inexorable application of logic will transform itself into another (often undesirable) position. A limitation on one's individual liberty to move around in one's car whilst driving, by enforcing the wearing of seat-belts, may metamorphize into the opening of the sluice-gates through which a paternalistic state will engulf its members. The analysis of actual political argument may well establish, as with this example, that a good pair of methodological boots permits theorists or ideologists to hold their ground at a point more or less of their choice, by superimposing value and cultural preferences that cut this particular logical chain. We have already commented on the dangers of a third device—the dichotomy-—as a categorizing implement that is, as will be shown in later chapters, most unhelpful in examining the relationships both among different ideological families and among political concepts. The analysis of ideologies will be furthered not through ignoring the strictures of logic, but through appreciating the interaction between logic, culture, and emotion or, put differently, between form and meaning. Fields of meaning are limited by logic and by available thought-practices, so that such fields are neither indeterminate nor rigidly bounded, neither flawlessly rational nor inarticulately emotional. The central importance of logical, rational, 60

R. G, Prey, Utility and Rights (Oxford, 1985), 9.

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and universal models for testing, criticizing, and exploring new ways of thinking about politics has been sufficiently demonstrated to require no further defence. But on their own, the methods those activities involve do not always provide the most useful or relevant manner of conceptualizing and understanding the ways in which political thinking is conducted, and the ways meanings are attached to, and develop within, political discourse. Rather than concentrate on the logical consequences of holding a particular viewpoint and on the extrapolation of positions from a given historically and geographically located argument, there is a scholarly call to look more precisely at the given argument as it presents itself, intentionally or otherwise. The actual manifestations of political thinking, in the temporally and spatially bounded circumstances to which they are inevitably joined, supply us with the abundant varieties of political thought from which to embark on a voyage of understanding of this facet of the human mind and its linkage with the worlds of government, power, and groupactivity. The thesis this book wishes to promote is that rigorous, pertinent, and challenging political analysis can be the outcome of identifying the basic features and units of political thinking as they appear to us. We require more subtle and sophisticated means of examining the contents and forms of political thought, and we need to refrain from streamlining the central ideas it displays, sometimes to the point of travesty. Here, too, generalizations may be entered into, and it would be foolish to pretend that the methodology advocated in the next two chapters will not favour certain perspectives over others. It is, however, based on permitting constant intercourse between political conceptualization and the real world to which it relates and from which it springs. It also sees the role of the scholar as focusing on the patterns, continuities, and discontinuities political thinking displays, and the manner in which it shapes the politically possible, and not as focusing on its critical replacement with more coherent structures, or normatively preferable positions which are often unrelated to the contexts in which political thinking actually occurs. Otherwise, the chasm between the approaches offered by dominant Anglo-American philosophical perspectives and those which apply to the politicalthought behaviour of individuals and groups is virtually unbridgeable. The more complex mainstream ideologies are comprised of ideas which, when carried to their logical extremes, could lead to serious contradictions and to substantive absurdities. But it is precisely because they are not carried to such extremes that those contradictions may be contained and that internal compatibilities

40 Ideological Morphology among different ideas are possible. Ideologies are the factual counterparts to the counterfactuals of much political philosophy. The latter—in order to elucidate, attract, or deter—may devise idealtypes founded on single concepts or principles each of which, when pursued to its logical conclusion, conjures up a world incompatible with the other. Ideologies, as actual practices of political thinking which never attain the total determinacy (and lucidity) of conterfactual thought, mix and balance the various concepts. The real question then is not, 'is there a mix?' but 'what is the range of mixes?'—what are the different possible conceptual combinations ideologies do and can produce? Political thought as it is constructed and as it does operate in societies, exhibits a far greater complexity than allowed for by unsympathetic or careless critics of ideologies, ever keen to categorize and label existing ideas in simplistic ways, and frequently proceeding to complex solutions based .on, and reacting to, the ideational abstractions they have themselves created. To be sure, analysts of ideologies impose their personal, cultural, and social categories on the reality they observe. But their intellectual efforts are not directed towards perfecting that reality through thought-exercises that distance one from it, but towards an interpretation of the intricacies of the reality as it appears to them. It is also the case that knowledge about, and understanding of, political thought is not merely a matter of tracing its development over time, if by that one means looking at laws of historical evolution or at the systematic unfolding of ideas and concepts. Rather, it involves acknowledgement of changing historical perspectives and of history itself as a category formed, often invented, to advance certain forms of political thinking. Both causal and functional explanations of political theories are important, but in this study they will be introduced to add layers of comprehension to the study of political thought as the phenomenological account and analysis of the interaction between the political concepts that make up a theory. This requires examination of the features of a political theory or ideology as the products of the interplay between what the forms we identify mean, and how those meanings themselves are formed. (h) THE UBIQUITY AND SPECIFICITY OF IDEOLOGY

Many scholars are unhappy with the extension of the concept of ideology beyond the restrictions imposed on it by Marxist and

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies 41 even Marxisant theory. They argue that such ubiquity will lose it any discriminatory force, and ideology will become synonymous with political thought in general.61 That is not necessarily the case, but we have to tread very warily indeed. It will be seen throughout this study that, on the sole basis of the morphology of political argument, as explored in Chapter 2, it is difficult to separate ideologies from political philosophies. Both use the same raw material, political concepts; both do so in patterns which lend themselves to similar analysis; both introduce, consciously or unconsciously, particular cultural and temporal standards of attributing meaning to words. Nevertheless, though significant structural similarities abound, and though these structures assist in defining substantive content, the shrinking of the analytical distance between political philosophy62 and ideology does not imply their total collapse into the same phenomenon. On the first dimension of producing political thought, high-quality political philosophies will cluster together in terms of their emphases on reason, logic, reflectiveness, and critical self-consciousness discussed above, whereas ideologies will scatter far more widely on the bases of those criteria. Indeed, some though by no means all political philosophies are articulated as 'semi-private' languages among professionals and specialists, penetrable only with great difficulty to the uninitiated, whereas ideologies have to appeal to masses, and be consumed and assimilated by them. They require therefore to be couched in a public language, or a language aspiring to be public.63 Finally, whereas ideologies need to insert certainty into language because they compete over public policy-making and public recognition—a feature elaborated on in Chapter 2—some political philosophers may prefer more tentative formulations that allow greater flexibility of interpretation. Even here a sharp divide cannot be made. The liberal family of ideologies displays considerable flexibility, self-reflexivity, and openness itself, while many political philosophers insist categorically on the correct meanings of political terms. It could also be asserted that ideologies abandon the ostensible 61

Cp. e.g. Larrain, Concept of Ideology, 100, 121; Thompson, Studies, 82-3; S. Barnes, 'Political Ideology and Political Behaviour', in R. H. Cox (ed.). Ideology, Politics, and Political Theory (Belmont, Calif., 1969), 350. 62 To reiterate, I do not include all political philosophers in this generalization, but am referring to predominant forms of philosophical discourse in the AngloAmerican world. 03 None the less, the cultural membership of a particular philosopher in social groups which contribute towards the formulation of his or her ideas cannot be overestimated.

42 Ideological Morphology detachment from the political arena which many political philosophers attempt to practise, ideologies being action-oriented and their producers being involved participants in that arena. But that is to suggest that the social world exists quite independently from our thinking about it (an approach challenged by nineteenth-century Idealism) or, even if there is an objective world, that we can have clear access to it and that our understandings of the world have no impact on our conduct in that world and on the ways in which it impinges on our conduct. Rather, to recommend a particular way of thinking about politics, on the first dimension of analysis, is also to recommend a particular way of acting in politics, to establish the rules for acting and the areas in which action is possible, to interpret the world—in particular the social world—and thus to assist in shaping it. We are inevitably caught in the circle of reflection and shaping, though this may be a dynamic, critical, and changing circularity. Hence the distinction between philosophy and ideology on that score too must be severely tempered. As Rorty has argued, though 'the world is out there,... descriptions of the world are not'. Language in its multiple forms is a human artefact through which the world is contingently comprehended and through which the human self is created.64 Although actions and thoughts exist 'out there', they do not become practices or behaviour without the injection of meaning and interpretation. When Marx penned his famous words: 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it',65 he was unwittingly paving the way to a threefold distinction. His was a contrast between what he saw as traditional European philosophy, in particular its speculative German manifestations, and the materialist dynamic of a dialectic acting on the world. More recently, this thesis could also have been seen as epitomizing the difference not between two conceptions of philosophy, but between philosophy and ideology. Finally, on the analysis proffered above, the Marxist distinction between interpreting and changing collapses yet again, but now because all (social and political) philosophy, as well as ideology, can change the social world by changing prevailing conceptualizations of such a world, seen as partly dependent on those very conceptualizations for its own shape and structure. 64

R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), 5-7. See also C. Taylor, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man', in C. Taylor (ed.), Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ii (Cambridge, 1985), 34: "The language is constitutive of the [social] reality/ *5 'Theses on Feuerbach', in K. Marx, Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford, 1977), 158.

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies

43

From here to a related observation, which refers to the use of a phrase that will repeatedly recur in these pages; thought-behaviour. The objection to the traditional philosophical distinction between thought and action can be queried on two levels: not only that thinking promotes certain kinds of action and, possibly, change, but that thinking is itself a kind of activity. But employing the term 'thought-behaviour' may appear to raise a difficulty. As Wittgenstein wrote; It is a travesty of the truth to say "Thinking is an activity of our mind, as writing is an activity of the hand"'. However, Wittgenstein was engaged in breaking down the distinction between thought and language, not in denying that thought is a process.66 Elsewhere he wrote 'Is thinking a kind of speaking? One would like to say it is what distinguishes speech with thought from talking without thinking... A process, which may accompany something else, or can go on by itself.'67 Other philosophers are content to go along with the proposition that 'a concept is a capacity for certain exercises of the mind' and that 'to say that a man has a certain concept is to say that he can perform, because he sometimes does perform, mental exercises of a specifiable sort'.68 By thought-behaviour I do not wish to suggest that thought is distinct from language/9 merely that although our analysis of (political) thinking obviously depends on its expression in speech or writing, it is also the case that much political thought is uncommunicated by its thinkers and needs to be inferred from their inadequate speech and writing acts, including the unconscious messages in those acts. On one level, 'ideologies include beliefs in people's heads, and these may be discovered by conventional methods of empirical investigation'.70 On another, the linguistic expression of ideologies may bear more meaning that the thinker is aware of, and the analyst must attempt to establish that additional meaning. The analysis of ideologies proffered here starts out from the assumption that thinking is a 'social fact', a process in which human beings engage. All instances of what could be termed silent speech may relate to thought-behaviour at a deeper level than its external linguistic expression, though thoughtbehaviour is intermeshed with language behaviour. Hence, as has 46 67

L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Oxford, 1974), 106, 161. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1958), para.

330.

68 69

P. Geach, Mental Acts (London, 1957), 78, 15. See Ch. 2. 70 S. Hill, 'Britain: The Dominant Ideology Thesis After a Decade', in Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner (eds.), Dominant Ideologies, 6.

44 Ideological Morphology already been argued, speech-acts construed as intentional acts constitute inadequate evidence of ideological thinking, and they require in addition an appreciation and decoding of the cultural, spatial, and psychological dimensions of meaning in which they occur. Much of that will never be retrievable. To sum up this section, what might have appeared as a paradox isn't really one. The ostensible paradox is that students of ideology can analyse philosophies as they would analyse ideologies, but philosophers of the kind discussed here cannot analyse ideologies as they would philosophies. What philosophers produce on the first dimension is supposed to differentiate them from what ideologists produce on that dimension, but that product would then immediately be appropriated as a target of analysis by students of ideology, operating according to the same guidelines they should apply to ideologies. Philosophers in their normative, substantive theory-producing mode, may clearly be caught in the analytical net proffered in this book. Both political philosophers and ideologists produce similar materials—arrangements of political concepts—and the differences between them, on the basis of the perspectives proposed here, are insufficient to warrant the analysis of their political thinking as belonging to entirely discrete categories. If we insist on the mutual exclusion of political philosophy and ideology, we shall merely bring about an artificial and deficient tidiness which will deviate from de facto practice, diminish the status of some ideologies by denying their philosophical attributes, and likewise impoverish some political philosophies by disallowing their ideological features. Above all, we will have weakened considerably the power of scholarly analysis at our disposal. The difference we are alerted to must exist then on the second dimension of analysis. It is that between political philosophers as critical evaluators and students of ideologies employing their own preferred methods of inquiry. Put differently, the study of ideologies is the study of the more general type of political thought directly produced by human beings; in addition, the political thinking that some of those individuals produce lends itself to analysis in further ways, as answers to the kind of questions put by political philosophers. The difference lies entirely in the readings of political thought as subject-matter offered by these two scholarly perspectives. The problem for the student of ideologies is that readings undertaken by Anglo-American philosophers rarely include, as they certainly should do, their own formulations of political thought. To the question, 'are we all ideologists?' the answer

Staking Out: Analysing Ideologies

45

is that we all have occasion to use political language in a selective manner, we all piece our political concepts together in particular patterns, we all interpret them in logically indeterminate but culturally significant ways, and these thoughts have bearing on the political activities of ourselves and of others.71 Nor is it merely the case that philosophers sometimes don the ideologist's hat because on another dimension they are also committed members of a political community. Rather, even when engaged in professional philosophical thinking political philosophers also contribute to the construction of ideologies. That is not to suggest that every single political idea and utterance is ideological, but that every major political thought or speech act will include ideological components, and that very many such acts undertaken by each and every individual display the attributes of ideologies. Those who object to caEing political philosophers ideologists may query, say, which passages of Rawls's are ideological and which philosophical. That is the wrong question to ask. Rawls is both a philosopher and an ideologist because his texts can be subjected to totally diverse analyses and can carry various meanings for different types of reading (and for different disciplines). Rawls may also be intelligible to a grammarian and to a cultural anthropologist. Texts are multi-layered; the point is that even within the range of political thinking, they are capable of bearing more than one significant set of messages. Political philosophers use language ideologically, though their intentions and meanings may concurrently be understood as engaging in another type of thinking about politics—e.g. devising 'better' kinds of argument or 'critically appraising' or identifying 'intuitively correct' solutions. The above analysis has not addressed all pertinent questions. Returning again to the epistemological issue, we need now to reassess where we stand vis-a-vis ideologies. If certain social and political knowledge is impossible, it follows that we must ask two questions: what uncertain knowledge may be gained through ideology; and what can our uncertain knowledge of ideology be? Uncertainty is of course a question of degree. Ideologies or, more precisely, practising ideologists (and we are all such in one capacity) often feel unable to live with uncertainty and insist on establishing an illusory certainty, necessary to political decision-making. We shall discuss its nature in detail in Chapter 2. But the reflective scholar of ideologies may be able to—indeed, may have to—live 71 For another kind of positive response to this question see Walsby, Domain of Ideologies, 145,

46 Ideological Morphology with a degree of uncertainty. Thus the problem is twofold. First, how can the uncertain knowledge we have as practising thinkers about politics, as ideologists, be assessed? Do we dismiss it because we cannot be satisfied about its truth-value; will this orthodox view of ideology have to give way to a starkly relativist approach to political thought, as some postmodernists suppose; or can new strategies be introduced for evaluating our perceptions and conceptions on the basis of their moral, emotional, or intellectual persuasiveness, or their ability to interpret facts meaningfully? Second, how can the value of the analysis of ideologies, such as the one advanced in this book, be assessed? Here again the manifold attractiveness of any proposal, as well as its attempt to bring new perspectives to bear, is significant. Part of the discussion pertinent to this issue will await the appraisal of hermeneutic approaches in Chapter 3.

2

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies

Whether we talk about freedom or equality, security or adventure, personal worth or personal development, the concepts must be placed in concrete circumstances, in a situation that we can envision, so that the content we want to give them can be understood and can be compared with other interpretations of the same general expressions,1 AVING examined some of the conflicting approaches to ideoHlogy, discussed some of its characterizations and ascribed fea-

tures, assessed some uses to which the notion of ideology has been put, touched on questions of both epistemology and function, and explored several boundary problems of ideology and philosophy, we are in a better position to realize how relatively untouched is the further issue pertaining to what ideologies are, in terms of their forms and the meanings they contain. It has been a feature of the 'black box' approach to suggest what objects of research can do, even to predict their behaviour accurately, while remaining agnostic as to what they are, what the inside of the box looks like. That reticence or quiescence often reflects apprehension in the face of the great complexity of both the structure and the mechanisms assumed to prevail inside the black box. This chapter is an endeavour to open the black box and assess its contents. We saw in the previous chapter that there are manifold ways of answering the question, what is an ideology? One important consequence of this pluralistic awareness has been a trend in the literature on ideology to replace traditional epistemology, preoccupied with the establishing of certainty and objectivity, with interpretative or hermeneutic approaches. However, much of that literature is unable to overcome its own doubts about meaning and understanding in order to concentrate on a more precise range of questions: 1 E. Wigferss, quoted in T, Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy (Oxford, 1990), 44.

48 Ideological Morphology not only what the implications of assigning meaning are for the notion of ideology but, specifically, whether there are not important areas of the potential meaning and understanding of ideologies whose very existence has yet to be acknowledged? It is the contention of this book that, while some kinds of answers have been adequately supplied, others have been virtually ignored. What ideologies are is sometimes represented as tantamount to what they do: thus they are integrative mechanisms, systems of domination, justificatory blueprints for political action, schemes of history, or reflections of social relationships and environments. I began to argue in the previous chapter that the analysis of ideology must instead be incorporated into the study of political theory, and this case will now be pressed further. For any serious political theorist there is a more fundamental level on which ideologies exist: as ideational formations consisting of political concepts. In other words, the concept of ideology will benefit from presenting concrete ideologies as themselves formed out of unmistakably distinctive configurations of political concepts. In that sense an ideology is itself a concept with a recognizable form, a particular way of organizing clusters of other political concepts, though this does not preclude our conceptualizing ideology also with respect to the other roles it performs, as seen above. The answer to the question 'what is an ideology?' must, from the morphological perspective, be sought in identifying, describing, and analysing the building blocks that constitute it and the relationships among them. This, curiously, has not been accomplished to date and it is what this study sets out to do: the shaping of an approach that focuses on the common unit shared by political philosophy and ideology—the political idea in its sophisticated form as political concept—and that seeks to portray ideologies as a distinguishable and unique genre of employing and combining political concepts. (a) POLITICAL WORDS AND POLITICAL CONCEPTS

By introducing the political concept as a central unit of investigation, we enter the dual realms of language and of the conceptual analysis of ideas. Words are the outward forms of concepts. But concepts can constitute theories, and theory is to concepts what language is to words: an organizer, a regulator, a set of rules and uniformities, a grammar, a system. Thus, although we will not focus on language, nor confuse the structure of language wiih the

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 49 structure of political concepts, some findings of linguistics are pertinent to our concerns. Above all, the revolution in linguistics effected by Saussure has some bearing on the type of analysis that will be applied here to ideological phenomena. It should not be forgotten that political concepts are expressed, or signified, in the form of words—indeed that words operate as significant rallying calls in politics—and the findings of scholars of linguistics may hence be relevant to understanding ideologies as forms of human expression, not only as complex and substantive analytical ideas. It was Saussure who implanted the profound theoretical insight that words were not separate from thought, nor thought from words but, rather, that a linguistic sign connected sounds and concepts, signifier and signified; and that consequently concepts did not exist independently of words. The study of signs, semiology, was designed to uncover the meanings that those signs conveyed. Meaning and form interlinked: grammatical phenomena were languagerelative, and the linguistic meaning of a word depended on its network of relationships with other words. These meanings and relationships were formed out of a large range of possibilities a language put at the disposal of its users. Saussure contributed a number of further important insights to linguistics which pertain to the enterprise of this study. First, his emphasis on language as an interconnected system led him to regard it primarily as a synchronic system, whose components derive meaning not from an essential core but from their contingent relationships at a particular point in time. Second, these relationships are of two kinds. The one is negative (associative) in that a unit of language is defined in contrast to other units. The other suggests that the signs of a language are linked in syntagmatic relations, namely, specific sequences in which they combine. We find that syntagmatic relations 'define combinatory possibilities', that they are composed of interdependent units and constitute 'a selection from a large range of associatively organised possibilities made available by the language'.2 These combinatorial possibilities influence the meanings of words. Third, the grammar of a language—its synchronic and systematic structural features-—need not be knowingly understood and acted on in toto but may exist at an unconscious level for the individual user of language. Consequently, one of the roles of the grammarian and linguist is to 2

F, de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London, 1983), 122-3, 126; J. Culler, Saussure (London, 1976), 48; R. Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein (London, 1988), 23,

50 Ideological Morphology uncover regularities that account for human linguistic conduct, to illuminate the rules that guide words and, indirectly, thought. As we shall see, all these propositions may inspire the scholarly analysis of ideology. The interdependence of word and meaning, and of word and word, conjure up a holistic system. But Saussure was not interested in the meaning of thought as distinct from its manifestations in language, specifically in signs. There was hence a third avenue that he, as a linguist, had no call to explore: the parallel interdependence of concept and concept, of complex units of meaning that, too, display characteristic forms. It was the anthropologist Levi-Strauss who, while embracing many of the insights of linguistics, grafted them on to a study of social behaviour.3 In his seminal article 'Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology', while acknowledging a profound debt to the linguistic notions of unconscious infrastructure, interrelationships, and system, Levi-Strauss shifted his perspective away from examining systems of signification to systems of meaning, specifically of attitudes and practices that carried meanings of their own.4 Ideologies, too, are systems of meaning, and they, too, are social phenomena and the product of human conduct, namely, thoughtbehaviour with respect to political issues, but their analysis must diverge in part from that adopted by anthropologists. Unlike anthropologists, students of ideologies, as do all students of political thought, focus on the complex of thought-speech-text, or thoughttext, as their subject-matter, rather than emulating the anthropological stress on objects, institutions, or customs as the containers of thought or myth. As a rule, the meaning of political thought is not extracted directly from such reified evidence but from immediate oral or written expression. In particular, its units of meaning are the political concepts which comprise it. For linguists, if the terms of political discourse are the signifiers, the political concepts to which they relate are the signified. There exists an immediate relationship between political term (word) and political concept (thought).5 However, to borrow further from linguistic terminology, ideologies treat political concepts not merely as signified but 3 4

See T. Dant, Knowledge, Ideology and Discourse (London, 1991), 101-2. C. L6vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Harmondsworth, 1977), i. 37-40. I. Shapiro, in Political Criticism (Berkeley, Calif,, 1990), notes the political relevance of the fact that the American philosopher Quine was arriving at similar systemic conclusions, if from a very different perspective. 5 Cp. W, Carisnaes, The Concept of Ideology and Political Analysis (Westport, Conn., 1981), 6.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies

51

as referents. Far from engaging in abstract thought-exercises, they refer also to observable facts and to concrete social practices in the external world. On that dimension their study may welcome the methods of anthropologists. As shall be noted below, this differentiates them from political philosophies, which usually claim and display immunity from the impact of such practices, though we shall also see that these practices alone cannot be the main focus of the scholarly attention applied to ideologies. Indeed, on a more complex level, ideologies also constitute the thought-behaviour that interpellates and identifies such practices. That thought-behaviour may itself be distinguished as a type of human conduct to be explored and analysed. For political concepts are located within a pattern of ideas concerning the understanding and the shaping—through changing or conserving-—of the political world. In that sense they have a dual existence, in part internal and in part external to the realm of language. Thus the concept of power relates both to actions in which, say, coercion actually takes place and to the thought-events that identify particular actions as coercive and that contribute to the formation of ordinary language usage, creating what Taylor has called 'common terms of reference'.6 Moreover, political concepts are units of structure as well as units of meaning, be the two ever so connected. That structure must not be fused or confused with the structure of language itself, but draws crucially on patterns of culture and history. It is therefore important that we address the morphology of political concepts, without which an exploration of ideology remains fragmentary. In addition, another important difference between linguistic and political-conceptual analysis must be borne in mind. The Saussurian emphasis on synchronic states was accompanied by a closing of the language system to external influences and by a relative de-emphasis on diachrony. The meaning of words according to Saussure hinges entirely on their relation to each other at a given point in time; for him, language is not accountable to reality.7 But political concepts exist in the 'real world' of time and space and their meanings derive in part, though not completely, from that world. More precisely, they derive from an interplay between thought and the facts of the external world.8 Furthermore, although a language is socially formed, some languages may be employed, * C. Taylor, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man', in C, Taylor (ed.), Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ii. (Cambridge, 1985), 36. 7 R. Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein (London, 1988), 76. * See Taylor, Interpretation', 38,

52 Ideological Morphology if not privately, at least semi-privately when intended for limited consumption, as would a technical or professional language. In contrast, as noted in Chapter 1, political thinking—-particularly in the shape of ideologies—is a cultural construct designed for public consumption. The ability of political concepts to account for, or explain, the changing world to which they relate becomes a further test of their viability. As for the diachronk perspective, political concepts are notable for their strong historical grounding (partly due to the impact of the history of political thought, as an academic tradition, on the meanings of political concepts). Ideologies, too, appear as lived' traditions of political thought, so that historical continuity plays an important role in organizing the political thinking of the members of a society, as well as in selecting the political words they employ. So whereas, as we shall see, important synchronic aspects of the morphology of political concepts are retained, the interpretation of their meaning must include diachronic perspectives as well. Effectively, the continuity of an ideological tradition—which is assumed, rightly or wrongly, by the continuity of the words that denote those concepts—can only be put to the test by examining multiple synchronic states, over time and space. If these are sufficiently close, both temporally and culturally, plausible conclusions are possible. These questions require further consideration; at this stage we recognize the importance of diachrony but equally appreciate that it depends on a9 developed synchronic notion of the nature of political concepts. Prior to that, however, some other aspects of the meaning of political concepts need clarification. Political concepts are complex ideas that inject order and meaning into observed, or anticipated sets of political phenomena and hold together an assortment of related notions. The present discussion is anchored to assumptions about their features as found in their actual usage. First, they are neither arbitrary, nor simply stipulative, models that the theorist invites us to adopt, but constructs that reflect social and historical usage. It is of course entirely possible that two people using the term liberty' may relate to two different concepts; but it is also the case that the established cultural, historical, and social contexts in which the word appears are assumed to impose on most of its users common, or overlapping, fields which they cannot easily shrug off. Words and their meanings are invariably the product of 9

For a discussion of the dual importance of these perspectives see R. Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), esp. 73-91.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 53 the social dimensions of language. But if the political concepts signified by those words are related in circular fashion to a sociohistorical context, because they not only emanate from that context but also seek to interpret and shape it, does this imply a total relativism in which meaning is inextricably embedded in contexts? By no means, for it may well be that some political arrangements and aspirations are so widespread that words will share connotations across cultures and centuries; equally, however, identical words10 may mask unbridgeable conceptual and behavioural divides. It is therefore necessary to begin by analysing those contexts in order to understand the senses in which the concept of liberty is being used, and whether we are faced with something other than an infinite range of the meanings of liberty. But relativism is not only an indication of the multiplicity and contextuality of viewpoints; it is employed as an indication that such viewpoints cannot be ranked as superior or inferior, in the absence of a criterion for such ranking. Certainly, a second assumption adopted here is that there are no correct ways of defining concepts, just as it is assumed here that words are not endowed with intrinsic meanings. There is thus no correct meaning of the word 'liberty', just as there is no perfect state of liberty to which one may aspire, and which dooms its existing impoverished replications to live in the permanent shadow of failure. To the contrary, following Wittgenstein, the meaning of words can only be determined by observing their grammar and their use in a language, and their conventional employment in a social context; "The concept of language is contained in the concept of communication/11 To invent a new usage, or to employ an aberrant one, is subject only to one test: is it acceptable, or is it in the process of becoming acceptable, to significant numbers of its users? Unlike other philosophical projects, the quest for a good usage of a concept, whatever this may be—a clearer definition, a truer 'correspondence' to reality, or a more ethical connotation—is not the primary purpose of this approach. That is not to suggest that there cannot be 'bad' usages (incoherent, unattractive, or abhorrent) but that such critical evaluation is analytically distinct from the focus of this study.12 Equally, concepts do not have fixed and determinate cores though, as will be argued below, concrete instances of concepts may display a core as a structural rather than substantial 10 11

The question of relativism will be addressed later in this chapter. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edit. (Oxford, 1958), para. 43; Philosophical Grammar (Oxford, 1974), 184, 189-91, 193. 12 See also s. (/) below.

54 Ideological Morphology feature. For all these reasons, the study of political concepts does not fall into the Saussurian trap that Eagleton has identified, of looking merely at the relationship between word and concept, signifier and signified, rather than at the triple relationship between word, concept, and referent,13 The latter, and the conceptreferent nexus, is an overt element in our analysis, pertaining to the pluralistic world of human thought-behaviour containing political explanations, rationalizations, prescriptions, and evaluations, and born out of particular temporal and spatial circumstances, At this stage it may be helpful to present the course which the argument of this chapter will take. The building blocks of political thought are the political concepts—indicated by terms such as liberty, justice, power, and rights—that constitute its main foci. Ideologies, it is submitted, are the complex constructs through which specific meanings, out of a potentially unlimited and essentially contestable universe of meanings, are imparted to the wide range of political concepts they inevitably employ. Political concepts acquire meaning not only through historically transferred traditions of discourse, and not only through the pluralist disparaties of culture, but also through their particular location within a constellation of other political concepts. That meaning is crucially imparted through the morphological attributes of ideologies for, whatever else they are, ideologies are particular patterned clusters and configurations of political concepts. An ideology is hence the macroscopic structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts. But this is no simple structuralist assertion. For the history of an ideological tradition, the conventions through which it is understood and perceived, and its geographical variations, play central roles in attributing meaning to the ideology in question, superimposing diachronic on synchronic analysis. The specific formations of political thinking embedded within an ideology are themselves formed by permissible and legitimated meanings at the disposal of a particular society. An ideology is thus located at the meeting point between meaning and form: it constitutes a significant sampling from the rich, but unmanageable and partly incompatible, variety of human thinking on politics, contained within and presented through a communicable and action-inspiring pattern. 13 T. Eagleton, Ideology (London, 1991), 213. Culler (Saussure, 33) suggests that philosophers might wish to extend Saussure's signification to contain both meaning and reference.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies

55

(b) REASSESSING ESSENTIAL CONTESTABILITY

Any examination of political concepts must be indebted to Gallic's seminal notion of essentially contested concepts. However, while building on GalMe's treatment, the following discussion will attempt to show some of its limitations as well as introduce the paramount but unacknowledged preliminary field of inquiry—morphological analysis—that must precede GalHe's inquiry. The feature of ideological morphology, I suggest, identifies a cause in relation to which essential contestability is but an effect. Gallic has noted a wide range of concepts, including political ones, over whose uses insoluble disputes exist. On GalHe's own assessment the following are the most important characteristics of essentially contested concepts. They have to be (1) appraisive, signifying or accrediting 'some kind of valued achievement'; (2) internally complex; (3) containing various rival descriptions of their component parts; and (4) open to modification in the light of changing circumstances. To those Gallic adds a second grouping of attributes which, as we shall later see, are not necessary to the definition of essential contestability: (5) mutual recognition by the parties concerned that their concepts are in fact contested by others, and consequent aggressive and defensive uses of the concept; (6) derivation from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged by all the contestant users; and (7) the optimum sustaining or developing, through competition, of the original achievement of the exemplar.14 If Gallic were merely saying that, because poHtical concepts have normative elements within them, and because there are no universally agreed schemes of values, it is impossible to agree on the worth of a political concept—on whether, say, it is good or bad to pursue equality—essential contestability would boil down to a matter of moral choices and human tastes. It is, however, more than that, even on Gallie's understanding, though he does not supply us with sufficient grounds for appreciating why his notion is a richer one. To begin with, Gallic adopts a confusing characterization of an essentially contested concept as appraisive, signifying a valued achievement. True, when we identify a political concept such as liberty, we may wish to attach value to it. We may, for example, include the notion of self-determination within our concept of liberty, and regard the former as a good, as valuable. But two major 14

W. B, Gallic, 'Essentially Contested Concepts', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955-6), 167-98 at pp. 169, 171-2, 180.

56 Ideological Morphology qualifications need stating. First, not all essentially contested concepts signify valued achievements; they may equally signify disapproved and denigrated phenomena, the ambiguity attached to the concept of power being a suitable example. 'Appraisive' cannot solely mean Valued' nor, as Connolly suggests, 'moral';15 it must include, as Gallic does not, the notions 'unvalued' and 'devalued'. Second, political concepts are not merely appraisive, and this applies to essentially contested concepts as well. To suggest that self-determination is a value is not to deny that it also has descriptive aspects, that it refers to 'brute facts', that something must happen in or with a person for that person to be designated as self-determining. Concepts may have empirically describable and observable components that may in addition be conceived of as desirable and thus become values. In similar fashion, the speed of a car is a fact that can be described, but its speed may also be a value if 'time is of the essence'. Those components of concepts must be distinguished from words and concepts that are always positively appraisive—-beautiful, wise, just. For many people liberty is always positively appraisive, but for others it may signify an ascertainable human condition irrespective of any desirability or undesirability that may additionally accrue to it. It is only in the first instance that essential contestability will pertain to the simple issue of positive evaluative appraisal; in the second instance, as I shall presently argue, it will pertain to a different question: to which concatenations of human behaviour and of social arrangements are we entitled to assign the term 'liberty'? From here to the third and most important point. Gallic collapses two meanings of 'appraisive' into one and thus underplays the crucial structural nature of essentially contested concepts. To be fair, he clearly identifies two central structural features of such a concept. Giving democracy as an example, Gallic maintains that it must be 'internally complex in such a way that any democratic achievement... admits of a variety of descriptions in which its different aspects are graded in different orders of importance'.16 But there is no follow-up to this intriguing observation about the structural nature of concepts. Instead, tucked into Gallie's notion of 'appraisive' but unnoticed by him is a second meaning, which relates not to the values and norms embedded in a concept, but to a different type of evaluation. That evaluation pertains to a judgement concerning the following questions. What is the intension of 15 16

W. E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass., 1974), 27-8. Gallic, 'Essentially Contested Concepts', 184.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 57 a concept? The inclusion of which features within a concept facilitates a particular extension?17 And, by default, which features are excluded from a particular interpretation of a concept's intension? What is the range of components from which the concept is, or can be, fashioned? What are the methods used to accord priority to certain parts of the concept over others? Now this will prompt a very different sort of contest, and a concept can thus properly be designated as essentially contestable not just when the norms and values it contains are contestable, but crucially, when all or any of its components are contestable, The issue in this case is not one of the adequate description of the components of a concept, because, as Connolly has rightly observed, description is itself the singling out of certain features 'from one or more possible points of view',18 The issue is hence either that of employing an analytical judgement, or of expressing a cultural preference, concerning what is proper, relevant, edifying, or intellectually justifiable to include within the compass of a concept.19 In that important sense, political concepts create, through their 'topography', the reality to which we relate and attribute significance. Those judgements or preferences, moreover, are in turn applied to two essentially contestable areas: (1) the range of the components to be included; (2) the potential but inescapable indeterminacy of many of the components, once included, that allows for more than one characterization. An example of conceptual usage that illustrates both areas would be (1) a decision to designate equality of opportunity as a distinguishing component of the concept of equality, and (2) a further and inevitable choice, within the multiple and indeterminate meanings of equality of opportunity, between identifying it as minimal formal and legal equality, or (more maximizing) social and economic equality. It is hence impossible to discuss the notion of appraisal without entertaining a conception of a concept, in actual practice, as the 17 For a discussion of intension, see G. Sartori (ed.). Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1984), esp. Sartori, 'Guidelines for Concept Analysis', 15-85. Intension refers to the features and properties included in a concept. Extension pertains to the referents, in the external (including social) world, to which a concept applies. 18 Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, 22-3. As Taylor has observed, this challenge to the distinction between 'descriptive' and 'evaluative' is a challenge to traditional empiricism ('Interpretation', 43-4). 19 As Feinberg has rightly pointed out in another context, a decision on a matter such as whether foetuses can be included in the category of rights-bearers 'is a conceptual, not a moral, question' (J. Feinberg, Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, 1980), 180).

58 Ideological Morphology product of various Judgements concerning how to assemble and describe its components, as well as incorporating any subsequent evaluation of them. The outcome of these choices and evaluations will itself, however, be empirically ascertainable and describable. By 'empirically ascertainable' I do not mean to imply that those units necessarily have objective or real referents, nor am I referring to their capacity to reflect the external world adequately. Rather, it may be demonstrated that they exist within the intension of the concept in question, as social, historical, and cultural constructs, in the thought-patterns expressed through actual linguistic usage. The identification and description of observable facts, the dual assessment of those extensions in terms of their inclusion in the intension of the concept and of their value, and the empirical fact that such assessments have taken and are taking place (for which spoken or written evidence is necessary) are all parts of the conceptual analysis in which we must engage. For instance, the concept of rights will refer to certain arrangements and practices in rights-observing societies. It will also contain contestable value-judgements about protecting fundamental human attributes: are they worth defending, is the right to life always desirable, are rights more compelling than the interests that may override them? And it also may comprise, to employ Hohfeld's categories, liberties, claims, powers, or immunities, or any combination of the above.20 It may apply to all individuals, or to specific kinds of individuals (e.g. those who are rational, or adult, or law-abiding), or to groups. It may involve legal rights or moral and human rights. It may designate rights as absolute, prima facie, or culture-relative.21 The formation of these intensions is to a considerable extent, as I shaE later argue, a matter of temporal and spatial conventions; hence our analytical judgements concerning intension may be vitally affected by our cultural preferences. There is no logical necessity for including or excluding any of the above particular components, as long as some components are included in the concept, which would otherwise be vacuous. Because the structure of the concept is multi-faceted, any agreed position on its range will be logically—though not culturally— arbitrary. Finally, the fact that evaluations are made and intensions outlined in particular ways is itself a prime focus of the student of political thought and political concepts. Let us repeat: there are few 20

See W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New Haven, 1919). For a discussion of these issues, see M. Freeden, Rights (Milton Keynes, 1991), 34-42. 21

Assembling'.' From Concepts to Ideologies 59 clear facts about description, let alone evaluation; rather, it is a fact that concepts include (indeterminate) components presented as descriptions. That fact too is empirically verifiable and its ramifications are a proper subject of study.22 But surely, one might argue, if only the concept of rights were to be extended sufficiently, it could encompass all eventualities, so that at least the intension of its components would not be essentially contestable? This is not so. Although some of the above sets may overlap, not all coexist with each other completely. Gallic too subscribes to the view that variety of description is part of essential contestability. But he is concerned with order of importance alone. There is more to it than that. Sometimes indeed there may be direct competition over the status of rights-bearer, as—from some ethical viewpoints—in the case of abortion: mother versus foetus. In other cases it is not a question of the order of importance, but of logical compatibility: a right cannot be both absolute and culture-relative, nor can all rights be absolute. In other cases again the contestability may be culturally rather than logically essential in the human worlds as we know them. For example, for a complete set of positive legal rights to be identical to that of moral human rights, we would have to postulate a counterfactual world where the law is perfect, where everyone's understanding of fundamental human needs is in total accord, where there is an agreed morality that generates no new ethical thinking. This logically conceivable philosopher's paradise falls short of the possibilities incumbent in socially embedded practices. Inevitably, certain legal rights will be preferred to others. But then, the notion of essential contestability is not an observation about the real or external worlds, but about the epistemological, psychological, and logical restrictions in making sense of those worlds. Contestability, in sum, will apply to both levels: the obvious contestability of value-judgements will coexist with the equally important contestability of the range of components deemed to contain the empirically ascertainable units of the concept. Nor is it necessary, for a concept to be essentially contestable, that all its 22

As will be noted in Ch. 3, this empiricism must be qualified by an awareness of the fallible interpretative role of the researcher. One cannot exclude the possibility of the researcher misdescribing the intension of the concept by misinterpreting the ordinary-language statements of the analysed population; e.g. by misconstruing a word to signify a particular concept, or component of a concept. This, of course, need not be the case. Such awareness cannot do away with the notion of empirical demonstrability entirely. At the very least, on the simple level of the presence of words in a statement, the description of intensions is possible.

60 Ideological Morphology components be incompatible, or capable of being ranked in order of importance, or culturally unrealizable. Essential eorttestability would obtain, even if its units displayed internal ambiguity or multiplicity solely in one area. A few words on Gallie's second grouping of attributes. First, the feature of mutual recognition is, of course, a prerequisite for the philosophical discussion of an essentially contested concept; in ideological practice we shall see that it is not required and frequently a hindrance to ideological expression. Moreover, Gallie's deliberate use of 'contested' rather than 'contestable' suggests actual conflicts on a level of ideational awareness. Neither of these conditions is logically entailed. Concepts can be essentially contestable even when they are not in fact contested in a given usage, or when not all aspects of the concept are contested. And in ideological practice, as we have seen, it is quite possible for a concept to be contested with no awareness, or limited awareness, on the part of the contesters. For instance, the consensus thought to operate in the 1950s and 1960s concerning the ends of the welfare state (known in Britain as Butskellism) masked great differences among the political parties claiming to support those ends. Second, there is no need for an original exemplar to have existed.23 The postulation of such an exemplar is in effect inimical to the very notion of essential contestability, as it presumes an agreed or correct position from which deviations have occurred.24 Third, it certainly does not follow that the existence of an essentially contestable concept needs to be coupled with its optimal development. Rather, it is quite conceivable that such a concept may be impoverished during competition over its interpretation, that some aspects of its meaning may be lost or abandoned, or that the level of debate may be of low quality. (c) THE MORPHOLOGY OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS

Connolly has usefully proposed the term 'cluster concept' for an internally complex political concept, with open connections to other political concepts. The relationship between these two aspects requires, however, further elaboration,25 The first set of questions 23 24

Gallic, 'Essentially Contested Concepts', 180. See e.g. 'Introduction', T, Ball, J, Farr, and R. L. Hanson (eds.). Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), 4; Q. Skinner 'A Reply to My Critics', in J. Tully (ed.)( Meaning and Context; Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 288. 25 Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, 14.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 61 that needs addressing is: what is the common denominator of a cluster concept? What entitles us to use the same word for its manifestations? Specifically, does it have a common core shared by all its instances? If indeed the concept of liberty has a central nucleus, how can we account for the very different uses it is accorded at different times and places, or by different users within the same cultural context? And if liberty is a capsule that incorporates a variety of properties, some overlapping with others but some possibly quite distinct, are we talking about the same concept or about the same polysemic word that may disguise the existence of different concepts? The guidelines adopted to tackle this issue derive from the postulate that words have indeterminate, rather than intrinsic meanings; that they are social constructs whose meaning is determined by their usage. Meaning has consequently to be ascertained empirically, with all the methodological pitfalls this may entail, and on that basis it will be contended that there exist a number of main political concepts. By the main political concepts I refer to the recurrence, in general as well as academic discourse, of terms (in no particular order of preference) such as liberty, rights, equality, justice, power, democracy. To that extent, the tradition of usage acts as a rough indicator of the presence or absence of a political concept, though not of its agreed content. Nor does this rule out the emergence of new political concepts as social and cultural conditions change, or as knowledge diversifies.26 The merit of this approach is to relate empirically to those concepts that exist as linguistic and cultural artefacts and that are, further, in reasonable general use; otherwise the minimum permanence and spread necessary to locate the very socio-cultural existence of a concept would be lacking. Put differently, the interpretation of the meaning of political concepts must rely on diachronic perspectives, even if—as will presently be suggested—their morphology incorporates important synchronic aspects. The morphology of political concepts, it is now proposed, can be approached through the following proposition. The main political concepts—those found in political theorizing as well as in ideological discourse—consist of both ineliminable features and 26 The separate question of applying later concepts to explain and interpret earlier political thinking is much more problematic, though it cannot be ruled out. For example, it must remain a matter for the critical reflection of the scholar whether the concept of autonomy can reasonably and usefully be applied to Mill's conception of liberty, although he did not employ autonomy in that context.

62 Ideological Morphology quasi-contingent ones. The ineliminable features of political concepts display two properties: 1. They are not intrinsic to, or logically necessary to, the meaning of the word to which they attach, but result from actual linguistic usage. In that sense, they come close to Saussure's notion of the 'arbitrary', except that we append arbitrariness to whatever substantive, determinate meaning is incorporated in the ineliminable feature.27 The feature is ineliminable merely in the sense that all known usages of the concept employ it, so that its absence would deprive the concept of intelligibility and communicability. Thus equality as a political concept appears always to have something to do with differences among human beings and the alleviation of those differences, rather than, say, with mathematical identity. 2. They cannot carry the concept on their own, that is, the concept cannot be reduced to its ineliminable component.28 At this stage we shall merely observe that the concept will therefore contain more than its ineliminable component, though its precise contents are impossible to establish. The choice of the word 'ineliminable' rather than 'core' is deliberate. Many political theorists suggest that concepts have a clear core or centre 29 and a hazy circumference where they merge into other concepts. Linguists have argued persuasively that the signified needs no essential core of meaning in order to be the proper signified for the signifier.30 But we need to advance beyond that assertion of relationship to examine the question of conceptual cores itself. There is reason to doubt the clarity of the core, and it is necessary to spell out the sense in which an jneliminable component constitutes part of a core. Later I will attempt to set out more precisely the relationship between the integral components of a concept and its circumference. If a core implies a pivotal and speciic element, lucidly spelt out, and able to stand on its own, to which more peripheral components are added in order to enrich it, the main political concepts do not possess cores. Rather, they 27

Saussure, in contradistinction, appends arbitrariness to the employment of linguistic signs and their internal relationships in a linguistic system (langue). See Saussure, Course, 71-8, and Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein, 47-50, 28 As we shall see below, the quasi-contingent features cannot carry the concept on their own either, though their further relationship with the given ineliminable component is complex. 29 B, Parekh, 'Social and Political Thought and the Problem of Ideology', in R. Benewick, R. N. Berki, and B. Parekh (eds.). Knowledge and Belief in Politics: The Problem of Ideology (London, 1973), 57-87 at p. 77. 30 Culler, Saussure, 23.

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have components that are ineliminable not in a logical sense, but simply in the sense that an empirically ascertainable cultural commonality ascribes to them some minimal element or elements. Democracy may mean the rule of the people, as its etymological meaning indicates (taking into account the burdens of translation from the Greek), but there is no logically entailed definition of either 'rule' or 'people', or any logical reason why this arbitrary word-combination, which signals the apparently ineliminable component of democracy, should not be altered or made unrecognizable to earlier users over time. Indeed, the deft implicit insertion of liberal' into many current accepted uses of democracy suggests a struggle—unsuccessful to date—over granting ineliminablecomponent status to a new, tacitly implied, notion. Inasmuch as the actual linguistic usage of a concept displays a generally shared and therefore de facto conventionally 'constant' or stable feature, that feature may be termed an ineliminable aspect of it: to eliminate it means to fly against all known usages of the concept (though this does not rule out its removal in future). To deny that political concepts have or can have such an ineliminable element is to concede that the word used to represent the concept in question refers to more than one concept. But to do that, to break down major political concepts into hosts of minor ones, is heuristically unmanageable as well as ontologically unnecessary. The prevalence of a particular political term that covers ostensibly different meanings and relates to a range of observable phenomena is an indication of an understood similarity that merits, at the very least, to be taken seriously. Let us illustrate the above by referring again to the concept of liberty. There is a strong empirical case for maintaining that all known usages of liberty contain the notion of non-constraint, and that if that notion is absent in a discussion of liberty, we are in fact looking at another concept usurping the word 'liberty'. It would be well-nigh impossible to discover an example of a text or speechact about liberty that does not contain the notion of non-constraint. That notion appears in one of two forms: (1) the subject claiming or desiring to be free will either feel (or hope to feel) unconstrained in some area of thought or action; (2) observers will describe the subject as being in a state of non-constraint, or claim such nonconstraint on behalf of the subject—irrespective of the subject's own views and feelings on the matter.31 The attribute of non-constraint 31 See W. L. Weinstein, 'The Concept of Liberty in Nineteenth Century English Political Thought', Political Studies, 13 (1965), 145-62; M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914-1939 (Oxford, 1986), 280-5,

64 Ideological Morphology is an integral and ineliminable component of the concept of liberty because, deprived of that attribute either in its 'feeling free' or 'being free' version, the concept would collapse. That argument is not tantamount to asserting that non-constraint, rather than another notion, is logically necessary to liberty. It suggests instead that non-constraint has become central to the ordinary-language, and to the philosophical, employment of liberty. For that reason, we must doubt whether the ineliminable component is also the central or core component in anything more than a conventional sense. It is simply a fact that human beings have organized the concept of liberty in such a way as to make the ineliminable and identifying component indispensable to it; though we may still wish to insist that other aspects of liberty, say, selfdevelopment or autonomy, are more central or core elements in terms of their importance for human and social life. Nor is the argument tantamount to asserting that non-constraint is identical to liberty. It must be stated emphatically that no political concept can be reduced to its ineliminable element— i.e. narrowed down to its minimum component.32 It needs further components without which the concept cannot be fleshed out. The reduction of liberty to non-constraint alone would render it entirely vacuous. We would lack further information about nonconstraint without which that notion is form devoid of content. After all, non-constraint entails a relationship between an object and a 'force' that has the potential of restricting an activity, or oppressing the sense of space, of the object. Dialectically, the notion of non-constraint is only possible when its opposite, constraint, is postulated. But who or what would not be constrained: individuals, groups, states, any living or social entity? And by what would they not be constrained: physical actions, internal hindrances, external impersonal forces, other objects? And how would that non-constraint manifest itself: through not impeding the actions of the free entity, through not interfering with its development (or non-development), through permitting the exercise of its abilities? All these are problems of intension separate from the further evaluative issue: would non-constraint be a desirable or deplorable condition to be in? We can immediately see that an isolated and abstract discussion of non-constraint leaves us with far too many imponderables to be able to make sense of it. Political concepts are 32

For that reason, G. MacCallum's triadic analysis offers a necessary, but insufficient, characterization of the concept of liberty ('Negative and Positive Freedom', Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th ser., ed. P, Laslett, W. G. Rurtciman, and Q, Skinner (Oxford, 1972), 174-93).

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 65 always richer and more sophisticated constructs than could be inferred from their ineliminable components alone. Why do political concepts have ineliminable components? Mainly because concepts are idea-artefacts that serve human convenience as ways of coming to terms with the world, and because, arguably, this is how our mind makes sense of that world. Certain political ideas, however vague, are deemed to be both fundamental and different from each other. They each become centrally ineliminable anchors for different concepts, that are designed, or are formed, around them. If liberty were to be defined entirely by a randomly fluid collection of components, and would therefore be bereft of a stable meaning, it would have no specific defining attributes and could be dispensed with as a specific political concept. But this is not the case. The specificity of political concepts derives from the combination of two factors: the presence of an ineliminable component, albeit an undifferentiated form rather than hard and substantive; and a non-random, even if widely variable, collection of additional components that are secured to that vacuous 'de facto' core in a limited number of recognizable patterns. An analogy with the overworked table might be useful here. All tables have one ineliminable feature: they constitute raised surfaces on which objects can be placed; they therefore have the property of raised levemess (or approximate levelness: the fact that tables can be tilted and caused to lose that property temporarily does not annihilate it, just as blindfolding people will not destroy, but simply interfere with, their capacity of sight). The further fact that not all objects with raised level surfaces are tables merely serves to illustrate that the ineliminable component of one item (or concept) is not necessarily exclusive to it, but may be found within the clustered features of other items (or concepts). By analogy, non-constraint—the ineliminable feature of liberty—may be an optional feature in the cluster of the concept of rights, in particular those rights termed choice-rights. The attribute of a level raised surface, while indispensable to the idea of a table, is insufficient. We have not spelt out any of its additional properties and we have no notion of what it will look like. The surface may be brown, it may stand on four legs, and it may be made out of wood. None of these attributes is essential; we can dispense "with any of them and yet may still have a table. Likewise, the additional elements that attach to the ineliminable core of a political concept are not likely to be geographically or historically universal features of that concept. Here, however, we encounter the important notion of quasi-

66 Ideological Morphology contingency. The additional components of a table, while individually dispensable, occupy categories that are not, A table will have a colour, it will incorporate some device to raise it from the ground, it will be made of a hardish material. Those categories are necessary, while their particular instances are contingent. We are consequently able to choose within each category, to offer a variety of different combinations. Moreover, there is no inherent reason why one instance of a category should have preference over another, why a table should be brown or white, have four rather than three or six legs, or be made of wood rather than plastic. Because this is structurally the case, the choice we exercise is essentially contestable, and the specific feature selected to fill each necessary category is contingent to the general idea of a table, though explicable in particular contexts and circumstances, Why are such categories necessary? First, because without some additional categories the core will remain vacuous, devoid of content and meaning. Second, because particular concepts need a specific range of categories: liberty requires the notion of a subject, it requires the idea of obstruction, and it may require an evaluation as to its desirability, if it is in competition with other concepts, Specific, contingent occupiers of those necessary categories accord sense to the core of non-constraint. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued, though it is impossible to fix the identity of the elements of a discourse, and these remain contingent floating signifiers, it is correspondingly the case that 'necessity derives.,. from the regularity of a system of structural positions'.33 However, third, there may exist entirely contingent categories that attach to political concepts as they may attach to tables, but have no bearing on the fully fledged concept or object. For example, some theorists will regard the question of the utility of liberty as superfluous. It is similarly beside the point whether a table is a work of art, or whether it supports a bowl of fruit. We have now come one step further. The above argument implies that there are constraints on the indeterminate range of meanings the idea of essential contestability may be thought to invoke. The initial limitation suggests that the main political concepts will each have to include certain categories, such as a unit of political analysis, a view of human nature, a notion of social structure, a conception of moral ends, and so forth. Beyond that there will be categories associated specifically with the concept in question: all approaches 33

E, Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony mid Socialist Strategy (London, 1985), 93113, Cp. also S. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 87-8.

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to the concept of authority, for example, will have to call up the concept of power, It may be further surmised that, although the concrete instances of each category will be contingent, their broad permutations may be limited. After all, the unit of political analysis will have to be the individual, or society, or some other group, or more than one such entity, but nothing else. And social structure is usually viewed on a spectrum that, roughly speaking, takes in positions from atomism to organicism. It is important for those who regard the essential contestability of political concepts as a cloak for relativism to appreciate that it does not allow for infinite variety or unfixity, We can now focus on a further paramount feature of a political concept: its location in a number of idea-environments, which bestow on it significant meaning. As Taylor has noted, 'things only have meaning in a field, that is, in relation to the meanings of other things ... there is no such thing as a single, unrelated meaningful element'.34 Ideologies constitute semantic fields in that each component interacts with all the others and is changed when any one of the other components alters.35 Some elements in those environments will be other concepts, adjacent and related, which can be swallowed up whole to form part of the concept we are initially examining, or they can be cannibalized for useful parts; some will be narrower ideas or attributes that are available for general purposes. For instance, autonomy has the status of a distinct political and moral concept, yet can be found within the quasi-contingent zones of the concept of liberty. On the other hand, the idea that 'man is wolf to man' is not in itself a concept, but has frequently been harnessed to the service of political concepts such as power, authority, or social justice. One conclusion which ensues from the above is that political concepts do not relate to each other entirely by negation. Parts of concept A may also 'belong' to other concepts, yet be logically entailed as a category by the inelkninable component of concept A, or be incorporated in concept A because of a social convention in a particular society to do so. Political concepts overlap and reinforce each other; it might be far neater if each were to occupy a distinct space, but such conceptual Utopias are not the stuff of which normal human thinking is made. In the analysis of the actual manifestations of political thinking we must take human thought-behaviour as we find it, to the best of our understanding. 34 35

Taylor, 'Interpretation', 22. See Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 52.

68

Ideological Morphology (d) LOGICAL AND CULTURAL ADJACENCY

To argue that a constituent of a concept is logically entailed by its ineliminable components is not to suggest that it must become an ineliminable part of the concept itself, A key distinction to be made when discussing the adjacent environment of a political concept is that between logical adjacency and cultural adjacency. As we have seen, the concept of liberty has as its ineliminable component a notion of non-constraint. But concepts logically adjacent to non-constraint will include autonomy, self-determination, selfde¥elopment, and power. They are logically adjacent because they refer to necessary options and permutations which are invariably brought into play by any concretization of non-constraint. Because those adjacent concepts are themselves essentially contestable, there is no way of establishing which of their own components will be embraced by the concept of liberty. All we can do at this stage is to apply the notion of quasi-contingency and to observe that some aspect of each of the following: autonomy, self-determination, selfdevelopment, and power, will necessarily be available to play a role in fleshing out any concept of liberty. Some instances of these logically adjacent categories wiE be locked into the ineliminable and integral component of the concept of liberty—non-constraint— and constitute further parts of that concept, just as the woodenness of a table may, in one design scheme, become one of its attributes. For although woodenness is not logically entailed, it is a logical necessity that a table be fashioned of some material or other. The specific attribute may be prised loose from the concept; the requirement for the category of material cannot. Without the particular pattern created by these interlocking categories, a concept such as liberty will remain a barren notion, bearing in mind of course that the patterns of liberty are multifold inasmuch as the inhabitants of each category are multifold, and inasmuch as the combinations of categories are indeterminate. Logical adjacency is both a constraint36 on the indefinite variety 36

This notion of constraint differs from the familiar one used by P. E. Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics', in D. E. Apter (ed.), ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964) 207-12, Converse provides no theory concerning the constraints operating on the internal structure of concepts, sees such constraints as more prevalent among elites than mass publics, rather than a property of political concepts irrespective of their articulators, and does not allow for the overriding of logical by cultural constraints. Ultimately, the difference between Converse's approach and that of this study is located in different aims. As a quantitative social scientist, Converse is primarily concerned with the prediction

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of a concept and an opening for its indeterminate and pluralistic structure. Using the notion of logical adjacency we are slowly moving towards our first glimpse of the concept of liberty itself. We could now, for example, assert that liberty concerns the ability to self-determine without hindrance, or perhaps the ability to selfdevelop without hindrance. But we also now know that those abilities will display manifold shades and that such variety is in the nature of the concept. We can hence appreciate why the 'essential contestability' problem is a consequence of the morphology of political concepts. But that appreciation is in turn informed by the realization that, when any concept is formed, the process through which incorporation-choices are made among adjacent ideas and parts of adjacent concepts is more complex than originally appeared to be the case. First, as we have seen, even though some answer or other to the question 'what mechanisms of human thought, will, and conduct are activated in a situation of non-constraint?' must be logically entailed, the choice among answers is not. Constraint is not determinacy or closure. It is not illogical to suggest that non-constraint is compatible with state intervention, if that intervention is intended to protect individuals from coercion by others. But how do we arrive at that choice among a number of logically adjacent options? Second, not every possible permutation of a concept follows logically from positing the notion of non-constraint. It does not logically follow, for instance, that people's life-plans must never be interfered with, though it may be part of a concept of liberty held by libertarians. In other words, there must be a method other than, and parallel to, logical adjacency through which concepts are fleshed out. Again, what is that method? The answer to both questions is this: decisions about which paths to follow within a large network of logical adjacency, as well as decisions to establish illogical adjacent connections, will be socially mediated through the notion of cultural adjacency, which imposes further constraints on the morphology of political concepts. This is more than merely asserting in general terms that such concepts are socio-cultural products. Rather, their specific internal formation, attached to the initial meliminable component, is shaped by what is referred to here as culture: temporally and spatially bounded social practices, of ideological behaviour, and he views the study of constraints as the means to project future regularities. We can, by contrast, endorse J. Bohtnan's useful distinction between constraints and limits as that between variable and alterable enabling conditions and determinate and fixed limiting conditions (New Philosophy of Social Science (Oxford, 1991), 121).

70 Ideological Morphology institutional patterns, ethical systems, technologies, influential theories, discourses, and beliefs (to include reactions to external events and to unintentional or non-human occurrences). To all these we need add the crucial factor of human agency, which is not determined entirely by such socio-cultural products. It may reflectively select among them, and may also frequently be the non-rational 'rogue-factor' in preferring one option over another. There are two types of cultural adjacency. The first acts as a brake operating within the framework of logical adjacency. For whereas logical adjacency must draw into the meaning of liberty all the additional components that are entailed by the ineliminable component, thus overloading the concept with more parts than it can simultaneously hold (owing to possible incompatibilities among them), cultural adjacency will intervene against making all those logical connections and will thus preserve the viability of the concept. For example, in one observed version of the concept of liberty, the answer to the logically adjacent question 'what is the effect of non-constraint on the subject?' might be self-development rather than self-determining stagnation. The choice of self-development follows the introduction of a cultural and historical preference for an intervening factor, in this case a specific conception of human nature, subject to processes of evolution and maturation and capable of self-activating or enhancing those processes. This particular conception of human nature cements the quasi-contingent relationship between non-constraint and self-development and prevents both developmental and non-developmental conduct from simultaneously being expressions of liberty. Similarly, the cultural translation of the concept of rights into civil and political rights is only one logical possibility, but in the Western political tradition it would be inconceivable not to include them in any reasonable discussion of the term. This type of cultural adjacency is a choice over which branches of a logical tree to climb, given that we cannot climb them all simultaneously, and given further that they stretch out indeterminately. There is no logically conclusive resting point where we can say: our work is done. For the logical structure of all the main political concepts is incompatible with their translation into political action. They contain internal dialectical tensions, and more possibilities than can be put into effect. The fullness of their logical structure draws them inevitably into practical contradictions and any attempt to express them in terms of human conduct and institutional patterns will result in their collapsing under their own weight. They need to be brutally pruned by means of cultural

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies

71

constraints in order to survive in their function ms-a-vis the real world and to contain their contradictions.37 Culture, unlike logic, is unsystematic and multifarious, and no guaranteed meanings can be allocated to the rump concepts that remain after they are cut down to manageable proportions. And because political reality is to an important degree a function of what human beings, the organizers of that reality, choose to select, the ranges a specific concept covers will differ from case to case. Consequently ideologies are in part impervious to logical criticism. Once a path of argument is condemned as logically flawed, the cultural pluralism of conceptual intensions allows alternative paths to be established, until they too are condemned.38 Indeed, two contradictory paths may lead out of and into the same core, as with extreme conservative opposition to the European Union predicated on a xenophobia insulating against change, and conservative support for it predicated on improved economic performance contributing towards stability. The second type of cultural adjacency refers to elements that do not follow logically from the ineliminable components of a concept, but are regarded in ordinary usage as legitimate, if not indispensable. Wittgenstein observed that 'when a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.'39 Here the opposite happens. A combination of words, which logicians and some philosophers would disallow, is accorded social and ideational legitimacy. For example, it is not logical to espouse the concept of political equality, to express it in general elections, to regard women as human beings, and yet to deny them the vote. Nevertheless, this variant has frequently been employed even within liberal-democratic systems, most notably Switzerland. Alternatively, ostensibly paradoxical logical features may be culturally pressed into one concept. Some versions of liberty will allow for force to be used in order to attain the behaviour considered consonant with non-constraint. If non-constraint is construed as applying to the removal of rational hindrances to individual choice, and those hindrances are deemed internal to the subject rather than caused by others, then the formula 'forced to be free' may be culturally acceptable despite what appears to be its defective logic. v That has been quite successfully accomplished in harmonizing the relationship between utility and rights. See Freeden, Rights, 83-100. 38 Cp. W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 43. 39 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 500.

72

Ideological Morphology Cultural adjacency refers to specific historical and sociogeographical phenomena that encourage the association of different political concepts, or smaller idea-units within a political concept, and which either operate within broader logically interlinked categories or override such logical linkage. It will relate to an historical and geographical usage of ideas and of language that may be either customary or innovative. Conversely, logical adjacency may, on rarer occasions and among more reflective ideologists, override cultural adjacency when attempting to reorder sets of values in line with agreed rational procedures or ends. Even here, the choice of which rationality is cultural. To recall, this analysis need not lead to a radically relativist position, as universal, or nigh-universal, usages of political ideas could well be demonstrated to exist. This contingent universalism is not an invariable attribute of the form and meaning of the political concept in question, but it can pertain to the concept at a particular point in time for socio-cultural reasons. Concepts have occasionally been analysed as composed of parts combined in a particular way. These attempt to correspond, on the whole unsuccessfully—as Wittgenstein argued—to the empirically observable component parts of something composite from which we construct our picture of reality.40 But an important element has usually been missing in such philosophical explanations. When Wittgenstein claimed that a triangle can be seen as a mountain, a wedge, a geometrical drawing, and so forth, or when he gave his famous duck-rabbit example, using a drawing that could signify either, he was persuasively attacking the notion of 'what is really seen' as a poor guide to defining a material concept. But the failure to interpret the object known as a duck-rabbit results from the isolated contemplation, that is, the decontextualization, of the object, Were the duck-rabbit to be depicted as floating on a pond, the likelihood that it signified a duck rather than a rabbit would be extremely high. Were the duck-rabbit to be located in a warren, or were a picture of it to appear on the cover of a book called The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the likelihood that it signified a rabbit would be similarly high. Of course, the relationship between object and environment is not always as highly defined as that. The concept of liberty may appear in ostensibly similar idea-environments, as we shall see is the case with liberalism and libertarianism, which might suggest that the same conception of liberty is in play. Only analytical 'fine-tuning' may assist in establishing identifying differences. 40

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras. 39, 59.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 73 The point is that the observable context of the material object accords its related concept a particular interpretation. In parallel, political concepts will gather meaning from their empirically ascertainable ideational context, from the idea-environment in which they are located. To that extent the synchronic relational perspective of Saussure is a useful one. Wittgenstein did indeed raise the problem of looking at objects and concepts from multiple viewpoints, and he usefully regarded concepts as having fuzzy edges.41 It is precisely because concepts are not hermetically sealed and allow for fluid, if controlled, movement across their vague boundaries that the areas beyond those boundaries—the ideaenvironments—acquire importance. However, Wittgenstein did not explore in detail the possibility that the indeterminacy of concepts is revealed only when we are capable of detaching them from a given environment.42 In addition, as we have seen, political concepts regularly exhibit a feature that material objects display infrequently and only with difficulty, namely, some of their constituent parts are also part of their idea-environment, because they appear simultaneously in other external concepts. Ideas, after all, are not limited to a particular space; they can be both here and there. We can hence conceive of a concept as turned inside out, by externalizing its so-called internal parts and treating them as free-floating units that intersect with the concept's ineliminable component. In other words, the analysis of a (political) concept is inadequate in so far as all its components or properties are treated as internal to it, as independent, self-supporting, and sharply demarcated from other concepts. Conversely it will benefit from a viewpoint that sees most of those contingent components, though not their necessary categories, as externalized, and available to be drawn in different patterns into its skeletal structure. Obviously, in the absence of that skeleton— the ineliminable component and its logically adjacent categories —the concept would be annihilated. Its presence, however, is insufficient for the concept to emerge. Were we not to attach this fixed cultural point to any one of a number of logically and culturally adjacent environments, the interpretation of ideological phenomena, and the transformation of words into meaning-endowing concepts, would become impossible tasks, 41

42

Ibid, para. 71,

Wittgenstein appreciated that concepts are formed through 'aspects of organization', namely, through associating different parts (ibid. 208), but he did not go on to develop the notion that locating an indeterminate concept in a context or idea-environment is a prime method of such association.

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Ideological Morphology Similar conclusions have been reached, via different routes, in linguistics and in anthropology. But the analysis of conceptual structure offered in both disciplines is still relatively unsophisticated. Words, as linguists point out, only have meaning in relation to their place in a sentence. The words signifying political concepts are no exception. But whereas words in a sentence are strung out in a linear sequence, political concepts are surrounded by multidimensional adjacent concepts. In addition, while words are consciously used, linguists regard grammar as a possibly unconscious set of rules that guide the speaker, that is, the structure of language may be unknown to the user. A political concept, however, may have unknown additional meanings, or as Ricoeur has put it, a surplus of meaning,43 contained in its very structure. That is to say, both the intended and unintended meanings attached to the employment of a concept are part of its baggage and draw upon wide ranges of assumptions and ideas, though these are not spelt out in the paucity of the spoken or written language. The notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force do some justice to these intricacies,44 but fall short of attesting to the multi-dimensionality of explicit and implicit adjacent ideas that keep any concept company and colour its meaning. In particular, whereas the structure of sentences is governed by strict rules of grammar, the morphology of political concepts, as we have seen, is capable of an enormous range of variations because there are so many ways in which the relevant components can become attached to each other. It is more akin to the structure of units of language such as phonemes or morphemes, but unlike phonemes, the parts of a concept are units of meaning, not of sound; and unlike morphemes, the parts of a concept are relatively complex units of ideas. Levi-Strauss, too, has emphasized the complexity of language deriving from its multiple elements. He is right in seeing language as a collective construct and in suggesting that 'much of linguistic behaviour lies on the level of unconscious thought'.45 He departs, however, from the approach proffered here by adopting too rigid a position when endorsing a view of structural linguistics that 'does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms'.*6 The dependence of terms and concepts is not in question. But we cannot treat political concepts in the manner that Levi-Strauss wishes to treat terms. 43 44

See p. 108 below, See Skinner's treatment of Austin's distinction in Tully (ed), Meaning and Context, III, 260-2. K L6vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, i. 56-7, * Ibid. 33.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 75 Though a concept is meaningless without locating it at the nodal point of a series of relationships with other concepts and ideas, it is not just the sum-total of those relationships. From our previous argument it is apparent that the embryonic, skeletal, 'thin' ineliminable part of the concept exerts an organizing control over the kinds of relationships it attracts and that eventually constitute its full, concrete, comprehensible, and operational version. This is not to deny that the meaning of the ineliminable component is itself constituted by other concepts or notions; rather, it is to make the point that the ineliminable component is culturally privileged, by dint of accepted or common usage, over the other components of a political concept. The notion of non-constraint exercises a curbing, though not determining, influence over the multiple ways in which the concept of liberty is constituted. (e) THE MORPHOLOGY OF IDEOLOGIES

The analysis of ideologies may now be advanced by utilizing a three-tier formation: the components of a concept, a concept, and a system of concepts, just as by analogy we could talk about a level surface, a table, and a furnished room. So far we have been discussing the internal morphology of a single concept. Ideologies, however, are combinations of political concepts organized in a particular way. Here we alight on a major morphological distinction between political philosophies, at least as commonly perceived in ideal-type, and ideologies: the different methods by which they handle the problem of essential contestability. As we saw in Chapter 1, pure philosophical argument, judged by its own understandings rather than its practices, would have to engage one of two methods. It could explore and account for all logical adjacencies to a given ineliminable component of a concept, that is, trace the entire families of incompatible cultural connotations that the logical structure of a political concept can summon up. Alternatively, it could present a reflective, rationally and morally justifiable case for a choice among its components, in which case the conceptual end-product would not differ in form from that of an ideology, though the means of organizing that structure might. Contrary to the first method, ideologies will seek to maximize or optimize deterrninacy, if never entirely securing it. Contrary to the second method—while not necessarily ignoring logical adjacencies—ideologies will allow a socially situated and partisan value-arbitrated choice among adjacent components, by relying heavily on the

76 Ideological Morphology notion of cultural adjacency, and the result will display various mixes of rational criteria, emotional inclinations, and cultural valuepreferences. A similar process will also be at work in deciding how to organize the wide range of political concepts encompassed by any ideology and how to interlink them. In parallel to philosophers and logicians, most linguists would challenge the attribution of a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. A word may be related to many meanings and to changing meanings. Ideologies, however, display precisely the converse features. They aim at cementing the word-concept relationship. By determining the meaning of a concept they can then attach a single meaning to a political term. Ultimately, ideologies are configurations of decontested meanings of political concepts, when such meanings are ascribed by methods at least partly foreign to those employed in currently predominant approaches of scientists, philosophers, linguists, or political theorists. Political philosophers, on the other hand, may claim not to decontest meanings at all when they are engaged in the clarification of concepts;17 and when they do engage in decontesting, they will attempt to do so by means which preserve accepted technical or moral standards of analysis. In concrete terms, an ideology will link together a particular conception of human nature, a particular conception of social structure, of justice, of liberty, of authority, etc. 'This is what liberty means, and that is what justice means', it asserts. Ideologies need, after all, to straddle the worlds of political thought and political action, for one of their central functions is to link the two. The political sphere is primarily characterized by decision-making, and decision-making is an important form of decontesting a range of potential alternatives. Thus, while the very nature of political concepts lies in their essential contestability, the very nature of the political process is to arrive at binding decisions that determine the priority of one course of action over another. Put differently, human thought-behaviour aspires to determine the meaning of political language, though any specific form this decontestation may adopt will, from the viewpoint of the analyst, necessarily fail to achieve finality.48 Ideologies serve as the bridging mechanism between contestability and deterrninacy, converting the inevitable variety of options into the monolithic certainty which is the 47

See D. D- Raphael, Problems of Political Philosophy (London, 1970), 11-17, although the possibility of clarification that does not assign meaning is highly questionable. * Cp. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 112,

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 77 unavoidable feature of a political decision, and which is the basis of the forging of a political identity. However, it is never possible to achieve total determinacy, and even an ostensibly clear-cut decision may retain ambiguities,49 For practical purposes, though, such indeterminacy may become insignificant. Furthermore, ideologies frequently adopt deliberately indeterminate statements, often because a political decision is to be avoided for whatever reason, or because a message is designed to appeal to a pluralist body of consumers, Political party manifestos tend to be such creatures, illustrating how the vagueness of language comes to the rescue of its political users. Even then, political language is employed to convey specific sets of meanings out of wider ranges. It is plain to see why so many theorists of ideology connect that term with power, for the act of decontesting, of deciding, of closing options, and of forging a political identity, is an instance of power-wielding. Because ideologies involve concerted action, they relate to the sphere of organization; because they involve decisions, they relate to control; and because they involve language, they relate to the attempted injection of certainty into indeterminacy. Competing ideologies are hence struggles over the socially legitimated meanings of political concepts and the sustaining arrangements they form, in an attempt to establish a 'correct' usage. But it is equally plain that the nature of action-orientated thinking necessitates such decisions, so that to attribute a pejorative connotation to the power aspect of ideology, in the absence of an alternative, is a futile qualification. Likewise, social psychologists draw attention to the inevitable cognitive ordering of the perceived (political) world required by individuals in order to make it intelligible and increase its predictability.50 What is meaningful is why one specific decontestation, one ordering of the political world, prevails over another. This is where morphology is underwritten by culture and history. Central to any analysis of ideologies is the proposition that they are characterized by a morphology that displays core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts. For instance, an examination of observed liberalisms might establish that liberty is situated within their core, that human rights, democracy, and equality are adjacent to liberty, and that nationalism is to be found on their periphery. The existence 49

As G, Therborn has commented, ideologies are ongoing social processes that actually operate in a state of disorder (The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London, 1980), 77). 50 See S. W. Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology and Politics (Oxford, 1988), esp. pp. 1819.

78 Ideological Morphology of concepts adjacent to the ideological core is essential to the formation of an ideology. The notions of logical and cultural adjacency, which we have explored within the framework of a single concept, are equally vital to the articulation of an entire ideology. On further examination of a specific case, for example, it would be evident that liberty may be given a particular meaning—selfdetermination—because of its close association with democracy, while conversely, democracy may be given a particular meaninglimited popular government—because of its structural interlinkage with liberty. So while the concepts of democracy and of liberty each have their ineliminable cores, they are filled out in a distinctive way due to their mutual proximity. This is a feature of the Western political tradition, in which the conventional path through the logical outreaches of liberty has become the one affiliated with democratic self-government, or with the kinds of equality that make self-government possible and that allow the generalization of liberty. Ideas drawn from equality and democracy have come in turn to create an ideational context that colours our understanding of liberty. In sum, all these skeletal or 'thin' concepts develop elements, both logically and culturally, that form overlapping and shared areas, which then react back on their separate ineliminable components to constitute full but mutually dependent concepts. These mutually influential relationships exist among the manifold concepts that make up an ideological system, and these structural networks give the ideology its distinguishing features. As with political concepts, an ideology will have concept-categories that are both culturally and logically necessary to its survival, though the particular instances of those categories are not. In addition, an ideology will contain peripheral concepts that add a vital gloss to its core concepts. More specifically, ideologies have two kinds of periphery. The one exists on the dimension of significance, and will be referred to as the margin. The other exists on the interface with time and space, and will be referred to as the perimeter. The margin pertains to ideas and concepts whose importance to the core, to the heart of the ideology, is intellectually and emotionally insubstantial. Concepts may often gravitate from a more central to a marginal position, or vice versa. Natural rights gravitated from a core to a marginal position in liberal morphology, whereas violence gravitated from a marginal to a core position in the development of fascism. Hence modifications on the significance dimension will often be longer term arrangements, reflecting accumulative changes, though they may occasionally be triggered off by cataclysmic events in the non-ideational environment of an

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 79 ideology, such as the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the hitherto marginal role of markets in East European socialist ideologies. Sometimes the retention of a marginal concept or idea may be dysfunctional to the survival of an ideology and direct it to ideational dead ends, as increasingly became the case with nationalization in Western socialist programmes. Although no longer closely adjacent to the socialist core in many modem reformulations of socialism, dogged adherence to nationalization in its new marginal location proved costly to many West European socialist ideologies, and German and British socialists, for example, acted on that insight. In addition, some concepts may be marginal simply in the sense that other ideologies force them on the agenda, but the ideology in question relates to them only reluctantly and contingently. Xenophobia and its impact on immigration policies may serve as an example. It is of course the case that a concept marginal to one ideology, for instance social order to liberalism, may be at the core of another—conservatism. The perimeter reflects the fact that core and adjacent concepts are located in historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. It refers to additional ideas and concepts that straddle the interface between the conceptualization of social realities and the external contexts and concrete manifestations in and through which those conceptualizations occur. It requires that, for an ideology to relate to, and emerge from, those contexts, indeed to avoid being couched at levels of generality that have no relevance to social and political worlds, it must conceive of, assimilate, and attempt to shape 'realworld' events. Through it a practice or institution or event is integrated into the macro-structure of the ideology.51 That process is essential to the specific decontestation and fleshing out of the abstractions which characterize core, and to a lesser extent adjacent, concepts. Whereas those abstractions enable ideologies to function on a long-term and wide-space basis, and hence permit the flexibility necessary to their survival, the relatively concrete perimeter concepts, ideas, and attitudes52 enable them to gain relevance for specific issues, to incorporate and identify significant facts and practices, to embrace external change, and to provide the 31

As Laclau and Mouffe have argued: 'the practice of articulation, as fixation/ dislocation of a system of differences, cannot consist of purely linguistic phenomena; but must instead pierce the entire material density of the multifarious institutions, rituals and practices through which a discursive formation is structured' (Hegemony, 109). 52 Attitudes are usually time and space specific, See E, Scarbrough, Political Ideology and Voting (Oxford, 1984), 37.

80 Ideological Morphology greater degree of precision necessary to interpret the core and adjacent concepts. Perimeter components of an ideology often are specific ideas or policy-proposals rather than fully fledged concepts, lacking the generalization and sophistication associated with a concept. They may also be applications of more general concepts to specific practices, as in the case of a concrete instance of censorship relating to the core concept of liberty. They may tend to be more ephemeral as well as particular, but that very specificity enables them to serve as the micro-ideological conduits of cultural constraints that impact on the macro-ideological structure, as well as conduits of structural and logical constraints already available in the ideological grouping in question, through which social facts and concrete events are construed.53 Their boundary location is crucial to the configuration, flow, and layering of meaning within the ideology and, unlike marginal concepts, is not to be regarded as a reflection of lesser or 'fallen' conceptual status within it. Nevertheless, any particular perimeter concept is peripheral in the sense that the existence of the total ideological morphology does not depend on its presence or absence. Of course, some perimeter concepts may be marginal concepts as well, while others may gravitate towards the ideological core. The impact of the practice of civil disobedience on conservative ideology has been marginal; while, conversely, free trade as a concrete set of practices moved away from both perimeter and marginal status to take on the features of an important adjacent concept to the nineteenth-century core of liberalism. By adopting an adjacent position, it no longer came under caseby-case scrutiny and thus was insulated from immediate arid continuous change. Here lies another significant morphological distinction between political philosophies and most ideologies. The former organize political concepts without much reference to perimeter ideas and practices. Their structure is controlled by the individual philosopher, or group of philosophers, producing them. Superficially, this constitutes a parallel with the subgroup of dogmatic and doctrinaire ideologies, whose structure is governed by powerful ideologues. However, philosophers adopt such an immunity to the perimeter for clarificatory reasons, or because they hope to maintain a high level of argument unsullied by less rational contributions, or 53

Quine identified the perimeter function of the peripheral boundary between belief and experience, but focused only on one of its two directions—the impact from experience to the internal logical connections among statements (From a Logical Point of View, 42-3),

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 81 because they focus on counterfactual or ideal propositions. Yet they remain open to internal conceptual rearrangements on the basis of logic or 'good' arguments. Doctrinaire and dogmatic ideologies, on the other hand, deliberately sever their links with key perimeter 'intrusions', thus isolating themselves from the external world and from the possibility of reflecting changes in their ideaenvironments, in order to ensure the relative immobilization of forced relationships among the components of their ideologies. Both need be contrasted with open ideologies which are partly perimeter-driven and shaped by notions and practices at the interface with political action, Any specific belief item within an ideology will be identified by a particular route (among many possible ones) from the core, through adjacent concepts, to a perimeter one, as well as by the reverse movement. Thus, the assertion of the importance of a viable national health service may be decoded as encompassing a core belief about human welfare, decontested (and valued) as human flourishing; attached to adjacent concepts such as community, power, and responsibility (jointly decontested as involving state intervention to further the core belief), human rights (decontested as rights to social services), and the public interest (decontested as the maintenance of human capacities at their highest possible level); and rounded off by perimeter concepts linked to specific policy-proposals, such as pain and suffering (decontested as undesirable, especially when avoidable), and need (decontested as the provision of medical services to all who require them). Concurrently, travelling in the other direction of the interface, a financial crisis, or the lack of blood donors, may spark off a consideration of market-exchange relationships as an adjacent constraint on human flourishing, or genetic engineering may be identified as a relevant fact when interpreted through the prism of its potential danger to the equal rights principle involved in a national health service.54 The result could be the relocation of an adjacent concept within the ideological morphology, and in the longer run a potentially transformational impact on the core itself if, for instance, the responsibility for human flourishing would, through the economic and legal penalization of infirmity, shift to parents and experts. Conversely, the existing morphology could be reinforced as a M

Shortage of space will necessitate restricting such examples in later chapters and concentrating on significant core texts and statements about ideologies. But the analysis of ideologies must equally proceed from the concrete inspection of political practices and through them (re)constructmg the larger, often implicit, core and adjacent morphology.

82 Ideological Morphology consequence of such a prospect. In addition, perimeter concepts acting as conduits for cultural constraints could override logical constraints. The latter, after all, are internal rather than external and do not interface with the 'real' world. Thus, a 'national' health service could override its entailed universal and equal treatment by granting differential access to various groups, as a response to exigencies of funding and to preferences of allocation. This rudimentary scheme does not rule out other interpretations. We can now appreciate that ideologies are groupings of decontested political concepts. The mutual influence of these concepts is paramountly affected by the specific morphological arrangements that place them in relation to each other; they constitute systems of internal relations,55 albeit open-bordered and in constant mutation. In some cases ideologies constitute virtual freeze-frames of the meanings of the concepts employed, though only if they are saddled with an artificially rigid logic, or if specific cultural meanings are forcefully imposed or excluded. Otherwise their forms will display degrees of flexibility. Ideologies are capable of bending under pressure, and of hosting a number of variations on each of their concepts without collapsing. However, if completely alien meanings of concepts are hastily injected into a particular ideology, its structure may snap. And in the short term, even the more open ideologies eschew the philosophical ideal of questioning some of the fundamental internal relationships among their concepts. The morphology of an ideology exhibits both similarities to and differences from that of a political concept. Because ideologies attempt to assign to their constituent concepts clear meanings, be these ever so logically contestable and culturally partisan ones, it is not uncommon to encounter the belief that they have permanent cores, as well as fixed relationships between core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts. The major ideological families or traditions are frequently portrayed in that light. However, in view of the above elaboration on the essential contestability of concepts, the likelihood that different exponents of, say, socialism would display a fixed and common ideational profile is remote. There are as many socialisms as there are instances of that ideology, and hence a degree of fluidity will apply within any ideological grouping. This fluidity may be more characteristic of ideologies than of political concepts, for the latter are more stringently controlled 55

For useful discussions which reinforce Saussurian insights, see B. Oilman, Alienation, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1976), 256-62; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, lllff.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 83 than the former through linguistic socialization. Ideologies may be held unconsciously and hence offer fewer opportunities for regulating their usage; even when consciously embraced, they are more complex constructs than political concepts and more capable of diverse forms. But having now introduced the term Ideological grouping', how can we determine which ideologies belong to which groupings? How can ideological morphology be classified into sets of distinctive arrangements that constitute the ideological patterns we can then call conservatism, liberalism, or socialism? Any attempt to answer this must begin with a related question: do ideologies have ineliminable concepts, just as political concepts have ineliminable components? In general they do, though the question allows for no easy answer. Liberty is rightly central to liberalism in the sense that its eradication is destructive of that ideology. No known variants of liberalism dispense with the concept of liberty. On the other hand, the ineliminability of concepts in an ideology is not particularly interesting, for the plain reason that virtually all political concepts will be found, deliberately or by default, within the ambit of any ideology. Precisely because ideologies are general, even total, political world-views—either by design or because they have implicit positions on all social issues—the presence within them of any particular concept is not a definitional property. In that sense most concepts within an ideology are ineliminable. Of far greater significance therefore will be two other features. First, as elaborated above, the rotation of each participating concept through a range of meanings until one of those meanings is held vis-a-vis the similarly held, or decontested, meanings of every other concept. Second (and affecting the first), the location secured by a political concept within the ideological framework. In effect, ideologies may be distinguished by the relative ordering in which they deploy similar concepts, on which depend both the precise decontesting of the concepts and the overall interpretation of any ideology's messages. The issue then becomes whether the continual presence of certain concepts in an ideological core location is necessary to maintain the identity of an ideology. This too is normally the case. However, the more complex the ideology, the more it is possible to remove one of its concepts from a core position, either temporarily or in the course of historical and spatial change, though it is highly unlikely to be eliminated from the ideological room altogether. In that case, the question must be whether the flexibility of the ideology's core morphological profile is still sufficiently

84 Ideological Morphology limited to preserve its identifiable pattern of ideas. But what then is the core of an ideology? If it refers to a structurally fixed and substantively permanent set of concepts, ideologies do not have cores. The term 'core' may be employed only as a flexible and empirically ascertainable collection of ideas, fashioned by social conventions.56 Some core concepts may migrate, over time and space, across the structure of an ideology. Others may be refused that right to travel: liberalism does not permit the concept of liberty to migrate to an adjacent or peripheral position. Its ineliminability from the liberal core is part of what constitutes liberal morphology. The same applies to equality in socialism. Moreover, if a core refers to a single constituent concept, ideologies do not have cores, either. They are not typified by one central organizing concept; in fact, they may invariably be described as having more than one core concept. That description pertains primarily to the actual thought-behaviour, as expressed verbally and in writing, of the adherents of the ideology in question. It would, for example, be far too simplistic to assert that liberty alone is found at the liberal core—indeed, one scholar has even identified that core, with equal implausibility, as equality.57 Rather, the core is itself a cluster of concepts. Furthermore, the same family of ideologies may present variants of a core cluster, each of which will emphasize different component concepts. In addition, they may not only eliminate a core concept, but include the odd newcomer. Nevertheless, all these variants may legitimately bear the same ideological tag. Thus some socialists will stress equality as their most important core concept; others, welfare, creativity, or the attainment of species-being—though all four may appear in different variations of the socialist core. Alternatively, there may be disagreement concerning which concepts are core, adjacent, or peripheral within the same ideological system. Different positions have, for instance, been claimed for property within the family of liberalism. Over the centuries that concept has travelled, in some liberal variants, from core to marginal position. It has in effect been eliminated as a core liberal concept. The assessment of the conceptual components of an ideology, and how to establish its minimal essential features, will depend in part on the synchronic 56 It is also, of course, subject to interpretative projections by the analyst of ideologies, though the insistence on empirical evidence for such analysis must be safeguarded. 57 R. Dworkin, 'Liberalism', in A Matter of Principle (Oxford, 1986), 183 and passim. See Ch. 6 below.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 85 58 standards the evaiuator employs and in part on the diachronie tradition of liberal interpretation into which the evaiuator taps (and there are as many such traditions as legitimate versions of liberalism, constituted by competing recognized conventions that have evolved over time and space), A parallel between the morphology of a concept and of an ideology exists also on another level. The core concepts of an ideology are non-specific, allowing for diverse interpretations to be attached to them through adjacent and peripheral concepts. By binding together a large number of concepts, each of which has been decontested through its association with its neighbouring concepts, ideologies obtain clear ideational profiles. Hence, for example, liberalism will rule out some of the meanings of its core concepts of liberty, rationality, and individuality simply by attaching a specific range of additional concepts to that core. As will be seen in Chapter 4, Mill decontested rationality by assuming the possibility of harmonious development, and individuality by linking it to pluralist views of eccentricity and the human ability to form life-plans. Liberty was decoded within these sets of constraints. Thus the meaning of each of the concepts within an ideological system, as well as the overarching meaning the system in toto is held to represent, will depend heavily on ideological morphology. That morphology will invariably reflect the fact that ideologies permit logical adjacency to be restricted by cultural adjacency. This vital mechanism enables ideologies to minimize the problem of internal inconsistency by creating acceptable connections between terms and arguments in order to escape logical criticism.59 Perfect internal consistency should in any event not be expected to obtain in political thought, but even salient inconsistencies can be overcome in the formulation of ideologies. The association of nationalism and socialism within German fascism is a conspicuous instance of forging links between viewpoints considered by many to be incompatible, logically as well as culturally. A further comparison between Nazism and Stalin's 'socialism in one country' illustrates the range of possible combinations of socialism and nationalism within different cultural contexts and idea-environments. It may be useful to illustrate the above discussion by exploring an analogy with a map. We may regard logical constraints as determining the network of roads emanating from a given point—given 58

See pp. 103-4 below. For a psychological exploration of the problems of consistency and dissonance-reduction in order to achieve psychological harmony, see M. Billig, Ideology and Social Psychology (Oxford, 1982) 162 ff. 39

86 Ideological Morphology by our choice of starting-point, not as immanent to the map— whereas cultural constraints make recommendations as to the preferable route, depending on whether our priority lies in landscapes, speed, safety, or avoiding hostile villagers. The cultural constraints may also close some routes to traffic and recommend unfinished roads. Each ideology in turn offers a map competing with those of its rivals. But here the notion of a map becomes intriguing. Imagine the main political concepts as a given number of towns, except that each ideology seeks to position them not only within a different road grid, but wishes to alter the topographical space between them, even to reshuffle their locations entirely, merge them, or deny that some of them exist. Unusually, for a map, the relationships between towns would themselves be multi-dimensional. The traveller would be offered a range of considerations in respect of moving between any two points, considerations that would not be evident on a simple reading of the map as a spatial representation of distance. Values such as efficiency, comfort, aesthetics, security, would supply alternative schemes for linking up the towns. Unlike a geographical terrain in which spatial relations are fixed, no one dimension of an ideological map is constant. What is constant is the very network of mutually informing and influencing concepts, on which human minds (rational or otherwise) and human wills impose the particular preferred set. Moreover, as there is no absolute sense in which any of the competing ideologies is superior, there is no correct map. The specific morphology of an ideology that entitles us to group a number of its instances under one heading may be illustrated by an extension of the table/concept analogy. Ideologies may be likened to rooms that contain various units of furniture ki proximity to each other. Two important, if obvious, observations need to be kept in mind: (1) rooms may be distinguished by the kinds and combinations of units of furniture they accommodate (kitchens will have sinks and cookers; studies will have desks and bookshelves); (2) the same type of room will appear in an infinite variety of furniture-combinations (there are hundreds of different don's studies in Oxford). This is precisely the position with regard to ideologies. Though it is impossible to give a clear-cut definition of liberalism, it is empirically ascertainable that liberalism has always contained units such as liberty, human rationality, and individualism. Subtract one of them from the liberal configuration and profound question marks begin to appear. Subtract a second and it is no longer liberalism. Similarly, a kitchen without a sink is hardly a kitchen; without a cooker either its identity is destroyed.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 87 Note also that, though there are countless kinds of cookers, they are all cookers; the same rule will apply to varieties of individualism. In sum, the appearance of certain items in a pattern endows an ideology with a distinctive nature. The example, however, is an extreme one: kitchens and studies share few items of furniture, tables and chairs being the most probable ones. But what if a common pool of furniture is used? Here we alight on the critical issue of organization. It is unlikely that in the hands of different furnishers the same room will be repeatedly cloned; far more probable that identical units of furniture may be used to create very different rooms. Modular furniture, for example, is specifically designed to achieve that. Ideologies, as we have argued, will display most, if not all, of the major political concepts within their system. Only the small number of closed, doctrinaire ideologies will succeed in forcing out a concept altogether. The key lies in the relation of the units to one another, in their positioning vis-a-vis the centre, and in the way units are made to interlock and support each other. A room with a table at its centre may be a billiard room, a dining room, or a study. It is unlikely to be a bedroom. If a table is surrounded by four chairs and a table cloth, rather than by strong arc lights, surgical equipment, and an anaesthetized person, it is most probably a diningtable, not an operating one. Now this is exactly the case with an ideology. If we find liberty, rationality, and individualism at its centre, while equality—though in evidence-—decorates the wall, we are looking at an exemplar of liberalism. If order, authority, and tradition catch our eye upon opening the door, while equality is shoved under the bed or, at best, one of its weaker specimens is displayed only when the guests arrive, we are looking at a version of conservatism. Core, adjacent, and peripheral units pattern the room and permit its categorization. It may also be noted that in some ideological rooms the furniture will be elaborate, elegant, and striking; in others spartan, rough, and bland. Matters can, however, become more complicated. What if my study also happens to contain a sink and a fridge in a salient position? What if—taking this further—two ideologies, one calling itself liberalism and the other conservatism, happen to share the decontested concepts of limited power, liberty from intervention by other people, constitutionalism, and private property? This is perhaps the most important facet of ideological morphology; the absence of absolute boundaries which separate the features of ideological systems. Multiple instances exist of ideological hybrids that could only be described as conservative liberalism, liberal

88 Ideological Morphology socialism, and the like. This is, however, the crux of any analysis, To compartmentalize ideologies into prefabricated categories called socialism or liberalism flies in the face of the evidence. Ideologies are modular structures, frequently exhibiting a highly fluid morphology. The myriad variants they manifest can only be broadly reduced to the few main categories, or families, with which we are conversant. It is useless to entertain the notion of precise ideological boundaries, or of features exclusive to one ideology or the other. These are merely popular as well as scholarly conventions for simplicity's sake. They are, unfortunately, conventions that have caused great misunderstandings both in the worlds of politics and of academe, and have frequently vitiated the subtlety requisite for the serious investigation of ideologies. An appreciation of ideologies as multi-conceptual constructs, and as loose composites of decontested concepts with a variety of internal combinations, provides the clue to understanding the linkage between political concepts and the many forms ideologies embrace. The comparative study of ideologies—synchronic and diachrortic comparison being the touchstones of scientific study— can only commence on that basis. The various profiles ideologies adopt are to a significant extent accounted for by the morphology of the ideational subject-matter on which they build. Nevertheless, comparison can also lead to classification, and here evidently boundary problems occur. One way of confronting these is to consider the similarities between the classification of ideologies, as loosely holistic phenomena, and the psychological process of Gestalt-forming. It is hardly surprising to find a structuralist such as Levi-Strauss making a similar connection between 'Gestalt' in psychology and structural perspectives, according to which a configuration is always more than the sum of its parts.60 In Gestalt psychology that additional import is a question of perception and recognition of evidence, but with respect to the analysis of ideologies it is also a question of interpretation imposed on such evidence. Merleau-Ponty likewise regarded parts as bereft of meaning on their own, and allowed for their rearrangement to form different wholes through which an emerging rationality could be seen. Gestalt was a pattern that accorded significance to what he termed 'the contingent configurations of the empirical'.61 And ideologies, too, have their Gestalten. Although I may enter many socialist 60 61

L^vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, L 324-5. M, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, 1962). See D. Cooie, 'Phenomenology and Ideology in the Work of Merleau-Ponty', in N. O'Sullivan (ed), The Structure of Modern Ideology (Aldershot, 1989), 130-2.

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 89 rooms in my lifetime, for them to be categorizable as socialist I will need to be able to say: 'despite the different carpets, and even though in some cases the rooms lacked cupboards, and had very poor paintings on the walls, their arrangement of furniture was plainly socialist, not conservative'. What can make me reasonably sure of that will occupy us in the latter parts of the book. Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances offers a further approach to these problems. For Wittgenstein a particular combination of features could be identified as having broad similarities with another particular combination, if enough features overlapped. He called up the phrase 'family resemblances' to characterize 'a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail'.62 This notion differs somewhat from the structuralism of anthropology, if not of Gestalt theory. Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology seems to be more formal and precise than the rattier flexible idea of family resemblances, which is more useful with reference to the macro-analysis of an ideology in toto than with reference to its details.*3 However, ideologies can also be subjected to the more rigorous scrutiny of morphological analysis, applied to the microanalysis of the idea-environments of a given concept, whereas LeviStrauss is concerned with the universal features of practices and Wittgenstein with the common features of units. Notwithstanding, Wittgenstein departed both from Gestalt theory and from structuralism in introducing the dimension of change over time. Families, after all, have histories. They are identified because their members have a direct relationship with other people that have hitherto been members of the family. Wittgenstein was anxious to argue that those resemblances are like a thread. There is no one fibre running through the thread in its entirety, only the overlapping of many fibres which create the object we call thread. This may be another way of describing a tradition. Ideologies exist on historical continua and the bunching together of political concepts in long-term relationships is a central ideological characteristic. An ideology may well follow a developmental sequence during which its components will subtly change. Over a long period of time, as with biological evolution, its core may shed or acquire concepts, and its morphology may undergo some transformation. The history of a tradition may assist in the decision whether to classify a particular instance as within or outside the confines of 62

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 67. " See below, Ch, 3, s. (/). 63

90 Ideological Morphology an ideology. Because we know that British liberalism abandoned private property as a core concept and introduced a notion of community, while retaining other identifiably liberal features, we need not commit the error of classifying liberal communitarianisrn as a form of socialism. In this case a variant of liberalism has been wrongly renamed. But on another dimension, the name of an ideology—its signifier—may remain constant. There are variants of liberalism that have retained both the name and the conceptual morphology; but there are identically named liberalisms that under close scrutiny reveal the existence of two different ideologies. Two problems now present themselves in applying family resemblances to ideologies. First, we clearly cannot pinpoint the beginning of a family; conceptually, that grouping may have emerged out of a custom which gave a number of objects the same name; empirically, there have been families as long as there have been human beings. Some ideologies, it has been argued, are more recent historical phenomena, dependent on the development of mass media without which their dissemination and consumption is impossible. Ideologies in their modern guise—liberalism, socialism, certainly Marxism and fascism—were subject to an initial decision to name them; in some cases, even to (re)construct them artificially, although some may have existed before they were named. Second, Wittgenstein's analogy of a thread as a discontinuous fibre may not be quite apposite. Although the same ideological family may display different decontestations of its constituent concepts, so that no decontestation overlaps with another, the fundamental aspects of morphology will run through all its instances: at least in the short run there will be a unique core, and certain concepts will be adjacent to it. As for each specific ideological family, the question of continuity of meaning is not an easy one to resolve. On one view the meanings of core concepts, though the same word is applied to them, differ from one cultural and historical context to another, so that it is merely the terms that maintain continuity. On another view, the meanings of political concepts can be sufficiently preserved and inherited to suggest that continuity prevails over change. It is not only that each successive instance will bear a notable resemblance to its predecessor. Whereas in Wittgenstein's family, the first member may be quite unlike the most recent, there still are recognizable resemblances between early and late versions of all major Western ideologies. But these have to be demonstrated. What we cannot do is take an ideological family as given and then discuss its overlapping variants as they now appear to us. We have to insist on some structural, empirically ascertainable common

Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies 91 features over time and space before we bestow the same name on different ideological genres. In that sense, too, ideologies are bereft of fixed cores. Not only do family resemblances change, but the family resemblance may well be one selected by the observer, not one 'inherently' salient. The Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances, when transported to ideological analysis, serves as a reminder that history plays a crucial role in the study of political concepts. They have conventionally appeared grouped together by traditions and ideologies, have had cumulative meanings attached to them and have existed on a level of political action and political culture, which have important pasts that contribute to their meanings. To concentrate on synchronic meaning, which cannot alone account for the burden that political concepts bear, is a weakness not only of semiology but of much analytical philosophy. Conversely, historians tend to look at contingent and unique occurrences and are suspicious of recurrent patterns. The emphasis on morphology counterbalances that by drawing attention to the general patterns that the history of political ideas—rooted as it is both in language and political concepts—must display. It has already been noted that those patterns need not be universal; at most, they may be contingently universal or nigh-universal, reflecting the proliferation of human conventions, though they may contract again in the future. (/) THE ESCAPE FROM STRONG RELATIVISM

Conceptual indeterminacy, and its ideological response in the form of decontesting, may seem to posit an inescapable relativism which cannot prioritize any ideological solution over another, a view shared by some postmodernists. Importantly, however, although there are no correct definitions of political concepts, not all usages are equally acceptable. To say that they are not equally acceptable is not to dispute that unacceptable usages may gain social legitimacy in specific contexts. Rather, it is a reasonable concession by the analyst of ideologies towards political and moral philosophers, not because it is necessary or relevant to the analysis engaged in here, nor because rationalism or intuitionisrn are compellingly persuasive, but because of the consequentialist impact that political concepts and their signifiers, political words, have in the real world. Rorty has forcefully argued that the very issue of relativism cannot exist in a world where there is no truth 'out there' which language must represent. It is not that relativism is right, but that

92 Ideological Morphology universalism is unhelpful,64 But whereas we may agree with Rorty that there are no absolutely true standards independent of the vocabularies we employ, the absence of a 'view from nowhere'65 does not endorse the view from anywhere. Nor does the rejection of total or strong relativism necessarily ensnare us in a universalist perspective, as the purveyors of dichotomies would have it. Rather, societies may adopt standards and express value-preferences which, however imperfect, are the result of the combination of two factors: enlightened deliberation and factual knowledge. Enlightened deliberation assumes, on the basis of the experiences of articulate individuals—and this is merely a working hypothesis rather than a truth-—that reflective, open, and collaborative consideration of courses of action produces results which have less ill-effects for individuals than the converse. There is no suggestion here that one set of responses would be elicited by these processes. Indeed, enlightened political debate may itself arrive at different conclusions, liberal, socialist, conservative, or other. Nor is there a suggestion that such debate is not contextually embedded; it is merely that some contexts may be more conducive to the type of conceptual thinking that promotes human flourishing than others. The value of human flourishing, however, may been seen as an acceptable starting-point for political debate, even as we acknowledge that there is no way of determining tihat it is universally valid. However, standards of behaviour cannot be the consequence of preferences expressed in abstract enlightened debate alone, however openly and deliberatively arrived at. They must also be guided by factual knowledge based on experience, such as that torture brings suffering, or unemployment in developed societies is correlated with a rise in crime. The concept of welfare will rely, to no small extent, on medical and psychological knowledge, and that knowledge will serve to stabilize, if not to decontest completely, the indeterminizing tendencies in all political concepts. If human rights derive, among other reasons, from a desire to decrease pain and suffering, the natural and human sciences may supply standards beneath which human life will be intolerable, though individual variations—as with any empirically ascertainable phenomenon—will always persist. As Mill contended, it would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as i f . . . experience had done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence, or of 64 45

R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), 8. T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).

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conduct, is preferable to another... it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.66

Again, two caveats need to be entered. First, even state-of-knowledge evidence awaits contrary proof, yet societies cannot be blamed for abiding by what they may reasonably perceive the facts to be. Thus, once psychoanalysis legitimated the factual status of notions such as repression or unconscious drives, it became reasonable to accept these as a basis for decisions about human good or benefit. If smoking is considered factually damaging to one's health, it is legitimate to aspire to contain that practice, assuming all the while that human beings do not on the whole desire damage to themselves. Second, interpretations of identical empirical facts may be so different as to make the divergent ways in which they impinge on ideological thinking irreconcilable. This does not imply the nonexistence of the fact or the experience; merely that an agreed process on how to access to and know about them is not always available. Thus the accuracy of conceptualizing facts is impossible to ascertain, though that may have little bearing on the assumed validity or the function of the conceptualization, or even on the way it in turn recreates a social reality. All these caveats apply to enlightened deliberation as weE, for its assumed beneficial results are themselves a consequence of accumulated and shared factual experiences. It is also quite possible that some political conclusions arrived at through the combined process of enlightened deliberation and the establishment of facts through experience may be shared by a number of societies. That does not mean that they are a priori universal or intuitive, but they may be quasi-universal cultural practices, such as the high regard in which nurturing the human young is held. Even on the stricter political level, authority, obligation, and liberty may invoke similar images among different peoples, from which we may establish predominant or at least common usages. In addition, once a concept is postulated, logical constraints on its structure may counterbalance its interpretative fluidity and contribute to the establishment of common patterns. Hence both strong relativism and universalism may be eschewed. So whereas one can endorse the postmodernist contention that knowledge is never neutral, in order for decisions to be taken in societies it is necessary to accept that pockets of temporary and/ or fragmentary knowledge, which have been subjected to critical 66

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, 1910), 116.

94 Ideological Morphology assessment according to the best available criteria at the time, may provide reasonable guidelines. The deliberative equilibria which ensue wUl be of different temporal durations: some changing quickly, others far more stable. Nevertheless, and as a backdrop to the discussion to come, the escape from relativism cannot be attained through the tools used in analysing ideologies. The language of ideologies is couched in terms of truth-assertions, but ideologies—as contended in the previous chapter—do not attain truth-value status. The relevant question for the analyst is: what has to hold, in terms of conceptual configurations and prioritizations (reflecting cultural beliefs), in order for an assertion to be considered true by its producers? Such analysis—as distinct from what is being analysed—can offer no privileged viewpoint, though it may supply materials from which to forge privileged positions. The escape from relativism must therefore be attained through other paradigms, combining knowledge with the reflective assessment on human existence, the latter to include also the imaginative exploration of alternatives based on experiences regarded as dehumanizing. The preferred positions that will emerge may themselves be overturned on the basis of changed knowledge or new reflection. This view is sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty's observation that, because we are in the world, 'our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on which we are trying to seize.., The philosopher... is a perpetual beginner'.67 That is immanent critique which at the same time is not trapped in immanence.68 If postmodernists such as Derrida or Lyotard perceive an unconceprualizable or unutterable chasm beckoning beyond the spatial and temporal finitudes that confine us,69 ideologies offer a necessary haven—however contestable—from that void in the very inevitability of their conceptual morphologies, enabling us to function in our personal and social worlds. On the level of distanciated scholarship, however, postmodernism facilitates a stark redecontestation of political concepts and, in particular, identifies the cultural quasi-eontingency of previous decontestations rooted in logical techniques or in specific explanatory paradigms. Its essential destructiveness notwithstanding, postmodernism offers those prepared to break with its sceptical and frequently nihilist epistemology the opportunity for a reordering of meaning on lines adumbrated above. In the end a balance has to be struck: while we 67

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. xiv. See Bagleton, Ideology, 171. 691 J. Derrida, Of ' Grammatology (Baltimore, Md., 1976); j.-f. Lyotard, The Differend (Manchester, 1988). 68

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cannot ignore the human ability to reflect, to make sense out of the world and endow it with decontested meaning, nor can we attach any degree of absoluteness to those meanings or accept them all. Any interpretation, including the one advanced here, must comply with the evaluative maxim: awaiting contrary reflective reassessment. To conclude, there is a distinct disjuncture between the viewpoint of the ideologist and that of the analyst. While no ideology can legitimate ideational diversity beyond what it condones in its own conceptual configurations70 and must consequently deny or disparage the innate pluralism of language and meaning, the positing of such diversity underlies the study of ideologies. Ideological morphology is neither fixed nor permanent apart from the decontesting nature of the core-adjacency-periphery nexus itself. Within those confines, internal formations are malleable relationships among political ideas that reflect changing cultural and historical conceptions. These latter factors rejig the basic morphology of ideologies to create different ideological families, so that within each family the structural element can only be held together through devices such as the Wittgensteinian 'family resemblance'. Nevertheless, the existence of historically long-term families of ideological interpretation suggests that meaning is not as contingent as some post-structuralists would have it. Political ideas can exist in broad patterns that may be shared, or at least overlap. When those patterns, which define each specific ideological family, change, they may do so almost imperceptibly. The exploration of meaning in the next chapter will focus centrally on such diachronic perspectives, as expressed among others through hermeneutical approaches and B Begriffsgehschichte. 70

On liberal flexibility as distinct from diversity, see Ch. 4,

3

Applying: The Contexts of Ideological Meaning

The text as a whole . . . may be compared to an object, which may be viewed from several sides, but never from all sides at once.1 QUIPPED with a developed conception of ideological morphoE logy, and building on the bases of the previous chapters, we now turn to exploring further the consequences of conceptual contestability and determinacy in conjunction with questions of meaning. As seen in Chapter 2, the composition of concepts, the relative position of their components, and the conceptual ideaenvironment in which they are set contribute importantly to a determination of their meaning. But from the outset it has been stressed that morphology alone cannot account for meaning, precisely because the morphology of an ideology is not a hermetically sealed network of conceptual relationships. This is so both for participant and observer. The hermeneutic persuasion has driven home the importance of the scholar's perceptions and misconceptions in constructing an interpretation of reality, as distinct from the impossible task of reconstructing that reality. The scholar may in addition be confronted with the infinite regression of decontesting the concept of ideology itself in the course of attempting to explain ideology as a decontesting exercise. In that sense we can only attempt to argue rationally for the plausibility of our approach to ideology in terms of its explanatory power, usefulness, or analytical attractiveness. In addition, we may pick up some wrong signals when engaged in the actual analysis of a particular ideology. We may overlook adjacent concepts, surround the core with wrong neighbours, 1 P. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex., 1976), 77.

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misapprehend the arguments we are trying to understand, overor underemphasize certain concepts, locate the ideology in inaccurate contexts, or misconstrue the consumption-value attributed to an ideology by its public. Nevertheless, we are not operating entirely in the realm of speculation and conjecture. Some aspects of the meaning of political concepts relate, as we have seen, to scientifically determinable facts, inasmuch as they have been integrated into political language; other aspects to generally recognized cultural speech practices and thought-behaviour. The observable employment of political language may supply us with a range of workable political concepts which, while different from the stipulative models or ideal-types preferred by some philosophers, are nevertheless the stuff from which conceptual political analysis can be fashioned. (a) THE INEVITABILITY OF HISTORY

There are, of course, many ways of bestowing meaning in an ideological system. We have noted in Chapter 1 some of the angles from which diverse disciplines observe and interpret ideologies. Those are questions concerning the ways in which the phenomenon of ideology can illuminate human and social conduct. But what of the phenomenon itself rather than its consequences? It is not the intention here to belittle functional or teleological explanations, which have always loomed large in ideological analysis. We are however, to reiterate, more concerned with what ideology is as a form of political theory than with what it is good for, though the two perspectives may inform each other. The question becomes more complex when the nature of ideologies is approached through their formation and development. It is, after all, a convention inherited from ancient Greece to harness genesis and growth to explanations of nature and essence. Mannheim may have been right to reject the dualism between meaning and existence which he pinned on modern Idealist thought, but it is unclear from his discussion on what Ms denial of the separation of genesis and meaning is grounded. When he insisted that there is 'a complex of conditions of emergence and existence2 which determine the nature and development of an assertion', his must have been more than a temporal argument in order to hold water. A mere 'geneticism' would relegate the study of ideologies to a tracing of 2

K, Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, n.d.; 1st publ. 1936), 292-3.

98 Ideological Morphology developmental sequences, with the attendant dangers that such a sequence attain a life of its own, abstracted from socio-cultural location, or—as already noted—that the idea of the corruption of a correct meaning may take root. This is where the utility of a third perspective applies: the morphological arrangements of cultural and socio-ethical concepts must necessarily supplement both their origins and consequences as sources of meaning. All this does not imply that we abandon temporal perspectives. Quite the reverse: it raises the broader issue of the role of history in ideological analysis. The concept of history makes its entrance through four different apertures. First and centrally, history—as well as geography—is an integral arena within which political concepts and ideologies are located, and it contributes the context required to concretize their particular meanings through perimeter concepts and ideas. Second, political concepts bear the accumulative burdens of their past in a manner rare among economic or sociological concepts. Democracy is a term heavily packed with past associations, debates, and prejudices stretching back to antiquity. Its present coating peels off only to reveal further layers without which the outer membrane would collapse. Most political concepts carry a public dimension of discourse which enshrines specific connotations as points of reference. Roosevelt's 'four freedoms', the trinity of the French Revolution linking equality, liberty, and fraternity, constitutions as official documents that embody ideological perceptions—all these indicate the salience of temporal points to which conceptual meaning is anchored. The formal, public aspect of ideologies combined with their social production and wide consumption ensures that linguistic innovation must to a considerable extent defer to customary usage. Third, the notion of change—as a specific reading of historical time—is itself a socio-political concept directly incorporated into an ideology. The concept of progress, for instance, both interprets reality as the march of human and social improvement, and reacts on other adjacent concepts to fashion a particular understanding of welfare, liberty, or rationality. A conservative view of slowly changing phenomena affects adjacent concepts that will either be halted in their development or construed through the prism of organic change. Theories of development or evolution thus allow for change within ideologies, either on the macrolevel of an ideology directed at attaining teleologkal or open-ended goals, or on the microlevel of patterned change within the structure of an ideology. In the latter case the concepts interact and co-ordinate their reinterpretation until an internal balance, or a continuous dynamic

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equilibrium, is achieved. It is consequently believed 'natural' for political concepts to be dynamic capsules for the development of their ineliminable cores. One difference may then be over the possibility of human intervention as a cause of the ordering and reordering of conceptual relationships. Furthermore, the nature of political language as decontestation operates at the very least to stabilize change, whether as stasis, as equilibrium, or as the attainment of a teleological end-state, so that there are limits to the fluidity of concepts and ideologies, and indeed to theories of history. Chaos and total contingency have no place in political language. If history (at least in a non-teleological sense) invokes the idea of constant renewal and non-repetition, the tension with political language is evident. Political language restrains the continual historical impulse for renewal by offering stabilizing patterns, and it does that through constraining our conceptualizations of history logically and culturally. The range of possible interpretations of historical and spatial events is restricted to a relatively small number of dominant paradigms, continually challenged by a few secondary ones, though even those constitute only a small sample from the potential perspectives on time and space. Every now and again a new perspective emerges which involves conceptual restructuring. Then a debate may occur over whether that perspective should already have been evident in past interpretations, or whether it could only arise given a particular set of cultural circumstances. Fourth, broad theories of history may themselves be a factor affecting the configurations of political concepts. Thus, a deterministic view of history will influence the decontesting of liberty and of power, perhaps subjecting human will to laws of development and serving to reduce the 'free choice' assumed to be available. In contrast, a view of history evolving towards increasing individual rationality will affect on a time-continuum the relative weight accorded to rationality in the make-up of the core concepts. The 'from status to contract' theory of history will expand the concept of individualism and concentrate on the shifting nature of human relationships consequent on that movement. In sum, history is both a concrete framework within which meaning can be located and an abstract value-laden concept which attaches itself to an ideological formation and colours the meanings of its contiguous concepts. Winch has identified serious difficulties with the temporal dimension: 'ideas and theories are constantly developing and changing, and . . . each system of ideas, its component elements being

100 Ideological Morphology interrelated internally, has to be understood in and for itself; the combined result of which is to make systems of ideas a very unsuitable subject for broad generalizations'.3 This is too pessimistic a view. Concepts and systems of ideas can be interrelated temporally on an historical dimension as well as spatially in frozen time. The 'in and for itself of a system must include the accumulative meanings it bears, and there is no reason to suppose that those are devoid of patterns, or that generalizations about past change cannot be introduced into ideological analysis. Though diachronk analysis, as was contended in Chapter 2, can only be superimposed on syrtchronic understanding, series of synchronic systems can be assembled in such a way as to shed a strong light on diachrony. However, Winch is right in parting company with attempts at scientific generalization directed towards predicting the future developments of ideologies. (b) CONTEXTUAL HISTORY AND INTENTIONALITY

The relationship between meaning and historical context has been explored by the influential school of historical research associated in particular with Quentin Skinner. Skinner has refocused scholarly attention on the issue of authorial intention as the central task of the historian of ideas when studying a text of a political thinker or ideologist. An initial feature of Skinner's approach is that he is not overly committed to maintaining the distinction between political theory and ideology, a distinction that, as we have seen, is far less categorical than is usually maintained. As he urges: 'We can hardly claim to be concerned with the history of political theory unless we are prepared to write it as real history—that is, as the record of an actual activity, and in particular as the history of ideologies.'4 Of course, ideology is not coterminous with any system of political ideas. It may be preferable, as 1 have argued, to pose the issue as one in which any system of political thought must contain ideological elements, rather than conflate the two. But the sentiment expressed by Skinner is commendable. Skinner's approach regards political texts as a written reflection of deliberate and purposive speech-acts, and emphasizes the need 3

P. Winch, The Idea of a. Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London, 1963), 133. 4 Q. Skinner, 'Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action', Political Theory, 2 (1974), 280.

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to reconstruct the conscious intentions of the thinker within his or her social context as the prime method of making sense of an ideology or political theory. In adopting Austin's notion of the illocutionary force which attaches to utterances and iEuminates what an agent is doing in performing a speech-act, Skinner calls for historical scholarship to explain the behaviour of agents not only in the language of causation or motive, but to redescribe it on two alternative dimensions: decoding the meaning of political speech-acts in terms of the intentions of the agents, and placing those intentions firmly within the context of 'the conventional standards which are generally found to apply to such types of social action within a given situation'. Social actions, it would appear, are simply individual actions undertaken within a social context and which also conform to known instances of commonplace behaviour in a society.5 That social context contains in addition the acceptable standards of rationality employed by the culture of the agent and as such provides indispensable information about the rationality of the beliefs of the agent under consideration.6 In many ways, particularly in his emphasis on context and on the retrieval of meaning, Skinner has revitalized the nature of ideological research. Nevertheless, the heart of his enterprise diverges from the purview that an analyst of ideologies could most usefully adopt. Recently, Skinner has come out in favour of assuming the truthfulness of utterances and taking what people say at face value. He contrasts this with the social anthropologists' assignment of symbolic value to statements that purport to uphold the structure of the speaker's society.7 This stark choice is not one that the student of ideologies need make. Even if we bypass Skinner's unduly conservative characterization of structural anthropology (one could equally examine disruptive mechanisms conducive to change), there seems no reason to presume that a scholar could not accord equal respect both to 'face-value' reproduction of intent and to unconscious structural or psychological symbols that refer to further aspects of thought and conduct not apparent to the agent or the agent's society. The ostensible danger that this merely imposes the false perspective of the present-day historian is both unavoidable and unwarranted. It is unavoidable—even in the case of recovering intent—as 5

Cp. Q. Skinner, ' "Social Meaning" and the Explanation of Social Action', in J. Tully (ed.). Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 83-4, 87-8, 94. 6 Skianer, 'A Reply to my Critics', ibid. 244-5, 247. 7 Ibid. 246-7.

102 Ideological Morphology Skinner frankly acknowledges, because 'there can be no observational evidence which is not to some degree shaped by our concepts and thus by the vocabulary we use to express them'. But this argument runs counter to the reasons he uses to reject contemporary methods of explaining the behaviour of historical figures. Those unwholesome methods, asserts Skinner, 'require us to map their distinctions and the terms they used for expressing them on to the distinctions and expressions we happen to use ourselves'.8 Again, a dichotomy is posited where none is necessary. Hermeneutical perspectives have re-emphasized that we cannot help looking for what we think significant, and construing past vocabulary in terms of present language. If, as Skinner seems to do, we accept that social reality is at least in part a construct of our minds, then it is unavoidable that past realities will be reconstructed through the conceptual frameworks of following generations, however excellent the instructions bequeathed to them by their forebears. Bearing this built-in bias in mind, we can then move to approximate the usage and meanings with which words were endowed at a particular time and place. But there is quite another level on which Skinner's misgivings are unwarranted. We may deliberately wish to apply current perspectives and concerns to previous societies in order to tease out aspects of their thought and behaviour about which they could have had no way of knowing. The political theory of modem feminism is exactly such a case in point, where available facts are (re)discovered with the aid of different ideological paradigms. Skinner himself concedes that concepts not available at a particular time may later be introduced to organize empirical evidence, but does so reluctantly and incidentally.9 The point is that the two scholarly activities can coexist as equally respectable and equally valuable. Recovering intent is one facet of ideological explanation; analysis of implicit but unconscious assumptions is another. Establishing the relation of both to current theoretical interests may be a third, even though it will suffer the ephemerality of a moving target. For instance, many late nineteenth-century European liberals intended (first) to recommend the more equal redistribution of social goods; they assumed unwittingly (second) that power relationships were to be found only in the formal, and hence politically controllable, sphere of social relationships and the messages they unintentionally imparted suggest that they were for the most part unaware of the social bases of power. And what makes them (third) interesting to us is 8

Skinner, "A Reply', 250, 252.

9

Ibid. 254.

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their unusual employment of communitarian organicism with a liberal bent, a conception that is considered problematic in modern liberal theory,10 All these facets of that variant of liberal ideology merit analysis; the study of none debars exploration of the others. The more we know about an ideology, the more we can maximize the explanatory power at our disposal, and the more we can understand (a disposition inevitably located in us). There is of course another eventuality, crucial to the analyst of ideologies, that is eclipsed in Skinner's emphasis on face-value intentionality and the truth-value of individual utterances. It is the problem of the fit between the self-perception of a holder of beliefs and their actual contents. The issue at stake is not the illocutionary force of an utterance, but the subsequent intention to put a particular ideological gloss on one's own political statements, as in 'my views are those of a true socialist'. It may very well be that an intention to be counted under a particular flag is simply invalidated by the understanding of others. In the best of all possible worlds, one who calls her or himself a socialist will indeed be one. In all other worlds, a disjuncture may occur between the self-classification of a socialist and the distinguishing marks of socialist thought as understood within that individual's social environment or by other available yardsticks outside that society. For example, the forms of 'democratic socialism' practised in former communist systems present little evidence of a family resemblance with Western social democracy, and suggest that the terms may have been stretched beyond conventionally acceptable limits, or that they covered more than one concept due to different conventions developing in West and East respectively. But nor can we permit the external imposition of an ideological identity totally alien to or rejected by an individual who holds political beliefs with some modicum of rationality. It would not do merely to tell a laissez-faire libertarian that he or she is not, contrary to their own assertion, within the liberal camp. The challenge is for them to explain on what view of liberalism they justify their claim to a space within that camp and to assess this against competing interpretations of liberalism. The conundrum facing the scholar is to establish a synchronic balance between the self-definition of an individual professing to adhere to an ideological family, the understandings of other contemporaries concerning that individual's place in the family, and the interpretation by the scholar both of the concrete evidence and 10

This liberal variant will be discussed in Ch. 5.

104 Ideological Morphology of the diachronic tradition currently held to constitute that family. This threefold interplay is essential to determining the nature of any specific ideology. Meanings will therefore centrally include agents' self-interpretations/1 but cannot rest content with their uncritical acceptance. For the purpose of analysing ideologies they may well serve as the starting-point, but each instance will then have to be tested against the growing body of accumulated evidence concerning that ideology's macro-features. Just as a morphological profile of a socially prevalent ideology may identify certain rules that exclude pretenders to the faith or plain unsophisticates, an innovative individual may push forward the frontiers of an ideology to include new tenets, omit some of the old, and thus modify its ideational profile. But in each case intentionality comprises only part of the presenting features. The question of contemporary reaction leads on to the major issue of the production as well as the consumption of ideologies. In focusing on an ideology as a product, we cannot rest content with the relationship of product to producer, e.g. the reflection of Marxist class or Skinnerian author in the finished ideational article. Rather, as with the analysis of all products, we must also bring in the relationship between product and consumer. Though it may well be, as Gouldner argues, that ideological products tend to gain undesirable independence,12 it is also the case that there are two ways of recontextualizing and relocating them in their historical milieux; by means of authors' intentions and of consumers' understandings (the Marxist, who would see decontextualization as alienation, solves the problem by eliminating the ideological product altogether). Here the distinction between political ideas and political ideologies, underplayed by Skinner, gains renewed significance when we shift our attention from the creation of ideologies to their function or, when deliberately contrived, their purpose. Skinner's analysis concentrates on two features of political speech-acts: they are produced (intentionally) and they are produced by an individual (an author). The position with ideologies is somewhat different, for they certainly cannot be adequately described in those terms. First—as we have seen—though some aspects of ideologies may be intentional, others may not. Second, it would be misleading to ascribe ideologies to an individual " As J, Bohmati insists on (New Philosophy of Social Science (Oxford, 1991), 378, 107). 12 A. W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (London, 1976), 44.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 105 producer. Third, to concentrate on the production of ideologies is to overlook features which ought to attract equal interest. For unlike other sets of political ideas, two central characteristics of ideologies are their overt action-orientation and group-orientation. The action-orientation of ideologies distinguishes them by their propensity either to recommend political conduct directly or, indirectly, to make others adopt conduct-evoking thinking through the shaping of legitimate language; hence the ways in which ideologies are perceived and understood—that is, consumed—are vital to an appreciation of how they operate. The group-orientation of ideologies suggests that they are, as are all forms of language, collective constructs in their production13 and, specifically and typically, consumed by groups qua groups, thus contributing to the formulation of communal ends. Ideology, more than other kinds of political thought, is a phenomenon squarely located within group activity; a form of political discourse not only produced by groups, as might be asserted about all political thought, but consumed by significant political publics. Let us look more closely at the question of production. Are the producers of ideologies really outstanding individuals, informed by their social contexts but nevertheless intentionally and personally creating an opus of action-oriented political thinking? Are we not then continuing to debate in the mould of traditional political thought, if on a somewhat broader base, observing talented and exceptional elites in thought for the edification of the masses? Or is the production of ideologies elitist in another sense, namely, the product of cliques in positions of socio-political influence who desire to manipulate weaker groups and so further their interests? And is not a third possibility, to the contrary, to regard ideologies as forms of grass-roots political culture, focused on the political issues of the day, reflecting the widely prevalent thought processes that a specific society evolves over time, as well as those ideas that smaller groups within it generate differentially? On the first two assumptions, the act of producing ideologies is not a general attribute of human nature, but a specialism engaged in by certain individuals and groups. This makes ideologies easier to envisage as distorted or illusory, going against the grain of common human activity, as well as conspiratorial, self-seeking, and exploitative. It also suggests that they may have logical and ideationally qualitative profiles which locate them above the heads of their wider clientele. On the third assumption, however, ideologies may be 13

See the references to Levi-Strauss in. Ch. 2.

106 Ideological Morphology ubiquitous, emanating from popular reasoning and prejudice, facets of the social environment that penetrate and help determine political thought and action in general, but over which deliberate human control and design is limited. The analysis here tends to balance these competing viewpoints with some caution. Ideologies are, after all, manifestations of group behaviour, supportive or subversive of social structures and institutions. The conventional manner of organizing studies of political thought by ascribing ideas to individuals presents us with a somewhat deceptive map. To be sure, the analysis of ideologies will also be agent-based, but the individual agent per se is not the optimal unit for advancing such analysis. Where then do individuals come in, as they obviously must? Ideology-producing groups will reflect the impact of articulate and representative individuals, who may be the effective channels that give expression to more widely held beliefs, as well as adding their own imprint on what they absorb and convey. Those individuals—serving as nodal and eloquent points of ideological discourse—may offer an excellent illustration of a particular ideological position, and it is for that reason, as well as the greater accessibility of their ideas, that future chapters will harness individuals to the analysis of ideological families. Nevertheless, their articulated thoughts are meaningless without an understanding of the conceptual and ideational environments which fashion them. We have to bear in mind, all the while, the relationships between those representatives and their social and cultural surrounds. Optimally-—a task beyond the confines of this book—the investigation of ideologies ought to examine mass, or at least large-scale, social thinking, and therefore must depend on the collation of large numbers of personally expressed individual ideologies examined in a relational framework. Out of that examination the contours of ideological families will begin to emerge, not as an essentialist view but as a reflection, to the best of the analyst's interpretative ability, of discoverable ideological patterns. Here the critique of Skinner coalesces with the limitations, for the purposes of the study of 14 political ideas, set by the study of the 'great' political philosophers. Most ideologies are not the product of single individuals in the sense that modern idealism can be laid 14 It should, however, be appreciated that Skinner has contributed much to extending the scope of individuals bracketed in that category. Also, he represents a genre of historical analysis, itself a group activity. Many of the observations in this section do not relate primarily to his own work, whose subtleties rise above similar but cruder instances.

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at Hegel's door, or Bentham can be called the father of modern utilitarianism (though even then historians of ideas may wish to correct these exercises in labelling). One of the most obvious and notable exceptions, Marxism, has nevertheless acquired an existence of its own to which no individual can claim intellectual paternity, just as a group may outlast any particular member. An ideology's morphology reflects the social practices of conversation and discourse in which individuals participate with variable, and mutually shaped, input. That individual variety, as well as the multiplicity of such social practices, also accounts for the existence of extensive permutations within the dominant structural and ideational type of the ideology in question. Ultimately, these adopt identifiable patterns. Founding myths operating within ideological traditions are one such instance. Core concepts may initially emerge in a particular decontestation attached to specific perimeter notions, combinations which may function as myths over a long period of time, even side by side with later decontestations that develop alongside the myths. The role of the founding fathers and of the US Constitution in current American ideologies is a pertinent example. Certain ideas about the Constitution, such as those attached to the protection of life, liberty, and property under due process of law, survive and even contradict the particular and individual forms its interpretation currently takes. While the study of ideology has a sociological sweep, potentially (if not actually, for reasons of manageability) encompassing in its grasp all who produce or consume it, accepting the product itself as worthy of analysis and having a political function irrespective of its content, the study of political philosophy identifies its population as those individuals who uphold standards of substantive ethical value and logical argumentation. Political philosophers, when examined in a historical context, are usually singled out as paragons rather than guides to mass political action. The single case needs no further justification as a subject of study, but the configuration of ideas of the chosen philosopher may tell us little about the way a society puts its political ideas to work. Indeed, pluralism of structure is often regarded as a flaw in the coherence of a philosophical argument, whereas in the case of an ideology it may, by contrast, reflect the complexity of culling together and co-ordinating a social outlook from a multitude of individual positions. It has of course become a truism, and one of which Skinner is well aware, that language makes sense only as a group activity. Occasionally, Skinner nods in the direction of a holistic view of

108 Ideological Morphology beliefs as part of a network and refers to Austin's 'total speech-act situation'.15 That very important point raises issues of system and interdependence which we have discussed in earlier chapters; Skinner, however, does not cultivate them further. His individualist bias overemphasizes the extent to which the intentionality of authors is a satisfactory means of accessing to the meaning of texts and speech acts. Even when we consider the individual political thinker, we need to match the notion of intentionality with the paraEel notion of the comprehension of a political utterance. There are two reasons for this. First, even intentions do not hang in a vacuum. What authors mean to say and do in a speech-act is to a large extent directed by the available meanings with which political language is endowed in their thought-environment and in their immediate social context. All producers of political language are also consumers of such language, and their comprehension both of words and of concepts—a comprehension mediated by accepted social meanings—is a major clue to the reproduction of political language in which they engage. To acknowledge that even intentional speech-acts embrace unconscious or semi-conscious levels of meaning is to recognize that the author serves among others as a conduit of cultural and linguistic codes that he or she consumes and then transmits further. Students of linguistics have been especially anxious to make this point: language has structural properties which diminish the autonomy and centrality of the subject; words and concepts are intermeshed. Intentions are hence themselves moulded in part by the language at the disposal of the author, for we cannot intend something that is impossible to conceptualize and to endow with linguistic form. Language— a social product—thus constrains the political ideas theorists can express even before we consider the further constraints of their specific culture; moreover, linguists certainly do not insist that the structural properties of language must be known to its users. Skinner accepts that, while there cannot be unintended illocutionary acts, there can well be unintended illocutionary force, and recognizes16 Ricoeur's notion of the surplus of meaning embedded in a text. But that acknowledgement needs to be accompanied by a 15 16

Skinner, 'A Reply', in Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context, 248, 274-5. Ibid, 266,272. Ricoeur interprets that surplus as the meaning over and above the literal meaning of a metaphorical utterance (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 55). However, the notion of a surplus may also apply to the multiplicity of meanings over any given meaning, whether that intended by the producer or understood by the consumer of the utterance, as well as to non-metaphorical utterances, and it will be employed here in that sense.

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discussion of the nature of, and reasons for, that surplus of meaning, and by the proportionate analytical treatment of the author in the twofold role of a consumer of ideologies and a member of an ideology-producing group. Second, looking beyond intention, texts are not only composed but also read. When we examine the impact of a set of political ideas on both intended and unintended hearers and readers, we do not engage in the activity of reconstructing the author's intention—an activity meant to do justice to the text as the author's creation, but in the activity of reconstructing the comprehension of the idea-audience, an activity meant to do justice to the text as a source of ideational shaping and political idea-related conduct. This is all the more so in the case of ideologies. Inasmuch as ideologies are levers of social action, the key to any scholarly analysis of their influence and an important component of their meaning lies in the manner the groups, to whom they are directed, comprehend the political concepts which fashion them. Moreover, inasmuch as many ideologies are, at least in part, disseminated and consumed unconsciously, the role of 'active' intentionality diminishes in relation to that of 'passive' comprehension. We have devoted space to Skinner as a particularly eminent and sophisticated exponent of the methodology of the history of ideas. But the intriguing nature of ideology derives from the sustenance it gathers from three separate, if overlapping disciplines: the history of political ideas, political philosophy, and political theory. This study attempts to show the need for the integration or, at least, mutual fertilization of those three perspectives so that a coherent and useful conception of ideology with analytical and explanatory power may emerge. Skinner's approach to the history of ideas has properly supplanted many older versions, especially those that have artificially created abstracted traditions, detached from time- and space-bound contexts and meanings. Nevertheless, the most common version of the history of ideas remains the establishing of an apostolic succession, a chain of discourse situated in some grand historical continuum, in which the thoughts of 'great thinkers' are expounded and related to each other. The result is a virtually closed list, difficult to join and from which it is almost impossible to be struck off. Academic traditions, with their search for standards of excellence that need to be emulated and repeated, have contributed to the conservative nature of such lists. More insidious than that conservatism are the biases that this predominant perspective has implanted into the practice of the history of political ideas. Whig views of history emerge which

110 Ideological Morphology mistakenly locate a movement from, say, Hobbes through Locke, Rousseau, and Mill towards more sophisticated notions of liberty, equating a chronology of thinkers with the progress of human thought. At worst, ideas attain a separate existence, with 'great thinkers' recruited as and when needed to inject those ideas with pace and direction, while history is replaced by pseudo-history and severed, as Skinner indeed observes, from context. Moreover, the role of certain individuals is central to this tradition of enquiry, and their impact has tended to be exaggerated in a number of ways. First, though such influence is immense within the confines of university curricula it must not be confused with the 'real-world' influence of individuals in formulating and disseminating political ideas that have operational ideological value. Hobbes is a case in point. Second, it is important to distinguish between individuals as convenient tags for ideational and ideological movements (Mill frequently appears as the representative of nineteenth-century liberalism) and between such individuals as members of groups, and drawing from existing pools of ideas, without which they could neither form nor spread their theories. Third, individuals may often be credited with influence for which they cannot be held responsible. T. H. Green, for instance, has frequently and speciously been hailed as a major contributor to welfare-state ideology. Even his immediate disciples attributed to him political influence that his ideas, in closer analysis, do not corroborate;17 moreover, empirical evidence of welfare-state thinking demonstrates many conceptual constructs not associated with British Idealism. Nevertheless, there are two areas where Skinner has overstated his case. First, the role of tradition cannot be discounted altogether, as Skinner is wont to do. Inasmuch as people come to attach importance to reified traditions, however erroneously conceived the latter are, they become factors in the formation of human thought and in the explanation of human behaviour. It is a "fact that many political thinkers refer to traditions of thought and attempt to place themselves within such frameworks. The frequent reference by later liberals and socialists to J. S. Mill's work illustrates the power of the idea of a (liberal) tradition as a binding image on the thought of other theorists. The power of Marxist theory, to take another example, even though parts of it are unsubstantiated and others unfalsifiable, lies in its persuasiveness and in 17 For some of these arguments see M, Freeden, 'The Stranger at the Feast; Ideology and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century Britain', Twentieth Century British History, I (1990), esp. 17-20,

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its perception as intellectually correct and emotionally inspiring by large numbers of individuals, who consequently desire to rally under that banner. To explain later variants of those theories within the framework of developmental sequences superimposed by their subsequent formulators is itself to gain considerable insight into their modes of thinking. Second, Skinner's hostility to the study of 'the "idea" itself as a "unit"'18 does not do justice to the different ways in which an idea unit may be handled.19 After all, one cannot just disregard the plausible contention that the history of (political) ideas should be about ideas. To discuss ideas is not tantamount to insisting that they have a life of their own, and it is not therefore necessary to adopt some of the excesses of Idealism or to offend against historical canons. For when those ideas are located within ideologies and their existence is empirically ascertained to relate to concrete groups in specific historical situations, much of the force of the old criticisms of the history of ideas as a discipline is dissipated. Empirical and contextual research, when focusing on the nature and role of ideologies, may still profitably identify the political idea, or more specifically, the political concept, as the central unit of analysis, without sacrificing academic respectability, offending the related disciplines of history and philosophy, or, most importantly, forfeiting the interest and novelty of approach that research and analysis should provide.

(c) IDEOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS

The insights of hermeneutical approaches afford another set of perspectives on the problems of meaning. Within that school, however, divergent emphases have different implications for ideological analysis. Ricoeur in particular has been instrumental in associating that type of interpretation with the study of ideologies. He, too, accepts that the polysemy of words is the essential problem confronting the understanding of ideas and highlights 'the selective role of contexts for determining the current value which 18 Q. Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', History and Theory, 8 (1969), 35. ** This in itself is a legacy of Lovejoy's unit-idea which suffered from similar fixity. See A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 3; and M. Richter, 'Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas', Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), esp. 260-2,

112 Ideological Morphology words assume in a determinate message'.20 For Ricoeur, the challenge of hermeneutics is to recognize the relatively unequivocal message the speaker has generated from the polysemic basis of the present lexicon. But the handling of the issue is not conducted on the micro-level of morphological scrutiny preferred here. Rather, by alighting on a unit identified as a 'text', Ricoeur diverts the exploration of ideologies into a somewhat narrow channel. The text is approached as a block of meaning, to be absorbed in toto, and furthermore, a block capable of autonomous existence. The hermeneutic challenge is to overcome the distanciation between text and understanding that is the consequence of the threefold liquidation' of the author, socio-cultural decontextualization, and the removal of the original addressee. Because a text is subject, as Ricoeur sees it, to 'an unlimited series of readings', the text is emancipated from its initial environment and recontextualized through multifarious acts of reading.21 The conclusion, it should be observed, is sharply delimited from the Skirmerite enterprise, for Ricoeur (building on Dilthey and Schleiermacher) regards this breakthrough in comprehension not as enabling one 'to discover an intention hidden behind the text but to unfold a world in front of it'—to utilize the potential embedded in the text in order to refashion oneself through these externally induced imaginative variations, and to develop the path of thought opened up by the text.22 Ricoeur rejects the Diltheyan objective of understanding the author 'better than he understands himself'.23 If ideological analysis were to proceed simply by replacing self-knowledge with the external decoding of references assumed to be unknown to their authors, that method would indeed be incomplete. Self-definition, as argued earlier, must coalesce with empirically ascertainable criteria imposed by the analyst. Nor should the discovery of the unconscious as a primary factor in linguistic expression degrade in any way the status of the conscious. But there are problems with Ricoeur's position. The text as 'a worldless and authorless object'24 does not correspond directly to an ideological system for at least the following two reasons. 20 P, Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J, B, Thompson (Cambridge, 1981), 44. 21 Ibid. 91. 22 Ibid. 94, 162. 23 Quoted in ibid. 151. See also H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, 1979), 263. 24 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 152.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 113 First, ideologies are by their very nature oriented to a particular political and social situation, even if not the one in which they first saw the light of day. Consumers of an ideology are unable to see it as a detached text because they will attribute to it social worlds and secondary authors, however unreal or inaccurate those attributions may be. Ideologies, unlike texts, are already absorbed as partially decontested packages. They are conveyed and consumed by groups whose perceptions may impose on those ideologies new rules of interpretation, which in turn have to be integrated into inherited rules of interpretation embedded in existing ideological patterns. Ideologies are not in themselves the commencement of the process of interpretation but are positioned at an advanced point in that circular process. No reader is in that sense 'free' to do what she or he will because of the cultural constraints operating on ideological interpretation, and because ideologies have groups both as their subjects and objects. Second, the viewing of the text as a unalterable palimpsest detaches it from the mutational underpinning which, as we have argued, is an important constituent of all ideologies. It would deny the malleability and fluidity of internal relationships which characterize each ideological family. Whereas the text as a pattern of words remains an objective constant, all ideologies—because they are constructed from many texts—are in a continuous process of restatement. Even if broad patterns remain identifiable and change imperceptibly over relatively long periods, the forcing of an ideology into a text, or single list of tenets, will constitute an arbitrary viewing of its temporal totality. The moment of interpretation, while located in time, is also a function of time, a product of the temporal transmission of meaning. This point is not lost on another major theorist of hermeneutics, Gadamer, though he encounters difficulties of the opposite nature. Moving away from epistemology and back to questions of ontology, Gadamer poses the question: 'what is the mode of being of that being who exists only in understanding?'25 Answering that in a famous phrase, Gadamer refers to 'the conversation that we ourselves are'.26 Significantly, Gadamer sets understanding in a public rather than a private framework, a framework in which individuals are assimilated by the historical process, rather than pre-tnterpreting it. Here is a tool that can apparently be applied to ideological analysis, with its own emphasis on the public political domain. Gadamer's preoccupation with the historical dimension 25

Quoted in ibid. 54.

26

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 340.

114 Ideological Morphology is central to his work. Contrary to the Skinnerite discomfort with tradition, as more often than not a reified artificiality superimposed on the historical process, Gadamer sees human beings as standing within traditions as part of themselves. The essence of understanding involves placing oneself within a tradition. He rejects that historical method which demands a release from the prejudices of the scholar in order to experience correctly a historical moment, just as he rejects the necessity of historical distance as a precondition of understanding if it is merely in order to quench any interest qua27involvement the historian may have in the object of investigation, Gadamer's conception of understanding is driven by the past, however modified that heritage becomes. He specifically singles out as constraints on thinking those 'prejudices and fore-meanings' given within the common tradition that binds interpreter and object of interpretation. Whereas the morphological approach proposed in these pages contends that meaning is to a considerable extent a function of the vast combination of options among the concepts constituting an ideology, Gadamer concentrates instead on the infinite variations of meaning that ensue from the different temporal points from which the interpreted text is observed. Because we ourselves are constituted by the very traditions in which we operate and think, we will share fundamental prejudices with those traditions. But the distance in time is not something that has to be overcome, as many modern contextual historians believe. As Gadamer puts it, 'it is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition' which lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully'. Eventually two horizons appear, the one the horizon of the enquirer and the other that of the particular historical situation in which the enquirer places him or herself. These two will of necessity fuse, though the end-product changes continuously, and the tension between the two horizons remains a chief factor in the process of understanding. Moreover, although the possibility of truth in understanding is entertained, 'the discovery of the true meaning of a text or28 a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process'. Yet, as we have just seen with respect to Skinner, the question of tradition is a complex one. Traditions may be employed by ideological actors as a metahistorical device, while the scholar is engaged in uncovering empirically connected continuities, as well as discontinuities, of a different nature. Concrete traditions are 27

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 245, 250, 258, 251, 265.

2S

Ibid. 262-5.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 115 often far more fragmented series of highlighted periods and unexplored spaces that ideologies cement together. The choice of cement may itself become central to the reconstructive hermeneutical enterprise. That exercise of choice, however, is pivotal to the analysis of ideologies, while at the same time it must strike a note of caution for the scholar attempting to emulate ideological practice rather than retaining an awareness of the possible rigidity and artificiality of frameworks of tradition. What can ideological analysis glean from hermeneutics, while detaching itself from the overriding but restrictive image of the fixed text that the latter intellectual persuasion adopts? Whereas in the hermeneutic project the text is constant and the interpretations infinite, some analysts of ideology reverse this position only too frequently. The 'text' is fluid, voiced as it is by many creators within a given family, whereas the interpretation is frequently linked to a particular temporal manifestation of an ideology, and attempts to supply a durable, if not quite finite, understanding and construct an ideological profile. This temporal arbitrariness is faced with the continuous historical flow of an ideology, but there are mitigating circumstances that may justify it, and not all of those relate to the impossibility of the task or the flawed perspectives and ability of the investigator. Indeed, particular historical moments—as distinct from all possible ones—may have had a special significance in determining the dominant meanings of the political concepts comprising an ideology. Hermeneutics has three features to offer the student of ideologies. First, it makes conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that a more balanced evaluation of a text becomes possible. That eschews the difficulty of being trapped in the assumptions that the text hands down to us, and is essential to the 'decoding' aspect of ideological analysis. Gadamer rightly stresses that 'we cannot avoid thinking about that which was unquestionably accepted, and hence not thought about, by an author, and bringing it into the openness of the question'. This carries us beyond intentionality towards another level of interpretation that must characterize the study of ideologies. The hermeneutic position contra the Marxist view of ideology reinforces the contention in Chapter 1 that ideological unconsciousness in transmitting messages is not necessarily false consciousness. The tension between intentionality and unintentionality must be seen as a permanent feature in a world of multiple meanings, only a few of which the author can master, and only a few of which any particular interpreter or consumer can learn. Meaning will always run

116 Ideological Morphology ahead of the synchronic study of Language, and this very indeterminacy is also the key to human choice. Second, this issue of choice is what Gadamer means by asserting that 'the essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities'. The recognition of the range and plasticity of both experience and understanding is central to our attempts at gaining knowledge. From this viewpoint the existence of ideologies is not a repressive weight on the human mind, as it is so often portrayed, but a manifestation of the infinite variety of the political imagination. Third, the tentativeness of understanding is underlined by a consciousness of its own historicity. History is part of the process of understanding.29 Understanding is thus always interpretation, and has no constant points of reference. Variations exist between Gadamer's and Ricoeur's position over the relative capacity of the interpreter to cast off tihe shackles of history. Ricoeur hopes for a future-directed emancipation from the text,30 whereas Gadamer is backward-looking and cumulative in his perspective. In addition, Ricoeur sees the consequence of the hermeneutical method as personally beneficial to the interpreter as an actor in the historical process. He talks about a highly personalized herrneneutic experience, culminating in 'a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds which interpretation unfolds'.31 This may well be the case but, as has been noted, ideological analysis is also a scholarly activity that sees the critical observer as supplying reflective and evaluative knowledge which is distinct from the knowledge he or she will bring to bear as a producer of ideologies. The hermeneutical enterprise tends to overemphasize the situating of the analyst in the midst of the material studied, at the expense of those features of the material that may be reasonably detached from the subjectivism of a particular observer. The view of ideological analysis pursued here differs slightly from both of these standpoints. The phenomena of both context and subjectivism need to be engaged; neither should obscure the other. We must be more sanguine about the possibility, indeed importance, of detecting patterns of political thought, however constrained by the horizons of our own interpretative vision, and the possibility—to approximate Mannheim's terms—of attaining relative generalizations (if not relative truths), assertions of meaning that are an admixture of factual knowledge and enlightened, deliberative, cultural understandings. 29 30

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 337, 266, 268-9, 31 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 94, 99. Ibid. 94.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 117 Moreover, instead of contending with a fixed text, an unaltered configuration of words, we ought to be thinking in terms of the structural nature of the ideological 'text' as a system of flexibly related ideas, open not only to constant reinterpretation but, because ideologies are formed through group activity, to constant restatement by their authors at any particular place and time. In this manner we may also avoid the accusations of built-in conservatism to which some varieties of hermeneutics have been prey. At the same time, care is required not to fall into another hermeneutical trap, namely, an exaggerated deconstruction of the text, in the sense of looking past the text (for instance to power structures), rather than looking more closely at the text. (d) THE CONTRIBUTION OF BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE

German historians, some of whom are disciples of Gadamer, have developed a fertile perspective on social and political concepts that is pertinent to the issues we have examined. From their debates has emerged the school of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) whose foremost proponent is Reinhart Koseileck, Starting from the hermeneutic acceptance of the plurality of meanings embodied in concepts, Koseileck has ably identified the nature of socio-political conflict as including centrally a 'struggle over the "correct" concepts'.32 This insight corresponds to the thesis articulated above, namely, that the decontesting of political concepts performed by an ideology is an attempt to legitimate a preferred political order by controlling the meaning of key political words. Koselleck's conception of a concept includes ambiguity as a definitional property and, in parallel, suggests that concepts are concentrations of several substantive meanings—unlike words, which can become unambiguous. The similarities between this analysis and Gallic's 'essentially contested concepts' is all the more striking in view of the apparently separate paths trodden by the British philosopher and the hermeneutic persuasion; and the benefits of combining the two all the more obvious when the differential inputs of these historical and philosophical perspectives are evaluated. Begriffsgeschichte is not an academic discipline identical to that of the analysis of ideologies as proposed in these pages, but it can support the latter usefully. In particular, it strives for recognition as an autonomous branch of study, a claim we have made for the 32

R. Koseileck, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 77-8.

118 Ideological Morphology analysis of ideologies. Its formulators have intended it as an instrument of historical inquiry, a further means of exploring change and of illuminating social history, especially the latter's structures and conflicts. It does so, Gadamer-like, by fusing present and past understandings of conceptual usage, so that the mutating meanings of concepts serve as a window through which to observe and understand diverse socio-historical data. This parallels the world of analysing ideologies as a key to comprehending the universe of political ideas created by the human mind, and the interacting of that universe with the concrete world. Koselleck develops Gadamer's notion of horizons by identifying a horizon of expectations, linking expectation with experience. Experience is a cumulative horizon, 'present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered'. Expectation permits the projection of changing horizons on to the future, for 'cultivated expectations can be revised'. Moreover, expectations can be retrospective in rereading the past: 'This is the temporal structure of experience and without retroactive expectation it cannot be accumulated.'33 Koselleck's analysis could benefit from two further categories. Horizons are not only accumulative but diminishing, as some meanings are lost or abandoned. Moreover, they may be false horizons, as when current thinkers attempt to project an ideology into a framework not backed up by its cumulative horizons. The relationship of libertarianism to liberalism, to be examined in Chapter 7, is one such possibility. The analysis of ideologies should not primarily be attuned to the separating of the horizons themselves, though they are important features of historical thinking, but to their impact on the morphology of political thinking. Begriffsgeschichte addresses the defects of the older traditions of the history of political thought by reconstructing the meanings of concepts, not in isolated context, but over a temporal sequence. The analysis of ideologies may well deploy this approach among others it chooses to use, but its purpose is different; to establish the reaches and richness of the variability of political thought, and to detail both the possibilities and the constraints such variability projects on political action. H Koselleck has defined Begriffsgeschichte as dealing 'with the convergence of concept and history',34 the analysis of ideologies is the arena of the convergence of concept and political theory, not however as stipulative model but within a timeand space-bound setting. We tend to talk of interrelationships 33

R, Koselleck, Futures Past, 270-5,

M

Ibid. 85.

Applying; The Contexts of Meaning 119 between thought and phenomenon or object, and rightly so. But the different disciplines that acknowledge that systemic interdependence may nevertheless create an artificial dominant partner through accentuating their own perspectives, so that the convergence is not entirely symmetrical. Systemic interdependence is a two-way street, but it may be observed from different ends of the thoroughfare. In analysing ideologies, history, place, culture, and morphology feed political theory, though they may mould human conduct and institutions more generally as well. In Begriffsgeschichte, political concepts serve the comprehension of history, though they may also be a factor within history. Finally, Koselleck has contributed instructively to our understanding of the relationship between concepts and ideologies. The ambitious undertaking embarked upon by him and his colleagues may be designed, as Richter notes, not only to consider ideologies historically, but to provide the tools for their identification and uses.35 Moreover, the school's reliance on a heterogeneous range of source materials is particularly conducive to ideological research. It includes major thinkers from all fields that create socially oriented discourse, as well as the press, pamphlets, and official publications.36 That method is in stark contradistinction to the concentration of philosophers and some historians of ideas solely on 'high-quality thinkers', a practice both restrictive and elitist from the viewpoint of ideological analysis. Koselleck has usefully distinguished between semasiological and onomasiological dimensions of concepts, thus returning us to the methodological problems aired in previous chapters. Just as one word may refer to more than one concept, so a concept can be expressed through a variety of words. This parallels the question of ideological self-definition versus the location of an utterance within an ideological family by the scholar. If, for example, an individual uses different words such as 'claim', 'entitlement', 'duty towards', or more problematically, the German 'Recht', can these terms be placed unequivocally within the realm of rights-discourse? The heuristic challenge becomes that of deciding when a particular concept is being used at a different time or place, a judgement that must in part be 35

M, Richter, 'Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte) and Political Theory' Political Theory, 14 (1986), 632. 36 See M, Richter, 'Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas', Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 253. However, even the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe has been criticized as too elitist by other historians of the genre: 'To write the history of concepts in terms of major authors is... unacceptable as an empirical description of what different strata were in fact thinking' (p. 256).

120 Ideological Morphology entrusted to the scholar, relying heavily on different synchronic consumption-patterns of those ideas. Koselleck has also drawn attention to an historical development of socio-political concepts— their evolution from concrete to more abstract referents and consequently to greater open-endedness.37 If we accept that analysis, those concepts will be decontestable on more variegated levels of meaning and therefore more amenable to multiple ideological usage, while concurrently more dependent on the development of perimeter concepts and ideas that link them to the here and now. The past is undoubtedly a crucial generator of understanding for, as we have noted, history interpellates ideology on a number of dimensions. But the Saussurian distinction between synchronic and diachronic perspectives is necessary in order to maximize our interpretative ability. Koselleck is a rare instance of a historian acknowledging the need to alternate between the two, for diachrony 'scientifically defines anew the registration of the past meanings of words'.38 This alternation is especially important to the study of ideologies because the grand ideological families such as liberalism inhabit temporal as well as spatial fields—ideational traditions—from which they draw their layers of meaning. For similar reasons, but also because of the contemporary focus of much political research,39 the analysis of ideologies must utilize a comparative dimension; indeed, a resort to such analysis is both dictated by the requirements of scholarly method and enabled through the large number of conceptual combinations available. The extreme position which, though not incorrect, is unwieldy, is to argue that there are as many examples of ideological schemes as there are people who enunciate them. That would certainly supply enough material for comparative analysis. Even if we sensibly reduce those to more inclusive profiles, as we inevitably have to, there are still many variants within each ideological family and between families. The comparative analysis of ideologies is not plagued by some of the practical restrictions operating on political science, with a limited number of existing regimes or political systems to be compared. The objection that some samples available for comparative 37 Richter, 'Conceptual History', 617, commenting on Koselleck's introduction to O. Brunner, W, Conze, and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtlicke-Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1972-%). 38 Koselleck, Futures Past, 80, 39 The constant need to refer to foci of current fashionable scholarship is exaggerated, especially among scholars who feel obligated to link up their various research interests to what is termed, in Ch. 6, American philosophical liberalism.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 121 politics are too small to be significant is irrelevant within the rich universe of ideological variation. Beyond that, the comparative method must be grafted on to the insights we can glean from hermeneutics because, despite the diachronk leanings of the latter, similarities among cultures do exist, so that we are not comparing apples with oranges. Although, as argued in Chapter 2, logical constraints are subordinate to the cultural choice of logical branch within a mature tree, some logical attributes will be shared among different ideologies. Finally, the shared morphological characteristics of ideologies identified earlier are themselves independent of history, even if the contents of these formations are not, and this constitutes an important element in understanding ideologies. As Koselleck has observed more generally: 'Concepts do not only teach us the uniqueness of past meanings but also contain the structural possibilities, treat the concatenations of difference, which are not detectable in the historical flow of events.'40 Problems concerning the production and consumption of ideologies are also insufficiently addressed by hermeneutical arguments. Whereas herrneneutics is, for mainly incidental reasons, concerned with the intellectual creations of past individuals, ideology is a group product. That is why the text of an ideological family, or tradition, is never truly available, because the various statements of the contributors to that ideological profile make up a fluctuating mass of overlapping but non-identical arrangements. True, from time to time a text is artificially fashioned out of this fermenting entity: declarations of rights are typical instances of frozen group ideologies but, no less typically, they demand immediate defreezing in the form of interpretative restatements from the later bearers of ideological torches. It is precisely because liberal ideologies permit the political concepts which comprise them to be open to plural (though not to all) interpretations as a matter of principle, so that they are not rigidly interlocked but capable of modifiable configurations within a generously defined rubric, that the strait-jacketing role of constitutions is bound to create strains. Conversely, it is the case that some ideologies, in particular totalitarian ones, produce a 'text' that is monolithically superimposed on their consumers, so that an artificial inflexibility acts as an oversimplified representation of an ideational reality, or even as a scheme that flies in the face of empirical evidence. In those instances it may be necessary to establish a dual level of ideological activity, for beneath the formal rigid decontestations there may be an unofficial ideological *' Koselleck, Futures Past, 90.

122 Ideological Morphology system emanating from groups beyond the control of the selfappointed ideologues,41 Here the tension arises because the official ideology cannot bend with changes in time and perception— cannot integrate a growing mass of perimeter concepts—and is thus more liable to crack. Change is not only built into the diverse historical perspectives that hermeneutics applies to a past event, but into the multiple meanings injected by a host of contemporaneous ideological producers when structuring what they believe, or claim, to be the same ideology. Ideological change is hence not merely the result of a reaction to externally induced socio-economic events, but an internal property of ideological morphology itself. It is a function not of the historical process but of the multiple subjective units of perspective, the separate individual consciousnesses, that combine to form an ideology-producing group at any point in time, and the consequent minor shifts that result from switching from one exponent of the creed to another. In order, for example, to ascertain the dominant ideology of the British Labour party at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis, any sampling of opinion on which we choose to base our analysis will be composed of variations round a theme that include party spokesmen, the Labour press, and grass-roots Labour opinion. While we can recognize the prevalent 'group' profile, it will be both practically impossible and methodologically erroneous to pin that profile down accurately. Equally important, because the analysis of ideologies must highlight ideology as product, the effect of ideologies on their consumers is an important issue that needs recontextualization and historical location. While we are greatly indebted to hermeneutics for refocusing our attention on the triple relationship between author, product, and consumer which, as has been argued above, offers a vital viewpoint on the nature of ideologies, there is a clear difference of emphasis. The consumer of ideologies is not the isolated hermeneutical interpreter-cum-scholar but the group of contemporaries to whom the ideology is either consciously addressed or who stand within earshot and assimilate its messages. Here is yet another ground for summoning up a synchronic pattern of conflicting interpretations, no less significant than the diachronic understanding preached by advocates of hermeneutics. It is also a peculiar synchronic view, emphasizing not, as Koselleck does, the singularity of the situational context but the plurality of ideological 41

On an attempt to argue this sec M. Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London, 1976), who distinguishes between fundamental and operative ideology.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 123 voices. For all the above reasons, the products themselves—the concrete ideologies—-eventually gain some conceptual independence from those who create them to begin with, just as their study requires autonomous status. (e) COMPETING VIEWPOINTS AND THE PATH TO INTEGRATION

Concrete ideologies are the creation of three different groupings: professional political thinkers, political organizations such as parties and interest groups, and mass populations that entertain politico-cultural assumptions which percolate into more specific receptacles of political ideas. All three demand disparate modes of analysis and their input into the ideology under discussion will differ too. Central to this venture is the shift in perspective from regarding political philosophers and theorists as 'first-order' providers of normative thought-systems which cast a critical light on human political activity, to significant and salient suppliers of ideological interpretations and recommendations which societies are urged to adopt, and which they can plunder at will. Sometimes the stature of such philosopher-ideologists is so prominent that they become responsible for a disproportionate portion, qualitatively speaking, of the ideology in question. The discussion of the political ideas of those individuals—a Marx or a Mill—may be central to an exploration of the ideology with which they are associated—socialism or liberalism. It cannot, however, substitute for the wider purview of the group that sustained such individuals, that amplified their views, and that reinterpreted their theories. Nor is it always the case that the individuals who loom large in the philosophical tradition are those on whom the analyst of ideologies should concentrate. Alone, J. S. Mill is hardly representative of nineteenth-century British liberalism, because of the unusually high quality of his arguments, as well as their relative distance from some of the concrete issues that exercised liberals at the time. It is, of course, equally true that later liberals came to see Mill as pivotal to the liberal tradition and that their interpretation of his role as liberal thinker must be given due recognition in their own ideological utterances. Those competing viewpoints must guide the analyst of ideologies, attempting a threefold balancing of the individual gifted with outstanding ideological creativity, the groups that nourished and supported that individual and from which he or she drew, and

124 Ideological Morphology the later ideological producers who used their multiple interpretations of that individual's opus to spice their own ideational brew. To focus on one or the other is also to adopt different nuances of methodology: to grapple with complex arguments and their impact on fundamental political questions, to synthesize or organize the patterns of broader group debate and their role in formulating the parameters of political issues, to give due consideration to the wider beliefs of prevailing political cultures, and to include as potential candidates for investigation the entire gamut of individuals who give vent to political thinking, up to the point where their political understanding recedes into practical insignificance. It also means to shift between individual and group as the one or the other provides a more useful angle of insight, while acknowledging that the two are inseparable. For the above reasons, a commitment to the search for a total theory of ideology, overarching and employing macro-models, as is prevalent in some textbook approaches, is not necessarily a research paradigm guaranteed to optimize understanding. It is no coincidence that little attempt has been made in recent times to articulate a parallel general theory of the counterpart of ideology, political philosophy. In an area as complex and as indeterminate as human political thinking, it may be more appropriate to develop explanations for thought-patterns on different levels, multiperspectival as well as multi-causal. Our goal is, after all, the maximizing of understanding, which may best be served by a plurality of viewpoints, by an eclectic resort to complementary theories, and by sifting through evidence from any source deemed useful. (/} STRUCTURE AND MORPHOLOGY

The above discussion leads in more than one way to a reconsideration of the relationship between ideological morphology and the insights of structural anthropology. It needs emphasizing that the approach proffered here is not yet another offering on the altar of what is commonly known as structuralism, or the anthropological variant of structuralism-functionalism. Discrepancies exist which are at least as significant as convergences. Specifically, structural anthropologists present language as a collective construct, which reinforces our perception of ideology as a group product. But they do so in a manner that contrasts with many propositions that the proper analysis of ideologies should entertain. Despite our stress on decoding and unintentionality, ideologies are to a

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 125 significant extent a conscious act of creation. Human agency appears in two forms. First, ideologies will frequently include the deliberate formation of new conceptual patterns, and their study must draw out the plasticity of these configurations. The anthropologist concentrates on myths as unconscious 'givens'; the student of ideologies recognizes the role of innovators, reformers, or manipulators and allows for ideology, unlike myth, also to be an agent of change. Second, the more open ideologies offer the option of internal choice among conceptual decontestations. Levi-Strauss, moreover, is keen to distinguish between myth and objective reality and subsumes ideology under the first category. In contrast, the intellectual and emotional activity of shaping both myths and ideologies preoccupies the analyst of ideologies; that activity is in itself a reality demanding scholarly attention. As the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty observed, ideologies are existential, neither ideal nor false, and as such they reflect some truth about their society.42 Specifically, they provide some information about the nature of political thought as an aspect of human conduct. Moreover, their interface with the external world is not a given, but the focus of analysis. My preference for 'morphology' over 'structure' as a term that characterizes the internal ideational arrangements of an ideology stems from the broad connotations of structure in recent scholarship and a desire not to associate with any particular stream. Psychologists who talk about ideologies as sets of structures sometimes allude to styles or types of perceptional or attitudinal responses.43 But these refer to attributes of ideologists—people thinking ideologically—rather than attributes of the product itself. They offer explanations, on cognitive and emotional levels, for why individuals decontest political concepts in particular ways, not what the decontestation itself amounts to, and what it means in terms of the organization of political ideas themselves. Structure has already been used as an organizing device for the analysis of ideologies, but mainly to indicate their macro-systemic properties44 rather than offer a micro-morphology of internal relationships. A current textbook identifies the structure of ideology as composed of 'philosophy, program and propaganda'.45 These themes do indeed run through ideological thought, but as attributes 42 D. Coole, 'Phenomenology and Ideology in the Work of Merleau-Ponty', in N. O'Sullivan (ed.), The Structure of Modern Ideology (Aldershot, 1989), 137, 140-1. 43 See L. B. Brown, Ideology (Harmondsworth, 1973), 170-80. 44 See e.g. the valuable collection of essays, N. O'Sullivan (ed.), Structure. 45 M. N. Hagopian, Ideals and Ideologies of Modern Politics (New York, 1985), 4-7.

126 Ideological Morphology of presentation and discourse rather than conceptual structure. Indeed, the genre known as discourse analysis offers a contentanalysis of ideologies quite distinct from that required by the adoption of morphological perspectives. Discourse analysis attempts, among others, to identify the idiom and social connotations of key turns of phrase, of metaphor and sentence construction, even of emotional implications of tone. In particular, as with Foucault, it emphasizes the power aspect of such discourse, thus reclaiming the concept of ideology for the broadly Marxisant approach. The content-analysis employed here is rather a function of the constrained interlinkages among political concepts and regards political discourse as shaped by such constraints, which cannot be reduced to power relationships. An alternative approach in existing literature is to talk of a grammar of ideology, where the grammar represents not a linguistic set of rules, but a set of rules in general. This can be an instructive and fruitful perspective on ideological style. As Manning has put it, 'all ideologies play the same language game of persuasion, but they each play it with a different vocabulary'.46 At its most fundamental level, a grammar is a type of combination of words, not of ideas, and its intellectual affinity is far closer to linguistics than to ideological analysis. But many students of ideological grammar go further. They inform us that ideologies are one of many types of human verbal expression and proceed to detail what the type is. The observed regularities are presented as being of an Elocutionary and perlocutionary nature. However, a grammar in that sense refers to the methods and patterns by which human beings deliver certain political ideas, without telling us much about how these ideas bear specific properties as a consequence of being combinations of political concepts. Although ideologies frequently have a 'grammar of prescription'47 (not, however, if unconsciously held), there are morphological grounds, related to the constraints on decontesting political concepts, that account for the feasibility of prescription. Under conditions of prescription conceptual configurations are forged which facilitate and prioritize specified routes between core and peripheral concepts. Susser's sophisticated discussion of ideological grammar has attempted to identify the rules of discourse that typify ideological speakers. For him, too, structure refers to the general sense of recurring patterns of verbal behaviour, but in a manner distinct from the morphological approach adopted here. The grammar of 46 47

D. Manning, 'Ideology and Political Reality', in Q'Sullivan, Structure, 70. Ibid. 78.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 127 ideology does not uncover for Susser the meanings that conceptual units and their configurations are made to carry, but endeavours rather to identify the ontological and epistemological rules that are engaged over and above the logical, cultural (temporal and spatial) constraints which operate on an ideology.48 Susser regards structure as too unbending and immutable a notion;49 however, the aim of the analytical approach adopted here is to introduce the notion of morphology as flexible, internally pliant, and subject to continuous reshaping. What remains constant is the type of units we are dealing with and the requirement that they form mutually constraining attachments; what changes incessantly—due to essential contestability, historical and spatial circumstance, and human agency—is the particular shape the ideological decontestation will adopt, so that it can never be predetermined by rules of structure. Concrete, detailed historical and contemporary comparative investigations are indispensable to this conception of analysing ideologies. Their morphological peculiarities, namely their multidimensional properties, are however the very precondition of their indeterminacy. The reshuffling of concepts inevitably ends in an ideological position or statement, but that in turn is only the precursor of a new conceptual arrangement. All this is not to invalidate thoughtful investigations such as Susser's, merely to point to significant differences in the usages of 'grammar', 'structure', and 'morphology'. For that reason, too, the study of ideology is always the study of ideologies. One problem with the Marxisant reference to ideology in the singular is that it indicates a process50 which, while containing valuable insights that may be utilized by the morphological approach, suggests a unity of attributes and a monolithic reading detached from a recognition of the structural features of ideologies. (g) MEETING SOME OBJECTIONS

It is now possible to appreciate the inadequacy of those prevalent approaches to ideology that rest content with a compendium of attributes of particular ideological manifestations—lists such as Burkean conservatism, Millite liberalism, evolutionary socialism. 48

One result of this exploration is to offer the debatable grammatical rule that ideology is exclusively the product of intellectuals (B. Susser, The Grammar of Modern Ideology (London, 1988), 109), See also L. S, Feuer, Ideology and the Ideologists (New York, 1975), 202-10, m Susser, Grammar, 5. 50 See R, Boudon, The Analysis of Ideology (Oxford, 1989), 37.

128 Ideological Morphology Both particularization and listing contain heuristic perils. Historians, for example, are occasionally guilty of oversimplification, plucking out a complex phenomenon from its multidimensional existence, however well this may be done on its own terms, or regarding ideology as a subsidiary adjunct to social and economic forces,51 Students of contemporary ideologies are also sometimes prone to analytical errors, claiming to describe an ideological position through itemizing its beliefs, while oblivious to Winch's warning that 'the concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world'.52 From the philosophical side of the spectrum, Gaus exemplifies some typical concerns in his argument against a 'conceptual cartography [that] remains essentially descriptive'. He claims that theories of concepts are more lexicographical than philosophical if they are not engaged in explaining, criticizing, or defending the concept.53 This critique is based on a misconception. Mapping, if executed on the basis of the analysis proposed in these chapters, is not itemizing, and hence never simply description. First, it is not entirely reflective of existing usage, because it extrapolates from such usage what the limits of the possible are and could be. While some philosophers may prefer to delineate the contours of the desirable rather than the possible, students of ideologies—when presented with philosophical desiderata generated outside the disciplinary boundaries of ideological analysis—can explore those desired ideational configurations as components of ideological thinking and examine the extent to which they are feasible and what their institutional consequences may be. Second, the presentation of a map of internal conceptual relationships is an invitation to a viewing, to an interpretation of the social and political world. The map proffered in Chapter 2 should not be conceived in terms of a static model but as a multidimensional one capable of interpretative adaptation. Ultimately, we must take account of hermeneutic insights in realizing that an ideological map is a peculiar sort of map, one in which the cartographer plays a modest, though not decisive, role in fashioning the terrain itself. Other philosophers have doubted whether in fact concepts are essentially contestable.54 For Moriss, this runs contrary to the philosopher's commitment to the rational resolution of disputes. 51 H 53

See Freeden, 'Stranger at the Feast', 17-20, Winch, Idea of a Social Science, 15, G. Gaus, Value and Justification: The Foundations of Liberal Theory (Cambridge, 1990), 4-5. 54 For a qualified approach see A. Mason, Explaining Political Disagreement (Cainbridge, 1993), 47-68.

Applying: The Contexts of Meaning 129 But that hardly invalidates what, we have argued, is an ineluctable phenomenon of analysis, arising from the selective description of facts and the parallel indeterminacy of political concepts, rather than the failure of a scholarly enterprise. It ignores the probability, indeed inevitability, that the philosopher's resolution will be similarly selective. If the problem were merely to 'get the logic of our concepts sorted out', as Moriss seems to hold, then some form of rational solution would possibly be within reach,55 But as has been maintained in previous chapters, the subject-matter of human political thinking cannot beneficially carry the weight of logical purism, and—even if it could—the consequence would be to overlook entire areas of significant extra-logical analysis. Because essential contestability is predicated not only on logical, but on cultural, adjacency, both selective and normative linkages among the components of a concept are invariably shaped by political thinkers, either deliberately or as part of an unconscious process of cultural perception and internalization. Indeed, the major functions of the decontestation of political concepts are not connected, on our understanding, to underscoring the truths of logical purism or value perfectionism, but to supporting courses of political action and enabling the development of organizational practices, to the psychological need to restrict uncertainty, and to the communicative need to employ common linguistic conventions, whether agreed or imposed. In the course of that process a thought-of choice becomes a thought-of certainty, but certainty is no indicator of truth, and the form decontesting adopts is itself elastic and indeterminate. Acting as handmaiden to philosophical projects is only a small part of the enterprise of analysing ideologies proffered here. It is above all an enterprise in its own right. Whether or not it may assist normative analysis, it constitutes the application of understanding in a distinct way, by presenting a crucial aspect of ideological comportment as expressed through its highly flexible morphology. That understanding can never simply be reduced to description. At the same time, the morphology of an ideology is by no means all that is intelligible or significant about it. The argument here has been rather that a morphological perspective is a relatively neglected yet essential aspect without which the scholarly study of ideologies is impoverished. It also supplies the middlerange theory, the absence of which Gouldner bemoans,56 by linking up abstract generalizations with concrete instances, that is, by 55 56

P. Moriss, Power (Manchester, 1987), 202, 206. Gouldner, Dialectic, 64.

130 Ideological Morphology supplying the two-way route between core and perimeter. Ideologies need therefore to be seen as distinct means of organizing our experience of a specified human activity: that of thinking about politics through the formations we call political concepts. All the while, we need to retain an awareness that the product is both generated by those thinkers and outlasts in time, and outreaches in space, any particular thinker. For those reasons, also, an additional criticism that Gaus directs towards conceptual inquiry must be queried. He deems conceptual maps defective simply because not all the components of an ideology can be mapped.57 If ideological analysis were indeed merely descriptive, that failure would certainly be an indictment. But it is precisely because ideological morphology is indeterminate in content that such criticism misses the point. The proper conduct of the investigation of ideologies cannot be geared just to telling a tale about a particular set of beliefs, but to understanding the larger fluid phenomenon we call political thinking. A failure to enumerate every single conceptual linkage is analogous to a failure to discuss each instance of verbal and bodily conduct of parliamentary representatives when we examine legislative behaviour. To assume the possibility of a map that would display all possible kinds of thinking about politics is to abandon hope of human creativity and innovation.58 But a map may still have its uses while failing to reproduce completely the 'reality' it attempts to model It is impossible, indeed futile, to provide a complete picture of the adjacent and peripheral concepts and ideas constituting an ideology, and of the events and reactions that account for them, because in any event the exact determination of meaning is elusive and illusory. One type of map, an aerial photograph, is composed of grains that under magnification lose their contextual specificity, yet viewed from a sufficient distance and with medium determination the pattern becomes evident. Furthermore, the judgements of both participants and observers need to be incorporated in order to make an intelligible selection of items that appear to be of major consequence. In the conceptual dissection of an ideology, similar judgements must be exercised so as to concentrate on those that loom large in political discourse and that form and inform political acts and decisions. The purview of the observer is always far from perfect, but that is no excuse for abandoning the pursuit of the knowable and the interesting.59 57 58

Gaus, Value and Justification, 5. Cp. C. Taylor, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man', in C. Taylor (ed.), Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ii (Cambridge, 1985), 56, 59 This important point is well put by Boudon, Analysis, 117.

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(h) IDEOLOGIES AS VEHICLES OF POLITICAL THEORY

This chapter has concentrated primarily on the intrinsic elusiveness of meaning. That feature is the major corollary of the morphological characteristics of political thinking. It partly replaces the central role that the irrational unconsciousness of individuals, or that of social classes, has recently occupied. But whereas these were offered as heuristic devices to explain the inability of the scholar to assess the truth-value of political ideas, the question of such inability no longer seems relevant to the issue of meaning and interpretation. Rather, it builds on the fruitful notion of 'essential contestability'. That apart, my purpose has been a wider one. I have of course been predominantly concerned with giving a plausible account of the phenomenon known as ideology. But behind this lurks a more fundamental and ambitious aim: a reassessment of the nature and focus of political theory, and the reclaiming of its rightful place in the extensive area that exists alongside political philosophy and empirical political analysis. Political theory can no longer claim to be an absolute clarifier of meaning, an end to which it frequently aspired, though it may assist in illuminating meaning in timeand space-bounded contexts. The appreciation of the cultural variability and historical mooring of human thought has assisted in refining the notion of relativism, while retaining the contingent universalisrn that comparative studies sometimes discover. Nor can political theory aspire to establish ethical truths, though political philosophy has a vital role as an elucidator of political values and of ethical dilemmas. The decline of the status of 'truth' in the social sciences has combined with the realization that the older abstractions and model-building of political theory cannot satisfy the critical exploration of concrete idea-phenomena. The more political philosophers attempt to engage in their perfectionist enterprises, the more remote from the sphere of politics, and from politics as a Wissenschaft, do their findings become. On the basis of those partial failures of the past functions of political theory, a redirection is called for. It has been the contention of Part I of this book that the study of ideologies may be presented as the sphere in which political theory as a discipline can find its rationale. Political theory, as understood from the above concerns, is the study of the universe of political meaning and, no less important, of the interface of the variety of meaning contained in that universe with political conduct and with the formation of political institutions. Because the analysis of any one political concept is linked to its idea-environment, the study of political theory must proceed from an acquaintance with the range of socially supported

132 Ideological Morphology and produced formations of which the examined concept constitutes, or can constitute, an integral part. And because any form of decontestation of a set of political concepts is ipso facto an ideology, the conceptual analysis of ideologies is at the heart of political theory. Such decontestation is not only the product of those commonly known as ideologues: deliberate, manipulative manufacturers of superimposed and 'distorted' political ideas and rhetoric. It is the product of all members of a polity who express beliefs about political communities, theirs and others. It includes the highly systematic and articulate expositions of such beliefs formulated by those labelled as political philosophers, who are in fact operating as ideologists—exclusively or conjointly with their other intellectual activities*—and who thus become the subjectmatter of the study of ideologies just as much as any other deeontesters of political concepts do. The thought-behaviour of all these individuals, and groupings of individuals, affords insight into the corresponding permutations of the political concepts themselves, We can now reconsider some of the themes of Chapter 1. In the past, many political theorists have contraposed ideology and political theory, while oblivious to the relationship between political theory and the analysis of ideologies. It is one thing to maintain, as does Germino, that 'ideological thought in its most radical form is the converse of authentic political theory. Where theory is open to various dimensions of experience, ideology is the enemy of all openness...'. It is quite another to conclude that 'ideological politics... is in truth a non- or an antipolitics' and to exclude it from the compass of political theory.60 If political theory is, as inhtethe Germinoit, sees'the study of the principles of right order in psyche and in society', it is indisputable that those principles are fashioned out of the very same political concepts or units that comprise ideologies. It is because both political theory as philosophy and political theory as ideology offer a range of diverse solutions based on the identical polysemic and contestable features of those concepts, that we can focus on the type of political theory which explores, evaluates, and elucidates philosophies and ideologies alike with a view to establishing the properties of political thinking. This has been referred61 to above as the second dimension of analysing political thought. *° D, Genuine, Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (New York, 1967),

45-6, 66. 61 See above, pp. 27-8,

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At the same time, we need to recall the distinction between the ideologist and the analyst of ideologies. Ideologies either deny, or restrict considerably, the possibility of interpretative flexibility, whereas the analyst is confronted with morphological features that establish such flexibility as constitutive of political argument. Even then, the analysis of ideologies is not open to an unlimited range of interpretations, as deconstractionists might argue, because of the logical and cultural constraints on the permutations they display. Both the phenomenon of ideologies, and the implications for scholarship derived from their critical study, offer rich pickings for the discipline of political theory. The attitude of those political theorists-cum-philosophers who do not even consider ideologies as worthy of scholarly study on the conceptual level impoverishes our political understanding and diminishes our analytical capacities, and should be abandoned for the sake of political theory itself. Some philosophers might consider the linking of political theory to the analysis of ideologies unduly conservative, as ostensibly only immersed in existing patterns of thought. Adams has reiterated this well-known criticism of the Wittgensteinian project, and has condemned its preoccupation with shared practices as denying individuals freedom, choice, and radical moral change. Ideology in particular is seen to be parasitic on ordinary morality.62 The analysis of ideologies is not, as we have seen, restricted to reproducing Wittgensteinian insights, though those have contributed towards our understanding of the phenomenon. More importantly, the study of shared practices and ordinary-language usage is not tantamount to operating within their confines. Even were ideologies to be acknowledged as stunting innovation—an accusation that any acquaintance with progressive political thought will reveal is not based on fact—the very appreciation of the multiplicity of thought-patterns that ideologies can adopt may itself be a catalyst for change. Although the analysis of ideologies is an inquiry into what is and has been, it is not a conservative perspective on political theory. It also permits the exploration of what can be and thus allows for choice; it recognizes the role of change in political conceptualization and ideological expression; and it builds on the multi-valence of political concepts and of the ideational options they already have supported and do support. Speculation on what can be, reflected in an awareness of the pluralism of past and present, is particularly appropriate in the time- and space-bounded 62

I, Adams, The Logic of Political Belief: A Philosophical Analysis of Ideology (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), 82,

134 Ideological Morphology instances on which the study of politics concentrates, as an aid to policy-making when a given institutional or ethical target is established and the ideological means of securing or evading it are investigated. Adams's often penetrating consideration of ideology regrettably leads to a philosopher's assertion of superiority, in that ideology is dismissed, in what we must now regard as orthodox terms, as 'an inherently defective mode of thought',63 rather than an inevitable, and resourceful, product of thinking about politics. Would this contention similarly endorse the abandonment of the study of political institutions, because optimally rational and ethical institutions are not yet in place? We have already suggested that the disjuncture between political philosophers and ideologists has been overstated. Both groups are concerned, if through different means, to reduce drastically the degree of indeterminacy displayed by political concepts.64 Totalitarian ideologies illustrate the extreme form of one method, which assigns in a semi-arbitrary and irrational fashion a precise meaning to concepts, held in place by force not only of the physical kind but of that which pre-empts rational and open debate,65 The other method is adopted by those philosophers who assign stipulatively precise meanings to concepts and then proceed to construct a rational system around them which inevitably includes those precise meanings and excludes others.66 The ensuing simulation bears only partial resemblance to the prevalent usages of terms. Nevertheless, a vital issue is at stake here: how best to utilize the sophisticated analysis offered by political philosophers while attaching it to a. preponderantly empirically based exploration of ideologies? How to bridge the gap between model-building and a non-prescriptive interpretation and analysis of the thoughtbehaviour of individuals engaged in thinking about politics? That is the challenge taken up in this book. The view of political theory propounded here does not deny the parallel, if separate, concern of political philosophers with what ought to be, with perfectionist and reflective prescription. That latter concern, it is readily admitted, may itself become part and parcel of alternative future decontestations of political concepts, and the work of philosophers 63

Adams, Logic of Political Belief, 140. See Ch. 2. It is of course the assertion of radical critics of Western ideologies that they employ no less considerable force in a subtler manner. 66 For an example of this approach in political theory see F. Oppenheim, Political Concepts (Oxford, 1981) and, in philosophy, A. R. White, Rights (Oxford, 1984). 64 65

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is therefore essential in order to create the idea-universe from which ideologists can draw. But side by side with that traditional sphere of thinking about politics, an area exists which, to date, has been singularly underdeveloped—even though it embraces wide ranges of political thinking, it identifies crucial issues concerning the nature of political thought, and it integrates promisingly with many conceptual interests and investigative tools current political theory already provides. The paradigm now employed by Anglo-American political philosophy is only one possible conversation about political ideas. There are other legitimate and significant conversations, and those engaged in them need to decide how best to convey the notion of a plurality of conversations, and whether the best tactics to attain this will involve meeting current conversations on their own terminological grounds or departing from that language entirely.67 We are now also better equipped to return to another issue referred to in Chapter 1: an objection directed at non-Marxist ideological analysts by those reluctant to part with their view of ideology as a term specifically dedicated to 'sustaining asymmetrical relations of power'. That view has somewhat imperiously been designated the critical conception of ideology—as if critique could only encompass social transformation, rather than the appraisive handling which interpretative morphological perspectives level at political thought-processes,68 The objection is addressed in particular to those who extend the notion of ideology to all actionorientated political idea-systems, as well as to those who find power relations in every trivial human act. But such an extension may now be seen as perfectly proper without in any way depriving 'ideology' of the capacity to discriminate among different types of political thinking and verbalization. The distinction—and for a term to be useful distinctiveness is crucial—is not between ideology and human relations in which domination plays no part, as the Marxists would have it, but between ideology and other forms of thinking about politics. Ideology is ubiquitous only inasmuch as it indicates a general type of human thought-product, not in the sense that it contains all forms of political thought; much as human exchange relationships are ubiquitous while not embracing 67

On the history of philosophy as a sequence of superseding vocabularies see R. Rorty, 'The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres', in R. Rorty, J. B, Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984), 4975. 68 Cp. for example J. B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Oxford, 1984), 4; R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981), 26-44.

136 Ideological Morphology all possible kinds of significant communication and not capturing the entire range of human interaction. Eagleton seeks to protect ideology from the accusation of indiscrimination, but does so by showing that not all language, values, and beliefs denote domination, while confining ideology to the latter phenomenon.691 wish, in contrast, to protect a broader notion of ideology from that accusation. Even on the view promoted here, namely, that societies display ideological thinking in areas unrelated to domination, ideology is not an indiscriminate concept. That is so because the political ideas that also constitute ideologies have multiple dimensions—for instance, philosophical and fact-identifying, as well as ideological. Specific speech-acts and texts may display all of these simultaneously; what is at issue, however, is to retain awareness of the categorical, epistemologkal, and functional distinetiveness of ideologies, as well as their morphological specificity and the social, temporal, and cultural contexts from which they derive. Finally, it has been queried in recent scholarship 'whether the concept is that unit of analysis most appropriate for writing the history of political theory'. That question is specifically a reaction to Begriffsgeschichte, but it could equally be applied to the contemporary study of political theory as well. Alternative candidates for units of analysis have been 'individual authors, texts, traditions, persisting problems, forms of argument, discourses, ideologies'.70 The response offered in these pages is that the concept remains a pre-eminently apposite tool both for exploring past synchronic expressions of political thought and present ones, and one through which the alternative candidates can be organized. It is, however, also necessary to embellish our understanding of political concepts by situating them in contextual and diachronic idea-environments. In sum, the exploration of political thought, historically and contemporaneously, can benefit greatly from adopting a three-tiered unit of analysis, comprising the political concept, its components, and its configurations within the confines of ideologies. m 70

Eagleton, Ideology (London, 1991), 7-9, Richter, 'Conceptual History', 633.

II

Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology

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PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS The remainder of this book is devoted to examining the major ideological families of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, and some related boundary areas, with briefer sections on feminist and green ideologies. To do full justice to the methods advocated in Part I would require an investigation beyond the capacities of any one scholar. A two-dimensional diachronic and synchronic morphological analysis of any ideological family, based on a suitably extensive variety of source material, is an immense task. Does that mean that hopes for adequate ideological analysis must be abandoned? A theory-cum-method, however persuasive, that would be too difficult to apply is a futile one indeed. Nevertheless, adequate—if inevitably partial—illustration is feasible. The following chapters aim not to construct an encyclopaedic compendium of the conceptual variations within given ideologies but to demonstrate, through a selective use of sources past and present, the dominant features of those ideologies and the ranges of their internal conceptual decontestations. This has to be achieved, to conform to the method recommended above, without imposing a stipulative model on the actual manifestations of political thinking. No prejudged notions concerning the contents of particular ideologies should be allowed to overrule scholarly judgement about the idea-combinations they evince. Unavoidably, the author's guiding hand in that selection is in evidence and, as with any scholarly interpretation, other viewings of the same ideological families might well result in different analytical mappings. Some readers may utilize this study for an approach to political theory that is both conceptual and empirical, others for an acquaintance with the intricate world of the ideologies themselves. Even a partial success in conveying the complexity and richness of the subject-matter to the reader would be ample reward. Conscious of my own limitations in restricting the analysis to a few major Western exemplars, I hope that others may be persuaded to extend this horizon and, perhaps as a consequence, reassess my culture-bound investigation of ideological families. As an admittedly feeble mitigating circumstance I would point to the preponderance of the Anglo-American versions of liberalism, and to the signal, if less unique, contributions of those cultures to conservatism. Hayek observed of liberalism that only its British variant developed a definite political doctrine whereas many of the

140 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology Continental types were derivative,1 and with respect to that particular ideology that claim is a plausible point d'appui. Many balances have had to be struck—between utilizing my own original research, mainly restricted to British variants of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, with occasional forays into the Continent and the USA, and relying on the work of others; between choosing major theorists commonly associated with a specific ideology and broader expressions of ideological thinking; between examining the minutiae and adumbrating the broad overview. If I have failed to strike the right equilibrium, that will, I hope, attest less to deficiencies in my approach than in my education; moreover, a manageable book should whet readers' appetites rather than overwhelm them with information. In studying a distinct ideology one is conscious of the 'ism' attached to its configuration of concepts. This is a further dimension of conceptual analysis that may cause some confusion. Are liberalism and conservatism themselves political concepts in the same way as are justice, liberty, and rights? The thrust of the argument in Part I has been that the names given to ideologies signify combinations of political concepts and not a concept that exists on the same level as its components. Indeed, their contestability is a consequence of the prior contestability of those components. There is of course nothing either in common usage or in logic to prevent them being designated political concepts as well, and in a very specific sense they are. However, observation and analysis of these 'isms' entitles one to treat these as 'super-concepts' or 'umbrella concepts' without committing a methodological infelicity. 1 F. A. Hayek, 'Liberalism', in F. A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London, 1978), 121, 126-7, 132. But see below, Ch. 7.

4

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism

... liberalism is a basket of ideals that inevitably come into conflict with one another if a serious effort is made to realize any one of them fully, let alone all of them simultaneously.1

HE study of liberalism is both simple and complex. It is simple Tbecause liberalism is a pre-eminent ideology in Western political thought, extensively articulated and amplified, and a familiar component within the ideological spectrams of the past century and a half. It is complex because its permeation into rival families, both socialist and conservative, makes its unravelling difficult, and because its diffusion has led to an extraordinary range of variants that, unlike the many nuances of socialism, tend to present themselves under the same name, without qualifiers such as 'evolutionary', 'Marxist', or 'democratic'. Indeed, many theorists as well as laymen assume some vast homogeneity that adherence to liberalism bestows on its supporters, often described as a general attitude of mind rather than a distinct set of political beliefs, without being alert to the conceptual permutations which those beliefs display within a recognizably liberal morphology. Historians of ideas frequently date the evolution of liberalism back to Locke, if not earlier. The onomasiologicaL approach would justify this on the grounds that, although it is anachronistic to apply the term to the seventeenth century, the concepts actually used by Locke and his fellow theorists conform to the profile of what later became known as liberalism. Whether or not semasiological problems arise is another issue, as Locke may have had a different conception of liberal components, such as rationality or human progress, than did later liberals. But there is another difficulty, more of an historical than a conceptual nature. Can one usefully speak of the emergence of ideologies prior to the development of mass means of dissemination and prior to the mobilization of 1

W, Galston, Liberal Virtues (Cambridge, 1991), 95.

142 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology mass publics? And even if one could, which may well be the case, is it possible with the restricted information at our disposal to reconstruct the beliefs of these wide audiences without which an ideology cannot come into being? A research strategy must come to terms with these issues. At the very least, the inclusion of Locke could be unjustified in its own right but vindicated because of the prominence he was accorded in the emergence of a conscious liberal ideology. Here intentionality, Locke's own perceptions of his arguments, is a matter for historical reconstruction rather than ideological analysis, but the interpretations and misperceptions of Locke in, say, the early history of the United States, are a subject of immediate concern to the student of ideologies. Our discussion of ideology, then, will not begin much prior to the nineteenth century, although its emergence as a modern phenomenon may be situated somewhere in the eighteenth.2 From the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, I have selected four case-studies of clusters of thought claiming to be liberal, in order to perform the twofold task of assembling the units of liberalism into an identifiable structure, and of testing concrete instances against whatever dominant morphological configuration may emerge. First, there is what is misleadingly known as classical liberalism, an early- to mid-nineteenth-century creed associated in Britain with Mill. We shall look at some of its tenets while being careful not to fall into the trap of assigning lexical correctness to its conceptual definitions and merely secondary or derivative status to its successors. Second, there are versions of reformist liberalism, such as those associated with T. H. Green, the British new liberalism, and their German and French counterparts. Here we will want to assess both the question of family continuity and the boundary problems these permutations have, particularly with socialism. Third, there is a recent genre of philosophical liberalism, much in fashion in the American academic world but achieving success abroad through the prominence of American political philosophy. We will inquire into whether this school produces a possibly innovative but stipulative model and whether it is reconcilable with mainstream American liberal traditions. We will also examine the ideological elements in this philosophical position. Finally, there is a variant broadly known as libertarianism, with both nineteenth-century and contemporary instances. We shall explore its own claim to be representative of a (or the) 2

See the employment of ideology in that context in H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977).

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 143 legitimate strand of liberalism and the extent to which it is situated within or outside the accepted boundaries of liberalism. In all these investigations we will be guided by our own admonition not to confuse institutional liberalism (party labels) with its ideological guises, even though a proximity of the two would not be unexpected. Awareness of liberalism as an ideological tradition is chronologically subsequent to the political employment of the term from the 1830s onwards. J. S. Mill, considered by many to be the prime exponent of Victorian liberalism, did not describe his writings as elaborating a set of beliefs called liberalism.3 Rather, he used liberalism to indicate the doctrines held by the Liberal party and saw his own beliefs as developing on from those doctrines: both Conservatives and Liberals . . . have lost confidence in the political creeds which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made any progress in providing itself with a better. Yet such a better doctrine must be possible ... something wider than either, which, in virtue of its superior comprehensiveness, might be adopted by either Liberal or Conservative without renouncing anything which he really feels to be valuable in his own creed.4

Even Mill, though, hinted at the potential disjuncture between party and ideology when he wrote in a footnote: 'Well would it be for England if Conservatives voted consistently for everything conservative, and Liberals for everything liberal.'5 None the less, Mill regarded himself as a liberal in the political and ideational senses and has been likewise regarded by his readers and interpreters, even when they profess to encounter strong elitist6 or socialist7 undertones in his writings. Such undertones need not surprise us or deter us from classifying Mill as a liberal; 3

In earlier writings Mill had attacked liberalism's belief in equal individual sovereignty (see A. Brady, 'Introduction', in J. S. Mill, Collected Works (Toronto and London, 1963- ), xviii, p. xiii). Only in his Autobiography (Oxford, 1969), written in the 1860s, did Mill refer to advanced liberalism to suggest a doctrine not identical with Liberal party beliefs (p. 170). He also referred in a number of his writings to Continental liberalism as a topic of interest to him. 4 J. S. Mill, Preface to Considerations on Representative Government, Collected Works, xix. 373. * Mill, Representative Government, 452. 6 See M. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1990). 7 Mill's posthumous Chapters on Socialism (1879), Collected Works, v, enabled that interpretation to emerge. See e.g. S. Ball, 'Individualism and Socialism', Economic Review, 8 (1898), 234-5: 'As regards my own position in relation to Socialism, 1 am content to be a follower of Mill, from whom I learned my first lessons in Socialism as well as in Liberalism.'

144 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology it is a cardinal aspect of the analytical stance adopted here that ideological boundaries are blurred and that conceptual overlaps will occur. But is Mill (a liberal only vaguely by self-definition) a liberal by other-definition? To answer that last question we require a broader acquaintance with liberal argument—to establish whether there are features common, in one guise or another, to all liberal discourse and also part of the liberal core itself. And do we start with self-definition or with a famous instance of liberalism based chiefly on other-definition? We can see the type of problem confronting the researcher. It is necessary to commence with one exemplar of an ideology in order to begin a discussion of its general components, but the finalization of that discussion, if at all possible, must await comparison with other instances of the ideological family. Mill as a liberal ideologist cannot be discussed on his own but only as a member of a community of similar thinkers. Such a comparison will render an assessment of the morphology of his own arguments more visible. While as a political philosopher Mill's thought-edifices can be, and have been, subjected to discrete analyses, ideology is a group product. Particular thinkers who in one capacity may be appraised solely as individuals are here seen as participants in and contributors to thought-behaviour of general and communal provenance. We begin, therefore, with a synchronic investigation which needs later to be placed in diachronic and cross-cultural settings. (a) IDENTIFYING THE MILLITE CORE

If we assume, as hypothesis rather than proven fact, that Mill's OK Liberty is a text that illustrates liberal principles, what are the key terms or concepts that anchor the argument? First and foremost among them is liberty itself, for Mill formulates the object of his essay so as to place the preservation of liberty at its centre.8 Liberty, however, is positioned in immediate proximity to a dual decontesting of individualism. First, because 'over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign', the individual is the unit of analysis. As Mill categorically states, deliberately dismissing the role of groups in social inquiry, 'The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it/ Parallel to this emphasis on the individual is an appreciation of the personal attributes that individuals possess, what Mill terms 8

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, 1910), 73.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 145 'character', and the expression of which is 'one of the principal ingredients of human happiness'. Hence the assertion that 'the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being'. That freedom is exercised in a distinctive way and has a special effect on individualism, which in Mill's employ can now justifiably be termed individuality. It is present when 'he who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties'. The one phrase, 'the free development of individuality', contains three of the core concepts Mill wished to promote, for like many nineteenthcentury theorists he worked within the cultural constraints of a developmental conception of human nature, educable and capable of maturing, and linked it to the larger goal of individual and social progress. Indeed, early on in his essay he presents a definition of 'man as a progressive being' who by dint of this feature has permanent interests. The relationship of liberty, individualism, and progress is one of mutual dependence and definition. It is impossible to disentangle them and to position one alone at the core of Mill's argument; all three are most usefully regarded as core concepts. Each manifests an ineliminable component: for liberty, it is the notion of nonconstraint; for individualism, the notion of the person as a separate entity possessing unique attributes and capable of choice; for progress, the notion of movement from less desirable to more desirable states—'the idea of moving onward', as Mill puts it,10 Each core concept then attracts additional defining components, obtained, among others, from proximity with the other core concepts. Mill was not blind to the significance of this structural interrelationship. As he wrote of liberty and progress: The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporally with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals,11

The mutual proximity of the core concepts holds them in check, inhibiting liberty from gravitating towards licence, or mere vegetation, or a Rousseauist monolithic rationalism; restraining individualism from signifying vicious and anti-social competition;12 10 * Ibid. 73, 170, 115, 117, 74. Mill, Representative Gaverment, 388. " Mill, On Liberty, 128, 12 Mill intentionally detaches individualism from that decontestation in Chapters on Socialism, 715.

146

Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology

and avoiding an interpretation of progress as a mechanical, materialist, determinist, or superimposed process. This structural interlocking ensures that sizeable potential areas of meaning which each concept could logically signify are ruled out of court—a prime function of any ideology. Specifically, Mil's concept of liberty is decontested in a number of ways. First, he attaches it to the development of individuality. Second, he emphasizes that it is primarily liberty of expression and of action that need protection, because the actions of other individuals are the main threat to the exercise of liberty (although amorphous public opinion is also a danger, providing Mill with an undeveloped opening for discussing group activity). Third, by suggesting that "me only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way', Mill connects it to two farther adjacent ideas: it is open-ended and allows for each individual to be the arbiter of his or her choices; and it is not merely the passive condition of not being interfered with, but the active one of cultivating valuable behaviour and purposes. Mill also allowed for liberty in a more traditionally 'negative' sense, that of the mere absence of impediments to making choices, or to self-development, rather than the actual exercise of those capacities. But that was always a lesser option, a less valued liberty. The issue hinges around the use of the 'good' that individuals pursue in their 'own way' and Mill's preference for the term 'good' over the terms 'wants' or 'desires'. If liberalism is about neutrality among competing concepts of the good, as modem commentators often argue,13 Mill does not satisfy that criterion, clearly preferring certain human actions and conditions over others, and wishing as he did to educate people in the appreciation of liberty.14 Though the above quotation suggests that Mill valued individual choices equally, concerning the methods of pursuing their goods, it also implies that they were only free when pursuing their own good, and that the 'good'—as Mill's extended reference to Wilhelm von Humboldt demonstrates—involved 'the highest and most harmonious development' of individual powers.15 Nevertheless, the promoting of Mill's preferred position is a matter of exhortation, never of coercion. " See Ch. 6, s. (/) below, 14 See also G, W. Smith, 'J, S. Mill on Freedom', in Z. Pelezynskl and J. Gray (eds.). Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London, 1984), 190, 195. 15 Mill, On Liberty, 115.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 147 A package emerges that interprets liberty in a particular ideaenvironment. The linkage of the ineliminable component of nonconstraint with the additional component of making individual choices creates an exercise conception of liberty.16 The linkage of these two with development suggests the direction that valuable human choices can take, and rules out development that is not self-development. Put differently, liberty is not merely selfdetermination, but the subset of self-determination known as self-development. Nor does it proceed to become the subset of self-development known as self-realization, for that would entail a perfectionist view not found in Mil. To further situate non-constraint, choice-making, and valuable development in a context of individual interpersonal relationships suggests that there are areas of existence that concern individuals alone to the exclusion of others, that denying that space is harmful to individuals, and hence that the complex concept of liberty is vitally beneficial directly to individuals and indirectly to their shared institutions. We could of course similarly begin with individualism or progress and work our way towards a quasi-contingent decontestation that acknowledges the proximity of each to the other two core concepts. If liberty is culturally adjacent to pursuing one's own good in one's own way, it would be logically adjacent to a non-determinist conception of progress. But proximity is always a two-way street and this sequence could quite properly be reversed. The following could then be claimed. First, progress is culturally adjacent to a meliorist, but not a perfectionist or teleological, view of the world. Second, progress is also culturally adjacent to a particular conception of individualism. In Mill's own words (in good ideological fashion superimposing cultural on logical adjacency): 'individuality is the same thing with development, and ... it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings'.17 Third, given the above, progress becomes logically adjacent to a conception of an individual capable of exercising free choice. The permutations of discussing On Liberty in these morphological terms are intriguing, but also legion, and there is insufficient space in this work to do so. Diachronically, it may be useful to note the debt owed by Mill to von Humboldt's ideas (representative of German enlightenment 16

This latter phrase is from C. Taylor, 'What's Wrong with Negative Liberty', in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom (Oxford, 1979), 175-93. 17 Mill, On Liberty, 121.

148 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology thinking) about self-education and Bildung as a 'harmonious individuality nourished by diversity of experience', which included not only rational but creative and emotional self-development,18 so that the concept of individuality incorporated pluralist life experiences rather than a process of the unfolding of innate potential, and could be related to a diverse reasonableness of life-plans.19 We may not have completed our analysis of Millite core political concepts. What if his oeuvre contains further key concepts which appear onomasiologically camouflaged by different words or phrases? Two further topics of debate appear central in Mill's political writings: human nature and the organization of government. The theme of human nature is hardly a surprising feature of a political theory; the issue is rather one of its specific interpretation. Limited government, on the other hand, may simply transpire to be an institutional derivative of primary principles. We are therefore presented with an initial conundrum. Do these two areas constitute core concepts? Do they constitute adjacent concepts? Do they, in conjunction with Mill's other core concepts, constitute liberal concepts? Mill, we know, was impressed by von Humboldt's designation of the end of man as 'that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason'.20 But to suggest that human nature is rational and that rationality is a key liberal concept is hardly a startling discovery for one who inspects the works and statements of other liberals besides Mill. It is virtually a truism to state that liberals view human nature as rational.21 If, then, the concept of rationality is an ineliminable component of liberalism, it will require further decontesting to determine its precise liberal ingredients. In the course of the history of human thought rationality 18

See 'Editor's Introduction', W, von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. J. Burrow (Indianapolis, 1993), pp. xxx-xxxii and 76-7; and Ch. 5 below. 19 This constituted a partial rereading of Humboldt by Mill; as the former's harmony has cultural undertones lacking in Mill's rephrasing: a balance of an inward-looking particularistic originality with a universalistic, holistic humanism as part of the Bildungs tradition. See L. Dumont, German Ideology (Chicago, 1994), 91-7, 20 Mill, On Liberty, 115, 21 This theme is emphasized in a number of general surveys of liberalism over the past half-century (see e.g. J, H. Hallowell, The Decline of liberalism as an Ideology (London, 1946), 4; T. P. Neill, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism (Milwaukee, 1953), 20); by critics of liberalism (see K. Minogue, The Liberal Mind (London, 1963), 25-35); by studies of liberal theory (see G. Gaus, The Modem Liberal Theory of Man (London, 1983), 28); and by contemporary liberal philosophers (see J, Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), 212-54).

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 149 has signified tightness, or moderation, or self-willing and autonomy, or calculated means-end purposiveness, or obedience to the law of God—terms which, though all different, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.22 A strategy to ascertain the role of 'rationality' or 'reason' m Mill's liberal ideology would have to explore a dual path: to construe the manifest uses of the word, and to evaluate instances when Mill describes human activities in terms that indicate the concept of rationality to us as students of ideology, or to other liberals as ideational consumers. In a fundamental sense, Mill's political and ideological positions derived from his stated commitment to rational argument and evidence; ipso facto reason would be a tenet of his world-view.23 The process of reasoning was at the heart of the pursuit of happiness, including in particular the higher pleasures derived from employing the nobler, or better, human faculties. Utilitarianism, after all, entails a rational assessment of the ways of maximizing happiness, and Mill described the pursuit of happiness as 'the rational purpose of human life and action'. Moreover, there is a rational case to be made for the utilitarian formula itself.24 But reason was more than correct reasoning, logic, or proof, and more than the practical inductive method Mill subscribed to. It is no coincidence that von Humboldt, with Mill's full approval, juxtaposed reason and harmony. Harmony had for Mill a twofold sense: internally within a person, as the development of human powers 'to a complete and consistent whole', and among individuals, because 'the deeply rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being, tends to make him feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony between Ms feelings and aims and those of his fellow-creatures'.25 It would be plausible to presume that rationality was not just a way of thinking but the end-result of that process, for Mill frequently recognized that a means could become an end, and that the pursuit of happiness could involve permanent goods. Thus behaving rationally, pursuing one's happiness, entails for example the attainment of virtue, of wealth, and of power as aspects of happiness.26 There are thus a number of facets to Mill's conception of human rational nature. But in the socio-political sphere the 'strength of n

For the potential dangers of harnessing a 'hyperrationalism' to liberalism see S. Holmes, The, Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 247-52. 23 See A. Ryan, The Philosophy of J. S, Mitt, 2nd edn, (London, 1987), 187-212. 24 Mill, Utilitarianism, (London, 1910), 11, 4-5. 25 26 Mill, On Liberty, 115; Utilitarianism, 31. Mill, Utilitarianism, 33-5.

150 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology the utilitarian morality' is based on 'the social feelings of mankind, the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures'.27 A reading of Mill as advocating both a rational optimizing of individual happiness and harmony, and as affirming the natural sociability of human beings assumes the existence of these two further core concepts. An interpretation which regards both as crucially buttressing Mill's other core concepts deserves consideration. Rationality is a term that hovers in the background of Mill's political arguments but nevertheless underwrites much of his analysis. It is pointed in the direction of harmony and sociability and locked into an idea-environment of meliorism and non-constraint This is so because only under conditions of non-constraint can natural human attributes develop. We also learn from Mill that reason is natural, though its expression may be an acquired faculty.28 Rationality, then, will unfold, and progress will reflect its growth. Rationality is also a facet of individualism, both as the exercise of utility-maximizing choice and as the drawing out of human wholeness. To propose sociability as a candidate for a liberal core concept might seem surprising in view of the individualistic tenor of liberal ideology, or trivial fa view of the truism that most ideologies regard human beings as in some sense social creatures. Neither reaction is justified. As we have argued, a core concept may be present in more than one ideological family. Moreover, concepts undergo cultural trimming to enable compatibility between ideas that—given a different cultural slant or taken to a logical extreme— may prove incompatible. A successful ideology permits its core concepts to develop until they inevitably begin to intrude on the viability of the other core concepts.29 The area where that occurs is culturally rather than logically conditioned and may involve a range rather than a point. Mill's emphasis on sociability is certainly in evidence and it is of a distinctive kind—one that sees a mutual regard for interests as inevitable and promotes 'the general welfare of the community' rather than the interests of any section of it;30 one31 that is perceived as developing towards greater cooperation, but also one that does not subsume the individual into the larger group. It is, revealingly, decontested in such a way as not 'to interfere unduly with human freedom and individuality'.32 17 29 30

2S Mill, Utilitarianism, 29. Ibid, 28. I have discussed this in Freeden, Rights (Milton Keynes, 1991), 91 ff. 31 Mill, Representative Government, 436. Mill, Utilitarianism, 29-30. 32 Md. 31. See also W. Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 181.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism

151

In Mill's writings, however, the differentiation between the core concept of sociability and the concept of the general interest (served through the universalizing propensity of utilitarianism) is embryonic. The 'sense of unity with mankind, and a deep feeling for the general good', are both part of human nature,33 Mill's 'general interest' moved away from its identification by the philosophic radicals with the interest of the populace, the 'numerous classes'34 to an emphasis on the interest all individuals should have in advancing values such as self-development, and it was notably the former position which could accommodate ideas of group solidarity. As will be seen below, it is only through comparison with parallel liberalisms, or viewed from later horizons, that sociability and the general interest emerge as discrete, if frequently supportive, core concepts in liberal ideology. Their subsequent decontestation was often abetted by a transformation of the adjacently sustaining concept of equality, from denoting a formal/legal universalism to a substantive socio-economic notion encompassing mutual sharing and redistribution of resources, As is well known, Mill sought to delimit sharply the spheres of individual and society. At the same time, he displayed what in the larger purview is a typically liberal ambivalence towards society. On the one hand he acknowledged the dependence of individuals on the services of others for their happiness and conceded that 'no person is an entirely isolated being';35 on the other hand he worried that 'society has now fairly got the better of individuality'36 or, as Mill cautioned when a young man under Tocquevillian influence, 'as civilization advances, every person becomes dependent . . . not upon his own exertions, but upon the general arrangements of society'.37 The natural fact of sociability could, under adverse conditions, result in a stifling invasion of individual space. But that does not rule out sociability in its beneficial, rational, harmonious, sympathy-for-others sense. Situated at the heart of Mill's view of human nature, it too could be enlisted to core status in his ideological structure. In Mill's hands, the sphere of the organization of government emphasized the constraints applying to responsible leadership. Mill's Considerations on Representative Government, as political theory, is a study of the institutionalization of power. It may be deemed 33 34

Mill, Utility of Religion, Collected Works, x, 422. See J. Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mitt and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven and London, 1965), 53-6. 35 Mill, On Liberty, 133, 136-7. *> Ibid. 119, 37 Mill, Civilization, Collected Works, xviii. 129.

152 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology odd to propose power as a central liberal concept, in view of the habitual blindness of liberalism to many of its manifestations, notably class conflict. Mill, however, was one of a few liberal thinkers to accept the inevitability, even benefits, of power and to assert that all governments needed power 'to preserve order and allow of progress in the people'.38 Nevertheless, its existence as a central concept was honoured in the breach, by presenting the very notion of limited and responsible government as a prime tenet: 'To render its ascendancy safe, it must be fitted with correctives and counteractives',39 The control of power is central to an ideology that highlights liberty. Ideologies after all shape practical orientations towards political conduct and organization, and institutional arrangements must loom large in their schemes. Mill recognized a mutually sustaining relationship between the form of government and the promotion of the desirable qualities, moral and intellectual, of the governed: 'besides that their wellbeing is the sole object of government, their good qualities supply the moving force which works the machinery'.40 In this instance we are fortunately assisted by the frequency of Mill's direct references to power and its delimitation. We know that liberty necessitates protection of others against harm, and that the 'one very simple principle' of On Liberty concerns 'the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control'.41 And there is more straightforward evidence. Power was decontested by Mill in a specific way. Arguing against the effect of a hypothetical benevolent despot on his people, Mill voiced concern that 'their passivity is implied in the very idea of absolute power ... What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What development 42 can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?' Power could be dangerous when exercised unduly either by individuals or by governments. In the first case, Mill identified a chief feature of the well-ordered state in that 'while it respects the liberty of each in what specially regards himself, [it] is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others'. In the second case, Mill categorically stipulated that 'the ... most cogent reason 38 39

Mill, Representative Government, 435. Mill, Duveyrier's Political Views of French Affairs, Collected Works, xx. 307. Mill, Representative Government, 390. Mill, On Liberty, 72. Mill was of course aware of the tyranny of public opinion, against which institutional safeguards are less precise. 42 Mill, Representative Government, 400. 40 41

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 153 for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power'.43 The art of government, Mill decided, had to address the complex balance between centralization and the benefits of widespread mental activity by providing centralized information together with 'the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency'.44 Much of the argument in Representative Government was therefore directed at constructing the institutional edifice required to counter 'the corrupting influence of undivided power'. Power itself may be beneficial and is certainly necessary, but the government wielding it should be based on participation of the people, 'the admission of all to a share in the sovereign power of the state', and consequently the exclusion of particular group interests. This was conjoined with the responsible exercise of power: 'Nothing but the restriction of the function of representation within ... rational limits will enable the benefits of popular control to be enjoyed'. That would be achieved by securing for the many, 'under strict responsibility to the nation, the acquired knowledge and practised intelligence of a specially trained and experienced Few'.45 We now have in place a mutually sustaining core structure of political concepts that holds Mill's ideology together. It is a core structure in a dual sense: the removal of any one of the concepts would change the peculiar pattern created by their joint intermeshing, causing the core to collapse; and a further range of adjacent and peripheral concepts derives from, and is in a slightly looser sense dependent on, that core. If Mill is a typical liberal, liberal ideology places the protection of individual capacities at the core of its programmatic concerns and its arrangements are primarily geared to ensuring that free individuals will be able to develop their rational and sociable attributes. A diffused, responsible, and limited use of political power is the chief institutional corollary of liberty; it complements Mill's specific conception of liberty, of achieving non-constraint through space for individual expression. It also complements the avoidance of sectional privileges and, with the adjacent concept of democracy that attaches itself to limited power, the accountable and educated exercise of 43

Mill, On Liberty, 159, 165. Ibid. 168. Mill's experience in the East India Company was an additional environment from, which to draw ideas about good administrative practice. These served as perimeter notions that helped to decontest centralization and bureaucracy as undesirable facets of power, inimical to the general interest. See Brady, 'Introduction', in Mill, Collected Works, xvii, pp. xli, Ixiii. 45 Mill, Representative Government, 514, 412, 433-4. 44

154 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology political choices and decisions, But that typicality must yet be put to comparative tests. (b) DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ADJACENCIES

Prior to that, the Millite ideology requires some fleshing out. Many political concepts are logically candidates for adjacent-to-core status, but the appearance of some of them on Mill's agenda was facilitated by the cultural constraints to which he was subject. Democracy was the most prominent of those concepts, and its peculiar decontestation reflected Mill's synchronic location in relation to a number of mid-nineteenth-century debates, both British and French. It was logically adjacent because it could be inferred from Mill's views on individuality and self-culture, rather than their deriving from it. Its adjacency could also assist in further decontesting the core concepts, beyond the mutual decontesting they exercised on each other. It was culturally adjacent because the questions of the enfranchisement and inclusion of the masses, and representation and protection of minorities, had become salient political issues in nineteenth-century Britain in general, and topics of concern, in varying measures, for the intellectual groups from which MiE obtained nourishment. The concept of democracy assisted Mill in holding a number of themes in a delicate and shifting balance, which ultimately produced a semantic field that avoided some of the slippery-slope fears of his contemporaries. First, the decontesting of freedom as self-determination pointed the core concept of liberty in the direction of equating the rulers with the people.46 Under the influence of the philosophic radicals this could further be construed as one man one vote, and irt Mill's case—with Harriet Taylor at his side— even one person one vote. But, second, democracy as popular rule had to be tempered by quality control, by the securing of competence in government. The elitist views Mill absorbed from France coalesced with the home-grown produce of Coleridge and Carlyle to insist on the protection of those able enough to make wise decisions from the mediocrity of the uneducated populace, and to suggest that when the former were able to exercise power and moral influence, 'Society may be said to be in its natural state.'47 46 47

Mill, On Liberty, 67. Mill, 'The Spirit of the Age', in Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture ed. G. Himmelfarb (New York, 1962), 17, This appeal to nature had strong conservative

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism. 155 48 This elitism fell on the welcoming soil tilled by James Mill, and it must be acknowledged that Mill's upbringing, despite all his later reservations and taking into account his high degree of reflectiveness, provided49an unconscious receptivity to an elitism sustained by education. In addition, another theme which was becoming central to liberal argument in particular emerged in Mill's tempered democratic inclinations: the avoidance of sectional or class rule, be it of the aristocracy or the masses, as inimical to the pursuit of the general interest50 Hence, the core concepts of both rationality and the general interest were engaged to moderate the logical potential of liberty as unqualified self-determination. Moreover, the general interest had to be underpinned through the positioning of the two adjacent ideas of participation and education.51 The one ensured the generality of the interest; the other, that it indeed was in the interests of those who expressed it, Finally, Mill's principled allegiance to democracy as an ethical arrangement was retained through the cultural path the concept of liberty was made to take, among logical alternatives, from self-determination to self-development. The participatory facet of democracy was made to work for individuality and progress by requiring in the long run a democratic framework for all. This would enable the exercise of the mental and moral faculties without which the rationale of good government was undermined and no nation could flourish. Conversely, once an educated, developed, and critically aware individual had emerged, democracy would be both justifiable and desirable. Hence quasi-contingent instances of democracy operated within a logically necessary adjacent category, given the nature of Mill's core concepts. Mill accomplished that through building into his liberalism a diachronic sensitivity which assumed, as given (i.e. as attainable), a change of relationship between the liberal core and the adjacent notion of democracy. The success involved in allowing full expression to leanings, as has been pointed out in ], H. Burns,']. S. Mill and Democracy, 182961', in J, B, Schneewind (ed.). Mill: A Collection of Critical Studies (London, 1969), 305-7, Cp. Ch. 8 below. 48 Cp. J. C. Rees, John Stuart Milt's On Liberty (Oxford, 1985), 71. 49 See }. Stillinger, 'John Mill's Education; Fact, Fiction and Myth', in M. Laine (ed.), A Cultivated Mind: Essays on ]. S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson (Toronto, 1991), 19-43. 50 This was an. elaboration of Bentham's admonitions against sinister interests channelled through the philosophic radicals (see Hamburger, Intellectuals, 46). 51 D. F. Thompson, John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton, 1976), 176.

156 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology core and other adjacent concepts would result in the gradual integration of a richer conception of democracy into a more central position in liberal morphology. Mill's conceptualization of democracy was thus positioned between diverse boundary posts, and in the course of his life he thoroughly traversed the area in between, his work reflecting the cumulative horizons he encountered. In part this attested to his reflective willingness to experiment with the wide range of approaches to which he had been exposed, and to query them when he believed it to be justified; in part because, on his own account, he had accepted the diachronic insight of his French intellectual mentors, the Saint-Simonians, Comte and d'Eichthal, that the ideas of one period in time were not necessarily correct or fixed,52 As for the wider background of Mill's ideas in the context of nineteenthcentury British liberalism, current scholarship has reaffirmed the ideological unity of Victorian liberalism while remaining alert to its internal nuances.53 Mill operated among & number of important liberal political forces. First came the utilitarian influences of his father, James Mill, and the philosophic radicals, who contributed a rationalist and reforming zeal, as well as an appreciation of individuals as the arbiters of their own good, and whose 'ideology initially provided a defence of democratic government',54 Then came populist liberals, as well as Nonconformists, whose purpose it was to bring immediate and extensive political reform to the working classes;35 university liberal intellectuals and educationalists, who pushed learning to the forefront of their endeavours to control the direction of democracy,56 and the inspiration of the German philosophers, notably Humboldt,57 Mill's continuous acquaintance with French 'Continental Liberalism', including JeanBaptiste Say and Frangois Guizot, also influenced his development58 M Mill, Autobiography, 100. 53 j^ parryi jfu mse mtj fan oj ubeml Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993), 3 and passim. 54 Hamburger, Intellectuals, 2, See also S, Collini, D. Winch, and J, Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983), 102-4. 55 See E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone 1860-1880 (Cambridge, 1992). In addition, Biagini has redirected attention to popular Liberals—organized labour movements which were Liberal (P.567). See C. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860-86 (London, 1976); Parry, Rise and Fall, 231, 57 See B. Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven, 1984), 165-7. 58 Mill, Autobiography, 39. See below, s. (d).

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 157 It is hence an analytical illusion to portray Mill as requiring undivided attention as a representative of liberal ideology. Ideology is a group product, however illustrious some of its individual exponents, and Mill was no exception to that rule. Mill's conceptualizations, as he oscillated among different stances, were clearly fashioned by the semantic fields that moulded Victorian liberalism and some—like Continental positivism—were fashioned outside that family. Yet such was his impact on the thought of his time that liberalism was to no small extent refined in turn by his opinions, which firmed up distinctive conceptual morphologies. Mill was himself unusually aware of the interaction between logic, culture, and emotion at the basis of his thought, as of any ideology. His is a fine particular instance of an ideological system both intellectual and lived, and of the passionate intellectual commitment extant even within liberalism. It is not the aim of this study to trace Mill's intellectual development, a task which has already been admirably discharged by others. Let it be noted rather that his youthful Benthamism reflected the egalitarian democratic tendencies of many of the philosophic radicals, as well as their sanguine faith in their ability to mould the masses in their own likeness.59 Initially regarded as their mouthpiece, Mill recognized the semi-conscious operation of Benthamite principles on Ms early thought, and was regarded as 'a "made" or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce'.60 An early visit to France saw him donning the imaginary mantle of a Girondist, and in politics he developed 'an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things: representative government, and complete freedom of discussion' as direct guarantors of the core concepts of reason and the general interest.61 His youthful crisis brought him—through Comte and the Saint-Simonians, among others—into touch, both intellectually and emotionally, with the values embedded in advanced cultures and the need to ensure that their carriers would not be silenced. Mill's new but resurgent elitism preferred the educated and talented, the pouvoir spmtuel, to the untrained and accorded them additional political weight. He consequently argued against compelling representatives to undertake pledges vis-a-vis the electors, 'because we knew the formidable array of human weaknesses and passions which would be 59

See W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841 (Oxford, 1979), 159. 60 61 Mill, Autobiography, 93. Ibid. 40, 64-5.

158 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology perpetually at work to make a Representative Democracy... a mere mob-government' ,62 Mill's later acquaintance with Tocqueville's works reinforced Ms fears concerning the tyranny of the majority, a theme to which he adhered in his subsequent writings. Here power, organized or through public opinion, was unleashed by democratic procedures to threaten liberty and, especially, individuality. As he became increasingly sensitive to the dangers surrounding individuality,63 he encircled it with an expanding number of protective devices. It was not that Mill had become an anti-democrat, but that his rich liberal ideology demanded the preservation of a range of values, not the monomania of a single cause reformer. Democratic practice had to be contained within those decontested limits that did not imperil liberty, individuality, or the general interest of the people. Under the impact of Tocqueville and Samuel Bailey, Mill threw out the earlier utilitarian decontestation of democracy as 'identification of interest between the rulers and ruled' and argued for a looser conceptual link in the form of 'a somewhat less approximation ... than might possibly be attainable'. The new conceptual structure he envisaged was 'the grand difficulty in polities': 'how best to conciliate the two great elements on which good government depends; to combine the greatest amount of the advantage derived from the independent judgment of a specially instructed Few, with the greatest degree of the security for rectitude of purpose derived from rendering those Few responsible to the Many'.64 The perimeter notions Mill engaged to support these vacillating views on democracy included, at various times, a softening of his views on pledges, the abolition of the hereditary chamber, and practices such as the secret ballot (later discarded), a one person one vote system, strongly influenced by the 1848 events in France,65 plural voting, and proportional representation recommended through Mill's acquaintance with Hare's scheme and adumbrated in Representative Government. This is not the place to query Mill's consistency, which is evident even in his final decontestation of representative government in elitist terms as the protection of knowledge against ignorance.66 What is important is that the 62

Mill, Newspaper Writings, Collected Works, xxiii. 504. Rees, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, 68. M Mill, Rationale of Representation, Collected Works, xvili. 23-4. 65 See B. L. Kinzer, 'John Stuart Mill and the Experience of Political Engagemenf, in Laine (ed.), A Cultivated Mind, 191 ff. 66 Cp. Bums, '}. S. Mill and Democracy, 1829-61', 327-8. 63

Tlze 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 159 patterning of Mill's political concepts reflects the changing relationships he perceived between the elements of his synchronic system as well as a diachrony interacting with external events, personal biography, and competing schools of thought. And it was through the perimeter interface of the political and administrative life in which Mill participated fully that the morphology of his ideology adopted shape after shape, testing different formulae for optimizing its core concepts. The open perimeter was the hallmark of a non-dogmatism in which new evidence was continuously permitted to permeate Mill's liberal ideology and reorganize its conceptual configurations. Millite democracy leads logically to the adjacent concept of equality, but again in a culturally muted form that denies it the status of core concept claimed for it by some modern liberals,67 Though universal suffrage is a formal egalitarian arrangement, the absence of complete political equality was not fatally detrimental to Mill's liberal project. Moreover, the question of extra-political equality was favourably tackled only in Mill's later writings. In his earlier attitudes to equality he was clearly at some distance from modern liberal philosophical formulations: if it is asserted that all persons ought to be equal in every description of right recognised by society, I answer, not until all are equal in worth as human beings. It is the fact, that one person is not as good as another; and it is reversing all the rules of rational conduct, to attempt to raise a political fabric on a supposition which is at variance with fact.68

It is also a fact that liberalism has not constructed its arguments on the more fully developed concept of equality developed by other ideologies, and that the profile of liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not depended on the salience of equality.69 Rather, the intension of equality has been shaped mostly by features of the core concepts of rationality and individuality. The universalization of rationality as an attribute of human nature and its attachment to the individual freedom to choose (in pursuit of one's life-plans, whether reflectively or not, as long as they did not critically impede those of others) contains aspects of equality as a consequence of these premisses. Liberalism has thus been able to incorporate the two ineliminable components of the concept of equality: the postulation of a common humanity in virtue of a shared 67

See below, Ch. 6. Mill, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, Collected Works, xix. 323. tft See the remarks on American liberalism in Ch. 6, s, (d). 68

160 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology rational capacity, in which the worth of any individual is commutable into the worth of any other, and the negation of irrelevant differences among individuals. Such differences are those immaterial to the free and rational pursuit by all of individual life-plans, for each individual is assumed potentially to be in possession of some merit. The liberal semantic field has been culturally constrained to signify one or more of the following: a moral conception of equal regard and worth, itself joined to a conception of individualism as self-expression and purposiveness; a notion of equal legal and political opportunities for fair competition and individual development; sharply, but not totally, reduced economic and social inequalities; and a notion of sovereignty which locates decisions in a democratic popular majority directed by the constitution. That semantic field has never included equality as sameness, nor nonliberal maximizing versions of equality of opportunity, that allow for continuous redistribution on the basis of equal need, nor equality of result. Nineteenth-century liberal thought was specifically nourished on prevalent beliefs about the uneducated masses that viewed equality as potentially destabilizing, even pernicious.70 Hence Mill subjected Tocqueville's examination of equality in America to minute scrutiny, concluding that America's lessons could pave the way for a democracy in Europe which would recognize that 'where all are equal, all must be alike free, or alike slaves'. The former condition could only be attained through intermediary bodies and the cultivation of centres of antagonism to government that would prevent the stultifying possibility of even the partial political and social equality evident in America.71 However, the evils of sectionalism could, as in Britain, emerge without the equality of conditions.72 Of far greater concern to Mill was the positioning of equality in relation to the concepts of progress, power, and rationality. Though 'a constitution which gives equal influence, man to man, to the most and to the least instructed, is nevertheless conducive 70 Mill of course acknowledged the Saint-Simonian and Coleridgean advocacy of government by the cultivated few (Hamburger, Intellectuals, 87, 103). For the wider views of Victorians on the subject see C. Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto, 1978), 34—52. W. E. Gladstone, too, supported a limited extension of the franchise, blending hierarchy and egalitarianism (see H. C, G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809-1874 (Oxford, 1986), 140). The question of women's suffrage is another case, based on partially different grounds, and on which Mill's later views ran ahead of those of most liberals. 71 Mill, De Toccjueville on Democracy in America, I, Collected Works, xiii. 57. 72 Mill, De Tocqueville on Democracy in America, II, Collected Works, xiii. 191-6.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 161 to progress', because it encouraged deliberation among the latter, its effect could also be, 'when they are made the possessors of all power' that 'they have no longer need of the arm of reason' and consequently to retard their development,73 Once cultural factors such as Mill's intellectual environments and external political events had narrowed down the options, the inevitable morphological chain of reactions was triggered off, as one cultural decontestation of equality took the logical path that led via participation to individuality and progress, while another led via (unlimited) power to the diminution of reason and self-development. Mill's choice of the one or the other adjacent decontestation would thus establish differentiated patterns of interrelationships among the liberal core concepts. Most typically, when equality was put to work as an adjacent concept to the Millite liberal core, it served to prevent the undue claims of 'privileged' social groups to consideration on grounds not sanctioned by democratic agreement—that is, to preserve the core liberal concept of a general interest that overrode sectional claims; otherwise, it was kept in check to shield other core concepts. Only in Mill's later writings did an interest in extra-political equality, neatly obviated in his assessment of Tocqueville, emerge. Significantly, though, it was presented by him, and consumed by many of his contemporaries, as a form of socialism. We shall evaluate the accuracy of that epithet, as well as its compatibility with liberal morphologies, in later chapters, but Mill's substantive argument about equality certainly merits attention: 'The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance.'74 Though he continued to reject equal pay for all, Mill developed qualified sympathy towards another decontestation of equality, equality of desert, which would have far-reaching social and economic repercussions, and he looked forward, in the long run, to 'an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour'/5 that is, to an equality conditional upon its adjacency to another political concept: sociability decontested as productive cooperation. This is by no means an exhaustive list of adjacent concepts, were such a list indeed possible. Education, for instance, runs as 73 74 75

Mill, Representative Government, Collected Works, xix. 478-9. Mill, Chapters on Socialism, Collected Works, v. 714. Ibid. 729-30, 743-4; Autobiography, 115, 138.

162 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology a central thread through all Mill's writings, as formal qualification for exercising the skills of government, including the professional civil service, on which Mill's personal experience meshed with his elitism to bind education to progress and rationality; as well as in the broader sense of self-culture which coincided with his ideal of the harmoniously developed individual Mill held the meaning of the "free development of individuality' by means of constraining satellite terms which made it 'a co-ordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture', as well as 'a necessary part and condition of all those things' —another insight into the mutually defining morphology he constructed.7* One could also mention rights or property, simply because those political concepts are well-established in all dominant Western ideological systems, and subject to degrees of criticism in alternative ideologies, mainly socialist or anarchist. I have argued elsewhere—contrary to most current rights-based theorizing—that the concept of rights cannot be part of an ideological core, being definitionally attached to any political value or concept it is designed to protect and prioritize.77 A right is a prioritizing concept which deliberately secures a specific configuration of the core concepts of a given ideology. In classical liberalism this occurs typically through linking together life, liberty, and property. More generally, rights serve as a device that identifies and protects whatever attributes of individuals and groups are regarded by their societies as significant On the micro-level, the concept of rights has a specific impact on deeontesting the concepts to which it is proximate. Thus, its attachment to the concept of liberty entails specific conduct on the part of others towards the subject of Eberty; the possibility of conflicting life-plans of liberty-bearers (otherwise their rights would not need stating); the active selfdetermined behaviour of the units; and the desirability of promoting their good understood in the above senses. In his early work Mill himself defined a right as a correlative of a duty not to interfere and prevent a person from an action—thus attaching a right to the protection of liberty.78 In On Liberty Mill perceived the historical role of rights as limiting the power of rulers and thus enhancing liberty—in this instance adjacent to two liberal core concepts.79 But Mill moved on significantly to specify political and electoral rights as protective of a uniquely valuable 76 78 79

n Mill, On Liberty, 115. Freeden, Rights, 6-11. Mill, 'Use and Abuse of Political Terms', Collected Works, xviii. 9-10. Mill, On Liberty, 66.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 163 type of human activity, 'one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind'/0 consciously appending instrumental status to rights as servants of individuality and development. This was a clear departure from the language of natural rights and contract which located rights within the context of irremovable restrictions on the power of rulers in an attempt to establish legitimate consensual government. Mill shifted rights to a relatively peripheral and marginal position. Their inviolability was not central to a universal theory of political society; rather, their broad utility was proportionate to their role in fostering individuality. The concept of rights was no longer fastened to the core concept of liberty in such as way as to protect the latter from redefinition. It was flexibly and loosely attached to promoting individual abilities within a time- and space-bound view of civilization.81 It is especially illuminating to observe how Mill dealt with the concept of property. His views on the subject must be seen in the context of changing opinions in mid-Victorian England but, importantly, he was aware of his own changing horizons and the theoretical significance of those permutations. Looking back, Mill conceded that private property as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to m e . . . the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice... involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical... .82

He came to recognize that it was normal, especially in periods of transition, for words to be invested with polysemic meaning, expressing this most lucidly towards the end of his life in language close to the concerns of this study: One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No word has been the subject of more of this kind of misunderstanding than the word property. It denotes in every state of society the largest powers of 80 81

Mill, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, Collected Works, xix, 323. Cp, M. Francis and J. Morrow, A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1994), 148-51. 82 Mill, Autobiography, 137-8,

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exclusive use or exclusive control over things83.,. but these powers ... are very various, and differ greatly in different countries and in different states of society.., The idea of property is not some one thing, identical throughout history and incapable of alteration, but is variable like all other creations of the human mind.84

Mill himself allowed different ideological deeontestations to permeate his work, thus affording insight into the handling of the concept. The young Mill could assert categorically that 'the security of person and property are the first social interests not only of the rich but of the poor'.85 The importance of the inviolability of property lay in the protection of individuals' ways of life and in the linking of exertion and reward,86 which was part of the prevalent notion of character. In Mill's later works such arguments persevered, but they were accompanied by a reflection of changing attitudes to the concentration of wealth, the problems of poverty, and the power that emanated from property, all of which impelled Mill to associate the upholding of excessive property rights with anti-reformers.87 As is well known, Mill called for a redistribution of the burden of taxation,88 the resulting spread of property being intended to bolster more universal opportunities for individual development, as well as recommending the abolition of some types of inheritance, and the taxation of some forms of unearned income.89 His opposition to the granting of monopolies was entirely in line with the contemporaneous liberal fear of the concentration of economic power. He believed that the practices surrounding property constrained two other desirable political concepts: equality and justice.90 In conclusion, in no sense can Mill's concept of property be assigned the core role it is thought to play in classical liberal theory grounded on Lockean natural right premisses.' It is of incidental interest to note the virtual absence of Locke in Mill's political writings, despite the pivotal function of Locke in American political discourse. However, though property migrated away from the Millite core, it did not become a peripherally marginal concept. It played a supportive and interpretative 83

Even this generalization is ideologically biased against decontestations that permit non-exclusive property. 84 Mill, Chapters on Socialism, Collected Works, v, 750, 753. 85 ME1, De TocijueviUe on Democracy in America, I, Collected Works, xviii. 80. 96 Mill, De Tocquevitte on Democracy in America, II, Collected Works, xix. 176. 87 Mill, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, 316, 88 Mill, Representative Government, 442. 89 Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Harmondsworth, 1970), passim, 90 Ibid. 358.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 165 role for the core concepts of liberty, individuality, and development, but was seen even by Mill currently to fluctuate among indeterminate meanings, some of which were detrimental to the viability of the Millite decontestations of those core liberal concepts. (c) PERIPHERAL PERMUTATIONS

A brief allusion to peripheral concepts and ideas will round off this discussion. State regulation of some economic and social practices, free trade, equal rights for women, national selfdetermination, free education, and social order are all candidates for perimeter status in the Millite morphology.91 The positions they occupy, thought not vital for underpinning liberalism's basic structure, provide the necessary interface between general ideological conceptualizations and their temporal and spatial contexts. Free trade was tangentially related by Mill to his core complex concept of individual liberty, 'only in so far as leaving people to themselves is always better, caeteris paribus, than controlling them', though state intervention in some aspects of trade was desirable to protect the welfare of workers and consumers.92 Free trade was a nineteenth-century liberal doctrine shed by liberals only in the 1930s, by which time the liberty it offered was judged to be akin to free play and to the lack of rational control of a society over the behaviour of its members, especially because of its 93rising costs in unemployment and a declining standard of living. Equal rights for women, which Mill helped to promote, were presented as a special case of universal rights for human beings.94 They were perceived as problematic only when an injustice of deprivation or discrimination was committed. Those rights were marginal, for once the circumstances of the particular need were removed, by annihilating the socio-political distinctions under which women laboured, the issue could be subsumed within the concepts of equality or individual development. However, the views of Mill (and Harriet Taylor) on women assisted in reinterpreting the core 91

Some of these, such as state regulation and equal rights for women, later attained adjacent status in liberal argument. See Chs. 5 and 13. w Mill, On Liberty, 150-1. 93 See B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970); and M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914-1939 (Oxford, 1986), 121-2. 94 Cp. S. M. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (London, 1979), 202-6.

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notion of progress, linking it with a sweeping historical faith in 'the whole course of human improvement' towards equality of rights of the two sexes,95 But this version of political and intellectual equality was continually constrained by Mill from including the uneducated. State regulation, a negatively connoted combination of directive power and interference with liberty, was acceptable under clearly curtailed circumstances, with respect to educating children, preventing harm to others, the supervision of local government, or the securing of standards of welfare.96 Its role in Millite ideology was far more marginal than that assigned it by later liberals, for reasons to be pursued later. Education was itself immediately adjacent to the liberal version of rationality, the cultivation of talent and intelligence being essential to the ends of self-developing, active, and internally harmonious human beings. It was no coincidence that Mill supported the broad principles—though not the denominational bias—of the 1870 Education Act. Liberals as well as conservatives insisted on coupling the enfranchisement of 1867 with an educational programme that would make democracy safe for the world.97 The unconscious and unchallenged assumption was that education and knowledge would decrease social conflict and be put to beneficial ends. The question of nationality was attached by Mill to the problem of liberty, while concurrently recognizing the claims of groups: there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of a nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.98 The association of a mild culturally and historically based nationalism with liberty, so much in the Gladstonian mould of Victorian foreign policy, was clearly distanced from a nationalism in which the state was glorified, or in which a society was endowed with mythical characteristics setting it indisputably above its members. As for the concept of order, a central plank in many conservative 95 96

Mill, The Subjection of Women, Collected Works, xxi. 272. See Ch. 13 below. Mill, On Liberty, 160; Representative Government, 544-5; Centralisation, Collected Works, xix. 602. 97 Cp. R. Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1918 (London, 1976), 86-91; F. W. Garforth, John Stuart Mill on Education in Society (Oxford, 1980), 123-4,129. 98 Mill, Representative Government, 547.

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ideologies, it was diffused by Mill over a wide range of meanings: obedience, the preservation of peace (both for Mill means to other ends, not a purpose of good government), or—significantly attaching it to the concept of progress—the preservation of the good that progress was meant to increase, 'a part and means of Progress itself. It is only when bonded and subservient to progress that order became a constituting, though marginal, concept of Mill's liberal thought. Otherwise, alternate decontestings of order and of the consequent exercise of governmental authority, 'may differ by the whole interval which divides the best from the worst possible'.99 Let us recall what we set out to accomplish. The above discussion is not a summary of Mill's thought, nor a detailed philosophical exploration of its subtleties. It is an exposition of the main political concepts used by Mill when constructing his arguments, and the most salient configurations they have adopted. His diverse arguments form the unique contours of those morphological configurations. As it stands, this exposition is incomplete. It awaits the greater sophistication that comparative analysis will give it. We require a feel for the range in which the concepts selected by Mill move within the liberal ideological family and still lack a sense of their multi-dimensionality and the richness of their liberal decontestations. We cannot yet be sure whether all of Mill's conceptual preferences will be located within an emerging morphology of liberal thinkers: is his elitism, for instance, a prevalent liberal form of decontesting individuality or progress? We have as yet no information on the consumption of Mill's ideas by other liberals. And, returning to the map analogy, we are dependent on the magnification factor that we have selected. We have outlined Mill's conceptual scheme in general terms, to provide an overview of the entire area. We could have chosen a larger magnification, as many specialized works on Mill have admirably done, in order to cast light on the highways and byways that surround any selected concept. We would have gained in terms of the meticulous investigation of a specific topic, but at the expense of comprehending the whole ideological picture. It may be asked whether we could not do both? The answer must be in the negative, because the question of which map to choose significantly depends on the purpose at hand. To engage in both would have meant to devote an entire book to Mill alone, or to another worthy exemplar of liberal thought. At this initial stage of its adumbration, the broader 99

Ibid. 384-8.

168 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology view of ideological morphology needs to sacrifice detail for the sake of its own clarity. (rf) FRENCH CONNECTIONS AND DISCONNECTIONS

Outside his own, France was the country with which Mill was most familiar. He was also well placed, through personal contacts and journalism, to act as a transmitter of French reform movements to Britain.100 Rather than offering a detailed exegesis, this section outlines some currents outside the Millite framework in the pursuit of the morphology of liberalism and of the analytical validation of that approach to liberal ideology. A comparative perspective is utilized to identify broad themes in French liberal ideology that cohabited over a longer period of time. Unquestionably, the concept of liberty occupied a prime position in French liberalism, while a strong historicism and evolutionism brought liberty into close proximity with conceptions of progress. A vigorous respect for universal and disinterested law offered the possibility of imposing constraints on the excesses of free action, while the divide between individualism and individuality was making itself known through Benjamin Constant's writings. Yet one can discern a range of reordering of the relationships among the core concepts. The experience of the French Revolution had caused a schism in the employment of concepts that later liberals were to use. Through the good services of Rousseau and other participants in the enlightenment project, rationality was proffered in a more abstract form. This had repercussions on the concept of the general interest, now accruing holistic (rather than aggregative) connotations which were unavailable at the time to British liberals. In particular, rationalism in France was associated with universality and a generality of attributes vested in social wholes and in the abstract features of law; whereas British liberals preferred to follow Mill, until late in the nineteenth century, in situating reason in the free, discrete, and personally valuable chokes of individuals, as long as they did not impede the similar choices of others. In addition, the main problem of French liberalism in the first 101 half of the nineteenth century was its relationship with democracy and the letter's movement from a marginal to an adjacent position 1(0

M. Filipiuk, 'John Stuart Mill and France', in Laine (ed), A Cultivated Mind, 80-120. 101 P. Rosanvailon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 13.

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within the liberal configuration. In Britain, in contradistinction, the democratic theme—-while evident—often trailed behind a concern with individual liberty, political rights, self-development, and their limits. The French liberal sensitivity to constitutional guarantees of limited power might have appeared redundant in a culture whose version of rationality, as a constant and general will, put complete faith in the combination of liberty and democracy—decontested as popular sovereignty—based on the possibility of arriving at universal truths and the introduction of populist notions of equality. Unsurprisingly, faced with a rationality that dispensed with safeguards for individual liberty, and unable to attach a diverse rationality to a range of individual actions, some French liberals, such as Constant, were uncertain about the centrality of reason in their ideological morphology. They preferred to rely on devising institutions that would, in one scholar's words, 'channel their nonrational drives, such as amour-propre, in the direction of reason'.102 There were those for whom abstract law embodied rationality; for Constant, the reasoning powers of individuals shaped concrete laws. The formality of law replaced the moral virtues of the community as the locus of rationality. Sociability, too, took on a distinct hue in French political debate, and its colours rubbed off on liberalism. The social and sociological contexts of political behaviour were closer to the concerns of French than British political thinkers. Moreover, the famous slogan of the French Revolution had conveniently and significantly tied together in ordinary language usage not only liberty and fraternity, but equality as well. This opened up the possibility of decontesting the revolutionaries' motto on two diverging tracks: the one leading towards sociability,103 the other—deplored by Tocqueville—towards a more radical atomization of individual rights, which could either threaten liberalism or direct it towards commercial activities.104 Thus, in comparison to Mill's own inclinations, the French liberal tradition included some features which were more individualist, while others were more socially oriented. As a whole, though, it displayed a recognizably similar morphology. The liberal response to the Revolution both retained old themes 102 S. Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984), 140; see also p, 202. 103 But see C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Oxford, 1989), 41, about the patriarchal limitations of fraternity. 104 On the latter possibility see C. B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York, 1984).

170 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology on which liberalism could seize and—often as a reaction—saw the emergence of new ones, French liberal thought had, as far back as Montesquieu, related the analysis of political concepts to diverse social structures and had decontested liberty within a 'context of social rules'105 and (institutionally) through the extolling of intermediate bodies between individual and state. Its conception of liberty had been grounded on a rational and moral sense of responsible social conduct within the confines of the law. If the ineliminable component of liberty was still identifiable as nonconstraint, one of its interpretations, contrary to English traditions, was that 'no-one will be constrained to do the things the law does not oblige him to do, or be kept from doing the things the law permits him to do'.106 In this way liberty and a duty-bound rationality were combined in the French liberal tradition, expressing a dual belief, first, in the possibility of just law based on 'a raison universelle ... which resided in a sphere superior to the conflicting interests of individuals'107 and, second, in the virtues and internal cohesion of the political community, thus detaching the conceptualizations of liberty from the taint of an adjacent social atomism. There was of course a more Individualist strain among French liberals. Parallel to the mainstream of a centralizing 'political' and 'constitutional' guarantist liberalism108 there emerged themes of 'economic' liberalism influenced by Say and indebted to British Cobdenism.109 This divide occurred against the cultural backdrop of the stronger role allocated to the state in French politics. 'Economic' liberals concentrated on the individual entrepreneur as the unit of social action and preached the reduction of social responsibilities in favour of the balance established by a free market, thus severely curtailing the core concept of sociability at the expense of a market-generated conception of the general interest. But this was the exception rather than the rule. While even Mill had to approach the connection between liberty and community through a mild form of the 'general interest', mediated—as we have seen—via other core concepts such as individualism and progress-cum-development, many French liberals displayed little 105

L, Siedentop, 'Two Liberal Traditions', in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of freedom (Oxford, 1979), 155-6. 106 C. L. de S. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), 155-6. 107 G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Boston, 1959), 160. 108 Cp. N. Roitssellier, UEurope des IMraux (Brussels, 1991), 58-60. 109 Cp. L. Girard, Les IMraux franyns 1814-1875 (Paris, 1985), 140-4; Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 15.

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unease with a direct linkage between their core concepts of liberty and sociability. The utilitarian concern with the individual bequeathed to Mill an ideological predilection for a conception of a state whose worth was that of the individuals composing it, one in which social entities and structures did not have a salient role to play in organizing and forming individual conduct While in the work of Constant or Henri de Saint-Simon (himself no liberal but respected by Mill) utilitarian resonances can be detected,110 the two thinkers sought consciously to dissociate themselves from utilitarian argument, causing a distinctively liberal horizon to diminish. Indeed, among French liberals this was most strikingly accomplished—from the British perspective—while nevertheless maintaining allegiance to theories of property and economic individualism. The general interest was skilfully construed not merely as the harmonious and enlightened, yet discrete, self-interests of rational individuals. Rather it became, as with Adolphe Franck and Paul Janet, a set of duties owed by each individual to society —the obligation to serve—which sought above all to reconcile the claims of society with individual free choice. That could partly be achieved through a formal guarantism, but behind the operation of the constitution loomed the idea of rational, occasionally still natural, law, and freedom was often decontested in a direction which implied a morality expressed in responsibility towards society."1 Some of the groundwork had already been prepared by Constant. His much-publicized 1819 discussion of liberty drew attention to a tension between the (so-called ancient) conjunction of liberty with an adjacent participation in the public arena, and the (so-called modern) conjunction of liberty with an adjacent individual choice in action as well as in association.112 The first allowed each person to share in national sovereignty, so that 'the will of each individual had real influence', but it diminished individuality by locating liberty in the political collectivity. The second installed liberty—in the shape of concrete liberties such as those of 110 See also Girard, Les Libemux frangais, 48-52; and Welch, Liberty and Utility, with reference to the ideologues. 111 See W. Logue, from Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism 1870-1914 (DeKalb, 111., 1983), chs. 1,2, for an elaboration of some of these themes. Logue notes aptly that some of the eclectics who espoused these views later became conservatives (p. 50). The ideas of a natural morality and progress fostered by such thinkers were, as will be contended in Ch. 8, the most likely to carry them into the conservative camp. 112 These different stresses also reflected diverse historical circumstances which shaped Constant's arguments (see Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 33-43).

172 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology opinion, expression, and religion113—in the domain of commerce, which 'inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence'.114 As Constant noted elsewhere, 'by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality'.115 The dichotomy was not as stark as it seemed. Constant approved of the path leading via participation and reason to community, a path which conferred the 'eternal rights to assent to the laws,... to be an integral part of the social body of which we are members',116 because he also believed in a society united by common ideas.117 But he appealed for a reduced role for political liberty, now to be balanced with a civil liberty buttressed by an adjacent regard for property and security and a perimeter allegiance to free trade, as well as a respect for variety and tolerance—all this providing the best route to the progress of civilization. This was not a plea for a retreat to the domain of the private, but an endorsement of a circumscribed popular sovereignty through representative government, with its mechanisms of limited and constitutional power, reinforced by a commercial civil society capable of resisting the state. In contrast to the conjectural Rousseauist strain in French political thought, Constant observed: "The abstract recognition of the sovereignty 118 of the people in no way augments the sum of individual liberty.' Hence Rousseau's direct democracy was ruled out. Democracy was decontested by holding it firmly in check between 119 constitutionalism, pluralist decentralization, and participation. Only this could ensure political liberty, and 'political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development'120—though this was interpreted not as Mill's self-cultured individual, but in more limited fashion as an enlargement of spirit and ennobling of thoughts. Constant sought to promote the general interest through a pouvoir neutre, a body which combined the popular121desire for liberty with the government's concern with stability. Private property, too, found its way 113 Cp. 'Introduction', in B. Constant, Political Writings, ed. B, Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 27. 114 Constant, Political Writings, 315-16. 115 Quoted in G. A. Kelly, The Humane Comedy; Constant, Toctjueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992), 41. m "* Constant, Politkal Writings, 324, Kelly, Humane Comedy, 45. ns Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 96, See also P. Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, 1994), 86-93, 119 See also Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 2, 44, 77, 120 Constant, Political Writings, 327, 121 Cp. Girard, Les Liberaux frangms, p. 43. On the pouvoir neutre see p, 263 below.

The 'Grand Projects' of Liberalism 173 to the liberal core by new routes, linked not only to liberty but adjacent to social co-operation as a contingent consequence of social life. And equality was decoupled from its populist potential and rendered safe by associating it with the opening up of the structures of the ancien regime and enabling free individual choice.122 The internal conceptual balance in Constant's thought establishes him as a highly representative figure in French liberalism, even though the more famous Tocqueville helped shift that balance back towards an appreciation of the social and intellectual forces without which a liberal-democratic state could not flourish, and towards the controlled democracy from which Mill took his inspiration. The omnipresence of the concept of sociability emanating from sociological assumptions had become a defining feature of the semantic field of French liberalism. Although the earlier legacies of Montesquieu or Constant figure only marginally in his writings, Mill was conversant with Guizot's work, and had indeed met him and become a qualified admirer.123 Through Guizot, Mill had access to a historicist perspective additional to that of the positivist school, one that emphasized liberty of thought—reason taking herself for her own starting point and her own guide', and reinforced the conceptual connections between progress, liberty, and rationality, while also further decontesting liberty as the exercise of the critical ability and moral conscience of individuals.124 However, Mill took exception to the 'Liberal' or 'Whiggish' politics of Guizot and the French doctrinaires, whose respect for constitutionalism as a political panacea offered a core liberal concept inappropriately conjoined with inflexible stances. He believed that they had returned to interpreting rationality in politics as an abstract universalism, not that of the radical but of the conservative who wishes to set in stone a natural political arrangement.123 As Guizot had written; 'In this rational existence, capable as he is of discerning the truth, man is sublime , . . liberty is in him only the power of obeying the truth which he can discern and of shaping his actions in conformity with it.'126 This was contrasted with an interpretation of 'natural' liberty, at 122

Cp. Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 70, 200-1. J. C, Cairns, 'Introduction' to Mill, Essays on French History and Historians, Collected Works, xx, pp. Ixxii-lxxix. 124 Mill, Guizot's Essays and Lectures on History, Collected Works, xx. 271-3. 125 Mill, '"French News", Examiner, 21.10.1832', Newspaper Writings, Collected Works, xxiii. 512-16. 126 Quoted in Ruggiero, History, 170, from Guizot, Histoire de gouvemement representatif. 123

174 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology an earlier evolutionary stage, of doing nothing except what one likes. In this decontestation Guizot could divorce liberty entirely from rational deliberation and judgement.127 Progress, therefore, also saw the development of rational-cum-moral capacities, but for Guizot it was to be preserved by law rather than vested in the free activity of individuals. It retained however a typically liberal open-endedness: 'The more society is perfected, the more it will aspire to new perfections.'128 Though the core concept of reason figured prominently, it was the sovereignty of a transcendental reason, divorced from the autonomous exercise of individual choice, indeed inaccessible to individuals as such. It could only be reflected in a communal reason scattered throughout a society, embedded in law and right practice, and retrievable by those who acquired social intelligence. As a perimeter notion, the qualified freedom of the press acted as a shaper of and outlet for reflective public reason, a concrete form of social rationality and communal common sense.129 The concept of power was also subjected by Guizot to a treatment that retained its core location, but redefined its heart as social as much as political. Instead of being opposed to and superimposed on society by an external government, power, particularly with the rise of mass politics, was embedded in society.130 The morphological spin-off was the decoupling of a constrained power from the task of securing individualism and laissez-faire, and its reconfiguration with state activity on behalf of the community which, though still constitutionally restricted, could also be permitted to reflect rational social interests.131 In his opposition to an atomization of society with its consequent loss of moral liberty, Guizot exercised great influence, not least on later figures such as Tocqueville. The search for intermediate institutions, a recurrent theme of French political theory, acquired fresh urgency. Local government no longer wielded aristocratic autonomy, and new means were required to resist the tyranny of centralization.132 Checks on power had to emerge not 127

Cp. L. Jaume, 'La Raison politique chez Victor Cousin et Guizof, La Pensle politique, 2 (1994), 248. 128 Quoted in Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 97, from Guizot, Des ntoyens de Gouvernement et d'Opposition dans I'&at actual de la France (Paris, 1821), 271,129 F. Guizot, 'Thoughts upon the Liberty of the Press' in E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish (eds.), Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce (London, 1978), 493-5. Cp. Rosaiwallon, Le Moment Guizot, 88-94, 67-9. 130 Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 41, 52. 131 Cp. Manent, Intellectual History, 96-7. 132 Cp. L. Siedentop, Tocqueville (Oxford, 1994), 7-8, 25-6.

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only from existing constitutional or social structures but, through the elaboration of sociological perspectives, from a reassessment of the relationship between liberty, individuality, equality, and responsible power. That reassessment was the measure of Tocqueville's success. The contextualization of equality reflected polysemic ideational combinations in French political thought, and its indeterminacy was contained by its diversion into three channels. Of the first two it has been pointed out: 'Rousseau.., believed in sameness and unity; Tocqueville foresaw sameness and separation'.133 That is, a universal rationalism decoded equality as conformity to general rules; whereas a temporal and spatial understanding of the role of community decoded equality as developing on a mass-induced route of alienation, leading from the Revolution to atomization and centralization. The third route, followed by Tocqueville as value preference rather than sociological prediction, but in the footsteps of the liberal doctrinaires and Guizot, led via the upholding of Christian morality to an appreciation of individual rights and liberties,134 without which the exercise of an equal, reasonable, personal, and commercial liberty was meaningless. Needless to say, the adjacent concept of property was not the subject of equal redistribution, for fear of reducing the opportunities of individual development. The upshot was a further conceptual configuration, affecting diverse understandings of liberty, which in its modem mode could be attained via natural right and equality ('the employment of a common right'),05 and in its aristocratic and more desirable mode was interlocked with 'the individual possession of a right to independence' and the expression of individual worth. These divergent logical trees intersected uneasily in practice.136 Tocqueville's alternative liberal morphology situated liberty within social constraints through a more refined appreciation of social as well as political power (the former decontested as mass despotism, the latter appearing in the distinctive form of centralization). It attempted to control the rapid movement of equality towards the centre of leading ideological cores, attached human rationality to the pursuit of cultured and moralized choices,137 and supported this conceptual configuration by social mceurs, religion, and conscientious participation in public life. Tocqueville thus 133 135 136

m Kelly, Humane Comedy, 52, Cp. Siedentop, Tacqueoitte, 63-4,99-101. Quoted in Kelly, Humane Comedy, 61. Kelly, Humane Comedy, 61-2. 137 Cp. J. Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, 1965), 9.

176 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology proceeded with the retrieval of the concept of community for liberalism, while recognizing the sociological limitations on free choice. Here Constant's ancient world found an echo, in 'the duties of men towards each other as citizens' and the rediscovery of the 'public virtues'.138 Freedom was not an exclusive value for Tocqueville, but it was, as for other liberals, a non-negotiable good, 'a sacred thing... what is virtue if not the free choke of what is good'—a choice governed by a regard for a moral order created in a social context.139 His sensitivity to the restrictions imposed by that context were greater than Constant's,140 and Mill chose not to follow this specific interpretative path. Saint-Simon, although another guiding light for Mill, also adopted decontestations of core liberal concepts which Mill refused to embrace—for, as with Rousseau, they could lead away from the individualism and variety Mill held dear. His highly selective approach to Saint-Simon's teachings was mainly supportive of ideological tendencies Mill had already evinced. Mill shared with many French liberals a moralizing or, at least, educational view of politics—hence the importance of political participation in his writings as in theirs. But participation was for Mill an act of individual choice and personal development, whereas for French theorists it could be transformed into an affirmation of the ends of social membership, an essential by-product of social activity. Thus Saint-Simon wrote: 'True liberty is not simply a matter of keeping one's arms folded in the association, if one so desires. Such an inclination should be severely repressed whenever it arises. On the contrary, liberty means developing a temporal or spiritual capacity useful to the association ...'. Here Saint-Simon offered a version of liberty alien even to French liberal formulations, in failing at the very least to maintain an equilibrium between individual choice and universal rational activity.141 Liberty, individuality, progress, rationality, the general interest, sociability, and constraints on power—all these appear in central areas of French liberal rooms, but interpretative nuances and repositioning adapted them to the cultural requirements of the locality, and the respective subtleties of each conceptual decontestation actuated a chain reaction that affected the other core and 138 139

Quoted from Tocqueville in Siedentop, Tocqueville, 101, Lively, Social and Political Thought, 13-14, Quotation from Tocqueville at p. 140 13. Kelly, Humane Comedy, 39, 141 H. Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, ed. K. Taylor (London, 1975), 229, We shall return to Saint-Simon in Ch. 11.

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adjacent concepts. The morphological resemblances between Mill's views and the instances of French liberal thought noted here are undoubtedly sufficient to confer on them all membership of the same ideological family; while the differences among the concepts and their ensuing relationships allow for the emergence of many varieties of liberalism. Here lies a final yet crucial comment on the liberal core. What has been termed liberalism's self-critical spirit is morphologically corroborated by the conscious readiness of liberals to entertain multiple rearrangements of their conceptual furniture to a far greater extent than would non-liberal ideologists. Scepticism, non-dogmatism, or tolerance are thus translated into a disposition for conceptual reconfiguration. These have often been presented as substantive liberal values, and may well constitute a different interpretation put on the reflectiveness and variety which are adjacent, respectively, to rationality and to individuality as differentiated uniqueness.142 In their active form they encourage synchronic conceptual flexibility. Hence the deliberate and rational exercise of structural tolerance—always within the limits set by its substantive core concepts143—is an additional non-conceptual feature of liberal ideology.144 It needs to be distinguished from the passive diachronic flexibility of the liberal tradition whose features encourage unintended conceptual change over time. We turn now to ano&er set of case-studies which will assist in exploring the wider dimensions liberal conceptual arrangements occupy. 142 114

M3 See also p. 256. Cp. Hobhouse's comments on p. 262. This differs from the strategic flexibility of conservatism explored in Ch. 8.

5

New Liberal Successions: The Modernization of an Ideology

From the standpoint which best presents its continuity with earlier Liberalism, [the new liberalism] appears as a roller... realization of individual liberty ... But to this individualist standpoint must be joined a just apprehension of the social, viz., the insistence that these claims or rights of self-development be adjusted to the sovereignty of social welfare.1 (a) THE IDEALIST LIBERALISM OP T. H. GREEN

of Mill's ideational legatees offers an unusuANallyexamination useful insight into ideological variation. Later liberals constantly alluded to Mill as a yardstick by which to measure their own attainments; we thus face a tradition consciously absorbed and recreated by a new generation of ideological consumers, employing common points of reference to forge a sense of ideological community through expanding horizons. The Millite paradigm of the previous chapter becomes pivotal not merely as a preference of the analyst of ideologies, but because so many shapers of liberalism believed Mill to be pivotal. To assess their contributions on the basis of that perception—at least partly, because we cannot entirely abandon current judgement to their self-evaluations—is methodologically justified. Moreover, from the historical perspective, a period offering instances of both ideological continuity and change is optimally suited to studying ideological diversity and conceptual mutability. Liberty, individualism, progress, rationality, the general interest, sociability, limited and responsible power—how did these core concepts fare in the hands of the Millite succession?2 It is contended 1 2

J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (London, 1909), p. xii Spencerian-type Individualists are excluded from the current discussion because their relationship to liberal ideology is explored in Ch. 7.

New Liberal Successions 179 in this chapter that they all remained constituents of the liberal core, but that some underwent redecontesting due to changing scientific fashion, new sets of ethico-cultural beliefs, and specific events that made their mark on ideological assumptions. The final feature of liberalism—structural tolerance—was a key facilitator in that process, allowing critical distanciation from the modernist project with which liberalism was associated. Many participants in, and observers of, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras have followed Dicey in summing up the times as a transition from individualism to collectivism,3 an emphatic movement from one mutually exclusive position to another. This is another instance of a false dichotomy. The break that occurred was not with the concept of individualism but with a specific meaning of individualism as an atomistic conception of social structure, predicated on the separateness of persons. It may be argued that this is a semasiological trap, inasmuch as 'individualism' refers to two different concepts altogether—a structural unit of social analysis as against a notion of personal uniqueness—but that is a doubtful claim. The two notions have been integrated in common discourse as they were by Mill himself: the single person is also seen as unique in worth and ability and largely self-responsible for his or her attainments; the creative centre of thought and action is, in the last resort, located in separate people. The dispute is rather over inflating one of the decontestations of individualism to take up the entire available space of the concept, a tendency more apparent among 'atomistic' thinkers than among Millite extollers of individuality or the communitarian liberals explored in this chapter. It is indisputable that liberal individualism was making rapid strides along the path indicated by Mill, when individuality and progress were interlinked. T. H. Green served in this process as an ideological halfway house towards the communitarian theories of the British new liberals. Human nature was reaffirmed as developmental, though this was now accompanied by the cultural influence of the Idealist conception of (self )-realization, that is, of moving from a potential to an actual state: 'man has definite capabilities, the realisation of which, since in it alone he can satisfy himself, forms Ms true good'. Excising this process from conservative interpretations of living out a familiar and repeated pattern, Green continued: "They are not realised, however, in any life that can be observed, in any life that has been, or is, or (as it would seem) that can be lived by man as we know him; and for this reason we s

In recent years especially W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, ii. The Ideological Heritage (London, 1983),

180 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology cannot say with any adequacy what the capacities are.' That indeterminate and open-ended notion of human development followed the Millite deviation from Comtean ideas about the closed and finite nature of progress. It was bound up with an emphatic insistence on the individual person, or personality, as the unit of such development, as the only entity to which self-consciousness—the precondition for the full rational development of human life— could be ascribed. But the idea of individual development was equally joined to an extension of the concept of sociability: 'It is in fact only so far as we are members of a society, of which we can conceive the common good as our own, that the idea has any practical hold on us altogether... society is the condition of all development of our personality/4 Green had inherited, and was recasting in new philosophical language, the liberal aversion to promoting the sectional interests of particular groups which, rightly or wrongly, they attributed to their ideological rivals, conservatism and socialism, The relatively embryonic, though nevertheless central, liberal concept of sociability was available in a form capable of redirection towards budding notions of interdependence and community. Green's 'common good' was predicated on the idea of the self as social, possessing a good that included 'interests in the good o f . . . other persons', though they remained ends in themselves.3 Because Green defined himself, and was perceived, as a liberal6— as well as an active member of the Oxford Liberals—and because his popularizations of liberalism,7 if not his abstruse philosophy, had a noteworthy ideological impact on a generation of followers, it is legitimate to consider his reformulations as significant contributions to liberalism. Two practices engaged in until recently, however, are not legitimate. The one regards Green as one of the final milestones in the evolution of liberalism, mainly because scholarly biases induce students to equate major philosophical constructs with ideological ones.8 This line continues the overestimation of philosophical at the expense of ideological argument, as 4

s T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford, 1883), 189, 192, Ibid. 210. * See R, L. Nettleship, 'Memoir', in Works of Tttomas Hill Green, ed. R, L. Nettleship (London, 1889), iii. p. cxx. 7 In particular 1. H, Green, Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1881), and some vulgarizations of his philosophical positions that percolated into current ideological discourse, such as the conception of positive liberty. 8 See e.g. C. Brinton, English Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York, 1962), 212, 226; W. H. Coates and H. V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism, ii. Since the French Revolution (New York, 1970).

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a provider of insights both into conceptual analysis and into political conduct. The other sees Green as a radical reformulator of liberal positions, ignoring the cultural context in which his statements were made and their progressiveness or otherwise in relation to other contemporary liberal positions.9 Whereas Green has strong claims to rank as one of the last important social philosophers in Britain, a number of liberal thinkers who succeeded him can fairly be designated as more ideologically innovative and influential. No group of thinkers was more adamant than the British Idealists in insisting on the complementary nature of the individual and social principles—the one defining the other and dependent on it, each incapable of autonomous existence.10 Nevertheless, some Idealists gravitated towards positions identified in their times as conservative while others did not.11 What then makes Green an exemplar of liberal political Idealism? In order to answer that satisfactorily, a diachronic match has to be demonstrated between Green's core concepts and those already posited as characterizing Mill's liberalism. These can also be synchronically tested against the liberal ideas held by his contemporaries. To traipse through every combination would be tedious, and in making short cuts I must occasionally appeal to the reader's indulgence. There is, however, no proper substitute for textual analysis. Nor would a total match be necessary as long as liberal ideologies displayed sufficient family resemblances. From establishing changes in sociability and individualism, we turn to Green's concept of liberty and its intersection with other core liberal concepts. Note immediately how Green homed in on a specific decontesting of freedom.12 Surveying past uses of the concept—Stoic, Pauline, Kantian, and Hegelian—he observed: in all these different views as to the manner and degree in which freedom is to be attained, 'freedom' does not mean that the man or will is undetermined, nor yet does it mean mere self-determination, which . , . 9 This view was represented by G, H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd edn. (London, 1951), 615. 13 See A. Simhony, 'Idealist Organicism: Bevond Holism and Individualism', History of Political Thought, 12 (1991), 515-35,' " The most controversial Idealist to categorize in these terms is Bosanquet, who has been described as both liberal and conservative. See A. M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles (Oxford, 1987); ]. A, Hobson, 'The Social Philosophy of Charity Organisation', in Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (London, 1909), 192-217; and G. Gaus, The Modem Liberal Theory of Man (London, 1983). 12 I treat freedom and liberty as synonymous.

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must be equally applied to the man whose will is heteronomous or vicious, and to Mm whose will is autonomous ... It means a particular kind of self-determination.

Feeling Ms way towards the inelimkiable component of tihe concept of liberty, Green continued: 'Now none of these modes of self-determination is at all implied in "freedom" according to the primary meaning of the term, as expressing that relation between one man and others in which he is secured from compulsion'—or non-constraint, as proposed in Chapter 2. He was incorrect, however, in suggesting that securing from compulsion necessarily implies 'that a man should have power to do what he wills or prefers', because that already attaches non-constraint to certain attributes of human nature—power, consciousness, choice—not inherent to all decontestations of the concept of liberty. Nevertheless, Green correctly indicated that adjacent notions are necessary to elaborate the meaning of freedom, which 'is not constituted by the mere fact of acting upon preference, but depends wholly on the nature13of the preference, upon the kind of object willed or preferred'. Here Green departed from Kant and permitted a substantive evaluation of chokes and their consequences, evident in Mill—rather than just the formal exercise of an autonomous will— to persist in the British liberal tradition.14 In assuming that a person's 'will is himself. His character necessarily shows itself in his will', Green adapted current conceptions of the essence of human nature to liberal Idealist causes.15 This conception dictated the cultural adjacency between freedom and the exercise of individual will. In turn it was presented as a chain of logical adjacency between exercise, individuality, and freedom, decontesting the latter as the expression or assertion of a selfmastering or autonomous individual. In addition, it was joined by the assumption that the freedom of the will depends on the character of the objects wiled, objects in which individuals could satisfy themselves. Freedom is 'the expression of that same self-seeking principle from which the quest for such an object proceeds'. Between the ineliminable component of non-constraint and the full 19

T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London, 1941), 9. Italics added. 14 See P. P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies (Cambridge, 1990), 61-2. 15 Green, Political Obligation, "12. For Green, character entailed conscientiousness (see Nicholson, Political Philosophy, 78). See also S. Collini, 'The Idea of "Character" in Victorian Political Thought', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 35 (London, 1985), 29-50.

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concept of freedom, Green interposed dominant cultural interpretations of such 'quests' deriving from, psycho-biological theories of 'a consciousness of impeded energy, a consciousness of oneself as for ever thwarted and held back' as well as from his deontological Idealist views on actualization. Freedom now became 'the fulfilment of one's possibilities'.16 Given this cultural decontestation, we are led not to the logically adjacent concept of self-determination alone, which is merely a formal category,17 but to a particular direction of self-deterrnination—self-development,18 which appears in Green's terminology as 'self-improvement', 'self-realising', 'moral endeavour', 'moral growth', or 'attainment o f . . . human perfection'.19 Green shifted carelessly between decontesting progress as improvement (self-development) and as human perfectibility (selfrealization). The latter interpretation, inspired by Hegel's notion of the idea realizing itself in the world through human selfconsciousness, exceeded Mill's more modest assumption of harmonious meliorism. Only by insisting that the motive and forms of such perfectibility spring from individual wills, rather than a transcendental, absolute idea, could Green avoid the positing of a model of human development to which individuals must inexorably subscribe—a model frequently, if not always accurately, read into Hegel's system. By retaining freedom at the centre of his argument, and by joining free will with individual self-development, the idea of perfection was restrained from linking up with a determinist and universal standard against which any individual would be judged. The postulation of that standard would have raised serious doubts over Green's status in the area we are beginning to map out as liberal, inasmuch as liberals tend to decontest rational development as pluralistic.20 In locating human rationality at the core of Ms liberalism, Green strengthened the interdependent relationship of the other core concepts. 'Reason and will... are one in the sense that they are alike expressions of one self-realising principle'.21 The freedom he wished to see realized was a rational freedom. But will was also 16

Green, Political Obligation, 17-18. 1, H. Green, 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant', in Works of Thomas Hill Green, ii. (London, 1886), 95. 18 See also H, J. McCloskey, 'A Critique of the Ideals of Liberty', Mind, 74 (1965), 483-508, 19 Green, Political Obligation, 18-21, 25. w That indeed was Berlin's critique, the result of his evaluation of the perfectionist principle separately from the context of the idea-environment in which Green firmly locates it. See I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), 133 n. 17

21

Green, Political Obligation, 23.

184 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology the basis of the state. The true state was a society in a specific mode, one 'fulfilling its primary function of maintaining law in the interest of all'—the liberal appeal to a general interest grounded on classlessness. It was also 'the nation organized in the form of a self-governing community'—-which now decontested liberty as self-determination in the context of a common good.22 By attaching self-determination to a good, Green introduced a dynamic bonding the two together. His ideological core thus contained an emphasis on 'the development of society and of man through society.' He asserted that 'it is only as members of a society, as recognising common interests and objects, that individuals come to have ... [moral] attributes and rights'.23 Those rights, specially guaranteed, were the means through which the moral attributes embarked on the process of development. Liberty, progress, and rationality were placed in proximity to a rather stronger notion of sociability than that employed by Mill. But nor was society conceived, in the manner of French liberals, as the repository of a sociologically based morality and reason, accessible through retrieving certain established institutional and moral practices. Sociability was for Green an individual ethical attribute, rather than the social fact of embeddedness in a group. It is both because individuals have a consciousness of ends, and because those ends encompass a common good that individuals share 'in virtue of their relation to each other and their common nature', that the state can realize 'an idea of social good'.24 Whereas for Mill sociability denoted mutual dependence and sympathy, Green's stronger version posited a shared rationality and a conception of human nature in which moral elements were held in common. Conversely, whereas many French liberals perceived society as supplying individuals with instances of universal rational practice, Green saw society as granting individuals the power and conditions without which they would be unable to exercise their rational faculties freely,25 and did not attribute personality and will directly to an organic community.26 22 Green, Political Obligation, 129-30. There is little distinction in Idealist thought between state and society in their optimal forms as ethical communities. See Z. Pelczynski, 'The Hegelian Conception of the State', in Z. Pelczynski (ed.), Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1971), 1-29. 23 24 Green, Political Obligation, 121-2. Ibid. 129,132, 135. K Ibid. 144. 26 Cp. M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T, H, Green and his Age (London, 1964), 207, and M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978), 57-8.

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To assist in buttressing his ideological structure Green drew in the adjacent concept of rights. A right supported the mutual interlocking of the core concepts of individuality and sociability. It was both "a claim of the individual, arising out of his rational nature, to the free exercise of some faculty' and 'a concession of that claim by society, a power given by it to the individual of putting the claim into force', The most essential rights were those to life and liberty, the connection between the two being that human life entailed the exercise of will. The right to the most fundamental human attributes was based on an understanding of human capacity or nature. It was 'capacity on the part of the subject for membership of a society, for determination of the wiE, and through it of the bodily organisation, by the conception of a well-being as common to self with others'. This line of argument allowed Green to indulge in the common hallmark of ideologists and to present a cultural set of adjacencies as logically sufficient as well as necessary: 'The admission of a right to free life ... does in fact logically imply the conception of all men as forming one society in which each individual has some service to render, one organism in which each has a function to fulfil.'27 We are now confronted with a morphology in which a rational and sociable human nature freely develops towards a perceptible concept of community. That concept became manifest in the liberal core and was made to engage in a mutually supportive relationship with the individual. Did this entail the demise of individualism and hence the removal from the Millite liberal core of one of its pillars? And was the notion of community, with its incipient organicism, intolerably intrusive on the other core liberal concepts? That the answer is negative can be demonstrated through following Green's arguments further. In Idealist fashion. Green proffered individualism and community as two sides of the same coin. One's function in the social organism must be freely fulfilled, and a right, though secured by the community, is a power of acting for the individual's own ends (though these include ends incorporated in the notion of the common good). Individualism clearly sheers towards individuality. Green saw community as emanating from individual minds which move towards exploring the ground they share,28 not being a notion that imposed a preformed conception of community on individuals, nor even one that allowed communal interests to take a direction of their own.29 The liberal core concepts 17 28

Green, Political Obligation, 144, 155-6, 157, 29 Ibid, 159, 207, Cp. p. 252 below.

186 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology of the general interest and of sociability merge in a unique way through Green's conception of the common good.* With its strong sense of moral agency and of individuality, the common good is still containable within a liberal morphology. Furthermore, the concept of tihe state, adjacent to Green's core concepts, had a service function with respect to individual self-assertion and development. It was crucial, as Green insisted, that the state 'remove obstacles to the realisation of the capacity for beneficial exercise of rights, without defeating its own object by vitiating the spontaneous character of that capacity'.31 His ideological morphology thus retained a pervasive liberal complexion; liberal not only in the light of Green's self-definition, but because of sufficient family resemblances to Mill and his contemporaries. The best-known pronouncement of Green's liberal ideology in non-philosophical garb, Liberal Legislation and the Freedom of Contract, caste additional light on the core concepts while adding some peripheral ones. Its intention was to decontest liberty so as to exclude from it total freedom of choice. The concept—and institution—of the state as a culturally adjacent concept was harnessed in order to debar, by its authority and even force, those senses of liberty detrimental to the other liberal core concepts. Green's well-known definition of freedom deserves careful structural examination. 'We do not merely mean freedom from restraint or compulsion', he wrote. But we also mean that. The ineliminable element is retained, but immediately locked in to components which point it in a specific direction while preventing it from moving towards other contested meanings of the concept. First, the exclusions: 'We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is that we like.' The unqualified choice of ends, of objects of desire, is ruled out. Freedom is not a wants-related notion. Furthermore, 'We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others.' Here the social constraints on the unlimited exercise of any individual's freedom as an absolute right are recalled to mind. Both notions are clearly visible in Mill's writings, even if Mill gives the second greater prominence than the first. Then comes the approved decontestation. By freedom 'we mean a positive power or capacity of doing something worth doing or enjoying, and32 that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others'. Freedom is tied in to a range of features character30 31

Cp. Gaus, Theory of Man, 55-6. Green, Political Obligation, 210.

32

Green, Liberal Legislation, 9.

New Liberal Successions 187 izing human nature—powers, capacities, doing, and enjoying— and external conditions are organized so that non-constraint applies specifically to those beneficial areas of human self-expressioncurn-development. Non-constraint does not have to apply to all human actions, for some unconstrained actions will not result in freedom. As Green himself observes: 'the mere removal of compulsion, the mere enabling a man to do as he likes is in itself no contribution to true freedom'. The ineliminable element of nonconstraint is insufficient to bear the weight of freedom and may occasionally be attached to concepts (on the theoretical level) and conduct (on the practical level) far removed from freedom. Ineliminability does not entail exelusiveness to one concept. Moreover, for Green freedom is only fully attained when a particular combination of its components is secured; it is impaired when other potential components are employed, components that other— possibly non-liberal—champions of liberty might advocate. But freedom is also bound up with a common activity, arising out of the sociability component of human nature. Freedom is moreover, we learn, something capable of growth, and 'we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom'. Hence Mill's core concepts attain even greater fusion. Liberty is not merely a sign of, or means to, development; it undergoes growth itself. And the more do the sociable attributes—those that contribute to the common good—emerge as a result of this freedom, the more can 'the citizens as a body ... make the most and best of themselves'.33 Here is yet another decontestation of liberty. We already know that it is not mere self-determination, and that it has to be fertilized by another core concept—development. Green now narrows the options further; not even casual or limited development, but its optimaHzation, collapsed into maximization. In that, again, Green follows the perfectionist route tihat, taken on its own, might have caused liberal meliorism to burst through the restraints of its fellow core concepts, and appears to weaken the structural tolerance liberalism exhibits. However, liberty is firmly held in place by what is importantly taken to denote subjective, not objective, optimalization—the citizens are those who make the most and best of themselves. It is a modified item of furniture in a room we have already come to recognize. The next step follows closely. Green now subdivides the concept of freedom. Its less exalted 33

Md. 10. For a discussion of some of the above themes see A. Simhony, 'On Forcing Individuals to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of Positive Freedom', Political Studies, 39 (1991), 303-20.

188 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology manifestation contains all forms 'of doing what one will with one's own'. Its preferred manifestation (the end of social effort) is specified as positive liberty, 'the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contribution to a common good'. Again, this sentence is morphologically packed with meaning. Liberation of powers implies the unleashing and consequent natural working out of human potential. That potential is made available for social purposes and—introducing a new element—equality of such liberation is placed adjacent to liberty. 'Freedom contributes to that equal development of the faculties of all which is the highest good for all.'34 There are in Green's writings occasional references to, though little sustained analysis of, the practicalities of the responsible, delimited use of political power.35 But the concept is implicit throughout When Green wrote that 'will, not force, is the basis of the state' he was indicating that very point, though he couched the issue in terms of rights and obligations. As an Idealist, he regarded submission to the power of the state as the rational self-regulation by individuals of those ends which they share with others.36 In predominant liberal perspectives the gap between individual and society is presented as a constant fact of liberal ideology, although it may be narrowed and co-ordinating mechanisms established. The perfectionist Idealist paradigm parts company with liberalism inasmuch as individual and society are so integrated that the question of political obligation is rendered superfluous. If even in this regard Green was in the liberal camp, and his perfectionism was a not altogether intentional surplus of meaning, it was because he felt the need to argue in favour of political obligation— for by assuming that a case for bridging the divide must be made, the divide was perceived as given—and because he was prepared to accept the empirical world and 'take men as we find them'.37 Here is the opening to structural tolerance. Unquestionably, too, force limited by right is a core concept in Green's liberal edifice. Individual development and institutional arrangements stand, as components of an ideological core always do, in a relationship of mutual sustenance: the institutions by which a man is moralised . . . express a conception of the common good;... through them that conception takes form and 34 35

Green, Liberal Legislation, 11. Cp. Green's reflections on Cromwell and constitutional government in 'Four Lectures on the English Revolution', Works, esp. pp. 361-4. 36 37 Green, Political Obligation, 122. Green, Liberal Legislation, 13.

New Liberal Successions 189 reality; and... it is in turn through its presence in the individual that they have a constraining power over him, a power which is not that of mere fear, still less a physical compulsion, but which leads Mm38to do what he is not inclined to because there is a law that he should. (b) PERIMETER PRACTICES AND ADJACENT AFTERMATHS

Green popularized some of his philosophical and ideological views in order to promote several peripheral liberal concepts and push others off the liberal map. Thus he joined the ultimately unsuccessful effort to transfer temperance from a marginal idea to a more central position in liberal theory, suggesting that it was critical to protecting the ineliminable core of liberty: 'drink is the greatest impediment to freedom that exists in England'.39 The reasons for this unexpected adjacency were both personal and specific to a strong British subculture. Green's brother had been an alcoholic, and the temperance movements in their different currents had long agitated for the control of drink for a variety of reasons. These ranged from disapproval of the dissipation of moral fibre involved in alcoholism, to the perceived association between drink and adherence to Conservatism, to a fear that the working class would be unable to attain full citizenship and welfare under such debilitating conditions.40 To these may be added Green's typically Victorian concern with character. Temperance had a vital perimeter function in Green's liberalism, unlike its marginal position for Mill, who stated: 'Drunkenness... in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference' unless its consequences were violent.41 Green, to the contrary, returned to his conception of the state as removing hindrances—in this case to liberty and to the development of character as constituting the common good—and supported legislation for a local option'—a devolved and direct community decision on whether to permit the liquor traffic rather than rely on remote state action. In turn, the powerful United Kingdom Alliance prohibitionist organization 'helped to publicize the "constructive" Liberalism of T. H. Green'.42 The drink question 38

Green, Political Obligation, 123-4. Quoted in P. Nicholson, 'T. H. Green and State Action: Liquor Legislation', in A. Vincent (ed.), The Philosophy of T. H, Green (Aldershot, 1986), 76. 40 Cp. ibid. 76-103 and passim; Richter, Politics of Conscience, 362-70. For a general discussion see B. Harrison, Drink and the Vktorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872 (London, 1971). 41 42 Mill, On Liberty, 153. Harrison, Drink, 210. 39

190 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology offered concrete support to wider trends in liberal ideology. One tendency relied on apportioning areas of self-determination to individuals, or allowed them to discover, in utilitarian fashion, the costs of their own errors. Green's alternative strand now raised issues of substantive goods without which human development was unachievable. Specifically, temperance reform affected Green's morphological core in its contribution towards controlling the interrelationship between liberty and the coercion that safeguarded it, securing vital conditions for progress, and linking community, rationality, and democracy by permitting concerned local communities to set majority standards of rational conduct. In broader terms, despite its relative failure, it preshadowed the direct concern of later liberals with the attainment of welfare, decontesting core concepts in terms that spelt out a general duty to establish minimum values for each core; though in an institutional sense it moved only gingerly in the direction of the assumption of state responsibility for the supply of such goods. Green's attack on freedom of contract was intended to marginalize, if not remove, that particular configuration, and to contest some of the rights of property commonly associated with liberalism, and it was far more successful in contributing to that cause, The notion of contract assumed complete equality of choice but attached it to inequalities of power. In endorsing the equality that offered all people the same opportunities for development, Green rejected Benthamite views in favour of Kantian ones. The Benthamite principle that 'every one should count for one and no one for more than one' was beneficial when it was practically construed as meaning that every person was 'deemed an end of absolute value'; but it was unsatisfactory because in the final analysis the pleasure, not the person, was of value.43 Only the Kantian formula—acting to treat one's own person and others always as an end—employed the concept of equality in order to secure the underwriting of the core notion of the individual. The type of equality of choice embedded in freedom of contract related to equal respect for people's wants, while disregarding their equal development and common good, and was too weak to support Green's decontestation of liberty. Contrary to many interpretations, equality was not a core concept of Green's, It was employed to serve the substantive and general end of securing the common good, and the formal end of providing the conditions for individuality. It appears regularly, 43

Green, Prolegomena, 226-8,

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in some guise or another, adjacent to the liberal core, but some of its forms are frequently banned from the liberal room and what remains is thin. Beyond equality of freedom, of opportunity for development, and an ethically orientated equality of treatment Green interpreted the concept of equality with caution. This is especially noticeable in his handling of the concept of property. By attaching property to, as well as severing it from, perimeter ideas and concepts prevalent in his day, Green supplies our second glimpse of that adjacent liberal concept in the process of change. Specifically, he sought to restrict the right to property while vindicating the inegalitarianism of its accumulation. 'The rationale of property', Green claimed, 'is that everyone should be secured by society in the power of getting and keeping the means of realizing a will, which in possibility is a will directed to social good.'44 This complex sentence bridges an entire universe of liberal argument. Green began with the Lockeart linking of the right to free life with the right to property,45 but then connected the latter to his specification of will as a constant principle aimed at the realization of human well-being. He added the prevalent late nineteenthcentury departure from natural-rights theory by identifying social recognition as a crucial component of any right, that to property included.4* And he ended by reminding the reader that property must be justified as a means to promoting the social good.47 The restriction of the powers of appropriation was defensible when an individual's possession of property interfered with the possession of property, and consequent self-realization, by others. However, 'once admit as the idea of property that nature should be progressively adapted to the service of man by a process in which each, while working freely or for himself, i.e. as determined by a conception of his own good, at the same time contributes to the social good, and it will follow that property must be unequal'.48 In this respect Green did not depart from contemporary liberal wisdom, nor did he do so in upholding the freedom of bequest. It was not, he insisted, the fault of capitalism or the free development of individual wealth that rights over land had been misused, but the failure of the state to regulate unlimited private ownership. 44

46

Green, Political Obligation, 220,

4S

Ibid. 216.

See M. Freeden, 'Rights, Needs and Community: The Emergence of British Welfare Thought', in A. Ware and R. Goodin (eds.). Needs and Welfare (London, 1990), 54-72. But, like Hobson after him, Green retained the qualifier 'natural' to denote a right that was ideologically necessary {see Richter, Politics of Conscience, 234). 47 48 Green, Political Obligation, 212-14, 216-17. Ibid. 219-21,

192 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology The state was, significantly, entitled to regulate the distribution of property for purposes of freer access, but not to deprive individuals of what Green saw as the fruits of their labour. He was not ready to consider the taxation of unearned increment in land, an item frequently present on contemporary radical agendas, both because it was too difficult to identify that increment, and because of the cost to individual incentive.49 In many cases, Green's perimeter notions did not sustain the radical and communitarian potential made available in his core and adjacent decontestations and his political views were shaped by, but did not spearhead, the advanced liberalism of his day.50 Green's theorizing was the product of a number of intellectual environments. Two general ones were the burgeoning political Liberalism of the mid- and later nineteenth century, harnessed to emancipatory causes internal and external, and the powerful radical and reformist impulses unleashed by utilitarianism.51 But there were also more specific environments. One such was constituted by the small but influential coteries of Oxford (and Scottish) Idealists. They maintained a supportive philosophical subculture that adapted Continental interests, Kantian and Hegelian, to a revived Aristotelian tradition, central to the Oxford curriculum, and markedly teleological in its posited relationship of individual to society.52 Though Green and his fellow Idealists served in different ways as conduits of a dominant stream of critical German philosophy into Britain, which affected his ideas on the links between liberty, individual consciousness, and rationality, his thought was formed by alternative contexts which mitigated the impact of Kantian perfectionism and its strong emphasis on intuition, transcendentalism, personal autonomy, and truth. Instead, it was filtered through British empiricism and a political radicalism based on gradualist and concrete aims and prescribed political action,33 as well as awareness of current moral practices54—including the 49 50 51

Green, Political Obligation, 223, 228-9; Liberal Legislation, 15-19. See Freeden, New Liberalism, 16-19; Nicholson, Political Philosophy, III, 193. On Green's limited affinity with utilitarianism, despite his—-and others'—protestations to the contrary, see J. A. Hobson 'The Philosophy of the State', Ethical World (I Sept. 1900); Nicholson, Political Philosophy, 189-91, and D. Weinstein, 'Between Kantianism and Consequentialism in T. H. Green's Moral Philosophy', Political Studies, 41 (1993), 618-35. 52 Cp. Richter, Politics of Conscience, 221; S, den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation; A Study in Late Victorian Thought (Oxford, 1996), 36-51. 53 Cp. I. M. Greengarten, Thomas Hill Green and the Development of Liberal-Democratic Thought (Toronto, 1981), 107. s * Nicholson, 'Green and State Action', 96.

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practices enshrined in the British liberal tradition itself. Another environment was reflected in a strong infusion of politics with ethical concerns culled in part from the emergence of a liberal, humanist, and non-dogmatic Broad Church in which citizenship was underpinned as a religious vocation.56 More generally, an activist nonconformist ethic spurred liberalism into the realization of public duty as social and political reform, reflected in personal example—e.g. through the Settlement Movement.57 In Green's case, it was further buttressed by an immanentism supported by his interpretation of Hegel.58 Separately and together, these intellectual and cultural trends assisted in propelling liberal ideology towards a greater appreciation of human rationality as expressed in social organization, an increased cognizance of the systemic, if not yet organic, nature of society, a keener desire to give vent to human potential under conditions of personal and national liberation, and an enhanced awareness of political life, specifically via citizenship, as an arena for the fulfilment of human values. Nonconformity was one, though not the only, factor in turning the attention of liberal theorists towards social reform and the need to improve both material and moral conditions in order to secure a just society. Above all, liberalism became imbued with an internal dynamism unavailable from its previous association with laissez-faire and that doctrine's fixation with a natural, unintended, and relatively static harmony resulting simply from the private pursuit of individual interests. It was also unavailable from Mill's early work or from his later concern with the protection of self-regarding conduct. Nevertheless, horizons were accumulating as well as diminishing: the liberal tradition which Green's version of Idealism had inherited was already operating as a constraining horizon on the absolutist and conservative semantic fields to which Idealism frequently lent support. The hitherto concentration on Mill and Green must not be misconstrued as a departure from the programme for analysing ideologies set out in Part I. In examining some ideas of two 55

G, Thomas has asserted that 1 cannot see that in his political philosophy Kant significantly supplied Green with arguments or ideas' (The Moral Philosophy of T, H. Green (Oxford, 1987), 44). See also Ch. 6 below. 56 See Riehter, Politics of Conscience, 29-30; A. Vincent and R. Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: Tfw Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford, 1984), 6-17. 57 See Vincent and Plant, Philosophy, 132-49. 58 M. Bevir, 'Welfarism, Socialism and Religion; On T. H. Green and Others', Review of Politics, 55 (1993), 639-61.

194 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology outstanding political philosophers, three objectives have been borne in mind. First, to illustrate that the internal morphology of their liberal views is one characteristic of ideological thinking, with its patterns of decontestation, its struggle over the legitimacy of meanings, and its mixture of logical and cultural adjacency. Second, to indicate how the two could also be seen as part of wider social groups that sustained their ideas and from which they drew as consumers as weU as producers of ideologies; and how they could be put within spatial and historical contexts which cast light on their choke of conceptual decontestation. Third, to contend, as shall be illustrated below, that however much liberal ideology owes to these two theorists, it developed independently of them through groups possessed of lesser' intellectual rigour, often using different media, whose flourishing and influence, if not precise direction, would most probably not have been affected had Mill and Green not existed. (c) THE NEW LIBERALISM: THE EVOLUTION OF AN IDEOLOGY

The immediate generation of liberal thinkers to succeed Green took liberalism into areas considered to this day by many to be so close59to socialist thought as to render a clear distinction impossible. The purpose of this section, employing the diachronic criteria available at the time as well as measuring it against the emerging liberal morphology, will be to demonstrate that the new liberalism was emphatically liberal. Its configuration of core concepts followed already established patterns, while placing slightly different stress on the relative weight of each of them within the core. The new liberals constituted an explicit social and cultural reaction to the glaring evils of the industrial revolution, evils exposed in increasing detail by surveys and research into the condition of the poor and underlined by the pressing need to accommodate the ascendant working class in terms of an economic redistribution commensurate with its newly acquired political power. Concurrently, the rise of socialist groups necessitated a liberal response to, if not a pre-empting of, their theories. While socialist ideology was in many ways a development from liberalism,60 it threatened to undermine the centrality of some of the latter's concepts and to 5

» See e.g. J, Townshend, /. A, Hobson (Manchester, 1990).

" See Ch. 12.

New Liberal Successions 195 delegitimate its ideological solutions. The middle classes in Britain were eminently equipped to initiate responses within liberalism, because among them emerged new professional groups—journalists, social reformers, academics, churchmen—that combined a number of vital factors: an education bringing them in touch with new social thinking about society and the state, as well as awareness of new scientific theories; an enhanced ethical sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate through a sentiment of social mission instilled at the leading universities; an explosion in the means of dissemination of progressive ideologies through mass book circulation and the press, the latter partly due to the fortuitous emergence of powerful liberal editors; and an attraction towards new economic theories that combined historical liberal aims with fresh views on consumption and distribution. It is fitting to begin this discussion with L. T. Hobhouse's Liberalism—not the first book published in Britain bearing that title, but the first to concentrate on a self-conscious exposition of the principles of liberal theory rather than policy. Because Hobhouse was part of an identifiable group of interacting liberal thinkers, he can be shown to be both consumer of their ideas and consumed by them in turn. Hobhouse adopted historical as well as analytical approaches to locate his brand of liberalism within a perceived tradition. His views of that tradition constitute a central characterization of the new liberalism itself (that is, Hobhouse's history is also his ideology) and the compatibility of the new liberalism with its antecedents becomes a question to be tested equally by its producers and by our own examination of that tradition's reference points. Many scholars of liberalism regard Hobhouse primarily as a disciple of Green, a typical product of the Oxford Idealist tradition, and are therefore encouraged to read back into Green an ideological position that seems to make him indispensable to the evolution of a welfare-oriented, socially conscious liberalism.61 There is no disputing that Green exercised great influence on Hobhouse's ideas and formulations, but it is equally undeniable that Hobhouse expanded liberal theory in directions that Green did not initiate and might have felt unable to follow. Nor is it in doubt that Hobhouse developed an aversion to many of the principles he believed to be embedded in Idealism.62 It is worth drawing attention to the prominence of Mill as 61 S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology. L. T, Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1979). 62 Cp. L. T, Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London, 1918).

196 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology compared to Green in Hobhouse's book, and to his important statement that 'in [Mill's] single person he spans the interval between the old and the new Liberalism', a view held by many new liberals, anxious to establish their credentials within the liberal tradition.63 Though Hobhouse frequently converged on Green's position, he did so while associating with what he believed to be the logic of the British liberal tradition itself (Green being more concerned with the customary apostolic succession of individual Western philosophers), and he was far more influenced by evolutionary notions which are absent in Green's opus. It is those which led Hobhouse significantly to describe the heart of his liberal position as follows: 'We have, in fact, arrived by a path of our own at that which is ordinarily described as the organic conception of the relation between the individual and society—a conception towards which Mill worked through his career, and which forms the starting-point of T. H, Green's philosophy alike in ethics and in politics. Embarking on an examination of that path can begin usefully with Hobhouse's view of Mill. Reacting more positively than Green to Mill's utilitarianism, Hobhouse suggested that as a utilitarian Mill could not single out 'any rights of the individual that can be set in opposition to the public welfare'; indeed, that 'the permanent welfare of the public is bound up with the rights of the individual'. The preference for the term 'welfare' over Green's 'good' is indicative of a shift away from a predominantly moral view of individual abilities and social interests to the incorporation, within an ethical overview, of direct appeals to human needs and material human capacities for which the public is responsible and from which it would benefit directly.65 That approach had already outraged Herbert Spencer, who regarded it as an unacceptable intrusion in a natural order based on the free functioning of individuals.66 In particular, Hobhouse derived from Mill a notion of the rational self-development of personality, an understanding of liberty as a process of growth, a sense of the mutual compatibility between individual and social well-being (without reducing the latter to the former, as did the political economists who espoused laissezfaire), and a view of government as the responsible exercise of limited power.67 63

Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York, 1964; 1st edn. London, 1911), 58. See also J. A. Hobson, 'John Stuart Mill', Speaker (26 May 1906). 64 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 67. Italics added. 65 Green's position on this is ambivalent. See Gaus, Theory of Man, 17-18. ** H. Spencer, The Man versus the State (Harmotidsworth, 1969). See Ch. 7. 67 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 60-1.

New Liberal Successions 197 Two major factors in the restructuring of the liberal edifice were the interposition of evolutionary theories and the rise of an ethic of integrated social reform. The doctrine of evolution began to carry weight in political discourse from the 1880s, both in its specific scientific formulation and as a more general cultural view of progress. The absence of the post-Darwinist view of evolution in Green's writings is as telling a symptom of his failure sufficiently to radicalize liberalism as is the presence of that view a hallmark of the new liberalism. It is revealing that Hobhouse swore by evolutionary theory from early adulthood. Already when being taught in an Oxford still under the shadow of the newly departed Green, Hobhouse linked evolution, progress, and individual development: 'working on the Evolution theory.,. we may confidently predict that the growth will not cease, b u t . . . the rnind of man will set its own improvement or development before itself as its great object'.68 Above all, it was D. G, Ritchie who bridged the gap between a liberalism that incorporated mere progress and a liberalism that adapted to the evolutionary rhythm. Combining Idealist, utilitarian, and evolutionary perspectives, Ritchie believed the emergence of a rational human consciousness itself to be the product of evolutionary forces, enabling individuals to collaborate in a critical ethical assessment of their own society and to effect its improvement. Human rationality was the product of a cosmic sequence that Darwin had assumed to be ethically neutral.69 In later years, Hobhouse too gained from the theory of evolution a confidence in the emergence of the rational minds of individuals, a process through which the human race would control its environment and its own future development.70 While competing theories of social Darwinism conjured up a nature red in tooth and claw as a vindication of human competition and the Spencerian end of the survival of the fittest, the new liberals promoted an alternative interpretation of social evolution as one leading to increasing human co-operation, precisely because the development of human rationality was also the development of human sociability. Here again, Ritchie's contribution was instrumental. Mill's liberalism, as we have seen, absorbed utilitarian principles through philosophic radicalism in order to employ the concept of liberty as a tool for change, to introduce a nominal egalitarianism and to optimalize, if not maximize, individual good and development. 68

L. T, Hobhouse to Mary Howard, Gilbert Murray papers, Box 124 (Bodleian Library, Oxford). 69 D, G. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel (London, 1893), esp. pp. 60-3. 70 See Freeden, The New Liberalism, 86-8.

198 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology Ritchie elaborated on the idea of utility not only by detaching it from its atomistic and hedonistic presuppositions but through attaching it instead to two new partners: the social body whose utility could be pursued directly not as an aggregate but as an ethical community, and a notion of welfare extending from pleasure and happiness towards well-being and health in the broadest sense of the term/1 This still left later new liberals, as we shall presently see, with some ironing out to perform. They wished to avoid a clash between individual and social utility, and to reconcile a concept of welfare, that presumably also acknowledged objective standards, with the concepts of liberty and limited power. These tasks were essential for the purpose of refining an ideological structure that now stretched its core to accommodate logically possible configurations that had up to now been vetoed by cultural considerations. The intervening factor of evolutionary theory could be harnessed in important ways to different political ideologies. Conservatives could, and did, seek support from evolution for their stance of non-intervention in a social balance based on what they believed were natural aggressiveness and competition, and justified a limited role for the state in supporting the disadvantaged. Leftliberals and evolutionary socialists saw the emergence of regulatory social institutions as the very reflection of the rise of collective reason which the evolutionary process dictated. The doctrine of evolution was hence used by the new liberals to redefine the affiliations between the core liberal concepts of liberty, progress, rationality, individualism, sociability, and limited power. It plugged a gap in British political thought that strong historicist theories had long closed in its French counterpart. Human growth appeared normal and only its limitation unnatural, so that liberty became ever more associated with the unimpeded growth of individuals. Non-liberty, to the contrary, was attached to hindrances not just to human action but to any form of human development within the frame of human choice and control. Progress was again, as in past centuries, linked with a quasi-necessitarian movement of history, tempered in the liberal case by the exercise of free minds who could change its direction only as a rational response to circumstance. Liberals thus predicted with conviction that improvement, however open-ended, was inevitable. Finally, it was denied that conflict was endemic to the human condition. The misuse of 71 D, G. Ritchie, Principles of State Interference (London, 1891), 107; Natural Rights (London, 1895), 101-2,

New Liberal Successions 199 power—discouraged by the installation ol democratic institutions —was thought to be an aberration that a rationally self-guiding community would eliminate. Evolution recommended clear and promising routes on the liberal map. It supplied liberals with an exciting interpretative and diagnostic apparatus for social and political practices, and with as strong as possible an endorsement of a collective rational self-control that would complement individual self-determination and self-realization. Morphologically, liberalism forecast a temporal pattern of its conceptual reconfiguration to an optimum point of maturation and equilibrium, projecting a future ideological horizon. The reading into evolution of a communitarian ethic would not have proceeded apace without the further reflection of socioeconomic circumstances in political speculation. The growing preoccupation with social reform was shored up by empirical research into the spread of poverty, the pressures towards increasing democratization, innovative economic theories on the merits of redistribution, and the rise of a new group within the ranks of middleclass professionals, devoted to infusing a more communitarian humanism into society. These penetrated into the liberal heart through its perimeter concepts and ideas, pressing it into a redefinition of social duties, responsibilities, and rights. Concurrently, changes in the liberal core, relating to macro-theoretical changes in conceptions of development and sociability, affected the time- and place-dependent aspects of that periphery. Agitation for a betterment of the conditions of the poor was harnessed to all the major ideologies in turn, but the chemistry of the reaction created in each case different molecular structures. Progressive political groups, and many conservatives, were clamouring for an extension of citizen rights in a number of spheres. Old-age pensions were demanded as a social recognition for services rendered as well as a concrete statement of communal duties towards people now unable to cater fully for themselves. Plans for unemployment insurance reflected both the social interest in keeping the workforce in good condition, and public responsibility for relieving individuals from distress—now understood by progressives to emanate not from character defects, but from an economic mal-organization which society had in its power to prevent. Health insurance was a consequence of the national efficiency concerns exacerbated by the findings about the state of recruits in the Boer war. But it was primarily regarded as the sign of a civilized society that its members would not languish unassisted for the mere lack of means. Generally speaking, an assault

200 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology on poverty combined with an attempt to dissociate it from the pejorative connotations of pauperism. This latter concept had a meaning located somewhere between criminality and personal culpability, and the gradual depersonalization of responsibility for social and economic evils powerfully influenced a liberal ideology previously based on the very notion of individual accountability for one's fate. In the sphere of economic theory, interest was refocused away from a prime interest in production towards a re-evaluation of the importance of consumption, Ruskinian sentiments about the quality of life as the measure of human wealth and welfare were reinforced by Hobsonian economics. For J. A. Hobson underconsumption was a root cause of capitalist crises. He sought to correct its effects by a redistribution that would be economically sound—through increasing the purchasing power of a society and hence the demand for goods—-as well as ethically attractive, through reapportioning wealth in favour of the less well-off.72 These theories were transmitted successfully among left-liberals and some socialists who, like Hobson himself, were active in the creation of a liberal progressive press whose influence by far exceeded its circulation. The Manchester Guardian, the Speaker, the Nation, and a host of monthlies and provincial papers, served as the crucible of a new liberal ideology and supplied it with the means of dissemination without which no modern ideology can germinate and spread.73 The new liberal theories paved the way for utilizing the state, as the primary agent of a rational society, to alleviate and repair some of the ills that dehumanized its members and incapacitated society as a well-functioning organization, Hobhouse's Liberalism, published in 1911 when the sea change in social attitudes and political beliefs had reached an advanced stage, took full account of these developments and may be seen as one of the finest and most accomplished expressions of the revised liberal ideology. It also demonstrates that even liberalism contains nonrational elements for, as Hobhouse contended, 'great changes are not caused by ideas alone, but they are not effected without ideas. The passions of men must be aroused if the frost of custom is to be broken or the chains of authority burst/ And again: 'the vision of justice in the wholeness of her beauty kindles a passion that , . . burns with the enduring glow of the central heat'.74 72 73 74

}. A. Hobson, Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation (London, 1914). S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London, 1984). Hobhouse, Liberalism, 30, 127.

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(d) THE CHANGING ADJACENCIES OF LIBERTY

Like the vast majority of liberals, Hobhouse placed liberty at his ideological epicentre, decontesting it by incorporating formal restraints best summarized by the phrase 'the reign of law' and tying it in to responsible government and the democratic principles of popular sovereignty and universal suffrage. Like his predecessors, he detached the unlimited pursuit of self-interest from the concept of individualism and sought to reconcile that concept with collective responsibility. Pointing to an example of the shedding of a peripherally marginal ideological element, freedom of contract (a shift to which Green's arguments had contributed), Hobhouse noted that 'Liberalism seems definitely to have retraced its steps', that is, diminished one of its horizons. Alternative perimeter concepts were brought in to underpin a new interpretation of what constituted a responsible, rational, and free adult. These qualities would be secured not by the older appeal to individual self-interest or, conversely, to moral fibre and altruism alone, but by promoting education, health, employment, and housing, and doing so through public control.75 The reformulation of individualism was abetted by a closer analysis of liberty and sociability. Hobhouse weighed up two alternative definitions of liberty, the one 'the power to do what does not injure others' and the other 'a right limited by the consideration that others must enjoy the same rights'.76 The second definition was defective, both in that it reduced the concept of liberty to the formal equality it implied, and in that it imposed no restrictions on the exercise of liberty.77 In plumping for the first definition, Hobhouse cleverly integrated Mill and Green's two previous decontestations of liberty. It was both an ability of individuals in conjunction with others, and a gift that should not be used to harm others and their similar gifts. Indeed, the linking of nonconstraint to 'the free competition of isolated individuals'—the uncooperative behaviour assumed to be associated with the atomistic conception of social structure—produced a concept of liberty that involved, if not 'the decay and death of the older Liberalism', certainly the challenging of many of its 'old presuppositions'/8 75

7 Ibid. 17, 19, 28, 23. * Ibid. 36. Hence Hobhouse revealingly rejected as a liberal tenet what became Rawls's first principle of justice, with the proviso that Rawls refers only to equal basic liberty (J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1971), 60-1). See below, Ch. 6. 78 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 48-9, 69. 77

202 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology The older conception of liberty had been set in an idea-environment that endorsed competition, separate individual responsibility, and personal exertion. The newer conception affiliated liberty with 'growtih itself and greatly extended the coexistence of nonconstraint with legitimate kinds of constraint. Hobhouse stressed that his version of liberty involved the issue 'not of increasing or diminishing, but of reorganizing, restraints'.79 There was no question of moving from one concept of liberty to another; from identifying it solely with its ineliminable element, non-constraint, only to introduce a measure of constraint which would obviously appear to contradict the full and complex concept of liberty. That was, as we shall see, an interpretative error of libertarians who failed to see that constraint could be inferred also from their own concept of liberty, and who would therefore condemn new liberal approaches as abandoning any reasonable sense of what liberty was. For Hobhouse, all historical conceptions of liberty were attached to a notion of restraint as a logical corollary of liberty itself; indeed, they incorporated a notion of restraint. What differed were the types of restraint (formal, physical, social) and the features of human conduct that were being restrained (conduct harmful to others, irrational choices, conduct harmful to self). Old liberals and libertarians would simply not describe irrationality as a constraint, because it was not an observable physical act, and consequently removed it from tihe intension of the concept. New liberals, because they perceived constraint in unconventional ways, had a different understanding of non-constraint, which in turn coloured their conceptualization of liberty. Specifically, Hobhouse reiterated the view accepted by all defenders of liberty, except individualist anarchists,80 that liberty required control and limits on human action, and then followed the logic of that position in a manner ruled out by the culturally adjacent conceptions of laissez-faire theorists. The latter limited constraint to legal and formal restrictions on physical invasions of the free activity of others, because they entertained cultural conceptions of individuals as completely self-determining agents, because they could not conceive of significant political restrictions on individuals that were not visible and not reducible to the exercise of ultimately tactile force, and because they believed in the inevitable rationality and explicit non-constraint of the market. Hobhouse, to the contrary, could assert that 'there is no intrinsic and inevitable conflict between liberty and compulsion'81 because his cultural 79 81

Hobhouse, Liberalism, 81. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 78,

w

See Ch. 7, s.(f).

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preconceptions of intrusions on growth and self-expression were broader. Significantly, a 1914 Liberal party leaflet supporting unemployment insurance employed the phrase 'compulsion means simply a larger freedom'.82 The issue is in a sense quite simple. If liberty was to be construed as a blend of non-constraint and compulsion, and these elements were applied respectively to liberate the assumed inherent, desirable, and socially beneficial aspects of human nature, and conversely to repress any features that prevented their expression, then all particular decontestations of liberty depended on the cultural attire donned by human nature and the conditions under which it could be displayed. The path linking the chain of conceptual decontestations was paved by the evolutionary and economic scientific and quasi-scientific theories, as well as the ethical beliefs, predominant in the minds of the ideological producers. The integration of liberty with sociability was abetted by Hobhouse's version of human rationality as harmony. Well-being was predicated on the possibility of responsible and rational individuals, and the 'rule of liberty is just the application of rational method' but, crucially, 'liberty... becomes not so much a right of the individual as a necessity of society'. Though he referred to Green's notion of the common good, Hobhouse's interpretation of sociability allowed for a stronger assertion of communal action. He claimed joint star billing for liberty and sociability in the presentation of liberalism: 'freedom is only one side of social life. Mutual aid is not less important than mutual forbearance, the theory of collective action no less fundamental than the theory of personal freedom.' Social solidarity, however, had to be founded on liberty.83

(e) THE ORGANIC ANALOGY

The organic concept of society is as old as political thought itself, but its assimilation into liberal theory was unprecedented. The analogy had become popular both as a metaphorical indication of concrete social structure, and as indicating the interdependence of biological, psychological, and social aspects of human conduct. Most new liberals absorbed the idea from a milieu replete with organistic references. Ritchie, noting the more recent Comtean 82

'Why the Insurance Act was made compulsory and why it should remain compulsory', Liberal Publication Department (15 May 1914), 83 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 60, 66, 67.

204 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology pedigree of the term 'social organism', referred to its mid-century ventilation in Britain by Spencer, while dismissing its likening by Spencer to a decentralized life form, lacking a controlling sensorium. That had inevitably led to individualist conclusions which Ritchie found unacceptable. Instead, he concluded that 'the conception of society as an organism seems to admit of more easy applications to the defence of just those very views about the State which Mr. Spencer most dislikes'.84 The model provided a notion of growth that was both purposive, being directed towards conscious ends, and interdependent, being predicated on a parts-whole relationship in which either side to this partnership depended on and benefited from the flourishing of the other. That interpretation made the analogy of immense utility in sustaining the new trends liberal theory was promoting, and its frequent appearance in progressive political discourse explains the increasing salience within the liberal core of the concept of sociability which it supported.85 The purposiveness and consciousness with which Ritchie endowed the social organism suggested a self-regulation that,8 when rephrased in political terms, justified state intervention. * But the totalitarian implications of that view were decisively rejected. For Hobhouse, the organic theory of society assisted in establishing the dual centrality of liberty and sociability. It implied that individuals—^as parts of a whole called society—would be 'destroyed or vitally altered' when removed from society. It equally asserted that 'society consists wholly of persons. It has no distinct personality separate from and superior to those of its members.' It associated rationality and harmony, suggesting that the drive to harmony was 'a persistent impulse of the rational being'. And it linked these with the furtherance of the collective life of a society, so that it was 'harmonious interaction, the response of each to each, that makes of society a living whole'.87 No one formulated the liberal potential of the organic analogy better than J. A. Hobson, Hobhouse's colleague and chief coformulator of the new liberalism, when he wrote: The unity of ... socio-industrial Efe is not a unity of mere fusion in which the individual virtually disappears, but a federal unity in which the rights 84 85

Ritchie, State Interference, 13-22. See eg. M. Freeden (ed.). Minutes of the Rainbow Circle 1894-1924 (London, 1989), IS, 27, 86, 141-3, 149-50. 86 See Freeden, New Liberalism, 94-8. 87 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 67-71; L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory (New York, 1911), 87, 96-7.

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and interests of the individual shall be conserved for him by the federation. The federal government, however, conserves these individual rights, not, as the individualist maintains, because it exists for no other purpose than to do so. It conserves them because it also recognises that an area of individual liberty is conducive to the health of the collective life. Its federal nature rests on a recognition alike of individual and social ends, or, speaking more accurately, of social ends that are directly attained by social action and of those that are realised in individuals.88

The liberal furniture was inrriguingly reassembled. The concept of individuality was retained while fulfilling a twofold function— not only related to individual flourishing but to the immediate realization of social purposes. Individualism was ingeniously detached from the individual as the unit of analysis and extended to serve the interest of society—now installed as the second, co-equal social unit. Liberty and social welfare were aligned through the organic resolution of the tension, postulated by an older liberalism, between individual rational activity and the general interest. The pursuit of personal liberty was an integral aspect of social health; the guaranteeing of welfare was indispensable to a concept of liberty that embraced growth, development, and flourishing. The organic analogy was reinforced by the liberal aversion to sectionalism and class interests. In claiming to promote the good of society as a whole it served politically to distinguish the liberal programme from many of its ideological rivals. At times, Hobson had taken the organic notion to an extreme, introducing a notion of community stronger than anything seen before in liberal theory when suggesting that society could even develop a will and purpose of its own, and he was taken to task for that by the liberal Manchester Guardian.m If that seemed to burst the bounds of liberal ideology, it was immediately hauled back by his parallel insistence on the development of the parts as essential to the flourishing of the whole. Hobson extended the Millite theme of atrophy, in which the welfare of society was dependent on the healthy exercise of the faculties of its members, even as the latter were dependent on the rationally organized community for their self-realization.90 Breaking with earlier liberal-Benthamite assumptions, he used the new findings of the social sciences to contend that a social will that was merely 'the aggregate of feeling for the public good... m

J. A. Hobson, Work and Wealth (London, 1914), 304. See J. A. Hobson, 'The Re-Statement of Democracy', Contemporary Review, 81 (1902), 262-72; and leader, Manchester Guardian (4 Feb. 1902), 90 Mill, On liberty, 116-17; J. A. Hobson, "The New Aristocracy of Mr. Wells', Contemporary Review, 89 (1906), 496. w

206 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology generated in the separate wills,,.. may not suffice to support the commonweal'. But the liberal constraints on unwelcome interpretations of the notion of community still applied: 'Scope must remain, in the interests of society itself, for the legitimate play of individuality. The well-ordered society will utilise the energies of egoism in fruitful fields of social activity/91 Paradoxically, the organicist Hobson was more willing than some of his less communitarian new liberal colleagues to concede that individualism incorporated non-sociable aspects which none the less could have indirect social advantages. He also allowed for 'unchartered liberty' of experimentation which might not have obvious or immediate benefits, as long as it was not socially harmful92—again a telling instance of structural tolerance. However, the preference for arrangements that would respect the natural harmony of these energies was replaced by the advocacy of their social redirection. (/) FLESHING OUT THE NEW LIBERAL MORPHOLOGY

The liberal core concept of limited and responsible power also appears prominently in the work of new liberals. Emphasizing that responsibility should be commensurate with power, indeed that 'the establishment of responsible government [was] the first condition' of a social will,93 Hobhouse supported a programme of devolution, proportional representation, and reform of the second chamber. He also emphasized the interdependence of liberty and equality, bringing equality in closer proximity to the liberal core than did Green or even his new liberal colleagues. Nevertheless, equality was maintained as equality of opportunity, and in that form inequalities that were in the general interest were condoned. Equality remained subservient to a rational sociability and to the furtherance of the liberty of individual development and choice.94 When Hobhouse observed that 'a new and more concrete conception of liberty arose'/5 he was really indicating that new perimeter concepts had replaced the old. The new liberal conception of liberty stood at the centre of a web of rearranged conceptual links that formed its ideological identity. It pointed at a host of perimeter practices, central to the policy-making of the day, such as n

Hobson, Work and Wealth, 302, 291. J, A. Hobson, From Capitalism to Socialism (London, 1932), 36-7. *3 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 118. n Ibid. 20, 24-5, 70; Hobson, Crisis, 96-113. See also Ch. 6. 95 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 49,

n

New Liberal Successions 207 unemployment and health insurance, a living wage, old-age pensions, a redistributionary income tax, and the communal regulation of ills beyond individual control. Mediating between the core and the periphery arose a concept which, though hardly novel to liberal theory, was new in its location in liberal morphology and in the role it played in translating the more recent decontestations into concrete measures. That concept was the state, even if its institutionalized form fell short of its theoretical potential. Green permitted only the hindering of hindrances to individual activity, and cast the state (beyond its accepted tasks of restraining the excessive use of individual force and legitimating authoritative leadership) in the negative role of remover of historical obstacles to liberty and development, such as the peculiar landownership patterns prevailing in Britain, In contradistinction, the new liberals accorded the state—as potentially the responsible agent of a rational community—tasks commensurate with the evolutionary emergence within a society of an organized, cooperative intelligence. Hobhouse regarded 'the self-governing State' as the product of 'the self-governing individual' and saw one of its permanent functions as employing whatever compulsion was necessary to achieve the more extensive conceptualizations of the new liberal core. He noted a 'movement of opinion' in the posing of the question of 'what the State is to do for the individual'. 'Character, initiative, enterprise' remained only part of the desirable catalogue of liberal virtues, rather than constituting their entirety, and further, more sociable, human characteristics were encouraged, 'necessary to a full civic efficiency'. Moreover, the duty to realize them was thought to have shifted some distance away from the individual towards society. Hence the state now came into its own as the instrument of the collaborative responsibility of that society for the joint welfare of its members. Hobhouse also suggested that it 'was vested with a certain overlordship over property96in general and a supervisory power over industry in general'. Specifically, liberals and moderate socialists endorsed the idea of a state guarantee for a national minimum income and its assumption of direct responsibility for areas in which fundamental needs were concerned, or in which it could act more efficiently or at less risk to the public. In sum, the concept of the state was moved to a position immediately adjacent to the liberal core, with the express purpose of underpinning the development of creative, socially beneficial individuals, but ready to take the * Ibid, 81-3, 108.

208 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology initiative where socially valuable private action could not succeed on its own. Most new liberals were also blissfully unaware of the deficit of meaning they accorded to their notion of the state—the underplaying of its 'irrational' power aspects. The reformulation of liberal ideology also involved tracing new paths between the core concepts and their application to temporal and spatial circumstances. This was most evident in the redefining of liberal rights which served, as all rights do, as protective capsules for the protection and advancement of those human and social attributes most valued by the ideology promoting them.97 Older liberals had endorsed theories of natural rights, protective of static attributes and based on separatist, individualistic views of social structure which attested to the importance of liberty as physical non-interference and property as an adjacent concept propping up self-determination. The new liberals modified the right to life from a general statement to specific statements about the quality of life it entailed. Once it meant the right to a life that was not dehumanized, and the physical, psychological, and mental attributes of human nature were held equally valuable and necessary, these attributes were seen to crave adequate protection, even enabling conditions. The logical sequence which ran from life to supplying the means without which life could not be effected became the particular cultural option that was set in motion. Thus Hobson argued that the right to life implied a 'state guarantee of a minimum standard of life'98 and Hobhouse talked of the right to a living wage and the right to work as its cultural corollary." Correspondingly, the right to private property was further demoted and marginalized in liberal thought. In part this reflected new understandings of the goods without which all human beings could not function, in part the elevation of the community as an entity with co-equal and occasionally parallel demands to those of its members. By diminishing the intimate connection between property and prevailing distribution systems based on ascriptive and formal mechanisms of allocation and entitlement (while retaining the connection between property and market acquisition as an aspect of free, if not always rational, choke), the concept of property was unshackled to gravitate towards one of need and made to service the notion of universal individual welfare.100 97 See Freeden, Rights, 7, n J, A. Hobson, The Social Problem (London, 1901), 201, 99 Hobhouse, Liberalism, 83-4, 100 See J, A. Hobson, 'Rights of Property', Free Review (Nov. 1893), 130-49; Social Problem, 95-111.

New Liberal Successions 209 Concurrently, the organic analogy allowed for a concept of property to be attached to the community, inasmuch as the latter was conceived to be a distinct identifiable entity.101 After the First World War, the bifurcation of British liberalism into left and centrist tendencies provides a revealing illustration of the fine-tuning so typical of variants within the same family. Leftliberalism did not eject private property entirely from its beliefsystem, but secured it by making it subservient to communal priorities supported by adjacent ethical conceptions of social welfare. Centrist liberalism, a more entrepreneurial and structurally individualist genre, did not marginalize social welfare, but located it in a different part of its room, by introducing ideological units such as efficiency and productivity and supporting a substantively different, more economically oriented, view of the general interest. Both liberal streams were convinced that their beliefs would enhance notions of individuality and progress,102 It is not suggested that the above account is more than a macroscopic encapsulation of new liberal views. Independent variations existed, but were all recognizably the accoutrements of liberal rooms. All liberal core concepts were preserved by Mill's successors, while simultaneously all were subject to new interpretations, elicited both by preferring some logical connections among their components to others, and by encircling them with what were at the time compelling adjacent and peripheral cultural and ideational contexts. It is the very internal flexibility of an ideology that ensures perceived continuity in the midst of social, economic, scientific, and philosophical change. The reharnessing of familiar terms amplifies the claims of a previously successful ideology to renewed legitimacy and performs the important political and psychological function of retaining the loyalty of actual consumers while attempting to attract new allegiances. Immediate recognition is a must in the political world of quick messages and snap decisions. Not that all changes were cosmetic. The rooms occupied by the conceptual configurations were still plainly liberal. If the communitarian components of liberalism have been emphasized, it is mainly because their location and decontesting impact on its morphology have been commonly neglected. It is unquestionably the case that many liberals, who carry communitarian undertones as unconscious surplus meaning, will still prefer to identify individual rights, even markets, as morphologically salient in their rooms. Nor is the 101 H. Scott Holland, 'Personality and Property', in C. Gore (ed.), Property: Its Duties and Rights (London, 1913), 186-8, 102 For a detailed discussion see Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 13 and passim.

210 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology fact that, conversely, socialists may feel more at home in a liberal room with a communitarian decor, an argument in favour of its reclassification. These all are, however, arguments against the mutual exclusiveness or sharp boundaries that ideologies are thought to display, and an acknowledgement that their cogent analysis must attend to the multiple forms they adopt. (g) STATE, GROUP, AND SOCIETY: THE GERMAN CASE

However much German liberals struggled ambivalently with the concept of the state, their ideology was formed within a cultural context in which the state—as institution or as idealized integrative and emancipating mechanism—could not be overlooked. Early nineteenth-century German liberals reacted against the absolutism evident in existing states by embracing the Rechtsstaat, a constitutional arrangement intended to protect individual rights against arbitrary and parochial power by means of a strong parliament. Concurrently, they adopted a universalism whose purpose it was to ensure individual freedom and progress, by establishing a rational, impersonal, and legal framework realized through the state.103 Even etymologically rights and law, as Rechte and Recht, seemed to blend into one entity. Liberty, progress, individualism as the securing of space for personal development, a formal rationalism attached to the state, and limited and responsible power were core concepts constitutive of German liberalism. The HegeHan conception of the state as an ethical expression of social unity thus grew on ideologically fertile soil and injected a concrete communal foundation into earlier Kantian influences. The latter had imparted a compelling appreciation of individuality as autonomy and agentcontrolled activity, as well as an abstract universalism which promoted a formal equality of regard. The links Kant forged between will, liberty, and reason assisted in viewing law as an expression of both rational will and free104will, through which individual differences could be overcome. This blend of social holism and individualist universalism105 also merged into the German Bildungs 103 See J. J, Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1982), 40-3,131; G, de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Boston, 1959), 21920, 253; J. H. Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology (London, 1946), 39-47. 104 See R. Vierhaus, 'Liberalismus', in Geschichtliche Gntndbegriffe, iii (Stuttgart, 1982), 762. 105 Cp. Dumont, German Ideology, 14-25.

New Liberal Successions 211 tradition, with its high premium on education, cultural and moral enlightenment, and reason as the necessary trappings of the participating citizen. Education was linked to the concept of liberty as well as to that of progress, for liberty was decontested as a selfassumed spiritual emancipation, understood to comprise an extended non-constraint: not only the removal of unnatural external constraints to the human spirit, but of internal constraints as well.106 The adjacent concept of the state became indispensable to a developmental conception of liberty.107 Within this framework other forces were at work. The need for an integrative state was a prime political aim of German progressives, through which to combat the particularist anti-rational and illiberal tendencies of the localities. They could hence enter into temporary alliances with various strands of nationalist thinking. But liberalism itself was also the product of the corporate structure of German society, especially the notion of the Burger and its interplay with the concept of the citizen.108 A stark differentiation must thus be made between urban and national liberal loyalties, and correspondingly complex ideological configurations ensued. Moreover, the liberals in Germany as elsewhere subscribed to conceptions of a classless society in which their vision would play a key role. German liberals unconsciously generalized the virtues of the Mittelstand as those of the rational citizen per se, though they did not on the whole restrict those virtues to a narrow pursuit of bourgeois economic self-interest.109 When they did, that diminishing horizon of particularist Manchesterite individualism was accompanied by an impoverishment of the concept of liberty which undermined the integrative appeal of liberalism, weakened its pursuit of a general interest, and consequently impaired the balance between the core concepts that had been struck by incorporating a strong social component.110 Out of this medley of conflicting tendencies came a vigorous conception of group identities and social wholes, which was to pervade liberal thinking, and partly accounted (together with the undeveloped nature of the German economy) for the fact that laissez-faire had no major impact 106 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 14-15; Vierhaus, 'Liberalismus', 764; Dumont, German Ideology, 40-3. 107 See D. Langewiesehe, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988), 21. 108 Ibid. 210. 109 D. Blackboum and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984), 76-81; Sheehan., German Liberalism, 26, 85. 110 See H. Vorfander, 'Hat sich der Liberalismus totgesiegt?' in H. Vorlander (ed.), Verfctll oder Renaissance des Liberalismus? (Munich, 1987), 19-20,

212 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology among those liberals. But it also tended to emphasize the rights of citizens located in groups, at the expense of the actual development of individual personality.111 The concept of the general interest was identified by liberals through two different means—the nation and the state. If the state seemed initially to offer hope for a universal, rational organization, the Volk was a more concrete rendering of the Kantian abstraction employing a term close to the hearts, or at least central to the vocabulary, of most Germans. Nationalism served at first to strengthen the liberal concern for the general interest and counteracted class in the liberal search for non-sectionalism. By identifying with the notion of an emancipated Volk, liberals indicated consideration for the interest of the people at large, but they were reluctant to follow one possible logical path—towards an adjacent notion of democracy—and to see in the people 'the primary source of legitimacy and power'.113 Nevertheless, the appeal to a combination of state and Volk—the state limiting the irrational impulses of the Volk and the Volk containing the overbureaucratization of the state—appeared to sustain the full range of liberal core concepts. The prescription was similar to that adopted by Max Weber in his attempt to balance the pros and cons of leadership, bureaucracy, and democracy,114 and it reflected a more fundamental German liberal anxiety about the relationship between democracy and mass politics than could be found among British and French equivalents. German liberals consistently rejected political, as distinct from legal, equality, including the repudiation of democratic decision-making at local level, and insisted on objective criteria such as property and education for political participation.115 In part this was brought on by a political situation in which the socialdemocratic threat was perceived as immediate and dangerous to liberals.116 In some cases however it also signalled a principled opposition, as with the right-of-centre liberal Heinrich von Treitschke, to 'the recognized hegemony of the irrational', endorsing 111 112

HalloweU, Decline of Liberalism, 73-4, R. Koselleek, 'Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse', in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii, (Stuttgart, 1992), 149, notes that 'Deutschtum' and 'Volkstum' were parallel, mutually sustaining concepts, 113 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 115-16. 114 M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), i, part 1, ch. 3; ii. 'Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany', 1381-1469. For a critical assessment of Weber's liberalism in a European context see R. Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (Oxford, 1992), 157-216. 115 D. Langewiesehe, 'Liberalismus und Biirgertum in Europa', in J. Kocka (ed.), Deutschland im europHischen Vergleich (Munich, 1988), 371-2, 388, a * Langewiesehe, Libemlismus, 209.

New Liberal Successions 213 instead a withdrawal to competitive versions of individualism, and a defence of economic liberty, in which collective action played no role,117 yet in which the wholeness of the state was an end in itself.118 These outer ranges of membership of the German liberal family no longer corresponded to legitimate versions of British liberalism. They indicated a divide overlapping with, though not identical to, that between liberalism and libertarianism. The notion of Volk further contributed a romantic organicism into German liberalism, conceiving of the nation as a living and growing personality—a rather different formula for liberal organicism from that devised by the British variant, with its reliance on interpretations of evolutionary and biological science to cement mutual individual interdependence and rational democratic control, or from the French variant, with its penchant for sociological holism. But as with its British and French counterparts, the personality of the state was not allowed to override those of its individual members, the Rechtsstaat yet again containing the Volk.119 However, while certain decontestations and idea-environments of core liberal concepts were gaining ground and moving towards the morphological centre of German liberalism, others were tottering on the periphery. A strong adjacent nationalism, fuelled by emerging social-Darwinist views, had at a later stage to be evicted from its supportive adjacent position in liberal morphology and became increasingly marginal to that ideology. Once the meaning of nationalism was captured by the right, German liberals were deprived of a major integrative mechanism.120 The social liberal tendencies in the German liberal tradition were pronounced, indeed built into its basic ideological assumptions.121 Paradoxically, this is one reason why there was no distinct transition in the German case towards something equivalent to the British new liberalism.122 Left-liberals were frequently less inclined to endorse state social reforms for fear of strengthening a 117

Sheehan, German Liberalism, 154-5. Quoted from H. von Treitschke, Der Sozialismus und seine Conner (Berlin, 1875). See also Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 188-9. 118 H. von Treitschke, 'Political Freedom and its Limitation', in E. K. Bramsted and K. ]. Melhuish (eds.), 'Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce (London, 1978), 449-52. 119 Ruggiero, History, 223, 259-60. 120 D. Langewiesche, "The Nature of German Liberalism', in G. Marfel (ed.), Modem Germany Reconsidered 1870-1945 (London, 1992), 112. See also Sheehan, German Liberalism, 274. 121 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 7. 122 Cp. S.-G. Schnorr, Liberalismus zwischen 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1990), 56-7.

214 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology centralizing power, while the right-of-centre National Liberals backed those reforms for that very reason. However, well-developed local and communal welfare measures fostered a municipal mutual support structure that had active liberal blessing.123 From another source, the centrality of voluntary corporations was assimilated into liberal thinking.124 One of the pre-eminent German liberals, Friedridh Naumann, approached conrymturutarianism through notions of corporation and organization, while raising the concept of efficiency (as did many British thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries) to a position of structural prominence.125 Planning, organization, the attainment of common commercial and welfare ends—these were the 'communal' themes Naumann wished to implant in decontesting liberal core concepts.126 His emphasis was more on modernization and a recognition of the growing role of the masses in contemporary society—again without any enthusiasm for their democratic participation—than on the ethical case for mutual support and responsibility. Progress was construed as industrial and technical as much as social and political.127 In Ms respect for national power and economic prosperity, and the priority accorded them over the ethical and spiritual development of the individual, Naumann skirted very close to the boundaries of accepted liberal argument. Ambivalence on the issue of power and a quasi-instrumental understanding of individualism and rationafity radically decontested the liberal core to the point where its morphology became too unrecognizable to qualify for automatic membership in the late rdneteenth-century families of liberal discourse. It was only when Naumann's organicism, like Hobson's, insisted on the development of personality as a precondition for the functioning of the socio-economic machine, that the concept of sociability could be retrieved for liberal use.128 Naumann felt he had to remind Ms readers that the state had a dual nature: 1. We all are the state. 2. The state may not do everything.'129 The state extended strong support to the concept of community wMle itself 123

D, Langewiesche, 'German Liberalism in the Second Empire, 1871-1914', in K. H. Jarausch and L. E. Jones (eds,)» In Search of a Liberal Germany (New York and Oxford, 1990), 232; Langewiesche, 12S Liberalismus, 202, 124 Ruggiero, History, 270, Schnorr, Liberalismus, 116, 122, 126 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 232. 127 Schnorr, Liberalismus, 143, 145-50, 152-5, 168. There is a greater affinity between Naumann's liberalism and the British centrist-liberals, the latter lacking though the appeal to the state and the Volk. 128 Cp, Schnorr, Liberalismus, 218. 129 Quoted in ibid. 239 from F. Naumann, Das Prinzip des Liberalismus (1904).

New Liberal Successions 215 restricted, through the concept of constitutional power, from occupying a core ideological position. Notwithstanding, the state in the German tradition was closely associated not only with formal legalisrn, but with organization and the locus of expertise.130 Curiously, the Hegelian moralization of the state, a theme that in its un-Hegelian version was echoed in British liberalism, was largely absent from German liberal discourse in its later manifestations. (h) STATE, GROUP, AND SOCIETY: THE FRENCH CASE

French liberals, too, had by the end of the nineteenth century consolidated the liberal alliance with community, though the route they followed was not via the legal might of a unifying and respected state, but one that converged—with some significant distinctions—on British new liberal positions, even anticipating some of them. The solidarism typifying much Third Republic radical thought, though it engaged the state in important regulatory functions, had its roots in the organic and evolutionary social thought popularized by Comte. But, as in Britain, liberals reinterpreted the authoritarian and deterministic aspects of Comte's organicism in line with their values, and attached it to a view of social progress bent on wresting Social Darwinism from the grasp of the advocates of a competitive and aggressive evolutionism. Solidarism, as preached by the liberals Alfred Fouillee and Leon Duguit, and both advocated and practised by Leon Bourgeois, provides an instructive example of the adept reshuffling of arguments that a flexible and open ideology such as liberalism permits in order to suit the intellectual trends and political requirements of a society. It is a central argument of this study that political concepts cannot be understood in isolation from each other, and the syntagmatic structure of the trinitarian French revolutionary slogan facilitated the transmission of ideational interdependence into conscious popular political culture as substantive assertion, not just morphological feature. Anglo-American political discourse, in contradistinction, was susceptible to the disjointed and frequently reductionist treatment of an ideology represented by a sole concept. Astutely anchoring his arguments in that predominant conceptual horizon, Bourgeois reorganized the sequence of the trinity 130

See K. Rohe, 'Von "Bnglischer Freiheit" zu "Deutscher Organisation"? Liberates Refonndenken in GrossBritannien an der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert und deutsche politische Kultur', in K. Rohe (ed.), Englischer Liberalismus im 19. und Friihen 20, Jahrhundert (Bochum, 1987), 277,

216 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology in order to serve a more communitarian version of liberalism: 'Solidarity first, then equality or justice, which amounts to the same thing; finally liberty. Such, it seems to me, is the necessary order of the three ideas in which the Revolution sums up social truth/131 The package was retained; its internal priorities were transposed. Whereas earlier on, and again in the twentieth century, French liberals had selectively preferred liberty and rights from the indivisible totality of the revolutionary creed and thus weakened their association with the winning republican tradition,132 some late nineteenth-century liberals took a more generous view of the revolutionary message in toto. They allowed a movement of ideas such as solidarism (itself no more than a loose umbrellaterm for polysemic ideological combinations) to be self-consciously integrated into liberalism. As seen in the previous chapter, it would be wrong to regard fraternity or, indeed, community as foreign implants into an atomistically individualist French liberalism. To the contrary, a strong concept of the general interest incorporated into social groups and wholes typified the weightier part of postrevolutionary French liberalism throughout. Late nineteenthcentury radicalism took this further by cutting loose from those tendencies within French liberalism that offered succour to minimalist and order-preserving ideational composites represented in particular by Guizot.133 The ideological core of French liberalism in its Radical mode retained all the features of its equivalents elsewhere. It was assertively rationalist, drawing on both humanist anthropocentrism and revolutionary reconstructionism. It assimilated theories of progress congenial towards the other ideational decontestations it established, though it tended to incorporate individual into social development. It appealed to the power of the state and the law to enshrine individual liberty, rights, and duties in a protective constitutional shield, specifically developing a doctrine of guarantism to maintain a viable balance between the claims of individuality and those of the state or society. Yet subtle changes were introduced, adjusting the internal relationships among some core concepts, by rearranging their mutual priority and surrounding them 131 Quoted in J. E. S. Hayward, 'The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: L£on Bourgeois and Solidarism', International Review of Social History, 6 (1961), 27. 132 See S. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modem France (Oxford, 1994), 23, who rightly also emphasizes the frailty of the ensuing liberal political practice. 133 Cp. S. Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Oxford, 1983), 153-4,

New Liberal Successions 217 with modified adjacent concepts. Those changes should not be regarded as fusions of a liberal tradition with a revolutionary one134 —if by that is meant that clear-cut rigid and mutually exclusive political traditions actually exist. Rather, as has been claimed throughout this study, the flexibility of many ideological families allows for the emergence of a host of variants that can easily cross such presumed divides. The internal logic of liberalism enables— as it did in a series of widely legitimated European developments— the ascendancy of a communitarian strand without reneging on any of its core principles. Solidarism had been building up through a pedigree of French liberal thinkers keen to reinterpret liberalism by utilizing the state as an adjacent concept which would further the realization of the values embodied fat the core liberal concepts. In so doing it traversed considerable additional ideological territory. The initial role French liberals had accorded the state was that of protecting individual rights, though even that could entail considerable state power, provided the concept of liberty was not expanded to impinge on other liberal values.135 Individualist liberals such as Charles Renouvier had resisted the bureaucratic advance of the state and still promoted the diffusion of private property as the best way of maximizing liberty and individuality, interpreted on the lines of Kantian autonomy. Renouvier's guiding idea 'of a society of rational beings consisted] in each being an end in himself and in having the means to pursue this end, with the aid of others if need be'.136 Yet here too a tenuous link with joint social action was constructed, the collective extolling of voluntary associations serving to forge co-operative ties among individuals.137 Significantly, the notion of contract was stretched to allow not only for the formation of societies or the strict performance of pledged duties, but to encourage further consent and association through individual agreement. But this remained a weak form of sociability, denying the formation of a collective morality.138 It was left to later liberals such as Fouillee to advance further on that path, presenting artificial (contractual) co-operation as predicated on original natural m

Ibid. 159. Cp. W. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism 1870-1914 (De Kalb, 111., 1983), 28, 44. 136 Quoted in Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, 64. 137 Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 61. 138 R. H. Soltau, French Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York, 1959), 308. 133

218 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology 139 social affinities. The associatiorast drive of individuals was reinforced by placing it in close proximity to the concepts of human reason, consciousness, and liberty-cum-choice. Nevertheless, Renouvier too saw the state as the prime social association, entrusted with maintaining social justice. To that end perimeter notions were attached. One was endemic in the French secular tradition, in encouraging the use of state schools to foster republican values.140 Others concerned redistribution via progressive taxation, organizing labour and limiting profits and inheritance, and restricting Church141activity to diminish its power to interfere with individual liberty. The solidarism of Bourgeois became 'the official doctrine of the Third Republic'142—calling into question the assessment that liberalism had failed as a central belief-system in France. That latter judgement depends chiefly on the conceptual configuration such analysts attribute to French liberalism.143 Bourgeois, like Fouiilee, purged natural solidarity of its irrationalism by superimposing a human consciousness directed towards social justice. "The solution is to transform the involuntary, blind and unequal interdependence that is the result of the antiquated social policy of the past, into a free and rational interdependence based upon equal respect for the equal rights of all/144 Reason and sociability spawned in their interaction an ethical guarantism that called on a limited adjacent universalism, in the form of equality of treatment— specifically a diminution of the inequality of opportunity—and on planning and redistribution as perimeter concepts. The social practices of this ideological configuration were old-age pensions, a limited working day, and social insurance to cover accidents, Elhealth, and unemployment,145 Solidarism developed within the ambit of two cultural constraints, the one characteristic of the British new liberalism as well, the other specifically French. The shared constraint was a strong orgamcism which, on some assessments, underpinned the solidarist movement. Whereas in Britain the impact of organicism was 139

Cp. J. E. S. Hayward, '"Solidarity" and the Reformist Sociology of Alfred Fouillee', American journal of Economics and Sociology, 22 (1963), 208. 140 Bellamy, Liberalism, 64-5; Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 70. 141 Soltau, French Political Thought, 312-13. 14Z J. E. S. Hayward, 'Official Social Philosophy', 20. 143 See Soltau, French Political Thought, 295-306, who associates liberalism with a highly individualist and broadly anti-statist doctrine, increasingly confused by the challenges of political and cultural change. 144 Quoted in Hayward, 'Official Social Philosophy', 33, 145 See ibid., passim.

New Liberal Successions 219 coupled to the rise of co-operative Social Darwinism, French political thought, as Rosanvallon has noted, had its own indigenous scientific culture from which to interweave biological and social laws. Pasteur had, in Bourgeois's own opinion, been responsible through his epidemology for disseminating an appreciation of the robust social ties that existed among people, and the mutual dependence of each person on the intelligence and morality of the others.146 Here lay the key to unlocking the irreconcilable tension between individualism and collectivism, for liberty and individuality still remained cherished and privileged values. The specifically French constraint on conceptual realignment was the significance of voluntary associations and the ways in which they interacted both with society as a whole and with the individuals composing both groups and society. Voluntary associations were not, as in the British case, private organizations outside the realm of the state and supplanting some of its activities nor, as in the American tradition, interest groups relating to each other in a competitive pursuit of governmental distribution of scarce goods, but more directly integrated into the workings of society—itself perceived as a pluralist combination of groups and associations— and crucially shaping its communitarian dispositions. State intervention needed to adopt guises compatible with that social fact. Importantly, this conceptual interpretation reinforced the role of the state, and this intellectual current attained its apogee in the French liberal tradition with fertile Durkheim and even more so with L6on Duguit.147 Durkheim was influenced in his early years by Renouvier's rationalism, his strong ethical views of liberal republicanism, his balance of individual autonomy and individual interdependence, and, not least, by his 'scientific' approach.148 Later, Durkheim was to inject a new scientism into political theory by discovering a fresh set of sociological laws, the search for which had always fascinated French intellectuals. Durkheim's organic solidarity, which he claimed typified the division of labour of complex societies as a culmination of a sequence of social progress, established that increased individuation entailed increased interdependence. By calling this a social fact Durkheim employed a powerful verbal mode of decontesting core liberal concepts. Whether or not he was a conscious political solidarist, his sociology contained much surplus-meaning attached to 146 147 148

P. Rosanvallon, L'ttat en France: De 1789 a nos jours (Paris, 1990), 171-2. Cp. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 8, 176, 199. S. Lukes, tmile Durkheim (Harmondsworth, 1975), 55.

220 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology the liberal solidarist tradition. If, as has been argued, Durkheitn also displayed strong affinities with socialism,149 that was entirely consonant with the polysemic possibilities inherent in the interchange between late nineteenth-century liberalism, socio-biological theory, and the political pressures engendered by advanced industrialism.150 In France growing working-class power and malaise were also accompanied by a continual external threat to the integrity of the state, which smoothed the path of holistic theories. Indeed, Durkheim deplored the connection made between socialism and the working class, preferring to see the social question as affecting the general interest,151 as did British liberals. Pluralism and voluntarism coexisted in Durkhekn's theory with a spirited appreciation of groups. He anchored the individual in a group structure, which was both a repository of social norms and a functional instrument in their performance. The adjacent concept of the state established it as an ethical regulator, though not ultimate controller, of groups and individuals, against the backdrop of its increasing administrative complexity. The state was however linked to a liberal core in a new manner—not as protector of individual rights against arbitrary power, but as 'free[ing] the individual from the particular and local groups which tended to absorb him'. Yet the state was also the product of individual conduct and needed to be democratically moralized, directly by individual consent and indirectly by the groups that socialized the individual. Those groups, if sufficiently autonomous and individuated, could also curb the state's activities. In good rationalist fashion Durkheim wrote: 'What liberates the individual is not the elimination of a controlling centre, but rather the multiplication of such centres, provided that they are co-ordinated and subordinated one to another/152 This effected a recognizable compound, at a more sophisticated sociological level, of the liberal concepts of sociability and individuality. A semi-conscious subscription to a liberal notion of harmony,153 which mitigated power and conflict in healthy societies, was a further hallmark of the liberal in Durkheim, while the specifically nineteenth-century aspect of his liberalism was represented by an elitist conception of democracy, in which the public had to be educated by the state.154 149

Lukes, Durkheim, 320-30, Lukes accepts that Durkheim was also a liberal. Logue has significantly observed of Durkheim that 'his fundamental liberalism would have been more generally recognized, had observers been more aware of the movement we have called the "new liberalism"' (p. 151). 151 ISZ Lukes, Durkheim, 323-4. Quoted in ibid. 324, 325. m

153

m

Cp. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 173. fi. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London, 1992), 92.

New Liberal Successions 221 Durkheim's detailed analysis of the indeterminate meanings of individualism underscored the ways in which nineteenth-century liberalism successfully engaged in extending the accepted connotations of the term. Within the ideological framework of a strong sociability-cum-associationism, an organic holism, and an ethical conception of social life, the progressively oriented Durkheim was encouraged to construct decontestations of individualism reflecting the social prerequisites for the development of personality.155 Opposing both egoistic individualism, related to individual motivation and self-perception,156 and methodological individualism, related to an atomistic conception of social structure,157 he posited instead an autonomous individual sustained by supportive group relationships and by the state. This theory adopted a salient organicist profile whereby social life resulted from 'special cultivation which individual consciousnesses undergo in their association with each other, an association from which a new form of existence is evolved'.158 But as with other liberal organicists, social solidarity remained a prerequisite of individual liberty and reason.159 Fouillee attempted a synthesis between organicism and French associationist pluralism. Again, a liberal organicism repudiated the subordination of the parts while advocating their co-ordination and reciprocity.160 Fouillee emphasized 'idees-forces', motivating ideas which propelled individuals to action, refuting the dichotomy between thought and experience,161 Two such ideas were liberty and reason.162 Fouillee's organicism was thus voluntarist, and its reliance on choice permitted the introduction of a sophisticated social contract which would safeguard individual rights and personality. On the other hand, self-consciousness was holistically extended to include the consciousness of others, from which emerged a notion of community and a reconciliation—as with the British new liberals—of the requirements of individual personality and social solidarity.163 These conceptual devices were buttressed 155

Cp. Seidman, Liberalism, 174. t. Durkheim, Suicide (London, 1952), 364, 157 t. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Chicago, 1938), 122, 158 Ibid. 124. See also Lukes, Durkheim, 19-20,199, 326-7. 159 Cp. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 162. 16(1 A. Fouillee, La Science sociale contemporaine, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1885), 157, 161 Cp. J. T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Social Democracy and Progressmism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford, 1986), 53, 88. 162 A. Fouillee, La Liberte et le Determinism: (Paris, 1890), 221-51. 143 Hayward, '"Solidarity" and the Reformist Sociology of Alfred Fouiilee', American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 22 (1963), 209-14; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 77, 129, 148. m

222 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology by the adjacent conception of an activist state engaged in repairing social injustices, including the perimeter practices of pensions, child support, and insurance,164 a diffusion of property ownership, and the reformist perimeter of solidarism.165 They provided the cultural underpinning for a logically entailed path which successfully blocked off two political alternatives: a collectivism undifferentiated from socialist positions;166 and an individualism undifferentiated from what had become a conservative laissez-faire.167 Fouillee could conclude with some satisfaction that 'the doctrine of contractual organicism is a form of liberalism elevated to its highest power'. Significantly for the semantic field now staked out by liberalism, this was tantamount—because of an overriding commitment to pursuing liberty—to 'an enlightened and rational $ocialism'.m 'Liberty, right, society, are then the three moments of one and the same evolution; an isolated liberty has no meaning and cannot exist.'169 The mutual sustenance of these terms embraced the morphological adjustments in the reconceptualization of liberalism. Duguit presents an interesting case-study in the ability of an ideology to adopt the contours of indigenous and ephemeral sociopolitical debate, in this case syndicalism. Once the state was no longer the supreme social organization, and echoing the predilection of many French political theorists for the group as a key social entity, Duguit represented the climax of the attempt to construct a new social reality in which additional concepts were identified, and tentatively and experimentally introduced into the liberal family—as long as they were able to prop up a satisfactory configuration of the liberal core. Dismissing the conventional legal fiction of state sovereignty, Duguit preserved the role of the state only as an agent to enforce laws, and laws were 'the sum of those principles of social conduct which... are necessary to the achievement of the social purpose'.170 The state also actively supplied the opportunities for the unfettered material, intellectual, and moral development of individuals-—which constituted liberty—but it was now 164

Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 187. Cp. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, 145-6. MS perceptjQ]is of that French ideological divide did not necessarily correspond to the actual morphologies concerned. See Ch. 12 below. 167 Examples of the latter may be seen in P. Leroy-Beaulieu's The Modern State in Relation to Society and the Individual (London, 1891) and in ferrule Faguet's Le Liberalism; (Paris, 1903). 168 Quoted in Hayward, '"Solidarity"', 215. 169 Fouillee, La Science sociule contemporaine, 390. 170 Quoted in Soltau, French Political Thought, 474, MS

New Liberal Successions 223 171 demystified as a public service organization. Duguit located the adjacent concept of democracy institutionally in self-governing professional groups, whose ethos would encourage the reciprocity of individuality and sociability as well as providing a different, group-located, perimeter interpretation of the dispersed countervailing force with which liberals sought to delimit concentrated power. Duguit curiously transformed liberal theory by promoting a network of interrelated duties over the rights of individuals and states, as part of a process of social evolution. The correlativity of rights and duties does not as a rule postulate the one without the other, and his assertion should be regarded as a rhetorical device stressing the priority of mutual obligations over atomistic claims. In so doing he was bold enough to reject explicitly the horizon of the French Revolution with its inalienable individual rights,172 though at the cost of a rather deterministic evolution, Duguit pulled back from endorsing the revolutionary forms of syndicalism when he argued that 'groups have no will and cannot therefore be responsible persons'. He retained state activity, which 'emanates from individual wills, but is essentially collective in its end'. The proper functioning of both individuals and groups was the responsibility of the state,173 for individuality and social solidarity developed, as with Durkheim, in complete reciprocity.174 Britain experienced fainter resonances of the partial liberal reconciliation with syndicalism. One of Duguit's books was translated by Laski in Ms pluralist phase, and even self-defined British liberals advocated the extension of democracy into the workplace after the First World War, drawing in the themes of community, control, participation, individual liberty, and the development of human creative potential. New conceptions of rightful property ownership directly by value-producing groups were mooted. At the same time, British liberals, most of whom were bereft of the sociological holism that characterized French solidarism, were more reluctant to separate society into discrete entities that could in their view undermine the pursuit of a general interest.175 The presence of three central political concepts (liberty, equality, and fraternity) as common terms of reference at the heart of French political language has been a defining feature of ideological 571 m 174

L. Duguit, Law in the ModernmState (London, 1921), 30, 44, 51. Ibid., pp. xxxviu-xli. Ibid. 206-7. Cp, J. E. S. Hayward, 'Solidarist Syndicalism: Durkheim and Duguit. Part II', Sociological Review, 8 (I960), 189. 175 See Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 45-77.

224 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology discourse and a significant factor in the conceptual construction of a social and political reality. It has permitted the formation of a very wide range of legitimated combinations involving different decontested paths. That is not to argue that equality attained core concept status even in French liberal argument, though facets of it—relating to universalism and, through the revolutionary tradition, to the condoning of group if not mass participation—were high on liberal agendas. For most French liberals the concept of property inhibited a radically egalitarian socio-economic vision, and the analyst must not be led astray by the ubiquity of the egalitarian slogan. Equal respect, or equality of opportunity, still functioned as service concepts to core liberal concepts of libertycum-autonomy, individuality, or rationality.176 Indeed, they have also been appropriated by conservative ideologies as relatively marginal supports for personal entrepreneurship or the authority of law. Durkheim's sociological viewpoint was hardly exceptional in suggesting that 'the unequal merit of men will always bring them into unequal situations in society ... these inequalities . . , have no other influence over the determination of values except to establish a gradation among the latter parallel to the hierarchy of social functions'. To attain this correct gradation, equality of contract was sufficient, rectifying an external inequality, whereas compensation for inequalities generated by internal capacities was excluded from the conceptual environment of Durkheimian equality.177 Hence function rather than need defined the redistribution required by social justice,178 Though Durkheim objected to private property grounded on traditional legal forms such as inheritance— arrangements which, as we have seen, had migrated away from the centre of liberal morphology—it was acceptable when based on functional differentiation, and his arguments followed the welltrodden liberal path in relating property to a sphere of individual independence.179 At best, the liberal family had conferred guest core status on a neutered version of equality. As for structural tolerance—the readiness to shuffle core and adjacent concepts around—it was practised in so far as rational criticism was a maxim of both French and German liberals, but its status was weakened in both cases by a firm belief in the unequivocal directing power of reason, rather than in a substantive scepticism. 176 177 178 m

172.

See p. 175 above. fi, Durkheim, The Division of'Labor in Society (New York, 1933), 381-4. Cp. also Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, 87, Durkheim, Professional Ethics, 213-14; Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology,

New Liberal Successions 225 We now look across the Atlantic where, despite their intellectual origins and the existence of open routes of conceptual and linguistic communication witih Europe, a number of ideological variants were knocking on the liberal door, some of whose family links were distant and even tenuous.

6

The Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism: Contextualizing the Contemporary American Variant

, . . those who felt inclined to systematize liberalism—John Stuart Mill is the greatest name in this tradition—were handicapped by their commitment to the culture of their age.1 We have to concede that as established beliefs change, it is possible that the principles of justice which it seems rational to choose may likewise change.2

the past quarter-century an astounding revival of liberal OVBm thought has taken place. That revival, curiously, has occurred within academic rather than political or popular circles, has been spearheaded by philosophers rather than by ideologists-cumpolitical activists or even political theorists, and has been located geographically in the American east coast/ though the power of American mass marketing and the Ph.D. industry have secured it important overseas outlets. Despite initial attempts to present itself as non-ideological, through claims both to universalism and to non-bias, contemporary philosophical liberalism is an ideological phenomenon like any other liberal doctrine. This chapter will concentrate on two tasks: to assess its self-definition as Hberal in the light of the evidence assembled above about the identifying features of that ideology; and to assess its location in relation to salient features of the American liberal tradition with which it associates. The limited spread of philosophical liberalism beyond university walls suggests that is not a fully fledged ideological variant, lacking as it does detailed perimeter notions and practices, 1

G, Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (London, 1970), 74, J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1971), 548, 3 On this limitation and the problem of liberal relativism see J, A. Hall, Liberalism (London, 1988), 188. 2

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 227 although its espousers all exhibit the defining characteristics of ideologists. Were philosophical liberalism to become a popular political belief-system, there would be grounds for maintaining that a radical reformulation of ideas had been injected into both the American and European liberal traditions, and that while some of its core concepts were still recognizably liberal, others constituted a decisive departure from existing configurations. More incisively, as an applicable political doctrine philosophical liberalism falls seriously short of its aims. Designed as a normative improvement on important aspects of existing liberal theory, it ends up mainly in delivering hypothetical counterfactuals to the thoughtbehaviour already incorporated in liberal ideologies. Whatever the normative merits of those types of thought-behaviour are, and granted that they will inevitably change (whether for better or worse), they are evident in political conduct. Philosophical liberalism thus poses a challenge for the ideological analyst. It illustrates the divide between ideology and political philosophy discussed in Part I, even though at least one of its most representative formulators refers to its distinct ideological features.4 It is almost entirely ahistorical despite superficial allusions to the historical liberal tradition; it adopts the conceptual purism of some philosophers in its attempts to isolate the synchronic constitutive principles of liberalism 'as such'; it is formalistic and rule bound. It may be asked why philosophical liberalism merits consideration in a book on ideologies, and the answer must be tentative inasmuch as its dissemination, consumption, and political viability are still uncertain. It is currently the most carefully argued and academically the most widely discussed liberal theory. Moreover, it follows the academic trend of resurrecting major ideologies—Marxism is the best-known example—within the confines of philosophical discourse and, like twentieth-century Marxism, it exhibits the scholastic tendency of relatively circumscribed circles to focus detailed and often repetitive debate on a small number of texts. Liberal principles are consequently stated in such a way as to blur the distinctions between the theory and the ideology; in particular—again, as with Marxism—to disengage the theory from a diachronic tradition of thought against which its identity has been subject to continuous appraisal. Significantly, American philosophical liberalism is both similar to and different from other American liberal counterparts and a comparison between the two is therefore of some interest. Philosophical 4

R. Dworkin, 'Liberalism', in A Matter of Principle (Oxford, 1986), 185.

228 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology liberalism, it will be contended, has borrowed a false horizon5 for American liberalism, stretching back to Kant but unrelated to the thought-behaviour of American liberals. The hitherto existing horizons of those liberals, whether accumulative or diminishing, and whether compatible or incongruous, hark back instead to Locke, to progressivism and the New Deal, and to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. First, however, the arguments of philosophical liberalism need to be briefly examined. (a) POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND ITS CONSTRAINTS

The theorist most closely associated with philosophical liberalism is John Rawls. Ironically, while Rawls serves as the focal point of much discussion on philosophical liberalism and has been responsible for many of its main features, he himself later undermined some of the assumptions holding it together, though not sufficiently to justify detaching his current views from its basic premisses. It is not the aim of this section to reproduce the range of Rawls's complex arguments. Rather, some of his more revealing work, collated in Political Liberalism, will be assessed in relation to his seminal A Theory of Justice and to the writings of other philosophical liberals. In distinguishing fundamentally between the right and the good, Rawls has argued that a theory of justice as fairness precedes any particular conception of the good which may be expressed in social arrangements. He has hence claimed that a theory of justice can be universalized without predetermining the specific manifestations of plans of life that people wish to realize. Rawls has also suggested that a 'thin theory' of the good underpins a theory of the right, of justice itself; that is, some value assumptions, somewhat reluctantly identified by him as intuitive/ %

See above, p. 118. * By intuitionism Rawls understands the doctrine of weighing first principles against each other through applying a considered judgement as to the right balance among them, in the absence of any rules for such prioritizing (Theory of Justice, 34), Specifically, in 'Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 229, Rawls refers to 'society as a system of fair social cooperation between free and equal persons' as 'a more fundamental intuitive idea', a sentence deleted from the parallel section in Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), 9. In the latter book Rawls is keen to distinguish rational intuitionism from his approach, while drawing important parallels between the two (pp. 91-5), and continuing to make occasional appeals to intuition (e.g. p. 192).

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 229 are contained in a universal theory, but even they do not pre-empt its wide application. A frequent criticism to which Rawls's pre-198Qs work has been subjected is the suggestion that the assumptions of the 'thin theory' cannot be generalized, and that he has been working within the confines of an individualistic, even vacuous, conception of the person, which disregards the formative impact on the individual of social organization and of psychological dispositions. From this perspective, it is illuminating to examine Rawls's own corrections to his earlier statements. Specifically, we will want to explore whether there is any parallel between the thin and full theories of the good and the morphological features of an ideology: can the 'thin' be related to the anatomical core and the 'full' to the complete fleshed-out version of an ideology? We then need to know whether the 'thin' and 'full' theories can be severed so that the former may be generalized without having a bearing on the substance of the latter. Finally, we require an evaluation of Rawls's understanding of liberalism, a subject on which he has been more explicit in his later writings. To a much greater extent than some of his supporters, Rawls has conceded that his theory of justice is not as all-embracing as originally intended. He now acknowledges that what he previously termed the 'thin theory' of the good contains a liberal position, though he calls it a political, not a comprehensive, liberalism.7 Before assessing the validity of that distinction, this political liberalism needs to be explored. Is Rawls—by employing a political liberalism—a liberal theorist pure and simple, is his theory capable of alignment with non-liberal political doctrines, or is it a liberalism which parts company with recognized exemplars of that tradition? Since identifying his conception of justice as liberal,8 Rawls has accepted that it sets limits to 'permissible conceptions of the good', while continuing to insist that the basic values associated with the priority of the right do not 'suffice by themselves to specify any particular political view'.9 The challenge this poses to the student of liberalism as an ideology is to establish whether the tension between these two assertions may be resolved, and whether the conceptual configurations indicated by the permissible ways of life can be contained, without propelling us in the direction of 7 J. Rawls, "The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 17 (1988), 253-4, 8 Rawls, 'Justice as Fairness', 245, * Rawls, Political Liberalism, 190-3,177,

230 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology particular political views. In other words, is Rawls's political liberalism really 'thin' and, even if it were, can one entertain a politically liberal restricted basis which has such a meagre logical and cultural influence over more comprehensive political viewpoints that they can avoid being instances of a 'comprehensive' liberalism? Rawls is wrong to assume that no particular political view is assumed by adhering to Ms basic values. This may be explained by reference to the structure of the core of an ideology in relation to its other conceptual ingredients. The core of an ideology is indeed composed of concepts that, taken on their own, are too indeterminate to allow of a clear interpretation. But they are not, in linguistic and political practice, taken on their own. Already in A Theory of Justice Rawls introduced the notion of lexical priority that ordered the two fundamental principles of justice (the equal liberty principle and the distribution of social and economic inequalities principle).10 A configuration was formed which allocated relative positions of significance to one decontestation of justice as fairness over another. Redistribution to the benefit of the least advantaged was unacceptable on its own, being just only if it proceeded from social arrangements that facilitated the exercise of basic liberties, the pursuit of 'spiritual and cultural interests', and the furtherance of self-respect. Status based on equal citizenship was decontested as more desirable than status based on material means.11 In his later work, even more explicitly, the component concepts of the core inform and colour each other. Rawls's thin theory of the good constitutes a partial decontesting of the concepts it contains, and consequently operates as a constraint on, and (flexible) determinant of, whatever additional configurations the core can attract. 'Thin' and 'thick' are employed in Rawlsianinspired debate as dichotomized concepts, although the very terms suggest a continuity rather than a disjuncture. The liberal profile set out in the previous chapters involves a proximity of liberty, development, individualism, rationality, the general interest, sociability, and rule-limited government.12 These already rule out 10 12

Rawls, Theory of justice, 40-5, 60-1. " Ibid. 541-8. Though the previous chapters have examined European liberalisms, American liberal variants have always insisted on their European origins, particularly Louis Hartz in his The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955), but also philosophical liberals themselves. Ackerman acknowledges the European backdrop to American political self-understanding in his recent clarion-cry: 'Is [America] content, even now, to remain an intellectual colony, borrowing European categories to decode the meaning of its national identity?' (B. Ackerman, We the People (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 3).

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 231 ideological positions associated with fascism, with some kinds of conservatism, with anarchism, and with most variants of Marxism. Instructively, when the components of Rawls's 'thin', political liberalism are examined in detail similar limitations, no less restrictive, are evident. We learn that political liberalism draws 'solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime' and in its public political culture.13 We also learn that the citizens who support it are rational, free, and equal persons, that they are capable of growth, that they share the same basic rights, liberties, and opportunities, that because they are concerned to 'find the truth or to reach reasonable agreement' they are capable of an overlapping consensus, that they display the political virtues of 'fair social cooperation' such as civility and tolerance, and that they are capable of the development and full exercise of two moral powers: a capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good.14 These attributions of political liberalism are even more elaborate than those identified in chapters 4 and 5 as forming the liberal core. They constitute numerous postulates—for a number of which intuitive status is claimed, but all capable of being culturally conditioned—about human ends and their compatibility in a social context. Seven out of the eight core liberal features identified in previous chapters15 appear in Rawls's political 16 liberalism, together with adjacent concepts concerning equality,17 democracy, and allocations of rights and opportunities. The notion of an overlapping consensus, however, seems to stretch other liberal conceptions beyond their normal range because, unlike the general interest, its contents are unusually specific.18 The missing 13

Rawls, 'Political not Metaphysical', 225, 234; 'The Priority of Right', 262. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19, 176-80, 192, 194, 202. Italics added. 15 I have argued that tolerance is not just a substantive value but a morphological device enabling ranges of decontestations to be undertaken within the limits defined by the semantic field of the other core concepts. See Ch. 4 above. 16 Rawls distinguishes between rationality and reasonableness: the first refers to the judgement and deliberation used by agents in attaining their ends; the second to the social context of co-operation in a limited pluralistic framework that decontests and constrains rationality (Political Liberalism, 48-57). 57 Core-status claims made for the concept of equality will be addressed below, 14

8. (d). 18

Overlapping consensus is a constitutional procedural device identified by Rawls with a variant of neutrality (see s, (/) below). But it also assumes the principles of justice as fairness which Rawls has already allocated to political liberalism (Political Liberalism, 144-8). It is hence a serious constraint on pluralism.

232 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology core concept is individuality, to which Rawls mysteriously* assigns the status of a comprehensive liberal ideal.19 Rawls's political liberalism may not be comprehensive in his sense of the term 'comprehensive' ('conceptions of what is of value in human life, as well as ideals of personal virtue and character, that are to inform much of our nonpolitkal conduct'),20 but it is a highly advanced skeletal structure that, while capable of being fleshed out in many ways (as is typical of all ideological families), must necessarily be fleshed out in a manner consistent with the contours of its ideological anatomy. Though a core is too rudimentary an anatomical structure on which to suspend a fully fledged ideology, the principle of quasi-contingency applies. The introduction of certain adjacent concepts rather than others is logically entailed, even though the precise decontestation of those concepts is not specified exactly. To pick up an earlier analogy, once we have decided that a table is for eating at rather than generally for putting things on (= e.g. once we have decided that liberalism is a human-growth-oriented theory, rather than an unlimited selfdetermination theory), we will surround the table with eating utensils rather than with anything that can be put on it (= e.g. we will surround liberalism with the concept of equality of opportunity, rather than with the concept of non-interference in individual actions, or the endorsement of all human choices). We may still have generous leeway in deciding which crockery and cutlery to use (e.g. which version of equality of opportunity to support), but we shall certainly be using eating utensils (e.g. promoting equality of opportunity) rather than typewriters or table-tennis nets (e.g. inegalitarianism or sameness). Likewise, when Rawls argues that the state cannot be used to further a particular comprehensive doctrine, he illustrates this by means of an idea within the domain of comprehensive doctrines: human excellence. Now it is quite proper that human excellence should not be a shared or imposed notion of the good life. But excellence is one possible decontestation of human growth, and growth is a concept previously endorsed by Rawls as endemic to his political liberalism, one we have already found in other liberal variants, or covered by onomasiological terms such as development. So whereas excellence is too specific a decontestation of growth, growth itself is nevertheless a constant in Rawlsian theory which must run through each comprehensive doctrine the state 19 20

Rawls, 'Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', 245, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 175.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 233 can accept. An appreciation of ideological structure and conceptual relationships assists in realizing that the non-specificity still claimed by Rawls for Ms political liberalism is chimerical The baggage Rawls once carried surreptitiously, and which he is now commendably prepared to declare, is already designed in partially decontested patterns that severely restrict our freedom to introduce an open range of concepts into further discussion. Hence Rawls overloads political liberalism with more meaning than he intends it to carry. This runs contrary to his implication that one can prioritize the logical structure of a system of political beliefs over its cultural structure. That implication obfuscates the fact that his theory also possesses the features of an ideology, features which require any initial logical position to be linked to conscious or unconscious cultural preferences for a fundamental building block on which to construct the logic.22 Sometimes Rawls appears to waver on the brink of a culturally diachronic awareness, as when he says of his conception of justice that, 'given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us'.23 But he fails to spell out how exactly history and tradition shape conceptions of contemporary public life. 21

(b) CARVING OUT THE POLITICAL?

As has been noted, Rawls has moved some way towards recognizing that political justice, or political liberalism, is compatible only with some comprehensive doctrines. In other words, liberalism's basic ideological morphology legitimates certain configurations of ideas and concepts while debarring others. Nevertheless, the range of compatibility between political liberalism and 'comprehensive' moral doctrines—as Rawls puts it—is much narrower than he would lead us to believe. Political liberalism is both culturally and logically constructed so as to lead only to 'comprehensive' liberal doctrines (and to socialist and conservative ideologies inasmuch as they overlap with the former). But political liberalism is not directly and not necessarily compatible with other kinds of socialism 21 22

For the constraints on Rawls's notion of growth, see below, p. 234. Cp. B, Yack, "The Problem with Kantian Liberalism', in R. Beiner and W. J, Booth (eds.), Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary legacy (New Haven, 1993), 234; '[Rawls] merely superimposes his philosophically designed conception upon something he calls our public culture.' s J. Rawls, 'Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980), 519.

234 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology or conservatism, let alone other political theories. For example, Rawls's notion of 'free' is underpinned by a rationality and a constitutional power structure typical of all liberal ideologies, but certainly the former is not present in much conservative thinking, and the latter is anathema to some well-known socialist variants. More remarkably, political liberalism is not even compatible with all varieties of 'comprehensive' liberalism. Although 'political' liberalism does not entail any particular liberal variety, and although it is logically and culturally inevitable that a 'comprehensive' liberalism will follow a 'political' one, Rawls decontests 'fair social co-operation' in such a way as to exclude, as shall be seen below, some types of liberal communitarianism. In assuming a disjuncture between a political conception and a comprehensive doctrine based on a differentiation between political and non-political values, Rawls offers a distinction that is not easy to sustain.24 Is liberty a purely political conception? Political values are not formulated independently of moral, religious, and philosophical viewpoints. These various perspectives may espouse similar values, though in modified ideational contexts. Conversely, is Rawls's notion of growth political rather than philosophical? As it happens, his decontestation of growth is at odds with those of other key articulators of liberalism. It relates to inherent moral powers, whose development is removed from a conscious elucidation of the social and political arenas which enable such growth, no less than from the crucial historicity of the notion of growth itself. This stipulative shrinking both of the ambit of the political and of its context does not accord with the practice of most political theorists instrumental in formulating liberal thought. Similarly, another philosopher of liberalism, Ronald Dworkin, has distinguished between personal and external preferences— the latter being 'about what others shall do or have'25 and potentially rights-threatening—suggesting that a line can be drawn, removing decisions likely to reflect strong external preferences 'from majoritarian political institutions altogether'.26 This could be achieved by a Bill of Rights. Such arguments diverge from the conception of ideology presented in this book for four reasons. First, ideational interconnections are such that ideologies invariably draw in, either explicitly or implicitly, a wide range of concepts and values, thus facilitating the struggle of the political sphere to legitimate itself through pervading public discourse. The 24 26

Rawls, Political liberalism, 13. Dworkin, 'Liberalism', 197.

s

Ibid. 196.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism

235

exclusion of some areas from the impact of such discourse is unrealistic, because institutional constraints—the banning of legislation or action—are by no means sufficiently watertight. Second, the distinction between personal and external preferences is itself logically non-viable in some cases.27 For example, a personal preference for liberty must entail an external preference for others to behave in such a way as to permit the variant of liberty indicated by the personal preference. Third, the distinction is contestable and culturally conditioned, because of the flexibility of the boundary between the personal and the external, and because it embodies an individualistic ethos that demotes the value of reasonable concern for the conduct of others. If personal preferences alone could be legitimately practised, entire spheres of public debate and action would have to be abandoned. Fourth, a Bill of Rights may itself be decoded as an expression of strong external preferences. Precisely because politics is frequently the arena in which two external preferences clash—e.g. an external preference some individuals have for supplying the homeless "with housing may be considered by others to depart from the tenets of market economics—both the practising of external preferences and choices among them may be considered ethical and valid from other ideological viewpoints. In particular, not all sets of external preferences invade (as Dworkin claims) the right of citizens to be treated as equals, nor are they perceived as such even by those who are the objects of such preferences. The distribution of taxes in favour of the poor may be an external preference that some taxpayers will oppose, but it is one that is capable of moral justification and can be reconciled with concepts of equal treatment. Most importantly, Dworkin marginalizes the crucial problems raised by the cultural contexts of defining the nature of a preference. In a perfunctory remark designed to acknowledge a difficulty without meeting it, he notes with respect to external preferences that 'different liberals will disagree about what is needed at any particular time'.28 This observation about polysemic synchrony is the very reason for the unfeasibility of the proposed narrowing of the political. Parallel problems exist with Rawls's notion of comprehensive liberalism, which he has illustrated by reference to Mill's fostering of the values of autonomy and individuality. Rawls claims, rightly, that those values would govern much if not all of life. But so would Mill's notions of growth and freedom. Rawls thinks that comprehensive doctrines are perfectionist. This is not the case. 27

Dworkin acknowledges this in part. Ibid.

2S

Ibid. 197.

236 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology They are inclusive; they may be perfectionist. Liberalism is opertendedly meliorist rather than perfectionist, and to subscribe to autonomy and individuality as desired, but not imposed, values is neither to recommend an end-state nor to enforce it.29 Moreover, individuality is, as we have seen, central to Mill's liberal core; it is not an adjacent option but defines and decontests his other core concepts. In a revealing passage Rawls claims that political liberalism 'must have the kind of content we associate with liberalism historically'.30 Yet he excludes individuality, a concept that has in one form or another been at the heart of liberal thought. The consequently limited historical tradition to which Rawls refers is, one would assume, a particular reconstruction of the American, rather than the British, French, or German, liberal tradition,31 Rawls is uncontroversial when he maintains that there are many liberalisms. He is on more dubious ground when he asserts that political liberalism may be detached from a comprehensive liberalism and reattached to other doctrines; when he draws the distinction between political and non-political values within liberalism which, even in its comprehensive version, is a political philosophy (for Rawls) and an ideology (on our understanding); and when he specifically locates values in comprehensive liberalism which are demonstrably part of the liberal morphological core. (c) THE KANTIAN HORIZON

At the centre of Rawls's approach is a Kantian view of human nature and capacities, a notion of 'our moral consciousness as informed by practical reason'.32 Though Rawls distances himself from Kantian theory on many points of detail, in particular with reference to Kant's teleological conception of the person, and although some scholars are inclined to identify a distinctive difference in this respect between Rawls's A Theory of Justice33 and his work from the mid-1980s onwards,34 his understanding of the just 29 31

30 See above, Ch. 4. Eawls, Political Liberalism, 175. See O. O'Neill, 'Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism', Ethics, 98 (1988), 708, 713. Moreover, that assertion is a partial misconception of the American liberal tradition, and will presently be tested against the history of that tradition itself. K Rawls, Political Liberalism, 99-101. 33 On the Kantian themes in A Theory of Justice see M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982), 35-40, 118-20. 34 See e.g. S. M. Okin, 'Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice', in C. R. Sunstein (ed.), Feminism and Political Theory (Chicago, 1990), 17-21, who

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 237 society remains linked to an intemalization of Kantian fundamentals as well as to an ongoing debate in which Kant is employed as a point of reference. It is predicated on a conception of moral personality which regards all individuals as free and equal rational beings whose ends require respect,33 and consequently on a universalism in which all are equal in that sense. As Yack has commented, even when Rawls backs away from universalism and accepts the location of justice in a democratic constitutional culture, Kant's idea of a shared moral identity still permeates Ms approach to the notion of an overlapping consensus.36 Moreover, Rawls's notion of a person (as Nussbaum has argued) is characterized by a remoteness from the empirical world exemplified in his concentration upon the (two) moral powers of human beings.37 The current emphasis on autonomy as a central aspect of freedom also owes its force to Kantian arguments. Rawls distinguishes his position from what he terms Kant's 'comprehensive' view of autonomy38 (just as it is distinguished from Mill's 'comprehensive' notion of individuality) but this cannot belie the pervading impact of autonomy on his thought. For Rawls autonomy functions on three levels: first as rational autonomy—an artificial modelling device based on the capacity of citizens 'to form, to revise, and to pursue a conception of the good' and 'to enter into an agreement with others'. Second, in full, political autonomy, citizens act out the above principles 'by affirming the political principles of justice and enjoying the protections of the basic rights and liberties'. Third, as an ethical value which may apply to the whole of life. Strangely, Rawls cannot detect in himself what he finds in Kant. While Rawls disclaims the indispensability of the final form of autonomy to political liberalism, the first two are heavily indebted to Kant, as Rawls himself observes: 'Kant is the historical source of the idea that reason, both theoretical and practical, is self-originating and self-authenticating.'39 The historical source of that idea, certainly; nevertheless accepts the impact on Rawls of the Kantian notions of rationality and autonomy. 35 Cp. R. C. Sinopoli, 'Thick-Skinned Liberalism: Redefining Civility', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 612-20, on a contrast between Rawls and Mill on this issue. 36 Yack, 'Kantian Liberalism', 224-9; I, Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 10. 37 M. Nussbaum, 'Aristotelian Social Democracy', in R. B. Douglass, G. M. Mara, and H. S. Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good (London, 1990), 227, 242-3. 38 Eawls, Political Liberalism, 99. '" Ibid. 72, 77, 100.

238 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology but not the only historical source which fashioned Western liberal conceptions of reason or liberty. For to argue as Rawls does about the relation of freedom and autonomy is to adopt a particular nonnegotiable view of freedom adjacent to a specific view of reason,40 It regards autonomy as an ineliminable component of the concept of liberty, while disregarding the possibility that heteronomy under certain circumstances can serve as a non-invasive, liberating force. It also disregards the possibility of the mutual influence of the banished external standpoints of individuals41 on the process of rational deliberation, or the possibility of a non-rational sphere of freedom. Although the absence of the word 'autonomy' in other liberal languages does not entail the absence of the concept, it must none the less raise queries. Concepts common in liberal vocabularies such as liberty, independence, or self-sufficiency cater only partially to the notions attached to autonomy and they appear in proximity to—and thus always shaped by-—the further range of core concepts explored earlier. Rawls wishes to specify the types of autonomy entailed by a conception of the rational individual capable of enunciating principles of justice and, in doing so, admits (partly intentionally and partly inadvertently) that aspects of autonomy are present in Ms political liberalism. The analyst of ideologies wishes to understand why autonomy is made to play a role in a particular political argument and what preferences for, and interpretations of, human conduct it supports. It may emerge that autonomy signifies a particular morally and inteEectually endowed individual whose presence does not grace other liberal variants. The emphasis on rational and political autonomy privileges a distinct conception of the person, in whom resides the potential for supreme political judgement and decisions—a potential removed from competing notions of the person in which autonomy is neither the paramount goal nor a practical way of life. In saying that, there is no need to dispense with individual agency. What is necessary is an appreciation of agency not primarily as unimpeded individual rule-setting but as a critical attitude to self and to others within constraining social and cultural frameworks. Kant was of course a salient force in European thought, and outside Germany influenced liberals such as Renouvier. None the less his impact on many key articulators of liberalism is questionable. In Britain, though he entered liberal thought via nineteenth40 For a discussion of the relationship between freedom and autonomy see G. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge, 1988), 14, 18. 41 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 73.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism

239

century Idealism, it was in a curtailed and muted form, through the works of Green and Ritchie but not in other central liberal treatises. Ritchie in fact observed that Herbert Spencer had enunciated his 'law of equal freedom' for thirty years before having learned that Kant said something similar'—a comment on the independent sources of such ideas in Britain. Moreover, Ritchie berated Kant for exaggerating 'the idea of humanity as an end-initself and overlooking the requirement for individuals to serve the needs of others. He cautioned that Kant's thinking was 'pervaded by the individualism which lies at the basis of the whole theory of natural rights', echoing Mill's earlier comment that the universalizing nature of Kant's law of rational conduct was meaningless without adding the concept of a collective interest.42 In Mill's political writings, Kant is mentioned only once, and then merely as an example of a philosopher worth studying.43 In American liberal ideography, the absence of Kantian philosophy is striking. Until the advent of Rawls, Kant was missing from American accounts of the history of its own liberal tradition. Hartz, to give one famous example, although critically aware of the European influences on American liberalism, did not invoke Kant at all but inflated a Lockean liberal consensus in American politics.44 Nor does Kant play a role in major nineteenth-century American debates on aspects of liberalism, or in progressivism, or in the New Deal. Hobhouse, admonishing against the impact of Hegelian metaphysics on British philosophy, once warned that the waters of the Rhine were flowing into the Ms. The Rawlsian enterprise seems committed to diverting the waters of the Pregel into the George. Ideologies are constantly engaged in reconstructing their own history, as Hartz's Lockeanism illustrates. Rawls is no exception to that rule, albeit given the Rawlsian reluctance to relate his liberalism to existing liberal practices, he does not engage in a conscious act of reconstruction. To the contrary, it is significant that in reinventing and redirecting the history of American liberalism—by introducing theoretical perspectives rooted in a different intellectual experience and school—Rawls alighted on Kant, a philosopher for whom history played a very limited role.45 The result is an ideological position in which history is itself dehistoricized, for 42 D. G. Ritchie, Natural Rights (London, 1895), 141, 252-3; J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London, 1910), 48-9. 43 MOL On Liberty, 162, 44 Sandel correctly observes that Rawls's Kantian-inspired liberalism 'departs significantly from Locke's' (Limits of Justice, 118). 45 See the remarks by W. Galston in 'What is Living and What is Dead in Kant's Practical Philosophy?', in Beiner and Booth, Kant and Political Philosophy, 209.

240 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology a non-history is elevated to the rank of history. Contemporary moral philosophy is attempting to appropriate the title and garb of liberalism for its own principles, by claiming that its deontology, and its conceptions of human agency and purposes, constitute the liberal position itself. Are the various manifestations of liberal thought-behaviour timeless? Does individual rationality enable liberalism to sustain an overlapping morality which is the basis of generally just practices? And are they removed from the spatial grappling with the concrete problems of societies aspiring to implement a liberal ethos? It is highly doubtful that a reading of Mill can support these interpretations, which revert to older conceptions of political theory. Whether or not this intellectual venture will be successful in writing a new chapter in the history of American liberalism, one which will occupy a permanent place in the tome of liberal ideology, is too soon to predict. But what we can proceed to ask is: is philosophical liberalism in line with the American liberal tradition? And if not, what might its effect on that tradition be? Assuming philosophical liberalism were successful, the history of the Western liberal tradition itself would have to be retold from a new horizon of experience. Liberals of the Rawlsian persuasion would then be able to argue justifiably that the true liberal tradition lay dormant in Continental ideas which shaped the American constitution, but came into their own only with the belated importation of Kantian precepts into American political philosophy. From that point on, the argument could run, the strand of American liberalism which was connected to progressivism, and ideas about big government, and directed programmes of social justice, turned out to be a transitory stage, even a distortion of some liberal principles. It took a group of academic philosophers to alert liberals to the import and centrality of Kantian universalisrn and abstract rationalism and to its political consequences in terms of the neutral state, and of the centrality of autonomy as definer of human personhood. Kant's constructivism may appeal retroactively to Americans as a nation formed through a constitutive act. Seen thus, liberalism was not after all the sole achievement and export of the British empiricist political tradition, as it had been predominantly perceived hitherto, and was still perceived by many Continental thinkers. Continental Enlightenment theory had to wait two centuries before its brand of liberalism became the dominant member of the liberal family through the power of the American university system to penetrate into the liberal sanctum and rearrange its core significantly. As yet, this is conjectural history, though

Chalknge of Philosophical Liberalism 241 reading history backwards is itself part of the process of creating history. (d) IS EQUALITY A CORE LIBERAL CONCEPT?

The Kantian nuances of philosophical liberalism have predictably bolstered a universalism through which the concept of equality may be prioritized. But the location of equality within American liberal morphology has been problematic for much longer than that. The centrality of equality in its political (and legal) rhetoric has encouraged at least one theorist, Dworkkt, to advocate a conception of a liberal core at variance with those exhibited by the family at large. Dworkin is in basic agreement with the fundamental morphological view of political theory and ideology presented here, distinguishing generally between constitutive and derivative political positions.46 But he maintains that the constitutive principle of liberalism is a particular conception of equality. Specifically, that equality relates to the treatment by a government of its citizens 'as entitled to its equal concern and respect'.47 To that Dworkin adds a number of glosses: rough equal distribution of resources to be provided by the market, representative democracy, and a Bill of Rights which performs the function, noted above, of removing the possibility of its violation from the sphere of action of majoritarian institutions. It is never clear whether Dworkin is describing, as he claims, the American liberal ideology or enunciating a prescriptive set of beliefs,.'an authentic and coherent political morality'.48 On the whole he engages in the latter, but links it to a denial of the significance of diachronic analysis and of ideological change, through the debatable and ahistorical proposition that liberalism 'has remained roughly the same over some time'. Had that proposition referred to the liberal core, rather to liberalism pure and simple, it may have had plausibility, provided that the historical basis of the core was recognized. However, these prerequisites do not quite apply. 46 Dworkin insists, however, that constitutive positions are valued for their own sake, whereas I have suggested that their value is not independent of the complete configuration in which they appear; and he does not discuss the impact of the derivative positions on the core ones, 'Derivative', in other words, is not identical to 'adjacent' or 'peripheral' ('Liberalism', 408 n.). More than most scholars, however, Dworkin is sensitive to boundary problems when analysing political belief-systems. 4S *7 Dworkin, 'Liberalism', 190. Ibid. 183, 185.

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It must surely be questioned whether liberalism, or any ideology for that matter, can indeed have one constitutive principle sufficient to serve as morphological arranger; and the discussion of liberalism in earlier chapters would query why, if so, it would have to be that of treating people with equal respect. Three issues need examining. First, the exclusion of liberty from the status of a constitutive principle of liberalism—its etymological companion— has little analytical appeal. Liberty need not crowd equality out of the constitutive sphere, as Dworkin has argued. He is of course right to assert that the two cannot be weighted and balanced off as liberal constitutive principles.49 But the notion of a core suggests the ineliminability of all, or the great majority, of core concepts,50 not a quantitative relationship between them. On that understanding, each core concept may conceivably be optimized up to the point where it seriously begins to impinge on the presence of other core concepts. Second, the exclusion of liberty as a constitutive principle has little historical appeal. Empirical evidence establishes that liberals have invariably identified liberty as a constitutive principle, irrespective of other constitutive principles liberalism exhibits. Although Dworkin's predilection for equality as a core liberal concept undoubtedly reflects a cultural constraint whereby, as Pole has noted, America is distinguished by a 'strong and public rhetorical commitment to an unspecified egalitarian ideal',51 it is also the case that in the United States, the rhetoric of liberty, as well as a genuine adherence to one or more of its versions, is ingrained not only in liberalism, but in political culture in general.52 Moreover, if liberalism is reduced to the one constitutive principle of treating people with equal respect, would this distinguish between it and broad varieties of socialism? Third, the location of equality of respect as a constitutive principle is challengeable. It is plausible to argue (as has been done above) that equality of respect, as well as other kinds of equality, can be derived from core concepts of human rationality and individuality,53 or from the liberal core concept of the commonality and non-exclusiveness of the good, or from the universalization of liberty.54 It is because liberals subscribe to a certain idea of what a 49 51

'Liberalism', 186, 190-1. » Cp. Ch. 2 above, pp. 83, 87, J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 434. This, as shall presently be argued, does not necessarily transform equality into a core concept 52 See M. Foley, American Political Ideas; Traditions and Usages (Manchester, 1991), 15. 53 See above, p, 159. 54 On this latter point see J. Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism', Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1987), 130.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 243 person is that we can demand equal respect for all persons. Equality would then identify an area of regard for individual persons who share some attributes and ends, seen from the external perspective of law or government/5 rather than the existential connotation of a collective, group-centred identity or similarity. Had we entertained different ideas about the nature and value of human beings, we might not have arrived at a concept of equal respect. At most, the American liberal tradition has co-opted equality of politico-legal treatment as part of the liberal core package, defining the other core concepts and defined by them. For many socialists, this latter shortcoming has been at the centre of their critique of liberalism. But to what extent have twentieth-century liberal theorists coopted equality into the liberal core? Hobhouse, it is true, noted the habitual association of liberty and equality, but qualified this link in two ways. First, he made it clear that liberty implies equality (specifically, the impartial application of law, which is close to Dworkin's equality of respect), rather than the reverse. Second, he made the link dependent on more exact definitions of liberty and equality; that is, he confirmed that the terms in Mo are not reconcilable but that some of their subsets, or particular decontestations, are. Hobhouse went on to criticize Benthamite utilitarianism precisely for setting up equality as fundamental while relegating liberty to the status of a means.56 More recently, and from within the American philosophical tradition, Gutmann has noted that, though equality enters into discussions of modern social justice, liberalism itself is not grounded in equality.57 Her scholarly endeavours have been directed at tracing the egalitarian themes compatible with the liberal tradition, which is altogether a different enterprise from Dworkin's. Gutmann's analysis takes her beyond Rawls in emphasizing the egalitarian consequences of Mill's participatory goals, and in identifying a stronger redistributionary welfare function than is evident from Rawls's own writings (by prioritizing basic welfare rights over his second 'difference principle'), a function already located in new liberal thinking. It also recognizes the contestedness of equality within the history of liberalism by suggesting that those strands denote two liberal egalitarian traditions.58 For many British interwar liberals, equality came to possess greater 55

This aspect is also present in many socialist theories but, as will be argued in Ch. 11, equality gains additional, and different, layers of meaning when set in a constellation of strong notions of organic community, welfare, and need. 56 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, 1911), 17,28-9,39. See also p. 206 above. 87 See the definition in A. Gutmann, Liberal Equality (Cambridge, 1980), 3. 58 Ibid. 122-8, 175-6.

244 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology salience in the liberal core, though usually still as a service concept to liberty. Hobson expressed concern about the American transition 'from the libertarian to the equaiitarian factor in democracy', but in the Tocquevillian sense of the pursuit of sameness, which denied the uniqueness of individual personality,59 For left-liberals, equality afforded the means to the expression of personality, exceeding the notion of equal respect fostered by Dworkin, but personality was also thought to have a social aspect. The more radical among them wished to advance equality by recognizing the importance of community and the classlessness it promoted. For other left-liberals, differences of persons could be the basis of corresponding differences of treatment, though functionless wealth was ruled out and distribution was geared to enhancing individual development through mutual aid. Equality was a concept adjacent both to individual growth and to community, reinforcing the harmony assumed between the two.60 Ultimately, however, the claim of American philosophical liberals about the centrality of equality must be diachronically assessed in relation to the culture of American liberalism. The early commitment of Americans to equality as well as liberty in the founding constitutional documents obfuscates its decontestation by liberals as equal rights, when rights were frequently attached to an individualistic ethic of self-development and the removal of governmental restrictions.61 It has been observed that 'in American history, equal rights meant equal claims rather than equal obligations',62 thus emphasizing their individualistic rather than communitarian idea-environment. Alternately or additionally American liberals have decontested equality as equal opportunities, when opportunities were broadly equivalent to rights in the above sense, promising reward for merit and unequal results.63 At most, in the era of progressivism, liberals offered the prospect of state intervention against concentrations of capital to ensure fair competition among individuals.64 Even reformist progressives such as Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann did not radically depart from 59

j, A. Hobson, 'The Good American. The American Attitude Towards Liberty', Nation (7 Feb. 1920). 60 For a detailed discussion, see Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 246-57. 61 The historian Martin Diamond has noted that 'the Declaration does not mean by "equal" anything at all like the general human equality which so many now make their political standard ... equality... consists entirely in the equal entitlement of all to the rights which comprise political liberty' (quoted in Foley, American Political Ideas, 155). 62 a Pole, Pursuit of Equality, p. xvii. Ibid. 150-62. 64 A. M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope (Boston, 1963), 68.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 245 this instrumental view of equality, Weyl proclaiming that 'what a socialized democracy demands is an equalization, not of men, but of opportunities'.65 Whether or not such a minimalist, or 'thin', conception of equality deserves core status in American liberal thought is debatable. Weyl's colleague on the progressive weekly The New Republic, Herbert Croly, one of the most original twentiethcentury American liberal thinkers, asserted in his classic The Promise of American Life that the Jeffersonian insistence on equality, even as equal rights, would limit the 'free and able exercise of individual opportunities'. Calling up the core liberal concept of the general interest, Croly believed that the balance between equality and liberty could only be struck if power were to be vested not in an 'apotheosized majority' but in 'the people as a whole'. The organic view of the national interest and of community to which Croly subscribed saw it as enlisting state intervention to secure liberty rather than the equality of averages. Quoting from the French thinker Faguet, Croly viewed fraternity as the linchpin between liberty and equality.66 No less significantly, John Dewey distinguished the aims of liberalism as liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities'."7 Here too, equality could at best be conjured up as an adjacent derivative from the notion of individual opportunity. As has been suggested, 'in contrast to some of the other central values in American politics (e.g. liberty, individualism, democracy), the status of equality has fluctuated quite markedly during America's development'.68 This indeterminacy reflects its position in American liberalism as well, so that a substantive concept of equality, co-equal with other core concepts, cannot be demonstrated to occupy a permanent place, irrespective of diachrony, in its core. In recognizing the ubiquity of the concept of equality in the language of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, these reservations must be borne in mind. The role of the Supreme Court in that movement was central, and through it 'the egalitarian melody was strong in procedural decisions', promoting equal political status, minimizing the disadvantages of the poor, and forbidding discrimination by government.69 The main tenor of the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement, in its determination to improve the 65 66

Quoted in Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 282. H. Croly, The Promise of American Life ((New York, 1909), 186-90, 207-8. J. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York, 1935), 51, Foley, American Political Ideas, 156. 69 A. M. Bickel, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress (New Haven, 1978), 103-4. 67 68

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standing of salient minorities, was to demand equal access of disadvantaged social groups to basic social goods and in particular to promote colour-blindness and integration. Though the practical radical impact of desegregation was great, inasmuch as these standards were now read in to the Fourteenth Amendment, the 'equal protection of the laws', the conceptions of equality it embodied were modest and traditional, no different in principle from the equal treatment and moderate equal opportunities ethos of the past. These amounted to the banning of legal and formal barriers to attaining social goods, and related to issues of preferment and life-chances. As one prominent legal analyst put it, 'Give each individual the same opportunity to qualify, it may be said, without regard to race, creed, colour, sex, or national origin; this is the very essence of Equality.' True, this was tempered by the understanding that affirmative action may be part of that essence/0 and by a genuine attachment to the rhetoric of equality in liberal discourse,71 if not to a strong and distinguishable core conception. Yet even affirmative action, now applied to women as well as to ethnic and cultural minorities, has been plausibly described by a commentator on American liberalism as resulting from the 'liberal belief in the individual' and hence as springing 'from the same values and ideals that prompted the eighteenth-century belief in limited government'.72 To assert, as does Rawis, that 'the same equality of the Declaration of Independence which Lincoln invoked to condemn slavery can be invoked to condemn the inequality and oppression of women'73 is a strangely ahistorical comment which treats equality as a simple generalizable and deductive principle, abstracted both from the practices that constitute it and from the different morphological configurations which bestow on it variable meaning. Rawls himself is a clear representative of this dominant liberal American mode of thinking about equality. His second principle of justice proceeds from the justification of social and economic inequalities provided they permit access, understood as 'fair equality of opportunity', to positions and offices. But the further contribution of the second principle to the notion of equality rests on a redistribution of benefits to 'the least advantaged'—a prevalent use of language during the 1960s.74 Thus employed, equaMty reflects a shrinking of the political in comparison to many communitarian 70 See A. Cox, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government (Oxford, 1976), 56-66. 71 Foley, American Political Ideas, 155, 222. 72 P. M. Garry, Liberalism and American Identity (Kent, Ohio, 1992), 82. 73 74 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxix, Ibid. 5-6.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 247 views in which a more substantive and core equality is in evidence.75 It does not, for example, involve any decontestation of equality as a fundamental rearrangement of socio-economic practices, which would have introduced the general satisfaction of needs as a criterion of benefit, rather than a narrowly political notion of 'persons' needs as citizens',76 Nor does it suggest a strong communitarian interpretation of human relationships in which equality would emanate from the mutual interdependence of people. Rather, it presents a notion of primary goods which all individuals qua citizens require, one that identifies basic rights and liberties, freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, an indeterminate amount of income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect77 All of these are central to the values espoused by salient voices from within American liberalism, with a non-radical decontestation of equality as a by-product of other core concepts. But these primary goods offer only one possible cultural path among the logical possibilities entailed by the Kantian-influenced 'capacity for moral personaEty' that Rawls postulates as the potential on which equal justice is predicated.78 Moreover, Rawls follows the wellknown route all ideologies endeavour to tread by anchoring that capacity in 'the general facts of nature'79—a powerful decontesting device through which he attempts to remove it altogether from the realm of social and political debate. Once again, the universality of the Kantian appeal to reason is the unconsciously employed peg on which ideological surplus meanings are hung, in this instance a liberal conception of equality long-present in American culture. By the time a more assertive conception of equality, linked to affirmative action, had emerged, not a few liberals regarded it as putting the prior principle of liberty at risk. Specifically, communitarian and participatory egalitarian ends applied to the perimeter concept of beleaguered groups, and equality was seen to be promoted at the expense of diminishing individual liberty. The entry of the concept of groups on the liberal scene profoundly split the ideological morphology of American liberalism. (e) LIBERALISM AND COMMUNITY

The concept of community deserves comment on its own, particularly in view of its recent reintroduction into philosophical liberal debate. Within the latter context communitarianism is subject to 75 77

7f> See Ch. 11 below. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 179,187-90. Italics added. 7ft w Ibid. 181. Ibid. 504-7. Ibid. 510.

248 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology treatment similar to that meted out to utilitarianism by its philosophical opponents: an overly simplistic model is constructed which can then be demolished with consummate ease.80 This method of confronting an Aunt Sally with a sophisticated barrage ought to be ruled out as a 'no contest' situation. Certainly, there are many types of community incompatible with liberal precepts; but it is unreasonable to assume that community is any more monolithic than other political terms. The Rousseauist pedigree of community is no more exclusive or typical than the Aristotelian or Marxist, and while none of these is adequate for assimilation into liberal thought, it is a fact that communitarianism has been accommodated within liberalism. We have examined one such instance with respect to the organic analogy, but other nuances of community congruent with liberal premisses can be produced.81 To assert therefore that communitarianism is opposed to liberalism is true only if we take some instances of either term to represent their entire semantic fields. The initial so-called communitarian critique of philosophical liberalism was offered by Sandel, who pointed out the individualistic biases in Rawis's original position—the position in which only the thin theory of the good holds. Specifically, Rawis's theory is individualistic, argues Sandel, because its subjects are beyond the reach of experience and have a static existence independently of the values to which they subscribe. Conversely, common purposes and ends can inspire self-understanding, describe an individual in terms of others, and define a community as constituting a subject. For Rawls, Sandel maintains, a sense of community is only an attribute and not a constituent of a society.82 Three features stand out in Sandel's exposition as worthy of attention within the framework of our analysis. First, he claims that his is a strong sense of community, whereas Rawls employs community in a weak sense. It is only strong, however, in the sense of situating individuals within anthropological-cultural and ideational contexts, thus meeting part of the desiderata of ideological analysis, while failing to include historical contexts as well.83 Sandel's notion of community shares with the liberalism it criticizes the features of being suprahistorical, universal, and generic. Second, Sandel believes that his 80 81

See Ch. 1. See W. E. Connolly, 'Identity and Difference in Liberalism', in Douglass, Mara, and Richardson (eds,), Liberalism and the Goad, 77-81. 82 Sandel, Limits of Justice, 62-4, 83 Cp. E, Frazer and N. Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), 137.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 249 critique indicates the limits of liberalism, rather than the potential expansion of liberalism to include community. And that is because, third, Sandel forges a proximity between the concept of community and the notion of individual identity, exploring the vertical roots of the individual in a constituting group, rather than forging—as did for instance the new liberals—a proximity between the concept of community and the notion of human interconnectedne$sf exploring the horizontal interdependences of social relationships. These interpretations, repeatedly reproduced by other participants in the debate, have eroded the power of philosophical liberalism to come to terms with the heritage to which it occasionally signals allegiance. The new delimitations of Rawls's political liberalism must cast doubt on which version of community it can accommodate beyond the notion of sociability as a rational choice of individuals. It certainly fails to recognize social groups as actors. As Rawls has explained, social co-operation is based on individual acceptance and begins from each individual's conception of his or her advantage or good.84 But there is a much more profound methodological issue at stake here. As Taylor has persuasively claimed of Sandal's approach, it is ontological because of its holistic perspective, but • fails to be concretely temporal and spatial as well.85 The liberalcommunitarian debate has on the whole not recognized that the abstract nature of the embedded, situated self to which it refers is of little assistance in understanding the forms it takes and the roles it plays in actual political debate. In sharp contrast, the liberal tradition has employed communitarian arguments with a considerable degree of success. We may remind ourselves of Skinner's useful caution that it is 'less convincing to suggest that a concept might be coherently used in an unfamiliar way than to show that it has been put to unfamiliar but coherent uses'.86 It is all the more the pity that these developments in the British liberal tradition are recent enough to commend themselves, one might have expected, to the attention of the disputants in the liberalcommunitarian debate. Many liberals, removed from Rawls's revised position, and refuting Sandel's criticism, have espoused a much more developed 84

Rawls, Political Liberalism, 16. C. Taylor, 'Cross-Purposes; The Liberal-Communitarian Debate', in N. Rosenblum (ed.). Liberalism and the Moral Life {Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 160-1. * Q. Skinner, 'The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives', in R. Rorty, J. B, Sdmeewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984), 198. 85

250 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology conception of community while insisting that it nevertheless remained within the confines of the liberal tradition. That conception was the outcome of a specific convergence between the core liberal concepts of a common interest and of sociability: the opposition to elevating particular interests above the rest without general sanction, superimposed on a growing recognition of the existential interdependence of all individuals. Even at the level of a minimal common denominator, liberals often regard sociability as an original feature of human nature, rather than as the later evolution of a chosen common purpose. Beyond that, Sandel is himself a prisoner of the narrow vision of American philosophical liberalism, if we read him as arguing that his notion of community is outside the realm of liberalism. Furthermore, the strong communitarian notion of Sandel is overtaken by even stronger variants within the liberal tradition itself. It is an indication of the inward-looking nature of that school of liberalism, and of its entrapment within abstract and partially impractical assumptions, that Sandel debars even his moderate communitarianism from the liberal domain. Others such as Kymlicka are keen to rescue him from the clutches of communitarianism by displaying him—correctly, as it so happens—as a respecter of philosophical liberalism after all. Kymlicka believes that by relocating Sandel within the liberal tradition that allows persons to re-examine their ends, he has shown that Sandel is ultimately no communitarian.87 Obviously, if a communitarian viewpoint is so constructed as to rule out individual choice, that conclusion is warranted. But we have already encountered liberal communitarian variants that do not rule out individual choice and self-development as part of human flourishing. This methodological infelicity of an all or nothing approach (A/non-A) must remain in the domain of ideal-types or thought-exercises and cannot be helpfully applied to complex ideological constructs whose components move through a number of non-parallel dimensions. The current contraposition of liberalism to communitarianism88 reflects the general malaise of American liberals in particular with the notion of society and with the welfare functions with which a society, through its main political agent the state, may be entrusted. The broad agreement among American philosophical liberals that communitarians as a species have embarked on an attack on 87

W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford, 1989), 55-6. See A. E, Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', Ethics, 99 (1989), 852-82. 88

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 251 liberalism is another symptom of the twofold impoverishment in liberal discourse examined here: its almost total detachment from its own antecedents and a selective obliviousness to the complexity of conceptual structure and ideological morphology. It goes without saying that there are illiberal versions of commumtarianism which intrude on and challenge the liberal tradition. These are not the subject of our discussion at present. What is more noteworthy is that among the multifarious meanings of community at least five can be, and have been, assimilated into liberal ideology. From the vantage point of an historically informed present-day observer, these meanings constitute cumulative horizons without which it is impossible to make sense of liberal discourse and practice. First, the political state that liberalism, from the days of the protoliberals of the natural rights doctrine and social contract theory, has regarded as a guarantor of individual rights may supply the framework within which rights are claimed and within which citizenship is bestowed.89 In that sense, individuals choose to form a political community that enforces and protects their personal claims in a network of rights and obligations. Its necessity is underlined by the fact that without it the moral ends of individuals cannot be realized; it is based on a notion of formal membership in a society, which entails the mutual respect engendered by the predicaments of the human condition—survival and conflicting interests—and is expressed in the recognition of the worth of each individual as a facet of human status.9" Whether or not that membership also entails the wider idea of citizenship will depend on the evolution of active democratic participation and sharing in social goods, aspects that call for stronger variants of community. The second variant of community perceives human nature as containing among its attributes some that are socially orientated. They maintain a society and support it. In addition to, or instead of, the initiative-taking, assertive features that characterize the market versions of liberalism, human nature is thought to be benevolent, empathetic, even altruistic to a degree, and these attributes are cultivated for the purposes of the mutual co-operation of individuals, while opposite attributes are discouraged. The possibility of community is contained in natural individual leanings, not merely in the expediency, moral intellectualization, or calculating self-interest so often at the root of contractarian theory. w

See D. Harris, Justifying State Welfare (Oxford, 1987); I. Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge, 1986). 90 See M. Freeden, 'Liberal Communitarianism and Basic Income', in P. Van Parijs (ed.), Arguing for Basic Income (London, 1992), 186.

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The third variant of community assumes, as with Green, that rational individuals have an area of joint interest—the common good—which secures important aspects of their welfare. Social membership is the condition of individual development, but society is never more than the arena in which rational interests of individuals coalesce. Emanating from the separateness of persons, it nevertheless identifies a common sphere fashioned consciously by individuals to their mutual advantage, which is an inescapable by-product of their rationality, and reacts back on them to ensure their full realization as individuals. All these versions of community are weak—though sequentially less so—because they take for granted the ineluctable existence of individuals alone as the units of society. All are entirely compatible with mainstream patterns of liberal thought; indeed, they are part and parcel of well-known liberal theories. The association of 'community' with those theories is apposite because they do not contain aggregative conceptions of society and they appreciate that certain interactions among individuals create a qualitatively distinct view of individuals located in the interaction itself. They also dovetail into another core liberal concept: the widely expressed concern for the promotion of a genuine general interest. Contrasted with them is the conviction that community is not a question of individual choice and preference, but that there is a deeper 'naturalness' of group membership as an existential social and biological fact of life. The weak sense of community allows individuals the choice of joining groups and forming a community or, at the very least (in the third instance), the choice of converting a mechanical social membership into a rational forum of self-realization. The strong sense of communitysees uman beings as creatures who inevitably experience group membership, a membership that crucially shapes their consciousness and ends. Individual choice still exists, but as a much more limited choice of and in groups, not the fundamental choice as whether or not to form them/1 Significantly, group membership becomes a universal condition elevated, on admittedly different subjective levels of awareness, to a determinant of human self-knowledge. This has been partly expressed by Sandel,92 but the foci of his analysis are none the less individuals, rather than the community those individuals simultaneously comprise. Sandel also associates with Rawlsian liberalism a sentimental conception of community, based on the feelings of belonging that 91 92

Freeden, 'Liberal Communitarianism', 188-9. Sandel, Limits of Justice, 147-50.

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93

attend social co-operation. However, although sentiment has been used by liberals to reinforce the rationale of sociability, it has not on its own formed an historical component of liberal thought, appearing rather as an adjunct to more powerful rational motives and justifications. If it is true that 'central to the argument of the communitarians is a sense of loss'94—a frequent theme in MacIntyre's writings95—this refers to a romantic communitarianism aEen to prevailing liberal versions, tapping into the emotion that arises out of a conservative yearning for the affective ties that stabilize and integrate a society. Two further liberal conceptions of community are of an intensity that exceeds Sandel's 'strong view'. The fourth version of community is alluded to by Walzer. He draws attention to the separation, in American discourse, between communal experience —locating human nature in structures natural to all societies— and liberalism, which denies that. Walzer observes: 'Liberal theory now seems to have a power over and against real life that has been granted to few theories in human history/96 The artificiality of American liberal theory, and its consequent failure to refer to empirically demonstrable political conduct, is a serious indictment of its viability as an ideology, irrespective of its merits as philosophy. The problem has been that it cannot make up its mind whether it is both or the latter alone. Walzer, too, is drawn to the emotive facet of community when he attempts to reintroduce the concept. But he does so in a way that combines the conservative location of individuals in concrete groupings and the liberal acknowledgement of community as the institutional location of the common good. In effect Walzer is talking about communities, not community, when referring to the groups that sustain individuals: neighbourhoods, class, families.97 This particularization and concretization of the notion of community98 shares with the liberal tradition a pluralist perception of social structure and anchors that structure in voluntary and semi-voluntary associations and in the individual choices of leaving, and frequently of joining, such 93

Ibid. 149. H. N. Hirsch, "The Threnody of Liberalism', Political Theory, 14 (1986), 427. 95 See e.g. A. Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1981). % M. Walzer, "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', Political Theory, 18 (1990), 10. 97 See also A. Gutrnarut, 'Communitarian Critics of Liberalism.', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 320-1. **s See also I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), 234 ff. 94

254 Liberalism; The Dominant Ideology associations. Such pluralism is particularly in evidence in the American political self-image, as well as in the methods of analysis adopted by American political scientists. In its most recent manifestation—with the additional cultural constraints of the Canadian experience—it has developed into an argument for multiculturalism.99 This version is a specific variant of liberalism in which (other core concepts aside) an intersection takes place between a particularized notion of community and the concept of individualism understood as differentiated uniqueness.100 It departs from the more comprehensive notion of community as a statement of the general liaison between any individual and his or her society as a whole— an overarching web of human relationships that constitutes not only the society of societies, but maintains a direct and central relationship with each of its constituent members. We arrive finally at the fifth version of community, the strongest of those still retaining affinity with the liberal tradition: the organicist liberalism discussed in Chapter 5. Its distinguishing mark is that human beings have an individual and a social aspect, and the latter—a result of constant and existential human interaction— may generate direct social interests and purposes irreducible to those of any individual. Groups, of which society is the most important and the most inclusive, have rights and needs that must be cultivated in order both for the society and for its members to flourish. The liberal nature of this commurdtarianism is preserved by insisting that individual liberty and development are intrinsic to social flourishing. For that reason, the contrast between the general good and individual rights is yet another false antithesis of which philosophical liberals seem unduly fond.101 This notion of community, while allowing for the direct promotion of communal interests, proffers an area of human action in which individual rights are necessary to social health and in which choice and autonomy are possible within the confines of a rational, directly accessible, common good regulated by a democratically controlled state. Conversely, the pursuit of the common welfare is a prerequisite for the protection of such rights. American communitarians such as Walzer have incorporated this conception into social democracy, although its liberal pedigree is indisputable. Finding similar arguments in favour of a welfare-promoting state in the writings 99 A representative of this new and burgeoning literature is C. Taylor (ed), Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition' (Princeton, 1992). See also W, E, Connolly, 'Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation-State: Rethinking the Connections', Journal of Political Ideologies, I (1996), 53-73. m Wl See above, p. 146. See Freeden, Rights, 86.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 255 of Dewey, Walzer sees them as tasks too extensive for a liberal state.102 Whether or not it is legitimate for liberalism to contain such a strong version of communitarianism cannot be answered adequately with the tools provided by philosophical liberals. It can only be dealt with by posing two questions. Can liberal ideological morphology accommodate such a notion of community in terms of the logical and cultural constraints operating on its core concepts? Has liberalism contained such a notion of community in any of its recognized and recognizable historical manifestations? Both questions elicit a positive response, The above argument may be supported by a few illustrations which suggest that relatively strong conceptions of community have a solid pedigree in the American liberal tradition. Dewey focused on a moderate, yet central, variant of community, closest to the views of T. H. Green who figures prominently in Dewey's survey of liberalism's history. Through Green and his successors, Dewey identified the ideals of liberalism as the conceptions of a common good as the measure of political organization and policy, of liberty as the most precious trait and very seal of individuality, of the claim of every individual to the full development of his capacities . , . These new liberals fostered the idea that the State has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs.103

Liberty was decontested not as a condition individuals were in but as a process of achievement. Dewey's was but one instance of the trail of influence of British left-liberalism on its American counterpart, a trail which seems to have gone cold in tine memory and consciousnesses of contemporary American liberals. Ironically, Dewey complained that earlier liberals lacked historic sense and interest', while noting that 'disregard of history took its revenge' by blinding them to the historical conditioning 'of their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence'.104 Moreover, as did other left-liberals in Britain, he took Green's premisses to a conclusion that Green himself was reluctant to pursue fully, namely, an affirmation of the role of intentional social planning, of 'socially organized intelligence in the conduct of public affairs', because effective liberty required the 'social control of economic forces in the interest of the great masses of individuals'. An important perimeter concept attached by Dewey to these core 102 walzer, 'Communitarian Critique', 7, 19. 103 J. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York, 1935), 25-6. 104 Ibid. 32.

256 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology and adjacent notions was the requirement to 'socialize the forces of production... so that the liberty of individuals will be supported by the very structure of economic organization'.105 Liberty was construed and secured from a perspective rare in American liberal argument—the communal harnessing of the means for the liberating development of self-initiated individual capacity. The New Republic echoed these views in a reassessment of the development of liberalism during the periodical's first twenty years. At one level, it had ceased to describe its economics as liberal, because 'liberalism in the historical economic sense means a belief in individual business enterprise and a system of laissez-faire' and the remedy for America's social and political ills lay in a strong, central government that would restrain the power imbued in capitalist private wealth formation. This desirable 'advance towards collectivism' suggested that 'under a socially planned order, controlled by the interests of the masses, we should, in a sense, have the opposite of liberalism'. Yet this new social order was an adaptation of liberalism, of its adjacent and peripheral concepts, to the requirements of the age: 'it is our belief that this order finds its justification in the very type of aim that gave to historic liberalism its most solid philosophical sanctions'. Welfare and freedom—as with the new liberals promoted as mutually conditioning ends— were currently restricted by a capitalist apparatus that denied the vision of Adam Smith and Mill through providing opportunities for growth and development only to a few. A distinct conceptual amalgam had emerged. The interests of the masses had to be furthered through collective and democratic action, such action regarding liberty as 'meaningless aside from the person who exercises it and the objectives for which he strives'. The notion of liberty as restricted to the pursuit of intelligent choice applied to societies as well, and 'becomes more extensively true as the life of that society becomes more closely integrated'. This conceptual compound constituted one major decontested version of community strongly endorsed by American liberals in the earlier part of the twentieth century.106 Not only moderate versions, but even the strong fifth conception of community, is evident in American liberal ideology. The ever-acute Croly observed that the ambiguities in the American constitution allowed the supplementing of individual justice by a new ideal of social justice, again attesting to the structural tolerance of liberalism. When the constitution was written it reflected 'a 105 m

Dewey, Liberalism, 43, 47, 34, 88. 'Liberalism Twenty Years After', New Republic (23 Jan. 1935).

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 257 conception which practically confided social welfare to the free expression of individual interests and individual good intentions. Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare ... as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realized.'107 Society was not independent of the individual but nevertheless 'comes to be conceived as a whole, with certain permanent interests and needs, into which the different centers of association must be fitted'. The core concept of individuality was linked to this strong version of sociability, for 'genuine individuality is also essentially an ideal which does not become of great value to men or women except in a society which has already begun to abstract and to cherish a social ideal'.108 This lent sustenance to the liberal core concept of a general interest effectively insulated bom from atomistic individualism and from class interests. It was Croly's view of nationalism: the public and common interest represented by the state, imposing conditions which ensured that individual liberty be as efficient as possible.109 One commentator, writing about American liberalism in me early twentieth century, observed: 'The fundamental fissure in American Liberalism is found... between the Liberty-Liberals and the Welfare-Liberals.' These positions seemed reconcilable as both sought to enhance liberty. More importantly, they indicate that 'thoroughgoing interventionists' were considered to be well within the range of liberal variations.110 There is little appreciation in contemporary philosophical liberalism of the strong interventionist tendency in American liberalism. It appeared in the antimonopolist form of progressivism, emphasizing social reform and mutual responsibility but also the constraining of power through its distribution. It also emerged in the form of the New Deal, employing the state to promote communal ends as well as to relieve the disadvantaged—although it backtracked on the accountability and dispersal of power by curbing it through overreliance on the democratic process itself, now attuned to the concerns of a rising political majority. Indeed, the concept of democracy, in its evolution over the years, has been referred to as a 'supervalue' of all American ideologies. This is not, however, tantamount to locating it at the core of any American ideology but rather an adjacent consequence of adopting certain core patterns.111 107 108 110

H. Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York, 1915), 148-9, Ibid, 197-8. "» Croly, Promise, 188-97 and passim, R. Hugins, 'Confusion Among the Liberals', American Mercury, 15 (Dec, 1928), 419-25. Cp. K. M. Doibeare and L, J. Medcalf, American Ideologies Today: Shaping the New Politics of the 1990s, 2nd edn. (New York, 1993), 30. 111 Doibeare and Medcalf, American Ideologies Today, 22.

258 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology There is no space here to explore how the New Deal, with its notions of big government, developed this theme into a central connotation of the term liberal' in public discourse. As Hamby has noted, 'the New Deal made coilectivist democratic liberalism the norm in American polities'. If from a European perspective this view of collectivism may appear slightly sanguine, it is decontested more plausibly as containing adjacent and perimeter concepts such as a mixed, welfarist economy, the protection and promotion of civil rights and liberties, and large-scale bureaucratic organization, and an increasing periphery of marginalized concepts such as property rights and entrepreneurial opportunity.112 The emphasis on the common interests of the American people, on rational social intelligence exercised through government, became the hallmark of liberal ideology, first as applied to the economic sphere and later to the affirmative action of the 1960s. The role of leadership gravitated across the morphology of liberalism towards a position uncharacteristically adjacent to its core.113 Here was a clear cultural preference for a liberal conceptual configuration that departed from the ostensibly non-committal proceduralism associated with philosophical liberalism.114 What does all this indicate about liberal morphology? Philosophical liberalism in America—judging by the Rawlsian paradigm and its offshoots—is equipped with most of the core liberal concepts, with the declared exception of individuality. But the reading of its core is affected by the status of two concepts, equality and community. That status displays considerable disparities in comparison to the ideational configurations which have characterized the actual discourses of American liberal ideologies over time. Competing decontestations of equality pull the structure of liberal argument in different directions, and its intermittent celebration as core concept is severely eroded in significant samples of liberal thinking. When proffered as part of the liberal core, equality tends to be thin and minimalist; when in adjacent position it can bolster liberty through open access to opportunities, or reinforce community by providing arguments for social goods. The 112

A. L. Hamby, Liberalism and its Challengers (New York, 1985), 4. See e.g. Garry, Liberalism and American Identity, 62, 65. This liberal morphology was also far removed from interest-group liberalism which, as Lowi has persuasively argued, deviated significantly from the American liberal tradition by installing a market-place in which pluralist groups competed for the imposition of their interests on public policy (T. J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969), 70-1). 113 114

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 259 varying strengths of the concept of community serve to decontest other core liberal concepts in a manner entirely unfamiliar to contemporary philosophical liberals. They have in effect invented an artificial dichotomy by garnering, in defiance of time and space, all the conceptualizations of community under one word and then proceeding spuriously to exclude it—and consequently also much of human sociability—from the liberal core.115 The omission of many communitarian strands isolates philosopical liberalism from the usages and potentials of American liberal ideology according to which, to take a typical contemporary view, 'liberalism has combined its individual and community values by seeking to empower all individuals to participate freely and equally in their community'.116 In addition, liberty as autonomy is not entirely reconcilable with a configuration that includes a strong notion of community, nor is it easy to exclude some implicit version of individuality from Rawls's commitment to growth, personal reason, and choice, and the exercise of the full moral powers of citizens—yet another instance of the surplus of meaning carried by Rawls's political liberalism. Hence the reinvention or redirection of liberalism has been purchased at the cost of an oversimplification of its ideological complexity and flexibility, and at the cost of delegitimizing ideational combinations that still bear temporal and spatial meaning in late twentieth-century ideologizing. (/) LIBERAL NEUTRALITY

Not the least salient, and certainly the most startling, aspect of American philosophical liberalism is its recurring espousal of neutrality with respect to competing conceptions of the good. Yet unless severely circumscribed, the notion of liberal neutrality is a contradiction in terms, as is the idea that any ideology can be neutral, even when donning the mantle of a political philosophy. Most of the following discussion enters only incidentally the debate over the logical viability or intellectual attractiveness of such neutrality. Its prime focus is an assessment of the relationship between ideas concerning neutrality and the liberal tradition as it exists outside the school of American philosophy. Attention is thus directed not to the moral or logically entailed rights and wrongs of neutral 115

For a similar observation, see S. Holmes, The Anatomy qfAntiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 179-80, 116 Garry, Liberalism and American Identity, 131.

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perspectives but to their intellectual affinity or disaffirtity with liberalism. What does the assumption of neutrality entail and what effect does it have on liberal morphology? The most prominent promoter of liberal neutrality, Dworkin, understands neutrality as the independence of political decisions from any particular conception of the good life, or what gives value to life."7 For this to be true, a number of provisos have to obtain. First, liberalism simply cannot be an ideology. Because ideologies are decontesting devices that produce action-oriented public programmes of political change or conservation, a neutral state (the normal executor of such a programme) would be constrained from expressing any preference that could further individual or group preferences. Second, the arena of politics must shrink to exclude the spheres of human ends and of non-coercive persuasion. Third, there can be no call for the interpretation of rules and procedures. They are assumed to be all-inclusive as well as incontestable or determinate. Interpretative or hermeneutic perspectives would have no place in the procedural universality of DworMn's approach. Fourth, all individual preferences must be considered equally valuable from a public, if not private, viewpoint—valuable not only in their entitlement to express themselves but to draw equal support for their realization from the public domain. This last point has remarkable consequences for the structure of liberalism, for it would legitimate any decontestation of political concepts; serious doubts would then be raised whether it is possible to detect any patterns whatsoever in liberal discourse,118 In other words, the neutrality proviso cannot satisfy the function all ideologies serve to discharge: the channelling of private preferences into publicly acceptable statements of priorities.119 Nor can liberalism then be regarded as a group product endowed with identifiable social meaning. Instead, it is reduced to a procedure that ensures the integrity of all private decontestations of political concepts. All core structures, all adjacent and peripheral concepts, become indistinguishable from each other as guidelines for action, so that liberalism, being of all substances, is devoid of any. This 117

Dworkin, 'Liberalism', 191. 118 This has also been seen as a consequence of a 'weak' hermeneutics whose relativism eschews the possibility of any preferential epistemology (cp. N, Smith, 'Charles Taylor, Strong Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Difference', Radical Philosophy, 68 (1994), 19-27). That understanding of hermeneutics is not endorsed in this study, as explained in Ch. 3. 119 Cp. Shapiro, Political Criticism, 39.

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view of neutrality can mean one of two things: either—as intended by Dworkin, but dependent on an unsustainable divide between a political 'public' domain and a non-political 'private' domain-— a normativety archimedal point embedded in an agreed procedure from which equal treatment for different personal Weltanschauungen can be dispensed; or—as presumably unintended by Dworkin, but an inevitable consequence of the character of ideologies—a fragmented, normless, plethora of political ideas from which no ideology, let alone liberalism, can emerge. Ricoeur's admonition is pertinent here: the death of ideologies would be the most sterile of lucidities; for a social group without ideology and Utopia would be without a plan, without a distance from itself, without a self-representation. It would be a society without a global project, consigned to a history fragmented into events which are all equal and insignificant.120

At the root of Ehvorkin's characterization of liberal neutrality, and its critical assessment, lies a distinction between a conception of liberalism that merely imposes restrictions on the range of decisions a state may make and a conception of liberalism that adumbrates the legitimate meanings that political values and concepts, and their implementation, may adopt, be the span of that legitimacy ever so generous. Historically, the first conception evolved out of reactions to tyranny and represents a profoundly felt need to throw off the fetters that have inhibited human action. The second conception inquires beneath that surface reaction into the nature and social context of the human beings who are supposed to benefit from such release, and seeks to optimize rather than maximize the liberty they can secure from their political institutions, while arguing that the state may have to provide additional goods in order for an individual to have a good life. Hence within the liberal core, a strong notion of individuality coupled with a weak notion of sociability will lead to the quasi-sovereignty of individual choice and morality that Dworkin's comprehension of liberalism favours; while an emphasis on the social conditioning of that individuality coupled with acknowledged criteria of human progress will pull liberalism—as it has usually been pulled— in the direction of an explicit preference for some forms of human activity over others, namely those that also have both individual and social benefit. Because, of course, no ideology can avoid decontestation without 120

P. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981), 241.

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collapsing into total shapelessness, there is no reason to suppose that Dworkin's notion of neutrality is free from value-assumptions, nor that a state applying his criteria can avoid the implementation of preferences. Hence his employment of procedural arguments has itself to be tested for immunity from particular views of the good life, both in terms of its underlying assumptions and in terms of the practicability of a state remaining neutral while undertaking the residual decisions to which Dworkin entitles it. It is theoretically possible to claim that one is prepared to regard all particular conceptions of the good life as outside the sphere of the public interest, which is in effect what Dworkin proposes. But this must remain an abstract philosophical position, with no practical implications for the world of politics, of which liberalism is a product and which it addresses. Let us consider some of the reasons for this. First, treating people with equal respect in Dworkin's sense signals that all private conceptions of the good have equal value, even if that is not in fact what most members of a society or their government believe. It implies at the very least a level of toleration that liberals may not wish to concede. While liberals have as a rule been prepared to listen to all viewpoints and to accord them the equal right of expression, liberalism has frequently subscribed to a notion of foundational, ethical truth which suggests that values and opinions may be better or worse, in the sense of correct or erroneous. That was, of course, Mill's position.121 Hobhouse, too, reiterated Mill's conviction that the truth would be amplified by confronting it with error, allowing the latter a fair hearing while asserting that 'the Liberal does not meet opinions which he conceives to be false with toleration, as though they did not matter'.122 Those formulators of liberal theory would have severely limited the notion of neutrality promoted by the contemporary philosophical position. According all views equal status enervates the concept of neutrality. Neutrality (or some onomasiological equivalent) has more properly been employed as a device for the emergence of a definitely preferred viewpoint which then obtains general and commanding public appeal, subject to reassessment. The language of neutrality may conceivably acquire rhetorical weight in promoting a particular set of opinions, that is, be part of the arsenal of the ideologist, while the authentic concept of neutrality may be unavoidably absent. In diachronic perspective, one of the few past liberal theorists to 121

Mill, On Liberty, Ch, 2.

m

Hobhouse, Liberalism, 63.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 263 commend liberal neutrality, Constant, assumed that a constitutional monarch could act as a pouvior neutre. His defence of neutrality was historical and political rather than philosophical—based on his understanding of the English monarchy or his aspirations for Louis XVIII—and not more convincing for that. No concrete monarch could be designated as neutral by any stretch of the imagination (was not monarchy habitually conceived as a constitutional arrangement that could, at best, conciliate among different interests?}. Moreover, Constant's views on public and private morality required fundamental agreement within a society.123 Similarly, when a leading German Liberal politician, Johannes von Miquel, spoke in 1880 of his role as mayor of Frankfurt, he regarded it as occupying neutral territory in which all the different and conflicting opinions could co-operate towards the 'good of the whole'. But this good incorporated a preference for the paternalistic and non-democratic community politics of Germany, with a clear agenda for tihe protection of local interests and the furthering of communal responsibility, as well as the partly unconscious promotion of the values of the educated bourgeoisie as a universal norm.124 Second, we may proceed to query DworMn's conviction that, in order to protect individuals from majorities or from the sectionalism of governments, a liberal society must be debarred from promoting any external preference it regards as essential for individual flourishing or social well-being.125 This is not a broadly representative liberal position. It is not only that Eberals assume that the truth will out in a free market of ideas, but-—as we have seen—mainstream liberal variants do promote some values deliberately and intentionally, and the mark of those liberalisms lies in the priority accorded to those values. Moreover, they attempt to secure a rational convergence of external and personal preferences, while allowing the securing of such convergence limited leeway, through the reasonable coercion of individuals to adhere to the general interest, and through the reasonable constraint of governments and majorities from intervening in individual practices, even socially expensive ones. The range and cost of that leeway is established by the need to protect other core liberal values from extinction or serious impairment. 123 See Ch. 4 above, and S. Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 145-6. 124 See D. Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988), 209, 203; J. J. Sheenan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1982), 26,172. 125 Dworkin, 'Liberalism', 197.

264 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology The central problem here is to distinguish between the justified fears that liberals entertain about paternalism—the imposition of external standards of behaviour on individuals, ostensibly for their own good—and unjustifiable objections to the setting of such standards when they are agreed on the basis of enlightened deliberation and factual knowledge about human needs and flourishing,126 No public decision (or, for that matter, non-decision) is entirely costless in terms of individual liberty. For liberals its adoption must be scrutinized on the basis of humanitarian ends, subject always to criticism and adaptation in the light of new understandings. The imposition of viewpoints is inevitable if decisions have to be made, and decision-making is an essential communal need entrusted, primarily in terms of scope and ultimately in terms of authority, to the state. The question then shifts to the grounds for that imposition and the area in which it takes place. For Dworkin, a constitution with a scheme of civil rights is the mechanism enforcing standards of human conduct, but it is chimerical to assume that a totally consensual support for a constitution, one that could set our concerns about paternalism or imposition of viewpoints at rest, has ever existed. It is equally illusory to assume that the abstraction of all human preferences from the value of those preferences can be sustained on moral or psychological grounds that satisfy different liberal tests of spontaneity or rationality. Constraint in the choice of values is of course not eliminated by Dworkin. Rather, its focus is transferred to separate sharply between the private and the public and to insist that all human choices should have equal chances of realization. These two features are ideological statements with potentially illiberal consequences, for if all types of life-plan are allowed as equally 'good' in the public eye, even within the constraints of a bill of rights, society may be pulled apart into 'autistic' spheres of noncommunication, and come to depend entirely on voluntary private decisions to facilitate essential co-operation. Those features are far from typical spatial and temporal manifestations of liberalism. Even Rawls has come to accept that neutrality of aim can only apply to permissible conceptions of the good, though it is a moot point whether within such a severe constraint neutrality still applies, because in any practical political sense neutrality of aim becomes an abstraction detached from the effects or influence of the basic political conceptions. As Rawls has acknowledged: It is surely impossible for the basic structure of a just constitutional 126

See above, pp. 92-3.

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regime not to have important effects and influences as to which comprehensive doctrines endure and gain adherents over time , . . We must accept the facts of common-sense political sociology.'127 But in identifying a distinctive range of the effects of political ideas, Rawls seems propitiously near to conceding that there is more to political thinking than political philosophy alone, adumbrating instead a key role for ideology itself. If the accusation of paternalism is to be levelled at liberal variants, Dworkin's cannot be spared, either. It displays a 'paternalism' that demands respect not merely for human rational and moral potential, but for actual outcomes of personal choice. To insist on the value of human autonomy, as philosophical liberals do, cannot be tantamount to extolling the virtues of all choices. If the object of liberalism is to preserve the humanity of individuals, it must come to terms with the fact that some choices are dehumanizing and hence not of equal value to choices that do not dehumanize, nor deserving of equal support. Current philosophical debate is moving close to construing liberalism as a theory that grants the individual full sovereignty over his or her actions and appoints that individual as arbiter of his or her good, when that good is simply understood as wishes or rfesires.128 Most modern types of liberalism have specifically avoided entrusting the choice of the good either to the individual alone or to society alone, insisting on the sharing of that responsibility. It was after all a pre-eontractarian state of nature, in which individuals exercised a highly dangerous private sovereignty, that was considered intolerable by the forerunners of modern liberal theory. Third, another relevant distinction, at the heart of Mill's project, is that between enforcing values and promoting them. Philosophical liberals seem to equate the role of society with that of the state, and then to equate state activity with coercion. Were state coercion the only option available for promoting a point of view, a theory endorsing an active state would indeed deserve to be challenged by liberals. But that is not the case. Social standards and norms may be set that are not state or governmental norms, as Mill and Tocqueville realized. In a liberal society, as in any other, moral agreement and the establishment of scientific criteria of human welfare may develop independently of the state. All that liberals insist on is that those criteria be subject to constant critical 127

12g

Rawls, Political Liberalism, 192-3.

If it is understood as good in a shared or 'objective' sense, it cannot be neutral with respect to those who do not share it.

266 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology re-examination in the light of evolving humanitarian standards and current understandings of human needs and functions. Liberals see people as social beings, not just in the sense that personal failings require the setting up of a state to constrain irrational action. They claim that people rely on the wisdom and assistance of others in order to pursue their plans and assess their worth. In the informal domain of society and its groupings, operating far beyond the sphere of the market-place, individuals learn to attach value to thoughts and actions. Much of that domain is not voluntary, inasmuch as socialization processes are not entirely deliberate, nor is the cultural 'market' from which we derive our ideas completely subject to rational choices on our part. Too many theorists of liberalism argue within a framework that postulates a stark dichotomy between coercion and paternalism on the one hand and free autonomous choice on the other. Faced with that alternative it seems obvious to them that liberals are characterized by the latter. Perhaps, though, liberalism is best described as an ideology of preference, in which decontested patterns of thought are not imposed or insisted on, but are nevertheless clearly there for the taking; in which courses of action are recommended, even facilitated, but the refusal to adopt them is legally penalized only in exceptional circumstances; in which the wholesale repudiation of those patterns by the individuals towards whom they are addressed would result in the abandonment of recognizably liberal ideologies. It is only because there are theorists who associate the state with coercion alone that some liberals hold that liberalism must be anti-statist. To suggest that there is no resting place between the options of state compulsion and the market-place displays a paucity of sociological understanding, and to pin liberalism to the latter option for fear of the former is to deplete it in terms of the institutional arrangements its core can accommodate. As we have already seen, a facilitative rather than a coercive state may be the very instrument required by liberals concerned with the conditions for full human flourishing in order to realize their hopes for humankind. Power and influence assume many guises, the least prevalent of which is coercion. Governments or majorities may signal their preference for a particular way in which people could develop and contribute to their society, without coercing individuals to do so. There are gentler degrees of encouragement that indicate approval for courses of action which, it may be argued, would be perfectly in order for liberal polities to adopt. If asbestos has been discovered to contain noxious substances it may be prudent to

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warn people against using it, even to divert public funds to its eradication, without implying paternalism or employing coercion,129 The liberal interest in the adjacent concept of education, as a means of expressing individuality, or personal life-plans, or working out private conceptions of the good, could quite plausibly justify making an educational system (basic or otherwise) available to all, out of public funds that would have to be provided even by those who reject that notion. Making use of the educational system, and its form, could be optional; its existence could not—it is therefore a quasi-contingent liberal component. Obviously, some liberals might claim that the private market can supply educational needs, and that only those who expressed preference for education should pay for it. But the dissemination of liberal values, without which no liberal conception, Dworkin's included, would be viable, is not something that a liberal can leave to the sphere of private decisions. Education is a prerequisite to operating a democratic system or to respecting the constitution to which Dworkin attaches such import. There would be a liberal case for providing education if, say, the private market failed to do so adequately, and moreover, education in particular values rather than in all. One must be careful to avoid a further confusion here: a feature of liberalism, unlike some of its ideological rivals, is that even when politically dominant it does not aspire to impose itself on all members of the polity. Naturally, it is not imposed on its adherents either, but if they refuse to accept it, they cease to subscribe to it. Liberalism does not insist that ail be liberals; it does not insist that anyone be a liberal. But it must insist that those who wish to be called liberals freely choose to adhere to the set of beliefs it attempts, in its peculiar non-coercive way, to promote. They cannot remain liberals while dismissing its tenets; perhaps even, because of the strongly reflective nature of liberalism, without adopting them consciously. Arguably, liberalism may also demand, by emphasizing the adjacent concept of democracy, decontested as majoritarianism, that pronounced anti-liberals be debarred from deposing a politically legitimated dominant liberal ideology through means unacceptable to liberals. This latter point is not a sine qua non. The frequent failure of liberalism to protect itself in the past by its own preferred methods has been regrettable for liberals historically, but not always a sufficient incentive to defend themselves by illiberal means. Nor does the promotion of a viewpoint entail intervention in all 129

Cp. Mill's bridge example (On liberty, 151-2).

268 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology spheres of human activity. Underlying that assumption is an impoverished conception of politics. Current American philosophical discourse has depoliticized liberalism, abandoning it as a political theory and retaining it only as a moral doctrine. Whatever its strengths may be, as political theory the American variant is incapable of performing the institutional and ideological roles that liberals have always embraced. Its suspicion of politics arises out of a confusion between the generality of the political process and its invasiveness. All human activities exhibit facets of decisionmaking, conflict resolution, and the exercise of power. These are the political aspects of human conduct, and they occur at any level of human interaction. To accept this is not, however, to believe that state or social intervention, necessary though they are in some areas, involve the total regulation of the individual and the exclusion of free choice within reasonable or sociologically given limits. The promotion by the state—failing other agencies—of crosscultural goods such as health services could hardly be called paternalistic. To suggest that they involve the idiosyncratic imposition of values by a government on a society ignores those aspects of humanity, shared by human beings, without which they would be diminished. Although liberalism eschews forming the moral character of individuals, it is deeply concerned about that character and frequently engaged in providing the conditions for such formation, or in improving other human attributes not directly related to one's character. The elevation of character, in the form of virtue or autonomy, above those other attributes is a residual Victorian article of faith. It is a proclivity of philosophers that distorts the totality of being human and suggests misleadingly that positive intervention in some aspects of human existence—say, physical well-being or the adoption of humane standards of living—is less desirable or important than furthering the moral attributes of the person,130 Ultimately, we are confronted with the role of the state in liberal theory. Liberals have moved some way beyond an indiscriminate fear of the power of the state to oppress the individual. They have, as a rule, endorsed a strong state precisely because they have entertained a passionate respect for the integrity of the individual and the need to protect that integrity from harmful intrusion. The areas to which the strength of that state has been applied have mirrored the changing interpretations of the domains in which m

See Freeden, Rights, 45, 52.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 269 individuals are considered most vulnerable. In pre-constitutional and non-democratic periods and cultures, the rise of liberalism was accompanied by a concern with the physical security of individuals. It therefore channelled state power into the demarcation of clear boundaries, designed to block the impingement of one individual on the other (although individuals have in turn insisted on and obtained the right to control the state in similar fashion). As scientific knowledge combined with a social conscience and with more sophisticated theories of social structure and operation, the liberal state was harnessed as a defence against new human vulnerabilities without abandoning the old. The precariousness of physical survival has been extended to cover the kind of qualitative existence that wealthy and humane societies are expected to promote and guarantee. It is entirely in the eyes of the beholder whether that sphere of state intervention and regulation is more or less acceptable than its predecessor. What remains constant in liberal theory is an adjacent concept of the state servicing the particular decontestation of the core principles, as they are read and comprehended in different cultural contexts. The non-interventionist state is a chimera, in liberalism as in any ideology; the issue at stake is one of domain and degree and that in turn depends on the priority accorded to competing conceptions of what constitutes being human. For all these reasons, bearing in mind the noncoercive aspects of state behaviour and the nature of ideologies as political instruments, it is difficult to endorse Kymlicka's distinction between neutrality in the consequences of government policy and neutrality in the justification of government policy.131 Justifications as public utterances have consequences for political practices; indeed, they contribute to the shaping and identifying of such practices. Fourth, this conducts us to a different kind of argument, running parallel to the critique of political liberalism levelled at Rawls. The procedure of treating people with equal respect is itself the crystallization of a certain set of values. This comes as no surprise to the ideological analyst; nothing else would be logically or culturally conceivable. In cultural terms, behind Dworkin's positionas behind so many American political theorists, including Rawls —lies the overriding intellectual and emotional appeal of the 131 W, Kymlicka, 'Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality', Ethics, 99 (1989), 883-4. Kymlicka's approval of justificatory neutrality as refraining from acclaiming any particular way of life is facilitated simply by denying that the making of rational, autonomous, responsible choices is itself one way of life. See also J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986), 110-33.

270 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology American constitution, presented as a framework which defines the compass of the political, and is instrumental in shaping the belief that the political, or political liberalism, or a fundamental theory of justice, can be subject to an overlapping consensus. Dworkin's assertion that Bills of Rights embodied in constitutions can actually remove issues from the political arena and democratic decision-making, however imperfect its majoritarianism is, is indeed astounding, as is Rawls's claim that the Supreme Court serves as the institutional exemplar of public reason,132 Europeans may be slightly baffled by the formative and unique experience of the eighteenth-century constitution which the American historian Bailyn has discussed with great insight.133 The French, for instance, may have developed a wariness of constitutions, if the large number of such documents they have produced since 1789 is any indication. Be that as it may, the idea of a constitution, let alone its concrete incarnations, has had a fundamental impact on American political culture. What Europeans often fail to grasp is the peculiar American notion that constitutions are endowed with the potential to solve contested areas of social and political disagreement not, as Europeans may feel, because they allocate authoritative power to particular groups and offices, but because they seem to offer the possibility of impersonal decisions—codes or sets of rules that appear to transcend conflicting human wills and to appeal to an extra-political common denominator, thus fulfilling the same function for politics that religion or science have been called upon to perform in the past. Rawls has revealingly shown his hand on this matter when querying the possibility of procedural neutrality, and casting aspersions on the identification of neutrality with the common ground of an overlapping consensus that focuses on the basic structure of a constitutional regime.134 The constitution provides an interesting mix of substantive beliefs dressed up in procedural neutrality.135 Its values, as Foley has asserted, 'are variously described as natural, or eternal, or universal or divine'.136 And Croly commented: 'ever since the Constitution was established, a systematic and insidious attempt has been made to possess American public opinion with a feeling of its peculiarly sacred character'.137 With this strong set of cultural 132 133

Rawls, Political Liberalism, 231-40, B, Bailyn, Faces of Revolution (New York, 1990), 225-78. 134 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 191-2. 135 For a critique of procedural neutrality as itself ideological, see I. Mesziros, The Power of Ideology (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), 232-4. I3t m Foley, American Political Ideas, 201. Croly, Progressive Democracy, 22.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 271 constraints it is understandable that some American liberals are disposed to enshrine constitutional values in a palimpsest and depoliticize constitutional procedures. Latter-day academic liberals have themselves been taken in by the political myths perpetuated by the constitution in popular political debate. A partial explanation for this lies in the period following the Second World War, when this conception of the constitution was reinforced by marrying a renewed interest in Kantianism with legal and moral philosophy.138 The resultant moral universalism was employed both to counter the spurious scientism of Nazism and to fit in with the new global role of American foreign policy, offering a valuesystem composed of self-evident truths. One variety of cultural constraint, a European intellectual argument invigorated by a large number of academic emigres furnished with Kantian loyalties, blended with another variety, the perceived political need to set agreed and uncontestable standards of national and state conduct. But how neutral is a procedure? We have already observed that in cultural terms a constitution is a remarkable exemplar of ideological discourse. It is a relatively static, texrually embodied, configuration of political concepts, fashioning a time- and space-bound decontestation of political ideas and methods for their implementation.139 The common interest is thus predetermined by a particular, culturally inspired attempt to formulate it. The reinterpretation of the constitution by later readers entails, of course, the imposition of an alternative freeze-frame taken from the ideational and historical contexts that inform the new consumers of the document. Whether neutrality was a principle designed by the original drafters need not concern us here. Suffice it to note that there is no case for arguing that an unintentional principle of neutrality can be discerned in the constitution; nor is there evidence in histories of American political thought that neutrality was intended to form part of eighteenth-century American notions of liberalism. Rather, the constitution has been recognized as an instrument for attaining partisan, decontested ends. As Farr has contended, 'for the Constitution to realize the actions that the Framers intended, there had to be ... a large measure of agreement between authors and readers that certain forms of self-governance and certain individual 138

Galston, 'What is Living', 207-8. See Ch, 3 above. On the 18th-cent. nature of the American constitution, see 'Introduction', in T, Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (eds.), Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), 1-12. 139

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rights against government itself amounted to "liberty" ,.. and that "liberty" was a blessing deserving of the highest commendation'.140 Nor are neutrality or impartiality values consciously adhered to by American liberals. Croly remarked that 'whether in any particular case the state takes sides or remains impartial, it most assuredly has a positive function to perform on the premises. If it remains impartial, it simply agrees to abide by the results of natural selection/ Yet, Croly did not ignore the political value of the myth of supra-politics: 'While preserving at times an appearance of impartiality so that its citizens may enjoy for a while a sense of the reality of their private game, [the state] must on the whole make the rules in their own interest. It must help those men to win who are most capable of using their winnings for the benefit of society'.141 The link between emphasizing neutrality and the Kantian nature of contemporary American liberal theorizing is not merely an ideological feature of that theorizing142 but, as Maclntyre, himself no friend of liberalism, has asserted, is a product of a shift in the traditions of moral philosophy: At the heart of Greek moral philosophy is the figure of the educated moral agent whose desires and choices are directed by the virtues towards genuine goods and ultimately towards the good. At the heart of distinctively modern moral philosophy is the figure of the autonomous individual whose choices are sovereign and whose desires are, in one version of such moral theory, to be weighted equally along with those of every other person, or, in another version of such theory, to be constrained by categorical rules which impose neutral constraints upon all desires and interests,143

From yet another viewpoint, American philosophical liberalism is made to look suspiciously like the latest link in the great chain of Western moral philosophy itself: a retrospective re-creation of an artificial tradition. Does then moral philosophy currently offer a neutral procedure, as Larmore has argued?144 This is improbable, as Rawls now notes, for it 'affirms the superiority of certain forms of moral character and encourages[s] certain moral virtues'.145 But the truths of (liberal) moral theory are the options of ideology. The individual '*, J, Part, 'Constitutional Change and Constitutional Innovation', in Ball and Pocock (eds.). Conceptual Change and the Constitution, 16-17 and passim, 141 ul Croly, Promise, 192-3. Cp. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 82-6, m A, Maclntyre, "The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past', in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds,), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984), 38. 144 C. Larmore, 'Political Liberalism', Political Theory, 18 (1990), 339-60. 145 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 194.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 273 who benefits from the supposedly neutral procedure of the state is rational, autonomous, and responsible, very like the preferred model of liberal ideology, very different from the prototypes to be found in conservative ideology and lacking some of the attributes with which socialists endow people.146 Philosophical liberals have always argued that their individuals may still choose to be socialists or conservatives. That is hardly the point, even were it true. The point is rather that certain attributes of human nature have been selected as fundamental and universal, while others which may seem no less significant are crowded out.147 For philosophical liberals man is the rational choice-maker, rather than the speciesberng, the vehicle of tradition, the bearer of duties, or the enjoyer and self-expressor. Only the abstracted trait of rational choicemaking can logically induce theorists to recommend state neutrality; for neutrality is irrelevant to the furtherance of the other conceptions. This methodological elision overlooks the ways in which political procedures incorporate preferences and values; in which procedures are simply the institutionalizations of practices that entail social and political choices among available courses of action, and hence involve both questions of value-options and of conceptual intension. The rigid distinction between procedure and substance is incompatible with the analysis of political concepts as historical and spatial patterns of thought-behaviour. The philosophical liberal core overlaps with the cores of its liberal affiliates, though it is also unusual in comparison with them. Liberty as autonomy, and rationality, are overdeveloped at the expense of the other components that have always coexisted with them and informed their specific meanings. In particular, commonly recognized forms of development and sociability are either optional—that is, removed to adjacent positions—or marginal, and no longer constitute necessary aspects of human nature. People are defined as choice-makers independently of the choices they should be encouraged to take in relation to their cultural milieux— a stance close to tihe libertarian position, as will be seen below, but alien to the historical manifestations of liberalism. Indeed, by refusing to acknowledge that the relationships among the components of the liberal core are both unintendedly diachronical in their meanings and intentionally attached to proposals for concrete 146

See e.g. the critique of neutrality in L. Alexander and M. Schwarzschild, 'Liberalism, Neutrality, and Equality of Welfare vs. Equality of Resources', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16/1 (1987), 109-10. 147 See Freeden, Rights, 50-2.

274 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology historical change,148 philosophical liberalism has isolated its concepts from the political arena that has formed the language of liberalism. It is of course quite possible for a state to carve out areas in which the points of view of different individuals are given equal hearing and preference is accorded to none. But that149would severely shrink the domain to which neutrality applied. And the more restricted it is, the less central it would be to the liberal profile. Croly employed impartiality as contemporary liberals employ neutrality. But a concept of impartiality distinct from neutrality would more adequately depict the role accorded to liberal conceptions of the state. The state, and the society it represents, may have widely accepted non-neutral goals and norms, and it will make their pursuit beneficial and rewarding. Within that sphere it will be possible to treat people impartially. As Mill maintained, Impartiality... as an obligation of justice, may be said to mean, being exclusively influenced by the considerations which it is supposed ought to influence the particular case at hand',150 not being uninfluenced by any considerations. Thus if human development is the goal, anything regarded as development will be encouraged. If welfare is the aim, welfare may be construed widely enough to include all activities not demonstrably harmful to the self or others. Conversely, there will be areas where neutrality in terms of support will simply sanction existing distributions of power. In other areas neutrality will be impossible because of a clash between zero-sum notions of particular goods. A certain religion may incorporate animal sacrifices offensive to the promoters of animal rights. For the state to support both sides is impossible. Were such a sacrifice to occur, state action condemning it or praising it, as well as state quiescence, would be equally offensive to one side or the other. As Montefiore has remarked, when the structures of a society are called into question, 'those who would want to be liberals may have to abandon all present pretence of political neutrality'.151 It is intellectual humbug to assume that neutrality, even if possible, would be acceptable to the very intellectual elites who have advanced its cause in the first place; and it is historically and sociologically incorrect to proceed as if 148

On this latter point see M. Francis and J. Morrow, A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1994), 236, 245-6, 278. 149 Cp, J. Waldron, 'Legislation and Moral Neutrality7, in R. E, Goodin. and A. Reeve (eds.), Liberal Neutrality (London, 1989), 80. 150 Mill, Utilitarianism, 42. 151 A. Montefiore (ed.), Neutrality and Impartiality (Cambridge, 1975), 16.

Challenge of Philosophical Liberalism 275 liberalism did not appeal to a rational and moral intelligentsia to supply models of human conduct. Those philosophers who advocate neutrality are themselves one such self-appointed intelligentsia; the models they supply are, regrettably, deficient. Twentieth-century Anglo-American political philosophy has abandoned both the importance of time as a factor in the analysis of liberalism, and the notion of politics as grounded in adjustable social practices. In jettisoning these two features it has returned to a pre-nmeteenth-century conception of political philosophy, rooted in the priority of the universal over the particular, in synchronicity rather than in real or imagined diachronies, and in norms determined abstractly by knowledgeable and rational individuals. It cannot account for changing configurations within an ideological family; nor can it account for liberal politics as a reflection of the political languages adopted by identifiable groups, shaped through infra-ideological struggles over the legitimate meanings of the concepts liberals employ.

7

Mistaken Identities and Other Anomalies: The Liberal Pretenders

, , . the apparent agreement of the different kinds of liberalism on the demand for freedom of the individual... conceals an important difference.., The decline of liberal doctrine, beginning in the 1870s, is closely connected with a re-interpretation of freedom ., -1 (a) LIBERTARIANISM: AN ATTENUATED IDEOLOGY

HE past chapters have examined a number of examples of libT eral ideology, including an American version which contains considerable departures from what has normally been identified as liberalism. We now have sufficient evidence to confirm our hypothesis in Chapter 4 that Mill's morphology is central to the liberal family. But there is a further category—libertarianism—which claims to be part of the liberal family but which on closer observation appears to be seriously attenuated, lacking many of the attributes which bestow on the liberal profile its distinctive contours. It is etymologically related to liberalism through the concept of liberty, but eschews the unique configuration of concepts that typifies liberalism, preferring instead to overemphasize heavily one concept (liberty) at the expense of the others. In some of its variants libertarianism can lean towards anarchism, when the core concept of power as dispersed or—if centralized—accountable, is replaced by the absence of any centralized power. In others organized political power is retained, but as the guarantor of individual liberty alone, and the question of accountability diminishes in importance. Libertarianism may also differ from liberalism in 1 F. A, Hayek, Neio Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London, 1978), 132, 134.

The Liberal Pretenders 277 surrounding liberty with adjacent concepts drawn from a political culture that displays conservative characteristics, without itself being wholly conservative. It may be asked why libertarianism is proposed as a marginal member of the family of liberalisms, particularly given that its semantic field typified liberal ideology in the early stages of the latter's development and preceded historically the variants examined in previous chapters. Those who deny the existence of a libertarian cuckoo in a liberal nest might plausibly challenge Mill's status as a paradigmatic liberal and regard him, as did Hayek, as the watershed marking the departure of so-called liberal thinkers from the bask tenets of their creed. When people with divergent beliefs call themselves liberals, this may ensue from their allegiance to different diachronic or synchronic rules concerning liberalism, and the minimum number of features it is thought need to obtain in order to be termed a liberal. In this struggle over the legitimate use of the term 'liberalism' one may appeal to historical precedent, to majority usage, to the main figures of the liberal tradition, or to the persuasiveness of the intellectual cases made. If we were to conform to the Skinnerite project, tracing later deviations from the foundational purity of a political language, we could indeed label libertarianism, in some of its manifestations, as liberalism, and condemn many modern modifications for breaking with key aspects of the liberal tradition. But the analysis of political concepts as ideologies is positioned at the juncture of the historical and the contemporary, with the present horizon both determining, and constituted by, the view of the past. It proceeds from the state of the ideology at the point in time when the analysis is conducted, taking into account the historical weight of the terms and traditions that nourish it. The retrospective view of what liberalism has achieved, as seen by its proponents, is a significant one. Because Mill considered himself, and is now regarded as, a liberal, his version is in contention as a liberal variant. It is no accident of usage that the term 'libertarianism' had to be coined in order to denote some divergence from liberalism. Nor can libertarians simply explain away the emergence of Millite liberalism or the new liberalism by displacing them into other ideological families. We shall see in Part IV that socialism is structurally dissimilar to those liberalisms. Because ideologies such as liberalism undergo evolution they may reach certain levels of maturity both in terms of the internal sophistication of their arguments and of their applicability to their societies. On those tests, we shall argue, libertarianism falls short

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of the mark. It lacks concepts, both in core and adjacent positions, available in more complex liberal structures. Though complexity is not a recommendation in itself, it is regarded as characterizing evolutionary movement. That is why the evolved forms of liberalism deserve earnest consideration. That is why the jury must still be out on one of liberalism's ideationally most complex forms, American philosophical liberalism, even if its applicability, as an explanation of social conduct and as a practical guide to political action, is questionable. And that is why libertarianism is not a serious contender for the current mantle of liberalism—a mantle whose web and patterns had been plainly visible by Mill's time— because it is not an ideological development arising out of the broad cultural requirements of a society, as distinct from the economic demands of some of its elites. This is not to assume that Millite or new liberal versions pass such tests with flying colours. But broad support, force of argument, and relevant political impact must be three criteria for assessing the successes and failures of ideologies. Note that the reference is to success, not to moral worth. As for the future, viewed from a late twentieth-century perspective, we are confronted with many liberalisms,2 and the futility of predicting which configuration will be in the ascendant can only be matched by the certainty that it, too, will in time give way to rival conceptions. For the moment, the rich liberal paradigms discussed above are demonstrably stiE central to West European liberalism, and the complexity of their core and adjacent structures reflects the liberal tradition in its current maturity. This must hold even though liberals have been challenged both intellectually and politically by groups professing to operate within their tradition, just as they have been confronted by groups who, while rejecting the liberal label, have adopted some of the principles promoted by liberals past or present. This chapter will explore the purportedly internal challenge, whereas the pursuit of liberal principles across ideological boundaries will be reserved for later sections of the book.3 libertarianism is a loose collection of ideological structures, characterizing well and lesser known individuals and a few groups, but not linked closely to any specific political movement. We pick it up at the point when it became a distinct ideological position, during a period in which liberalism was undergoing crucial changes to which some 2

Cp. J. Gray, Liberalisms (London, 1989), 217-38. This is not to dismiss the adoption of conservative principles by liberal ideologies, nor to deny give and take between liberal and socialist ideologies. 3

The Liberal Pretenders 279 of its adherents, fast becoming alienated from a more progressive liberalism, reacted unfavourably. In its later manifestations, particularly in recent years, libertarianism has allied itself with conservatism. We shall look briefly at the continuity of ideas, especially through the views of Hayek as a self-styled liberal, and also explore the affinity of libertarianism with anarchism, but leave the question of the current libertarian allegiance to conservatism to Part III. An appropriate starting-point is the political thought of Herbert Spencer who, although not the most typical representative of the late nineteenth-century libertarian political and ideological backlash, was chosen by many libertarians as the anchor point of their ideological propensities and group-political activities. Spencer served as an unusually good popularizer and disseminator of libertarian ideology and his central role as an ideological producer is justified by the wide echo his writings had in the USA as well as in Britain. Nevertheless, he cannot be studied in synchronic isolation. A number of second-level, and secondrate, libertarian ideologists—many of whom constituted a conscious grouping with Spencer as their mentor—will also be sampled. (b) THE INDIVIDUAL AND LIBERTY: THE RETREAT TO NON-CONSTRAINT

When libertarian ideas first appeared they were not denoted as such, being close to the rising ideology of liberalism. It is only with the further developments of that ideology that libertarianism broke off from a fast-moving mainstream. Needless to say, libertarians asserted the reverse: they were the true liberals and the liberal tradition was departing from its own precepts. Spencer, more than most, was conscious of the parting of the ways and fought hard to 'conserve' the liberal tradition and prevent it from abandoning what he believed were its core principles. His failure to accomplish those ends teaches us something about the relationship between ideological ascendancy and socio-political relevance, and about the manner in which influential political thinking reflects the historical and sociological realities of powerful, articulate, or vocal groups. To understand Spencer a diachrortic perspective is also necessary. His views were moulded in the mid-century and were strongly influenced by the doctrines of 'economic liberalism', the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories disseminated in particular by Adam Smith and the political economists, although

280 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology Spencer did, when younger, advocate land nationalization and diverged from the political economists in important ways.4 Their brand of liberalism was a specific reaction to a particular set of events and intellectual problems, and it is as mistaken to generalize that variant as liberalism as it would be to attach liberalism permanently to any other set of historical contingencies. Indeed, from the wider perspective of the faces of liberalism over the past two centuries, the political economy version is as exceptional and as unusual in its components as the libertarian one, with which it shares many features. Libertarianism is largely the product of a time-specific interchange between liberalism and economic theory. Liberal ideology achieved take-off in the early nineteenth century while flying the colours of political economy, even though its famous predecessor, Lockean proto-liberalism, was notably different from this later version. That cultural contingency played a major part in the initial definition of liberal ideological parameters, and has been notoriously difficult to shake off in some political and scholarly circles. In the main, political economists decontested liberal premisses by emphasizing the individual as the centre of the social world and the repository of the qualities needed for progress and economic flourishing. Whereas liberalism had previously relied on natural rights theory to carve out an area of individual action outside the potential intervention of tyrannical government, that theory had supplied individuals with vague claims to respect and dignity rather than with rationales for certain activities. Now political economists began to equip liberalism with clear ideological functions that explained, justified, and further encouraged an entire politico-economic system. Not only were societies divested of group structures and communal allegiances, so that individuals alone were units of political analysis, but those individuals were the product of a conception of human nature that coloured liberal core concepts. They were characterized as self-seeking, competitive, initiative-taking entities, an outlook that dovetailed neatly into the psychological theories dominating utilitarian thinking. As each individual5 had in view 'his own advantage . . . and not that of the society', that conception was opposed to the one embedded in natural rights theory, guided by the prevalent ethical precepts of 4 J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971), 63, 137; D. Wiltshire, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford, 1978), 119-23. 5 Quoted from Adam Smith, in A. Bullock and M. Shock (eds.), The Liberal Tradition (Oxford, 1956), 25.

The Liberal Pretenders 281 the Christian religion, and endowed (except in the non-liberal case of Hobbes) with a fundamental altruism institutionalized by a social contract. Whereas Millite and post-Millite liberal paradigms placed human action within the context of development, this earlier genre, both in its political economy and in its utilitarian versions, attached itself to the notion of maximization as a desirable and obviously quantitative value. But though human beings were maximizing creatures, there was a divergence of approach over the internal or external nature of that maximization: was it a psychological drive for pleasure or happiness, or a productive drive to increase financial gain? Both possibilities decontested human rationality in a distinctive way. They located it in subjective individual conduct, unchecked by external standards, and equated it with the attainment of the largest possible number of units of whatever good the individual wished to pursue. The clever device of the invisible hand, suggesting that social benefit accrued mainly, if not solely, through the pursuit of private gain, was instrumental to that argument. This rationality was dressed up in an intersubjective scientific garb, and self-seeking quantitative maximization was described as a universal human trait, thus maintaining the generalizing appeal that liberalism had inherited from natural rights theory.6 The effect of this doctrine on liberal core concepts is instructive. The notion that the private pursuit of individual benefits was mutually advantageous implied an aggregative conception of social structure which utilitarians like Bentham were quick to attach to their psychological constructs. Sociability could no longer be a central liberal tenet, if the scientific study of human beings attested to the importance and the survival value of the isolated selfserving individual. It was relegated to the status of a by-product of economic laws that ensured mutual exchange and dependence as a matter of calculating choice, not existential fact This process was abetted by Bentham's insistence that society was the sum of the individuals composing it, by his rejection of the internal dynamics that groups may evolve on their own, and by his refusal to refer to the community except as a fiction or phrase of convenience. The centrality of the general interest in mid-nineteenthcentury liberalism and beyond was catered to by the invisible hand, but certainly not via a direct mechanism that could deliberately produce it. Bentham stated categorically: 'The interest of the 6

Cp. G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Boston, 1959), 22-50.

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Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology

community, then, is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.'7 In addition rationality, divested of religious and ethical undertones, became an instrumental attribute, as Weber was later to argue.8 Quantitative maximization prompted liberalism to look at human productivity as the criterion of ability and to foster an interest in economics as the arena where human achievement could be measured and human worth put to the test of the market. The need to protect individuals from political tyranny was transmuted into the need to insulate them from contrived or accidental intervention in the exercise of their natural prowess for manufacturing, trading, and entrepreneurship, Adam Smith could therefore talk of liberty as a condition that emerged when the individual was left untouched, not so much physically as through the artificial devices of government; 'All systems of preference or of restraint... being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord/9 One result was the ideological marriage of liberalism and the peripheral concept of free trade as the global expression of laissez-faire. The concept of the state was adjacent to the liberal core only as a guarantor of such natural liberty, and beyond that was relegated to a marginal position it had not known before nor since. Parallel practices followed suit in the mid-nineteenth century. Locked into the ethos of laissez-faire which decontested the concept of liberty was a conception of human nature that thrived on rivalry, was innately aggressive, and whose purposive conduct was aimed at improving material conditions of existence through consumption and rationally calculating reinvestment. Under the aegis of political economy a new human being was introduced into liberalism, reduced to want-fulfilment and bereft of more than a superficial gregariousness, of a sense of community, or of mutual obligation. Individuality was reduced to a formal and uradimensional meaning. The utilitarian promotion of the individual as the sole unit of analysis captured none of the richness of human behaviour and the sophistication that later liberal 7

J. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford, 1960), 126. * See M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C, Wittich (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), L 26; H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber (New York, 1958), 292-301. 9 Bulock and Shock, Liberal Tradition, 27. Smith, it must be emphasized, allowed governmental intervention in economic affairs beyond the minimalist position often ascribed to him.

The Liberal Pretenders 283 theories could attribute to human interaction. The decontestation of individuality as a liberal core concept was narrow, inasmuch as self-realization or self-development were not yet perceived as worthwhile ends. It focused on the recognition of separate human beings as the loci of action and knowledge. Development and improvement were translated into terms of wealth, so that the core liberal concept of progress, too, persisted mainly on the level of the technical and the scientific. Its open-endedness was the consequence not of the infinite needs or imagination of the human species, but of the infinite cardinal sequences through which the accumulation of wealth could be represented.10 Post-Millite libertarianism is thus an offshoot of an earlier liberal tradition, one that in Spencer's day no longer matched political practice nor served as an adequate response to the perception of the socio-economic issues arising from poverty, and the increasing pressures to extend the meaningful circle of citizenship. When more than one version of the same ideological family is in evidence, the question of its relevance requires assessment alongside the theoretical and intellectual standards that apply to the analysis of a configuration of political concepts. Spencer and other libertarians took an ideology which, in a particular context, in early and mid-nineteenth century, was radical and innovative, and unwittingly transformed it into a static, and partly conservative, one by imposing it on a set of circumstances which it could neither explain nor fashion. The logical adjacency that the libertarians traced among the concepts they employed was not buttressed by the standards of cultural adjacency employed by the predominant groups who had recourse to similar political concepts, but drew its inspiration from cultural assumptions of previous generations that had lost their attraction for most social thinkers as well as for most ideological consumers. Late nineteenth-century Britain is of special interest to the ideological analyst because two increasingly diverging semantic fields were competing over the denotation liberalism'. The political beliefs of the libertarians stand out against liberalism precisely because they were contemporaneous with a maturing progressive variant which was politically and intellectually dominant, as well as the one most acceptable to the adherents of liberalism at the time. Two themes stand out in the libertarian defence of an older liberalism against the encroachments of the new: a passionate 10

A representative view of this stage of liberalism is in F. Watkins, The Political Tradition of the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 149-77,

284 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology resistance to the coercion of individuals in all but a few narrowly circumscribed spheres, and a belief in the self-balancing capacity and evolution of the social order. The one relates to protecting the core liberal concept of liberty; the other provides the purpose that liberty serves and projects the confidence that the extension of liberty will be necessarily beneficial. That appeal to self-balancing natural forces was by the end of the nineteenth century no longer located at the innovatory frontiers of science. Above all, it did not elevate the notion of a deliberately willing and controlling individual. This is why we shall reconsider this second theme as a core conservative belief, and that will prompt the examination of the affinities of libertarianism with conservatism.11 At this stage it is worth noting the kinship of the notion of a self-balancing social order to theories of natural harmony. The latter originated as part of the radical assault of political economy and utilitarianism on the centralized and restrictive regulation of the economy, and contributed significantly to the release of the individual from the fetters of political autocracy. But they suffered the same fate as theories of natural rights through the strategy, employed by their proponents, of attaching 'naturalness' to existing arrangements and to certain areas of human conduct. Spencer thus bridged important aspects of the liberal and conservative ideologies of the late nineteenth century. As he himself wrote, with some regret: 'if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot'.12 Spencer, of course, claimed true liberal pedigree for his ideas and he could do so with some justification by carefully selecting his reference groups. It seems needful', he wrote, 'to remind everybody what Liberalism was in the past, that they may 13perceive its unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present'. Here was an acknowledgement by a contemporary, not just a later analyst, that two different strands of thought were competing over the epithet 'liberal'. That contest can only be settled, if at all, by reference to the criteria of the period, compared against the longer perspective provided by current horizons. It reflected the growing " See Ch. 9 below. W. H. Greenleaf, who has devoted much space to libertarian beliefs, divides them into anti-statist and conservative without offering a theoretical rationale for the distinction: The British Political Tradition, ii. The Ideological Heritage (London, 1983). 12 Spencer, The Man versus the State (Harmondsworth, 1969), 81. 13 Ibid. 66.

The Liberal Pretenders 285 confusion over ideological boundaries, largely the product of a fixation with words rather than with meanings and contexts, and was maintained through the growing artificial unity of the Liberal party, as it struggled to retain the loyalty of its centrifugal factions. Spencer declared of liberalism that it stood for individual freedom versus state coercion, that its roots lay in the right of private judgement, that it was realized through the relaxation of restraints in the way of the happiness of individuals, and that it disputed the assumption of unlimited authority to either monarch or parliament. His notion of liberty is interpreted as the non-constraint of individuals by the coercive actions of others, in particular governmental authority, seen as a main, though not sole, source of constraint. Hence 'the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured ... by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him'.14 As with the previous advocates of laissez-faire, Spencer was perturbed by legal constraints far more than by the straightforward coercive acts of individuals. As with them, he did not identify constraints in the realm of the social conditions that operate on individuals, a realm he regarded as beyond human control or, if within such control, only so in the sense that human intervention would have catastrophic effects on the future of the nation, operating against the law of the survival of the fittest. The free contracts that Green had criticized were deemed the model for the just institutionalization of voluntary human intercourse. (c) IN DEFENCE OF PROPERTY

Some of Spencer's assumptions displayed strong similarities with the precepts of the political economists. His concept of liberty was decontested in like manner: 'when [a man] is under the impersonal coercion of Nature, we say that he is free'.15 The notion of 16a self-balancing order is adapted from political economy as well, though instead of an invisible hand Spencer was more prone to talk about a natural justice extending well beyond economics, applying to Malthusian principles concerning the inevitability of some evils, and most importantly to theories of evolution and of biological selection, operating in discernible patterns. Although voluntary human co-operation was essential to individual well14

t5 Ibid. 67, 70, 78, 330, 79, Ibid. 316, M. Taylor, Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford, 1992), 146-7, 175. 16

286 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology being and thus to social progress, the emphasis was not on the activation of the market mechanisms that ensured such cooperation but on the uninterrupted maintenance of individual rights to liberty of action and private property, and the deliberate forbearance from offering artificial succour to those whose qualities were of no use to others. Spencer succinctly formulated this position as follows: 'every proposal to interfere with citizens' activities further than by enforcing their mutual limitations, is a proposal to improve life by breaking through the fundamental conditions to life'.17 By surrounding liberty with private property, established as a core liberal concept by an older liberalism though demoted to an adjacent role by the new, Spencer decontested liberty within the idea-environment of being 'left secure in person and possessions to satisfy [one's] wants with the proceeds'.18 Here a law of equal freedom' was the epitome of justice, allowing individuals to proceed with the gratification of their faculties: 'Every man is free to do that which he wills,19provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.' That want-satisfaction was dependent on the accumulation of property.20 The invasion of property by the state in particular was thus an anti-evolutionary restraint on liberty affecting the vital conditions to life.21 These views were similar to those of the Liberty and Property Defence League, founded in the 1880s, for whom Spencer came to serve as the ideological focus and inspiration.22 The LPDL was however a loose grouping of libertarians who propagated a relatively simple creed, lacking Spencer's theoretical sophistication. It consisted of members of some of the groups that lost out in the radical economic and political changes undergone in late-Victorian Britain, such as landowners, major employers, and the petty aristocracy. A particular cultural adjacency was consequently superimposed on the logical relationships among the political concepts to which they subscribed, reflecting the experiences and costs these changes had inflicted on them. The high salience given to state regulation in governmental legislation and action directed them to focus on the threat of the 17 19

w Spencer, The Man versus the State, 83-93, 181. Ibid. 181. H. Spencer, The Principles of Ethics (London, 1900), ii. 46. For an assessment see Taylor, Men versus the State, 204-5, 238-43. 20 See Greenleaf, Ideological Heritage, 65. 21 Spencer, The Man versus the State, 182. 22 See N. Soldon, 'Laissez-faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882-1914', in K. D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History. (London, 1974), 208-33.

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state at the expense of other logical decontestations of its role, but without the broader evolutionary analysis that Spencer had brought to bear on the issue. The LPDL's central tenet was that 'the League opposes all attempts to introduce the State as competitor or regulator into the various departments of social activity and industry . . . [The State's] apparently disconnected invasions of individual freedom of action by central authority are in reality so many instances of a general movement towards State-Socialism'.23 Its members held that 'freedom of enterprise and security of property were the corner stones of prosperity'.24 A core ideological structure was forged which surrounded individual liberty with its material guarantee in the form of private property, moved from an adjacent position virtually to the brink of core status itself, and which incorporated as a further core concept a narrow version of the liberal wariness of concentrated power. Characteristic of the LPDL's stance were the views of Wordsworth Donisthorpe. His preoccupation with the limitation of the state contained two main elements. On the one hand, Donisthorpe (like Spencer) extolled the absolute principle of civil liberty25 and reduced the concept of the state to that of a centralistic wielding of coercion, thus claiming to equate—as was the wont of antistatists—most state intervention with state-socialism. Interestingly, in thus qualifying the role of the state, Donisthorpe traced his beliefs back to Hobbesian origins (even if physical coercion was now largely replaced by legal coercion) and rejected the Lockean version whereby the state could be formed while retaining some fundamental individual liberties.26 If libertarians perceived themselves as discoursing in the Hobbesian tradition and questioning Lockean insights, there is surely a case for scrutinizing their liberal credentials carefully. A state charged with limiting individual conduct would inevitably play a conserving role. Whether or not this approach was a component of a conservative ideology depended on the comprehensiveness of that constraint, the areas in which it applied, which activities were released by it, the consequences for the progress of individual and society, and the reasons given for the value of liberty. It is significant therefore that the state was 23 24

At the back of LPDL pamphlets published in mid-18808. Lord Pembroke, Liberty and Socialism (London, 1885), 5. 25 W. Donisthorpe, Liberty or Law? (London, 1885), 16. See also J. N. Peters, 'Anti-Socialism in British Politics c,1900-22: The Emergence of a Counter-Ideology', D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1992), 88-95. 26 W, Donisthorpe, 'The Limits of Liberty', in T. Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty (London, 1892), 54-5. See also Ch. 9.

288 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology allotted a more repressive task in defending individuals against violence, while relaxing its control over private utilitarian arrangements.27 Libertarians could not dispose with the need for coercion because, unlike some evolutionary anarchists, they entertained no perfectionist view of human nature. Instead, they shifted coercion to an adjacent position, where it serviced their particular concept of liberty—liberty qua non-constraint on individual actions alone— while refusing to protect through coercion the other concepts that liberals placed at the core of their ideology.28 Donisthorpe, however, was not dogmatic about state intervention, permitting it on empirical and expedient grounds,29 and berating his own co-libertarians for an exaggerated concern with the state alone as a restrictor of liberty.30 By denying the existence of a hard and fast line between state interference and individual freedom, and by insisting that each case had to be decided on its merits, he allowed a certain flexibility to obtain among the concepts constituting his ideological structure. Because Mbertarianism emphasized two core principles above all, namely, liberty and the restriction of power, and as the state was conceived merely as the prime agent of power-wielding and bereft of other major functions, the concept of the state was, unusually, adjacently conjoined only to liberty, and that in a highly restricted manner: its role being to limit harmful force applied to individuals. However, a culturally conditioned reluctance to lay this down as an absolute principle meant that the state could be brought in to protect liberty of individual action in general, yet occasionally employed to curtail the misuse of power by private agents, as when preventing cruelty to children and the helpless.31 (d) THE BREAK WITH LIBERALISM

Two morphological features distinguished the libertarian concept of the state from its liberal counterpart. First, a refusal of libertarians to link it directly with other liberal core concepts. Second, an insistence that it be employed as a maximizer of the values it was attached to, rather than—as was the case with liberalism—a less persistent optimizer. Inasmuch as individualism-cum-individuality, rationality, progress, and the common interest are mutually 27 28 29 30

Donisthorpe, 'Limits of Liberty', 68. See e.g. E. S. P. Haynes, The Enemies of Liberty (London, 1923), 20. See Taylor, Men versus the State, 157, 193-4. Ponfsthorpe, 'Limits of Liberty', 79. 31 Ibid. 64, 93.

The Liberal Pretenders 289 sustaining concepts, ineliminable from the liberal core, libertarian ideational configurations differ from predominant liberal paradigms. Although all these concepts may be found in, say, Spencer's thought, they are decontested in such a way as to ensure their distance from the core area of his ideological morphology. At most, being polysemic, some of them appear in that core bearing an alternative meaning that sharply distinguishes them from their mainstream liberal conceptual counterparts. The individual whose release from the aggression of his fellows and from the tyranny of governments was a paramount object of libertarian concern was endowed with characteristics befitting the prevailing economic model of rational behaviour. Spencer attacked the 'socialist' ascription of altruism to people as unsubstantiated by the facts of human nature. Unless 'men's natures will be suddenly exalted', it was the pursuit of private interest that propelled individuals and that constituted their motive power.32 Self-development was thus a possible individual option but unnecessary and unobtainable as an intended universal end. It would be achieved, if at all, only through long-term impersonal laws of evolution. Dissociating himself from the sociability that both the originators of the liberal tradition in its pre-mass ideological mould and newer liberals attributed to human beings, Spencer further rearranged the core components of liberalism. Whereas the utilitarians had referred to society only as shorthand for an aggregate of individuals, the political economists had accepted society's existence, although restricted to a market sphere umpired by a state subservient to economic laws. From them Spencer adopted a resistance to the rising notion of community that the liberalism he confronted in his later life had begun successfully to develop, Because he identified the state with coercion alone Spencer could not conceive of a community seeking through the agency of the state both its own ends and those of its members. State and society were sharply demarcated.33 Spencer was hence unable to attach the core liberal concepts of rationality and the common interest to the new mutation of the 32

Spencer, flic Man versus the State, 330. Ibid, 205. In contradistinction, other libertarians, by concentrating too hard on the dangers to the individual from others, confused the two altogether, Thus the LPDL activist Lord Pembroke moved imperceptibly from asserting that there was 'no simple principle to be found limiting the rights of Society against the individual, and of the individual against Society' to discussing in the following paragraph the impossibility of 'the limits of individual and state rights' (Pembroke, Liberty and Socialism, 55-6). 33

290 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology liberal common interest: community. He frequently warned of the uselessness of planning and reform—perimeter decontestations of the communal rationality of the new liberals—because of the unpredictability of tampering with the natural social order. He continued to marginalize the state by assigning it to the protection of formal justice and natural rights—alone the components of a 'common' good. Consequently, he made government 'more and more the servant to these essential prerequisites for individual welfare', through limiting it to 'protecting its subjects against aggression external and internal',34 and by denying it any role of initiation or enablement. This view of the state was far more minimalist than the one espoused by more utilitarian libertarians, who (following Adam Smith) were not averse to state intervention in areas such as the Poor Law.35 On the basis of Spencerian premisses, however, social progress was but an umbrella term for individual liberty, secured primarily in the face of a tendency to state aggrandizement.36 The diminished, almost non-existent, role of society was evident in LPDL arguments as well. Donisthorpe reinforced the libertarian predilection for contracts as the main form of mutual combination of individuals: an egoistic motive for social ties that forestalled any sociable tendencies liberals would claim. Nevertheless, 'a State held together by too many compacts will perform all or most of its functions ill. What we have to find is [the] Least Common Bond.' Individuals would not benefit from being thrown together excessively. Typically the state had a major role to play in stamping out behaviour unconducive to contract, such as fraud and stealth.37 The libertarian partiality to maximization, a direct inheritance from its utilitarian and economic forerunners, identifies a major difference between liberalism and libertarianism. We have already discussed the optimalization by liberals of a basket of core values, because maximizing them all is impossible in view of the potential conflicts that may arise among them if they are pursued to their logical conclusions. A controlled enforcement of these cores, when other means fail, is still a legitimate means of ensuring the realization of liberal ends, provided that enforcement will not seriously damage the one core concept most vulnerable to that modus operandi —liberty. Libertarians reject that alternative, preferring to concentrate on maximizing liberty, and liberty alone, and assuming that 34 35 34 37

Spencer, The Man versus the State, 271, See Taylor, Men versus the State, 18, Spencer, The Man versus the State, 163. Donisthorpe, 'Limits of Liberty', 68-70.

The Liberal Pretenders 291 it will cany along with it many other values, such as progress and rationality, which are frequently demoted to positions adjacent to liberty. They adopt that attitude because they presume the total compatibility of those values with liberty, and their automatic advancement by any increase in liberty. Spencer drew this distinction with great conviction and clarity when explaining the difference between the old and new liberalisms: the welfare of the many came to be conceived... as the aim of Liberalism. Hence the confusion. The gaining of a popular good, being the external conspicuous trait common to liberal measures in earlier days (then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has happened that the popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints, but as the end to be directly gained.38

The new liberal morphology, conversely, had bestowed co-equal status on liberty and welfare. Many concepts that played an important adjacent role in liberal ideology fared badly in libertarian hands. Instructive in this connection was Spencer's attitude to equality. By the late nineteenth century, liberals were decontesting equality as an adjacent corollary of individualism and rationality in a far more generous manner than hitherto, though not, as we have seen, to the extent of regarding it as a core liberal concept. Spencer would have none of this, remaining firmly planted in a world in which formal political equality was the most that could be institutionalized; a view that was increasingly becoming a mark of conservatism. The role of the state was hence as protector of the law of equal freedom, not of any substantive equality. Here again diverging conceptions of human nature coloured the interpretation of political concepts. Spencer asserted that 'the defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts/39 To the contrary, turn-ofthe-century liberals mitigated the differences in human wants and capacities through the similarity of human needs and the high favour in which they held multiple ways of human flourishing. They located in social reform that very improvement of human conduct—based on their belief in the interaction between human nature and environment—which Spencer had deemed impossible in the short run. For Spencer, justice was the rewarding of merit and desert, whereas to enable the thriving of the poorly endowed 38

Spencer, The Man versus the State, 70.

39

Ibid. 110.

292 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology would create a mischief interfering with evolutionary processes.40 Even on the subject of democracy, Spencer was grudging and patronizing, confining the role of representatives—because of their inferior level of intelligence—to 'the comparatively simple duties of protector' of existing rights, rather than policy-making.41 Democracy was not adjacent to rationality and sociability, but an adjunct to the limitation of power alone. Spencer's views did contain some departures from the precepts of political economy. His conception of a natural balance drew sustenance from evolutionary principles rather than from market principles. He did not elevate prosperity as the end of human activity as starkly as the political economists did, nor see liberty as the prerequisite to prosperity alone. In that sense Spencer was atypical. Most other libertarians regarded human beings primarily as wealth-producers rather than self-gratifiers. Though wealthproduction had a part to play in liberal ideologies, people were never reduced to that function in terms of their internal purposes as well as of their external interaction. Even when liberal theory began again to disengage from strong models of sociability, as was the case after the First World War, it did not reincarnate homo economicus*2 Libertarians, on the other hand, proceeded with these time-frozen themes unabated. Francis Hirst, sometime editor of the Economist, provides such an instance. Like many libertarians he turned to the sphere of commerce and industry in order to continue the traditions of 'economic liberalism'. Already when a young man Hirst regarded 'the legitimate freedom of the individual' as endangered by the rise of monopolies.*3 He consequently launched an appeal to the old principles of liberalism, emphatically detaching it from collectivism— frequently equated with socialism—and attacking 'the organic unity of the State' as 'one of those pretentious metaphors'.44 In addition Hirst purged his creed of a core liberal concept by warning against progress for its own sake, if progress meant change. What else it could mean was left unclear, though in later writings progress was once again linked to liberty.45 Hirst's decontestation of the concept of limited power invites examination. The opposition to monopolies was a liberal tenet, 40

Spencer, The Man versus the State, 136-7; D. Miller, Social Justice (Oxford, 1976), 186. 41 Spencer, The Man versus the State, 269, 42 See M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1986), 127-76. 43 F. Hirst, 'Liberalism and Wealth', in Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (London, 1897), 34, 44 4S Ibid. 53-4, 60. F. Hirst, Liberty and Tyranny (London, 1935), 16.

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extended from concentrations of religious and political power to the economic field. The liberal right wing, as well as libertarians, was reluctant to grant central government control over all but a few natural monopolies. This followed from their desire to promote the non-restraint component of liberty by emphasizing the economic aspects of human nature. That nature was revealed as efficient wealth-creating and the instrumental forging of relationships among individuals, and fostered the concept of competition in the key adjacent role of allowing the expression of liberty and the maximization of its value. As Hirst later wrote: 'rivalry and competition are regarded not as abominations, which an all-wise Government should eliminate from life, but as salutary and healthful incitements to native energy'.46 Another noted libertarian, Ernest Benn, extolled the dual aims of national security and prosperity as central to his creed, while criticizing the public organization of comfort and happiness.47 His writings resurrected the Victorian interest in character as conduct securing the respect of others, as self-sufficiency, and the assumption of responsibility over one's life—another view that converged on conservative thinking.48 The conceptual triad of liberty, property, and security contained the valorized components of that version of libertarianism,49 security being the only aspect of power admitted to the ideological inner sanctum. The state guaranteed all three in a strictly circumscribed manner. Human rationality figured adjacently, mainly in its economic forms and not as a universal feature. The common interest, let alone natural gregariousness, was hardly addressed, unless assumed to emerge from the pursuit of private interests. The temporally parallel new liberal cluster had raised to the fore a self-developing and expressive notion of human nature, serviced by the beneficial consumption of healthy and invigorating material and social goods, concerned with a broad understanding of human welfare, and anxious to contain, if not eliminate, the wasteful and aggressive consequences of competition that propelled the concept of liberty into promoting a different form of power struggle. The libertarian opponents of state centralization did not recognize the possibility of harmful private pockets of power emerging as a result of competition and eroding the liberal principle of widely, rather than fortuitously and irregularly, dispersed power, and of 46

Ibid. 289. E, J. P. Benn, Account Rendered 1900-1930 (London, 1930), 10, 13. See also Greenleaf, Ideological Heritage, 295-308. 48 Benn, Account Rendered, 23-7. 49 See also Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 127-37, 47

294 Liberalism; The Dominant Ideology democratically accountable, rather than market-controlled, power. They deliberately assigned a deficit of meaning—by contemporary standards—to their concepts. The peripheral notions of libertarianism reflected, on the whole, the negativist content of their core. Opposition to increased and progressive taxation and to the social reforms of the pre-1914 Liberal administrations followed from an attitude to mutual help that saw it as inimical to evolutionary patterns or as destructive of the incentives that powered economic entrepreneurship. The demand for balanced budgets arose from a strong feeling for individual accountability and a fear of the wastefulness of large bureaucracies. Increased governmental centralization was met with general outrage. Free trade remained high on the libertarian agenda as a policy cure-all for the evils of unemployment and overproduction, as well as the recommended road to international harmony. The rise of trade-unionism was seen as providing an illegitimate alternative power centre and as an unacceptable tampering with market laws.30 As a standard against which to measure the validity of the analysis of libertarianism proffered here, we may refer to a contemporary ideological consumer-participant, F. C. Montague. In a wide-ranging survey of the concept of liberty, Montague observed: the party of progress are still embarrassed by exhausted traditions and obsolete watchwords. They are Liberals; Liberals are friends of liberty; and liberty means that everybody should do as he likes. Such freedom we may allow to be in some degree requisite of all intelligent or moral life; but just now, and in England, it is not the thing most wanted, or the thing which rational Liberals should most strenuously endeavour to supply. The reconstruction of society, not the liberation of individuals, is now their most pressing task... We profess to be successors of Bright and Cobden, to be the disciples of Ricardo and Mill; but we conform our action to the urgent necessities of the age, nor does the great reputation of Mr. Herbert Spencer shame us out of constraining our children to go to school.51

Overlooking the arguable interpretation of Mill, we have here an acknowledgement of the changing meaning of concepts, in the light of cultural constraints that demanded a consequent restatement of the meaning of liberalism itself. If an ideology retains its name while its main concepts are the subject of new decontestations, it will begin to represent new ideas, even if in old bottles. 50 51

Soldon, 'Laissez-faire as Dogma', 222-7. F. C. Montague, The Limits of Liberty (London, 1885), 15-16.

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Montague was unusually sensitive to those changing meanings. Of the core liberal concept of rationality he wrote; 'If fifty years ago it was rational to abridge, and it is now rational to enlarge the functions of the state, there must be some principle in the philosophy of politics by which both of these contrary endeavours are justified/52 What had happened was that cultural contingencies, broadly subsumed under the 'condition of the people' question, had conspired to attach new adjacent concepts to rationality. The principle Montague alluded to was simply that the values incorporated in the core concepts of liberalism were now seen to be better preserved through different means, by dint of new social theories, perimeter achievements of reformers and government, and the sheer necessity of a reassessment of the chief problems of national life. Ethics and utility had combined, despite the demurral of some modern philosophers, to attain both individual and social goods through whatever instrument was considered most efficient, rather than endowing certain instruments with an inherent disutility that was also counterproductive to morality—two common but divergent facets of rationality. The diachronic mobility of the adjacent concepts of liberalism had become a feature of that ideology. That very feature provokes some analysts to deny that liberalism is an 'ideology', a term they reserve, as has been seen, for rigidly closed systems. Libertarianism, as understood by roost of its adherents in Spencer's period and by his disciples, admirers, and intellectual descendants, overlaps with liberalism, but does so in a manner insufficient to constitute the liberal profile. Its conception of liberty supports an ideological structure as restrictive as that of any ideology and more restrictive than some. It establishes areas of exclusion of conceptual meaning that would appeal to philosophical purists but are in fact a reflection of culturally and historically contingent options that override the logical relationships among its permitted concepts. It subscribes to a modest view of politics because politics employs means and encourages institutions that are, on the libertarian view, essentially inimical to the good life. Individuals alone are regarded as sovereign decision-makers, their 'good' being on the whole coterminous with their wants and desires. Form rather than content carries the day here: if people are choice-making entities, they are so independently of the choices they make. Virtue and ethics, which play a major role in Millite liberalism, the new liberalism, and their Continental counterparts 52

Ibid. 16.

296 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology —whether attached to individual ends or to social ones as well— are conceived of as extra-political. That is not to say that libertarians do not hold to strong notions of propriety, but that they derive those notions from the sphere of 'civil society' and economic relationships and involve the political machine only to coerce those who fail to play by the rules or to be guided by economic and utilitarian rationality. Otherwise, the power required to control human conduct is unintentionally shifted to the rules of the market, which become the prevalent constraint on individual behaviour. Libertarians, who are blind to such types of constraint, define them out of the sphere of power. They do not acknowledge the existence of coercion that is not the inevitable result of aggressive individual action, or the deplorable result of misguided governmental legislation. For Spencer, as we have seen, nature's coercion was not coercion at all, but significantly freedom. This laxity with conceptual definition is ironical in view of the protests from libertarian and conservative groups when new liberals employed a parallel method, justifying social insurance by identifying state compulsion with freedom. Each side refused to assign the term 'coercion' to a practice they regarded as beneficial, even though individual choice was absent. The dividing line between what was natural and what was artificial was itself an instance of defining reality through conceptual interpretation. The one ideological view assumed the relationships among its core concepts to be natural, hence immutable; the other allowed for deliberate modifications that assisted individuals and their societies in securing the optimal realization of those concepts. Liberalism, not libertarianism, is characterized by the internal flexibility of its core concepts which, rather than bolted rigidly together, are capable of bending with the pressure of contingency to avoid snapping completely. We find in libertarianism both liberty and the limitation of power, but a liberty that is want-based and that lacks the current philosophical concern with choice and autonomy as essential aspects of an individual's moral capacity; and a power distribution that places a low premium on the responsibility of its guardians and a much higher one on the traditional respect for individual rights. We also find rationality, but it is self-seeking and competitive. Liberalism and libertarianism both hold a view of the world as rationally controllable, but while the former shares control between individual and society (the latter entity expressing its rationality by harnessing the state as planner and systematic manipulator of the human environment), libertarianism incorporates the notion of individual control and responsibility, regarding the state as a sub-

The Liberal Pretenders 297 servient instrument rather than as the agent of a society that may even attain co-equal partnership with the individual. Progress comprises tite voluntary activities of a material 'social' order for whose more general thriving wealth is a precondition, and that is left undisturbed by combined intelligence. Libertarians who embrace evolutionary principles see them as impersonal and not subject to human modification, thus placing change and development beyond the organized direction of societies. It is an error, argued Spencer, to see society 'as a manufacture; whereas it is a growth'; while the new liberal Ritchie retorted that such a choice was spurious, that societies both grow and are made.53 Individualism is the uninhibited assertion of the sovereignty of the private, anchored in an elevated regard for personal property ownership. This is a clear and consistent ideological position, but whatever we call it, it differs sufficiently from Millite, new liberal, dominant French and German, or American liberalisms to validate its recognition as a separate ideological entity. Above all, this illustrates forcefully that even when the internal conceptual structure of an ideology can remain virtually unchanged, its interpretation may undergo considerable diachronic modifications; whereas the removal of merely one or two concepts from its core will cut off the family resemblance that assigns it to a particular place in a classification. The important methodological point is that it .is entirely insufficient to characterize a system of beliefs as a member of a particular ideological family on the basis of its central and most salient terminology alone, without ascertaining the ideational environment that serves to lock its main concepts into particular modes of meaning. Social and cultural factors conspire to reformulate the denotation of a specific configuration of political terms, and their onomasiological identity with another ideological instance should not obfuscate the possibility that they no longer bear the same meaning. The family allegiance of a given ideology may be transferred, intentionally or not, as the particular configurations of its concepts are put to the test of cultural and ideational context, and as some of its internal decontestations change, and adjustments are made to core and peripheral conceptual positioning. In view of this possibility, the movement of a system of ideas from the liberal to the conservative family of ideologies is a plausible occurrence, and one that will receive attention later on. 53

Spencer, The Man versus the State, 147; D. G, Ritchie, Principles of State Interference (London, 1891), 49.

298

Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology (e) HAYEK: AN APPEAL TO THE OLD LIBERALS

The main justification for including Hayek in a study of modem ideologies is the increasing influence his writings have wielded in recent years. This study acknowledges the challenge posed by herrneneutics, which is to assess the past from the viewpoint of what is currently the present, while reappraising the present in the light of that continually changing perspective. Inadvertently Hayek has become an ideologue whose ideas have been reproduced at different levels of articulation and exactitude, and who has attracted numerous ideological followers. The first task, to evaluate the ideology produced by Hayek, will be briefly addressed in this section; for reasons that will become clear in Chapter 8, the second task—the reappraisal of his ideas in a recent context—is more appropriately left to Part III. Hayek was a sophisticated thinker who defies easy ideological categorization, though most of his disciples do not. Because of the complexity of his ideological structure, his theories pose a challenge to the analysis of contemporary liberalism more serious than that of Spencer and the nineteenth-century libertarians. Hayek's views were also clearly at variance with the philosophical liberals discussed in the previous chapter, so that he is yet another competitor over the meaning of liberalism, one who partly drew from past traditions yet brought material from recent philosophical and anthropological debates to bear on his scholarly interests. Indeed, Hayek was a very important player in the conversation over the nature of liberalism because he illustrates how much of it is informed by reference to different traditions, both historical and artificial, which retrospectively redefine the conceptions we entertain about the present product. In signalling attachment to a political discourse, Hayek recognized the paramount British component in the development of liberal thought, and regarded Continental liberalism as dominated on the whole by British liberal thinkers.54 Whether liberalism is Hobbesian, Lockean, Kantian, or even Humean, is not a question that should unduly concern ideological analysts, unless those philosophers figure centrally in the public perceptions of most liberals or, at least, can be demonstrated to have had direct and crucial influence on the categories into which liberalism is divided. The fashionable attachment of a known philosophical system to an ideology in order to facilitate its 51

Hayek, New Studies, 126-8.

The Liberal Pretenders 299 comprehension may instead have an obfuscating role, inasmuch as the system will have extraneous components irrelevant to the ideology in question. It may also confusingly cut across ideological structures and diminish our understanding of the ideology in question as an ideational entity in its own right, rather than a hybrid and indistinct offshoot of succinct philosophical constructs. An examination of Hayek's position is especially revealing with respect to the currently available conflicting perceptions of liberalism. Because he was a forsworn opponent of rationalist constructivism and yet called himself a liberal, the question arises: if we accept his self-definition, what type of ideology has liberalism now become? The dominant view among modern philosophers regards liberalism in a light similar to the contractarians of yore, namely, as a view of human nature and society that has great rational appeal, that is morally attractive, and that is ultimately both just and, because it is just, efficient. Above all, it is a set of political ideas that can be acquired by individuals and put to work to create a good society. Hayek is situated towards the other end of the pole (though not at its end) in that he saw liberalism as the evolved expression of a set of attitudes and rules, mainly concerning liberty, necessary to protect certain ways of life that naturally develop at the heart of a well-functioning society. The concepts of rationality and progress, so central to the liberal tradition, were extended by Hayek to include not only a characterization of human essence and activity—the subject-matter of liberalism—but to provide a battleground over the meaning of liberalism itself. Hayek mounted a challenge to some of the most notable twentieth-century perceptions of liberalism, both philosophical and ideological. Instead of being seen as a philosophy created to solve problems of well-being and justice, he presented it as a philosophical anthropology that grows under certain conditions but cannot be imposed or transplanted. Instead of being based on assumptions relating to an abstract Rawlsian individual, furnished with a pre-social moral and intellectual disposition, Hayek proffered an individualism that locates its subjects in concrete societies prior to the expression of their relationships in liberal terms. And instead of an automatic alliance between the liberal tradition and the idea of guided rational progress, he expressed a deep scepticism concerning the attainment of malleable public knowledge. Rather than signifying improvement, progress was reduced to the adaptability that is a consequence of liberty itself. The debate is a contemporary reworking of the choice between societies that grow and those that are made, the choice that Ritchie rejected. The

300 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology synthesis offered by Ritchie is an apposite comment on liberalism itself, for liberalism is neither contained in the notion of a normative theory that can shape human relationships, nor in the notion of a reductionist approval of the unconstrained relations that actually emerge among individuals. Seeing it as a system of political ideas that evolves to the point where it controls aspects of its future development may assist in accommodating the tensions between a socially located view of liberalism and the notion of maximal rational choice that many liberals cherish. How does all this tie up with the morphological analysis of liberalism as an ideology? Current philosophical liberalism approaches the structure of liberalism as a matter of designing in advance the optimal decontestations of the concepts that permit the expression of philosophical value-preferences. Ideological structure, according to this view, is initially malleable and can be shaped by philosophers-cum-ideologues to ensure the protection and attainment of certain ends—justice, reason, and liberty, for example. Its basic concepts can be tailored so as to obtain maximal mutual compatibility. Once finalized, however, because it reflects rather determinate pre-applied theories on the meanings of concepts, the structure is relatively unbending and impervious to perimeter notions (though not as rigorously as many ideologies outside the liberal family are). Hayek, on the contrary, referred to concepts whose meanings evolve naturally, embedded within the traditions of a society. His method was ostensibly to limit the deliberate design and decontesting of concepts to those (such as the rule of law) necessary to protect the ideas that proved adaptable and efficient in the course of history. Obviously, his interpretation of the liberal tradition—an interpretation lacking in contemporary philosophical liberalism because unnecessary to its scheme—is the area most vulnerable to assertions of misguided decontestations on his part. If American philosophical liberalism is open to accusations of abstract preconceptions concerning human capacities and of glossing over the historical complexities of culture and politics, Hayek is open to counter-accusations of an arbitrary and historically inaccurate selection of the dominant traits of liberalism as it has evolved. In his specific writings on liberalism Hayek differentiated between British liberalism, evolving and concentrating on individual freedom as 'protection by law against all arbitrary coercion', and Continental liberalism, incorporating 'a rationalist or constructivist view which demanded a deliberate reconstruction of the whole of

The Liberal Pretenders 301 55 society in accordance with principles of reason'. As we have seen, this does an injustice to both sides of the channel. Hayek focused his attention on 'classical British liberalism', nurtured by Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and, tellingly, Burke;56 however, he charted no non-classical British variant and the radical changes introduced by Mill and Green are noted as movements towards a moderate socialism and a positive conception of liberty. Hayek was virtually silent on liberal intellectual developments after that, but significantly remarked that Campbell-Bannerman's 1905-8 administration 'should be regarded as the last Liberal government of the old type, while under his successor, H. H. Asquith, new experiments in social policy were undertaken which were only doubtfully compatible with the older liberal principles',57 We are not informed what the newer liberal government or principles could have represented. In another major work Hayek referred briefly to the introduction of the French tradition of liberty into British liberalism, but did not actually discuss the merging, as distinct from the difference, of the 'empiricist' and 'rationalist' traditions in British liberalism.58 He had thus little to say on the symbiosis of Continental and British thinking through the influences of Comte, SaintSimon, and von Humboldt on Mill, and of Kant and Hegel on Green,59 when he dismissed Continental constructivist liberalism as lacking, unlike the British evolutionary type, a definite political programme. Notably, when Hayek approvingly quoted Kant as the source of the tenet that the freedom of each must be compatible with an equal freedom for all,60 he not only put Kant's ideas to work in a manner remarkably different from the American philosophical liberals, but ignored his lack of impact on the British, preGreenian, classical liberalism Hayek condoned. Hayek's substantive discussion of liberalism relied heavily on the early nineteenth-century British model. He regarded political and economic liberalism as inseparable and their analytical distinction as false, because economic activities are natural and to direct them would minimize the knowledge available from a selfgenerating spontaneous order. That knowledge was essential to 53

Hayek, 'Liberalism/ New Studies, 120; "The Principles of a Liberal Social Order', in F, A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (London, 1967), 160. 56 57 Hayek, Studies, 160. Hayek, New Studies, 130. 58 F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London, 1960), 56. * This latter point appears in one sentence in a footnote (ibid. 425). *° Hayek, Constitution, 196-7.

302 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology achieving a multiplicity of human ends. The political sphere imposed rules of law within which this negative conception of liberty could be attained. It was important for Hayek that these rules or laws be general, not specific, commands, their function being simply to guarantee the co-ordination of the overall order of actions by which individuals pursued their own ends, through 'defining the protected domain of the individuals'. It was equally important that those rules were the outcome of experimental social evolution and not imposed by arbitrary fiat. Unusually for a supporter of classical liberalism, Hayek's approach diverged from the laissez-faire position, because he did not believe in a natural harmony of interests. But neither did the English utilitarians, whom he saw as an objectionable example of constructivism and who, contra Hayek's analysis, had a major input into the British liberal tradition. How, then, could Hayek reconcile a negative view of liberty with the need for co-ordinating human activities? The answer lies in his sociological and historical premisses, which pointed him, albeit protesting loudly,61 in the direction of conservatism. Though Hayek entertained an experimental and dynamic conception of historical change, he did not subscribe to a theory of progress. Instead, in terms not far removed from Burke, he saw social evolution as a repository of collective human wisdom, and the source of guidelines and procedures which adjust human relationships.62 The legal underpinning of liberty is simply the safeguard of an evolving harmonization of human activities, learnt through the trial-and-error experiences of generations and, crucially, bereft of an identifiable end or telos (human knowledge was too fragmented for that to be possible). Hence the law acted merely as the 'essential condition for the maintenance of a self-generating or spontaneous order',63 Liberty, law, and property are core concepts of Hayek's selfdeclared liberalism, though liberty is allotted 'supreme principle' status.64 Rationality, progress, individualism, and sociability appear in somewhat idiosyncratic guise and occupy a less than central position in the structure of his ideology. These morphological divergences from mainstream liberal configurations require further exploration if we are to determine whether sufficient family resemblances exist to affirm Hayek's membership of the liberal 61 62 63

See the discussion of 'Why I am not a Conservative', in Ch. 9 below. See J. Gray, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford, 1984), 42. 64 Hayek, New Studies, 135. Italics added. Hayek, Constitution, 68.

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club. One thing is quite clear: Hayek's position was not an unadulterated restatement of the classical liberalism he admired. The analytical issue is not therefore one of adopting the approach of many late nineteenth-century libertarians, namely, ascertaining the nature of liberalism by employing a temporal trajectory and dismissing its later manifestations as erroneous deviations from the straight-and-narrow path of the original doctrine. Rather, Hayek intriguingly shared with various schools of the reformulated liberalisms he rejected some aspects of post-classical liberal theory, such as a version of evolutionism or the embedding of individuals in concrete social settings, but a closer inspection is necessary in order to determine whether that apparently common ground really exists. On the decontesting of liberty Hayek's position was relatively straightforward. Liberty is a state 'in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others'.65 Although Hayek was rightly conscious of the subjective meaning of words, he noted that the meaning he chose was the 'oldest meaning of freedom'—a reassuring observation for his system of ideas, which relied heavily on tradition as an analytical Archimedian point. Crucially for Hayek, liberty describes one thing only and can therefore be distinguished from other things, mistakenly also called freedom.66 This remark however suggests strongly that the meaning of words ought to be determined by reasons unconnected with actual usage, and that the conceptual craftsman, preferred by many philosophers, does after all have a role to play in an approach that emphasizes an anthropological social evolution and the errors of a guiding constructivism. Importantly, freedom is the absence of coercion rather than the absence of intelligent choice, or the blocking of the 'freedom of the will', or the absence of obstacles to one's desires. Hayek thus decontested the ineliminable component of the concept of liberty, non-constraint, in a specific manner, one that 'describes the absence of a particular obstacle—coercion by other men'.67 The concept of liberty, Hayek readily conceded, is dependent on the meaning of the concept of coercion. It was therefore fashioned by the following definition he offered: 'By "coercion" we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another/68 This remarkably value-laden definition amply illustrates 65

Ibid. 11.

66 Ibid. 11-12.

6?

Ibid. 19. Italics added.

<* Ibid. 20-1.

304 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology the specific decontestation of liberty Hayek employed. It asserts that extensive control of the circumstances of a person is 'evil', and that individuals are personally capable of producing coherent plans. The boundary where control becomes coercion is not stipulated, although it is in that no man's land that most of the ideological battles of liberalism have been fought. Free action, averred Hayek, 'must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another'.69 That is an odd stipulation. Are there data which are not shaped, to some extent or other, by the wills of others? Hayek was concerned about the absence of choice this entails. But if, for example, the data a person possessed were shaped by two people, thus affording a choice between the knowledge of A and of B, would the circumstances of that person be less controlled? And is it not strange that Hayek, who claimed a strong sense of the social nature of individuals moulded by shared traditions, and acknowledged the importance of socialization processes, was vague about the limits of the legitimate moulding of individual minds? Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in Hayek's analysis is a notion of human beings capable of formulating their own plans and intentions and following them. That is the kind of human conduct that freedom entails. That is also why free people must only be subject to rules which tell them what not to do.70 But for Hayek liberty was not just a condition; it was of course a value. Lack of coercion hence is not merely a state of non-constraint and thus, despite Hayek's minimalistic attempt to whittle liberty down to a single, distinct meaning, it became interwoven with conceptions of the good, as political concepts invariably do within ideological structures. Not oblivious to this problem, Hayek nevertheless observed: 'if liberty may therefore not always seern preferable to other goods, it is a distinctive good that needs a distinctive name'.71 So although there are other goods in the lives of human beings, and although they may exercise unattainable attractions for a free but starving individual, that individual can presumably find consolation in the fact that there is some good in his or her life, 69

70 Hayek, Constitution, 21. Hayek, Studies, 167, Hayek, Constitution, 18. The suggestion that Hayek entertains a positive notion of liberty because individuals follow rational rules (cp. C. Kukathas, Hayek and Modem Liberalism (Oxford, 1989), 142) is debatable, for those rules are not of their own making. All statements on liberty enlist a 'thin' notion of a universalizable rational, or at least reasonable, understanding. But that differs from a 'thick' positive liberty where common substantive values and extraneous conceptions of human flourishing are intentionally pursued by members of a community. Ultimately, this demonstrates again the analytical disutility of the conception of positive liberty. 71

The Liberal Pretenders 305 because liberty is always good in itself. At any rate, Hayek shifted quickly from the sociological to the normative when stipulating that 'freedom thus presupposes that the individual has some assured private sphere, that there is some sphere of circumstances in his environment with which others cannot interfere'.72 In sum, Hayek's concept of liberty finds itself adjacent to a notion of an individual whose essence lies in making plans and following out intentions, the result of which is a spontaneous order. It is also adjacent to a notion of limited power, contained through universal laws that outline rules of individual conduct. And it regards 'several property' as adjacently inseparable from liberty and law, Hayek accepted the logic that coercion may have to be exercised by the state in order to prevent the coercion of individuals. That legitimate coercion was attached to the protection 'of known private spheres of the individuals against interference by others'. This notion of limited power was also one of dispersed power because individuals need means to realize their life-plans, for 'we are rarely in a position to carry out a coherent plan of action unless we are certain of our exclusive control of some material objects... the recognition of property is clearly the first step in the delimitation of the private sphere which protects us against coercion'. Lest this be construed as a distributionist, if not socialist, plea for the ownership of property by each, Hayek blocked that meaning by adding that the extensive, as distinct from universal, dispersal of property was sufficient to ensure that a person, even if bereft of property of his own, was not dependent on a small number of particular persons.73 Elsewhere Hayek wrote: 'Liberalism is... inseparable from the institution of private property which is the name we usually give to the material part of [the] protected individual domain.'74 The ideological map is beginning to take shape. Property is elevated to core status (though not the 'super-status' of liberty), and decontested as exclusive control. Its acquisition is made possible through the institution of contract, the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Freedom of contract resurfaces, after a long period of liberal exile, as the vital link between liberty, security, and the obtaining of property, all of which combine to allow individuals to realize their plans. It is up to free individuals to determine the contents of contracts, although their enforcibility depends on general rules to which the state ensures obedience. Property provides 72 74

Hayek, Constitution, 13. Hayek, Studies, 165.

73

Ibid. 21, 140-1.

306 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology the wherewithal without which the value of liberty, as a condition in which coherent action is effected, cannot be realized. Conversely, a redistributionary social justice would hand out benefits under a preconceived plan, and thus interfere with a free and spontaneous order.75 It would also conflict with Hayek's market conception of rewarding merit in obeying the wishes of others and in paying for the experimentation necessary for successful styles of living.76 Hayek was keen to dissociate the market from needs and subjective merit, preferring to decontest this important adjacent concept in his ideological system in terms of a combination of skill and chance 'in which the results for each individual may be as much determined by circumstances wholly beyond his control as by his skill and effort.'77 This game of chance appears profoundly to underplay the centrality of individual development in the new liberal notion of a person. Hayek's further assumption that all agree to play that game, and must therefore abide by its results, is not empirically proven. None the less, Hayek's is a recognizable ideological pattern, however removed from the later developments of liberalism. But what of the other concepts that liberalism has been seen to espouse? Rationality and progress occupy a peculiar place in Hayek's 'liberal' thought. 'Human reason', he wrote, 'can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong'/8 thus removing it at a stroke from the enlightenment tradition assimilated by liberals into their theories. Whereas the new liberalism perceived the essence of the human evolutionary process in the emergence of enclaves of joint rationality which facilitated the attainment of both individual and communal ends, and which exerted limited purposive control over the evolutionary process itself, Hayek understood rationality as a retrospective critical assessment of evolutionary trial and error. Hence reason has a much reduced role in comparison to its prominence in mainstream liberalism. For whereas reason, noted Hayek, aims at control and predictability, its advance is dependent on 75 77

7 See Kukathas, Hayek, 168, * Hayek, Constitution, 100, 44. Hayek, Studies, 172. The question of the responsibility of society for circumstances over which individuals have no control is an important dividing line between communitarian and non-communitarian ideologies. See M. Freeden, 'Human Rights and Welfare: A Communitarian View', Ethics, 100 (1990), 489502. In welfare-state theory and policy it is related to the distinction between private and social insurance. For Hayek, the provision of security for all is supererogatory to considerations of justice (Studies, 175). 7 ^ Hayek, Constitution, 41.

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opposite features: freedom and the unpredictability of human action.79 Reason is decontested away from its guiding, 'constractivisf mode to a potentially conservative evaluation of existing practices; rather than being part of individual endowment, it is the outcome of past social processes. The spontaneous order and the fragmentation of knowledge deny the possibility of rationality as self-determination on the basis of mastery of the facts or comprehension of the good. It has been pointed out that Hayek's position on rationality was ambivalent, for unlike many conservatives he sought intellectual justification for the principles that succeeded through social evolution.80 Yet although Hayek allowed a socially embedded critical rationality a revisionist role, that role was dependent on the prevalence of his version of liberty and heavily subservient to its further promotion. Rationality thus became a process of inter-individual exploration and assessment and not also, as with most liberals, an attribute of human understanding applicable to recommending and justifying human conduct, let alone a facet of human sociability. With that particular conception of rationality in play, progress was also prised loose from the liberal tradition. It was no longer a core concept, becoming instead contingently adjacent to liberty and to a tentative rationality. "The implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress ... has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind', stated Hayek. Yet progress, he asserted, nevertheless exists as a process of adaptation and learning.81 Liberals would have no quarrel with Hayek's depiction of progress as a journey into the unknown, but they would object to his ruling out known goals that attract organized human effort. The choice is not between the opposing poles of total knowledge and planning and subjection to an uncontrollable evolutionary process. Liberals have frequently demarcated pockets of limited knowledge and predictability, sufficient for their political purposes of eliminating a specific social evil, or moral purposes of advancing towards a preferred good. The analysis of ideologies is not facilitated by dichotomous explanations that bifurcate the social world into logical extremes which bear no relation to observed reality. This is a major weakness of HayeWan analysis: spontaneity and planning are presented as stark, mutually exclusive alternatives. Progress is significantly described as cumulative growth, a 79 80 81

Ibid. 38. See also Gray, Hayek on Liberty, 113-15, 130. Kukathas, Hayek, 190-1; Gray, Hayek on Liberty, 113, Hayek, Constitution, 39-40.

308 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology conception of history remarkable for its backward perspective and one frequently found in conservative writings of the Burkean mould. The rejection of the concept of planning, adjacent to liberal evolutionary conceptions of progress, is instructive. 'Progress by its very nature cannot be planned', asserted Hayek,82 It is even detached from improvement its Millite decontestation. Instead, progress is underpinned by a notion of undirected change that is part of an experimental evolutionary process, as well as an expression of the adaptive intelligence and the idea of striving. It is typically employed in connection with economic and technological advances, and may not even be desired by some individuals. Here is the heart of Hayek's view of human nature, constituted on the one hand by a conservative adjustability to changes in the material environment and to the diffuse growth of knowledge, and on the other hand by patterns of conduct in which effort rather than achievement is predominant. Progress is also the province of the few, the entrepreneurs whose discoveries benefit the rest, and is hence removed from any association with moral or mental improvement, which need not await the invention of new material wants. Indeed, progress is conceptually tied to inequality, being spurred on by those who move fastest and, although accompanied by a process of catching up by the rest, it would be undermined by undue levelling and redistribution.83 This cluster of adjacent conceptualization is not to be found in the prominent types of modern liberalism. Predictably, the conceptual decontestations unfamiliar to liberalism also affect the concept of individuality. Despite Hayek's protestations that his theory was individualist, it was so in a form quite atypical of liberal individualism. 'Individualism', wrote Hayek, 'is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid/84 Strangely, Hayek used this argument to distinguish individualism from the authority-guided approach of conservatism,85 while failing entirely to perceive that his own words smacked of a positional conservatism that accepts people as they are irrespective of their ends or conduct.86 Some liberals may identify with that stance as being 82 84 85 86

Hayek, Constitution, 40-1. *3 See ibid. 42-53. F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Social Order (London, 1948), 11. Hayek, Constitution, 401. See Ch. 8 and the further discussion of Hayek in Ch. 9.

The Liberal Pretenders 309 one of a tolerant pluralist, but though all liberals extol toleration, the further implication that all aspects of human conduct are equally acceptable is not characteristic of mainstream European liberalism. Here Hayek converged on the neutrality of contemporary philosophical liberals with respect to the substantive choices that individuals make. Moreover, his individualism was a structural property of a society, not the full expression of human potential it was made to signify by liberal apostles of individuality, and its developmental aspect was absent. In addition, the preference for some individuals over others, as leaders of the drive to material progress/7 was based on a differentiation among persons which effectively decoupled the liberal conceptual linkage of individualism and egalitarianism, and which suggested an effective hierarchy, far less removed from conservative elitism than Hayek assumed, Hayek's methodological individualism located action in individuals alone, and regarded their separate activities as the sole means of collating the scattered knowledge that a civilized society can beneficially use. Beyond that his view of individualism was not entirely consistent. There are passages a liberal would accept, in particular when Hayek stated that 'a society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual. But it is also true that in a free society an individual will be esteemed according to the manner in which he uses his freedom.' This would suggest both that all individual choices are equally valuable (a statement contradicted in Hayek's examination of economic entrepreneurship and the conditions for the advance of civilization), and that there are external criteria for doing good, so that some choices are more valuable than others. This latter assertion must be interpreted in the context of Hayek's attitude to human reason, an attitude that demoted the individual at the expense of society. The pursuit of individual good is not the result of individual reflection but of social restraint and direction: 'a free society will function successfully only if the individuals are in some measure guided by common values/88 By anchoring individuals in a formative social context Hayek avoided bestowing too much power on individual judgement. Instead he granted individuals the status of entities free from unwarranted intervention, in order to bring about a condition in which knowledge can be optimized.89 87

Hayek, Constitution, 125-7.

m

Ibid. 79,

w

See Kukathas,Hayek, 129.

310 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology The limited Hayekian individualism leads directly to the topic of sociability and community. The Hayekian society is a constraining rather than enabling framework of individual activity, a repository of social knowledge amassed by encouraging the conditions for individual trial and error. It is as if individualism were encouraged not for the sake of the members of a society, but solely in order to guarantee the spontaneous order that will benefit them differentially. By denying the pre-eminence of common human purposes Hayek reduced the common welfare or public good to maintaining the rules necessary to guarantee a spontaneous order. That order—rather than the happiness or welfare of discrete individuals functioning in concert—often appeared to be the rationale of human existence, Hayek eschewed both teleological and openended purposiveness, objecting especially to a common hierarchy of ends because he could only envisage them as universal, rather than temporally and culturally subject to constant restatement. Purpose was confined to private and reciprocal arrangements, and contract was their model.90 Because Hayek claimed that the word 'social' had now come to denote central and comprehensive planning—another deplored departure from an 'original' meaning— and referred to undefined common aims of a community, he cannot be seen to endorse the prominent liberal trend to identify social spheres of rational control, of action, and responsibility.91 It may be suggested that there is a methodological flaw here. Perhaps, rather than comparing Hayek's thought with the key concepts of liberalism and finding him wanting, we should begin by searching for his core concepts and appraise mainstream liberalisms'—many of which were denied that epithet by Hayek— in relation to the presence or absence of Hayek's true liberal ideological structure. The answer to this is twofold. First, because the subject of this book is ideologies, not political philosophies, our interest lies not in ascertaining the Tightness of one approach or the other, but the relation of any approach to the defining features of existing and empirically demonstrable ideological discourses, conversations, systems, or families. When we permit ourselves to claim that Mill is a liberal and Hayek is not, this is—bearing in mind the different ways researchers perceive their subject-matter —a statement concerning markedly distinct conceptual structures. Hayek himself came to recognize the difference of his approach. While unenthusiastic about the term libertarianism', he wrote: 1 90 91

Hayek, Studies, 162, 164, 168. See Hayek, 'What is "Social"?—What Does it Mean?', Studies, 237-47.

The Liberal Pretenders 311 have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself,"2 The issue at stake is important, because the term liberalism' is endowed with social meaning and invested with the ideas and practices of identifiable social traditions. This is by no means a conservative appeal to past meaning for its own sake. Those 'traditions' are categories of morphological similarity that can be injected with radical, as well as conserving, content and which undergo considerable long-term change. It is rather, as ideologies always are, a struggle over the control as well as the meaning of words. Second, there is no doubt that Hayek included in his ideological scheme core concepts not to be found in the liberal core. At the very least the notion of a spontaneous order is one of them. The idea of a spontaneous order is not central to liberal argument; as we shall argue in Part III, it bears an uncommonly close resemblance to a major conservative precept. The bestowing of naturalness on spontaneity and urtnaturalness on rational design is itself, of course, an ideologically contestable view. Nor would most twentieth-century liberals be happy with Hayek's overemphasis on negative liberty at the expense of other known liberal values. Here a libertarian element is clearly in evidence. (/) ANARCHISM: THE VIEW FROM LIBERTY

Like Hbertarianism, anarchism has carved out a niche related to and intersecting with the major ideological families, yet markedly different from their most typical forms. Like libertarianism, too, anarchism straddles more than one ideological family.93 But whereas libertarianism overlaps with some liberal and conservative stances that are similar in the ordering and salience of their formative political concepts, anarchism is a looser umbrella term that covers a cluster of concepts whose totality can be made to pull in entirely different ideological directions: towards an individualist or a socialist mode.94 It may be mistaken to lump the two schools of anarchism under one roof, or family. Despite the shared name, the actual usage of concepts under its aegis offers insufficient joint features 92 93

Hayek, Constitution, 408, Cp, D. Miller, Anarchism (London, 1984), 3, who correctly argues that 'anarchism is not really an ideology, but rather the point of intersection of several ideologies'. gt The better-known and dominant variant, socialist anarchism, will be referred to again in Ch. 11.

312 Liberalism: The Dominant Ideology to construct a collective family profile. True, anarchism has a common core, embracing three concepts: first—indicated in the name of this ideational cluster—antagonism to power, culminating in the desire to annihilate it (power is decontested as centralized and hierarchical and manifested above all, though not exclusively, in the state); second, a belief in liberty, decontested as spontaneous voluntarism; third, the postulation of natural human harmony.95 But the adjacent concepts each mode conjoins to the core elicit very different sets of beliefs. In the one, the isolated individual is the supreme unit of analysis; in the other, the community composed of sociable individuals. The individualist mode may result in an abstract and principled resistance to monopolies of organized power in the name of a liberty understood as forbearance from intervention in individual actions. The socialist mode will identify the state as a concrete, historical instrument of class domination, a body oppressing groups and distorting natural rnutualist human relationships, that has to be superseded. The generality and 'thinness' of the core begs the question whether the allegiance of the two modes is not primarily to libertarianism and to the socialist family respectively.96 After all, both the Marxist 'withering away of the state' and the state of nature theme in early Lockean liberalism point to the possibility of rational communities and individuals foregoing (or almost foregoing) the need for coercion in social life. The reason for considering anarchism in conjunction with libertarianism lies in the striking first-line position accorded to the concept of liberty in both these conceptual groupings, whereas none of the core anarchist concepts is part of the socialist core. Though socialist anarchism espoused liberty, it had to be understood—as the Russian anarchist thinker Michael Bakunin saw it— within a social context,97 and was hence proximate to one possible logical corollary of harmony: community. In libertarian as well as individualist anarchist theories—both containing few core concepts—personal liberty stands out as their self-styled hallmark. As with any ideology that elevates one core concept at the expense of others, the result is a simplistic world-view combined with a faith in easy remedies to social ills. These creeds gloss over the 95

Although anarchism is usually classed as a radical movement (cp. A. Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London, 1971), 57), the naturalness of the harmonious end-state has also a static and conservative appeal. % Cp. J. Jennings, 'Anarchism', in R. Eatwell and A. Wright (eds.), Contemporary Political Ideologies (London, 1993), 127. 97 Cp. G. Crowder, Classical Anarchism (Oxford, 1991), 125-30.

The Liberal Pretenders 313 invariable complexity of ideological structure, either by ignoring the implicit multiplicity of their internal conceptual arrangements, or by using (paradoxically for freedom-fighters but typical of the political struggle over legitimating language) intellectual coercion and manipulation to exclude obvious conceptual connections. While individualist anarchists share with liberals a high esteem for the idea of liberty, they diverge from liberals by not drawing the limitation of power—through distribution and accountability mechanisms designed to give effect to liberty—into their core conceptual structure. One reason for this are the adjacent conceptions of human nature to which they subscribe. Some individualist anarchists, such as William Godwin, associated an individualism decontested as self-government with a progressive rationalism that included benevolence towards others. That objective and universal rationalism98 ensured that self-government would be compatible with social life, and it could therefore contain an embryonic notion of community." As with liberalism, this version of anarchism paid particular heed to the individual capacity for rational self-development and self-regulation. Indeed, it overvalued them, as a consequence allowing liberty free reign, because the potential conflicts which attended its maximization had been ruled out by this quasi-utopian vision. Unlike liberalism, it was confident enough about self-development to forgo surrounding it with enabling concepts and functions designed to facilitate individuality, such as the state. But other individualist anarchists adopted a more separatist view of human nature, and the proximate conceptions of rationality mutated as well. The identification of people as egoists (hardly a liberal view of human nature) was locked into a self-serving instrumental rationality. Max Stirner, an icon of later individualist anarchists, construed egoism as the sovereignty of individual judgement—a conception of autonomy as 'ownness' that negated any other-imposed or self-imposed obligations and abandoned all intimations of a concept of community.100 But whereas he conjured up a society in a condition of nihilistic conflict that departed from anarchist core assumptions, other anarchists pursued a different conceptual route. If neither this option nor that of rational benevolence was open, a third recourse was to be found in Spencer's early predictions, and in that of some of his disciples such as Donisthorpe, foreseeing the m 99

Ibid. 11.

Cp. M, Philp, Godwin's Political Justice (London, 1986), 1-5, 171-3. 100 Cp, D. Leopold, 'Introduction', in M. Stirner, The- Ego and Its Own (Cambridge, 1995), pp. xi-xxxii.

314

Liberalism; The Dominant Ideology

redundancy of the state in the course of social evolution/01 thus supporting the core by means of a notion of natural social progress. A fourth version of individualist anarchism was to retain egoism but to moderate it, and account for social co-operation, through an espousal of market relationships.102 This was the most prevalent conceptual configuration among individualist anarchists, most of whom focused on economic as well as political concentrations of power. Liberty and individualism could be mutually decontested through the conception of equal liberty, which attacked the joint barriers of accumulated property and state centralization. As most libertarians knew, the market was a mechanism through which property and power could be dispersed as a function of self-interest, a variant developed in late nineteenth-century America —against an appropriate cultural backdrop—by publicists such as Benjamin Tucker. Instead of asserting, as did socialist anarchists, that common ownership was the key to eroding individual differences of economic power, it located that key in the equalizing mechanisms of distributing property in an undistorted, 'natural', market.103 Morphologically, the market became the adjacent concept supplying social stability by acting as a constraint on the destructive consequences of individual egoism, and thus replaced the appeal to the harmonious potential of benevolent reason, let alone the socialist anarchist appeal to social solidarity. WJ

See Taylor, Men Versus the State, 178, 192. See Miller, Anarchism, 30-44. Cp. F. H. Brooks, 'American Individualist Anarchism; What It Was and Why It Failed', Journal of Political Ideologies, I (1996), 75-95. 102 103

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

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8

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology

The mere intention to spin out a theory of conservatism is somehow an unconservative impulse .,.' OTH conservatism and liberalism have, on one dimension, been B accorded similar treatment by some of the salient schools of ideological analysis: they have been denied the status of a fully fledged ideology by those who would restrict the phenomenon to total, closed, and cohesive views of human beings in society. But whereas liberals would issue, not without justification, a general challenge to this inaccurate definitional narrowing of their purview, and whereas they would not be embarrassed by the process of identifying both the structure and the content of their political beliefs, most conservative ideologists, as well as most exponents of conservative ideology, go out of their way to dispel any suspicion that theirs is an ideology.2 Obviously, if the notion of ideology is confined to an a priori, abstract, closed, and total system of massconsumed political thinking, then a creed that claims, as conservatism usually does, to be experiential, concrete, and delimited is not an ideology. Consideration of conservative thought, however, may query whether conservatives escape the features of that very definition of ideology. But even were conservatism to seek shelter outside the family of total and comprehensive ideologies, it could not escape categorization within the approach which these pages have advanced, namely, that of presenting ideology as a structural configuration of political concepts—the inevitable accompaniment to entertaining ideas about the political world. On that understanding, to allege that conservatives do not have an ideology is a particularly offensive 1 C, Rossiter, 'Conservatism', in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), iii. 293, 2 R. Nisbet, Conservatism (Milton Keynes, 1986), pp. vii-x, is a rare corrective to that position.

318

The Adaptability of Conservatism

insinuation, since it implies that they are incapable of thinking about politics in a way that can be analysed or understood by even the rawest of observers or scholars. Needless to say, conservatism's ideological opponents have frequently taken a harsh view of its intellectual packaging, following in Mill's footsteps when he called conservatives 'the stupidest party'.3 That view of the political organization has rubbed off on the ideas it has been assumed to carry, though it would be well to recall our earlier dissociation from the automatic linkage of party and ideology. Remarkably, proponents of conservatism have shared this deep-rooted image of anti-intellectuaMsm. As one of them, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, remarked without a hint of apology: 'It is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit.'4 Supporters and opponents notwithstanding, this line of argument cannot be adopted. Like any other concatenation of political ideas that refer to the real worlds of politics, conservatism is an identifiable ideology, exhibiting awareness among its producers5 and amenable to intelligent analysis. Most importantly, and despite protestations from both conservatives and their critics, conservatism displays a recognizable morphology like any ideological family. It is endowed with a number of core elements that allow for its distinct classification. But it requires a shift in its analysis towards an even greater emphasis on the structural characteristics that order the highly diffuse manner in which its variants employ value-sustaining political concepts. Before embarking on such an analysis, a mystery needs to be noted. Why is there such a dearth of capable, sophisticated enquiry into the nature of conservatism, by comparison with the reams of print on liberalism or socialism? Until the 1980s, and with only a handful of exceptions—Karl Mannheim's study being the outstanding example6—-the main anglophone studies in the field were Hugh Cecil's 1912 contribution to the Home University Library/ primarily a souped-up Burkean litany (more of which in 3 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Collected Works (Toronto and London, 1963- ), xix. 452 n. 4 F. J. C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1950), 8. 5 For some, this distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism. See A. Aughey, G. Jones, and W. T. M. Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States (London, 1992), 13. * K, Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1986). 7 H. Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912),

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 319 8 Chapter 9), or Russell Kirk's unsatisfactory tome. Since then more weighty works have been published, but they are preponderantly parti pris, written by staunch adherents anxious to defend and eager to spread their persuasion.9 Yet why are most studies of conservatism written by conservatives?10 And if, as conservatives so frequently allege, their creed is immune to theorizing, does that explain the intellectual paucity of so many such works? A number of possibilities arise. Within the academic world intellectual fashions loosely associated with significant historical events have accounted for the high reputation of Marxist studies from the 1960s to the 1980s, while more recently varieties of philosophical liberalism have entered the domain of scholarly respectability. Outside the universities, a preoccupation with welfare theory in the 1950s and 1960s commensurate with the rapid growth of the welfare state created important ideological texts—the works of C. A. R, Crosland and Richard Titmuss in Britain, and of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in Sweden, being a product of that trend. Young scholars of ability were attracted to fields where their careers could be advanced, and budding activist ideologues to areas where public interest and funding were available. Cultural factors assisted in determining the direction political thinking took, both as embedded in practice and as a more distantiated reflection on that practice. Students of ideologies were further deterred as a result of a confusion between a doctrine that appeared to its critics to be the product of undemanding intellects and the mistaken corollary that the analysis of that doctrine would suffer from a corresponding superficiality. True, the rise of right-of-centre thinking in Britain and the USA in the 1980s reflected a changing cultural atmosphere in public discourse, in the channelling of public funds, in the search for a new respectability for the right, and brought forth a remarkable admission by conservatives of the ideological nature of 8

R. Kirk, The Conservative Mind (London, 1954). The recent book by T. Tannsjo, Conservatism for Our Time (London, 1990), is a notable Scandinavian attempt to explore conservatism independently of a proselytizing role, either pro or contra, while R. Eccleshall has written a series of introductory essays to an anthology that critically examines British conservatism (English Conservatism Since the Restoration (London, 1990), and R, Eatwell and N. O'Sullivan (eds.). The Nature of the Right: American and European Politics and Political Thought Since 1789 (London, 1989), is a commendable collection. For an awareness of the ideological nature of conservatism on the historical side see E, H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880-1914 (London, 1995). 10 And when not, they are frequently out-and-out attacks on conservatism. See T. Honderich, Conservatism (Harmondsworth, 1991), 9

320 The Adaptability of Conservatism their thinking. But a consideration of this more recent ideological phenomenon, and its complex relationship to conservatism, will be deferred until later, (a) OAKESHOTT: CONSERVATISM A LA CARTE

Whereas liberalism has been subject to disagreements over the scope of the concepts it embraces, and their internal relationship, conservatism by contrast has been racked by a deep methodological disagreement from within its midst pertaining to its essential depiction and substance. It is important to be equipped with those maps of conservative self-definition if we wish to proceed towards decoding its anti-ideological stance and uncovering a plausible morphology. Indeed, the most influential accounts of conservative thinking have emanated from conservatives themselves. Their strength has been in occasional passionate defence; their weakness in the refusal to evaluate and compare their viewpoints as part of a larger family of political ideologies. This latter remarkable but not atypical feature brings home the further, and arguably the most important, reason for the shortage of good investigations of conservatism: its study is hampered by two exceptionally intriguing self-imposed obstacles. The first is the denial of the very validity of theorizing about human beings and societies, an attitude found among some of the less perceptive exponents of conservative thought, who insist that no schemes or categories can be applied to the spontaneity, diffusiveness, and pragmatism of actual human conduct. The second is a more complex phenomenon, illustrated most notably in the writings of Michael Oakeshott: a denial of the relevance of abstract techniques in directing human conduct, thus rejecting the rationality of any ideological manifestations of political thought as well as the recommendatory or deontological aspirations of political philosophy. However, a limited role for political theorizing and philosophizing is allowed, relating to the concrete understanding of human conduct. In his Rationalism in Politics Oakeshott portrayed rational knowledge—by which he usually meant a technique—acquired through books as remote from 'the genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society'. In a famous analogy, he observed of the rationalists: like jumped-up kitchen porters deputizing for an absent cook, their knowledge does not extend beyond the written word which they read mechanically—it generates ideas in their heads but no tastes in their mouths'." 11

M, Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1967), 22.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 321 What are we to infer from Oakeshott's favoured 'cook' metaphor? First, that conservatism is about doing, and about understanding what one is doing, not about thinking in the sense of planning what to do.12 Second, that conservatism is unreflective to the extent that it does not deal with packages of coherent ideas about human beings and their societies, but is a method of recognizing reality through experiencing it, intellectually unintelligible for nonparticipants. Third, and consequently, that it is non-transmittable, unless this be done by direct instruction in its practices. Fourth, and not least, that it is futile to conceptualize about human conduct, political or otherwise, in manners typical of Western political thought. Philosophy is simply 'experience without reservation or presupposition'.13 The world of the conservative—the world of practice—is unsystematic and contingent, though there is within experience an inner, self-contained, coherent world.14 As Oakeshott wrote elsewhere on the object of historical study: 'It is a complicated world, without unity of feeling or clear outline: in it events have no over-all pattern or purpose, lead nowhere, point to no favoured condition of the world and support no practical conclusions.'15 Given, particular, worlds have their own unity, but comparison and abstraction are futile.1* The profession of a historian—and we may add, of a student of ideologies engaging diachronic horizons—is thus well-nigh impossible. Oakeshott's position differs prominently from Burke's cumulative construction of history, but it too rejects the designed change of progressive ideologies and shares, as we shall see, a preference for Burke's growth metaphor. Its horizons still look upon the past and cannot be projected on an expected future. This type of conservatism was presented by Oakeshott as essentially anti-intellectual because it sees the intellectual as a dangerous or, at best hopelessly naive, dreamer, whose attempt to impose an abstract order on the world is unnatural and destructive. The intellectual or 'theoretician' is sharply demarcated from the theorist.17 Oakeshott's approach rejected the distinction between the political thinking of a member of a society and the external observer or scholar's theorizing on the18postulates and substances of that participatory political thinking. This is primarily so because Oakeshott 12 The common ground with Hayek's aversion to planning indicates a boundary13 problem which will require further consideration in Ch. 9. M. Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (1st edn, 1933; 1985 repr.), 82. H P. Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven, 1990), 25, 15 Oakeshott, Rationalism, 166, 16 Oakeshott Experience, 29-31; Franco, Political Philosophy, 24. 17 M. Oakeshott, Ow Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975), 30. 18 See the discussion in Ch. 1 on the two dimensions of analysis.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

dismissed the difference between experience and thought, inasmuch as all experience is organized through thought. But whereas there may be many systems of thought beckoning an individual, there is only one experience. Philosophy is self-critical experience, experience sought and followed for its own sake, and theorizing can do no more than expose contingently related beliefs and understandings of a particular agent in a contextual, historical situation.19 It is a gentle additional illumination of the performances of the agent, not a powerful and detached instrument of decoding human conduct and of gaining crucial new insights into the human condition. Theorizing about a society means exploring the specific understandings, thoughts, and practices in that society. The 'goingson' in a society are identified by the scholar 'as an exhibition of intelligence and therefore as an individual occurrence which is in itself what it is for itself'.20 The occurrence can then be understood not as an instance of human patterns of conduct but only in relation to its dependent and contingent connections with other individual occurrences. An analyst of ideologies can accept that approach up to a point. It is plausible to proffer a view of reality constructed by thought, though there is little resemblance with the Wittgensteinian project. Nevertheless, this need not rule out different levels of experiencing and constructing reality, levels in which contemplation and comparison may be distanced from the immediate context; nor the possibility of acquiring such a skill without active membership of a particular society (though adequate understanding of that society is essential). By rejecting the possibility of rising above the concrete and particular, Oakeshott disallowed the application of an external critical faculty, especially the possibility of utilizing fragments of experience to recombine them in a different, exhortatory pattern. By thus opposing a morality of ideals to a morality of habitual behaviour, Oakeshott constructed a false dichotomy, reflected in a misconceived contrast between conservatism and its rival ideologies. Conservatism is proffered as engaging in, and understanding, practical activity. But liberalism, even socialism, are far from being removed from practical conduct, though they may exhibit different degrees of attachment to such conduct. Demonstrably, they too are related to actual human experience through perimeter ideas, but their critical viewpoint results either from the rejection 19 20

Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 91,106; Experience, 81-2, Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 103.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 323 of negative experiences, or from the recognition that reality is complex enough to contain within itself the possibility of a number of clecontested presents and potential futures that pull in different directions, all based upon alternative fragments of actual human experience (after all, not even the most devout Oakeshottian can insist that all human experience is there to be known or felt). These ideals are not necessarily abstract techniques but relate to actual behaviour spun out on one of its possible routes. Although not concrete in Oakeshott's sense, they are not abstract in his sense, either.21 While Oakeshott, like many conservatives, did not think that traditions were fixed and inflexible, he saw a main or dominant 'sympathy' in a tradition which could be explored on the basis of customary patterns. Even when Oakeshott recognized the variety within a tradition, he insisted that it had an overarching, continuous identity. Indeed, contrary to the general direction of his argument, he even allowed for some patterns to be discerned within social arrangements. To probe into Ms own metaphor, while the sea on which men sail is boundless and bottomless, they are nevertheless sailing a boat that has to be kept afloat.22 Whatever else it is, a boat is a firm structure that implies a cohesive, purposive group, and Oakeshott certainly referred, however implicitly, to a single, dominant political culture. That was particularly the case when Oakeshott considered moral conduct. Though he suggested that it is a vernacular that did not constitute 'anything so specific as a "shared system of values'" and although he reasonably denied that right, obligation, fairness, or justice carry an unequivocal meaning, Oakeshott nevertheless left the clear impression that his 'pluralism' was strictly contained within the familiarity of the language of moral discourse, a learned language transmitted over time and expressing dominant understandings of propriety. It was a pluralism in which men, women, the old, and the young were treated as unified categories with their own dominant and typical idioms.23 Against that stands the view that clusters of traditions, or political cultures, contain a multiplicity of patterns which at different times will be dominant or subservient, and that a variety of such patterns may emerge from any social or political reality, in which an agreed moral language may be largely chimerical. Such pluralism constitutes the 21

n 23

Cp. Franco, Political Philosophy, 120,125.

Oakeshott, Rationalism, 123-4, 127. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 63-4, 78-80, 65.

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basis for retaining a role for theorizing about the political thinking that takes place in a society, while recognizing that any such theorizing may have an impact on a social 'reality'. And such second-dimension analysis is methodologically dependent on the comparative method, which Oakeshott's approach must eschew. Oakeshott was of course right in assuming that seemingly alike philosophical doctrines could differ markedly. The sole comparison he authorized was on the 24basis of already identical conclusions and the reasons for them, However, though not as precise as identity, similarity is an alternative basis for classification, and one that most conservatives will acknowledge to be the method actually employed by human beings when attempting to assimilate new experiences into the range of their understanding. Those very aspects of intuition and 'recognition' that Oakeshott welcomed are based on such loose comparison. Nor is this alternative Wittgensteinian view of family resemblances itself necessarily conservative.25 When representatives of new families emerge, they may initially be categorized indirectly and dialectically as lacking certain features of existing family members, or as composites of the desirable features of existing families. In both cases a positive drive for increasing the members of the new family may occur. Nor do you already have to be a member of a family to which you may want to belong, in order to believe that you want to belong to it. Most conservative theorists, however, do not aspire to Oakeshott's aim of considering practices separately from theory as a means to illuminating conservatism as a true epistemology.26 They rest content with applying themselves to the actual conduct of members of a society, and relinquish critical theorizing altogether. The main reason for this is that the conservative conception of the proper social order is based on sense-evidence masquerading as common sense: what you see is what you get. From the quasiempiricist conservative perspective on the world, the onus of proof that the world is not as it appears is passed on to alternative ideologies. It is Marxism which has to convince a potential clientele that man is currently a limited, partial alienated creature, soon to return to his true species-being nature, rather than the self-seeking, entrepreneurial, competitive, and consuming initiator many conservatives 'naturally' see him as. It is liberalism which has to convince its audience that the evolution of human rationality permits 24

25 See Franco, Political Philosophy, 84. See above p. 133. On conservatism as an epistenaological rather than moral doctrine see J. Gray, The Undoing of Conservatism (London, 1994), 32. 26

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 325 political arrangements that reflect art ever-augmenting trust in the individual. Conservatives simply do not have to make that tremendous imaginative and logic-bolstered effort to demonstrate that what never has been ought to hold. The result of this conservative approach is a theory-cum-anti-theory about the randomness and uncontrollability of events and human behaviour. The unlearnable talents of cooks signal the uniqueness and non-replicability of people which liberals may applaud, but also the difficulties of transmitting knowledge and education and the absence of common human denominators, and hence the social immobility and inequality of people. As always with a statement about human nature that stresses only the particular, it too cannot eschew a certain level of abstraction, even of universality, as an aspect of its surplus of meaning. That general message is inferred by default: human nature is permanently intuitive and singular. Oakeshott, too, refused to learn anything from, those conclusions. Even if one were to accept that human beings and their practices, 'goings-on', and social arrangements are unclassifiable and impervious in that sense to rational analysis—a conjecture that runs contrary to the approach proffered in these pages—it does not follow that such a conclusion applies to the ideational products of the students of human conduct, of political theorists and ideologues, including the conservatives among them. The conservative Oakeshott did after all produce a book on conservatism, and another on human conduct Given that his argument was not as pattemless as the world he presumed to describe, he enabled his readers to acquire knowledge about the way conservatives think without compelling upon them the practice of being a conservative. What makes this claim possible is the fundamental disjuncture alluded to above, according to which (on the Oakeshottian view) critical thought is inextricably part of practice and non-existent at a level of abstraction from experience, whereas (on the view adopted in this study) a recognition of the grounding of both ideology and political philosophy in temporal and spatial contexts does not preclude their study, because they are not reduced to those contexts. The products of political thinking, particularly in the form of ideologies, are systematically linked to other cultural factors, but are themselves a distinct cultural artefact. They convey important information about the ideational patterns societies weave and the nature of concrete human societies, and are hence amenable to separate analysis. Abstraction may seek to reconstruct and reinterpret experience and yet do so without abandoning its relationship to the particular,

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and without ceding its aspiration to be understood by the discriminating participant. Evidence about conseryative thinking is in fact abundant, if not always of the quality displayed by Oakeshott. Whether or not the world of human beings and societies is contingent, accidental, and concrete, this does not entail that methodical thinking on those features of the world is impossible. When Oakeshott suggested that he could find no systematic evidence about human nature in politics from which to construe a general theory,27 that itself was a general theory that emphatically lies at the heart of a preeminent approach to conservatism. Thus, when rejecting the idea of abstract natural law and preferring instead an historical and relative notion of rights and duties, Oakeshott simply resorted to a different notion of 'natural'—in the sense of a living and changing tradition. He thus drew an analogy between the practices of a society and vital growth, even if non-teleological and unstructured. The consequence was a cohesive tradition, one that comprised normal, diffused sets of experience, and that was good because it was how people had learnt to manage their lives.28 The Oakeshottian view that man has no nature requires some reinterpretation. It was typically conservative in denying the existence of intrinsic substantive values and concepts which direct human activity.29 It proposed to regard people as devoid of innate essences, though not of culturally prevalent characteristics. Indeed, on many conservative accounts, different societies may adopt overlapping patterns in the course of their natural growth. It focused on the common formal character of actions as procedures, unencumbered by common substantive ends. But the choice Oakeshott believed these procedures to offer was far more limited by the procedures themselves than he appreciated.30 Oakeshott understood 27 28 29

See especially Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 41. Oakeshott, Rationalism, 169-72,184. Franco repeatedly defends Oakeshott (e.g. Political Philosophy, 222 ff.) from the accusation of advocating general substantive purposes. However, it will be argued below that the nature of conservatism consists in advancing different kinds of general values, in particular the continued maintenance of what contributes to the making of a social order, which for Oakeshott is masked as the purposelessness of a civil association. Generally, in conservative ideologies substantive values play contingently adjacent and peripheral roles. The location of any such value in Oakeshott's writings would therefore not need defending from the accusation that it incorporated a universal substantive purpose. 30 It is therefore quite unsatisfactory to suggest, as Franco does (ibid. 9, 15960,231), that Oakeshott is a liberal, on the basis of the existence of a few ostensibly liberal core concepts—though decontested in a singular manner—in adjacent positions within the Oakeshottian structure. Moreover, Franco's interpretation of

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 327 human beings not in terms of clusters of value-substances but in terms of clusters of procedures and customs. These set up adverbial conditions for substantive performances of agents, (for human beings were also perceived as having particular wants and being capable of understanding them),31 They were what they did and performed, not what they inherently were (individually or communally). Unlike the Marxist notion of praxis, this conservative perspective eschewed a radical and Ideological working out of human nature in interrelationship with social and physical environments. It claimed to have no purposive conceptions of human nature attached to it (unlike Marxism with its totalist conception of species-being). As Oakeshott explained, a disposition to be conservative is not necessarily 'connected with any particular beliefs about the universe, about the world in general or about human conduct. What it is tied to is certain beliefs about the activity of governing and the instruments of government'. For Oakeshott, one of those beliefs is that governing is 'a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct', enabling individuals in civil associations to pursue their chosen activities.32 This apparent lack of general substantive beliefs is, as shall presently be argued, in one sense rightly descriptive of conservatism but erroneous in another. The decoding of Oakeshott's semi-implicit preferences concerning human nature and the social system discloses emphases on stability and safety, respect for prevalent traditions or practices over externally induced ones, and a view of human beings naturally embedded in their immediate social environment. These elements are a sufficient basis for a specific decontestation of the other concepts that attach themselves to that Oakeshottian core. Closely adjacent to his core notions of order and organic change (which are identical with predominant conservative core notions, to dispel any doubt about his ideological allegiances), Oakeshott places a conception of a practice (which replaces his older notion of a tradition).33 A practice specifies a procedure 'which prescribes Oakeshott as purging liberalism from its errors is untenable, since that 'purging' deprives liberalism of some of its key features, and the outcome simply is not liberalism. The intention to redesign liberalism is hardly a guarantee of retaining it in an identifiable form. 31 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 54-60. 32 Oakeshott, Rationalism, 183-4. In his later writings he advocated a more centralized state enforcement of the authority of the law, but still without dictating its substance (cp. R. Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven, 1994), 83). 33 See Franco, Political Philosophy, 171,

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conditions for, but does not determine, the substantive choices and performances of agents'. Although such rules or procedures are indeterminate, they are themselves learnt and understood conduct that qualifies a substantive, agent-controlled, unpredictable, and thus ungeneralizable performance: the agent 'as a "historic" self-enacted reflective consciousness'. Hence human conduct is in one sense specific and unique, yet in another sense subject to a general practice which endogenously 'emerges out of performances'.34 Those concrete practices provide the means of managing change and securing relative order. The thrust of the argument is therefore doubly conservative: on the level of 'doing', conduct generates order by ensuring its own isolated continuity within its vernacular idiom, whereas on the level of 'theorizing' the explanation of order can only be relative to a specific context, rather than to those laws of nature or history which introduce an abstract, comparative, or teieological dimension. On the basis of the above analysis, though unacknowledged by Oakeshott himself, the subject-matter of conservatism may be found in a different dimension from that of liberalism and, as we shall see, of socialism as well; a dimension that eschews deliberate preoccupation with universal human ends and values and with the realization of human potential within justly designed organizational frameworks. It is only through denying that conservatism is an ideology, bearing a systematic morphology and armed with a novel conceptual map of its own, that Oakeshott evaded realizing that he himself was a conservative ideologist who had justifiably become an object of inquiry on the part of analysts of conservative ideology. And it was through a refusal to explore the unintentional and unconscious aspects of human conduct that Oakeshott ignored the multi-dimensionality of both action and theory, and the general value-promoting messages that even an anti-generalist such as himself transmitted. Oakeshott regarded an ideology as a distorting mirror, an independent, premeditated, abstract abridgement of a tradition which is superimposed on a society in order to make the latter's arrangements agree with that abridgement.35 But that definition of ideology is, as we have argued, far too narrow. In asserting that conservatism is an ideology the impossibility of generalizing about conservatism must be dismissed, though there is no need to repudiate Oakeshott's insistence on the immanence and endogeneity of the practices which theorists of conservatism need to explore. 34 35

Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 37, 55, 56. Oakeshott, Rationalism, 123-5.

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(6) THE CHAMELEON CONTRA THE STATUS QUO: TWO DISCARDED THEORIES

There is a second way of evaluating the conservative enterprise, which appears to provide that special ideological dimension that marks conservatism out from its rival ideologies. It is commonly held, both by conservatives and by their critics, that conservatism is primarily concerned with upholding the status quo.36 This is, it is argued, its central defining feature, a feature that substitutes for the absence of specific core and adjacent beliefs and values concerning social justice, liberty, democracy, and so on. The archetypal exposition of that view has been put forward by Samuel Huntingdon, in his article 'Conservatism as an Ideology7. For Huntingdon, conservatism is a positional ideology, lacking both an intellectual tradition and substantive ideals. It is a response to an attack mounted against established institutions; it is 'that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter'.37 Conservatism, he further argued, is not transmitted over time, nor does it have an evolving and growing body of works attached to it and subject to constant reinterpretation. Its life pattern is more like a series of sudden births and sudden deaths, activated when provoked, dormant or absent when not. On the surface this seems to be a useful approach, one that offers conservatism a distinct morphology while obviating the apparent hostility of conservatives to substantive intellectual positions. It can explain among others why conservatism, more than other ideologies, appears to adopt different guises; why, for instance, conservatives in the nineteenth century entertained a hierarchical and strictly inegalitarian notion of communal responsibilities, whereas before the First World War some of them began to defend the older liberal traditions—by then more appropriately termed libertarian—of atomistic individualism and a free market, and why in the 1950s conservatives appeared reconciled to the redistributionist welfare state. The superficial explanation would relate to movements in opposing ideologies, such as liberalism, which occurred at a pace some of the latter's adherents (Herbert Spencer, for example) could not tolerate. Conservatives are hence simply residual opponents to whatever is new, and they move into positions 36

See e.g. C. Rossiter, Conservatism in America (London, 1955), 8. ' S. P, Huntingdon, 'Conservatism as an Ideology', American Political Science Review, 51 (1957), 455. 3

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abandoned by groups that undergo change, especially when 'the pace of history gets out of control.'38 This may be termed the 'chameleon' theory of conservatism. Tannsjo has reiterated the Huntingdonian analysis, though without referring to Huntingdon himself. He discusses an 'ideal' conservatism which asserts that 'traditional modes of behaviour have intrinsic value or, rather, that it is good in itself that traditional modes of behaviour be sustained'. Notably, traditionalism endorses no specific content but 'means a kind of faithfulness to an existing and well established practical knowledge of how to conduct a certain activity'.39 The logic of Huntingdon's analysis is that the defence of any social order, such as the determination of East European regimes until the late 1980s to preserve their (self-proclaimed) communist achievements, is structural conservatism of this nature. Tannsjo makes precisely this point, and his conclusions support Huntingdon's 'positionalism' in that he avers that conservative arguments cannot easily be classified in terms of the right-left political spectrum.40 It has frequently been observed that the quintessence of a radical or revolutionary doctrine in the eyes of its proponents requires that its attainment must involve the entrenchment of positions. Once you reach the top of the hill all paths lead down. Huntingdon unfortunately did not draw that inference. Quite the reverse, he fell straight into the trap he so assiduously avoided. Having asserted that conservatism lacks what might be termed a substantive ideal',41 he then concluded that positional conservatism, too, had a static and repetitive nature and hence 'that the essence of conservatism can be summed up in a small number of basic ideas. The number of ideas may vary in the different formulations, but their content is universally the same'.42 This poses a serious problem to scholars of conservatism. Huntingdon seemed to take the promising step forward of identifying a notion of conservative morphology which would account for diverse varieties of that ideology, as well as to suggest that all institutional arrangements may evince a conservative bias. In fact, he did no such thing. Along with many other observers, Huntingdon properly specified the absence of given substantive core concepts as central to conservatism,43 but then failed to apply the correct alternative conceptual morphology to the phenomenon 38

Rossiter, 'Conservatism', 292, Tannsjo, Conservatism for Our Time, 67, 32. ** Ibid. 140-55. 42 Huntingdon, 'Conservatism as an Ideology', 457. Ibid. 469. 43 See also the detailed discussion in Eatwell and O'Sullivan, Nature of the Right, 48-60, 39 41

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 331 under scrutiny. Hence a critique of Huntingdon must be twofold. First, his analysis is incapable of accounting for a conservative group that claims, as during the 1980s in Britain, to initiate change with respect to the status quo. Second, embarrassed by the lack of a core, of a colour for his chameleon, he fell back upon another assessment of conservative theory, one diametrically opposed to his positionalism in asserting the existence of a core, yet equally opposed to Oakeshott's particularism in asserting its universality. This further assessment of the nature of conservatism—the fixedlist approach—-need not detain us too long, despite its popularity. It is a simple attempt to apply to conservatism the same internal conceptual structure that other ideologies exhibit, but it attempts to do so while holding to the static and unchanging nature of that core, that is, while coming close to freezing it in time. Burke is usually taken as a starting-point for this approach, and his substantive review of conservative tenets reduced to the following list an insistence on concrete rights rather than abstract natural ones; an organic conception of society as an eternal partnership between past, present, and future; history as the accumulated wisdom of all generations; the natural inequality of human beings, and hence of their status and property; respect for authority and its institutional manifestations, law and religion; and, finally—a problematic item for a permanent list, to which I shall return—the acceptance of gradual change within a framework subservient to the other apparently core concepts.44 These principles have been adopted by later conservatives to adorn their own lists, thus paradoxically closing the small window for change that Burke appeared to leave open.45 As Huntingdon himself observes, without noting the absurdity, 'a history of conservative thinkers, such as Kirk's Conservative Mind, necessarily involves the repetition over and over again of the same ideas'.46 If this were true, conservatives would not have to engage among themselves in any political or ideological dialogue; cooking would be easy, its skills ubiquitous, and its menus identical; and chameleons would sit on the same twig for their entire lives without changing their colour. The fundamental error of this approach is a dual one. On the 44

See E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. C. Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth, 1969), esp. pp. 139-54; An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (London, 1791). Ernest Barker's essay on Burke and the French Revolution still stands as a succinct overview of Burkean principles (Essays on Government (Oxford, 1965), 205-33). 45 See e.g. Nisbet, Conservatism, passim. 46 Huntingdon, 'Conservatism as an Ideology', 469.

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level of the behaviour of ideologies—despite recognizing that social and technological changes occur—it assumes that timeless and culture-indeterminate responses are intellectually and politically adequate. On the level of historical evidence, the assumption that they indeed are features of conservative ideologies, or that they could sensibly characterize any viable ideological position, is patently false. It is a simple task to demonstrate that for the past two centuries conservatives have compiled very different lists. Disraelian conservatism, with its notions of power held in trust for the people, patronage, hierarchy, and authority is not what Macrnillan was talking about when Britain 'never had it so good' in the 1950s. This approach is basically flawed because it inevitably degenerates into enumerating different conservative cores, some detailing religion and some not, some paternalistic and some supporting a free-market ideal. What conservatives protect at one point in time cannot be, if discarded later on, part of the substantive core of the same ideological family. Fixed conservative lists, as will be seen in the light of the discussion below, are almost entirely composed of adjacent and peripheral concepts which are in principle eliminable. (c) THE CONSERVATIVE CORE; RESOLVING A MORPHOLOGICAL PUZZLE

We have now examined three central modes of thinking about conservatism and found all to be wanting. How does one proceed from here? To suggest that these modes are deficient does not entail their complete dismissal. The conservative attitude towards change is a case in point. Conservatism, it is submitted here, is not an ideology of the status quo. It is not merely an attempt to forestall change and to arrest the historical process. Rather, it is an ideology predominantly concerned with the problem of change: not necessarily proposing to eliminate it, but to render it safe. The difference is important, because most types of modern conservatism encourage one kind of change, only in order to delegitimate the others. Predominantly, conservatives identify desirable change as growth and hence 'natural'. Oakeshott put this well: 'innovation entails certain loss and possible gain ... the more closely an innovation resembles growth (that is, the more clearly it is intimated in and not merely imposed upon the 47situation) the less likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss'. And Rossiter has described conservatism as 'committed to a discriminating defence 47

Oakeshott, Rationalism, 172.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 333 of the social order against change and reform', advocating only that change which is 'sure-footed and respectful of the past'.48 Here is the first core component of conservative ideology. To ransack conservatism for the substantive core concepts and ideas located in rival progressive ideologies, such as liberty, reason, sociability, or welfare, is to look in the wrong place. For conservatives, those concepts are merely adjacent to the core problem of controlling change, and teased out only as a response to the threat of artificial, humanly devised, change, a threat that carries with it the prospect of potential entropy. Thus, the decontestation of history as organic growth renders change acceptable because it is conducted within proven frameworks, because its pace does not exceed the ability of people to adjust to it, because it is not destructive of the past or of existing institutions and practices, and because it does not appear to be instituted by human design. Why did Oakeshott not recognize this as central to conservative ideology? The answer lies in his mistaken confusion of a belief with a fact. He assumed that this notion of change described the world rather than being one of its possible descriptions; consequently he failed to recognize his unconscious preference for one kind of change over another, which constituted an ideological choice among polysemic meanings.49 The conservative understanding of organic change as a core concept, and its disavowal of other kinds of change, postulates a specific diachronic reading—a construction of a tradition—as part of its ideological synchrony. From that perspective, any conservative ideology centrally incorporates a view of change that appears to shore up current, or recent, synchronic arrangements, but it does so with a view to maintaining a balance over time. A diachronic interpretation of the present, in which the structure rather than the contents of the diachrony requires protection, is a ubiquitous morphological feature of conservatism. Through it a specific version of historical continuity secures the preservation of social order per se. The accumulative conception of history in which conservatives locate change involves a particular reading of practices rather than an accurate and concrete representation of 'what actually happened'. This applies even to Oakeshottian fragmented and unpatterned history, for his civil associations also develop practices over time, and the procedures through which those practices are maintained require protection and continuity. 48

Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 12. The hostility to designed change is also a Hayekian characteristic that suggests the proximity of libertarianism to conservatism as well as to liberalism. See Ch. 9. 49

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The defence of a specific, 'normal' type of change is significantly assisted by a second core component of conservatism that underlies whatever quasi-contingent guises its various manifestations may borrow: a belief in the extra-human origins of the social order, i.e. as independent of human will. It is undoubtedly a substantive and valorized core concept, though not always recognized as such by its practitioners. The phrase 'extra-human', rather than the more common phrase 'natural', is deliberate because it is an intriguing extension of the latter. The search for harmony, equilibrium, and order—itself a raising of the concern with change to a state of awareness—has adopted many forms. God, history, biology, and science, as understood by different generations, have served in turn as the extra-human anchor of the social order and have been harnessed to validate its practices. In the nineteenth century, conservatives saw stability as a function of a natural order or hierarchy, 'my station and its duties', with their concomitants of status and responsibility anchored in a strong sense of history. In the early part of the twentieth century, the emphasis was on identifying immutable 'psychological' principles of human nature, such as the need to provide incentives to action or the desire to compete, which justified property holdings as expressions of human worth and facilitators of human activity. Some contemporary conservatives still adhere to such notions of necessity, invoking the bonds of family or the natural instinct to endorse prevailing practices and institutions.50 In the era of welfare-state Keynesianism, as well as free-market post-Keynesianism, the appeal has been to another natural order—that of 'scientific' economic laws ostensibly endowed with universal validity. In all these cases conservatives have invoked a dominant fashion of extra-human sanctification, and have warned that to flout those natural rules would be to put the stability and survival of their societies in extreme jeopardy. A consequence of that fundamental belief in the extra-human underpinnings of societies has been to demote the status of the individual as the exerciser of a free will and purpose, to question the rationality of 'artificial' human design and planning, and to delimit the power of the state and of social organization; in short, to marginalize the function of politics understood as a deliberate and purposive human activity, a marginalization interpreted by some commentators as political scepticism.51 50 51

See R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth, 1980), 31,119. See A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (London, 1978), 16-17. A. O. Hirschman has incorporated this core concept in what he terms the futility thesis of reaction (The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 58, 70-2).

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 335 That delimitation must be distinguished sharply from liberal attempts to deter the state from intervening unduly in legitimate individual spheres of conduct. It is a much more fundamental restriction of the political, and its institutional agents, to the realm of the possible which poses no threat to the social order. As in Hayekian theory, that realm is primarily concerned with the maintenance solely of those rules that protect the extra-human order, with its organic processes of change, from tampering with by individual or social agents. The above analysis may now be further refined. It opens up the possibility of combining aspects of the fixed-core-list approach to conservative ideology with the positional one. This is the central challenge facing the student of conservative ideology, as distinct from the conservative ideologue. So far it has not been taken up because analysts of ideology have been accustomed, when turning their attention to conservatism, to look for the central features, in universal garb, located in progressive ideologies52—e.g a rational conception of human nature, a stated relationship between individual and community, a recommended method of social and economic distribution. They have then attempted to uncover parallel key conservative attitudes to those nodal points of political theory, assuming that some version of them must be central to conservatism too. The problem is insoluble on those lines because the internal morphology of conservatism does not directly reflect the structure of progressive ideologies. The latter deliberately concentrate on providing solutions to the well-known main substantive problems of political theory. Liberal and socialist ideologies emphasize a coherent set of ideas that orders human political experience in a purposive manner, and is designed to optimize the realization of certain desirable values. In contrast, conservatives intentionally—though not always successfully—avoid the search for fundamentally new rational solutions to social issues. They have no intellectual or emotional need to ditch those present or past solutions which appear to conform to their prized notion of organic change. To engage these problems, a third central feature of conservative ideology needs to be employed, one to which Mannheim drew attention in his excellent analysis. In contradistinction to traditionalism—and hence in contrast to the analyses of Huntingdon and Tannsjo—he regarded conservatism as 'a counter-movement, and 52 The term 'progressive' is employed as a family label, without implying a value-judgement, for ideologies seeking controlled and beneficial change.

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this fact alone makes it reflective: it is after all a response, so to speak, to the "self-organisation" and agglomeration of "progressive" elements in experience and thinking/53 And further: The conservative only thinks systematically when he is moved to reaction, perhaps because he is forced to set up a system counter to that of the progressive, or because the process has progressed to & point where he has lost touch with the present state of things, so that he is compelled to intervene actively in order to reverse the process of history.54 More recent writers such as Harwell have reiterated this view, contending that 'the right in practice can be most helpfully conceived as a variety of responses to the left',55 Because this reactive, enforced, and reluctant reflectiveness is insufficient to be graced with the term dialectic, and does not indicate an intellectually enterprising ideology, we may term the third core feature of conservatism its mirror-image characteristic. But the mirror-image phenomenon operates in a more subtle and distinctive manner than allowed for by current scholarship. It ensures that conservative thinking converts the typical core, valuearticulating, political concepts of its progressive assailants into merely secondary, adjacent concepts. More precisely, conservatives develop substantive antitheses to progressive core concepts, such as reason, equality, or individuality, but then (often unconsciously) assign them only adjacent status within the conservative morphology. These adjacent concepts crystallize in relation to the conservative core concept of gradual and organic change, but only when the core-attitude to change acutely requires defending, or when conservatives anticipate a degree of forced change which they consider to be both intolerable and unworkable. At that point the adjacent concepts become interlocked into a rigid support system, whose function it is to exclude pressures to obtain any ideational variation of the core which might secure discontinuous change or development through human design. The rigidity of that system is reinforced by the second core concept, the extra-human legitimation of the social order.56 53

S4 Mannheim, Conservatism, 84. Ibid. 88-9. Eatwell and O'Sullivan, Nature of the Right, 63. 56 This scheme assists in determining how to categorize Oakeshott. W. H. Greenteaf (Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics (London, 1966), 81-2} uncomfortably describes him as an 'immanent' rather than a 'transcendental' conservative, because Ms version is not based on natural law, divine right, or the organic view of society. But the latter are merely possible quasi-contingent conceptualizations of the core concept of natural and balanced change, while Oakeshott's traditionalism and respect for customary arrangements is an alternative conceptualization. 55

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337

Here we arrive at a paradox at the heart of conservatism. It is an ideology that attains self-awareness when exposed by its ideological opponents, rather than at its own behest, and it reacts to them in looking-glass manner, hi rebuffing what appear to be universal, abstract, and systematic theories, the conservative too is impelled, in direct response, to suggest counter-interpretations to those creeds—chapter and verse—based on the substantive terms of reference of the latter. When conservatism perceives change as unproblematic it remains intellectually dormant, and its principles or theoretical stances are only elicited when it is forced to mirror its opponents' arguments. True, progressive ideologies themselves develop as a response to outside circumstances—the interaction between thinker and social, cultural, and material environments is a necessary aspect of the production of a politically relevant ideology—but they also have an internal logic and life of their own, and a long-term attachment to values, that are not dependent on contingent external prodding. Even when progressives react to specific ideas of rival ideologies, conservatism included, their reactions are constrained by the valorized meanings their own core concepts have adopted. Nor do progressives feel so deep a psychological need to defend the cosiness of their position from the unknown. Take Oakeshott again, on what is really the delineation of a socially and emotionally agoraphobic psychology: 'To be conservative . . . is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss'.57 Because progressive ideologies have clear ideational cores, and inasmuch as conservatism is a mirror-image of those ideologies, it acquires a set of ideational concepts almost by default. This may be difficult to accept for analysts used to presenting, or exposing, conservatism as an ideology equipped with a distinct set of ideas on human nature, social structure, and the role of the political. Those analysts cannot meet the challenge involved in accounting for the extraordinary variety of conservative 'core' concepts, if conservatism is approached from within the list mode of interpretation, or in accounting for an unusual degree of spatial and temporal overlap and continuity, if conservatism is approached from within the 'positional' mode of interpretation. The fleshing out of conservative 37

Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 169, On this psychological disposition see also Rossiter, 'Conservatism', 290.

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morphology is not nearly as transient as the theory of positional conservatism would hold, simply reflecting the latest social and political developments. Rather, to negate a permanent, or at least enduring, progressive core may involve the construction of a counter-structure of considerable longevity, even if parasitic on the ideational pressure mounted by the external source. Burke formulated his much-reiterated position in response to the emerging theory of human rights, especially in France, and was led to negate the notion of abstract, a priori rights in favour of an ex post facto linearization of the development of rights within the English cultural tradition, as he construed it. In France, de Maistre had famously opposed the universal and abstract humanism of the revolution by denying he had ever met a man, as distinct from concrete and particular Frenchmen, Italians, or Russians.58 This aimed straight at a conservative understanding of nationhood, developed during the nineteenth century as a consciously emotive aspect of conservative ideology, and attached to integrative symbols,59 The next major intellectual movement seen by conservatives as threatening was utilitarianism, with its aMstorical drive towards radical change, and its vision, in Nisbet's words, of 'the nightmarish world of cold reason, bureaucracy, permanent reform, bloodless charity, and total absence of emotion and feeling that Bentharn foretold'.60 This was met by the reassurance of the Disraelian commendation of authority, reverence, and paternalistic, quasifeudal responsibilities, and by the conservative respect for history. In parallel, in nineteenth-century France, conservatives such as Maurras had to argue against the republic because it became 'the political idea against which all the other possible regimes in France define themselves'.61 The flexibility conservatives display in employing cultural constraints accounts for the variety found in conservative ideological presentation. That flexibility is possible because the general test of the logical compatibility of the components of conservative ideology is simply the extent to which they are consonant with its specific core notions of ordered change and social order. Any additional logical constraints are limited to the particular instance of conservatism under consideration, which needs to exhibit some coherence, 58 w

J, Lively (ed.), The Works of Joseph de Maistre (London, 1965), 80. Cp. Aughey, Jones, and Riches, Conservative Political Tradition, 80-5, 99. Nisbet, Conservatism, 17, }. S. McClelland, "The Reactionary Right: The French Revolution, Charles Maurras and the Action Fran^aise', in Eatwell and CySullivan, Nature of the Right, 92. 60 61

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 339 however ephemeral, among its selected adjacent concepts in order to attract political support. Apart from the stability lent by its underlying core concepts, conservative ideology can only display a substantive coherence that is contingent and time- and space-specific, because that coherence is created solely as a reflection of the substantive internal congruence of the rival ideological structures which the particular conservative discourse aims at rebutting.62 We could take more recent instances. Much conservative theorizing, or ideologizing, has reacted to the spread of the core liberal tenets of rationality, individuality, improvability, responsible power, and liberty, and their particular decontestations by liberals. Focusing on the concept of rationality, conservatives reject it because of its overquestioning and overcritical attitudes, because it smacks of hubris, because it asserts the sovereignty of the individual, because it challenges existing authority in the name of abstract logic, because it is not based on practical knowledge, because it holds out the chimera of externally designed social relationships. Instead, they offer the mirror-image concept of an embedded and empirical particularism. Individuality is tolerated only within the constraining frameworks of groups and the moral systems that sustain them, and it is conceptually marginalized at the expense of order, stability, and continuity. Human improvability is a special butt of conservative displeasure. The conservatives' mirror-image concept of imperfectibuity is linked with questions of pride and humility which have a strong religious underpinning.63 History is employed to provide further proof of the futility of attempts at human amelioration, citing the French and Russian Revolutions. Conservatives argue that human nature is not perfectible (here they part company with some socialists), nor radically capable of development (here they beg to differ from most liberals) because there are no guidelines which instruct people in what direction to move. History is cumulative and holds no key to the future; it can only be read backwards. It is not patterned, whether in cyclical, teleological, or open-ended form; it is not a repository of grand laws of motion, but of sensible rules of practice. Conservatives doubt the power of the human will to overcome the social and historical forces which fashion it. Hence, from a different perspective, we return to the need for psychological reassurance. Imperfectibility is a comforting notion, *2 On this latter point see A. Aughey, 'The Moderate Right; The Conservative Tradition in America and Britain', in Eatwell and O'SulJivan, Nature of the Right, 103. 63 N. O'Sullivan, Conservatism (London, 1976), 22-3.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

absolving people from the frequently intolerable responsibility to go on trying, and releasing them from the burden of their potential. The liberal diffusion of accountable power is not discarded by conservatives, but it occupies a different place in the conservative room. While attached to the idea of constitutionality, it is a constitutionality that emphasizes the harmony among the parts of the political order under the guidance of a wise and authoritative government, rather than the procedural protection of individuals against possible encroachments by governments. Nineteenthcentury conservatives held that government is always responsible and can therefore be strong. Governing was a skill emanating from particular cultured or materially interested classes, which traditionally supplied political leadership, and reflecting a hierarchy of control fundamental to human societies, even sanctioned by religion. Some contemporary conservatives, however, modify the idea of wise government and hold that only a government divested of unnecessary trappings will exercise its pared but essential functions to the good of society. Their notion of constitutionality converges on the Hayekian position that non-interference with individual liberty is the main prerequisite to a just constitutional order. Arising from the above, another core liberal concept is retained but subtly reconstituted: liberty is often translated as liberties, the social rights and duties that enlightened societies have enshrined in their practices.64 To reiterate, none of these conservative ideas constitutes the core of the conservative ideological structure. A comparison between conservatism and progressive ideologies establishes that what conservatism sacrifices in terms of substantive complexity, it makes up in terms of a greater morphological complexity. The fundamental asymmetry between the morphology of conservatism and that of its rivals lies in the fact that, whereas concepts concerning human nature, social structure, and the distribution of goods are core components of progressive ideologies, conservatism displays another type of substantive core: social and political activity, and its articulated defence, should be geared to preventing non-organic, disruptive change by invoking an extrahuman order. To these two core concepts conservatism adds a particular method of configuring whatever further concepts conservatives entertain. Underlying the common morphology conservatism shares with all ideologies, incorporating cores and peripheries, is a specific manner of interlocking and controlling the behaviour of 64

These themes will be elaborated in the following two chapters.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 341 its political concepts. This structural intricacy, rather than the substantive units comprising it, bears the hallmark of conservatism. Conservatism hence incorporates a unique morphological set of relationships among the full scope of political concepts that can comprise its ideological profile. It employs them eclectkally while minimizing the interpretative flexibility of each particular instance of conservatism in a specific cultural and temporal context. This is accomplished by ensuring that substantive concepts are decontested rigidly with the sole purpose of supporting the conservative notion of change. That rigidity is achieved in two ways. First, through expressing conservative ideas in a particular social and historical context that rejects a comparative analysis, which would require abstraction from space and time and be accompanied by the resilience of both relativism and pluralism. Second, through focusing on the extra-human sanctification of the social order. For what makes that core concept especially important is that, once the substantive adjacent concepts required to contain the threat of change have been chosen, it holds both their potential polysemy, and the whole conceptual structure, in check. The 'mirror-image' constituent of conservatism is, however, more than a passive reflection of rival conceptual cores, and it requires further elaboration in order to appreciate the final, and most resourceful, element of that ideology. Conservatives do not merely create permanent counter-reflections of the views of their opponents, for inasmuch as many progressive ideologies have a longstanding core which changes only very gradually, that could not account for the variety of seemingly unrelated conservative permeations. Rather, when conservatism constructs its substantive mirror-image response to progressive doctrines, three significant factors now come into play. First, its perceived enemies change contingently over time: classical liberals, welfare liberals, socialists, fascists, communists. In the words of Mannheim, the intellectual development of conservatism lies 'precisely in the fact that the most recent antagonist dictates the tempo and the form of the battle'.65 The quicker the pace of those movements—and the history of the past century in the West has evinced transformations of great magnitude—the greater the need for a fast conservative reaction. The result is thus a structural mirror-image reaction to whatever ideological configuration is perceived as the most immediate or menacing source of externally induced change, and the ideological response of conservatives is to come up with what 65

Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 231.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

they believe is the most effective and successful conceptual strategy for resisting it. To illustrate, in the face of the liberal threat and its appeal to rights and an incipient egalitarianism, Victorian conservatives insisted on the virtues of paternalism and class responsibility. Many French and German conservatives who had experienced actual and repeated revolution went much further than liberals in uncompromisingly attacking the rising theories of democracy and of historical inevitability. They also countered the advent of the democratically controlled state and the ascendency of mass politics with the discovery of the role of concrete social groups in protecting existing liberties.66 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives throughout Europe parried liberal and socialist welfare policies by reaffirming the importance of private property rights as anchors of the social order, and highlighted traditional institutions, such as the monarchy or, in Britain, the House of Lords, as protectors of the nation against unprecedented social upheaval In the interwar period, keen to distance themselves from fascism, yet faced with the continuing menace of socialism in its varieties, conservatives had to present different faces to different competing ideologies. They concentrated on opposing the fascist core component of violence, as inimical to the constitutionalism that buttressed the conservative core concept of order, yet at the same time had to call upon an adjacent unit shared witih another fascist core concept —the endorsement of human inequality—when defending themselves against the achievements of state-socialism. Later, in response to cold-war communism, conservatives developed a new mirrorimage emphasizing basic political liberties, combining it with the significance of the family and of traditional moral beliefs, which they duly trotted out of their furniture store. More recently, arguments for individual liberty have been engaged to stern the threat posed by the advance of the welfare state.67 The upshot of all this is a curious yet fascinating complexity. It is in that light that we may decode an observation of Quintin Hogg's: 'Conservatives ... see nothing inconsistent in having opposed Whiggery in the interests of the Crown, Liberalism in the name of Authority, Socialism in the name of Liberty, and even of the Liberal State.' The ground, argues Hogg, 'is the same, but it is being attacked from a different direction'.68 66 67 68

On this latter point see Nisbet, Conservatism, 49. On this issue see Hirschman, Rhetoric, 113-14. Q. Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (West Drayton, 1947), 15, 62.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology

343

However, the subtlety of the conservative response can only be appreciated if one also pays regard to the second factor, namely, that conservative ideology may mistake, or deliberately misinterpret, its rivals' idea-environments for their cores. The internal configuration of liberalism and socialism enables 'choice' in the conservative decision over which components to mirror from among their core and adjacent concepts. For example, conservatives frequently confuse the core of socialism with the adjacent notion of nationalization. The result is that counter-beliefs concerning privatization and decentralization appear central to the conservative creed. This disguises the mirror-imaging that actually takes place: a hereditarian and historically anchored view of human nature opposes the socialist core concepts of community and equality. Conservatives may also deliberately focus on a feature of a rival ideology, such as the support of communist regimes for totalitarian practices, in order to tar all Marxist core concepts with the brush of inhumanity and violence. All those decisions are contingent and culturally mediated ones, for there is no logical necessity for the conservative swivel mirror to reflect any particular core of a rival progressive ideology, or any particular unit within each core. The mirror can be angled to pick up different reflections.69 This flexibility in its choke of ideological opponent is the fundamental explanation for any particular form of conservative morphology and for what, on the surface only, may appear to be incompatible conservatisms. The pliant mirrorimage system is then the third factor in according rigid protection to the core notion of change, for it aims to seal immediately any chink in the ideational armour that could be penetrated by any particular opposing idea in any particular place, as and when it emerges, and thus to maintain the balance and order among the political concepts it has already endorsed. Most ideological change is induced by perimeter events and practices. Progressive ideologies, in deciding how to react or adapt to such change, channel them first to adjacent concepts and then, if necessary, to their stable substantive cores. This latter process is a slow one. Conversely, the m This is also evident in ideologies on the far right of conservatism, fascism in particular, as pointed out by M. Billig, "The Extreme Right: Continuities in AntiSemitic Conspiracy Theory in Post-War Europe', in Eatwell and O'Sullivan (eds.), Nature of the Right, 151, with respect to the identification of foreigners: 'the target of these prejudices changes, for it is not always the same "foreigner" who is being denigrated: fascist groups, depending where and when they arise, select different objects for hatred. Thus, the form of their beliefs and their appeals may be similar. Yet the content differs, because there is a substitutability of targets.'

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

swivel-mirror conservative morphology accords priority attention to any perimeter disturbance perceived to endanger its core concept of change. That core is directly and immediately involved in configuring adjacent concepts and alternative perimeter practices so as to close the access route of that disturbance. Two features are crucial to conservative morphology. First, it adopts a mechanism whereby it reacts to perceived or real threats to the ordering of its ideological furniture, rather than commencing ab initio with the offer of an attractive room with which to woo supporters and assailants alike. Second, its unity is preserved by an identical reaction to all external ideological offensives, one that is nevertheless substantively different in each case. The substantive difference is the key to the survival of the ideological structure. The conservative reaction is to single out the most persistent and threatening challenge to the existing arrangement of conservative furniture and to lock its counter-arguments into place by emphasizing and pinning down those units most likely to be cast out by the rival interior designer, that is, most likely to bear the brunt of the opposing ideological attack. Of course, conservatives may be misled for a while about the danger from without. As was the case with Thatcherism, pressures may be allowed to build up over a long period, or one external legitimation of the social order has to be replaced by another before the conservative intellectual response is elicited. A time-lag may ensue in conjunction with a response that utilizes the latest weaponry in the order-preserving intellectual arsenal, which then appears to be couched in terms of radical change. But the technique is the same; otherwise it would plainly not be conservatism. And if the conservative nature of this seemingly radical creed were denied, the analyst of ideologies would still have to account for the fact that its proponents believe it is radical, yet persist in calling it conservatism.70 To conclude: the law of conservative structure, and the key to identifying the common components of its variants, consists of four central features. Two of those are substantive core concepts, though not always identified as such: (1) a resistance to change, however unavoidable, unless it is perceived as organic and natural; (2) an attempt to subordinate change to the belief that the laws and forces guiding human behaviour have extra-human origins and therefore cannot and ought not to be subject to human wills and whims. Unlike other major ideologies, conservatism then intriguingly produces two underlying morphological attributes, instead of 70

See Ch. 10.

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 345 additional substantive identifying features. One of these attributes is (3) the fashioning of relatively stable (though never inherently permanent) conservative beliefs and values out of reactions to progressive ideational cores. This allows all substantive concepts in the employ of conservatism, other than the two enumerated above, to become contingent. They are subjected to a complex swivel mirror-image technique, superimposed on a retrospective diachronie justification of the current beliefs held by conservatives. In each instance, the consistent aim is to provide a secure structure of political beliefs and concepts that protects the first core concept of conservatism, and does so by utilizing its second core component. Finally (4) the process is abetted by substantive flexibility in the deployment of decontested concepts, so as to maximize under varying conditions the protection of that conception of change. Such flexibility of meaning permits a considerable firmness of conservatism's fundamental structure when confronted with very different concrete historical and spatial circumstances. What may superficially appear to be intellectual lightweightedness or be mistaken as opportunism is rather the performance of a crucial stabilizing function by means of the adroit manoeuvring of political concepts in positions adjacent to the ideational core. The morphological unity of conservatism is preserved by an identical grammar of response, but expressed through differentiated languages of response. When the semantic field of that ideological family is surveyed, the result is an immense range of conservative responses. The great strength of that range is to provide conservatism with a superior adaptive power to that of other ideologies, but its parallel weakness is a conceptual rigidity within each particular instance that preserves the specific morphology from 'inorganic' change. In the longer purview, conservatism can assimilate any stresses applied to its conceptual structure more successfully than other ideologies, precisely because it is designed above all to do so, however unconsciously, however masked by a discourse that prevents this from being acknowledged. In the shorter run, however, its flexibility is undermined by its dependence on the structures of its ideological opponents, or on the misperception of those structures. The more those rival ideologies are believed to threaten conservative essentials, the more unyielding does the conservative response become, and consequently its capacity to adapt to a specific social and political context diminishes. While in principle there exists a large pool of valorized or devalorized political concepts, each with its multiple decontestations, which conservatism can utilize to sustain

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

its core, there are countless instances when it becomes locked into an unpliant mirror-reaction to progressive political ideas. In a most peculiar sense, any particular instance of conservatism can die without endangering its ability to re-emerge in the future. Thus the ideology par excellence of organic continuities may itself be discontinuous in a way that would destroy the ideational integrity of its progressive rivals, whose core concepts require precisely such historically seamless evolutionary threads. Once we bear these features in mind, an intelligible analysis of conservatism becomes possible. The theoretical framework of this chapter is based on evidence that must now be provided in greater detail. The reversal of the sequence from evidence to generalization has been undertaken merely because a case had to be made for the existence of conservative ideology before it was possible to move forward, and a second case had to be made for the existence of common family resemblances among its members that might otherwise be suspected of different ties and genealogies. Moreover, the complexity of the argument and its novelty have required early adumbration for the sake of later clarity. Having already benefited from acquaintance with liberal morphology, the general discussion of conservatism has a point d'appui from which to proceed. The path is now open to sample some historical and cultural instances of that ideological family and to tackle a major problem of modern conservatism: the question of cross-cultural variance among conservatisms as well as the variance within one cultural sphere. Taking the British example, how can one account for the great temporal discrepancy between earlier twentieth-century versions of conservatism and so-called Thatcherism, or, more broadly, the acceptance of some classical liberal principles, specifically those pertaining to the free market? Are these not two different, indeed irreconcilable, ideologies? More generally, how can one term, 'conservatism', apply to such different phenomena as Burkean Whiggism, Disraelian paternalism, Diehard anti-welfarism, Macmillanite welfarism, and New Right Thatcherism? How can one term encompass within its domain both a belief in history and a rejection of history, both reverence for the state and contempt for it, both a conception of community and an atomistic libertarianism, both a faith in high politics and a diminution of the political sphere, both a notion of citizenship based on responsibility and duty and one based on contractual markets and an economic clientele? The student of political language will want to know what the point is in having a common label. The next two chapters will

Theorizing about Conservative Ideology 347 explore some conservative variants both on a temporal and spatial dimension. If once again the emphasis on Britain is pronounced, an excuse for this bias may be found in the remark of a prominent American conservative that the most famous school of conservative political thought, 'although it has loyal and eloquent adherents in countries like France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, and the United States, has held continuous sway as a major political and intellectual force only in Great Britain'.71 71

Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 16,

9

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

In the past, Conservatives 'trimmed' in favour of the state and against laissez-faire. Today they 'trim' against the state and in favour of the individual. And both today and in the past, the purpose of their 'trimming' was . . . to achieve balance.1 (a) THE MULTIPLE COUNTER-DEFENCES OF BRITISH CONSERVATISM

ROM the mid-nineteenth century, conservatism found itself in F acute competition with the rising ideologies of the left, liberalism and then socialism. By the end of that century, the struggle was one of political survival on the institutional level, though the late nineteenth century provides an excellent example of the illfitting relationship between party and ideology. In British history the closing years of the last century are a Sattelzeit much as the French Revolution and its aftermath were on the Continent,2 years in which the three ideological families engaged in profound ideational disputes that exposed their features with unusual clarity. As for the subjects of inquiry great, or even moderately great, conservative thinkers did not emerge in Britain after Burke, and it is more instructive to focus on some popularizers and prominent groups. Because conservative spokespeople and intellectuals had resisted depicting conservatism as a coherent doctrine, the dearth of major treatises on the political ideas of conservatives was not initially problematic and only became so when perceived as a drawback after the First World War.3 But the methodical treatise is far from the only, or even main, source for analysing ideologies. 1

I. Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (London, 1978), 109. See R. Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), for this notion of a bridging period. 3 See A. M. Ludovid, A Defence of Conservatism (London, 1926), 131-2. 2

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 349 Moreover, we must recall the peculiarly dormant nature of conservatism before hastening to dismiss its few proponents as representatives of a beleaguered and shrinking band. It is a commonplace to discern a dual British conservative tradition from the end of the nineteenth century. According to that view, the older, paternalist, Tory tradition was joined by a newer, anti-statist strand, resulting in an internal tension between a collectivist and a libertarian, or individualist, conservatism.4 Superficially that may seem to be the case, but a morphological analysis of conservatism exposes the underlying similarities and relegates the division between collectivism and individualism to contingent status. Nor can the collectivist-individualist divide be utilized to distinguish between conservatism and liberalism, for it cut across the two ideological families. The reality of conservatism was more complex. When the apparent tension began to manifest itself, conservatives were experiencing the peculiar difficulties that arise from the nature of their ideology. After a long spell of ideological stability, during which the Disraelian paternalist tendency had been pitted against liberal attempts at moderate economic and political change, the conservatives were attacked by progressive ideologies on the very ground on which they thought themselves safe—the role of the state and the harnessing of political power to further national ends. Nineteenth-century conservatism had attached political concepts such as authority and the general good to a view which entrusted government to the upper classes, which regarded those classes as the repository of the interests of all the governed, and which used the state as a device to secure the existing social and political order.5 Suddenly, as it were, the control of the state was about to be wrested, ideologically speaking, out of those wise hands. The paternalistic state gave way, in the political arguments of new liberals and socialists alike, to an activist, transformatory state which, under democratic control, would engage in as wide a range of undertakings as possible, with the aim of catering to the expressed or unarticulated needs of the populace. Conservatives were torn between two responses. The one, endemic to the conservative outlook, reflected a slowness of reaction in which many conservatives continued to preach the virtues of Toryism. They saw the bolstering of organic continuity as the best means of digging in to prevent the effects of the rise of a mass 4 W. H, Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, ii. The Ideological Heritage (London, 1983), 189-95, 5 R. Eedeshall, English Conservatism Since the Restoration (London, 1990), 9-11, 118-19.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism 6

democracy. But the turn of the century was still a period towards which the long shadow of Burkean influence, an influence that solidified the Victorian conservative tradition, reached out The other therefore took as given the external changes wrought by the Second and Third Reform Acts and by the progressive ideologies that blossomed under the new industrial order. It sought therefore to attack those ideologies—as the optimal route to blocking nonorganic change—by exposing their absurdities and suggesting counter-measures to attain ostensibly similar political and economic ends. Those reactions were by no means peculiar to Britain. A similar dual conservative position also emerged in post-1830 Germany, displaying a tension between reactionary responses to political and social change, and the willingness of a more reflective conservatism to adopt liberal-constitutional reforms. The latter tendency evinced a Burkean reverence for organic historical change as a provider of order; indeed, because the non-revolutionary constitutional and monarchical state played so major a role in German liberalism, it was not difficult for those conservatives to align themselves with a perceived etatist appeal to a strong authority, a stabilizing force amidst more dangerous currents of populist democratic change.7 In Britain, the struggle over the nature of the state became a central means of bringing the battle to the progressive enemy over an issue that threatened the heart of conservatism. It was a straggle not over state intervention as over the legitimate areas in which the state was justified in wielding its power. Unlike Germany, the perceived anti-statist nature of mid-nineteenth-century British liberalism in the economic sphere usually overrode, in the minds of conservatives, any overlap in the constitutional theories of the two ideological families. Some conservatives were quick to recognize a parallel overlap between traditional Toryism and socialist doctrines on this question. 'Modern Conservatism', wrote Lord Hugh Cecil, 'inherits the traditions of Toryism which are favourable to the activity and authority of the State/ Illustrating the workings of the conservative mirror-image strategy, he observed that 'in the nineteenth century, when Liberalism enforced to the utmost the principle of personal liberty, it was among Conservatives that 6

For a sophisticated analysis of conservatism from this perspective see E. H. H. Green, 'The Strange Death of Tory England', Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991), 67-88. 7 See R. Vierhaus, 'Konservativ, Konservatismus', in O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, in (Stuttgart, 1982), esp. pp, 544-6, 549, 557, 563.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

351

the authority and control of the State was defended and in some instances enlarged and strengthened'.8 Both conservative responses were core features of its morphology and sometimes, as in the work of W, H. Mallock, they appeared in tandem. To complicate matters further, late Victorian conservatism was forced to tarn, Janus-like, towards two disparate opponents, liberals and socialists, and to mirror their different arguments in its attempts to rally and counter-attack. Libertarian or collectivist theories—the simplified tags through which conservatives often confronted their two opponents—were all grist to the mill of resisting illegitimate change and reasserting the extrahuman sanctification of the existing social order, but they triggered off different substantive arguments and utilized different adjacent concepts. The ideological complexity of the period propelled conservatives to pursue alternative parallel methods to secure their core ideological principles, so that the illusion of two strands of conservatism relates to a deeper, perhaps not entirely conscious, conflict over the optimal angling of the conservative mirror in order to secure the shared ideological core. In the domestic cultural context of late-Victorian conservatism, the various proposals for dealing with the 'condition of the people' question posed a direct threat not only to the established political system of patronage, by which Disraelian conservatives exercised their power on behalf of the people, but to the nouveau conservative support, alarmed at the redistributionary policies of progressive groups. This tension prevailed within the extended conservative family. Its mid-Victorian ideology had allowed for state intervention to regulate the behaviour of the masses and guide them by means of the wisdom of leadership. Its new middle-class partners perceived the state as an instrument in the hands of those who, through a spreading democracy, had risen to assert their control over it, with results pernicious to the wealth and security of the well-to-do. Against this the conservative mirror-image ideology began to react. It had to do so while both conflicting but aggressive ideological signals from outside, as well as an internal transition between two conservative synchronies, were in evidence. Late nineteenth-century British conservatism responded to the challenge of coming to terms with the rise of a mass electorate by developing a modern party system.9 But it was also undergoing internal 8 H. Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912), 169-70. ** See J. Cornford, 'The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century', Victorian Studies, 7 (1963-4), 35-66.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

transformations that reflected the changing fortunes of its traditional sustainers, the landed aristocracy, and the shift of support of considerable numbers of the urban mercantile and professional classes away from organized Liberalism, even before the 1886 desertion of the Liberal Unionists to the Conservative party.10 Some ideological developments are relatively easy to trace, none more so than the defection of Joseph Chamberlain from the Liberal party and the movement with him of the old Whiggish elements into the Conservative camp. And although one should not presume a oneto-one relationship between ideology and party, nor can the associations between the two be ignored. Chamberlain himself began his political career as an avid social reformer but, significantly, those who came over with him were out of sympathy with measures that would increase the strain on the purses of the upper middle classes." The flight of Whiggish elements into Toryism was on the political level a defence of threatened interests, and on the ideological level the consequence of the perceived abandonment of laissez-faire by liberalism. In tandem, the conservatives attempted to instil a measure of 'Tory Democracy' into their ideology. Whatever has been said about that initiative as an opportunist sham, or at most a reorientation of political machinery, its ideological proclivities were clear. Randolph Churchill expressed them in a revealing passage: The Tory democracy is a democracy. .. which believes that hereditary monarchy and hereditary House of Lords are the strongest fortifications which the wisdom of man, illuminated by the experience of centuries, can possibly devise for the protection... of democratic freedom. The Tory democracy... believes that the connection between Church and State imparts to the ordinary functions of executive and law something of a divine sanction . . . under the shadow and under the protection of those great and ancient institutions, [it] will resolutely follow the path of administrative reform.12

The taming of change through the guiding hand of the past, the appeal to the masses to put their faith in established institutions, and the bestowing of extra-human sanction on the existing state machinery by means of the Church, suggest that Tory democracy was but a reiteration of old Tory principles. It was integral to the 10

See M. Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics (Oxford, 1982), 42. See P. F. Thiede, Chamberlain, Mand und das Weltreich 1880-95 (Frankfurt-amMain, 1977). 12 Speech by R, Churchill, Manchester, 6 Nov. 1885, quoted in R. J. White, The Conservative Tradition (London, 1964), 228. 11

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 353 continuity-emphasizing response of conservatives to the changing social and political scene. The mirror-image reaction of Tory democrats to the increasing salience of social reform in progressive platforms was either in the guise of very modest doses of political and land reform, a pale reflection of Chamberlain's Radical Programme of the early 1880s, or by insisting that the welfare of the people was already a conservative aim, and that existing political institutions needed no alterations to pursue that end,13 True, there had existed a Disraelian social reform tradition, of moderate proportions, just as in Germany a centralized and statist policy of social reform had been advocated to confound the political and economic individualism of the liberals, and to take the wind out of socialist sails,14 But that tradition was waning, both because it could not keep up with its progressive rivals, and because the Tory sense of duty was being replaced by different interests and concerns, as the landed aristocracy gave way to an urban plutocracy. The ancient themes of conservatism continued to be voiced by some of its more vocal representatives, hi his philosophical cogitations, the future Conservative prime minister A. J. Balfour set up authority against reason as the grounds for producing a psychological climate that could maintain the beliefs and morality of a society, 'That interior assent should be produced in countless cases by custom, education, public opinion, the contagious convictions of countryman, family, party, or Church, seems natural, and even obvious.' Authority, to begin with, 'stands for that group of nonrational causes, moral, social, and educational, which produces its results by psychic processes other than reasoning'. But Balfour argued that authority could have a rational base simply by accepting the trustworthiness of the source of the information to be considered authoritative. By being a reason, authority became a species of reason. This neat sleight of hand enabled the assimilation of a liberal core concept, consistently used to criticize conservatism, into the conservative ideological structure. Reason was positioned adjacent to authority, and both functioned to prevent unnecessary challenge to the existing order. That confined notion of reason operated to direct 'the public policy of communities within the narrow limits of deviation permitted by accepted custom and tradition.'15 13 14

See Greenleaf, Ideological Heritage, 217, See Vierhaus, 'Konservativ, Konservatismus', in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 561-3. 15 A. J, Balfour, The Foundations of Belief (London, 1901), 215, 218, 226, 232-4, 240.

354

The Adaptability of Conservatism (b) THE CASES AGAINST SOCIALISM

From the beginning of the twentieth century the ideological threat of socialism loomed large in conservatiYe perceptions. It assumed proportions that extended beyond party boundaries so that, for example, the radical Liberal Budget of 1909-10 was heavily criticized in the conservative press as socialist in nature.16 Nevertheless, much conservative argument was addressed directly towards socialist theory. Detailed studies of socialist thinking appeared, such as The Case Against Socialism, a handbook for Conservative speakers and candidates. Significantly, many titles of books on conservatism have been formulated negatively as an attack on ideological positions considered to be menacing.17 The Case Against Socialism portrayed socialism as seeking 'to uproot entirely the whole industrial and economic system which to-day prevails in civilised countries, and also to very materially repeal and alter the moral code'. In particular, it voiced concern about 'the extent to which man, instead of as hitherto depending on himself, is to depend, and, if necessary, to be made to depend, upon the State'. Socialism 'declined to recognise the principles which govern human action' and in the economic sphere this would react 'upon the quantum of national production... As a consequence . . . Socialism would, in practice, intensify the very social diseases which it today so confidently purports to cure',18 by diminishing the incentive to work and decreasing invention. Visions of socialist bureaucracy were construed as assaults on individual liberty, and authorities running from Mill through Spencer and the anti-socialist Robert Flint to the new liberal Hobhouse were mustered to warn against the regimentation and loss of individual rights consequent upon the implementation of socialism. The predictable conclusion was that 'it is wholly impossible to establish real Equality without destroying Liberty, since those invested with Liberty promptly utilise this privilege to advance their own position'. With a preference for liberty assumed as given, 'the inevitable result... of19the continued existence of Liberty is the creation of further Inequality'. Hence, in their eagerness to hurl all possible intellectual counter16

See B. K. Murray, The People's Budget 1909/10 (Oxford, 1980), 249-50. e.g. W. H. Mallock, A Critical Examination of Socialism (London, 1908); Q. Hogg, Tfe Left was Never Right (London, 1945), 18 The Case Against Socialism, 2nd edn. (London, 1909), 139,149,176,187. Italics m original. 19 Ibid. 212-13, 215. 17

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 355 arguments at the socialists, many conservatives based their assertions on liberal as much as on conservative theorists and exploited the standard nineteenth-century liberal arguments about individualism, motivation, and liberty. Although certainly no libertarian, Balfour had mouthed those liberal ideas when he stated: The productive energies of this country must... be based upon the individual energy of its citizens, and that individual energy can only be called forth by a system based upon the fact that what a man earns he possesses, and no greater injury can be done to the working classes of this country than to spread [aj feeling of insecurity about private property,20

This overlap with an older liberalism cannot be explained merely as the result of the entry of the Liberal Unionists into the conservative family, although that too played a role. Rather, it illustrates how mirror-image arguments were employed in these instances of conservative thinking. Their lack of fixity and apparent substantive discontinuity in relation to more traditional conservative views was lent coherence through one crucial mechanism: diachronic continuity was still maintained in the search for the most persuasive account of natural human conduct and social growth among alternative conservative histories. It was a partly unconscious competition over the best method for shoring up the notion of organic change. So although cultural adjacency appeared to override logical adjacency, the logic of conservative morphology remained the paramount common element, Of equal interest is the reshuffling of concepts specifically to contain the greatest threat to such controlled change. The socialist challenge induced conservatives to bring a core liberal concept, limited power, to the fore of conservative ideology. It was placed in a position immediately adjacent to and protective of the conservative core of organic change, in the form of limiting a concentration of power in the hands of the state. In addition, the idea of a self-motivated individual, exercising independence and force of character shored up by private property, replaced the more complacent notion of a deferential community that had sustained conservatism in the past. None the less, conservative continuity was preserved because individuals were still subject to inevitable social and psychological laws beyond human control, and were not the choice-exercising agents liberals favoured. That inevitability was mediated not only by a conception of organic growth, but by a substantive cultural preference for a social world populated by 20

Ibid. 195, Italics in original.

356

Tfte Adaptability of Conservatism

individuals of natural strength and ability.21 In the late nineteenth century this appeal to the principles of Social-Darwinism-cumstruggle was increasingly becoming a conservative feature.22 Many of these conservative counter-attacks on socialism were inspired by the writings of W. H. Mallock, one of the few individuals who devoted most of his opus to a considered attack on socialism in order to clarify conservative principles, and whose ideas percolated into rum-of-the-century conservative ideology by being23 frequently reproduced in Conservative Central Office literature, Mallock was an explicit and early example of the conservative response to late nineteenth-century socialism, either of the Marxist or state-socialist variety, singling out the socialist concentration on equality, decontested as economic equality, as a specific target for attack. For Mallock, the one 'peculiar doctrine on which Socialism rests' and which distinguished it from all other systems, was that 'Ability will continue to exert itself as heretofore, when almost every motive to exertion is taken away from it/24 Examining the Fabian variant, Mallock concluded that socialism proposed numerous measures for the national ownership of the means of production—expropriation on his terms—with the intention of supplying collectively the full range of goods that people required, with the state as employer,25 For Mallock this was adjacent to a conception of human nature for which human ability was fundamentally similar, and the human readiness to work was sustainable irrespective of outcome,26 In contradistinction, Mallock emphasized the indispensability of differential ability to set the wheels of the economy moving. Like all conservatives, he appealed to 'permanent facts of nature'. One of those was the need to labour, for 'the task-master of man is nature'.27But there was another natural faculty, indeed a natural monopoly —ability, which developed only under special circumstances, and which constituted a practical reality without which the national income would shrink.28 21 22

The Case Against Socialism, 238. See B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895-J914 (London, 1960). 23 See D, J. Ford, 'W. H. Mallock and Socialism in England, 1880-1918', in K. D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), 319. M W. H. Mallock, Studies of Contemporary Superstition (London, 1895), 268. On Mallock's notion of ability see J. N, Peters, 'Anti-Socialism in British Politics c.1900-22: The Emergence of a Counter-Ideology', D.Phil, thesis (Oxford, 1992), 142-8. 2S Mallock, Contemporary Superstition, 235-43. 24 W. H. Mallock, Labour and the Popular Welfare (London, 1894), 291-2. 27 x Ibid. 229. Mallock, Contemporary Superstition, 254-8.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 357 Mallock plainly exhibited the conservative morphological appeal to the extra-human sanctification of the social order, but the salient aspects of that order were now psychological and economic. In the early 1880s he had concentrated on the advocacy of a scientific approach to the study of society: 1 attach such importance to the study of social science ... it should rest on the facts of the human character', which would be henceforth established beyond doubt.29 Those facts enabled the injection of psychological insights into political philosophy. They centred on the study of human motive, and identified that motive as selfishness, or self-interest.30 Thus individualism was superficially decontested, in similar fashion to the Benthamite utilitarians, as the pursuit of gain. But the theory lacked the implicit egalitarianism of utilitarianism. To the contrary, the very notion of gain was a 'desire for some kind of inequality'. The science of human motive led inexorably to the following conclusion; 'the cause of wealth and progress is the genius and enterprise of individuals ... brought to the surface by the prizes offered through a sense of social inequality'. Furthermore, 'the accumulative instincts are as natural to man as are the philoprogenetive'.31 As Mallock wrote elsewhere, a law greater than Parliament's 'is human nature itself, and its laws are those by which all human civilisation is compelled to construct itself—the laws of property, of inequality, and of obedience'.32 The decoding of this creed is instructive. Following socialist practice, Mallock responded with an attempt to construct a true social science. In determining the extra-human sanctifications of the social order, he took out multiple indemnity. First, he endorsed the economic 'truth' of the older Malthusian view, according to which 'it is impossible to attribute to any alterable condition of society, and especially to anything alterable in the position of the rich, any considerable part of the evils that afflict the poor'.33 Conservatives, it is worth noting, were not averse to raising the issue of uncontrolled population increase in public discussion. During a debate on assisting the urban poor, one Member of Parliament epitomized the core of conservatism when warning that 'what is 29 ^y_ JLJ Mallock, 'Civilization and Equality', Contemporary Review, 40 (1881), 660. 30 W. H. Mallock, 'A Missing Science', Contemporary Review, 40 (1881), 950. 31 Mallock, 'Civilization', 666, 667, 668. 32 W. H. Mallock, 'The Philosophy of Conservatism', Nineteenth Century, 8 (1880), 746. 33 W. H, Mallock, 'How to Popularize Unpopular Political Truths', National Review, 6 (1885), 227.

358 The Adaptability of Conservatism going on under the operation of natural laws should not be interfered with; it is better to allow it to proceed, rather than to interfere with it by artificial laws'.34 Mallock was saying much the same thing when he claimed that 'the lot of the poor is not, as such, a fit subject of any commiseration. It is the normal type of human life.'35 Second, Mallock bolstered a psychology based on observation of human behaviour with the more traditional conservative invocation of instincts, in this case for the acquisition of property. The location of self-interest in an immediately adjacent position to the conservative core abetted the assimilation of an individualist political economy into conservative thinking. It was matched by a second adjacent concept appended to the core: 'inequality is the effect, or the expression of something that has been most permanent in human character itself. As for change, it was remarkably harnessed to the idea of progress, but only because progress was restricted to the material and technical improvements considered part of the capitalist ethos Mallock was promoting. The lesson Mallock wished to impart was that 'it will be found to be a universal law, that all progress, all advance from savagery, all permanent alleviation of human suffering, is accomplished by the agency of the superior minority'.36 All this did not imply the adoption of radical reformist perspectives. Indeed, Mallock's alter ego, young Mr Seacorts, did not depart from the typical conservative naturalistic conception of organic continuity: 'You look upon inequality as a upas tree to be destroyed; whereas it is only the elm-tree on which the vine of life is to be trained.'37 In 1914 Mallock reiterated the point emphatically: Conservatism, as a protest against reform... is not a protest against change. It is a protest only against change in the organic structure of society. So defined, it stands for the rights of indi\ridual property, property being taken to include not only land and capital, but all the incomes which, under a system of individual ownership, society does as a matter of fact enable various individuals to earn by the exercise of their various capacities.

Mallock went on to assert that 'Conservatism, then, in this larger sense—in which sense it is often called Individualism—represents the rights of individual property as justified by their concrete 34 35 36 37

S. Gedge, Parliamentary Debates (2 Apr. 1889), 1462-3. W. H. Mallock, Classes and Masses (London, 1896), 40. Mallock, 'A Missing Science', 943, 952-3. Mallock, 'Civilization', 659.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

359

38

results.' His individualism was not endemic to conservative thought but the reflection of the current, if embattled, state of affairs by which ability and progress were best served. The natural oligarchy after which Mallock hankered took the liberal individualist notion of personal excellence, as the mainstream of social progress, to the logical extreme that only a cultural preference for inequality could dictate, Hobson took Mallock to task for treating ability and labour as if they were separable productive powers, and for confusing ordinary men of property with inventive geniuses, overestimating the value of their organizing skills. For the much more egalitarian Hobson, ability was distributed throughout a socio-economic system, and throughout 'the whole organic structure of a business',39 Hobson's employment of 'organic', as an interdependent and vital conception of human relationships, was far removed in its meaning from the historical organic growth to which conservatives subscribed. Mallock's refusal to allow even for a limited concept of equality, in the form of equality of opportunity,40 served as a further clear demarcator between the competing ideological families. The conservative perspective had shifted to viewing society as an organization primarily for the production, secondarily for the distribution and consumption of goods, and did so under the impact first of liberal, and then socialist, theories. Mallock reacted to socialism entirely as an economic doctrine rather than an ethical one,41 reflecting the heavy Fabianstresson economics, and by doing so assisted in projecting capitalism into the substantive heart of the conservative ideology of his age. This also served the purpose of restricting the range of concepts that an anti-socialist doctrine would have to offset. It is, however, misleading to suggest that, because he had previously defended the landed aristocracy, the rise of new wealth and business created a real conflict in Mallock's thought.42 The morphological characteristics of conservatism provided continuity in supporting whatever existing order seemed most likely to resist unnatural and uncontrolled change.

38 W. H. Mallock, Social Reform: As Related to Realities and Delusions (London, 1914), 375-6, 39 J, A. Hobson, 'Mr. Mallock as a Political Economist', Contemporary Review', 73 (1898), 528-39. 40 Mallock, Critical Examination, 253-77. 41 See e.g. Mallock, Contemporary Superstition, 235-8, 42 Ford, 'Mallock and Socialism'", 318-19.

360

The Adaptability of Conservatism (c) PARRYING LIBERAL ADVANCES

Parallel battles were of course still being fought with liberals, and one chosen ground of confrontation was the issue of tariff reform versus free trade. Conservatives saw in the protection of industry through preferential tariffs a means of promoting the interests of manufacture and commerce which increasingly sustained the Conservative party, and of ensuring social harmony by minimizing the unemployment consequent upon the opening of Britain to highly competitive external markets. It was furthermore a means of fostering the emotive appeal to imperial dominion with its notions of sectarianism ('our own kinsfolk') and national grandeur ('the great inheritance which your ancestors have left to you'). Like all ideologies, conservatism made direct appeal to the passions. In addition, conservatives who had inherited their traditional concern for welfare measures directed at the underprivileged, had now to compete against a growing tide of social reform policies emanating from progressive groups. Tariff reform promised to raise sums for social reform without the heavy redistributionary taxation that was anathema to those who wished to preserve existing property rights.43 In particular, the protection versus free trade controversy was in Chamberlain's hands one in which conservatives reasserted their opposition to economic individualism by attempting to capture from the progressives the high ground of 'collectivism'*—decontested loosely as state controlled socio-economic policy—although to a large extent it obtained its shape from being a concerted counterattack on the pre-1908 official policy of the Liberal party. As against those who regarded free trade as an expression of natural relationships among people and the working out of the maxims of political economy, the tariff reformers counterposed their version of extra-human legitimation: 'a scientific, a reasonable transposition of taxation'.45 Poised against them, the liberals were equipped with a perimeter decontestation of liberty as free trade, which presented itself in the interests of an expanding internationalist capitalism and as an assertion of the anti-monopolistic spirit that denounced concentrations 43

See Ecdeshall, English Conservatism, 127. The quotations from J. Chamberlain appear on pp. 145-6. See also E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (London, 1995), 11-23, 248-53. 44 See A. Sykes, Tariff Reform in British Politics 1903-1913 (Oxford, 1979), 2; Green, Crisis, 20-1. 45 Chamberlain, quoted in Ecdeshatt, English Conservatism, 144.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

361

of power, as a guarantee of lower prices and hence of the greater welfare of the working classes, and as the promoter of universal co-operation and peace among nations. For a while, in the first years of this century, two notions, each peripherally marginal to the ideological structure of its proponents, served as a focus and point of negative contact of conservatives and liberals. Because the old successes of liberalism had been identified so closely with the doctrine of free trade, it was an obvious target for conservatives to single out against a re-ascendent liberalism. Even though the period saw the rise of the new liberalism, for which free trade was but one means (as it later appeared, a dispensable one) to other social and economic ends, all ideological wings of the Liberal party seemed to unite over it. Though the Conservative party continued to espouse tariff reform despite Chamberlain's defeat within the party in 1903, it failed to become a successful focus for conservative pre-war ideology. This indicates that conservatives were off-target in what they perceived to be a response to the central issues of the day, and that their mirrors were beaming into the conservative centre a reflection of what was becoming increasingly marginalized in liberal thought. As Sykes has observed, tariff reform was designed as 'a single policy to solve a multitude of problems' capable of responding 'to changing circumstances by changes of emphasis'.46 In ideological terms it rearranged its conceptual units through the shift from 1907 onwards of conservatives away from a protection versus free trade position to one of protection versus socialism. The cultural constraints that imposed this new stance emanated from the increasing combativeness of the Liberal Administration in seeking to push through radical measures of social reform linked with the 1909-10 Budget. Edwardian conservatives believed increasingly that the failure of free trade to raise revenue for social reform would necessitate socialist measures of nationalization and confiscation. Hence tariff reform became, under Balfour's leadership, merely a measure to stem the 'socialism' of higher graduated taxation, now seen by many as the main threat to the propertied classes, and not an instrument of alternative revenue for social reform.47 It was thus from that point on an inefficient, because indirect, response to the radical social reform policy of the Liberals. A centralist and apparently collectivist policy was pushed into the 4

* Sykes, Tariff Reform, 6.

47

Ibid, 202-6. Green (Crisis, 172), has noted that some conservative economists regarded the socialists as logical inheritors of many tenets of political economy.

362

The Adaptability of Conservatism

foreground of the conservative ideological structure while merely serving as substitute for the really adjacent concepts—inequality and economic individualism—that should have been pitted against liberal principles. The resistance to drastic change and the appeal to extra-human justifications of the social order was surrounded by a strange assembly of adjacent concepts. Power was interpreted as the national aggrandizement of Britain vis-a-vis its competitors. Inequality was decontested not only as the maintenance of the hierarchical institutional political structure, but as economic dirigisme by a government acting in the interests of the nation. But liberty and property continued to forge the mutually supportive alliance struck by nineteenth-century liberal thinkers, one far more central to the tariff reformers' ideological system than the collectivism to which Chamberlain paid lip-service.48 An almost atomistic individualism apparent in the attitudes towards businessmen and industrialists ran alongside a residual communitarianism in which duties and responsibilities were exercised by the ruling class. Conservatism was also, by dint of its homage to successful historical formulas, to pick up the themes that other ideologies had once introduced as efficacious ideas, and with which they had won ideological battles for political power, but had since discarded as either irrelevant, unjust, or unhelpful to the interests of new rising social groups. This lack of focus was the consequence of the internal confusion among conservatives, simultaneously trying to react to a host of different progressive positions, with the result that not a few espoused the cause of free trade themselves (as did many older liberals) as a defence against the new collectivism emanating from both new liberal and socialist ideologists. The success of conservative ideology is dependent on the emergence of a single, clear ideological rival whose systematic ideas will lend the semblance of substantive cohesion to the conservative morphological response. A period of multiple progressive positions coupled with the lack of a clearly perceived ideological rival, may render conservatism equivocal and relatively inarticulate. (d) CECIL'S CONSERVATISM

In 1911-12 the Home University Library published three books it had commissioned on liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. The 48

Sykes, Tariff Reform, 4,

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

363

first, by Hobhouse, became a minor classic; the second, by Ramsay MacDonald, was a respectable volume written by a reflective practising politician. The third, by Hugh Cecil, the first president of the conservative free-trading and libertarian British Constitution Association, owed its status to its appearance in the series and to the fact that it was one of the few general books expressly on conservatism published before 1914. As a portrayal of one major strand of conservative ideology it is, however, invaluable. Instructively, Cecil believed that 'what brought Conservatism into existence was the French Revolution... until 1790 there was not a definite Conservative Party nor even anything resembling a consciously held body of Conservative doctrine'. Reactiveness remained a permanent feature: 'Conservatism arose to resist Jacobinism, and that is to this day its most essential and fundamental characteristic.' The man credited by Cecil with forming that reactive ideology was Burke. It is no less instructive that Cecil found in Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution themes 'which permanently underlie Conservative thought, and are as full of interest today as when Burke wrote'.49 Here is the crux of the apparent 'paradox' the previous chapter has explored. How was it possible that Burke, who denied the existence of universal, abstract theories such as the 'rights of man', could be employed to reiterate the very type of substantive and timeless generalization his writings opposed? How could Cecil, in a book written 120 years later, simply reproduce entire paragraphs from Burke as representative of early twentieth-century conservatism? And how could Mallock formulate universal laws of human conduct as part of his conservative philosophy? Were those universal principles the basis for substantive core concepts as would be found in liberalism? The answer lies partly in the transformation of a diachronic view of social activity (and the social thought that emanates from such activity) into a core concept integrating each successive synchronic instance of conservatism, and partly in the identity of the causes that Burke as well as Cecil and Mallock were fighting against, resulting in a mirror-image illusion of universality. Burke's famous formulation of society as a contract between past, present, and future, coupled with metaphors of growth, promoted the concept of diachronic organic continuity central to a conservative reading of history.50 And the 'metaphysical' attack of 49 50

Cecil, Conservatism, 39, 249, 48. Icdeshall has observed, referring in similar terms to Burke's mistrust of reason: 'The canonization of Burke is central to the retrospective task of establishing the continuity of doctrinal scepticism.' (English Conservatism, 3.)

364

The Adaptability of Conservatism

the French revolutionaries on the established order had resonance in the fear elicited by the socialist and new liberal proposals for radical reform, both impugning the inegalitarian, anti-rational, and imperfeetionist views of society entertained by conservatives in the two periods, and capable of being contained by an appeal to natural change. The Burkean tradition in Britain was thus better equipped than some of its Continental counterparts to take conservatism into a period of increasing social change. German conservatism, for instance, had been much preoccupied with the re-establishment of the original ideals of a golden age and utilized a notion of revolution that was patently restorative of values perceived as fundamental and permanent: property, rights, patriotism, and religion, while its anti-libertarianism was bolstered by fears of popular sovereignty. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that progress was referred to as a goal of German conservatism, though heavily hedged with historical continuity as a planned extension of past practices and values.51 The French ultramontanism that followed the Revolution was similarly backward-looking.52 Cecil has often been depicted as a libertarian anti-statist and an extreme individualist.53 This is an overstatement which fails to do justice to the peculiar conservatism of his creed. For a libertarian he felt curiously bound by norms, proclivities, and institutions which determined the range of proper human conduct. He emphatically insisted that 'the championship of religion is... the most important of the functions of conservatism', while more secular libertarians were stressing the centrality of economics and human enterprise. He spoke of 'natural conservatism' as a 'tendency of the human mind', suggesting that change was both fearful and tiring,54 and lending his weight to those who represented conservatism as a normal psychological trait. Like Mallock, he endorsed a modicum of progress in science, the arts, and social life, but demanded restraints, in Burkean fashion, to make progress efficient and 'appropriate to circumstance'. He detected in patriotism a 'strong sense of corporate personality', and wrote approvingly of Burke's conception of human society as an organism: 'the sense that the state is a mysterious organism may almost be called the keynote of Burke's political philosophy/55 That organicism possessed two 51 Vierhaus, 'Konservativ, Konservatismus', in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 534, 538, 564. 52 Cp. O'Sullivan, Conservatism, 32-7. 53 See e.g. Greenleaf, Ideological Heritage, 287-95. 54 5S Cecil, Conservatism, 9-10. Ibid. 14, 36, 48, 54.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 365 components: a unifying and focal social framework, and a defiant repudiation of the rationalist approach to human nature and politics. Central to Cecil's brand of conservatism was a dichotomy between ethics and economics. Throughout his book traditional and 'modern' conservative themes are intertwined. While he would have gone along with Mallock in identifying an instinct to 'promote industry and thrift by the possibility of acquiring and accumulating property', he decried selfishness and self-interest—those stalwarts of the political economy doctrine—as unethical. And while he objected that it was 'most perverse to say that our Lord was 56a socialist', he condemned the competitive system as unchristian. Whether or not the existence of the two conservative traditions within the thought of a single person suggests inconsistency, and glosses over a more fundamental morphological unity, is a question that requires further investigation. While acknowledging that it was unfortunate that so many financial rewards displayed no ethical merit, Cecil was adamant that the law of supply and demand regulated earnings, so that 'ethics are beside the point; desert is irrelevant; the pecuniary value of exertions is determined by wholly non-ethical economic causes'.57 It was as if a true conservative, although accepting the primacy of religious teachings, was forced by the scientific laws of economics to insulate market relationships from the superior call of ethics, lest society be required to pay a heavy penalty. This enclave of 'natural sinfulness' was often an integral part of the conservative religious world-view, reconciled to the necessary 'wickedness' of some social arrangements. Because 'the forces that make wealth are never ethical', both socialist and Christian ideals were inapplicable to that sphere. The next chapter will explore similar instances in which conservatives could endorse economic competition while railing against the personalized needs-orientated 'ultra-individualism' of progressives, which endangered the survival of the family—a traditional institution entrusted with the transmission of social morality. Behind such conservative compartmentalizations58 lay a conception of law thoroughly conservative. 'Within its own sphere' the state was concerned with the maintenance of authority, and was owed obedience. Irrespective of its breadth, that sphere constituted an area where disobedience to authority was a crime, and entailed the right to punish. Hence criminality was defined as the transgression of existing legal arrangements. Because, for example, the 56

Ibid. 119-20, 91, 117, 89.

57

Ibid. 124.

58

See Ch. 10 below.

366 The Adaptability of Conservatism heavy taxation of property had no legal justification, It would be rightly called confiscating', and if its proceeds would be used to benefit particular classes, 'philanthropy will soon degenerate into thieving'. The mark of criminality could thus be extended to the pursuit of all policies lacking sanctification in the existing legal system. Justice was narrowly construed by Cecil as having a simple feature: it 'only requires that no one should be injured or cheated'— on the current legal understanding of those harmful activities. Hence, when the state acted for the common good, it could not do so in ways that contravened justice; it could not, for example, treat people in a manner proportionate to their services, let alone needs. 'Justice knows nothing of any special claim arising from distress.' Tellingly, Cecil's attack on the wayward logic of old-age pensions was precisely the reason that welfare theorists marshalled for granting them. If they were paid 'as a due justly owed on account of the services rendered by the recipients of such pensions, we ought to pay it to all old people from the richest to the poorest'.59 Cecil specifically rebutted the liberal and socialist extension of justice to cover a redistributionary policy that backed up conceptions of human development, individuality, or welfare. He dismissed the entire thrust of progressive social reform, while allowing for the continuing pursuit of alternative social reform measures. Ostensibly, he claimed, 'Conservative social reform need not... proceed on purely individualist lines. There is no antithesis between Conservatism and Socialism, or even between Conservatism and Liberalism.' But behind the semasiological term of social reform lay a 'rigorous adherence to justice' which debarred the redistributionary measures central to the new liberal and moderate socialist ideologies. Instead, the concept of equality was introduced and decontested in a particular way. It entailed the notion of 'a fair equivalent being due for good done' but was 'only part of the conception of justice under certain conventional conditions, as in the playing of a game. Where there is no convention, where there i s . . . no implied promise, neglect to help the deserving or the suffering, however cruel or however ungrateful, is not unjust.'60 Liberals, too, as we have seen, have a notion of legality, but it was adjacent to the core concept of responsible and accountable power. Cecil's implicit accountability was not to a democratically elected set of alterable institutions and the norms they embodied, but to common notions of entitlement and prevailing ideas of legal innocence.61 That is why he could contend that 'it is not true that w 60

Cecil, Conservatism, 153, 168, 180. 61 Ibid. 195-6, 198, 174-5. Ibid. 173,166.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 367 a poor man has the same claim to be relieved by the State from ill fortune as the rich man has to be left by the State in undisturbed enjoyment of good fortune'. When Cecil maintained that 'no proposition in morals is clearer than that you are not entitled to commit one injustice for the sake of remedying another', he conveniently ignored the fact that this statement masked the precedence given to an earlier established norm of justice over a later one. Such precedence was demonstrated by Cecil's assertion that 'the simple consideration that it is wrong to inflict an injury upon any man suffices to constitute a right of private property where such property already exists'. It was further upheld by a view of a historical constitutional providence watching over the English people.62 That notion of established law adjacently enshrined the concept of change, decontested as controlled and natural. It was noted earlier that Cecil accepted the Tory inheritance of an activist state. Does this square with his libertarian reputation? On the one hand, Cecil appeared to promote some libertarian views. He was a strong respecter of private property. He saw the state as no more than the sum of the individuals that composed it, an older liberal and Benthamite conception. He asserted that the state depended on the character of the individuals who constituted it, and that character would be weakened 'by the habit of looking to state help'.63 Yet when insisting on the restricted role of the state, he advanced typically conservative arguments for that containment. First, politics concerned but one area of human activity, the more important being 'a centre of spiritual life in human nature which lies beyond the sphere of the State'. Second, 'nothing is more certain than that the mechanism of human society will only express human character; it will not regenerate it'.64 On the tariff reform issue, while he departed from dominant conservative views and feared that protection would let socialism in by the back door, his advocacy of free trade was shored up by an historicist explanation severed from libertarian argument: 'the conservative, looking back to years of success and prosperity that have followed the adoption of Free Trade, is indisposed to make a change'. On the other hand, Cecil identified within the tariff reform movement some of the Tory themes we have mentioned above: patriotic sympathy, the guaranteeing of order and stability. Above all, he observed on tariff reform: 'whether we think this particular instance of State interference wise or foolish, it is for our present purpose more important to emphasise that a policy of State interference is not, as such, alien from Conservatism'. The concept of the state was moved 62

Ibid, 196-7, 120, 220.

63 Ibid. 162, 189.

M

Ibid. 161, 163, 91.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

to a position far closer to the conservative centre than libertarians would have tolerated. As Cecil reminded his readers, Spencer was as much an enemy of Toryism as of socialism in his opposition to the wielding of state authority.65 The concept of liberty, though close to the centre of Cecil's ideological morphology, did not occupy as privileged a place as it did in liberal variants, let alone libertarianism.66 It was restricted to 'personal liberty', and operated within the framework of a constitution that valued liberty as a symptom of historical continuity, and searched for 'a compromise between liberty and authority', both concepts being accorded equal status, with religion securing against the excesses of either. Liberty attended upon order and constitutionality, the constitution being 'the greatest contribution that the English people have made to human progress'. Cecil's 'liberty' was therefore associated with that of the Tory, organic conservative for whom, as the American conservative Rossiter has observed, liberty is to be preserved and defended, whereas for the liberal it is to be improved and enlarged.67 In particular, the Tory conservative decontested liberty within the legal category of existing liberties'—another means of securing the conservative core. Cecil also distanced himself from the concept of individualism as understood by 'the old-fashioned individualist Liberalism of the early nineteenth century'. His particular decontesting of conservative principles was most probably constrained by the events of 1909-11, in which, from his perspective, a rampant liberalism wielding the axes of budgetary and legislative reform was 'much more likely to transgress the principles of liberty than Conservatism' and under which the threat to the House of Lords undermined the servants of the public good in the name of sectional interests.68 In sum, Cecil's conservatism was marshalled to contain the radical excesses of the Edwardian era, and did this by mirrorimaging the liberal understanding of social reform, liberty, and progress and the socialist preoccupation with welfare and the common good. All these concepts were reined in through constitutional and 65 Cecil, Conservatism, 193, 195,169. For a detailed discussion of Cecil's views on the state see J, Meadowcroft, Conceptualizing the State: Innovation and Dispute in British Political Thought 1880-1914 (Oxford, 1995), 89-112. 66 Rodner overstresses the position of individual liberty at the heart of Cecil's political philosophy. Substantive concepts of that nature are not, as we have argued, at the centre of conservatism (W. S. Rodner, 'Conservatism, Resistance and Lord Hugh Cecil', History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 531). 67 Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 58. 68 Cecil, Conservatism, 246-8, 218, 232.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 369 conventional (religious and political) constraints that assisted in their prudent and tested reformulation. (e) AMERICAN CONSERVATISM: PARALLEL THOUGHTS

In Clinton Rossiter's able, if parti-pris, survey of American conservative thought, Conservatism in America, considerable space is devoted to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinking. Rossiter presented an excellent discussion of the ways in which basic political concepts have been decontested by conservatives, though without the analysis necessary to integrate it into a general theory. His findings corroborate the trends discovered in the British versions. American thinkers appear to be more outspoken and direct in articulating their political beliefs without some of the window-dressing with which their British counterparts decorate and disguise them. Between the 1880s and 1920s American conservatism demonstrated the same twofold tendency as in Britain, except that the economic libertarian variant was more powerful than the traditionalist and historicist one in the practical political field. And unlike some other studies of American conservatism such as Kirk's/9 Rossiter was prepared to concede that the laissezfaire capitalists, as he called them, were part of the conservative family, even when he was unsympathetic towards their views. Rossiter astutely observed that a major struggle was over political terms: 'While the Left fought for social reform in state and nation with words like democracy, liberty, equality, progress, opportunity, and individualism, the Right struck back from its privileged position with the very same words/70 The mirror-image technique in this case involved not a confrontation of opposites, but an attempt to wrest the decontestation of the main political concepts out of progressive hands by endowing them with meaning that rendered them safe for conservatism. Democracy, for example, was decontested as laissez-faire capitalism, that is, it was stapled to notions of economic liberty that suggested open markets of talent and enterprise.71 Equality was permitted to make an appearance as equality of economic opportunity, or as equality in self-reliance. Liberty, however, was positioned contingently closer to the conservative core than equality. Libertarian conservatives attached it *9 R. Kirk, The Conservative Mind (London, 1954).

70 Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 132. The following pages rely on Rossiter's investigation on pp. 132-70. 71 But see Ch. 10, p, 409, on democracy.

370 The Adaptability of Conservatism firmly to the ownership of private property ('the essence of liberty') while simultaneously securing it as a legally enshrined right. The language of freedom of contract continued to be employed in the United States some time after it had fallen into relative disrepute in Britain, and its sanctity was upheld by the courts as central both to personal liberty and the right of private property. Looming like a gigantic puppet-master behind all American political thought is the idea of the constitution. We have already noted in Chapter 6 its powerful influence on contemporary American liberals, as a defining framework of justice, supplying an overlapping consensus and enforcing standards of human conduct. American liberals have, however, endowed the constitution with a neutrality that ultimately serves their own conceptions of liberty and rights, an apolitical method of providing guiding rules through rational interpretation according to prevailing moral codes. Conservatives, too, venerate the constitution, but for them it is a particular historical embodiment of proven political wisdom, not a mechanism for extracting the considered judgements of the current generation.72 In one sense, this boils down to a different view of what values are incorporated in the constitution: as we have seen, liberals are too prone to overlook that their understanding of the constitution implicitly invokes certain goods and preferences, disregarding countless examples of its ideological flexibility. Conservatives do not have that problem with acknowledging the substantive contents they read into the constitution. For that reason they can regard the founding fathers, irrespective of whether or not they were radicals at the time, as the repositories of their version of the American political tradition to which all must turn for guidance. As Rossiter has noted, 'the laissez-faire conservatives transformed the Constitution into a second Holy Writ. The framers were converted posthumously to rugged individualists, and their handiwork was placed side by side with the Ten Commandments.' Most importantly, of course, the constitution served as the historically consecrated extra-human guarantor of the social order for all subsequent generations. The elevation of 'a strong, dignified, independent judiciary' over the legislature and the executive was symptomatic of that attitude.73 The pursuit of happiness of the early declarations of rights was rephrased as economic individualism and, though libertarian conservatives adopted the idea of progress, they did so in order to promote the existing order under which alone progress was possible. 72 73

See W. Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Chicago, 1971), 47. Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 146, 147-8.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

371

As with British conservatives who subscribed to progress, it appeared in a distinctly materialistic guise, hitched to economic enterprise,74 The participatory aspects of democracy were eschewed and the inequality of ability received the same airing as Mallock had accorded it. The old aristocracies were simply replaced by hierarchies of talent and achievement. Despite their appeal to libertarian principles, now suitably 'deradkalized',75 the laissez-faire conservatives continued to espouse the defining morphological characteristics of conservatism. Though their language departed from analogies with organic growth, their ideas concerning change remained consistent with a restrained and orderly movement, opposed to any socialist notion of radical reform, let alone revolution. In addition, they referred to 'acquisitive instincts' in describing human nature and harnessed that attribute to a belief in 'a higher law that dictated individual conduct'.76 The cultural constraints that directed American conservatism into those paths had much to do with the extreme individualism and wealth-orientation of a society that allowed virtually unrestricted economic growth in an underpopulated country and transformed capitalism into a distinctively American ideology.77 Unlike Europe, where traditional landed aristocracies still attempted to carry the conservative banner, and where notions of class and responsibility forged conservative thinking on 'one nation', the American economic experience channelled most influential conservatisms at the turn of the century into capitalist vessels. The ubiquitous Locke, playing a far greater role in the United States than in Britain, could be made to work for conservative views on property as much as for liberal views on liberty and became, in an important sense, the father of the founding fathers. Beyond that, Spencer's well-documented influence on American political thought was pervasive. American conservatives welcomed his 'scientific' system as a justification of their thoughts and deeds and as an alternative extra-human underpinning of a social order— no longer simply predicated on religious precepts—in which the courageous individualistic economic pioneer figured as a cultural hero. Capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie echoed the language of the survival of the fittest and were ensnared by the biological justification of competition that Spencer seemed to provide, the objective endorsement of their ideological values and aspirations. As Hofstadter put it, 'conservatism and 74

75 76 Ibid. 152, 161. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 150. See R. G. McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (New York, 1964). 77

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

Spencer's philosophy walked hand in hand'. The dissemination of his views in popular ideological form surpassed anything comparable in Britain, symbolizing 'the harmony of a new science with the outlook of a business civilization'.78 Foremost among the Spencerian Social Darwinists was W. G. Sumner who, in a much quoted passage, stated: 'Let it be understood that we cannot go out of this alternative; liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members.'79 Sumner interpreted liberty as the non-constraint of individual actions, and linked it both with the direct ability to participate in the process of the struggle for survival and with a natural differentiation of talent that was the product of natural selection, for which equality was a perverse counter-current. He identified wealth as the outward sign of that process, much as Calvin had done some centuries before. Hence private property defined the parameters of the concept of liberty.80 The concept of rights, on the other hand, was removed from Sumner's conservative ideological cluster to a marginal morphological position. Rather than supporting conservative precepts through a traditional structure of rights, the law of natural selection was positioned in its stead to impose an iron and immovable control on human conduct. All conventional human rights were simply contingent expressions of that general law. As with the libertarian conservatives, democracy was transformed into a set of rules by which the able could rise on merit to the top. The adjacent concept of social structure was atomized by relieving it from interdependence and corresponding ties of general mutual obligation: 'A free man in a free democracy has no duty whatever towards other men of the same rank and standing, except respect, courtesy, and goodwill.' On the extrahuman foundations of the social order, Sumner was emphatic: 'God and Nature have ordained the chances and conditions of life on earth once and for all. The case cannot be reopened.'81 As for the other core conservative concept, organic change, Sumner, like other evolutionists, believed it sustained gradualism.82 78

R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, 1955), 45-6,49. Quoted in ibid, 51. See M, Foley, American Political Ideas: Traditions and Usages (Manchester, 1991), 35-6, 81 W, G. Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1883), quoted in E. Ions (ed.), Political and Social Thought in America 1870-1970 (London, 1970), 62, 66. m See Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 56-63. 79 80

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism

373

(/} LIBERTARIANISM REAPPRAISED

Can the discussion so far contribute to a reassessment of libertarianism, previously examined in relation to liberalism? To what extent is it a separate ideological position or are there sufficient grounds to include it within the family of conservative ideologies? Inasmuch as libertarianisrn evinces a clear substantive conceptual core other than adherence to controlled, or resistance to radical, change, it cannot be a conservative doctrine. Individualist anarchism is one such variant. However, inasmuch as conservatives support libertarian positions in particular temporally and spatially limited contexts, they may appear to be substantive libertarians, but the concepts they employ in libertarian fashion may upon closer inspection merely be contingently adjacent to the conservative core. It may also be the case that some libertarian ideologies which, as we have seen, fail to display the full minimal complement and arrangement of concepts to count as liberal, will fail on the same criterion to be conservative. In sum, libertarianism appears to be a borderline phenomenon upon which the judgement of the analyst of ideologies may itself be essentially contestable. The evidence for the following conclusions is mainly that already presented in Chapter 7, though Hayek's 'Why I am not a Conservative'83 requires specific consideration. It has already emerged that Cecil is no candidate for a stake in the no man's land between libertarianism and conservatism. On his own admission he adopted free trade because it was the established economic pattern, thus installing liberty in a position adjacent to the core of organic change, and free trade as a perimeter expression of that adjacent concept Spencer, on the other hand, remained a loyal champion of a negatively decontested liberty, as a test of the efficacy of social institutions rather than as their retroactive justification, even when the ideas he espoused were employed in later life to inhibit the direction public policy was taking. Thus his genuine endorsement of a particular version of liberty overlapped with the ideological proclivities of conservatives, who harnessed such substantive concepts to buttress other, more fundamental, views. Whereas Spencer simply superimposed outdated libertarian cultural constraints on his conceptual configurations, liberty-supporting conservatives attempted to tap the anti-progressive counter-culture of their own times to reassert the values of natural growth and order, and argued the case for the continuity 83

F. A. Hayek, 'Why I am not a Conservative', in Constitution, 397-411.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

of the practices and frameworks they advocated. This nuanced distinction is important. There are unquestionably key conservative principles in evidence in libertarian thought. The first and most salient is a belief in the self-balancing and natural evolution of a social order which, as Spencer saw it, underpins a conception of natural justice. Hayek similarly talked of a spontaneous order, which on closer observation referred to a balance independent of human design. While libertarians interpret such balance as a dynamic equilibrium, capable of producing a progressive momentum, and thus distance themselves from those conservatives whose conception of order tends to the static end of the analytical continuum, they coalesce with conservatives in warning against the consequences of human intervention in the social evolutionary process, seemingly an act of rational and volitional control but in fact immensely damaging for its miscomprehension of the forces sustaining society. By upholding the core conservative feature concerning the extra-human sanctification of the social order, irrespective of its quasi-contingent substantive characteristics, libertarians gained a foothold in the conservative camp as a matter of underlying ideological morphology. The second conservative feature embedded in libertarian thought is the disinclination to run sufficiently hard with the times. Though the Red Queen's famous advice to Alice has been converted into a conservative motto, the second part of her sentence is too often forgotten. It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place' is immediately followed by Lewis Carroll's warning to complacent conservatives: 'If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.'84 Spencer was backwardlooking, in that he did not wish to go anywhere else; Hayek protested rather unconvincingly that he was not, and that he supported evolution and change. Nevertheless, both related favourably to ideational golden ages, or golden practices, that had been, or were in danger of being, abandoned. Hayek termed himself 'an unrepentant Old Whig—with the stress on the "old"'. His view of change was close to a counter-revolutionary one. As he admitted, 'what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping-away of the obstacles to free growth', obstacles that mainly emanated from the socialists. And he described progress as cumulative growth.85 84 L. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Works of Lewis Carroll (London, 1965), 136. 85 Hayek, 'Why I am not a Conservative', 409, 399. See also Ch. 7 above.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 375 Hayek's purported faith in uncontrolled change was greatly weakened by entrusting it to the market, in which he had supreme confidence as a controlling and self-regulating mechanism.86 He distanced himself from what he perceived was the conservative fondness for authority, but did not appreciate the need to decode that fondness as an instance of the wider search for authoritativeness, which, in Hayek's own case, was provided by the laws of supply and demand, He correctly identified a conservative (and socialist) penchant for moral coercion that was in his opinion nonliberal,87 It is indeed, though not necessarily non-libertarian. Hayek was not prepared to take into account the alternative forms of economic coercion that libertarians use to control human conduct, nor to accept that the rules of the market may assume a moral dimension too. Though he believed that liberal elitism advocated an acquired, not ascribed, status, he none the less patently endorsed inegalitarianism.88 Hayek's respect for evolution and the advance of knowledge, undoubtedly features of many progressive ideologies, was contained within strict interpretative frameworks. That respect cannot on its own be sufficient to dissociate him from the strong morphological similarities he shared with conservatives. Both he and Cecil opted for the protection of existing at the expense of future rights. Hayek in particular invoked the rule of law to uphold existing arrangements and, especially, to prevent the coercion of individuals in exercising their traditional liberties. Both entertained an optimal ideological model which, in their opinions, was being eroded by radical and externally interposed ideas and policies. Indeed, the very reference to liberalism as a tradition is dangerously close to incorporating a conservative accumulation of certain political ideas as its defining features, though only when— as with Spencer and Hayek—specific decontestations of its core concepts were made to prevail over later variations. A third feature of conservatism may also be found in some libertarian versions, and it has not yet been discussed at length. Many commentators have identified the belief in the intellectual and moral imperfection of human nature as a central feature of conservatism.89 It does not deserve the status of a core concept because other conservatives have endorsed a human potential for adaptability and improvement, however limited. If imperfection implies 86

Ibid. 400. Hayek quoted far too selectively (529 n, 5} from Cecil's Conservatism in attempting to establish that conservatives oppose change as such, rather than uncontrolled change. 87 M Hayek, 'Why I am not a Conservative', 400-2. Ibid. 402-3. 89 See A. Quinton, Tfe Politics of Imperfection (London, 1978), 11.

376 The Adaptability of Conservatism imperfectibility and simply means a rejection of perfection, that view is shared by liberals as well as conservatives. Usually, though, conservatives mean more than that. They relate to fundamental weaknesses of character associated with doctrines of original sin; hence imperfection is the secular version of an older, predominantly religious, conservative outlook, suggesting that human beings, 'acting on their own uncontrolled impulses, will on the whole act badly'.90 The notion of imperfection in that sense is a static one, postulating a permanent cluster of capabilities incapable of improvement. If however we adopt the positional conservative perspective, a human chameleon will reflect whatever capacities he or she will have absorbed from their current cultural context. As Cecil observed in a remarkably ambiguous sentence: 'Human beings are so adaptable that what they are used to is ... pleasant to them/91 But they do of course become used to different things. Parallel to the idea of imperfectibility is the tendency to identify existing human defects, and they are no doubt legion, as constituting empirical evidence for the imperfectibility thesis, just as inequality is cited as a factual attribute of all societies. Here of course the particular conservative appeal to scientific facts, in the form of reliance on sense-evidence that may well mask particular conceptualizations of reality, is manifest yet again. Science, far from being an instrument through which human beings can mould their destinies, and far from being endowed with the falsifiability that many now take as essential to the scientific disposition, assumes the role of a higher, unchallengeable authority, the acceptance of which exempts people of collective responsibility for their deficient condition, irrespective of whether that condition is amenable to modification or not. Libertarians have often associated a policy of economic liberty with that of moral constraint, when they have shared the view of human beings as morally flawed. Constraint plays an important part in all conservative theories—it is certainly central to Burke's world-view—and it is illuminating to find libertarians such as Donisthorpe or E- S. P. Haynes applauding measures for public safety to be wielded by a strong government.92 The theoretical sophistication and ideational sincerity of Spencer and Hayek must be distinguished from a fourth conservative strand in libertarian thought, which arose not out of principled adherence to possibly defunct, or socially irrelevant, notions of liberty but out of a fear that entrenched interests were endangered 98 92

Quintan, Politics of Imperfection, 13. See above Ch. 7.

91

Cecil, Conservatism, 14,

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 377 by new ideological movements. The Liberty and Property Defence League was an immediate response to the harnessing by progressives of the state to redistributionary ends that would have weakened the power and social position of landowners, businessmen, and propertied groups. Prosperity, security, and property were the concepts immediately adjacent to the halting of undesirable change. Because not all members of society benefited from these values, nor did the LPDL labour to promote them universally, the liberty that accompanied those concepts was arguably not a core concept of these libertarians. Rather, it was the means to secure their sectional ends and to prevent the state from legislating in a manner harmful to them. To that extent, these libertarian variants were motivated not by an inviolable commitment to liberty but by an overriding concern with established property rights, and their conservatism lay in protecting social and political arrangements that would best contribute towards maintaining those historical and constitutional entitlements. Finally, a fifth attribute of modern conservatism relates to those permanent, or highly durable, aspects of progressive ideologies that libertarians have reflected in mirror-image fashion. The rationalism of both liberalism and socialism finds its antithesis among libertarians who resist the universalization of human knowledge in favour of its restricted social location, and who express scepticism about the planned utilization of certain forms of human understanding, namely, those that do not arise out of current unconstrained human relationships.93 The predilection of conservatives for 'concreteness' is one form their reaction takes. While it is difficult to locate sufficient morphological similarities between libertarianism and liberalism to conjoin them under one roof, there are plainly enough structural resemblances to allow for an interchange—though one crucially dependent on historical and cultural context—between libertarianism and conservatism. The unravelling of these neighbouring ideological systems has therefore to be left to the considered judgement of the analyst. As we have seen, this is no easy task. When is, one may ask, a refusal to countenance a radical interference with individual liberty of action overtaken by an obsession with the preservation of an order in which such interference is ruled out not for what it does, but for what it is? That is the dividing line. Whether we are dealing with a libertarianism that shares important features with conservatism, or whether we are dealing with a situational, or contextual, 93

See also Hayek, 'Why I am not a Conservative', 406-7,

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conservatism that happens to don the garb of libertarians, may differ in each instance and require some understanding of the individual thinkers and groups. There are enough examples of each kind, however, to conclude that they are not all members of the same ideological family. (g) CONSERVATISM AND PUBLIC DEBATE

In the previous chapter it was suggested that the mirror-image technique of conservatism not only reflects progressive ideological cores, but may erroneously or deliberately misinterpret them. It may fasten on to adjacent, even peripheral, concepts and beliefs while mispresenting them as core features of those progressive rivals. It may be useful to supply a few illustrations of these techniques as evident in actual political debate surrounding concrete issues. During the/in-de-siecle Sattelzeit the fear of an over-interventionist state had become a feature of conservatism despite its own previous utilization of the concept of the state to protect its ideological core. Conservatives resisted legislation which could both undermine organic change and introduce the heretical notion that people could shape their own fates in the face of the laws and modalities of human conduct. This was expressed in the growing confusion over the nature of the liberalism that conservatives had to resist, and the characterization of socialism both as liberalism's newest manifestation and as the embodiment of a destructive statism. Inasmuch as persistent and deliberate human legislative and administrative interference with the natural social order was believed by conservatives to strike at the very heart of their worldview, it was crucial to define progressive ideologies as primarily structured round that desire to interfere. Once the older, familiar, and, to a certain degree, trusted liberalism had been forsaken, conservatives made two moves. They traced the liberal metamorphosis to its abandonment of liberty, now replaced by state coercion, and collapsed the new liberalism and socialism into a single ideological form obsessed with a rampant statism that had to be contained and repulsed. Significantly, they accused liberals of not behaving according to conservative rules concerning ideological change, of not maintaining an organic commitment to tiieir own historic principles, an accusation that, ironically, new liberals would have denied. These themes are central to the political debate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It needs to be reiterated that

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 379 conservatives promoted many diverse substantive views, and that individual conservatives may not conform to some of the tendencies adumbrated below. That is, however, a general problem of ideological analysis, superimposed on the specific conservative feature of substantive conceptual diversity. If conservatives adopted a whole range of positions, both for and against social reform, they were all in their different ways attempting to foster or restore social order and ensure the optimal conditions for its continuing prevalence. Certainly, conservatives found it difficult to come to terms with the changing nature of liberalism. On the libertarian side, Earl Wemyss complained: Could any man on the Opposition Benches, soi-disant Liberals, say that the Liberals of the present day had any connection with the Liberalism of the Grays, Althorps, Russells or Palmerstons, or with the Liberalism defined by Macaulay, Cobden, Fawcett, and other distinguished men?.,. their words would live for ever as regarded what true Liberalism meant.94

And on the more traditional Tory side, Balfour clashed with Herbert Samuel in the Commons. 'I listened with pain and surprise to the hon. Gentleman', he reproached the advanced liberal. 'I thought he was an economist of the older school, I thought he carried on the traditions of Adam Smith, Ricardo, James Mill, John Mill, Bright, and Cobden.' 'Heaven forbid', was Samuel's quick, if somewhat sweeping, riposte. "There are very few of us to-day who share the hostility to interfering with the regulation of labour which was entertained by the Manchester school.' Balfour, sensing a debating victory, retorted: The doctrine which he now thanks Heaven he does not share ... was part of a general system of laissez faire,.. He separates himself from those distinguished individualists and advocates of freedom as they understood it, not with regret but with triumph... he may discover that the differences which separate him from hon. Gentlemen on this side of the House are not so profound as he appears... to imagine.*5

These very diverse reactions to the changing features of liberalism illuminate the dual nature of the conservative response, latching on to an older liberalism in order to rebut the new, or suggesting that the new was embracing an interventionisrn that Tories with a paternalistic social conscience could accept. But the more typical conservative reaction was to ditch the struggle with traditional liberalism in favour of a concerted attack on socialist ideas. Conservatives did not wish to suggest that the state had no role to 94 95

Earl Wemyss, Parliamentary Debates, Lords (4. Sept. 1895), 1679. A. J. Balfour and H. Samuel, Parliamentary Debates (18 Mar. 1908), 704-5.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

play, nor could they do so in view of their belief in the need to control human conduct. F. E. Smith rejected both the positions of libertarian conservatives and of the radical-socialist 'The Socialist has rushed to one extreme and the Individualist to the other/ Instead, he appealed to conservative 'empiricism' by urging conservatives to look 'at the needs of the people as they really are, and not as they are conceived to be by the ideologues of either extreme school of thought'.96 Socialism, however, was interpreted so as to maximize the conservative ability to organize conceptually to resist planned state intervention. Salisbury, when Conservative prime minister in 1890, excellently illustrates the conservative ideological strategy. While freely admitting the contested nature of socialism ('it is astonishing how many ideas are mixed up under this name of Socialism') he then immediately proceeded to decontest it: 'I take Socialism in its strict meaning to be for the State to do that which is usually done by private people for the sake of gain.'97 Salisbury was well versed in the morphological features of ideologies. Back in 1861 he had noted, disapprovingly, that 'the man who first connected the words "freedom" and "progress" with the word "democracy" did ... [an] inestimable service to the democratic cause'.* The conservative reduction of socialism to state intervention and control demonstrates the mirror-image technique in operation. It mistakenly promoted an adjacent concept of a rival ideology to core status, and then constructed an antithetical adjacent structure of its own to protect the conservative core. The state was never more tihan a means, and a controversial one at that, for socialist thinkers, as will be seen in Part IV. But many measures of social reform advanced by liberals in the years between 1906-1911 were condemned as socialistic, be it the feeding of school children, old-age pensions, or the 1909-10 redistributionary Budget. For conservatives, socialism was not merely state intervention; it was intervention of a peculiar kind: 'Socialism meant putting the manufacture and distribution of everything into the hands of the coiranunity; if it were adopted, it would destroy the mainspring of progress by sinking all individual effort/99 These arguments harnessed an older individualism to underpin the natural 96

F, E. Smith, 'State Toryism and Social Reform', in Unionist Policy and Other Essays (London, 1913), Quoted in Eccleshall, English Conservatism, 147-9.
The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 381 order of human motivation, much as Mallock had done. They were primarily instances of a conflict conducted on an ideological rather than party-political level, for socialism as an organized political force presented little threat in Britain at the time, and conservatives were more interested in insinuating that socialist ideas had seeped irretrievably into liberalism. Harold Cox, a notable representative of conservative libertarianism, repeatedly assailed the liberals for their blatant 'socialism', while surrounding his ideological core with concepts that were decontested to emphasize conservativelibertarian virtues. As against municipal responsibility for children, he asserted that the family unit would be weakened, drawing upon the notions of self-sufficiency and individual responsibility, whose purpose was to prevent children from constituting a burden on the public domain. The resort to an atomistic conception of society was utilized to counter socialist mutual concern, for 'in the long run they could only raise people by teaching them to raise themselves'.100 Old-age pensions had of course been supported by many conservatives, though most preferred a contributory to a non-contributory system. Those who objected, mainly libertarians, differentiated between 'two very distinct principles [socialism and individualism] on which they101 might proceed in approaching this question of old age pensions'. The duty for each person to provide for their old age was contrasted by Cox with the degrading destruction by the state of the independence of the poor through pensions. As against the organic theories of social structure that new liberals were disseminating, Cox insisted that between members of a society there was no obligation for mutual support. Self-control and independence were the operative human traits employed as concepts that strengthened the case for non-intervention in the condition of the people.102 Social Darwinists of the old school picked up these arguments, anchoring them in apparently scientific evolutionary principles beyond the reach of human volition, in order to insist that 'the continuance of competition and Natural Selection is essential to the well-being of a civilised community'.103 Less libertarian conservatives preferred to attack socialism on the grounds of an impersonal and stultifying bureaucracy, as well as on the grounds of sapping initiative, personal energy, and motivation. Balfour warned during the debate on the 1909-10 Budget that 'it is perfect madness to tamper, as the present government 100

H. Cox, Parliamentary Debates (2 Mat. 1906), 1412-20. Lord R. Cecil, Parliamentary Debates, 4th set (15 June 1908), 613. See H. Cox, Parliamentary Debates (13 Feb. 1907), 227-33. IDS p_ YV_ Headley, Darwinism and Modern Socialism (London, 1909). 101 m

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

are doing[,] with equality m the rights of property... as long as you choose to carry on your system as it has always been carried on, upon private enterprise and private initiative, so long you must make the rewards of private enterprise absolutely secure'. The issue of rights was a sore one for conservatives who decontested the concept as a claim to be protected by existing legal arrangements. The repeated attempts of the Labour party to legislate a right to work, which even liberals found hard to stomach, were met by conservatives with an appeal to the duty owed 'to the community as a whole'. Such a right 'would destroy at a blow all incentive to thrift, and would shatter that sturdy independence of character which has made the British workman famous throughout the world'. Above all, it went against 'natural and economic conditions'. The minimum wage was presented as a interference with the liberty hitherto enjoyed by workmen to settle their concerns directly with their employers—an echo of the freedom-ofcontract doctrine—and an attempt to coerce the community in the name of a sectional interest,104 Beyond conservatism's core concepts, identified in the previous chapter, its ideological details display no consistency. Adjacent and peripheral concepts were deployed with a facility that superficial observers have labelled as opportunistic. That is far from being the case. While the conceptual units of conservatism were quasicontingent, its consistency lay in its morphology as a whole. In the period under examination British conservatives reacted to the furious pace and innovative direction of social reform set by the liberals, and this accounts largely for the cultural garb of, and constraints on, their political ideas. The adjacent concepts of conservatism ranged from liberty, property, individual rights, and respect for the law to the extolling of authority, inequality, and a paternalistic concern for the public good. Sometimes these principles competed with each other, often they were made to coexist through particular decontestations, always they were a reaction to those ideological threats perceived as most pressing and most menacing to the conservative core. Perimeter concepts and ideas adopted by conservatives included protection (and free trade by a minority), an educational system that ensured the transmission of traditional values, an approach to social reform and social welfare that aimed at social harmony between employers and workers m See A. J. Balfour, Parliamentary Debates (4 Nov. 1909), 2115; H. W. Forster, Parliamentary Debates (10 Feb. 1911), 651; A. Chamberlain, Parliamentary Debates (21 Mar. 1912), 2179.

The Chimera of Conservative Dualism 383 and emphasized wealth-making as a sufficiently common interest to satisfy the wants of both sides, a respect for the constitution and for existing political institutions, a rejection of the rise of trade unions as centres of legitimate political power, and a preference for imperial links that reinforced the perception of cultural superiority, and the desire for material benefits, close to the interests of the dominant social classes. This list is far from exhaustive, but is intended to suggest further ways in which political concepts were given concrete flesh and blood in a specific cultural context. As for the issue of logical adjacency, it posed far less a problem than it did for the more complex substantive ideologies on the left of the political spectrum. The logic lay in the preservation of a core to which any successful adjacent conceptual combination was grist. The extraordinary internal flexibility of conservatism allowed for a constant process of ideological trial and error, in which new conceptual combinations replaced old ones, and in which the test of ideological consistency was often at a morphological level not plainly observable in the heat of debate. That is not to suggest that conservatives were incapable of constructing intellectual cases for their values; rather, the manifest intellectual case served a latent function that becomes saMent only when a wider diachronic view is adopted.

10 Forward to the Past— The Conservative Revival

The development and the shared characteristics of modern conservatism ... are due in the last resort to the dynamic character of the modern world.1

HE strong revival of conservatism in the 1980s both as a govT ernmental force and as a body of political thought, is frequently /

portrayed as a flowering of beliefs and attitudes attached to new theoretical frameworks, meriting the designation New Right or neo-Mberal conservatism, as distinct from plain neo-conservatism. Those frameworks, it is often asserted, have substantially reformulated conservative doctrine and launched a cohesive set of positive ideas matching progressive ideologies in sophistication and breadth. The contemporary study of conservatism is thus confronted with two conundrums. Is there now in evidence a new type of conservatism, breaking with its past incarnations and embarking on a programme of change so active that it may no longer be conservatism? Moreover, is there an unbridgeable rift between two concurrent conservative creeds, neo-liberal and traditional? In this chapter it will be argued that late twentieth-century conservative thought occupies fundamentally the same semantic field as its predecessors, granted of course that the cultural constraints within which its network of concepts is decontested have been considerably transformed; consequently, conservatism appears to be attached to an innovatory range of substantive ideas and policies. Two salient facts require mentioning from the outset. First, an appreciation of the ideological nature of conservatism is now more widespread and more acceptable than ever before, due, not least, to the unusually forthright and conscious employment of easily 1 K. Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1986), 86.

The Conservative Revival 385 decodable ideological statements by Margaret Thatcher. The student of ideologies need no longer be frustrated by the stock argument of many conservative intellectuals who maintain that their political views are eminently more concrete and pragmatic than those of their 'ideological' opponents.2 Second, a perceived dichotomy between 'neo-liberal' and 'traditional' conservatism has become the main stumbling block in its contemporary analysis. The question of conservative dualism which occupied the previous chapter has now come out into the open. This spurious dualism is one which both supporters and critics of conservatism are slow to recognize, the latter in particular referring to tensions, contradictions, and double standards. This is not to argue that conservatism is a seamlessly consistent ideology—no such ideology exists—but that there is no need to invent further inconsistencies than those which already obtain. (a) THATCHERISM AS CONSERVATISM

At the end of Chapter 8 it was suggested that Thatcherisrn may not in fact be viewed as a member of the conservative ideological family. How, it may be asked, could conservatives in one country, and within a period of thirty years, both support and oppose the policies of the welfare state? And within Thatcherism itself and its American New Right equivalents, was there not an illogical disjuncture between economic liberty and social control? Any attempt to answer these questions must first examine the cultural constraints that have operated on contemporary conservatism. Some of the most significant of those constraints can be found among economic developments, perceived failures of progressive parties and ideologies, and social upheavals that have contributed to instability and inefficiency in the political sphere. The resurgence of both British and American conservatism took place under specific sets of social, economic, and cultural circumstances that allow for a relatively clear understanding of its reactive conceptual configurations. In the British case, the continual economic decline of Britain against a backdrop of rising inflation, governmental costs, and industrial unrest was paralleled by the inability of the welfare state to offer long-lasting and stable solutions to the issue of redistribution and the relative status of key social 2

See e.g. I. Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (London, 1978), 121, 132-3, 140.

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groups. The welfare state appeared to be overloaded by its openended commitment to the continual improvement of health standards, provision for the underprivileged, full employment, and the broadening of educational opportunities. The American case exhibited some of these problems, but was also specifically beset by the demands and rights of minorities and by the partly selfimposed burdens of America's role as preserver of a world order and container of communism. Repeated failures of the Labour and Democratic parties, respectively, prompted conservatives to redefine major political goals and values, and with them central political concepts, in a manner that reflected their understandings of the causes of political malaise. British conservatives began to update their ideological positions in the 1970s. The post-war conservatives had come to terms with the basic tenets of the welfare state: the state guarantee of employment, the adoption of Keynesian demand-management economics, the provision of minimum standards of human flourishing. However, the much-flaunted post-war consensus was chimerical. Conservatives did not adopt the welfare state for the same reasons as progressives. Rather, they saw in the welfare state the means to encourage productivity through cultivating satisfied workers, and to maintain social harmony through banishing some causes for resentment.3 For those conservatives, still imbued with a paternalist sense of responsibility for national order, unity, and quiescence, Keynesianism had become the new orthodoxy which could be fashioned to preserve traditional values. But the state was a leading and active participant in these processes, and it resurrected the conservative respect for wise and authoritative government. In addition, while Britain still sought, with whatever self-delusions, to play a world role in international affairs, the enemy from without—rather than potential adversaries from within—was utilized as the target on which the conservative mirror could be trained. Anti-communism, directed against a creed interpreted as a major military threat to home, hearth, and national independence, as well as a social and political threat to individual initiative and basic liberties, reinforced the political values attached to a mixed economy guided by the rule of law and promising security, prosperity, and the protection of property. The British conservative metamorphosis came about as a result of a changed international environment in which not political super3

Cp. e.g, Quintin Hogg, quoted in S. R. Letwin, Tie Anatomy of Thatcherism (London, 1992), 55.

The Conservative Revival 387 blocs, but economic interdependence and decreasing competitiveness were the most striking influences. New developments in the adjacent and peripheral components of conservative ideology reflected the subordination of almost all other aspects of public life to the perceived need to revitalize the British economy, and through it repair the damage caused to Britain's national standing and to some of its most cherished institutions. An interesting reworking of conservative essentials took place. Despite conservatism's crucial reliance on the extra-human legitimation of the social order, and its debunking of the role contemporary human volition can play in rationally forming and directing social arrangements, it had temporarily to allow for such a role in order to re-establish the natural order which could correct current deficiencies. Human volition had committed the unpardonable; it had tampered with that natural social order; so much so, that the order was incapable of sustaining, let alone restoring, itself. The hubris of trade-union assertion was a prime instance of the misdirection of human will to rearrange economic relationships, to the point of their breakdown. For the time being, human volition had to be endowed with the function continuously accorded it by progressives: the rational construction of a new order. Except that, on closer inspection, this was not construction but reconstruction; this was not a new order but an older, experientially known, and revived one; this was not a permanent recognition of the state as the agent of a rational, human will, but an act of power-wielding, only partly rational, intended to bring to a halt the dangerous by-products of the welfare state, through a judicious but ephemeral use of the state itself. The conservative manifestos published since 1979 provide instructive evidence of the perceived cultural constraints and the manner in which they shaped conservative ideological morphology. Although their rhetoric, like that of any political manifesto, must not be taken as the final or most authoritative word on the structure and contents of the ideologies they present, the selfdescription of an ideology by its adherents cannot be ignored as an important guide to its interpretation. The 1979 manifesto, in particular, unusually constitutes a set of political objectives, the overwhelming majority of which were methodically put into practice. It was based on a perception of increased state intervention which 'crippled the enterprise and effort on which a prosperous country... depends', and diminished Britain's standing as a great nation. That intervention was especially heinous because of the nature of the groups that had obtained the ear and activated the

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arm of the state. Political strife and industrial strikes were interpreted as the consequence of an undue extension of trade-union power, which gave 'a minority of extremists the power to abuse individual liberties and to thwart Britain's chance of success'.4 Such developments were seen as endangering the proper functioning of the economy as well as undermining the authority of the state by expanding its normal duties into areas where it could not perform an adequate political role. An assault on stability, on a sense of nationhood, on individual freedom, and on the long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law' had to be countered, albeit by conservatively unorthodox means. The ideological response was to direct the mirror-image at the spectre of a paternalist, bureaucratic, and artificially manipulative state and invoke instead 'self-reliance and self-confidence which are the basis of personal responsibility and national success'. These latter qualities were buttressed by the inevitable conservative appeal to the extra-volitional foundation of social life, through being described as 'working with the grain of human nature'.5 It must be emphasized that it is not individualism which is at the core of this variant of conservative ideology, but—as ever—an appeal to a social order that is preservable, predictable, and has been proved to work in the past. Individualism is an adjacent concept, extracted as a reaction both to the perceived failure of welfarestate collectivism and the difficulties of Keynesian-dominated aggregative economic theory as a guide to prosperity. Authority too is merely an adjacent concept.6 By 'attempting to do too much, politicians have failed to do those things which should be done. This has damaged the country and the authority of government.' But authority is in turn enlisted as a response to the destabilizing impact of trade-unionism (an endeavour to extend politics into industrial relations and to create alternative centres of legitimate power), and also as a response to the erosion of governmental efficiency through its undertaking duties which it performs badly. At all times authority is a service concept to a natural order protective of what made Britain great in the past. In the economic sphere that order is based on incentives 'so that hard work pays' and 'success is rewarded'; in the political sphere it invokes the 5 * The Conservative Manifesto 1979 (London, 1979), 5-6. Ibid. 6-7, 6 Many scholars (e.g. R. Eccleshall, English Conservatism Since the Restoration (London, 1990), 10) identify submission to the authority of the state and of leadership as a fundamental conservative principle. It is indeed a frequently found belief, but itself parasitical OB a conception of the balanced social order.

The Conservative Revival 389 upholding of the rule of law; in the private sphere—the support of family life.7 A third adjacent concept that undergoes redefinition is the notion of rights. Thatcherite conservatives regard rights as potentially irresponsible claims (ie. claims unconducive to natural economic and political conduct) advanced by extremists, an approach very much in keeping with the tradition of construing individual universal rights as abstract rational assaults on the social fabric. But they are also prepared to harness rights (now decontested mainly as traditional liberties within the framework of the rule of law) to corresponding duties.8 While it is a logical constraint found in all ideologies that rights entail duties, the decontestation of duties undertaken by conservatives is not based on the ensuing notion of reciprocity, as in liberal and some socialist thought, but on a cultural constraint promoting the obligation not to burden others and, instead, to assume self-responsibility. As the manifesto makes clear in a discussion on pay-bargaining: 'The return to responsibility will not be easy. It requires that people keep more of what they earn; that effort and skill earn larger rewards; and that the State leaves more resources for industry.'9 Within that idea-environment of economic independence and entrepreneurship, responsibility could indeed act as a brake on any concept of rights that might otherwise be decontested within a structure of social justice as social welfare. In addition, the conservative record on civil liberties has been shown to be particularly poor.10 That record reflects in the main an insistence on the adjacent value of political obedience-cum-obligation when hierarchy, the centralization of decision-making, and political and cultural stability are under threat from dissenting individuals or groups. By 1992, the internal priorities of rights were demonstrably reshuffled. In a technique developed by contemporary British conservatives, peripheral ideas were upgraded to adjacent status, while older adjacent meaning of concepts disappeared. The 1992 manifesto declared that 'the opportunity to own a home and pass it on is one of the most important rights an individual has in a free society. Conservatives have extended that right. It lies at the heart of our philosophy.'11 The concept of rights, developed by progressive ideologies as a powerful tool to identify and protect core 7 8 10

The Conservative Manifesto 1979, 7, Ibid. * Ibid. 12. P. Thornton, Decade of Decline: Civil Liberties in the Thatcher Years (National Council for Civil Liberties; London, 1989). 11 The Best Future for Britain: The Conservative Manifesto 1992 (London, 1992), 33.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

human attributes, was diminished not so much by overemphasizing ownership and inheritance, as by concretely attaching it to a perimeter notion as a central human right. An objective closely linked to the support and stabilizing of the existing socio-economic system was selected from the plethora of potential individual rights, while others were passed over in silence, A focus on the family is the second ideological mainstay of this distinct meaning of responsibility. As the 1983 Conservative manifesto indicates, the family and the individual—frequently mentioned in the same breath, so that individualism is underpinned by and interpreted through a 'natural' group framework which is institutionally constraining and morally directive—are the two complementary units of society.12 The 1987 manifesto elaborates: 'The desire to do better for one's family is one of the strongest motives in human nature/13 Egoism is harnessed to the service of a natural social unit, A responsible society is one that allows families and individuals to flourish: 'freedom and responsibility go together' is a succinct statement of adjacency. The rule of law, as well as its attached negative notion of liberty as non-interference, are concepts that guarantee those natural structures. It is no accident that the adjacent concept of property is coupled to a perimeter notion of home-ownership, a form of property which provides the bastion of physical security, privacy, and self-containment for the family.14 Social justice is interpreted as a reward for individual success rather than, as welfare ideology has it, the equal treatment of all, spelt out as the distribution of fundamental scarce goods on the basis of need. The 1987 manifesto is explicit in stating: 'Reverse discrimination is itself an injustice and can have no place in a tolerant and civilized society... it would undermine the achievement and example of those who had risen on their merits/15 Any form of distribution of social goods not based on individual attainment, which would introduce compensatory elements or appeal to a collective social responsibility, is excluded from the intension of social justice. The 1979 manifesto presents a clear ideological morphology corresponding both to the features of all ideological structures, and to the specific characteristics of conservatism. The core remains, as it must in order for the ideology to be recognized as a , 1 2 The Conservative Manifesto 1983 (London, 1983), 24. See also Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatckerism, 36-7, 13 The Next Moves Forward: The Conservative Manifesto 1987 (London, 1987), 27. 14 The Conservative Manifesto 1983, 24-5. 15 The Next Moves Forward, 59,

The Conservative Revival

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member of the already existing conservative family, and as it does in fact when its interrelated concepts are examined in their minutiae, a balanced society in which change will depend on the natural mechanisms of human activity. The extra-human legitimation is now provided by the laws of the market,16 specifically linked to free enterprise. 'Profits are the foundation of a free enterprise economy', asserts the manifesto,17 and profits are of course the incentive without which the human will is unavailable for productive effort. In addition, extra-volitional legitimation is also provided by the tradition of respect for the rule of law. Some of the adjacent concepts (themselves already decontested) employed to shore up the core are: incentives, personal responsibility, justice as reward, security of private property, nationhood. Incentives relate to the springs of economic action, as well as to the currently dominant theory of human nature. Personal responsibility is proximate to the concept of individualism and assists its interpretation as referring to a self-contained, self-propelling unit (again, with the assistance of incentives). The family supports personal responsibility through its non-economic services, though it is itself a main raison d'etre for the display of responsibility. Decontesting justice as reward transforms the term (excluding the rule of law) into a system of economic (re)distribution based on effort and, especially and more easily measurable, achievement. By conceiving of property as primarily private, it is attached to separate realms of personal action and space, strengthening the concept of individualism as decontested above, and acting both as the material reward for, or incentive to, initiative, and the source of security which surrounds important traditional value-bearing and socializing institutions like the family. The nation has to be protected from challengers from without and within.18 Finally, perimeter notions such as lower income tax, debureaucratization, and privatization flesh out the inner structure. Being of lesser generality, their relative ephemerality and greater flexibility permit the rigid preservation of the core through its adaptation to concrete policies, cultural constraints, and externally imposed events. Other units of ideological furniture also undergo instructive 16

A point made even clearer in later manifestos. See e.g. The Best future for Britain, 1. 17 The Conservative Manifesto 1979, 14. 18 Ibid. 20; The Conservative Manifesto 1983, 5, See M. Biddiss, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 100-1; J. Barnes, 'Ideology and Factions', in A. Seldon and S. Ball (eds.), Conservative Century; The Conservative Party Since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), 338-9.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

decontestation. Democracy is associated with property-ownership in a manner reminiscent in tone, if not in detail, of its nineteenthcentury association with the franchise. This time, however, the link is established through a variant on economic democracy, a system whose units are described not as citizens or voters but as owners. This theme developed through the 1980s. In the 1987 manifesto the 'property-owning democracy' made way for a 'capital-owning democracy'. A particular kind of property—shareholding—was deemed to be especially valuable: 'Our goal is a capital-owning democracy of people and families who exercise power over their own lives in a most direct way.'19 Democracy is thus decontested through its proximity to the making of economic choices, the cultivating of economic independence, and the political allegiance that financial investment may bring, rather than, for example, to participation or equal political weighting. Accountability, as Levitas has noted, is decontested from the sphere of political to that of financial responsibility.20 If this is merely rhetoric, acknowledged perhaps on a semi-conscious level, it is none the less a clear indicator of ideological preferences. The allure of individual free choice as the icing on the Thatcherite cake is firmly anchored in its ideological structure. 'The British instinct is for choice and independence7, reassures the 1987 manifesto,21 thus attaching those values to the conservative belief in a core ostensibly immune to external rational critique. This decontestation of freedom is cemented to prosperity and to personal responsibility, thus offering the financial inducements of the market while absolving the public domain from the onus of guaranteeing those fruits of free choice. Choice and independence are decontested in close proximity to the values of economic independence and economic participation, through the use of perimeter practices involving privatization, the sale of council houses, and the proliferation of share ownership. The reduction of choice to the economic sphere is presented as strengthening the family and as checking state power. It also entails the exposure of newly privatized22companies 'to the full commercial disciplines of the customer'. The 19

The Next Moves Forward, 10. R. Levitas, 'Competition and Compliance; The Utopias of the New Right', in R. Levitas (ed.), The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge, 1986), 91. 21 The Next Moves Forward, 3. Italics added. 22 Ibid. 10-11, 36. For an account of the policy changes brought about by Thatcherism see G. Peele, 'British Conservatism: Ideological Change and Electoral Uncertainty', in B. Girvin (ed.), The Transformation of Contemporary Conservatism (London, 1988), 13-34. 20

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elevation of the individual as customer or client over the individual as citizen assists in realigning the relationship between the economic and the political spheres. It decodes the conservative core as consisting of 'natural' economic laws as well as human motives that translate into economic activity. Value itself is decontested as 'value for money'. Conservatives portray the reduction of taxes as necessary to a climate of enterprise and initiative in forceful ethical terms. High taxes deprive people of independence and the ability to care for their families, making their choices for them. There is hence 'a strong moral case for reducing taxation'.23 The capacities manifested through such enterprise and initiative are not there to be cultivated, taught, or developed by social agencies. Rather, their expression is frustrated by artificial and unnatural hindrances, a view much in line with the self-sufficient view of human nature subscribed to by negative libertarians. As the 1992 manifesto declared, '[National] success has been won when we have given our people their head: when their natural skills, talents, energy, thrift and inventiveness have been released, not suppressed.'24 So while the individual is in one sense (mainly economic and psychological) self-sufficient, he or she is in another sense (mainly social, emotional, and traditional) family-sustained and family-orientated. (b) THE SUBSERVIENCE OF ECONOMICS

The combination of monetarism and supply-side economics which characterized British (and to a lesser degree, American) conservatism in the 1980s was, in the eyes of some astute commentators, far more than a technical recipe for material prosperity. It ensured the survival and consolidation of a range of values conducive to the broader ends of conservative ideology. This point is repeatedly made in two of the most thorough analyses of contemporary conservatism, the studies by Hoover and Plant and by Gamble.25 As Hoover and Plant suggest, monetarism as such was an antiinflationary tool. It needed the ideological infusion of a supplyside belief in low taxation, removing hindrances to individual incentives and initiative, in order to act as a brake on public expenditure and to counter effectively what were perceived as the 23

u The Next Mmes 'Forward, 27. The Best Future for Britain, 50. K. Hoover and R. Plant, Conservative Capitalism in Britain and the United States (London, 1989); A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 1988). 25

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destructive consequences of a welfare state based on unlimited rights to state assistance.26 Behind this lay the well-trodden themes of modern conservatism: a view of human nature in which incentives, self-reliance, and independence were fundamental features (the substantive embellishment of the non-volitional source of the social order), complemented by downgrading the role of the state, whether as purveyor of a social justice that ran counter to nature, or—as Gamble has argued—as a participant in power-struggles it could not always hope to win. The conduct of the state undermined the traditional authority it required in its role as guarantor of the social order.27 The power of the state, then, is a function of its contraction. But, we must recall, its power and authority are not core conservative concepts. They are merely a means, albeit a highly efficient one, for subordinating the political to the natural or, if another formulation is preferred, for subordinating those political projects which threaten dominant theories of social balance to those which sustain them. The state was thus deemed to have overexposed itself by entering domains of human activity in which it could not hope to control the speed and direction of social change; in particular, it was overloaded by the free access to the centres of political decisionmaking of important interest groups wielding the language of rights and redistribution. This wrangling for positions in a queue for a limited cake threatened social stability, especially as the struggle over such differential positions was by its very nature continuous; concurrently, it threatened the morphological distinctiveness of conservatism, its built-in resistance to the ephemerality of human volition. As Hoover and Plant observed, privatization fulfilled at one stroke a number of ideological ends: the retrenchment of the political sphere, a system of incentives to elicit individual performance, an increase in economic freedom and consumer choice.28 In terms of political concepts, power was restricted to the formal sphere of legitimate authority. Through monetarism, the authority of central government was aimed at re-creating the market. It did so with the objective of severing its micro-economic extension— directly or through local government—into market relationships.29 The latter regained importance as the arena in which success and failure were presented in terms of human ability, the competitive 16

Hoover and Plant, Conservative Capitalism, 156. Gamble, free Economy, 12-13, Hoover and Plant, Conservative Capitalism, 185-7. See R. Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven, 1994), 33-5, 153-64. w 28 29

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process, and maximization of benefits in a game accessible to all. Power was also diffused through property-ownership. In addition, it was decontested as intentional, conversely absolving marketruled conduct from responsibility for oppressive or unjust outcomes, and reinforcing the conservative core belief in the necessary existence of mechanisms of social order and interaction. As Keith Joseph put it in Hayekian fashion, markets are a 'state of nature' which has spontaneously evolved, and to disregard their rules is as pointless as attempting to ignore the law of gravity.30 This was reinforced by Joseph's observation that 'equality of opportunity is a neutral concept', such equality being defined as the absence of external barriers which prevent individuals from exploiting their talents.31 That observation is significant for two reasons. First, it is incompatible with the analysis of ideologies as presented in these pages, because like any other definition, it is clearly decontested. In this case a preference is voiced for the encouragement of talent over other human attributes, and for free and unimpeded activity over externally guided activity. Second, it is a typical conservative statement in appealing to neutrality as an argument that removes issues from the spheres of debate and uncontrolled political direction. The resemblances between these forms of market neutrality and the neutrality theories of contemporary liberals establish the possibility of overlap, and demonstrate how close the latter may find themselves to the conservative assumption that there exist areas of individual conduct which can be removed from the effects of human will and control.32 North American philosophical liberalism posits its protection from that affinity on the postulation of a rational, autonomous, and aware self, but conservatives may have some justification in countering that to invest such hopes in human conduct has little bearing on the way they behave in known societies. Behind these conservative views lies the ontological belief in the limits of human knowledge, expressed in the demotion of human, volitional laws. Hayek's similar belief in fragmented knowledge charged the market with the self-generating spontaneous ordering of that knowledge. The liberty which conservatives generally recognized as pertaining to the preservation of basic legal liberties, and occasionally as tantamount to behaving responsibly and adjacent to virtue and 30

K. Joseph, "The Economics of Freedom', 19-20. Quoted in A. Jeffries,' "Freedom" in Contemporary British Political Debate: A Conceptual Case Study', D.PM1. thesis (Oxford, 1991), 86. 31 K. Joseph and J. Sumption, Equality (London, 1979), 29. 32 See the discussion on Dworkto in Ch. 6 above.

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authority, was now additionally extolled as the exercise of choice among goods produced by markets, and the provider of the requisite leeway for entrepreneurship and productivity. Its meanings have shifted to these two decontestations, considered equally useful in sustaining the two core conservative concepts. As a leading American conservative maintained: 'It is a part of the conservative intuition that economic freedom is the most precious temporal freedom, for the reason that it alone gives to each, one of us, in our comings and goings in our complex society, sovereignty/34 Markets appear to provide the insulated arena of freedom and equality35 which politics cannot be permitted to emulate.36 At the same time, welfare is detached from its position adjacent to liberty, thus reversing the trend initiated by new liberals and moderate socialists.37 Instead, liberty is reduced to a largely negative conception, by privileging arrangements which will release the individual within clearly prescribed areas for economic activity, family-based choices, and the pursuit of traditionally safeguarded entitlements. Concurrently, rights are either construed as relating to customlegitimated practices, or employed to protect the property which is both incentive and reward for economically beneficial conduct. Democracy, rather than descriptive of consumer sovereignty, is effectively removed from the private sphere.38 Whether that sphere concerns markets or party organization, expertise is assured at the expense of popular control. The juxtaposition of 'capital-owning' and 'democracy' typical of conservative literature is a severely decontested pairing, as on closer inspection economic democracy pertains to access to decision-making rather than to its effective exercise, and to the entitlement to participate rather than to accountability. The concept of democracy is hence positioned adjoining the traditional protection of liberties, and utilized to support the crucial adjacent conservative view of legitimate authority. On the surface it would appear that Thatcherite conservatism bears great similarity to the centrist liberalism of the interwar years, with its emphasis on entrepreneurship and the attractions of the 33

R. Scraton, The Meaning of Conservatism {Harmondsworth, 1980), 15-19, 723. See Levitas, 'Competition', 92. 34 W. F. Buckley, Jr., Up from Liberalism (New Rochelle, NY, 1968), 207. 35 As Gamble has astutely remarked (Free Economy, 50), freedom and equality are 'achieved through the daily plebiscite in the market' and, one may add, through little else beyond formal equality in the eyes of the law. 36 See s. (e) below. 37 See M. Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, 1978), 258; Hoover and Plant, Conservative Capitalism, 48. 38 See also Gamble, Free Economy, 52.

The Conservative Revival 397 market. But conceptual overlap is no indicator of morphological identity. Centrist liberals did not employ the market as the latest instrument in a series of guarantors of a social order rooted in 'natural' laws, but as a human contrivance whose main purpose was to promote the core liberal concept of individualism, a device that opened up paths to economic and technological progress. Nor did they appeal to social units ostensibly outside the orbit of politics, such as the family, in order to tame the pace of social change and to confine the risks of liberty to markets; rather, they were quite ready to welcome state activity both to enhance market behaviour and to assume responsibility for those areas of human conduct beyond the reach of markets. They held to39the value of liberty as the rationale for markets, not the reverse. Both the conceptual intension and the internal arrangement of centrist liberal ideology are sufficient to distinguish it from Thatcherite conservatism. The extreme econorrtism of Thatcherism is a prime instance of the conservative appeal to science as a means to release the political state from the responsibility for most social arrangements. The measurement of human activity in terms of value for money successfully reduced a range of human achievements and purposes to an area where the impersonal market could exercise control over such activity. It also attempted to introduce an objective criterion of merit that would protect the state from conflicting pressures and diminish the threat of loosening public purse-strings to service the infinite claims of quality. Public expenditure not only dragged the state down to the level of a contestant; it could undermine the current balance of social forces by impoverishing the wealthy classes, raising the expectations of the poor, and providing a formula for social turmoil. Anti-egalitarianism was, on this view, not a core conservative tenet, but adjacent both to a view of human nature and of social order. (c) 'WHO IS THE FIERCEST OF THEM ALL?'

The complexity of conservative structure is reproduced in the Thatcherite variant with respect to the mirror-image technique, which swivels flexibly in order to maximize its efficacy. On the international level, 'totalitarian socialism' continued to be described as a main threat, and its interpretations of equality and state legitimacy were countered with an appeal to constitutionalism and the 39

See M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1986), 132-7.

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respect for individual liberties, including the liberty to amass private property.40 On the domestic level, however, little mileage was to be gained from a constitutionalism which, although rather different in motivation and detail from the liberal varieties, might be seen as a common component of the two ideological families. The attack on progressivism was consequently constructed as a response to both liberal and social-democratic values, values which were beginning to fuse within welfare-state ideology. Against liberalism, adjacent and peripheral concepts and ideas were employed to limit democratic participation (for example, by a continuing adherence to the hereditary principle in politics). The developments in liberty and in rights-theory were, as we have seen, ignored or resisted by customary interpretations of these concepts, and perimeter structures were utilized which accorded priority to the liberty of individual economic agents (employers and individual workers) over the collective liberty of groups to engage in particular activities (secondary picketing). Universal claims to health care were carefully circumscribed, both by excluding non-citizens from their ambit and by removing categories such 41 as psychogeriatrics from entitlement to full and equal treatment. Liberal feminism was thwarted in its efforts to achieve gender-neutrality by the insistence of conservatives on the value of traditional female roles, particularly in the family.42 Against socialism, an anti-statist and anti-welfare policy was consolidated. Conniving with moderate British Labourites to label inaccurately the multi-origined welfare state a creature of socialism, conservatives could use some of the above measures to counter not only the universalism of liberal rights, but the open-ended socialist conception of human nature as needs-defined, the egalitarian redistribution that the financing of a welfare-programme required, and the bureaucratic state-direction that such measures involved. Denationalization and the spread of property-ownership served some of those purposes; the control wielded by a centralized government over the policies of local authorities with different ideological proclivities was another, emphasizing not only that conservative sovereignty was indivisible but that pluralism and 40 41

The Next Moves Forward, 73. See D. Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics (Oxford, 1990), 234-8; A. Weak, 'Social Policy', in P. Dimleavy, A. Gamble, and G, Peek (eds.), Developments in British Politics, iii (London, 1990), 210-17. 42 See A. Jeffries, 'British Conservatism: Individualism and Gender', Journal of Political Ideologies, 1 (1996), 33-52. Other kinds of feminism were not even considered as worthy of an ideological response, apart from to label them as extremist fringe views.

The Conservative Revival 399 grass-roots democracy would only be tolerated if they succumbed to whatever ideological control was necessary to guarantee organic change.43 The decline of liberalism as a political movement has reduced the scale of attack on its values. The conservative defence of its core is nothing if not utilitarian, in the sense that it reacts to what it perceives as the most profound and pressing threats to its Weltanschauung, Its comprehension of politics as concerned with power and leadership considerably reduces the salience of politics as persuasion and control in a wider social context. Hence liberal ideology, irrespective of its current influence through welfare-state thought and practice, no longer retains pride of place in British conservative demonology, whereas its centrist variety has ceased to commend itself to the public eye as a distinct identity, having— however crudely and erroneously—been assimilated into the late twentieth-century conservative view of individual virtues. Only among more traditional conservatives, alarmed by the rise of the New Right and incapable of distinguishing between left-liberalism, centrist-liberalism, and libertarianism,44 do past reflections of an anti-liberal mirror-image still shimmer. For them, freedom (economic or otherwise) is not the ultimate value but a traditionalism that shores up inequalities within the framework of authority.45 In the words of the American politician Barry Goldwater, 'freedom, under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God. Freedom, balanced so that order, lacking liberty, will not become the slavery of the prison cell; balanced so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the licence of the mob.'46 For them, too, individualism is dangerous if it means the elevation of social irresponsibility; desirable only when the individual is bound into social structures where his or her activities are reined in as concrete and particular instances of moral and conventional conduct. (d) RECENT AMERICAN CONSERVATISMS

In the United States the picture is somewhat different. Some conservatives have insisted that the American tradition they wish to 43

M. Biddiss, 'Thatcherism: Concept and Interpretations', in K. Mtoogue and M.44Biddiss (eds.), Thatcherism: Personality and Politics (London, 1987), 1-20, J, Casey, 'Tradition and Authority', in M. Cowling (ed.). Conservative Essays (London, 1978), 84. 45 M. Cowling, "The Present Position' and 'Conclusion', in ibid. 9, 11, 194. 46 Quoted in M. Foley, American Political Ideas: Traditions and Usages (Manchester, 1991), 127.

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preserve is itself liberal,47 Yet liberalism as a social creed with policy implications has been the central internal target of conservatism for many decades. It has been associated with the big government and bureaucracies of the New Deal and the Great Society. It has embraced heavy public spending, as well as social reform programmes involving redistribution and affirmative action and aimed at improving the standing of underprivileged groups that often have a specific ethnic and cultural profile. For some conservatives, especially at times of economic difficulty, this is perceived as an attack on the lower middle and skilled working classes, forced to pay taxes that are intended to aid people who, in their view, lack self-discipline and self-reliance.48 In response to the New Deal ethos, which set the cultural framework within which mid-twentieth century American liberalism was interpreted, American conservatism superimposed a new set of beliefs on its Burkean traditionalist and organic outlook. It offered a different decontestation of its core beliefs through an alternate arrangement of its adjacent concepts and beliefs, some of which were well-tested, others brought in as befitted the task in hand. To counter the directive state, and in direct contrast to the etatisme of German conservatism, it stressed the value of small communities. To counter the universalism of human rights and the sameness of human needs with their egalitarian message, it emphasized a social pluralism incorporating human differences. To counter the assertiveness of rational humankind, it articulated appeals to perennial virtues, whether in populist terms of the moral majority or in the narrower academic circles which reacted favourably to the theories of Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom. As Dolbeare and Medcalf have perceptively observed: 'Neoconservatives did not really propose a program for governing; they only outlined a critique of those who were doing so. Nonetheless, an alternative program can be inferred from the criteria used against liberalism.'49 On a philosophical level Strauss constructed a history of liberalism as moral decay. Liberalism fostered an unwholesome universal respect for all individual wills and a non-discriminatory pluralism that sapped objective standards of good and virtue, eroding notions of duty within a society and weakening America's 47

A. Aughey, G. Jones, and W, T- M- Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States (London, 1992), 3-7. 48 Cp. A. Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology and Public Policy in America (New York, 1988), 12-13, 17-39. 49 K, M. Dolbeare and L. J. Medcalf, Amerjcan Ideologies Today: Shaping the New Politics of the 1990s, 2nd edn. (New York, 1993).

The Conservative Revival 401 50 resolve against the evils of communism. On a level more immediately relevant to political debate William Buckley ('America's all-purpose conservative thinker'51} represented the American conservative mirror-image reaction to liberalism. For Buckley too, 'Conservatives are bound together for the most part by negative response to liberalism/52 His views offer revealing evidence about the perception of American liberal practice, to say nothing about the disparities between it and the more recent East Coast philosophical variant. In the late 1960s Buckley still stood by his earlier description of a liberal as one who believed 'that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determinable; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated'.53 On this perception of liberalism a conservative reaction was constructed against ideological 'mania' and doctrinairism. In similar vein, Milton Friedman complained of the changing and distorted meaning of liberalism, from a system promoting private enterprise and economic and political freedom (decontested as 'the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men') to 'a readiness to rely primarily on the state [whose]54catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom'. For Buckley, in contradistinction to the rhetoric of more recent conservatives, most truths had already been discovered, thus removing the grounds for the future-orientation of liberalism. But this was no anti-intellectualism; rather, it anchored the conservative intellect in the natural social order of past certainties. The attack on human volition, exercised as the arbitrary but orchestrated wills of the current generations, was expressed in the question: 'What choices will man, whose first choice was so catastrophic, go on making?'55 To that extent, as Hoeveler has observed, Buckley's 'libertarianism was qualified by his deference to the social and cultural norms of society'.56 Buckley went on to decontest democracy as 50

L. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York, 1968), pp. v-ix, 220-3. See Devigne, Recasting Conservatism, 47-9, 51 J. D. Hoeveler, Jr., Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Rmgan Em (Madison, Wis., 1991), 23. 52 M Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 219. Ibid. 37. 54 M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1982), 15,5. Bizarrely, Friedman attempted to redefine the core concepts of liberalism by arguing for the centrally of what is an adjacent conservative concept: 'The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings' (p. 13). 55 Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 182-3. 56 Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 38.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

'nothing more than a procedural device aimed at institutionalizing political liberty', thus carefully removing it from adjacent concepts such as equality or participation. To the contrary, he claimed, liberals overloaded democracy by 'attempting alchemical experiments' on it, 'transmuting it to the status of the Virtuous Society', Moreover, he argued, the use of constitutional devices, themselves an expression of self-government, would curtail freedom, because liberal constitutionalism relied on the centralized political power of the state. Democracy could only succeed in a 'culturally homogeneous society', one in which harmony reigned; otherwise it was not conducive to stability. In an astute observation Buckley noted that democracy becomes epistemology in the hands of liberals: 'democracy will render reliable political truths just as surely as the market sets negotiable economic values'.57 One foundation myth replaced another. Liberals also committed another cardinal sin. Echoing the more recent conservative insistence on the separation of politics and economics, as well as a strong anti-taxation stance, Buckley wrote: 'economics—which to be sure has always had an uneasy time of it asserting its autonomy as a social science—has become the pliant servant of ideology'. However, the divorce of politics from economics was limited and one-sided. Politics was enjoined not to disturb the functioning of the market; economics, however, was still connected to politics, if only, as Friedman observed, in the sense that economic arrangements have an important effect on the dispersal of power and consequently on political freedom.58 Politics became the dependent variable and economics the key player. Moreover, social-security measures based on compulsion were unacceptable, for 'compulsory participation in any enterprise is wrong, because human freedom is diminished'. This reiterated the decontestation of liberty as non-constraint by the actions of others. Ultimately, the conservative view of freedom is aggregative and concrete, as in the listing of traditional and legal liberties'. It opposes those liberal and socialist views of freedom that regard it as an essential, universal, qualitative, and incommensurable prerequisite without which individuals are dehumanized. As Buckley has put it: 'Freedom is not indivisible/59 The central external target of American conservatism was, of course, communism, McCarthyism being only one of its more extreme manifestations, in that case, perhaps, one evil reflecting 57

Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 145, 152-5, 149, * Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 7-9. 59 Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 169, 204, 211. 5

The Conservative Revival 403 another. Certainly, the felt intensity of the cold war and its multifold expressions in American political behaviour constituted a cultural constraint which affected the structure of conservative ideology and caused it to target communism as an immensely potent enemy, a crusade supported by quite a few former communists as well.60 The very comprehensiveness of communism, and the consequent invocation by conservatives of a total crisis/1 of its being 'eschatologically conceived',62 assisted in its exploitation in order to develop a large number of mirror-image themes. Totalitarian control served as a dire warning against the abandonment of the value of individual freedom. A militant secularism, Godlessness, and destruction of the family unit reinforced the need to root a system in traditional (religious and family) values. Enforced egalitarianism underscored the openness of a system in which talent, ability, and enterprise could rise to the top. The common ownership of property elicited references to the importance of private property for individual prosperity and security. The future-orientation of communism, and its revolutionary fervour encouraged a commitment to gradual change. Generally speaking, contrasting communism with democracy was a significant conceptual strait-jacketing of antonymic unlike with unlike. The apparently eclectic quality of conservatism, misconceived as it may be, has been sustained by the increasing complexity, even disorganization, of the conservative defence. Conservative traditionalists, whose organic imagery was required in order to counter the rising individualism and atomism of nineteenth-century liberals, have more recently resorted to rather different devices intended to shore up core conservative beliefs. They have co-opted Oakeshott, among others/3 to insist on the irreplicable variety of human conduct and associations and on their attendant individuality and pluralism. If the organic notion of community served in the past to locate individuals firmly within traditions that were immune to rational reconstruction, the disparities of human practice now supplied another adjacent structure. That structure was grounded on the assertion that attempts to interfere through social engineering or legislation in human relationships were condemned to failure not because they threatened close-knit natural patterns of collective hierarchical organization—an ontology in which individuals 60

See G. Peele, Revival and Reaction; The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford, 1984), 22-3. 61 62 Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 27. Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 145. 3 * Hayek, and R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974) have also supplied vital ammunition to this camp.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

were subsumed in the wisdom and knowledge of social groups— but because they simply could not hope to impose any order on the unique configurations of individual and social conduct.64 This is not to say that these conservative positions are the social equivalent of cosmic entropy. Rather, each association may evolve concrete arrangements suitable to live its life in orderly fashion, but these are not transmittable through collective and accumulative understanding, merely through small-scale and haphazard socialization in human conduct. What is most useful, in a cultural world in which the value of communitarian principles was felt to be diminishing, is the postuiation of a new argument to fend off human tampering with, and preconceived alterations to, existing practices. Their immunity to such tampering derived from the singular nature of human association and the impossibility of fully understanding its complexity. Qntological uniqueness, individuality, and pluralism were lifted from past liberal and present libertarian arsenals, where they could themselves constitute the ideological core or bond intimately with it, and employed as adjacent concepts to protect the specifically conservative set of core beliefs that inhibited patterned, humanly initiated, change. None the less, the American conclusion was more structured than Oakeshott's. The upshot was a conservative rediscovery of community, this time as a concrete, spatially as much as temporally specific, entity. As Devigne has argued, it focused on local public determination both of what is moral and what is culturally acceptable in the realms of religion and state, public expressions of patriotism, censorship laws, education curriculums, and abortion regulations'.65 Another example of this approach is the recent work of Etzioni, who has called for individuals to develop a culture of responsibilities towards their communities to offset the American preoccupation with individual rights. Those responsibilities would reflect the preferences of local communities, and are based on 'the strong bonds and the moral voice' of a common language, values, and practices, located in families and schools with shared spaces, causes, and futures.66 This conservative conception of community shares spatial features with that discussed earlier with reference to Walzer,67 but is distinguished from its liberal counterpart by its 64

Cp. R. Nisbet, Conservatism (Milton Keynes, 1986), 38. Devigne, Recasting Conservatism, 66. ** A. Etzioni (ed.), New Communitarian Thinking (Charlottesville, 1995), 24-5; A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community; Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (New York, 1993), passim. 67 See p. 253 above. 45

The Conservative Revival

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rejection of multiculturalism as a desirable goal, expressive of social diversity, and by its repudiation of the supremacy of individual will and choice on issues of public morality. Instead, the diverse communities are expected to endorse 'a prosaic, social morality of piety, industriousness, sobriety, thrift, charity, humility, and discipline'.68 For these reasons American conservatism could contain within its tendencies 'a celebration of place, of regional variety and local colour'. Its Oakeshottian current was embodied in its 'overriding interest in the present and in the daily and ordinary aspects of life. Conservatism is what makes one at home in one's world.'69 In its unsophisticated form this became a type of populism, concrete and irrational.70 Similar views, formulated from a more Smithian and Hayekian perspective, were voiced by Milton and Rose Friedman. Their conservative mirror-image was directed at the welfare state, with its perimeter notions of increased expenditure, high taxation, centralized planning and hence waste, inflation, and inefficiency.71 The Friedmans offered a core and adjacent structure of argument in which human wisdom, and hence governmental intervention masquerading as knowledgeable, was insufficient to direct market activity optimally. The need for tight restraint on governments was simplistically presented by them as a link between political and economic freedom. It furnished the prerequisites for voluntary exchange, which elicited information about prices and provided incentives to react to them. Knowledge simply grew out of voluntary interaction; trial and error, not planning, formed social values, 'through a kind of social evolution paralleling biological evolution.'72 The appeal to extra-human forces was once again buttressed by a freedom for individuals to play the undirected roles that evolution seemed to require. Coercion was in that sense 'anti-evolutionary' and impeded the progress that the Friedmans located adjacently to freedom and voluntary interaction; it was also an irrational, because unknowledgeable, method of organizing individuals, if the attainment of a materially productive and innovative society is the 68 69

Devigne, Recasting Conservatism, 93, Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 57, 280. In Britain John Gray has expressed similar views on the role of decentralized communities, combined with limits on multiculturalism (Beyond the Neio Right (London, 1993), 55-9, 63). 7(1 See Aughey, Jones, and Riches, Conservative Political Tradition, 12-33. 71 M. Friedman and R. Friedman, Free to Choose (New York and London, 1980), 91-102, 115-19. 72 Ibid. 7, 17-18, 26-7.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism. 73

aim of progress. Freedom was also decontested in conjunction with responsibility for, as the authors stated, 'we cannot categorically reject paternalism for those whom we consider as not responsible'. A knowledge of moral conduct transcending economic information was assumed, and in common conservative fashion was located in the family as 'the basic building block of our society'.74 The removal of the peripherally situated concept of welfare and its replacement by the concept of incentives and policies of negative income tax75 would allow the re-emergence of the adjacent concept of self-reliance and hence protect the conservative self-balancing core. Peele has commented on the continuing passionate commitment of American conservatives, especially those who directed their enthusiasm for communism towards new conservative targets.76 In that sense, style and emotion play a role in tempering the realism of conservatism and in characterizing it (as, indeed, communism) as an ideology, rather than the more dispassionate political philosophy into which Oakeshott or Strauss attempted to transform it. The same commitment balanced with hard-headed realism is, of course, true of Thatcherism. Among the American New Right there are still those who, like Irving Kristol or Michael Novak, do not wish to detach economics from virtually all political or ethical control. While Novak appealed to a Christian morality/7 Kristol represented a somewhat different conservatism, one termed by Nisbet Neo-conservatism rather than the more traditional postwar New Conservatism, with its collectivist organicism.78 Neoconservatism was enunciated by a number of individuals with radical backgrounds who remained wedded to general ideas of social justice, but developed conservative positions reflecting the impact of certain historical occurrences. Those occurrences, in particular the excesses of the welfare state and of Keynesianism, and the perceived evils of communism, moulded a specific ideational 73

See also Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 170, where progress is decontested as follows: "The chief characteristic of progress and development over the past century is that it has freed the masses from backbreaking toil and has made available to them products and services that were formerly the monopoly of the upper classes,' 74 Friedman and Friedman, Free to Choose, 33. 75 Ibid. 120-2. 76 Peele, Revival and Reaction, 26. 77 M. Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (London, 1991), 333-60. 78 Nisbet, Conservatism, 99-102. This terminology has been accepted by Kristol himself. See also Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, on George Will, pp. 73-5.

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periphery that was brought in to protect core conservative values, m particular social stability,79 The importance of an attachment to a traditional liberal past— by now concealing a conservative view of organic change which recognized the 'conservative predispositions of the people'—was bonded by Kristol to a resistance to the gnostic antinomianism of the 'French-Continental Enlightenment'. Adjacent concepts were drafted in to secure the new intellectual structure: a Friedmanite market economy as an engine of economic growth, the Hayekian notion of a spontaneous social order, and a Straussian search for pre-capitalist values as a moral anchor, establishing the priority of politics over economics,80 This latter point, embellished by the further insistence that nee-conservatives are not libertarians, merely acknowledged the falsity of the disjuncture between politics and economics that other conservatives wished to assert. Although in earlier writings Kristol seemed to go out of his way to deny a natural conservative order, he also extolled the attractions of subscribing to 'a prevailing social philosophy' and reiterated the allure of authority and leadership,81 Those principles are regularly employed by conservatives to lend justification to, and to seek a legitimated stability in, a non-volitional social order, one not based on wills expressed in a national participatory democracy. In other works Kristol belied his conservatism by frequently slipping into the language of conservative discourse: assuming that it is 'natural for people to want their preferences to be elevated' through freemarket mechanisms, and appealing to family and religious structures as 'indispensable pillars of a decent society'.82 The construction of a historical horizon that traced the decline of desirable bourgeois values was intended to counterbalance its removal from the individualistic liberty espoused by Friedman.83 This goes some way towards explaining the co-option of Tocqueville (that devotee of religiously underpinned intermediate institutions) into the American conservative pantheon.84 79

I. Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York, 1983), 75. 80 Ibid., pp. x-xiii. The Hayekian influence is also evident in D. Bell, 'Liberalism in the Postindustrial Society', in D. Bell, Sociological Journeys: Essays 19601980 (London, 1980), 228-44. 81 See I. Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York, 1973), 97-8,102. 82 Kristol, Reflections, 76-7. 83 Cp. Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 94, 96. 84 Nisbet, Conservatism, 73.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism (e) THE UNITY OF THATCHERITE IDEOLOGY

The concept of organic growth essential to conservative ideologies is doubly serviced in the Thatcherite instance by a traditionally anchored constitutionalism and by the belief in a naturally expanding market nourished on individual productivity. But this dualism—the strong state and the free economy, as Gamble terms it—remains problematic for most commentators. For some contemporary scholars, such as Norman Barry, the disjuncture between economic liberty and social control occupies the no man's land between conservative political opportunism and the ambiguity of conservative responses.85 For others, such as Hoover and Plant, this is more definitely a 'terminological paradox'; 'a movement originally rooted in an attack on rationalism and individualism ... is now seen as the primary defender of the capitalist market society.' They regard this 'not so much as a transformation as the development of a rival inclination. Conservative capitalism is a hybrid of these rival tendencies/86 One possible approach to the problem is alluded to by the authors, when they point to the different ways conservatives use terms borrowed from an older liberal tradition. For Kristol, on the other hand, in a view typical of some American conservatives, the distinction refers to the inversion of the (American) liberal prescription of 'massive government intervention in the marketplace but an absolute laissez-faire attitude toward manners and morals'.87 This dualism could be reinterpreted as the detaching by conservatives of concepts, such as liberty, from an idea-environment regarded by earlier twentieth-century liberals as de rigueur: social welfare and the pursuit of a commonly identified social good. By placing liberty amidst another group of adjacent concepts its meaning shifts to reflecting the new conceptual milieu. Alternatively, a more complex phenomenon may be at work; nineteenth-century libertarian decontestations of liberty were adopted by conservatives, including sufficient adjacent concepts to retain some of the older meanings requiring preservation. However, the broader cultural context had changed to such an extent that an entire set of 85 N. Barry, The New Right (London, 1987), 89-93. A similar conviction was expressed by Letwin, Anatomy, who reiterated the denial of conservatism as a theory, while dismissing it as an ideology relating to 'an eternally correct programme of action'. The inner cohesion which she correctly detected nevertheless remained inadequately accounted for (pp. 29-31), 86 Hoover and Plant, Conservative Capitalism, 76. 87 Kristol, Reflections, 77.

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ideological positions was transformed through its attachment to totally new socio-economic conditions and perimeter practices. Thus the defence of a libertarian market against the backdrop of corporatist practices, or an interdependent international economy, would of necessity relay messages of a very different ideological content than would have been the case a hundred years ago. The new frameworks supplied perimeter ideas-—for example a hostility to the importation of foreign labour and, more broadly, to immigration—that redefined the interpretation of the core and adjacent clusters transported from the past, possibly in some form of segregationalist nationalism. An alternative strategy employed by analysts of conservatism has been to identify a substantive common denominator shared by individualists and traditionalists: a belief in inequality and a recognition of the importance of elites. More recently this has been presented in the Grarnscian language of hegemony,88 Despite the ubiquity of these distinguishing marks, they are not core components of conservative ideology, but instances of conservative institutional practice. No method of ideological analysis will account for conservatism unless one is prepared to accept that its identifying characteristics are to be found in the features of its structure, and that its two substantive values remain throughout support for gradual, natural, or organic change, and an appeal to an extrahuman legitimation of order and orderly change. Were inequality, for instance, to be a core substantive component, it would possess an aura of an ideal to be attained as well as preserved. This active element is hardly a feature of most forms of conservative ideology. For the older type of conservative, inequality was perceived rather as a fact of social organization, occasionally raised to the level of consciousness by egalitarian attacks on conservatism, and not an end deliberately to be pursued. More properly, equality is a regular feature of the conservative mirrorimage stance because so many opposing ideologies stress the attainment of some sort of egalitarian ideal. Of course, even conservatives have come to espouse a formal political equality in the form of the suffrage. But the reason is edifying. As one book written by conservatives in the 1920s declared, The Conservative Party hesitated to accept democracy; but democracy, once established, has become the traditional form of government which Conservatives support/89 m

See Gamble, Free Economy, 1-3, 174-207, 236-7. R. Boothby et al, Industry and the State: A Conservative View (London, 1927). Moreover, this may attain the fundamental emotional backing of an item of faith. See Kristol, Democratic Idea, 50-1. 89

410 The Adaptability of Conservatism Yet again, the structural characteristics of conservatism dictate the content of its values. As for conservative elitism, that is a debatable candidate for core concept status. True, inasmuch as conservatives perceive individuals as different, they tend to do so on a scale of better or worse, employing criteria which strengthen extant preferences and practices. Inasmuch as all political systems incorporate elements of hierarchy, conservatives will have less problems with this issue than do socialists. But it overstates the case to regard elitism, or even strong leadership, as a universal conservative ideal actively to be realized. It represents rather the conceptual juncture of perceived natural hierarchies with an appeal to a repository of wisdom or virtue immune from fleeting human wills. In any case, there are other ways of coming to terms with the mutating faces of contemporary conservatism. In particular, it is necessary to account for what appears to be a conservative ideology committed to rapid change; indeed, in an extraordinary reversal of its past linguistic practice, berating its opponents for being 'suspicious of change'.90 We may identify a minor and a major method of reassessment. The minor method is to take the phenomenon of self-description very seriously, and to examine the self-depiction of capitalist /New Right conservatism as a new brand of radical conservatism.91 What indeed was radical about Thatcherite conservatism? Perhaps the root-and-branch attack on the welfare state and the trade unions, or the mass policy of privatization? Perhaps the attempt to introduce a system of economic conduct and criteria which had been consigned to historical insignificance by the near-absolute dominion of Keynesianism? Perhaps the activist role of the state as an agent of social change, a role that conservatives had in the past rejected out of principle? From a short-term perspective, which cuts off Thatcherism from its ideological roots and from the course of twentieth-century British history, change there was indeed. But there is a counter-argument, which would run as follows; 'The word radical has been misappropriated. It denotes root changes, whereas conservatism wishes to preserve roots and to clear away the debris of welfare and interventionist superstructure, the poison ivy that is attacking the roots. It opposes social reform with social disform—a comprehensive rejection of a series 90 91

Cp. The Best Future for Britain, 50. For an assessment of the appropriateness of the term 'New Right' in relation to previous conservative and libertarian positions see R. Levitas, 'Introduction: Ideology and the New Right', in Levitas (ecL), Ideology, 1-24.

The Conservative Revival 411 of accumulative changes that have occurred over the past century.' The illusion of radicalism was thus simply created by the fervour and scope of Thatcherite reactionary counter-reformism. The idea is a reactive one: not the creation of new institutions or new forms of social behaviour, but—in parallel with Marxist argument—the negation of the negation. It assumes all the while that the true nature of human beings and of society, on whatever culturally adjacent conservative version now current, will re-emerge after a massive, one-off, government intervention. As with Marx and Engels, it would be a temporary but emphatic use of the state to destroy what it had previously enshrined, in order to restore the roots of human intercourse and social order. And as with the dictatorship of the proletariat, it miscalculates the immensity of the task, the non-temporariness of the intervention, the unavoidable spread of the political, and the complexity of social structure which requires permanent regulation. The major method applies the scheme developed in previous chapters. For while the notion of counter-revolution goes some way to explain conservative activism, it fails to distinguish Thatcherism from reactionary conservatism, such as the ultramontanist variety. In particular, it cannot reconcile tihe tension exhibited in Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism between an individual free in economic activity yet, when it comes to social mores and sexual behaviour, under strict social control through the legal system and the family. Are these simply two artificially fused traditions? Is this a compartmentalized approach to human nature? Have liberal positional values been assimilated in one sphere only? The problem might not arise were we to examine two manifestations of conservatism over time or space, for different cultural contexts could develop ways of overriding the apparent logical inconsistency, but it is a pressing one when liberty as an adjacent concept is attached within the same variant of conservative ideology to some spheres of human action and not to others. The key to decoding lies elsewhere: the contemporary conservative scepticism concerning human nature sees it, in response to progressive view's, as 'naturally' self-centred, independent, aggressive, and competitive, even if capable of sporadic instances of charity. As Letwin has suggested, the 'vigorous' virtues are emphasized at the expense of the 'softer' ones which, significantly, include sympathy.92 Frequently, the former tendencies are destructive and have to be restrained. They emerge in criminal guise, in 92

Letwin, Anatomy, 33.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

the forms of greed, rebelliousness, or as the shrugging-off of private responsibilities. Hence law, religion, and the need for authority, all of which provide tempered control over people to ensure change that finds its legitimation not in concrete, arbitrary, or contrary individual wills but from an extra-volitional (in this case a traditional moral) source. Yet in one sphere that same potentially destructive behaviour may have beneficial consequences: in industry and invention. Insulate its rules from other forms of social activity, so as to avoid contamination, and productivity will soar, and with it the prosperity that acts as its own reward for achievement Here, conveniently, restraint-—normally the function of politics and of education—is not a charge on social institutions; rather, it is the outcome of abiding by the laws of the market, laws which are not enacted by human beings but believed to be beyond their control. The ideology produced, with its message of 'rolling back the state', differs however from the ideology consumed, as it is necessary for the state to cultivate market behaviour by eliminating alternatives and rewarding conformity to market rules. But the quasi-natural status accorded to the market commands the respect that renders unnecessary the active wielding of social power, exercised elsewhere by the state, churches, and families. In parallel, the latter institutions prepare individuals for assuming the responsibility and rule-governed behaviour that93will serve them well in complying with the dictates of the market. Conversely, freedom and equality in the domain of politics and education would undermine the rationale of families, churches, and the state, not the least because of the introduction of untamed democratic ideals. This view of the market may, in addition, receive immunization against spectres of radical change and novelty by asserting that 'the market economy is not just a neutral economic device but a set of traditional institutions which we have inherited from previous centuries and which have a firm moral basis'.94 In contrast, the conservative post-war support for Keynesianism embodied a doctrine that regarded economic intervention as a dictate of (extra-human) science, and conceived of that extension of politics as part of the natural exercise of legitimate authority by government, an institution in which political 93

See Jeffries, '"Freedom"', 98. Scepticism about the power of the market as a sufficient restraining factor leads other conservatives to return to religion, with its promise of a puritan work ethic rather than blatant consumerism. See e.g. D. Bell, Tfe Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London, 1976), 146-71. 94 B. Griffiths, The Moral Basis of the Market Economy (London, 1983), 18. Quoted in Jeffries, '"Freedom"', 106.

The Conservative Revival 413 expertise is invariably deposited. The structural flexibility of conservatism, as ever, lies at the root of its sustainability. The conservative core concept of controEed change is most typically decontested as restraint, for human nature, argue conservatives, cannot be modified. For some, human nature is innate; for others, it has been accumulatively shaped over many generations; for others again, human understanding is too limited to effect it, To want to change human nature would be a misplaced desire to do good. Its springs, for good and evil, cannot be tampered with, for those very qualities requiring restraint when they threaten law and order—egoism, aggression, competition—are essential to the proper functioning of other spheres. The inherent destabilizing attribute of freedom of choice is contained by releasing it only in the circumscribed form of consumerism.95 Nor are these notions abstract; they pertain to concrete 'evidence' or 'demonstrable' rules of individual conduct and social intercourse. Organic harmony, when values are successfully transmitted and the laws of economic conduct obeyed, and imposed restraint, paralleled by the punishment of failure, when they are not, are thus complementary laws of concrete human nature. The above is not merely the conservative tendency to look disparately at concrete details instead of at the structure of the world as a whole.96 It has rather to do with the ambiguous qualities with which human beings are endowed, or so conservatives assume through observation. It is entirely in line with conservative interpretations of the social world to regard a definitive, streamlined, and consistent view of human nature as an impossibility. It is left to critics of conservatism to point out that the sharp differentiation it makes between respectability and criminality,97 as well as the privatization of responsibility (at the doors of families, schools, and cultural respect for traditional values) for it to occur,98 is based on a confusion. That differentiation is the unavoidable consequence of accepting as given certain human qualities that can count both as deficiencies and as the building blocks for human achievements. Economic activity becomes a safe outlet for these vices, transforming them into virtues only inasmuch as they serve another conservative mirror-image adjacent concept, anti-egalitarianism. 95 On this point see A. Belsey, 'The New Right, Social Order and Civil Liberties', in Levitas (ed.), Ideology, 183, % Mannheim, Conservatism, 88. 97 For a good example of that differentiation, see D, Dale, 'The Politics of Crime' in R. Scruton (ed.). Conservative Thoughts (London, 1988), 141-54. 98 The Next Moves forward, 55.

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The Adaptability of Conservatism

Economic innovation and initiative are presented as having everything to do with personal character, achievements, status, and attracting differential talent, while the questions of human creativity and fulfilment are distanced from its intension. The 'natural laws' of the political economists, which claim to harness those destructive and egoistic transactions to further the good of a society, are put by such conservatives to optimal use. The swivel mirror-image device is simultaneously pointed by the New Right in more than one direction, by picking up more than one progressive threat. The growth of the welfare state, with its perceived rampant state paternalism, is countered by the liberating of economic activity from its clutches. Concurrently, the lawlessness or, at least, social decontrol of individuals, apparently encouraged by an ethos of rights-claiming, by a pluralist legitimation of alternative lifestyles, and by the marginalization of the family, is offset by intrusive intervention in most other areas. Even the release of economics from politics has embraced, as with Thatcherism, centralized political decision-making to a degree rivalled only by highly statist systems." In other words, the ideological rhetoric concerning the disengagement of politics from economics is matched by ideological principles embedded in institutional practice in which government, on its own volition, becomes engulfed by the values of business which it then appropriates as its own, so that on the level of action there is little separation of economic and political norms. Ultimately, the perceived disjuncture within contemporary conservatism between libertarianism and authoritarianism,100 which for some indicates opportunism or lack of consistency, evaporates in a complex structure, in which the two strands buttress each other, each performing an essential, parallel, sustaining function vis-a-vis its core concepts. The 'naturalness' of these two tendencies defines both the source of the social order and the paths of its possible modifications. w

Cp, D. Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics (Oxford, 1990), 284-94, A point made by Gamble, Free Economy, 28, who sees this as a paradox of the New Right. 100

IV Socialism: The Containment of Transcendence

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11

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity

This is the standpoint we will take. We will regard socialism as a thing, as a reality, and try to understand it.1 To define socialism merely in terms of public ownership and power negates the ideological concept of socialism ,. .2

his stimulating introduction to The Socialist Idea, Leszek I NKolakowski identified a series of issues around which socialist thinkers are divided. He went on to suggest that 'some of the values belonging to the very core of socialist tradition conflict with each other in practical application' and that what is necessary is knowledge about how these values can be prevented from such a clash.3 In that observation lies a misunderstanding. The values of socialism, like those of other ideologies, may come into conflict on the conceptual level long before they are put into practice. Indeed, one cause of their practical irreconcilability is to be found in the potential range of incompatible positions that specific meanings bestow on core socialist concepts. Not surprisingly, practical implementation falls foul of the theoretical variety of such constructions, irrespective of any institutional, historical, and contingent problems that attach to their realization. An inherent harmony, actual or possible, among core socialist concepts on a non-practical level does not exist. Whatever harmony is achieved is due entirely to the work put in by the adjacent and peripheral concepts acting to select and hone certain aspects of the core so as to contain its endemic tensions. The internal tensions of socialism run deep also on another dimension. Unlike conservatism, or even mainstream forms of liberalism, socialism is peculiarly prone to a dual temporal existence. ! 2

fi. Durkheim, Socialism (New York, 1962), 44. L. Kolakowski, 'Introduction', in L. Kolakowski and S, Hampshire (eds.). The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal (London, 1974), 8. 3 Ibid., 'Introduction', 12, 15.

418 Socialism: Containing Transcendence It is centrally founded on a critique of the present, yet significantly projected onto a future of which there is as yet little empirical evidence. Socialism entails a massive leap of faith and imagination, an emotional as well as an intellectual effort to claim that what has never been, or what belongs to a conjectural history, is nevertheless normal and proper to human beings and their societies. Whereas conservative dualism is an analytical miscomprehension, socialism displays a dualism which is built into the structure of its ideology, creating a world that both ought to be and can be out of a particular understanding of a world that is, The framework of analysis is based on concrete historical, economic, social, and ethical observations and interpretations; the preferred socialist alternative to those assertions about concrete reality is coloured by spatial and temporal events, yet aims at transcending them. Because the future is as yet unknown (although not, for some socialists, necessarily open-ended), a range of possible future horizons emerges on the basis of different understandings of the evils of the present. Not only is socialism torn between present and future, but the contestability of its conceptual ordering of the present is further fomented by the problems of spinning out an alternative social future on the basis of largely untested hypotheses on human nature and corresponding social arrangements. The multiplicity of futures makes conceptual decontestation occasionally less responsible, certainly less ruled by the limits of experience. In particular, cultural constraints operating on conservative and liberal ideologies, especially those concerned with the feasibility and costs of ideological configurations, are often absent. Such costs have to do with political limitations such as the necessity to recruit significant support and demonstrate accountability for favoured ideological positions, or they relate to the introduction of ideas whose unknown and untested consequences are potentially disruptive or ethically unacceptable. One characteristic of socialist ideologies is a disjuncture between the variants which reflect, and put greater emphasis on, current cultural constraints—including those emanating from the imagination and personality of the theorist—and those which indulge in the elaboration of a system supposedly subject mainly to logical constraints. Early German students of socialism such as Lorenz Stein and Moses Hess, for instance, proudly distinguished their critical approach to socialism—based on philosophical rational self-consciousness—from the4 French attitude with its emotional reaction to human suffering. The result 4 See W. Scheider, 'Sozialismus', in O. Brurmer, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. v (Stuttgart, 1984), 952-4.

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is that socialist ideology ranges freely over an unusually large spectrum. The visions of socialists may occasionally soar to heights that become detached from political feasibility and adopt a plethora of forms conditioned by the selection of very variegated items of furniture. The choice between evolution or revolution, state or economic unit, short- or long-term transformation, class or classlessness, to take a few examples, puts new glosses on core socialist notions and prevents the establishment of a stable incarnation. Conversely, the peculiar identification of socialism with highly articulate and distinctive bodies of theory must also be weighed against its attachment to activist political movements. These have persistently generated pressure for continuous reformulations of its ideational suppositions. Socialism offers a permanent reminder that political theory emanates from practice, that practice itself is an embodiment of conceptual structures. It is therefore less easy to draw up an agreed cluster of core socialist concepts. Unlike either liberalism or conservatism, even the socialist core, let alone its adjacent and peripheral conceptual bands, has undergone marked change over the past two centuries. Whereas the very ubiquity and attractiveness of liberalism mask a broad range of internal variations, all of which present themselves under the same name, socialism has tended to be qualified by terms such as 'evolutionary', 'Marxist', 'democratic', or 'state'.5 Nevertheless, the challenge to the analyst of ideologies remains the same as with respect to other ideological families: if socialism is to be used as an overarching term, it must embody some common denominators. If no such shared features exist, the surveyor of the family of socialisms must reassess the membership of some of its constituent parts, and possibly effect an ideological breakup. Though most variants of socialism exhibit a high degree of logical constraints, it emerged out of a far greater time- and spacespecific set of cultural facts and perceptions than did liberalism or conservatism. As always in the study of ideologies, the impact of such cultural forces may be explored on two levels. The first is the discourse, or conversations, conducted by theorists and ideologists with one another and with past members of the identified belief structure, in order to establish a body of doctrine or explicate and refine an intellectual tradition. Such cultural constraints on the individuals concerned are partly biographical, partly social. 5

Scheider, ibid. 923-4, observes; Tor all these special forms of socialism, it is characteristic that the word alone is an insufficient indicator of their respective position. Specific adjectives have to be adopted, in order to relate the respective socialism to the concept'

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Socialism: Containing Transcendence

The second is the mass basis of an ideology, which demands detailed historical knowledge and understanding of the societies in which the given ideology takes shapes and undergoes transformations. Because of its high degree of articulation, its growth within a clear intellectual framework, and its relatively easy location as a political movement within Western Europe, socialism is a more salient instance of that dual backdrop. As one historian has observed: 'While there is a long-term structural correspondence between the working class and the socialist ideology it sustains, socialism has its own relatively autonomous internal history to which individual leaders, theories, political institutions, and accidents also contribute/6 But, to re-ernphasize, the prime focus of this study is not on the origins and social formation of ideologies but on the complex product itself. Here the detailed kinds of cultural constraint can only be hinted at. It must be left to others to illuminate them in greater precision, and to point out the exact manner in which they contribute to demarcating the intensions of socialist concepts. (a) PRE- AND PROTO-SOCIALISMS

The origins of socialism are closely linked to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and to the development of urban, industrial societies. Though emanating as a protest movement against the former, within the setting of the latter, the nascent forms of socialist ideology adopted arguments, ideas, and proposals that were heavily influenced by the economic arrangements and politico-social environments of its formulators. Socialists, however, did not replicate the mirror-image technique peculiar to conservative ideologies.7 In reacting to the perceived inequities of their day, and to the articulated defences of those inequities inasmuch as they existed, they offered substantive counter-accounts which rested on distinct, long-term, conceptions of human nature and society, and on independently sustainable ethical arguments. Their ideological beliefs, once enunciated, developed their own momentum through clear conceptions of history and action, rather than being ephemerally parasitic on the prodding of external stimuli. The rise of a new mode of production, centred on the market, 6

B. H. Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement 1830-1914 (Berkeley, Calif,, 1976), pp. x-xi. 7 A view of socialism as a negative reaction to capitalism, though not solely so, is advanced by A. Wright, Socialisms (Oxford, 1986), passim.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity

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with a technology that facilitated the mass production and circulation of commodities, contributed to severing the link between product and producer and to the control of labour by the owners of capital.8 In the field of social and political thought, it elicited a complex and radical set of responses, centring on the nature of human creativity, the increasing disparities of power among members of industrial societies, the social costs of poverty, the character of the interconnections among human beings, and the future course of social development. France, Germany, and Britain were three main arenas in which various socialisms thrived; indeed, London and Paris became the intellectual foci of socialist thought, while Germany produced many of its most prominent ideologists, Close intellectual contacts between the three socialisms led to many points of convergence.9 In France, one trend of thought, which can be traced back at least to Rousseau, generated an ethos of egalitarianism based on a critique of the property relationships in existing societies and a quasi-romantic eschewal of the evils of civilization. Rousseau's appeal to a common good in the strong form of a general will suggested that, contrary to the atomistic individualism that appeared to be part of the utilitarian and liberal legacies, human groups were entities to be acknowledged and cultivated.10 Another trend was engendered by Henri de Saint-Simon and the coteries of his followers who, while in many ways distant from subsequent socialist developments, incorporated arguments that nourished future socialist themes. When Saint-Simon wrote that 'we regard society as the ensemble and union of men engaged in useful work. We can conceive of no other kind of society',11 he struck a chord that reverberated in socialist theory: the depicting of social activity as a co-operative, productive, and creative venture in which social harmony would be realized to the benefit of all. Saint-Simon envisaged a rational, scientific, and centrally organized economy and society, in which power as conflict would be transcended, ideas which inspired some of the solutions considered by socialists when attempting to eliminate the intolerable social costs incurred by the irresponsibility and randomness of 8

See G. Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (London, 1970), 3-18, and A. S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven, 1983), ch. 1. 9 ]. T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory (New York, 1986), 223. 10 For a link between Rousseau and Marxist socialism see G, della Volpe, Rousseau and Marx (London, 1978). 11 H. Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organization, ed. K. Taylor (London, 1975), 158.

422 Socialism: Containing Transcendence individual actors. The traditional French respect for the authority of the state was thus channelled in the direction of the French left. Saint-Simon also developed a conception of industrialism before the concept had been fully recognized. But his extolling of an economy of production and of the division of labour was too ambiguous to afford continuous succour to socialists; indeed, his views could equally be harnessed to the endorsement of individualism, utilitarianism, and proto-capitalism. Charles Fourier's opus constitutes a third trend feeding into socialism. His emphasis on the pleasurability of work and on the liberating aspects of a radically reorganized community were motifs which appear in diverse types of socialist thought. His dismissal of the division of labour was an aspect picked up by Marx. Fourier's obsession with the small and fantastic details of his ideal social group, the phalanstery, earned him a permanent place among the Utopian socialists, Utopian in a more positive sense than that imparted to the phrase by Marx, who used it to denigrate socialisms in competition with his 'scientific' version. Yet other facets of Fourier's theories failed to spark the socialist imagination: his antiindustrialism reduced his appeal to socialists who sought a modern solution to the problems of their times, nor did his support for differential rewards and lifestyles allow for an advanced egalitarianism. Furthermore, his unusual psychologically based libertarianism and stress on the human passions and their constancy departed from stricter rationalist variants of socialism and from beliefs in human malleability and hence progress,12 and exceeded— as with respect to sexual conduct—the puritan boundaries implicit in many socialist views, such as those on work. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon represents yet another variety of socialist thinking, which shades off significantly into anarchism, that set of beliefs we have already encountered in its libertarian version.13 However, whereas the latter anarchism was configured with individualist and conservative concepts, this variant was a hybrid of socialist and libertarian perspectives. As we have seen, anarchist morphology displays within its ambit elements to be found in liberalism and conservatism as well as socialism, which raises difficulties concerning its comprehension as a distinct and independent conceptual arrangement. Proudhon illustrates a minority trend of French anti-statist socialist thinking, in which liberty 12

See A, Fried and R. Saunders (eds.). Socialist Thought; A Documentary History (New York, 1992), 151; J. Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and his World (Berkeley, Calif., 1986}, esp. pp. 220-40. 13 See Ch. 7,

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 423 —decontested as the shaking off of the interventionist shackles of others, rather than as a developmental self-realization—was accorded a preponderant part. Although immortalized by his slogan 'property is theft', lapped up by later socialists,14 Proudhon attacked only the accumulation of large amounts of property, which distorted the rough equality without which liberty was impossible. He condoned the creation of numerous small property owners, based on decentralization and voluntary co-operative association, while denying that possession could justify property. So while Proudhon recognized that economic equalities undermined the freedom to act, he vacillated between the broadly negative conception of liberty so often found in anarchist thought, and an alternative decontestation of liberty as moral self-direction.15 The tension between the two positions may be noted from the following quotations from Proudhon: All men are equal and free; society, by nature and destination, is therefore autonomous and ungovernable . . . The principle of the revolution, we know it still, is Liberty... no more government of man by man, by means of the accumulation of powers; no more exploitation of man by man by means of the accumulation of capital.16 ... the greatest amount of freedom coincides with the greatest recognition of right and duty, and the greatest unfreedom with extreme ignorance and corruption.17

Equality (in the form of a rnutualist reciprocity) played an adjacent role to his core notion of liberty. There is consequently a case for caution in evaluating the claim that Proudhon was a pillar of the socialist tradition in more than an inspirational sense. All these themes are proto-socialist, embryonic forms of socialist ideology, provoking frequent disputes among socialists and their analysts concerning which of the above are entitled to membership of the socialist family.18 They were all tributaries that fed into the river which alone combined the different currents. But the metaphor is also misleading. If there was a river, there were also 14 P.-J. Proudhon, What is Property?, ed, D. R. Kelly and B. G. Smith (Cambridge, 1994), 13-14. That slogan was traceable to pre-revolutionary slogans. See Lichtheim, Short History, 56-7, 15 Proudhon, What is Property?, 77, 212. See G. Crowder, Classical Anarchism (Oxford, 1991), 75-80, 16 Proudhon, from Les Confessions d'un revolutionaire (1849), quoted in G. Woodcock (ed.). The Anarchist Reader (Glasgow, 1977), 166. 17 Proudhon, Du principe de I"art (Paris, 1875), quoted in Crowder, Classical Anarchism, 78. 18 Cp. Scheider, 'Sozialismus', Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 941-2.

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Socialism: Containing Transcendence

many forks and bends, and at a number of points a multiplicity of parallel streams could be observed. As Judt has noted, 'to be "a gauche" in France.,. was to be Republican, Radical, Socialist, or Communist at different times (or at the same time in different places)'. In France especially this multiform socialism was not only the product of an intelligentsia (as the sophisticated and articulate varieties of socialism invariably had to be at a time of limited educational facilities) but emerged in looser form from a longstanding working-class tradition, so that 'the distinction between left-wing argument and popular mass politics simply never existed'. Concurrently, the perceived split between confrontational social groups affected the mutual exclusionism of political language as well as political style. Thus, as Judt argues, the concept of economic exploitation arose only after the revolution of 1830, when the labour movement gained the freedom necessary to consolidate a working-class consciousness.19 The political separation of the 'worker' from the 'bourgeois' predated the economic critique of capitalism, and these different strands delineated culturally the bounds of ideological meaning. This did not, however, parallel a statist versus an anti-statist attitude, for respect for government has typified also those who resented a particular manifestation of governing. By the 1840s there existed 'an overwhelming popular preference for an interventionist state'.20 'Power' and 'the state' are, therefore, concepts we would expect to figure prominently within the configuration of ideas that constitutes the mainstream of French socialist ideology. The methods of early French socialists and proto-socialists were on the whole reformist and peaceful, but that aspect of their message did not percolate into the formation of a popular socialist ideology. Before the mid-nineteenth century, a more aggressive brand of French socialism emerged, concentrating on the need to employ force, if necessary, to overthrow the political and social systems that sustained economic inequality and flourished through it. Here the spirit of the French Revolution, grafted on to populist radicalism, conspired to emphasize the lot of the underprivileged masses, the gap between haves and have-note, and the efficiency of violence, and supplied an amalgam of ideas that pulled Continental socialism as a whole into a revolutionary tradition which became well-established as the century unfolded. Auguste Blanqui, for example, advocated a Jacobin-inspired conspiratorial seizure 19 20

See T. Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford, 1986), esp. pp. 2, 8, 59-60. Ibid. 70, 5-6.

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of power—a view strengthened by the failure of the 1834 Lyons uprising—after which a small dictatorial group would enforce an egalitarian, 'communist' society in which the wealth of the rich would be redistributed among the poor.21 Blanqui resurrected a belief in progress while focusing on the destruction of the existing social order. However marginal those views were in the early nineteenth century, their impact grew later on. In Marx's own words: 'the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui'.22 It was on that soil that Marxism —indeed, many of Marx's own ideas—took root and flourished, and it is through a combination of the profundity of Marxist critical argument with a revolutionary, adversarial political culture that the dogmatic claim of Marxism to be socialism can be appreciated. The pantheon of early French socialists is, needless to say, far larger than the above illustrations indicate. It would be apposite to add Robert Owen's name (well-known among French socialists) to the originators of modern socialist ideas, with his advocacy of cooperatives as a means to combat poverty, his assertion of the role of the environment in facilitating human happiness and improved moral standards, his belief in social reconstruction on the basis of organizational rationality, and a quasi-religious, quasi-Utopian fervour expressed in the planning and running of small cooperative communes.23 But enough initial evidence exists to make tentative suggestions about socialist morphology and to reinforce in conceptual terms the historical assertion of 'a common ground on which "utopian" socialism and Marxism alike were being constructed'.24 (b) THE SOCIALIST CORE

The socialist core contains five concepts or conceptual themes, though some socialist variants will differ on whether additional conceptual components are adjacent to that core or part of it. The five are: the constitutive nature of the human relationship, human welfare as a desirable objective, human nature as active, equality, 21

See Lindemann, History, 72-6, K, Marx, 'The Class Struggles in France', in Selected Writings, ed, D. McLellan (Oxford, 1977), 296. 23 R. Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. G. Claeys (Harmondsworth, 1991). 24 Judt, Marxism, 83. 22

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Socialism: Containing Transcendence

and history as the arena of (ultimately) beneficial change. This latter core concept—unlike the concept of change in conservative ideologies—is a diaehronie perspective on the development of the other substantive core concepts. Though it overlaps with the concept of progress in liberal ideologies, it is not always an openended guiding principle of individual conduct or development, nor a goal to which individuals can always aspire intentionally. These five core concepts need to be spelt out more accurately, All socialisms subscribe to some notion of group membership, to a view which regards individuals as constituting fraternities or communities, even—in some cases—as defined by their membership of such groups. The emphasis on human inter-relationships, and their consequent community structure, as a salient feature of human life appears in different but unmistakable forms. SaintSimon's ensemble, Proudhon's mutualism, Owen's co-operative, Fourier's phalanstery were all meant to give expression to the fundamental importance of human ties. The strongest statement on the theme came from Marx: 'Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.'25 Socialism thus allows for a unit of analysis—the group—which may in extreme cases replace, but more typically runs in tandem with, the individual. Individuality, which within a different conceptual setting is prominent in the liberal core as well, is conditioned and shaped by the sociability implied by group membership and gregariousness. Ultimately, as with Marx, human beings are not merely social animals, but 'an animal which can develop into an individual only in society'.26 These pronounced organicist assertions, according to which the individual 'does not exist in himself but only as far as he is a member of society', are a frequent theme. In conjunction with a severe decontesting of individualism as unbridled, atomistic, economic egoism, they may aver that 'it is the individual who lives for the species and that the latter alone is the eternal reality of life'.27 Often the community is both historically and scientifically elevated above the individual as focal unit of analysis. For other less holistic socialist variants there is nevertheless a strong case for contending that sociability and altruism are human characteristics which were unnaturally made to give way to self-assertion and competitiveness. 25

K. Marx, Grundrisse, ed. D. McLellan (St Albans, 1973), 89, Ibid. 27. E. Ferri, Socialism and Positive Science (Darwin-Spencer-Marx) (London, 1906), 55, 60, 98, 110. 26 27

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 427 All socialisms aspire to achieve a high standard of human welfare, flourishing, or happiness, based at the very least on the elimination of material want and optimally on the satisfaction of as broad a range of human needs as possible. It was common for socialists to distinguish between economic and ethical socialism, as an indicator of two mutually supporting but analytically separate conceptions of welfare. Through abolishing poverty, economic socialism would permit the earning of an honourable living, promote temperance, improve the environment and education, and thus elevate character.28 As Kirkup put it, there was 'a growing tendency to regard as socialistic any interference with property undertaken by society on behalf of the poor'.29 Concentration solely on that aspect of socialism encouraged many of its critics to label it as materialistic, or a 'bread and butter' doctrine. In Marxistinspired genres of socialism, of course, an economic critique occupied an important adjacent position which became well-integrated into the socialist morphology, bringing with it scientific theories of value, labour power, interpretations of the state, and theories of capitalist expansion and crises. It assisted crucially in decontesting the socialist core, by opposing it to the current imrniseration which dehumanized workers, and the commercialization which sapped human relationships. It tended in its more sweeping forms primarily to decontest many socialist concepts in terms of the alienated economic interests which currently distorted human conduct. Ethical socialists broadly accepted the economic basis of socialism, but regarded socialism foremost as an altruistic system of ethics which would affect all people and championed 'the complete participation' of the working classes as well as other members of society 'in the material, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance of the human race'. Moving beyond the mere abolition of poverty, socialism would 'render... all the material and economic factors underlying human life, subservient to the well-being of man in a way hitherto unattained'.30 In Marx's own view of human nature, that well-being was centrally addressed in terms of the normal satisfaction of all needs, physical, cultural, and social: 'the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need take the place of economic wealth and poverty. The wealthy man is the man who needs a complete manifestation of human life and a man in whom his own realization exists as an 28

'Socialism', in W. D. P. Bliss (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York and London, 1897), esp. p. 1272. 29 T, Kirkup, A History of Socialism, 3rd edn, (London, 1906), 4, 30 Ibid. 14-15, 305.

428 Socialism: Containing Transcendence inner necessity, as a need.'31 The production of means to satisfy basic material needs was 'the first historical act'.32 However, human flourishing included capacities as well as needs and communist society allowed for the totality of human powers to be developed.33 that conception certainly could be graced by the broad notion of human welfare. In the non-Marxist socialist tradition, Fourier insisted that human nature would flourish once the repressed passions were liberated and the pleasures of the senses and the soul were cultivated. In his 'new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future'. His ideal society would hence accompany liberty and productivity with happiness.34 The escape from poverty was itself a fundamental aspect of human welfare. For well-being entailed not merely equality, but—as Owen for example stipulated —the material and moral conditions without which human selfrespect was impossible. Poverty was demoralizing and disaffecting, whereas a socialist vision would, by removing social evils, introduce 'permanent happiness' or, in more utilitarian language, 'the greatest happiness to every individual'.35 In more recent times, it has been observed of Swedish social democrats, for example, that their party's36 efforts were geared 'to abolishing poverty rather than exploitation' —a significant realignment of concepts in comparison to Marxist morphology. The firm association of welfare and happiness in the utilitarian tradition attracted many socialists to the formulations of that school. Sidney Webb regarded socialism as 'a theory as to the social structure most likely to conduce to human happiness'.37 Adapting Bentham's search for the greatest happiness of the greatest number to the 'sound health of the social organism', as did the new liberals and in particular Ritchie, Webb asserted that a person's 31 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Selected Writings, 94. Cp, L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, i. (Oxford, 1978), 150: 'To Marx ... the world of men is a world of needs and ... it is they which constitute the real links between members of the community.' 32 K. Marx and P. Engels, The German Ideology, ed, C. J. Arthur (London, 1974), 48. 33 For a further discussion, see J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985), 68-74, and A. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London, 1976). 34 C. Fourier in M. Salvador! (ed.), Modern Socialism (New York, 1968), 93. Cp. Beecher, Charles Fourier, 220-3. 35 Owen, Nero View, 124. 36 T. Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy (Oxford, 1990), 112. 37 Cited in W. Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism (New Haven and London, 1975), 207.

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'conscious motive for action may be, nay always must be, individual to himself; but where such action proves inimical to the social welfare, it must sooner or later be checked by the whole'.38 Importantly, because welfare appeared in the socialist core in conjunction with community, it could be attached to the flourishing of the social entity as well as its parts. The Webbs' perimeter decontesting of welfare in terms of minima was typical of socialist as well as left-liberal thought at the turn of the century. They wished to apply a standard to the whole community, 'by prescribing a National Minimum, absolutely to prevent any industry being carried out under conditions detrimental to the public welfare'. Wages, working hours, and conditions would reflect current understandings of human need.39 Later this century, the British Labour party, guided by theorists such as Crosland, emphasized the promotion of welfare as distinct from equality, while reducing need to its older sense of primary and secondary deprivation.40 But whereas welfare may have meant slightly different things to different socialists, the core position the concept occupied in their various theories is not in question. All socialisms conceive of human nature as essentially productive, usually in the further sense of creative, and work or labour is seen as a major component of that natural activity. Saint-Simon's conception of society, as noted above, engaged it in useful work. Fourier's extolling of associative labour is striking in its contrast with the existing repugnant conditions of work: 'Labour... forms the delight of many creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favour as these animals?'41 The labour theory of value implied unquestionably that human labour was the motor of wealth-production and exchange, and that it could be performed out of a combination of duty and willingness. And although Owen addressed his arguments to a conception of human happiness which had utilitarian undertones, and his conduct of affairs at New Lanark had been paternalistic, he too saw work as an essentially creative human function: 'A necessity... will now 38 S. Webb, "The Basis of Socialism: Historic', in Fabian Essays (London, 1889), 57. Cp. also A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884-1918 (Cambridge, 1962), 149-55. 39 S. and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (London, 1897), 766-84. 40 C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1963), 76-7, 81-101. 41 Fourier in Salvador! (ed.), Modern Socialism, 92.

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compel men to be trained to act together to create and conserve.' Particularly in his later years Owen spoke of establishing 'general habits of healthy and beneficial industry', and in an early condemnation of the division of labour, asserted for all men 'the power over the production of wealth and the formation of character'.42 Nevertheless, pleasure and enjoyment were derived from the fruits of labour rather than from labour itself. In Proudhon's writings labour as creativity was much more marginal/3 which may reinforce tiie query about the centrality of his location within the family of socialisms. Through Marx, of course, the notion that 'work is a positive, creative activity',44 and the idea that human beings were actors engaged in praxis, became pre-eminent in the socialist tradition, expressing in particular the salience of living labour power in the productive process and as contributing to human sociability and control over nature. In Britain, from a very different perspective, William Morris voiced an aesthetic restatement of the 'hope of pleasure in our daily creative skills', transforming the necessity of work imposed by nature on the human race into the quasi-artistic act that would conquer that nature.45 For socialists in general, the appeal to human creativity was an exhortation to tap into the depth and range of the human potential. Socialist productivity and creativity need also to be distinguished from the far more limited conception of wealth-creation prevalent in liberal capitalist thought. In such instances it is more usual to find such activity as essential to the satisfaction of human wants and as an engine of material social progress, but not as a desirable end or endeavour in itself. All socialisms assert the equality of human beings. On one level this is an historical construct, a fundamental statement about their original condition. On another it is a desired goal, in view of its observable material absence in modern industrial societies as well as in most other types of social association, to be reattained through political and economic reorganization. The origins of socialism may be seen in its dual response to the rise of industrial capitalism and to the unfair and contrived hierarchies which the new economic order adopted, imposed, or further promoted. These constituted a material as well as ideational environment which attracted socialist 42

Owen, New View, pp. xxvi, 277, 317, 354. Italics in original. See also B. Goodwin, Social Science and Utopia (Hassocks, 1978), 122. 43 Proucthon, What is Property?, 81-94; cp. Crowder, Classical Anarchism, 104-7, 44 Marx, Grundrisse, in Selected Writings, 370, 45 W. Morris, 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil', in A. L. Morton (ed.), Political Writings of William Morris (London, 1979), 88, 95.

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perimeter concepts, through which that environment was both interpreted and permitted to fashion socialist morphology. What often began—modestly, from the vantage point of conceptual sophistication—as a protest against poverty, was soon grounded on a string of decontestations of equality.4* Any suggestion of sameness or numerical equality must be excluded from the intension of socialist equality. Levelling up and levelling down were not an understanding of equality exhibited by socialists but a criticism frequently heard from their opponents. Few socialists other than G. Bernard Shaw, and he albeit with habitual tongue-in-cheek, recommended the parcelling out of identical incomes,47 More commonly, a distinction can be made between economic and ethical equality. Because the problem of poverty, even if secondary to that of an ethical social order, presented itself as a major material challenge to socialists, the redistribution of wealth was one chief form through which the concept of equality was construed. Behind that, though not always explicitly, lay the ineliminable component of equal and cornmutable human status and worth, whether in religious or secular form. The evolutionary sequence of socialism has seen in the course of the twentieth century an attachment to equality in conjunction with the growing acceptance of democratic practices, the relaxation of class distinctions, and the accessibility of mass consumerism. But in its early stages, the notoriously visible gap between rich and poor was astutely and innovatively decoded as political inequality, including especially inequalities of power, and the concept of equality consequently gained a particular complexion. The revolutionary tradition was crucial in fashioning this inclination. The Manifesto of the Equals of 1796, in defence of the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, proclaimed equality as the first principle of nature, a self-evident truth. This entailed not only-equality before the law but communal ownership of the earth's resources and an end 'to this unnatural division of society into rich and poor, into strong and weak, into masters and servants, into rulers and ruled'*s The inverted link between the core concept of equality and the adjacent concept of power, the second decontesting the first in its sheer adverse oppressiveness, is vital to facets of socialist argument which will be further examined below. 46

See Lichtheim, Short History, 36. See G. B, Shaw, 'Equality of Income', Nation (10 May 1913), 48 S. Marechal, Manifesto of the Equals, quoted in Salvador! (ed.), Modem Socialism, 56-8. 47

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Marx himself signalled the rejection of some aspects of the revolutionary tradition, which tainted equality by a formal, atomistic, and self-interested (and hence in many socialists' eyes, liberal) decontestation. Referring to the French Constitution of 1793, Marx wrote: The term "equality" has here no political significance. It is only the equal right to liberty as defined above; namely that every man is regarded as a self-sufficient monad/49 The famous slogan, attributed to French socialists and amplified by Marx, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs',50 was a far more significant interpretation of socialist equality. Human beings, whose nature was established as consumers as well as producers, were no longer mainly conceived of as bundles of subjective wants and desires that craved satisfaction through the exploitation of others—a rather extreme extrapolation from utilitarian principles. Instead, they could be envisioned as objective clusters of needs (here socialism could nod, as it frequently did, in the direction of science) the fulfilment of which released vital human potential. Because human needs could (it was believed) be determined objectively, and because they nevertheless varied from individual to individual, equality was construed as a differential catering to essential human requirements. While recognizing their diversity, all individuals were concurrently regarded as participants in the optimization of their welfare. Equal distribution on the basis of merit or achievement (even the early communist distributive goal according to work) would thus not be part of the socialist idea-environment of equality. Inasmuch as these latter conceptual components appear in the socialist family, as shall be seen in Chapter 12, they are relatively peripheral and qualified by other decontestations. Equality, of course, included equal, democratic participation in political processes or more generally in social life, but it contained far more, Rousseau's moral vision was paralleled in socialist thinker after thinker, concerned with a society in which, as Owen put it, all would be 'equal in their education and condition, and no artificial distinction, or any distinction but that of age, will ever be known among them'.51 This 'naturalness' of equality, an a priori assertion of human worth, was mirrored in conservative inegalitarian arguments. It survives within the socialist family as a radical interpretation of what is 'natural' because it has still not been 49

Marx, On the Jewish Question, in R. C. Tucker (ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York, 1978), 42. 50 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Selected Writings, 569, 51 Owen, New View, 350.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 433 realized except in most circumscribed and ephemeral circumstances, because it exhibits so many competing versions, and because unlike the core conservative appeal to nature, it is not devised to justify the totality or fixity of socialist essentials. As one socialist explained when distinguishing between the two senses of 'natural', the socialist understanding would refer to relative and flexible laws 'naturally determined by the condition of the social organism', while the orthodoxy of political economy holds to absolute laws which are 'suitable to humanity for all time and all places, and consequently.,, they are unchangeable in their chief characteristics, though they may be susceptible to modifications in detail'.52 Equality, therefore, cannot be regarded as the socialist core value (though some analyses move in that direction)53 because, in its different formulations, it is incapable of carrying socialist ideology on its own, just as liberty cannot perform that task for liberalism. Only in conjunction with notions of community, welfare, and the creative-cum-productive view of human nature can socialism gain sufficient breadth for its profile to emerge. Indeed, for some commentators, 'equality must lead logically to community', because equality is decontested as non-competitiveness, which conjures up an altruism in which the quantitative ranking of individual worth is objectionable; or decontested as the common ownership of property, including the means of production, which encourages a shared notion of membership in a whole.54 Though equality appeared ki socialist thought in different forms, some of its versions did not rule out the acceptance of distinctions of wealth and position. To that extent a thinker such as Fourier, who remained content with minima of food, clothing, and subsistence, has echoes in mid and late twentieth-century Western socialism.55 Nevertheless, his reluctance to advocate a radical diminution of equality sustains his proto-socialist status. (c) HISTORY: THE FIFTH CORE CONCEPT

History, especially in the sense of broad paradigm identified in Chapter 3,56 constitutes the fifth core concept of socialist ideologies. The Hegelian-Marxist views of history have contributed 52 54 ss

53 Ferri, Socialism, 79. See Wright, Socialisms, 33. See R. N. Berki, Socialism (London, 1975), 25. 56 See Beecher, Charles Fourier, 247-8. See above, p. 99.

434 Socialism: Containing Transcendence towards reifying it as a particular patterned advance of reason in society, culminating in the complete universalization of reason and the realization of freedom as self-mastery or dealienation. Ambitious as this enterprise is, it is also a limiting perspective on the rhythm of progress and the viability of end-states, excluding from its intension (except through devices such as the 'cunning of reason') any deviation from this optimistic, even relentless movement, or any pluralist notion of the multiplicity of historical options and the possibility of the failure of social advancement. Bolstered in addition by a dialectic conception of the inevitable march of history, the decontested version, employed in the Marxist group of socialist thought, takes on definite features. It is perceived mainly as a necessitarian set of logical constraints on the movement and development of societies through time, The very phrase 'cunning of reason' implies that cultural occurrences which run counter to the inexorable logic of history are suppressed by that logic, to which time and space are merely an adjunct. Even Marx's materialist version of the laws of history, according to which historical development, and social relations, are a function of the modes of production of material life, is often portrayed as Mstorieist determinism. Its empiricist clothing hides a quest for scientific-cumlogical laws. Unintentionally, socialist argument sails here very close to the wind of the conservative postulation of extra-human causes of the social order, as it does with the concept of natural equality. But it stops short of being caught in the slipstream. Marx's famous phrase, 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past',57 demystified the Hegelian view of history by suggesting that human choice might play a significant part in its unfolding, while assigning socio-cultural patterns—specifically productive forces and economic structures—a dominating role in the direction of that choice. Hence, the Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of history contain both purpose and agency58 (which in socialist ideology is an attribute not of world spirit but of human activity). The notion of purpose injects into socialist morphology the ingredient of changing relationships among political concepts up to the point where a particular desired configuration is attained, as well as the radical transformation of the meanings of some of those concepts. The notion of agency imparts compatibility 57 58

Marx, Eighteenth Bmrmire, Selected "Writings, 300. Cp. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1979), 18.

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with causation theories and specifically the possibility of human control over the design of the configuration, an option that reactive conservatisms must abandon. Moreover, the core concept of activity, interpreted as practice, leads to a view of the relationship between human beings and the world which involves a continuous changing of the latter—that is, the making of history—as expressed in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Engels was more insistent on recognizing 'the law of development of human history', but that general tendency was channelled through a respectable intellectual tradition. This tradition was the enlightenment belief in stages of historical growth, often but not exclusively triadk, evident in much nineteenth-century socialist and proto-socialist writing, such as Saint-Simon's, and common in diverse manifestations of French and German thinking.59 The concept of revolution was itself a cataclysmic eruption within the historical process, but it relates to the third facet of history discussed m Chapter 3>—a specific reading of historical time—and does not challenge the grander logical structure of history. Within the context of analysing ideologies, revolution pertains to a discontinuity in the transition from the conceptual morphology of pre-socialism to socialism, A logically permissible but culturally (because ethically) unacceptable configuration of political concepts encouraged by capitalist structures and practices suddenly gives way to a new cluster. Significantly, this temporal sequence is often presented as the product of a dynamic logic, the dialectic, and it differs fundamentally from the conservative cumulative approach to history. The reading of history as movement and social advancement discharged a triple function in Marxist thought. It operated as a bridge notion, through which a future ideological core could be delivered, despite the daunting cultural constraints of a bourgeois capitalism which seemed to pose insuperable obstacles, and despite empirical evidence which appeared to validate the inevitability of those obstacles. It exonerated past and present generations from the stigma of the failure to create a feasible alternative society, by pointing to the oppressing forces which previous and penultimate historical stages generated. And it held out the promise of the future control by societies over their own fates, as they began to make their histories in circumstances which were of their choosing, 59

Cp. V. Kiernan, 'History', in D. McLellan (ed.), Marx: The First 100 Years (London, 1983), 57-8.

436 Socialism: Containing Transcendence Evolutionary socialism took a somewhat different route in harnessing the concept of history to its cause. That route had at least two features. The first was contained in the famous Fabian aphorism, 'the inevitability of gradualness'.60 In the case of this British socialist group it connoted not the logical necessity of a socialist end-state, but a culturally contrived and manipulated political agenda which had to be systematically and rigorously pursued by means of propaganda and working-class political education. The second related to the impact of scientific evolutionism on social theory. Although Marx had treated Darwin's findings with great respect, there was no obvious reflection of strict evolutionary theory in his approach. However, the same evolutionism which, as we have seen, was drawn into British liberal ideology, also affected socialist arguments. The Italian socialist Ferri derived much comfort from Darwinism as a theory complementary to socialism. While the struggle for life weakened, human societies evolved according to a 'law whose action is progressively more efficacious in social evolution, the law of solidarity or of co-operation among living beings'. This allowed for a scientific socialism that, as with Darwinism, affirmed the validity of the 'trajectory of human evolution ... in the sense of a continuous, progressive preponderance of the interests and benefit of the species over those of the individual'— a view comparable to that of the British non-socialist thinker Benjamin Kidd.61 Similar themes may be found in the writings of Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw, and Ramsay MacDonald, As McBriar has argued, the Webbs rejected what they saw as Marx's imposition of a transcendental pattern on historical facts.62 The communal selfcontrol which Marxism had anticipated as a final, post-revolutionary phenomenon began to take shape for evolutionary socialists at an earlier stage, in effect 'pre-empted' by decisive, conscious social action, and guided by what may best be termed an intellectual vanguard. History and an adjacent rationality were thus intertwined in evolutionary socialism. That rationality was an attribute of the scientific, positivist method seen to cast light on the development of societies. It was also a function of the increased ability of communities and collectives to govern their own destinies. But this related not simply to the emergence of rational consciousness as much as to the growth of rational institutions. For the French 60 61

Cp. M. Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism (London, 1961), 175-6. Ferrl, Socialism, 35, 114. On Kidd see D. P. Crook, Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwinist {Cambridge, 1984), 62 McBriar, Fabian Socialism, 63,

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socialist leader Jean Jaures, socialism was an irresistible consequence of the evolution of democracy guided by organized labour, expressing 'precise and certain methods of social transformation and progressive organisation'.63 His view of progress was ambivalent, however, vacillating between an acceptance of material forces and a cosmic order on the one hand and embracing human direction on the other.64 The German revisionist socialist Eduard Bernstein, though no Fabian himself/5 paralleled the Fabian belief in gradualism. He articulated a socialist philosophy of history, in which the Marxist insight linking economic and political development was centrally highlighted, but was attached to an open-ended dynamic evolutionary theory which abandoned the Marxist predilection for logical necessitarianism and material determinism. Instead, the human will asserted itself: 'historical materialism by no means denies the autonomy of political and ideological forces'.66 As Gay noted, in language suited to the analysis adopted here, Bernstein 'moved the dialectical method from the center of the Marxist system to the periphery and substituted "evolutionism" as the core of Marxism'.67 A particular version of history-cumdevelopment, with liberal resonances, came to play a key role in revisionist socialism. Evolutionism was both the continuation of the more traditional unilinear view of progress already evident in the eighteenth century and an alternative attempt to legitimate social processes scientifically by an appeal to the new findings of biologists, rather than philosophers, logicians, or historians. The concept of history is obviously not the only core concept to move through a broad semantic field. The nature of the social relationship, and the group or community structures which emerge from those relationships, may range from a loose notion of mutual interdependence, via industrial co-operation, to a strong sense of integration, to a very strong definition of human beings as entities whose sociability is their essence. It may comprise an internationalist view of society, or one linked to nationhood, or a smaller group associated with the concept of activity. The concept of activity itself may encompass productivity, creativity, or work—as the 63

J. Jaures, Studies in Socialism (London, 1906), 22, 80. For the complexities of Jaures's position see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 232-3, 235-6. 65 See P. Beilharz, Labour's Utopias (London, 1992), 110-11. 66 E. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. H. Tudor (Cambridge, 1993), 17. 6/ P. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (New York, 1962), 143. 64

438 Socialism: Containing Transcendence investment of labour into an environment. It may be directed at society, at nature, and at the actor him- or herself. The concept of equality spans incompatible operationalizations: equality of income is logically commensurable with equality of need only if underpinned by the cultural assumption that all people permanently have identical needs. The concept of welfare moves between physical, moral, mental, and spiritual needs and capacities, while affixed both to individual and to society, as well as to the individual-in-society. All this may affect the relative weighting even of core concepts: for instance, welfare and equality may focus attention on the distribution of wealth, but the communal nature of the human relationship in conjunction with the concept of creativity may encourage an emphasis on the system of production as the determinant of distribution,68 As is the case with all ideologies, the core concepts of socialism are vacuous unless situated in a constraining idea-environment, They are surrounded by an intricate and sophisticated body of adjacent concepts, such as democracy, liberty, property, the state, nationalization, power, or rationality. Some of them display durability of presence, others are interchangeable, but all will, through subtle or less subtle decontestations of their own, react back on the core concepts to impart to the latter the further specificity without which the cores cannot carry meaning. Those adjacent concepts are logically compatible with the cores, but not all of them are synchronically compatible once culturally specified, nor compatible with respect to the entire ranges of their potential decontestations. The diversity of socialist movements is morphologically accounted for by this variety of conceptual permutations. Cultural factors of a temporal and geographical nature play a decisive part in selecting the specific paths which connect the core and adjacent concepts, as well as in influencing the location of those concepts that also discharge a perimeter role. (
Democracy is so closely intermeshed with core socialist positions that there may be a case for including it as a core concept itself. If it is regarded more usefully as adjacent to the core, that is because it can be logically derived from the communal social relationship and from equality, and because linguistic usage within the socialist 48

Cp. Wright, Socialisms, 31.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 439 tradition has identified 'democratic socialism' as one distinct strain in the family, often distinguished from the exercise of power on behalf of the people. The belief in community and in equality entails a genuine commitment to some version of democratic selfgovernment, both because a community operates in one sense as an undiiferentiated body and because, superimposed on that perspective, none of its members has a valid claim for superior status. On the first count democracy relates to all the people, and on the second to every person. It could hence be persuasively argued that authoritarian variants which emerged within the socialist tradition, those which assent to the role of elites of talent or of organizational capacity as well as those which remain cemented to functional dictatorships of the proletariat, however ephemeral their life-span was originally envisaged, have distanced themselves from socialist ideological structures. Of course, democracy could logically also be derived from liberty as self-determination, or from self-realization as participation. What is special about democracy when it appears as part of a socialist morphology is that its communitarian and egalitarian components are firmly and centrally locked into its decontestation. Even when agreeing on some version of democracy (directly communitarian, co-operative, or syndicalist) for the final stage of socialist development, nineteenth-century socialists differed on whether to implement the practices of a political democracy in the struggle to attain a socialist society. Karl Kautsky's comment on Bernstein succinctly expressed the divide: 'If Bernstein believes that we must have democracy first, so that we may then lead the proletariat to victory step by step, I say that the matter is just the other way around with us: the victory of the proletariat is the precondition of the victory of democracy/69 Bernstein's 'revisionist' approach to socialism affected his analysis of democracy. He expressed impatience with the 'superficial and purely formal definition' of 'government by the people', preferring 'democracy as the absence of class government', 'in which no class has a political privilege which is opposed to the community as a whole'.70 Against a backdrop that saw the political establishment piling obstacle upon obstacle to democratization and which also saw a revolutionary socialism appealing to proletarian consciousness,71 Bernstein hemmed in the concept of democracy with adjacent notions concerning the evaporation of hierarchies (i.e. power structures) and M 71

n Quoted in Gay, Dilemma, 77, Bernstein, Preconditions, 140, Cp. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 218-20.

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an assertion of the viability of the community over a class as the significant social group. But the idea-environment of democracy extended further. It included, 'as we understand it today... an idea of justice, that is, equality of rights for all members of the community, and this sets limits to the rule of the majority'. In addition, 'the more democracy prevails and determines public opinion, the more it will come to mean the greatest possible degree of freedom for all.'72 Bernstein appeared here to run together rather carelessly a number of separate, but mutually defining, concepts. The socialist connection between democracy and equality was more specifically decontested as an equality of rights, which brought the discussion within the liberal ambit. Yet it was not an endorsement of majority rule, thus removing it from predominant liberal examplars. The link between democracy and what socialists at the time would recognize as justice depended entirely on the nature of the rights asserted. The suggested interchangeability between democracy and freedom made sense only when democracy was more specifically decontested as self-determination (a liberal interpretation) or as the suppression of class government (a socialist interpretation, which Bernstein endorsed). His version of democracy was sustained, as we shall see in Chapter 12, by linking an advanced conception of participation to a human emancipation which would restrain absolutist and suppressive power, for 'the right to vote in a democracy makes its members virtually partners in the community, and this virtual partnership must in the end lead to real partnership'.73 The cultural constraints operating to refine this version of democracy were those experienced by German social democrats at the end of the nineteenth century, pertaining to factors such as the impact of evolution, the example of other liberal societies, or the distribution of power in the German political system. Democracy performed an important perimeter function, harnessing those constraints into fashioning a conceptual decontestation that transformed it into a major adjacent concept within socialist ideology. Two concepts saliently interdependent in liberalism—controlled power through equal political participation— were shifted by socialists to slightly different internal locations and combined with community to produce a new defence of Parliamentarianism. A particular morphology was plainly emerging. Other socialist configurations accord democracy somewhat different positions, Marx insisted on detaching it from political and 72

Bernstein, Preconditions, 141.

73

Ibid, 144.

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state structures, which by their very exploitative nature could not be democratic. But an understanding of Marx's notion of democracy must begin from an appreciation of the core concept of community and human relationships at his disposal, one which he developed from Western, and specifically newly available Hegelian, traditions of political thought. Community appeared as a very much stronger construct than the participatory and mutually sustaining group embraced by revisionist socialists, in fact by most non-Marxist socialists. It defined human beings as species-beings, entities whose sociality is their essence, a sociality which marked their uniqueness. Democracy had to support such a conception, which is why Marx asserted that 'democracy is the constitution of the species'. It was a mixture of form—a political constitution— and a real basis, 'the real man, the real people ... socialized man as a particular constitution of the state'/4 Direct democracy was an organizational requirement of that interpretation. Marx's later thoughts on democracy were indebted to his readings of events in France, and emphasized the inadequacies of its formal, political manifestations as against participatory versions which, nevertheless, retained some overlap with liberal theories concerning human rights, representation, and accountability.75 Syndicalist, anarcho-syndicalist, and Guild-Socialist forms of direct control of workers over decision-making processes are another variation on the democratic theme, in which the national group is replaced by a smaller one, constructed on a principle closer to the core definition of human beings as actors and producers. They are of course also variations, together with the state and the face-to-face group, on the socialist notion of community. The assimilation or rejection of political democracy forms one kind of watershed among members of the socialist family. To accept the institutional arrangements of political democracy is to endorse a central feature of 'capitalist' liberalism and to attach democracy firmly to the state, itself decontested not merely as a powerwielding organization but a self-directed communal intelligence and will. For some socialists, unable to accept the viability of that decontestation, this is a practical betrayal of their principles as well as a theoretical absurdity—it is neither a legitimate cultural constraint nor is it logically adjacent to their core concepts. They would prefer immediately to replace political with economic 74 75

Marx, Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', in Selected Writings, 27-8. For the development of Marx's ideas on democracy see A. Gilbert, 'Political Philosophy: Marx and Radical Democracy', in T. Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge, 1991), 168-95.

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democracy, or to break down this analytical distinction altogether.76 For others, it is a first step in an evolutionary path towards alternate, economic, forms of democracy. These are sufficient to support egalitarian and communal values, while not threatening the position of further adjacent concepts those socialists hold dear, many of which are viewed as positive inheritances from the liberal tradition,77 However, the absence of recognized forms of democracy in the work of thinkers such as Owen or Saint-Simon, wim their alternative appeal to rationality and knowledge, suggests not only once again that proto-socialists were not fully-fledged members of the incipient socialist family, but that a complex balance of adjacent concepts needs to be struck. As Kolakowski queried, how do we square democracy in the productive process with competent management?78 (e) SOCIALISM AND POWER

The rise of communism as a distinct and increasingly separatist tendency within the socialist tradition augmented the salience of equality as a concept relating to political power differences. The French socialist experience, and the mid-nineteenth-century European concern with renewed revolution, directed socialists towards a keen interest in questions of power, just as the experience of German Revisionists encouraged their interest in issues of freedom with a liberal hue. By the time of the Second International this was reflected in a clash of theories within the socialist movement. Power, however, came to play an ambivalent and often elusive role in socialist ideology. Because communism was couched in terms of class conflict and the exploitation of workers by capitalists, equality came to refer to the removal of class barriers, even of class itself, as well as to the realization that differences in income masked far more profound instances of control over individual destinies. Equality of power thus meant the emancipation of the oppressed, usually but not exclusively the proletariat, and the re-establishment of the control of each individual over his or her life, albeit within a social context. Most of these themes are evident, for example, in the German Eisenacher and Gotha programmes.79 76 77 79

Cp. P. Snowden, Socialism and Syndicalism (London and Glasgow, [1913]). 78 See Ch. 12. Kolakowski and Hampshire (eds.), Socialist Idea, 2. Cp. Gay, Dilemma, 34-7.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 443 It is easy to understand that a pursuit of this tendency can lead to anarchism, or at least to a socialism hostile to state power, as the most obnoxious expression of potential and actual oppression. The result may be an unwieldy attempt to exclude power from the socialist ideological room altogether—certainly a tendency found in Marx's humanist visions with respect to existing forms of political power—and replace it with apparently discrete concepts such as administration, a Saint-Simonian proposal adopted by Engels. However, as we have seen, the encounter with liberal democratic ideas could direct this logical possibility towards participatory political arrangements that would remove the harmful and asocial sting from power structures. The alternative view of power is the conception of human nature as capable of control, of changing external nature as well as itself. It provides the malleability required by a progressive ideology to persuade its potential adherents not only of its future prospects, but of their own role in achieving its ends. That malleability is a theme already evident in Owen's writings, where the perceived impact of social and educational environments opened up the possibility of radical social restructuring,80 A combination of materialism and utilitarianism allowed Owen to recommend a scientific social reorganization, in particular with respect to religion, private property, and marriage,81 A more complex form of this theme is also at the centre of Marxist thought, where the overcoming of alienation is primarily a reintegrafion of the total self and, hence, a re-establishment of control by the individual over tihat self. This self-management simultaneously includes an active role in shaping and assimilating nature—via appropriation— and control over social activities through the exercise of human powers,82 One of the most striking statements on control under socialism, penned by Engels, decontests it so as to connect it with liberty: The whole sphere of the conditions which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who now for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has become master of his own social organisation... It is m

This could logically lead socialists to adopt forms of social engineering, even eugcnist views of society, unless curtailed by cultural constraints that block those options. See below on efficiency, 81 Cp. K- Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists (London, 1982), 85-6. 82 See in particular the illuminating discussion in B, Oilman, Alienation, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1976), 73-93.

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the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.83

Progress, too, becomes a function of the increasing control by human beings over their environment.84 The characterization of capitalist society as exploitative through impounding surplus value implies the alternative solution of workers' control over their labour power. As Petrovic has asserted, 'power as domination and power as creation, enriching humanity, are in irreconcilable opposition. However, both of them presuppose power as mere power or force. Creativity cannot be powerless!'85 Not all socialists were conscious of the surplus of meaning contained in their notions of creativity, concealing power as self-realization amidst their strong objections to the exercise of its exploitative version. Power as the organized control over and self-direction by a society of those modes of its existence of concern to all may, in the specificity of socialist decontestations, involve a democratic commitment, the ultimate form of group self-determination. The theme of social control differs slightly from the notion of individual empowerment and control over one's own labour, being informed by its conjunction with the core concept of the community, or the social relationship. The fact that in some communist theories, and of course in 'Communist' practice, social control has been detached from democracy, constitutes one (not entirely persuasive) argument for detaining the concept of democracy at the gates of the socialist core. Specifically, non-democratic communism is an instructive example of one form of cultural constraint—a combination of autocratic practices in Russian political culture and Leninist elaborations of the Marxist tradition—that overrode the logical constraints associating egalitarian conceptions of community with democracy. One commentator establishes a common denominator of the means of all socialist movements in that 'they seek some form of effective social control over the dynamics of [an industrial] economy'.86 The preferred terminology here would replace 'means' with adjacency. Control is logically adjacent in all socialist theories to the extent that it may be derived from the interaction of the particular decontestations of community, creativity, and equality 83

F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, iii. (Moscow, 1970), 149-50. See also Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 117. 84 Cp. Cohen, Marx's Theory, 22. 85 G. Petrovic, 'Socialism, Revolution and Violence', in Kolakowski and Hampshire (eds.), Socialist Idea, 108. 86 R. Lowenthal, 'The Future of Socialism in the Advanced Democracies', in Kolakowski and Hampshire (eds.), Socialist Idea, 222,

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity

445

as they define each other. Democratic control is logically adjacent to the extent that community is non-hierarchical and informed by a participatory, not just a distributionary, equality. Control also invokes planning and an appeal to rationality. The latter concept exerts its influence on socialist morphology from a position also just outside its ideological core. Liberal and socialist ideologies share allegiance to the concept of rationality but place it in different idea-environments. As has been seen in Part II, various liberalisms project rationality on individual conduct related to self-determination and self-development, and express ultimate confidence in the potential of human judgement. Because liberal ideology attaches rationality to the individual as the unit of analysis, even when that individual is perceived as operating within a mutually sustaining human environment, it seeks ways by which to ensure that the pursuit of a personal good is compatible with the like pursuit of parallel goods by others. Rationality has therefore to incorporate a notion of social harmony. For socialists, the route to rationality passes through the concept of control, especially when attached to the dynamic and social conception of human nature to which they subscribe. Rationality is thus associated with action that sustains human relationships, and the link between action and control is at the very least implicit, if not stated. Rationality means more than the liberal agency and control over self. It contains a strong collective appeal to active and productive integration with others, the unimpeded pursuit of communal welfare goals, and the harnessing of non-human nature to human ends. Furthermore, control in Marxist terms is not contained conceptually by action alone, but refers to the conscious understanding of a knowable universe.87 For some socialist varieties, such as British Fabianism, utilitarian influences welded rationality to a consequentialism concerned with attaining communal welfare. For other socialist varieties under Hegelian influence, rationality has been further imputed to the historical process itself. The direct appeal to individual reason, however, plays a more modest role in socialist ideology, and accounts for its adjacent rather than core position. As Taylor has argued, there are strong anti-rationalist or expressivist strands within socialism, even ambivalently so within Marxist discourse itself. The core socialist element of creativity may thus be decontested as a non-teleological form of agency.88 This emotive appeal 87

See also the eco-socialist positions discussed in Ch. 14, C. Taylor, 'Socialism and Weltanschauung', in Kolakowski and Hampshire (eds.), Socialist Idea, 50-5. 88

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of socialism, often disguised as a question of style, constitutes an unconscious component of that ideological family, manifested for example in the decontestation of community as fraternity, or in the appeal for class solidarity. Socialism, too, expresses the rational and emotive mixture typical of ideological debate. (/) THE 'SOCIALIST CLAUSE' AND THE STATE

Many commentators on and adherents of socialism regard the public or common ownership of, or control over, the means of production and exchange as central to its belief-system. This slogan (commonly called the socialist clause) affords another access route to the features of socialist morphology. Its British version read as follows: 'To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service/89 The centrality of productivity and of eommonality-cumcommunity are the general cases of the more specific wordings it employs. Control, too, figures prominently. The distributionary aspects of the clause allow, in conjunction with further qualifications, for a measure of equality. Yet, because of the absence of a stated reference to human equality—as distinct from equity of distribution—the slogan is inadequate as a definition of the socialist enterprise. Other adjacent concepts are logically entailed, however. The allusion to 'common' demands a decontestation in the form of the agency in which ownership, or control, is vested. And if ownership is the concept in play, it obviously implies some notion of property. Beginning with the latter issue, the socialist clause is often abbreviated as nationalization. In the actual linguistic practice of socialists, the state has been drawn in as the owner or controller of the means of production and exchange. To bring in the state— however popularly supervised—is, as socialists and non-socialists alike will agree, to reintroduee power differentials and some type of inequality, even on the most voluntarist justification of the state. Hence any decontestation of the socialist clause must proceed with caution if it wishes its ideational configuration to remain within the loose morphological parameters of socialist ideology. One 89

See R, McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party (Oxford, 1974), 96,

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 447 method is to determine the agency of ownership/control as a nonstate one—e.g. the co-operative, the guild, the syndicate, or, more recently, a mixture of public and private agents. Thus Swedish social democrats 'early dropped any notion of nationalization as art end in itself, viewing it instead as a means (often only one of many) to other more central objectives'.90 Another method is to accept the idea of the state as an adjacent concept, and its institutional manifestation as a political necessity—that is, to advocate state socialism—but to hedge its conduct with conditions that ensure the protection of all components of the socialist core. Though the state will inevitably retain functions of power, even force, its power can be directed to realizing whatever the favoured egalitarian system may be; it will operate, much as it did for the new liberals, as the rational and accountable agent of the democratic community; and its purpose will be the liberation of the creative potential of its members. In France, one of the main proponents of state socialism was Ferdinand Lassalle, for whom the state was the prime, even Germanically exalted, agent of socialist development, whose object it was to promote a 'morally ordered community' characterized by 'solidarity of interests, community and reciprocity in development'.91 In Britain, another main proponent was Ramsay MacDonald, champion of the 'positive view of the state'. MacDonald regarded it as the central institutional manifestation of the socialist community and closely adjacent to the latter: 'the Socialist considers that the State is as essential to individual life as is the atmosphere, and he regards the evolution of political democracy as having been necessary in order to create a state which could respond to the common will.'92 By reinterpreting the state through surrounding it with a different conception of power, a democratically buttressed community, and the promise of evolutionary history, the path of socialism veers sharply away from a socialist morphology in which the state is absent. These themes will re-emerge in Chapter 12. In Britain, adherence to the socialist clause, Clause Four, was often perceived as a triumph of rhetoric over policy. More accurately, it illustrated the four features of political rhetoric noted in Chapter I.93 First, rhetoric in this case had an authentic base in 90 91

Ulton, Swedish Social Democracy, 6. F. Lassalle, "The Working Class Program', in Fried and Saunders (eds.), Socialist Thought, 386. Cp. Gay, Dilemma, 92-3. 92 J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Society (London, 1905), 133-4. Cp. J. Meadowcroft, Conceptualizing the State (Oxford, 1995), 185-9. 93 See above, pp. 35-6.

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early socialist policy and constituted part of the cultural context from which later socialist variants diverged. Second, as & political belief, it assumed a reality for its consumers—supporters and opponents alike—irrespective of the perimeter concepts actually deployed by British socialists. Third, Clause Four had a strongly emotive role to play in highlighting the centrality of communal control in socialist morphology and consequently figured prominently in the hyperbole of public debate. Fourth, the appeal to nationalization is decodable as an unconscious ideological feature expressing the unwillingness of socialists to indicate the possibility of compromise with a dominant capitalist system, for fear of triggering off a slippery-slope process and unravelling the cohesion of their core concepts,94 Its ultimate abandonment signalled a desire to reconstruct the historical horizon of British socialism in line with its dominant ideological profile. (g) CLASS AND PROPERTY

How do socialist ideologies relate to the issue of class? Here again, an adjacent category is put to vigorous use in order to reinforce decontestations of equality and power. The ultimate vision of socialism as a classless society can be simultaneously used to sustain different socialist morphologies. It can buttress a conception of an equal society in the sense of the abolition, or steep reduction, of material differences among groups; it can be harnessed to the elimination of power in its exploitative meaning; it can uphold a social, dealienated view of human nature; it may even serve, as it did for Bernstein, as one definition of democracy. Concurrently, as a shortterm socialist conception, it can further the cause of proletarian revolution and conflict, by identifying the only social group that displays the attributes of activity, work, and fraternity on which a socialist future can rely. In that latter sense, power as force, even as violence, gains legitimation in some socialist variants as the only, and necessary, means that oppressed groups with the odds stacked against them can employ in order to realize their historical mission. In that sense, too, class is defined as a group with the productive and associative attributes at the core of socialist ideologies. Even in the weaker British versions, Labourism moved the concept of class to a salient adjacent position in such a way as to 94

Cp. K, O. Morgan, labour People (Oxford, 1992), 228-9; D. Howell, British Social Democracy (London, 1980), 222-4.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 449 elevate the interests of the workers, and their protection, at the expense of a more embracing conception of community, Community was demoted to denote class solidarity.95 As for property, its role in socialist ideology is no less complex, and in different ways it is closely associated with the socialist core. Both the means of production and the products created by those means are in one important sense property, namely, material goods over which control may be exercised. Property refers to the relation between an agent (individual or group) and an object. Hence socialist argument is not aimed at the abolition of property (as its less discerning critics claim, decontesting property solely as the entitlement to exclusive individual possession) but at the diffusion, or duties, of private property, and its relationship to ownership. Inasmuch as particular property distributions are also distributions of wealth, they have a crucial bearing both on power and on the egalitarian core of socialism. For Marx, of course, private property was an exploitative and inegalitarian degeneration from historical forms of common, if primitive, property holdings. Truly human property was simply appropriation that was not alienated, that constituted a 'real reappropriation of the human essence by and for man'.96 Communist society would replace it with the more socialized form of communal property.97 'Under collective property', wrote Marx, 'the so-called will of the people disappears in order to make way for the real will of the cooperative/98 NonMarxists, as did Jaures, could employ the concept of property as the main buttress of the communitarian core of socialism, by asserting that 'the essential aim of Socialism, whether Collectivist or Communist, is to transform capitalist property into social property'. That notion of property was conjoined to the adjacent concept of individualism decontested as individuality: 'Social property has to be created to guarantee private property in its real sense, that is, the property that the human individual has and ought to have in his own person/ Thus, private property was detached from class property and subtly transformed into a defence of those individual rights that assured the 'complex development of [human] faculties'." On another level, the distinction between exchange and use value was utilized by socialists to suggest a potential severing of the link between the formal ownership of property 95

Cp. R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1991), esp. ch. I , '* Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Selected Writings, 86-9. 97 Marx, Grundrisse, in Selected Writings, 349. 98 Marx, On Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy, in Selected Writings, 563. "„ Jaures, Studies in Socialism, 6,29,32. See also Ch. 12 on Jaurfes and Vandervelde.

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and the benefits that accrued from its enjoyment. Thus for R. H. Tawney, property was justified by its social function, that is, 'by reference to the services which it enables its owner to perform', This entailed cementing a connection between using property, creative work, and the supply of 'things which are necessary, useful, or beautiful' to people in general, as well as supporting distributive theories proportioning remuneration to service.100 Though Proudhon labelled property as theft, he mainly decontested property as 'unearned'.101 He advocated the abolition of its more extreme forms to support a notion of limited political equality, and his notion of labour value bolstered a view of individual co-operative human relationships,102 On Marx's reading, Proudhon related only to the form of property but not to the underlying question of alienation. However, the labour theory of value—itself pre-socialist—can easily be assimilated into socialist structures, because it presents property as reified work. This links it to the creativity/productivity core of socialism. Hence also the widespread objection of socialists to unearned income. The German expression 'Arbeitsloses Einkommen' expresses better the perceived interdependence of work and property.103 Further forms of property will be reconsidered in Chapter 12. Those forms are significant both for their perspectives on the relationship between property, ownership, and control, and because they permit the parallel existence of social and individual property, signalling that the core socialist concept of the community or group may exist side by side with the analytical preservation of the individual. (ft) THE SOCIALIST PERIPHERY

Though adjacent concepts such as democracy or nationalization have discharged perimeter functions for socialists, most of its perimeter concepts and ideas are to be found in peripheral structural positions. Their permutations and responsiveness to cultural constraints are virtually infinite. Many perimeter measures, such as the regulation of working conditions, or the redistribution of wealth, were part of the radical arsenal of the late nineteenth m

R, H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London, 1921), 63-4,9,31-2. Cp. also M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1986), 313-14. 101 See Crowder, Classical Anarchism, 85. 102 See D. Milter, Anarchism (London, 1984), 11-12. «8 See E. Vandervelde, Collectivism and Industrial Evolution (London, 1907), p. xii.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 451 century, and their role within different progressive ideologies reflects the adjacent and core concepts to which they were attached: the preferred furtherance of individuality or of equality, of power as participation or power as group assertion, of welfare as personal or as social interest, of property as containing both social and individual value or as the sole preserve of the community. Others may be illustrated through two examples: the practice of trade-unionism and the concept of efficiency. Trade-unionism generated a considerable overlap among socialist programmes in the late nineteenth century.104 The role of workers' co-operation was one such instance, an institutional form close to the heart of socialist movements, but its conceptualization was peripheral to the structure of most, if not all, socialist systems. Trade unions may be and have been regarded as one or more of the following: crucially involved with the organizational aspects of working-class politicization, increasing the awareness and 'consciousness' of class or group, serving as the main politico-economic unit of a society, influencing the economic distributionary patterns of their societies towards greater equality of opportunity or need, retarding the speedy realization of socialist end-states, and antagonistic to the articulation of intricate classless and communitarian 'Utopias'. Any one of the above cultural constraints imposed on a range of logical adjacencies will have substantial bearing on the decontestation of core and adjacent socialist concepts. We are of course not only taking trade unions as empirically observable phenomena but exploring socialist conceptualizations of their functions and attributes. That is precisely why they are a perimeter as well as a peripheral notion. When Lenin asserted censoriously that trade-unionism was the spontaneous working-class movement, and that 'trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie',105 he was, in conceptual terms, demanding the 'closure' of socialist ideology so that it could carefully and intentionally be produced by a vanguard. The power to construct socialist ideology needed to be located in a particular section of society and exercised in a specific way. He was also suggesting that trade unions were conduits of ideas concerning wage relationships and political and economic reforms that reinforced a narrow conception of equality as modest redistribution. Those ideas abandoned 104

See R. C. K. Ensor, Modern Socialism (London, 1904). Lenin, What Is to be Done?, in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. H. M. Christman (New York, 1966), 82. 105

452 Socialism: Containing Transcendence the socialist values of community and creativity in favour of an impoverished non-revolutionary stance, no longer recognizably part of Lenin's interpretation of socialism. When, to the contrary, G. D. H. Cole proffered trade unions as the fundamental organizational unit of his guild socialism, his intention was to retain the structure of the liberal-democratic state and the political control of consumers, while counterbalancing them by according producers and industrial activity a central role.106 Cole regarded trade unions both as the agents of pressures towards economic reform and as agitators for a fairer distribution of social power and the control of industry. Their location on the periphery of Cole's guild socialism sustained some of the interpretations of power and control examined above. It played an important role in defining equality not merely in terms of income but of status—i.e. of social membership. It endorsed an evolutionary view of political and economic development. But as Wright has observed, it failed to spell out satisfactorily the socialist potential of trade unions, despite loosely advancing notions of community and democracy.107 In other words, the positioning of trade unions on the periphery of socialist ideology did not, in Cole's case, provide adequate support for the socialist core. Perhaps this was to be expected in view of the general lack of enthusiasm of the British trade union movement for elaborate socialist doctrines. That is not to say that trade unions had no role to play in socialist morphology; simply that their role was somewhat different from the one intended or aspired to by many socialist theorists. Bernstein too addressed the question of trade unions. Unlike Cole, who exhibited the cultural constraints of a preferred view of the functions of guilds, grafted on to a trade union tradition of political activism, Bernstein displayed more obviously the constraints of historical developments. As a peripheral factor, trade unions impinged rather differently on Bernstein's revisionist socialism. The German trade union movement was more pacific and conservative than its British counterpart,108 a standpoint which served as a congenial setting for the emergence of revisionism. The nature of revisionist ideology reflected political realities in late nineteenth-century Germany. While exceedingly powerful, German 106

G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated (London, 1920), 189-207; G. D. H. Cole, Self-Government in Industry (London, 1972), 54-82. 107 A. W, Wright, G. D. H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford, 1979), 84-90,95, 101. 108 C. Landauer, European Socialism (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1959), 314-17, 356.

The Congruence of Socialist Diversity 453 trade unions opposed the use of the general strike advocated by some socialists, but supported the gradualist tactics—the conceptions of change and political activism—espoused by the revisionists. In addition, through challenging economic absolutism, trade unions played a key role in the development of the democratic practices, in partnership with the community, which Bernstein hoped to see in a socialist Germany—hence their important perimeter function,109 In Britain, conversely, the trade union movement was central to the formation of the Labour party, and the subsequent tensions between the labour' and the 'socialist' wings of the party shaped some of the qualities of British socialism both negatively and positively. Trade-unionism was either ignored initially by British socialists, as it was by the Fabians in the 1880s,110 or its activism appeared more of a threat than a blessing. In Ramsay MacDonald's earlier work, written around the period of the formation of the Labour party, trade unions were seen to support his evolutionary view of socialism, while playing a relatively minor role in the organization of industry under the aegis of the state. Trade-unionism would keep 'the communal industrial organisation in the closest touch with the needs of the workers'.111 Workers—understood as members of the working classes—were nevertheless only one part of the community. As MacDonald wrote, 'under any free government the Socialist movement must unite for political purposes with the industrial organisations of the workers'.112 However, trade unions also employed practices which 'could not always be defended from the point of view of Society'. They had to transcend their conflictual role as bargainers with capital and act also as the political arm of socialism.113 They needed to be rallied to the more general social aim of communal restructuring and prosperity, but both their role as power-wielders—potentially including the weapon of the general strike—and their contrary role of exaggerated collaboration with capitalists, were anathema to many British socialists. Communitarian, organic considerations had to override the trade-union proclivity to develop sectarian political power. Ultimately, MacDonald concluded, 'Trade Unions are absolutely essential for defence; they are weak for progress.' In expressing a 109 110 111 112 113

107.

Bernstein, Preconditions, 139-40. See also Gay, Dilemma, 130-40. See MeBriar, Fabian Socialism, 53. MacDonald, Socialism and Society, 185. J. R, MacDonald, The Socialist Movement (London, 1912), 234. J. R. MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive (London, 1921), 64, 66,

454 Socialism: Containing Transcendence fear of union leaders propelled by mass sentiment, thus endangering in his view the evolution of democratic socialism,114 he certainly skirted around the edges of socialist conceptions of democracy. Likewise the Webbs, in their rejection of syndicalist and guild-socialist solutions, wished to retain the element of trade-unionism dedicated to working-class defence as a means for equalizing power relationships within a social democratic community,115 rather than allowing trade unions to form an inegalitarian power base of their own. The Fabian emphasis on the rational direction of socialist collectivism produced a morphology in which 'scientific' methods and expertise were adjacent glosses on the concept of a guided community, one in which uneducated political action, such as might emanate from trade unions, had little place, and in which the individual had to make way for the collective intelligence of such an organic society. Efficiency, another common peripheral socialist concept, was an offshoot of rationality but also of power as the control of human beings over their environment. In its milder forms it has been decontested as an emphasis on organization, on planning, on the elimination of waste, and the advance of reforms that will, in quasiutilitarian mode, maximize human happiness or need-fulfilment. The Swedish version of socialism, however, allocated a far more central role to the concept of efficiency than its European sisterideologies. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, as well as Ernst Wigforss, built on the interest in planning characteristic of social thinking in the 1930s,116 asserting that socio-economic equality, and a solidaric community, would enhance productive efficiency through conscious control of the economy. The association of efficiency with the core concept of equality is a key feature of Swedish social democracy.117 In its more potentially abrasive forms, efficiency has been linked in socialist thought to a fascination with eugenics. Personal efficiency—that is, physical health and flourishing—was the stipulated precondition for communal welfare.118 More generally, the Webbs exemplified the socialist concern with the mechanics of power and organization, and their views have been associated with the drive for greater national efficiency.119 There even was a 114 MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive, 188, 230. "* McBriar, Fabian Socialism, 103. 116 Cp. Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 351-6. m See Ulton, Swedish Social Democracy, esp. pp. 56, 149-53, 260. 118 S. Webb, 'Eugenics and the Poor Law: The Minority Report', Eugenics Review, 2 (1910), 237. See also M. Freeden, 'Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity', Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 645-71. 119 McBriar, Fabian Socialism, 75-9, 159-60; G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford, 1971).

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spillover at the margins of socialism into fascist terrain, as in H. G. Wells's call in 1932, under Mussolini's impact, for 'Liberal Fascist!, enlightened Nazis' to provide a 'competent receiver for the present disorders of a bankrupt world',120 though all we may wish to conclude from this affinity is that different ideologies employ overlapping concepts while maintaining their interpretative distinctiveness. More recently, market socialism has been identified as introducing a different, non-directive, notion of efficiency.121 Despite the great and seemingly loosely connected varieties of socialism, common threads run through them all. Though socialist family resemblances are sufficient to justify the umbrella term 'socialism', its differentiae may appear in a plenitude of morphologically legitimate forms. The analysis of the family of socialisms proffered above may provide access to new and complex meanings attached to central political concepts. Through the prism of socialist structure we can refine our comprehension of the ways these meanings become mutually dependent, as well as flexible enough to absorb and fashion political realities. The purpose of this chapter was neither to do justice to the historical development of socialism, nor to the profundity of individual thinkers. It goes without saying that any concrete instance of socialism is infinitely more intricate and subtle than can be imparted through the necessarily highly schematized treatment offered here. One objection to this treatment of socialism might be that twentieth-century communism has split off from socialism into a distinct ideology. That contention is acceptable, provided that the reference is not to socialist end-states, as in the French socialist and Marxist traditions, but to a quasi-totalitarian system, in which some conceptual meanings are nailed down by political fiat, in which central aspects of adjacent concepts (such as many facets of negative liberty, or acknowledged participatory forms of democracy) are banned from the structure, in which power and inequality appear in forms recognizable to critics of capitalism and authoritarianism, and in which the socialist core is consequently impoverished to the point of extinction. Conversely, in order to broaden our appreciation of recent socialist variants, and to understand the boundary problems between socialist and liberal approaches to the twentieth-century welfare state, more needs to be done. The next chapter will return to the important issue of the place of liberty—an adjacent concept—-in socialism. It will also contain an assessment of the market, as a novel perimeter concept within socialist morphology. 120

H. G. Wells, Manchester Guardian (I Aug. 1932).

m

See Ch. 12.

12

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice

... socialism is now being developed into a policy of individualism—only, of an individualism as different as day from night from the absurdity which the Liberty and Property Defence League holds up as ideal freedom.1 (a) THE PURSUIT OF LIBERALISM BY OTHER MEANS

ideas of liberation and emancipation were integral to the THE Continental socialist tradition, drawing as we have seen on theories of human fulfilment. Furthermore, Marx had raised liberation to the forefront of socialist agendas, not as the attaining of self-consciousness in the manner advocated by nineteenth-century German philosophers, but as 'real liberation in the real world ... an historical and not a mental act'.2 Breaking with formal bourgeois liberty—the freedom of buying and selling-—Marx exposed them as manifestations of the subjugation of individuality.3 Emancipation meant overcoming obstacles in the path of self-control; a release from waged production, which was geared solely at satisfying immediate material wants; and the consequent enabling of selfrealization within a social framework, which exploitation and alienation had impeded.4 Even those forceful ideas could not encapsulate the considerable potential of the concept of liberty for socialist purposes. Through the Marxist concept of emancipation, it may have conspicuously been decontested in opposition to socialist theories of domination. However, socialist discourse also adopted 1

J. R, MacDonald, 'The People in Power', in S. Coit (ed.). Ethical Democracy: Essays in Social Dynamics (London, 1900), 70. 2 K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (London, 1974), 61,3 K. Marx, Gmndrisse, in Selected Writings, 371-2. 4 See e.g. Marx, ibid. 368. See also S, Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford, 1985), 71-99.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 457 paramount liberal interpretations in contrasting liberty with obstructions to action, as well as with human inertia and stagnation. Self-determination and self-realization, even within communal frameworks, invited a large range of conceptual combinations in which liberty performed supportive as well as constitutive duties for socialism. For most socialist varieties, liberty does for socialism what equality does for feminism: it is an adjacent concept through which most discourse has to pass en route to and from the core, and it has a considerable impact on the range of decontestations the core may undergo.5 Within the British socialist tradition, as well as in non-Marxist Continental socialism, both liberty and individuality were desirable values. Their presence in the writings of many leading British socialist thinkers reflected the liberal-radical roots of their tradition/ as well as—in the larger sense—the predominance of the concept of liberty in all major forms of British political and economic thought since Hobbes, After all, it was only in the 1890s that British socialists deliberately broke off their institutional relationships with the Liberal party, whose aims and programmes had been a major socializing factor in their political consciousness,7 And to the extent that Marxist socialism traversed the Channel it was—notwithstanding Marx's similar journey—rapidly assimilated into local cultural preferences. It reflected the general appeal of liberty as a personal political value cutting across British ideological loyalties. In particular, British socialists were not prone to dwell on liberty as a macro-phenomenon relating to the emancipatory casting-off of class shackles, but tended to 'privatize' it by attaching it to individual benefits. The impact of British liberal ideas on socialism was greatly amplified by a few remarks of Mill in his Political Economy and his Autobiography, where he welcomed a cautious move towards collective ownership.8 On the other hand, Mill's posthumous 'Chapters on Socialism' ultimately cast doubt on the compatibility of socialism with the free and spontaneous development of individuals. Though he roundly condemned the existing distribution of property and expressed qualified support for a gradualist non-revolutionary socialism, and while he treated the short-term 5

See Ch. 13. * See W. Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism (New Haven and London, 1975), 1-2. 7 See M, Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, 1978), 145-50. 8 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Harmondsworth, 1970), 358-9; Autobiography (Oxford, 1969), 137-9.

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problems of socialism with considerable sympathy, Mill fell back on his unrealistieally sanguine belief in a high standard of both moral and intellectual education, if the common ownership of the instruments of production was to succeed. Only Fourier among the socialists appeared to Mill to offer sufficient scope for individual free choice; otherwise socialism, for all its virtues in the realms of co-operation and equalization of property differentials, could not be implemented in the foreseeable future,9 Standing back from the contemporary debate, it is intriguing to compare Mill's interdependent concatenation of core concepts, 'the free development of individuality',10 with the Marxist phrase, 'the original and free development of individuals'," On one level the latter is prima-facie evidence for an affinity with values which liberals hold dear, and powerful ammunition against those who would emphasize the abyss between Marxism and liberalism. For Marx, too, these concepts were at the forefront of his ideological preferences. But at another level they were interpreted by different sustaining concepts, as we have seen in Chapter 11. There is a significant difference between Mill's 'individuality' and Marx and Engels's 'individuals'. The former extolled the distinct uniqueness and inventiveness of the one individual, and the consequent contribution to society of such individuals, on the basis of establishing the separate social space necessary to their development. The latter, to the contrary, wished to contract, if not collapse, the structural distinction between the private individual and the general domain, by insisting on the individual as an all-rounder who embraced 'various activities and practical relations to the world', controlled productive forces, and was enmeshed in conscious solidaric social relations. Development was exclusively related to these factors.12 Furthermore, Marx's use of the word 'original' implied a distortion in the historical process to which Mill did not subscribe. Mill cannot be seen as a progenitor of British socialism,13 because his arguments display all the features of the liberal conceptual configuration and because overlap, or reputed influence, are insufficient to establish membership of an ideological 9

J, S. Mill, Chapters on Socialism, Collected Works (Toronto and London, 1963- ), v. 737-8, 746, 748. 10 See above, Ch. 4, " Marx and Bngels, German Ideology, 118. 12 Ibid. 105, 117-18. See also Grundrisse, in Selected Writings, 380, where Marx commends a more self-developmental conception of free time alongside the development of the social individual. 13 Contrary to the argument presented in Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, 48 and passim.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 459 family. What needs to be stressed is simply that the great modern ideological families all share some blood ties, Within British progressive traditions, however, the mature Mill was invoked more than any other nineteenth-century British theorist to construct the historical horizons of later ideological developments seen to emanate directly from 14him onwards, whether towards a left, interventionist liberalism, or towards socialism itself. British socialists were eager to co-opt Mill to their cause in their attempt to acquire cultural legitimation for introducing profoundly liberal ideas into their semantic fields. Sidney Webb invoked Mill to advocate a recovery of the producers' share of their produce and noted of Mill's Political Economy that 'every edition of Mill's book became more and more Socialistic'.15 Kirkup's early history of socialism praised Mill's 'conception of socialism which is at once intrinsically more reasonable, more adapted to the English mind and to16 universality, than any other offered by prominent economists'. Looking back from the 1920s, H. J. Laski commended Mill for promoting industrial co-operation and for a disengagement from laissez-faire, as well as for emphasizing human rights and active individual citizenship.17 This latter attempt of Laski's to appeal to Mill as the advocate of individuality and liberty, of 'the eminent worth of human personality',18 and to integrate that perspective into socialist discourse, sums up the tendencies of British socialism. Its prevalent pattern, however, was not one in which liberty constituted part of the socialist core,19 but one into which it was introduced as an adjacent concept shaping the nature of the human communitarian relationship and constituting a comment on the essence of human creativity. Occasionally, though, both in British and in Continental socialism, liberty was added to the socialist core itself by attaching it firmly to the other core concepts. When that happened in Britain, boundary problems with the new liberalism all but blurred the separate family credentials of the two, though tell-tale marks— especially with respect to the concept of equality—usually permit faint distinctions to be preserved. Moreover, limited political cooperation was evident between Liberals and socialists—witness 14

See Freeden, New Liberalism, 49-50. S. Webb, "The Basis of Socialism: Historic', in Fabian Essays (London, 1889), 35, 58. 16 T, Kirkup, A History of Socialism, 3rd edn. (London, 1906), 286-7. 17 ls Nation (28 Apr, 1923). Ibid. 19 Cp. M. Luntley, The Meaning of Socialism (La Salle, 111., 1990), 119, on the secondary position of freedom in the 'logical geography of socialism'. 15

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the Fabian policy of permeation, and feelers put out for a progressive party in the 1890s.20 On the Continent the situation was more complicated. In France Jaures found common ground with the liberal Le"on Bourgeois on graduated taxation.8 The Swedish social democrats pursued 'alliance polities' with liberals and others.22 In contradistinction, German liberalism was on the whole sufficiently distinct from moderate socialism—both in contemporary perception and in its identifiable morphology—to avoid such boundary issues. If boundary problems in Continental political thought persisted, they did so despite the lack of a developed leftliberal discourse. German socialists were not met by a strong leftliberal movement that had sprung up to replace the demise of the older liberalism. Because they moved virtually unchallenged into that vacuum, German socialists were able to create ideational constructs which British analysts would have recognized as left-liberal. Because in Germany they were not identified as such, socialists had no need to justify their morphology against ideological rivals. Ramsay MacDonald was typical of his progressive generation in dissociating atomistic individualism from individuality, as had the new liberals. But he diverged from the latter in warning against exaggerating the free play of the human will, and in endeavouring to set individual action firmly within a communal framework. Of individual activities such as house-building, the religious life, art, and philosophy, he observed that 'we seldom think that all these precious possessions and exercises belong to Society, and not to the individual... our life is of value mainly in so far as it has contributed to the fulness of social23life and the development of social organisation and efficiency'. Clearly subordinating the concept of the individual to that of society and thus removing it from his ideological core, MacDonald concluded in defiance of social-contract theories: 'The "being" that lives, that persists, that develops, is Society; the life upon which the individual draws that he himself may have life, liberty and happiness is the social life.'24 Yet individualism decontested as individuality played an increasing part in MacDonald's thought, and he insisted that 'so far from 20

See e.g. D. Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity 1884-1929 (Cambridge, 1992); A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884-1918 (Cambridge, 1962), 95-7. 21 J. T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory (New York, 1986), 259-60. 22 T. Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy (Oxford, 1990), 10, 16. 23 J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Society (London, 1905), 15-16. 24 Ibid. 16-17.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 461 being an anti-individualist philosophy, Socialism contains all the essentials of real individualism'.25 Socialism revived the 'classical individualist claim that unless a man can find the means of life all theories about his liberty are but unreal shadows'.26 To cement that point MacDonald advocated a conception of liberty which combined a love of political liberty'—the throwing off of fetters assisted by the rise of democracy27—with liberty as the depositing of economic controls in the community. Thus would the dependence of individuals on the whims of others be eliminated.28 MacDonald identified the subjects of liberty as both the individual and the community: 'where two persons form a community, they have to provide for common liberty as well as for individual freedom. Liberty is an adjustment of opposites.'29 Unlike Hobson, he was not exercised by the fine print of the organic analogy, simply denying the possibility of an antithesis between individual and social activity, or between liberty and coercion of a moral character'. Employing developmental and quasi-Idealist language, he decontested 'the liberty of Socialism... [as] the liberty of a man to fulfil his true being—the being which has ends that are social, that relate to Society, and that are not merely personal'.30 The conceptual configuration differed from the liberal one in that liberty was outside the core, an adjunct to the servicing of communal flourishing. The two-pronged new liberal awareness of social and individual ends, and the securing of areas in principle outside social control, was also absent in this socialist interpretation of liberty. Fusion rather than interdependence was the order of the day: 'Self and government are but aspects of the same individuality.'31 There was no space left between the concepts of individuality and community, or of liberty and control. Among the Fabians a spectrum of views on liberty abounded. Sidney Webb queried whether the maxim, that liberty stands predominant over equality' could withstand the findings of economic analysis, which 'has destroyed the value of the old criterion of respect for the equal liberty of others'. If complete individual liberty meant unrestrained private ownership of the instruments of wealth production, it was 'irreconcilable with the common weal'. Clearly, community or, as Webb put it, 'consciously regulated coordination among the units of each organism' had priority over 25 26 28 30 31

}. R. MacDonald, The Socialist Movement (London, 1912), 164. l? Ibid. 166. MacDonald, Socialism and Society, p. xxiv, s MacDonald, The Socialist Movement, 134-5. Ibid. 137. J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Government (London, 1910), 152-4. Ibid. 155.

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liberty in the socialist structure. Its purposes determined the acceptable range of liberty. In a famous passage, Webb went further than most British socialists in marginalizing the liberal end of individuality: we must take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our own individual developments. Or, rather, the perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine.32 Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, retained an early interest in anarchist ideas while developing his brand of socialism. His economic arguments, and his general view of socialism, identified inequality with poverty, as a central concern of justice and morality. In a snap definition he described socialism as meaning 'equal rights and opportunities for all',33 though this was qualified by his insistence on 'no wealth without work'34—a reminder of the core position of work in all socialist designs. However, one important by-product of an equitable distribution of goods, work, and leisure would be 'a steady increase in the hours of individual liberty'.35 Like so many socialists whose creed aimed at breaking up the routines of human work so as to release human life, Shaw was attracted by the vision of a leisured class. Unlike Webb, participation in public affairs would be optional and undesirable for the mediocre masses.36 The cultural chain of conceptual links within the universe of logical possibilities was succinctly spelt out: leisure brings freedom, and freedom brings responsibility and self-determination.'37 Shaw dismissed the 'nervous dread of overregulation' fomented by those ignorant of socialism. Interestingly, he subscribed to the customary view of liberty as the preservation of civil liberties, most of which would be deemed valuable under socialism.38 Elsewhere he advocated the freedom to work in order to satisfy individual wants in a manner undistinguishable from liberals. Inverting T. H. Green's approach, Shaw wrote: 'When England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively, 32 33 34 35

260. 36 37

Webb, 'Basis', 58-60. Cp. [G. B. Shaw], What Socialism Is (Fabian Tract 13; London, 1890). G. B. Shaw, Tte Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism (London, 1929), 9. G, B. Shaw, 'Preface to the 1931 Reprint', in Fabian Essays (London, 1962), G. B. Shaw, 'Sixty Years of Fabianism', in ibid. 307, Shaw, Intelligent Woman's Guide, p. xxviii. * Ibid. pp. xxxiii, 393, 395.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 463 England becomes socialistic. Artificial inequality will vanish then before real freedom of contract; freedom of competition, or unhampered emulation, will keep us moving ahead; and Free Trade will fulfil its promise at last/39 The break with liberalism occurred rather in Shaw's elevation of work over the liberty to desist from it. That was one area in which 'official interference with personal liberty would be carried under Socialism to lengths undreamed of at present... The idler will be treated not only as a rogue and a vagabond, but as an embezzler of the national funds.'* To that extent, the socialist core concept of labour trumped whatever liberty individuals might have to dissociate themselves from communal obligations.41 R, H. Tawney's more sophisticated views on liberty reinforce the specifically socialist morphology. His notion of social function understood the role of the individual as that of discharging a social service, with rewards in the industrial sphere being commensurate with contribution. In addition, democratic governmental accountability underwrote economic liberty. The lexical sequence was indicative of the relationship between core and adjacent concept: 'It is a question first of Function, and secondly of Freedom.'42 This was supported by43 a Christian understanding of liberty as discharging one's duty. In discussing economic liberty, Tawney displayed a clearer appreciation of individuality than did MacDonald. He respected an individualism which, instead of 'valu[ing] riches as the main end of man', had a 'high sense of human dignity, and desired that men should be free to become themselves'. This notion of self-development was attached to a very liberal partiality for the variety of interests.44 Reiterating the negative/ positive liberty distinction, Tawney pressed for a freedom which was 'not merely the absence of repression but also the opportunity of self-organization'. But self-organization was immediately linked to 'the right to associate with others in building up a social organization with a consciousness and corporate life of its own'.45 Liberty was simply not permitted to inhabit the individual domain undisturbed. Instead, it was allied with the capacities of communal 39

Cp. Wolfe, Front Radicalism to Socialism, 130, 138-9, * Shaw, Intelligent Woman's Guide, 399-400. 41 See also G. Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw (London, 1993), 116-17, 42 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London, 1921), 8. 43 Cp. R. Terrill, R, H. Tawney and his Times (London, 1973), 128. 44 Ibid. 20, 43, 45 R. H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition (Harmondsworth, 1966), 107.

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action and pulled into the intension of power. Referring to the members-cum-workers of a community, Tawney declared that 'their freedom is simply their corporate power to control the conditions upon which their livelihood depends'.46 Power was, as so often in socialist argument, cleansed of its pejorative connotations and harnessed to the causes of action, control, and emancipatory selfdirection.47 Yet unlike the views associated with the Fabians, economy and efficiency were positioned at a further distance from the core than the liberty attending the demands of community. (fc) EQUALITY AND LIBERTY: A PARTNERSHIP OF EQUALS?

Tawney specifically addressed the purported antithesis between equality and liberty, arrived at by contraposing selected decontestations of the two terms in the manner commonly used by opponents to discredit socialism. If liberty was decontested as 'every individual... free, according to his appetites' to indulge in the accumulation of personal wealth and power, then the core socialist concept of equality could have no truck with it. But, as Tawney astutely commented, 'it is possible that equality is to be contrasted, not with liberty, but with a particular interpretation of it'. In one of the more remarkable discussions by a socialist of the relationship between the two concepts, Tawney put great emphasis on the infinite diversity of human beings as the end of social arrangements. He could consequently imagine a situation in which a particular institutional format promoted dehumanizing decontestations of equality. 'Hence', he claimed, 'institutions which guarantee to men the opportunity of becoming the best of which they are capable are the supreme political good, and liberty is rightly preferred to equality, when the two are in conflict.'48 Does the above excerpt signal the demotion of equality as a core socialist concept? Not in the general context of Tawney's thought. It must be noted that he also weighed diversity against commonality, and concluded: 'in spite of their varying characters and capacities, men possess in their common humanity a quality which is worth cultivating'. A community would make the most of that if it 'stresses lightly differences of wealth and birth and social position, and established on firm foundations institutions which meet common needs, and are a source of common enlightenment * Tawney, Radical Tradition, 108, 47

48

See also A. Wright, R. H. Tawney (Manchester, 1987), 67-8. R, H. Tawney, Equality (London, 1931), 207-8.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 465 and common enjoyment'. Individual differences 'were no reason for not seeking to establish the largest possible measure of equality of environment, and circumstance, and opportunity'. For most British socialists, equality was unquestionably a core concept, but unlike many of their Continental counterparts they formulated it negatively in terms of concrete diminutions of inequality and not as a generalized metaphysical value. The important thing was 'not that it should be completely attained, but that it should be sincerely sought',49 It has already been noted that the two ineliminable components of the concept of equality are a comparison among all individuals that negates irrelevant differences, and the postulation of a common humanity in which human worth is commutable.50 The concept falls short of containing an ineliminable observable, measurable, and, above all, ethically sufficient, criterion of identity. Equality is a concept that seems to imply absoluteness (one is either equal or unequal), yet is incapable of delivering it. Logical or scientific notions of sameness or identity have, in political discourse, to give way to notions of similarity, or to acknowledging differences while denying their political, social, or ethical significance and relevance. Tawney warned against 'using the impossibility of absolute cleanliness as a pretext for rolling in a manure heap'.51 It is no accident that British treatises on equality concentrate on ways of diminishing particularly unacceptable inequalities. What is unacceptable is determined by cultural adjacencies superimposed on sets of logical possibilities. For Tawney, a civilized society would not eliminate inequalities based on individual differences, but only those inequalities whose source lay in social malorganization. Nevertheless, the notion of a common humanity implied a unifying norm. More recently, it has been challenged by ethical and political positions which have recourse to the newer vocabulary of pluralism and multiculturalism. If there appeared little to choose between Tawney and the new liberals, giving cause for regarding him as a boundary case, he nevertheless placed greater emphasis on the disposal of forms of economic power and on binding equality firmly to community. Tawney immediately followed his comment on preferring liberty to equality with the suggestion that, in modern societies, the limited freedom which could be enjoyed was only possible when violent inequalities were repressed.52 His boundary position is also 49 51

so Ibid. 36-7. See above, pp. 159-60. H Tawney, Equality, 207-8. Ibid. 208.

466 Socialism: Containing Transcendence illustrated by his attitude towards power. For liberals, power was primarily a phenomenon to be restrained by constitutional and political means. For socialists, as we have seen, power was an ambivalent concept signifying either exploitation in the hands of an oppressive class, or the exercise of democratic communal control over the welfare of a society's members. For Tawney, too, power was ambivalent, but in a different sense: its dualism was stretched not between a liberationist exaltation of human capacities in the light of the inhibitions to their expression, and a Marxist critique of capitalist structures, but between the former and a traditional liberal fear that the state and its representatives would operate without consent and accountability.53 Tawney consequently echoed liberal core beliefs about inequality of power—in the form of differential individual capacities—buttressing liberty. That was abetted through a decontestation of the two concepts whereby liberty 'implies the ability to act' and one such central activity was the control by human beings over the conditions of their existence.54 Conversely, were one to retain the traditional liberal meaning of liberty on its own, equality could be disregarded: 'As long as liberty is interpreted as consisting exclusively in security against oppression by the agents of the State, or as a share in its government, it is plausible, perhaps, to dissociate it from equality.'55 Tawney's final salvo, producing what was effectively his socialist solution, was to decontest liberty not by raising it above, but by entangling it with, equality: In conditions which impose co-operative, rather than merely individual, effort, liberty is, in fact, equality in action, in the sense not, that all men perform identical functions or wield the same degree of power, but that all men are equally protected against the abuse of power, and equally entitled that power shall be used, not for personal ends, but for the general advantage.56

The morphological pattern emerging here is one of a core in which equality, community, and creativity are shored up by the introduction into the core of a compatible liberty, while power and democracy retain a close adjacency which underpins the core's mutually supportive decontestations. Tawney's socialist core of creative work even allowed for a weak, but not negligible, adjacent concept of private property aimed at securing the performance of serviceable 53 54

Cp. Terrill, Tawney, 146-9; Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 318-19. 5S Tawney, Equality, 209. Ibid. 213, ** Ibid. 214.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice

467

57

work, In addition to the perimeter concepts and ideas normally associated with gradualist socialist programmes, such as open access to free education and other measures to further welfare, Tawney's interwar socialism was specifically anchored in the historical and cultural context of the interwar years through advocating public control of monopolies and regulation of industrial policy, a partnership between labour and management, and state planning.58 Other British socialists took an even stronger line on the signif cance and distinctiveness of liberty. Though Laski's political thinking went through a number of disparate phases, the centrality of liberty and individuality, indeed of much of the liberal core, is evident until his 1930s quasi-Marxist phase. His early pluralism emphasized the values of individual development and free expression, the importance of limiting state power, and a social bond which did not subsume the individual in the communal whole. Crucially, he retained the individual as the unit of social analysis, and shied off from organic views of society.59 In an extraordinary passage for a soi-disant socialist, Laski announced of the individual citizen that 'his true self... is the self isolated from his fellows, and contributes the fruit of isolated meditation to the common good which, collectively, they seek to bring into being'.60 Reiterating the existing liberal faith in religious and political freedom, he nevertheless deplored, as did all socialists, the unfreedoms endemic to capitalism where freedom was 'a function of property'. The socialist attitude to freedom was, in contradistinction, the establishment of social arrangements which would enable 'each individual to be himself at his besf ,61 Was this any different from the structure of liberal argument? At that point in his work, what Laski termed socialism could equally well have been the new liberalism. Although he insisted that liberty and equality were inseparable, his maximalist interpretation of equality of opportunity was matched by perimeter concepts similar to Hobson's: access to education, delivery from material want, reasonable wages and conditions of work; ultimately the state had to recognize 'my equal claim with others, in the things essential to the good life'. Furthermore, existing political liberties would be extended because greater effect would be given to the =7 58 59 60 61

See Tawney, Acquisitive Society, ch. 5, 'Property and Creative Work', esp. p. 67. For further discussion see Wright R. H. Tawney, 56, 64, 68-9. See Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 295-313. H. J, Laski, The Grammar of Politics (London, 1925), 31. H. J. Laski, Socialism and Freedom (Fabian Tract; London, 1925), 8.

468 Socialism: Containing Transcendence democratic process. On the other hand, the crucial differentiator from a liberal morphology was, as with Tawney and Shaw, the second clause of the above quotation: 'no one is admitted to an equal claim save as he pays for it by personal service/62 The core decontestation of community as invoking a quasi-contractual obligation to certain types of conduct, namely, the organization of one's personal life in such a manner as always to benefit others as well as oneself, reinforces the secondary nature of liberty in that construct. In contradistinction, the mature conceptions of liberty, as they have developed for over a century within the liberal family, include both a protective area of unregulated activity and an enabling area of human flourishing. Even Hobson had allowed for conduct that, though not harmful, was of indifferent value to society.63 When Laski wrote that liberty means absence of restraint; it is essentially a negative thing',64 he was not referring to the negative conception of the fully fledged concept, but to the ineliminable component of liberty identified in Chapter 2. As an ineliminable component, one would expect to find it in socialist ideology as well, but its consequent decontestation would depend on its idea-environment. Liberty involved restraints because the separate freedoms I use are not freedoms to destroy the freedoms of those with whom I live. My freedoms are avenues of choice through which I may, as I deem fit, construct for myself my own course of conduct... Freedoms are therefore opportunities which history has shown to be essential to the development of personality.

Opportunity, however, was the domain of the state, not the individual alone. Private, political, and economic liberty were conjoined, the latter construed in the light of a cultural adjacency with industrial democracy, a major concern of post-war British social theory and, to a lesser degree, practice.65 Revealingly, Laski later elaborated on the structure of liberty thus: 'I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modem civilization, are the necessary guarantees of human happiness', thus attaching a notion of utility-cum-flourishing to the fuller morphology of the concept.66 Community, individuality, and creativity were also tied closely together. Most socialists, Laski claimed, demanded that 'the government of socialised industries shall leave ample room for the 6S *2 Laski, Socialism, 8-10. See above, Ch. 5. ** Laski, Grammar, 142, ^ Ibid. 144, 145-8. 66 H. J. Laski, Liberty in the Modem State (Harmondsworth, 1937), 49.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 469 individual worker to feel himself a creative unit in its operation'. Artistic creativity, in particular, would flourish, once the 'commercialism [which] has destroyed the true liberty of the individual' was removed. Of course the libertarian socialism of Laski did not 'mean doing as one likes'. The community was the structurally proximate arbiter of the domain of liberty: 'there can be no freedom until those things about which conformity is demanded have been established only with the consent of the community.'67 (c) THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF REVISIONISM

Laski's theory of liberty was patently one which displayed close affinity with advanced liberal ideas. It serves as a salutary reminder of the impossibility of establishing mutually exclusive boundaries between the major ideological families. Yet popular perceptions of the ideological overlap of liberalism and socialism were diminishing. The two ideologies were assisted in their divergence by party-political distinctions, echoed in Laski's stamping of contemporary liberalism with laissez-faire features. Despite nodding in the direction of Green, Tocqueville, and Hobhouse, Laski regarded the 'evolution of the doctrine as a whole' as too closely associated with economic individualism. Contrary to the mature self-understanding of modern liberals as espousing non-sectional and universal ideas, he saw liberal principles as the servant of a single class in the community, the free entrepreneur. Liberals 'had refused to see that a just society means either one in which there is recognition of an equal claim upon the common stock of welfare, or one, at least, in which differences in reward are capable of justification in terms of the common stock'.68 If Laski represents an important current in British socialism, that generalization, implying a divide between liberalism and socialism,69 is untrue. The convergence of many liberals and socialists on those very points demands a subtler and more microscopic conceptual analysis in order to separate them. Laski's characterization of liberalism was itself part of the ideological warfare in which closely positioned ideologies frequently engage. Historical evidence in Britain corroborates the existence of a strong welfare tradition, moulded by the new liberals in the early 67 68 69

Laski, Socialism, 11-12. H. J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (London, 1962), 168-70, Ibid. 155-8.

470 Socialism: Containing Transcendence twentieth century and adapted and elaborated by socialists within the mainstream Labour movement. That is not to suggest that welfare ceased to be a socialist core concept; rather, socialists decontested it within cultural constraints infused with advanced liberal ideas. This strengthens the case for arguing that the British party-political divide does not reflect the clustering and nuances of ideological patterns. One central example of the socialist-liberal intermingling is the 1950s bible of British socialism, Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism. Crosland enumerated the five basic socialist aspirations as follows: First, a protest against the material poverty and physical squalor which capitalism produced. Secondly, a wider concern for 'social welfare'-—for the interests of those in need, or oppressed, or unfortunate, from whatever cause. Thirdly, a belief in equality and the 'classless society', and especially a desire to give the worker his 'jusf rights and a responsible status at work. Fourthly, a rejection of competitive antagonism, and an ideal of fraternity and co-operation. Fifthly, a protest against the inefficiencies of capitalism as an economic system, and notably its tendency to mass unemployment.

Underlying those, and 'taken for granted', was a 'passionate belief in liberty and democracy. It would never have occurred to most early socialists that socialism had any meaning except within a political framework of freedom for the individual.'70 Though Crosland's ideas are rightly seen as representing Labour 'revisionism' in the political sense/1 ideologically speaking that revisionism was rather a question of redeploying the variegated material at the disposal of British socialism from its inception. Crosland's list is noteworthy for its coincidence with the new liberal outlook. It is not identical to the socialist core, though it identifies equality and fraternity or co-operation as central themes, and contains references to the need for status at work and to the evil of unemployment. Notably, it does not dismiss capitalism but merely the poverty, squalor, and inefficiency caused by it. Its five points are compatible with new liberal tenets, though there are slight differences in further decontestations. Thus, left-liberals might not have elevated equality as such to a core position, but they would have defined classlessness as non-sectionalism, and had moved a long way in the interwar years towards acknowledging the importance of workers' rights in a form of industrial democracy.72 The concern for social welfare as social reform was an 70 71 72

C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1963), 67-8, Cp. D, Howell, British Social Democracy {London, 1980), 190-4. See Fieeden, Liberalism Divided, 45-77.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 471 immediate consequence of the new liberal cross-fertilization of community, progress, liberty, and individuality, sustained by the enabling state. Crosland brought the socialist core concept of welfare m line with reformist and market-tolerant new liberal views, while emphasizing the plight of the poor.73 And all advanced liberals would have rejected a competitive antagonism in which individuals were damaged, and limited their endorsement of competition to the eliciting of useful or fulfilling performances in areas not lethal to human flourishing. What then made Crosland's ideology socialist? In part the unawareness in post-1945 British political thinking of the liberal roots of the welfare state, and the question of self-definition we have already confronted; in part a greater insistence on collectivism and social responsibility for private misfortunes, as well as on giving welfare claims 'exceptional priority over other claims on resources' or, in the language employed here, of promoting them to core socialist status. Even then, Crosland was loath to assert the superiority of altruistic and communal incentives to work over the stimulus of private gain, and appeared to distinguish between socialism and liberalism on a quantitative axis of realizing social values: 'more social equality, a more classless society, and less avoidable social distress'.74 That was an inadequate substitute for the conceptual fine-tuning necessary to identify an ideological genre, On the question of liberty, Crosland's approach is instructive. In taking the appeal to individual liberty for granted, he remarked that 'since this political assumption is shared by British Conservatives as well as socialists, no further reference is made to it'.75 It is difficult to overlook the methodological paucity of this observation, as if the interpretations and functions of individual liberty were similar in the two ideological families. In any event, Crosland did not abide by his decision. From a consumer-based perspective atypical of socialists, he decreed that the individual 'was the best judge of how to spend his money' and, significantly, 'even if he were not, the principle of individual liberty would still require that he should be left free to spend it, subject only t o . . . social service considerations', relating to special needs, when the government would intervene in the market allocation of resources. This was left-liberalism in all but name. In addition, Crosland advocated the widening of opportunities for enjoyment and relaxation, even frivolity, complaining about puritanical restrictions on 73

For progressive views of need at the turn of the century see M, Freeden, 'Rights, Needs and Community: The Emergence of British Welfare Thought', in A. Ware and R. E, Goodin (eds.), Needs and Welfare (London, 1990), 54-72, 74 75 Crosiand, Future, 77, 71, 79. Ibid. 68.

472 Socialism: Containing Transcendence people's private lives, an echo of the puritan strand in the attitude of some socialisms towards work. As Crosland himself recognized, within the British context: 'Much of this can at least claim the sanction of one powerful stream of social thought—that stemming from William Morris; though other, Nonconformist and Fabian, influences wear a bleaker and more forbidding air.'76 In recent debate in Britain, liberty has been dramatically upgraded by some members of the socialist camp. The title of Roy Hattersley's book, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism,77 speaks for itself. Although the Thatcherite strategy of emphasizing freedom of choice may have redirected the lines of ideological battle towards the arena of liberty, Hattersley is unusually self-aware of the libertarian element within Labour ideology. Nevertheless, his reversal of the relationship between core and adjacent concepts is striking. 'What we stand for is freedom. That is the ultimate objective of socialism . . , the purpose of the equality which we seek ... is the extension of liberty.'78 This theme was echoed in the 1992 manifesto of the Labour party. While acknowledging that real liberty required high standards of community provision and wide access to that provision, the defining statement was: 'At the core of our convictions is belief in individual liberty.'79 British Labourite socialism was returning to its centuryold progressive origins. (rf) CONTINENTAL COMPARISONS

Crosland and Hattersley constitute borderline cases between socialism and liberalism, reflecting the evolutionary and statist tendencies of the recent histories of both ideologies in Britain. But the concept of liberty was dignified and valorized in most varieties of Continental socialism as well. In 1894 the Belgian Labour party programme, inspired by a strong co-operativist and decentralist tradition,80 insisted that 'the right of individuals or groups to enjoy this [common] heritage [of mankind] can be based only on social utility, and aimed only at securing for every human being 76

n Crosland, Future, 346-7, 354-7. "" (London, 1987). Ibid. 21-2. N. Kinnock, Foreword, Labour's Election Manifesto (London, 1992). Cp. C. Landauer, European Socialism (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1959), i. 468-71. In their decentralizing tendencies, the Belgian socialists differed from their German counterparts. See the comparison with the Erfurt programme in G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, ii. Marxism and Anarchism 1850-1890 (London, 1954), 436-40. 79 80

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 473 81 the greatest possible sum of freedom and well-being'. The language was identical to that of the contemporary new liberals in Britain, drawing together core and adjacent concepts of the two ideological families. No appeal to community in which such a rights-linked liberty had a role to play could succeed in decentring the role of the individual. The immediate adjacency of liberty within the family of socialisms acted to contain community and to humanize welfare. In Germany Bernstein had participated with Kautsky in drafting the German 1891 Erfurt social democratic programme/2 which contained a list of principles demanding civil liberties, including the 'free expression of opinion', the emancipation of the whole human race, and 'universal equality in rights and duties'.83 As has been seen, Bernstein commended liberty as a central concept, supporting his view of democracy by the device of replacing a negative understanding of liberty with an emancipatory one.84 'The individual will be free, not in the metaphysical sense dreamed of by the anarchists—that is, free from all duties towards the community—but free from any economic compulsion in his action and choice of vocation. Such freedom is only possible for all by means of organisation'. Hence Bernstein combined freedom from domination with 'the development and protection of the free personality', and that only in conjunction with an advanced conception of participation to protect against suppression.85 Bernstein, who had been closely associated with British new liberals and gradualist socialists,86 requested moderation 'in declaring war on "liberalism"'. Its affinities with his social democratic version of socialism meant that 'with respect to liberalism as a historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only chronologically, but also intellectually'. Consequently, 'the defence of civil liberty has always taken precedence over the fulfilment of any economic postulate'. Bernstein's project diminished the historical horizon linking socialism to Marxism, rerouting it partly as 81

R. C. K. Ensor, Modem Socialism (London, 1904), 322. Cp. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 62. 83 Ensor, Modem Socialism, 316-21. 84 As one commentator observed of Bernstein: 'Socialism rooted in democracy stabilizes the value of freedom by opposing all suppression of the individual/ (P. C. Ludz, 'Socialism and the Nation', in L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire (eds.), The Socialist Idea (London, 1974), 135.) 85 E. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. H. Tudor (Cambridge, 1993), 150, 147. 86 Cp. Gay, p. 68. Bernstein had also contributed in the 1890s to the British Progressive Review—an organ of new liberal and socialist thinkers. 82

474 Socialism: Containing Transcendence an accumulative horizon through the liberal tradition, and merging the core socialist conception of (evolutionary) history with the core liberal belief in rational progress. In a provocative and persuasive challenge to conventional ideological boundaries, he maintained that 'there is no liberal thought that is not also part of the intellectual equipment of socialism'. Even the insistence by the Manchester School on economic personal responsibility acknowledged that the individual had to contribute to social morality by making freedom of action responsible. The identifiably socialist reinterpretation of Manehesterism came at the end: 'Recognition of his responsibility for his own economic welfare is the return the individual makes to society for services it has rendered or made available to him.'87 It is indeed rare to read a socialist defence of the conceptual flexibility and interchangeability of humanist liberalism, when most socialists prefer to exaggerate the divide between the two. But then political practice also steered British and French liberals and socialists together in loose alliances at the turn of the century. Swedish social democracy provided another instance of a socialist path in which conceptions of liberty were preserved and protected. The Swedish ideological package valued liberty highly, though never as a core concept, attaching it to the concepts of equality, welfare, and solidarity—the latter decontested as democratic solidarity and supported by perimeter measures concerning state-subsidized housing, pensions, and an integrationist immigration policy.88 The overlaps with Croslandian socialism and with elements of British new liberalism are striking. Individual freedom would flourish with the removal of economic and social hindrances. Ernst Wigforss, the key social democratic ideologist, saw the extension of freedom of choice and experimentation as a central aim. Or as Alva and Gunnar Myrdal contended: 'Socialism's distant goal has always been the realm of freedom where people themselves become the purpose of society and production is deliberately directed to the satisfaction of human needs.'89 State welfare —as with the new liberals—was seen as the complement to liberty, enhancing the options open to individuals.* Elsewhere Gunnar Myrdal wrote: The Welfare State of tomorrow would ... realise a type of society which in many fundamentals would have deeply satisfied John Stuart Mill and all the earlier liberal philosophers "7 Bernstein, Preconditions, 147-9. w Tilton, Swedish Social Democracy, 35,179-82,253,279. Cp. also M. B. Hamilton, Democratic Socialism in Britain and Sweden (London, 1989), 189. 89 M Quoted in Tiltan, Swedish Social Democracy, 152, Ibid. 53, 175, 178.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 475 more than a hundred years ago, if they had had the power of imagination to envisage the final implications of a development they barely saw the beginnings of.'91 That optimistic progressivism was a joint property of this particular evolutionary socialist model as it was of the new liberalism. The perimeter practices harked back, through slightly different paths, to their respective adjacent and core concepts, shaping two very similar ideological morphologies. It is of course not difficult to find critics of socialism, such as Spencer or Hayek, who are adamant about the exclusion of any meaningful conception of liberty from socialism. Nor indeed is the Swedish example representative of the variety of Continental socialist strands. Some evolutionary socialists were more confident than others about keeping liberty at arm's length from their ideological core. Defending socialism from the 'repugnance which many persons, even with good faith, feel towards socialism in the name of liberty', Ferri insisted that liberty is not, and cannot be, an end in itself. By decontesting liberty within the range of the classical liberal civil and political liberties—those of public meeting, of thought, or of the right to vote—he declared it insufficient to solve the issues of poverty and starvation: 'Liberty for liberty's sake—that is, progress attained opposing itself to progress to come—is a sort of political self pollution.' To use liberty properly, it would have to be put to the service of a more humane social organization.92 Another problematic relationship between socialism and liberty is revealed in the writings of the Belgian socialist writer and politician fimile Vandervelde. He began by challenging the alleged incompatibility between the two. If the proletariat was indeed merely offered the liberty to starve, the concept was deficient. Even the liberty to vote was a chimerical interpretation of the term. However, contended Vandervelde, because liberty was centrally dependent on property—for 'he who has nothing can do nothing' —the liberty of all could only be secured by giving property to all, by socializing the means of production.93 Whether or not this was debating-chamber sleight of hand, it represented a socialist conception of liberty in which liberty was associated not with human fulfilment but with a notion of individual action and choice facilitated by material means—a capitalist view transported into socialist organization. The French socialist Alexandre Millerand, 91 92 93

G. Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State (London, 1965), 69. E. Ferri, Socialism and Positive Science (London, 1906), 100-2. fi. Vandervelde, Collectivism and Industrial Evolution (London, 1907), 224-7.

476 Socialism: Containing Transcendence applauding Vandervelde/ likewise asserted that 'socialism aims to secure to every human being... these two advantages: liberty and property, of which men are deprived by the capitalist regime.'94 Vandervelde in effect defended socialist restrictions on grounds parallel to capitalist ones: 'people talk to us ... of the restraints on social liberty which would result from the regulation of social labour... how is it possible to fail to see that this regulation,.. exists just as much under a capitalist regime.' What socialism seemed to offer was a greater distribution of choice and of leisure. And that particular decontestation was held in place by property as an entitlement securing 'an independent position', emphasizing the consumption as well as the production aspects of human life, quite in line with a non-socialist 'custom and tradition of liberty'.95 In practice—despite his frequent formal adherence to Marxist rhetoric—Vandervelde pursued perimeter reformist policies that incorporated, in an evolutionary spirit, the general right to vote and freedom of choice, accompanied by a range of welfare measures relating to pensions and a limited working day,96 In France, socialists as much as liberals had been nourished on the idea of liberty incorporated into the revolutionary tradition.97 Jaures, described by G. D. H. Cole as an 'ardent humanist liberal',98 saw socialism building on that indigenous resonance which had already 'establish[ed] the liberty of individuals'. If now the emphasis was on the nation-cum-community, it was because of its superior ability to furnish the 'means of free development to all'. Justice was intertwined with liberty and the nation appeared to operate mainly as a better champion of liberal ends, for 'there is only one universal organization that can guarantee the rights of all individuals without exception, not only the rights of the living, but of those who are yet unborn... in the fullest and most universal sense'.99 For the socialist Jaures, 'the human individual is the 94 A, Millerand, 'Saint-Mande Program (1896)', in A. Fried and R. Saunders (eds.), Socialist Thought (New York, 1992), 420. Of this speech it has been written that, 'though the language was that of Marxism, the meaning was much closer to the Fabian evolutionism of Sidney Webb' (G. D, H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, Hi/1, The Second International 1889-1914 (London, 1956), 341). 95 Ibid, 226-7, 229-33. % J. Polasky, The Democratic Socialism of tnile Vandervelde (Oxford, 1995), 3, 161-73, * On the socialist resonance of the slogan of the French Revolution see B, Crick, Socialism (Milton Keynes, 1987), 84. 98 Cole, Second International, 374. 99 Jaures, Studies in Socialism (London, 1906), 7. Italics added. Cp. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 280.

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100

measure of all things', In terminology indistinguishable from that of the new liberalism, social property was decontested as the facilitator, via the nation as a common base, of 'all individual rights and activities'. Liberty was interpreted through the adjacent concepts of independence and the active exercise of the individual will.101 Lacking in this scheme was any appreciation of the strongest version of the community itself as claimant, or of the integration of social and individual ends across a wide area. Instead, perfect individual development was firmly located in the core, the individual 'having the right to exact from humanity everything which can supplement his own effort', while the community could 'only ensure the rights of the individual by putting the means of production at his disposal'.102 This curious arrangement of the ideological furniture makes for a problematic ideological configuration, but illustrates yet again the powerful hold of advanced liberal beliefs on the evolutionary socialist imagination. If it was nevertheless socialism, that was because it was structured around classlessness, equality, creativity, and the eradication of poverty, and in particular because Jaures's understanding of solidarity was highly sensitive to its egalitarian implications.103 (e) THE PERIMETER PROBLEM OF MARKET SOCIALISM

The emergence of the term 'market socialism' in the 1980s provides another example of the complex relationship between socialism and Eberty represented and engendered by a set of perimeter practices. The location of the market in socialist morphology is a strange one. Previously, it was an unwelcome intruder into the socialist room—a 'pragmatic' compromise with existing conditions necessitated by evolutionary socialist understandings, a relic of a decaying capitalist system whose time had almost come or, at best, an acknowledgement that pockets of market activity, which were not socially injurious, could exist in severely restricted areas. The novelty of 'market socialism' lies in its introduction as an intentional and desirable variable into socialist morphology, where its function has become to underpin a particular constellation of concepts which can still lay claim to family membership. 100 101 103

Quoted in L. Dumont, German Ideology (Chicago, 1994), 210. m Jaures, Studies, 8-9. Ibid, 12. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 284, 293-6.

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It does not require a great stretch of the imagination to appreciate why the practices incorporated in markets have been decontested by socialists and non-socialists alike as irreconcilable with socialist values. The individualism contained in maximizing private interest and gain, the oppressive control over the lives and destinies of others (alternatively decontested, the equalization of opportunities for all to succeed or fail), the irrationality and arbitrary injustice of outcomes (alternatively, the neutrality and rational spontaneity of outcomes), the abrogation of responsibility for human welfare in general (alternatively, the quasi-contractual securing of diverse areas of personal liberty and responsibility)—all these reinforce their conventional association with libertarian territory somewhere between liberalism and conservatism. Perimeter concepts and their related practices are not, however, wedded to any particular ideology, and socialists discovered that market socialism could be joined up with alternative, non-capitalist conceptual configurations. Instead of offering emancipation from capitalism, those elements which could be beneficial to socialists were extricated from its destructive potential.104 Two major themes in debates on market socialism may be noted. The one lies in the realm of a possible, if not probable, future—the development of workers' co-operatives as restricted businesses, using socially owned capital.105 The other has already been located in the domain of socialist practice as well as prescription, and is firmly supportive of the adjacent socialist conceptions of efficiency and liberty. In the context of this section, all that needs to be said about efficiency is that decentralization of choice encourages a responsiveness that is itself regarded as a measure of efficiency.106 As for liberty, because a market is based on choice with respect to the production and consumption of goods, the socialist challenge is to establish a route linking that choice with the core concepts of creativity (of which production is one decontestation) and welfare (of which consumption is one decontestation). The ideological solution lies in inserting state-guaranteed distributive measures into the market that ensure an equality of opportunity no different from left-liberal versions. This is accomplished by dispersing both 104 R, Lowenthal, "The Future of Socialism in the Advanced Democracies', in Kolakowski and Hampshire (eds.), Socialist Idea, 235. 105 See D, Miller, Market, State and Community (Oxford, 1989), 15, 83-93, and the observations in A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Oxford, 1994), 68-9. 106 'Market Socialism', in J. Le Grand and S. Estrin (eds.), Market Socialism (Oxford, 1989), 20.

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power and property. Consequently, the market can sustain choicemaking that enhances both individual and social welfare, provided some limits are imposed on the availability of choices deemed harmful by socialists. And the market can enhance productivity and creativity by introducing variety into production activities— constrained by strict state control of conditions of production but not by the bureaucratic tendencies of centralized state planning— thus eliciting pluralist forms from what might otherwise be too monolithic communities.108 Whether this is left-liberalism masquerading as democratic socialism depends entirely on where one wishes to draw the boundary line between the two; indeed, on whether they can be separated by so crude a device as a line. But it does attest once again to the exceptional plasticity of ideological morphology. The argument that many differences between evolutionary socialism and left-liberalism are illusory is a compelling one. Socialism is often distinguished from left-liberalism by suggesting that the former went in for fundamental ownership changes and for the socialization of the means of production, whereas left-liberals concentrated their energies on distribution and redistribution. British ideological practice, Swedish socialist theory, as well as modem variants of market socialism, indicate that even that distinction cannot be consistently held. The rule which pertains to political parties vying over the favours of an overlapping electorate applies here too: because diverse ideological families compete over the correct meanings of their terminology and aim, among others, at attaining power through the legitimation of their linguistic practices, they will go out of their way to exaggerate their dissimilarities. For a long while, socialists in countries with a strong Marxist tradition like France and Germany continued to establish their identity by reference to Marxism and to orthodox socialist positions, even when attempting to revise them. Remarkably, the morphological outcomes of these discussions and presentations were akin to British socialist ideological patterns, although in Britain the Marxist tradition was infrequently referred to in socialist debate and operated—even within socialist circles—more as a hindrance to its legitimation. With the collapse of orthodox socialism as a popularly held ideology at the end of the twentieth century, the sustaining of the illusion of distinctiveness has become more difficult. It is not that 107 108

Ibid. 3; R. Plant, 'Socialism, Markets, and End States', in ibid. 70. Plant, ibid. 73-4.

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evolutionary variants of socialism are in total crisis (they are less so than the social democratic parties attached to those ideological variants), as that the separate location of evolutionary socialism on the ideological map is unclear. It can therefore be construed as an offshoot or the left-liberal tradition as much as, or even more so, than of orthodox socialism. The 'rediscovery' of the market and of a 'mixed economy' only attests to the fact that political exigencies are interposed between the formulation of ideological positions and their recognition as such. The intelligentsia as well as the populace at large are misled through preferring slogans to ideological facts. (/) A NOTE ON OTHER SOCIALISMS

The focus of this chapter has been not so much on the confrontation of a libertarian socialism' with an 'organizational socialism'109 as on the complex ways in which liberty has been assimilated into socialist ideology and the direction socialist argument has taken as a result Undoubtedly, twentieth-century communism, mainly within the Soviet Union and East European societies, needs also to be considered for membership of the socialist family. An analysis both of the official political ideology of communism and of its political practice—that is, of the perimeter concepts and ideas in actual use—reveals the marginalization of liberty, and its replacement by a state centralism and the elevation of politically aware and functional elites above the welfare of the masses. Whether or not this is socialism is a moot point, for self-definition cannot be our only guide, and it departs substantially from the nineteenthcentury socialist tradition in all its varieties. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the popularization of the label socialism in common linguistic usage for this illiberal, authoritarian, and potentially totalitarian doctrine, not the least by the detractors of socialism. Names eventually signify what many people take them to mean. Yet this begs the question whether from the horizon of the 1990s communism and social-democracy belong to the same ideological family, irrespective of their shared origins,110 m Wright, Socialisms, 27. R, N. Berki overemphasizes the 'hyper-liberal' or libertarian element in the socialism of the New Left of the 1960s (Socialism (London, 1975), 28, 154), 110 A recent survey of socialism, while recognizing these difficulties, clusters Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, and Spanish socialisms under the same umbrella.

Socialism, Liberty, and Choice 481 In some cases, as with Leninism, which incorporated a disparaging attitude to working-class organization and entrusted the formulation of socialist ideology to a vanguard intelligentsia, a legitimate variant of Marxism can be recognized. As a commentator has correctly observed of Marxist socialism and Leninist communism, 'the most contradictory aims could be and were deduced with equal logic from the same theoretical formulations'.111 That is to say, cultural adjacencies have to be employed to arbitrate among the multiple logical paths at the disposal of those orthodox socialists, but each may claim legitimacy in terms of its relationship to the core. Leninism undoubtedly reflected aspects of authoritarian Russian political culture, and the lack of capitalist development and of trade-unionism, quite different from its central and Western European counterparts. However, in other cases, and in post-Leninist communist systems both in Europe and in Asia, the core socialist concepts we have identified are either lacking, or present in a decontestation so peculiar as to be removed from association with the predominant meanings conferred on them by the socialist tradition. The espousal of totalitarian dictatorship by an entrenched minority in the name of socialism is not an attractive way of claiming membership in the family of socialisms. The core concepts of that ideological position relate rather to the party-cum-state, decontested as the repository of supreme political know-how, the identification of leadership with the communal good, and, as with all totalitarian systems, the collapse of the distinction between individual space and social or political space—all these superimposed on a equalizing process in one specific sense: that of undifferentiated masses subject to central public control.112 The result has been the abandonment of a participatory democracy honouring personal liberties, and a stifled conception of human welfare. This brand of communism, unlike the ideological groupings discussed here, is significantly undiscernible as a popular and widely endorsed ideology sustained by common beliefs at various levels of articulation and social interaction, produced as well as consumed by large groups. It depends rather on the thoughts of a small number of See C, Boggs, The Socialist Tradition: From Crisis to Decline (New York and London, 1995), 216-20. 111 J, V, Femia, 'Marxism and Communism', in R, Eatwell and A, Wright (eds.), Contemporary Political Ideologies (London, 1993), 112. 112 Cp, L, Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, in. (Oxford, 1978), 77-105,

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individuals and the practices they direct, as well as on the reintroduction of a conception of actively controlled change that exceeds even the conservative one. Even if liberty is not at the core of socialist morphology, its virtual elimination has drastic consequences for the meanings attached to that core.

V Transformation and Dilution: The Assault on Ideological Convention

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PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS If feminism, is about justice for women, it does not follow ... that it is about justice per se. If it is about equality for women, again it does not follow that it is about equality per se.1 ,.. this isn't, after all, a fast-food, cafeteria political ideology, grabbing from here and there without any rhyme or reason; instead, it seems well-balanced and wholesome.3 Instead of the grandiose ideological constructs of 'old' liberal and socialist politics there are a scattered set of issues and demands that do not add up to a unified vision or coherent ideology.3

latter part of the twentieth century has seen the emergence T HE of a number of groupings of political thought that attempt to escape from the morphological and interpretative constraints of the older established ideologies. One way of effecting this has been through the processes of redefining the domain of the political, reconceptualizing the ideational elements of the contending ideologies, renaming the components of political vocabulary, and revalorizing marginal political concepts. Another has been through decreased internal integration in comparison to existing ideological families, the outcome being the formation of thin-centred assimilative ideologies, which then either challenge the relevance of additional ideological baggage, or thicken by ingesting the patterns of other ideologies. The following two chapters examine two of the more prominent exemplars. The quotations above illustrate a potentially deep divide among analysts of ideologies: to what extent are the conceptual clusters that present themselves under the heading of feminist or green political thought ideologies or not? Surely even eclectic ideologies, whether wholesome or not, may be well-balanced. The issue is, however, a slightly different one. Are feminism and green political thought too eclectic to display the unifjue features of disparate ideological families? Should not many of their central arguments be subsumed under other 1

J. Evans, Feminist Theory Today (London, 1995), 43, A. Carter, 'Towards a Green Political Theory', in. A, Dobson and P. Lucardie (eds.), The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory (London, 1993), 54. 3 J. Ferris, 'Ecological versus Social Rationality', in ibid. 149. 2

486 The Assault on Ideological Convention ideological groupings, a condition that dilutes their uniqueness? Are they not on the whole amalgams of older political traditions, such as liberalism, socialism, or anarchism? Do they have cores and, if they do, are those cores sufficient to bear the weight of adjacent and peripheral concepts, or do they need to graft on to them the self-contained morphologies of other ideologies? There is a second problem, tied to the first but analytically distinct: if they are not eclectically diluted, can they exhibit a full spectrum of responses to the issues (as understood at the time and place) that political systems need to resolve or, at least, to address? Is their morphology too narrow to encompass the spread of conceptual decontestations we have come to expect of diverse ideological families? The options appear to be: extensive but eclectic or unique but truncated. Doubters might see in these phenomena a confirmation of postmodernist fragmentation, but that would not—it will be argued in the following chapters—accurately encapsulate the morphology of contemporary feminisms or of variants of green ideology; nor would it offer an historical or analytical account of such morphologies. Both feminist and green ideologies emanated from what at first sight appear to be restricted, if not single issue, viewpoints; both were radical in their response to dominant ideological families; and both contained ideational ingredients which, though historically in evidence, had featured in the past as scattered minority positions or as secondary themes within other ideologies. Those required, if not rediscovery or reinvention, then retrieval and reconstruction. But both feminist and green ideologies have since made strenuous efforts to accumulate a range of conceptual furniture that will thicken their ideational density and sophistication and extend their appeal and viability. This subsequent ideational growth, and extended involvement in realms of political activism, has resulted in an expansion of limited issues to constitute identifiable cores of broader, if not tightly integrated, structures. These processes are a compelling instance of the triumph of cultural constraints over logical ones, for the two ideologies have nevertheless chosen to exclude areas which are logically entailed by many of their fundamental assumptions and which therefore demand intellectual satisfaction. Decreased integration does not imply the absence of a set of unifying core concepts altogether. It may, however, indicate the inability of the cores to sustain on their own a general ideological structure without heavy reliance on entire batches of ideas borrowed from other ideological families. This is more the case with

Preliminary Observations

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green ideology, for the self-perception—justified, to a degree—of many feminists lies in identifying the heart of their enterprise as a holistic challenge to semantic fields and intensions of current ideologies. Nor is any criticism implied through noting the incompleteness of an ideology by prevailing morphological standards. It may well be, as feminists have argued, that the structures of most existing ideologies are themselves highly biased and incomplete, or that their conceptual arrangements include commonplace units of furniture that deserve to be excluded from their rooms or exposed as mere covers to quite different units. In the following two chapters these questions will be explored, using works of contemporary theorists as the texts through which their ideologies may be explored.

13

Feminism: The Recasting of Political Language

KIY problem attracts attention when reading contemporary A analyses of feminism. Feminists commonly portray their beliefs as a stark departure from existing, male-constructed political theories and ideologies. As Coole has put it, 'many of the questions traditionally posed by political theorists are either irrelevant or marginal',1 That claim deserves serious consideration. At the centre of much contemporary feminist argument is the contention that, in speaking traditional political languages, people are necessarily engaged in articulating a linguistic surplus of value (or disvalue), of which they are only partly conscious. In the terminology of this study, the insights of feminism reinforce the finding that decontestation is a principal device in the analysis of political ideologies. The implication of that device is that the choice of any combination of conceptual decontestations necessarily has an impact, directly or by deliberate exclusion, on an indeterminate range of known, as well as undetected, proximate concepts and their decontestations. Hence the certainty introduced by ideological language into one area of political discourse is always, in the larger sense, an admission of the indeterminacy and essential contestability of political language in general. The role of feminist arguments with reference to political thought has been to discover domains of surplus meaning and to suggest that, by reading the surplus back into the employment of words and arguments by past and current mainstream users of political theory, a significant new interpretation of political conduct and its purposes emerges. That interpretation centres on the problematic position of women in the political world and the construction of an alternative world acceptable to feminists. It consequently necessitates the reordering of the conceptual morphology employed by 1

D, H. Coole, Women in Political Theory (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), 257.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 489 political theorists so as to give an account of political relationships perceived as correct, as well as a basis for normative recommendations, with the aim of producing an intellectually and emotionally sustainable political theory. On one interpretation, this surplus semantic field posits a synchrony that precedes diachrony, inasmuch as the question 'are women's rights discovered or do they evolve?' may be answered by reference to universal claims for equal treatment that exist in the social categories called 'woman' or 'gender', irrespective of time or place. On another interpretation the question may be answered diachronically, inasmuch as it involves the gradual cultural and historical deliverance of women from the constraints of a language that, at worst, enlists patriarchal notions in order to subject them to severe dehumarazation and, at least, enlists rights talk that conspires to reduce women to men by equalizing them androgynously. Nevertheless, a salient theme in the development and currents of feminism is its categorization into liberal, socialist (Marxist and non-Marxist), and radical types.2 The very forms feminists seek to transcend cast their shadows on the new ideological product. Those categorizations are not unhelpful for a broad-brush accentuation of some of the features of feminism. But they divert attention from the distinct conceptual structure of feminist positions in three ways. First, by ignoring the internal logical and cultural decontestations that simply cannot be explained away by references to the historical associations of feminists with major ideological schools. Second, by importing unsophisticated generalizations, in particular concerning liberalism and socialism, that overlook the intricacy and malleability of configurations within those ideological families. Third, by disregarding the extent to which some feminists have reinterpreted liberalism and Marxist socialism and claimed to uncover new core concepts in the morphology of those ideological families.3 Whether sufficient features of other ideologies have been injected into feminisms to merit their hyphenated description, whether indeed, from one possible perspective, such feminisms are an offshoot of older ideologies to the extent that one could talk not of a liberal feminism but of a feminist liberalism, not of a socialist feminism but of a feminist socialism, requires further reflection. Moreover, whether radical, second-wave feminism, in particular in its postmodern varieties, has in fact abandoned the 2 3

See e.g. A. M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ, 1983). See C, Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Oxford, 1989), 44.

490 The Assault on Ideological Convention conceptual proximities and preferences of earlier feminisms must be put to an empirical test, Three major approaches to the analysis of feminist ideology are thus possible, each of which provides important insights for political theorists, and none of which rules out the others. The first examines the contribution of various feminisms to the handling of mainstream political concepts and especially to the liberal, socialist and (less pronounced) conservative packages in which they are presented. The second investigates the challenge feminists have mounted to the chief concerns of predominant political thought and their attempts to propose alternative methodological paradigms. The third explores the family of feminisms in terms of the unintended ideological positions to which they, too, resort. The first two are central to the self-perception of feminists; the third is essential, though on its own insufficient, to an adequate account of feminist political thought-behaviour. This chapter will address all three, but not in a lexical sequence. These perspectives are interwoven and mutually illuminating. The greater dependence of feminist theory on already existing ideological languages, a tradition of working in part through those languages, and a clear focus on the customary subject-matter of political thought—the political conduct of, and relations among, human beings and their formal regulatory institutions—suggest that the morphological range of feminism may be more comparable to mainstream ideologies than some of its exponents might claim, and—to pre-empt the argument in the following chapterrather more successful in doing so than green ideology is. Yet it is also the case that feminism is not about political and social arrangements in general (however defective other ideological solutions to those arrangements are deemed to be) but about the problems and aims of women in social, temporal, and spatial contexts. For instance, the logical adjacencies between women's claims for equality, and the bearing of such claims on other questions of social and political equality, are curtailed from being applied more widely by cultural adjacencies held by feminists concerning the privileging of women's issues, or the current advantages already enjoyed by men.4 A responsible account must balance these different considerations as well as harbouring an awareness of the complexities of assimilating feminist thinkers into analytical frameworks with which they often have ambivalent relationships. 4

Cp. Evans, Feminist Theory, 44.

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(a) THE FEMINIST CORE: BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND PRESCRIPTION

The core concepts of feminism are still in a state of flux, and the advent of second-wave feminism allows for some internal competition over their precise morphological status. The first core concept is undoubtedly the centrality of the role of women or, more precisely, of gender in politics, and many feminists make no apology for an ideology they see as directed to the advancement of women alone. This gender-based assertion leads logically to the second core concept: the relationship between women and men is a key problematic in social organization and practices. Put differently, a crucial characteristic of social relations is the overriding importance of their gender-based dimension. Attached to that is a third core concept: the male-female relationship is a power nexus in which women are dominated, exploited, or oppressed by men, a relationship which has to be transformed or integrated. The centrality of the role of women is itself subject to a theoretical dispute over its desirability or otherwise, relating—as will presently be shown —to the equality-difference debate. Moreover, the logical connection between the first and the second core concept is one that some feminists deplore and would prefer to be overcome culturally. As MacKinnon critically comments, women's status is 'defined through relations with men', those relations being not personal but structural.3 Some feminists might prefer a more explicit notion of power, such as patriarchy or sexuality, to be named specifically as a core concept, but the latter are nevertheless decontestations of the former.6 It is important to note that the above core—especially the third core concept concerning power—is that of feminism in its critical ideological mode. This may appear similar to the structure of Marxism, but Marxism's critique of capitalism is predicated upon a clear conception of human nature which emerges dialectically (that is, logically) from the negation of the negation. In contradistinction, the ideological recommendations of the family of feminisms have no sharply demarcated and positively valuated core concept of human nature which could underpin their arguments collectively. Some feminists rest content with the elimination of power relationships between men and women, some replace them 5 C.A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 9, 68. 6 Cp. ibid. 235; Pateman, Disorder of Women, 2.

492 The Assault on Ideological Convention with social virtues drawn from values which reflect and respect the closest concerns of women, others assume emancipated women and men may generate a common pool of human attributes. The disagreement over whether the adjacent features of human nature are those of women alone (culturally, historically, or biologically) or those men can adopt as well is pronounced. Others again believe in a multiplicity of developmental and expressive directions human beings can take. Not a few exclude the concept of human nature from their ideological network altogether, by insisting that it is a social construct—although that, of course, simply attempts to deny the ideological nature of feminism and the ubiquity of such social constructs in all ideologies. In short, it may be sufficient to state that feminism aspires to revalorize practices and ideas that express the centrality of the first core and solve the problematics of the second. The addition of the third core concept reflects the tension between critique and recommendation that at this point in the development of feminism is weighted in the direction of critique. Finally, there are feminists who decry any attempt to conceptualize feminism which, on their account, is a set of concrete practices. While there is no disputing this central point, they are wrong in their anti-theoretical stance: not only is that an atypical view among feminists, who have to the contrary developed complex theoretical apparatuses, but the practices these dissenting feminists emphasize are replete with tiheoretical significance, as befits the relationship between conceptual periphery and core. In addition to its core structure, feminist morphology is crucially affected by the indeterminate role of the concept of equality. At times, equality batters on the gates of the core, demanding full membership in the inner sanctum. In that event, it is perceived as indispensable to feminist discourse. At other times, it is the most significant of the adjacent concepts of feminism, seeking to route theoretical elaboration and concrete specifics through its midst. But it also intersects with the concept of difference, as shall later be noted. The result is a range of decontestations reflecting a spectrum of cultural positions within a broad logical network. It is the key to the morphological decoding of contemporary feminist ideologies. (b) GENDER AND POWER

A discussion of feminism can usefully commence with the core concept of power and its adjacent concepts. Feminists have always

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pointed to the inequality of power between men and women, from the days when the gaining of political power seemed to be mainly a question of securing the vote—ostensibly, equal access to public decision-making. Initially, the integration of the concept of power into feminist ideology followed accepted routes. It was expanded through socialist interpretation to cover social and economic inequalities, deliberate or not, personal or systemic. However, an exclusive contribution of feminism to the decontestation of power has been to discover it in a previously unrecognized form of social relationship: patriarchy. This is a prime example of feminist reconceptualization.7 It is of course not the case that a new type of power has been registered. Rather, further sets of social practices are included within the domain of power, and the identification of a new source of power leads to a reorganization by feminists of conceptual proximities within prevailing ideological positions. As Millet has contended, patriarchy as sexual dominion is 'perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power'.8 It is both ubiquitous and entrenched. For patriarchy is only a partly conscious phenomenon. It has, on one level, been clear to its practitioners that men could and did control and command women. However, the attribution of naturalness to that array of practices deprived it of its transparency as a power act, just as the current control of children is seldom seen as the exercise of power by parents. In both cases no counterfactual is assumed to apply; from that perspective the attribution to power of manipulation, exploitation, or domination cannot make sense. Here, then, is the unconscious dimension of patriarchy, now uncovered by feminists as a temporally and spatially anchored practice witih high human costs (as in the case of Marxist alienation) both for those who practise it and for their objects. The decontestation of power as patriarchy allows for two further interpretations: power is either decontested in terms of the object towards which it is directed (in this case solely a group called women),9 or in terms of a particular practice-cum-attribute of the power-wielders (in this case solely sexuality). The two are analytically distinct, though the theories in which they appear may employ them side by side. An exponent of the first tendency, Pateman, has explained patriarchal power partly as a function of 7 Cp. Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 252. * K. Millet, Sexual Politics (London, 1977), 25. * Pateman, Disorder of Women, 35.

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removing the notion and practice of consent from social relations involving women. Only the social power of men drawn from other men remains a matter of the choice and voluntarism incorporated in contract. As far as women are concerned, nature replaces consent as a concept adjacent to, and supportive of, the powerenabling aspect of men's actions.10 Many feminists would regard the involuntary enabling of men by women as a central source of men's power, as well as a manifestation of the power of already male-dominated social and intellectual practices. Moreover, as Coole has noted, the removal of consent seriously marginalizes other key adjacent political concepts—legitimacy and obligation." An exponent of the second tendency, MacKinnon, highlights male sexuality (albeit itself a social construct and hence alterable) as 'the primary social sphere of male power'. For her, 'sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality'. Indeed, she draws a structural parallel with Marxism: 'Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism.'12 The morphological flexibility occurs over the positioning of sexuality either as the key facet of male power—evoking its perimeter manifestations through controlling social practices such as rape or pornography—or as only one of its expressions. The concept of eroticization, and its misuses, is politicized by its introduction into a semantic field lorded over by power. This decontestation is an act of competition over the acceptable rubric of a critical and engaged political vocabulary. Whether it is an extension or a reduction of the range of that vocabulary depends upon whether it tolerates other meanings of power or crowds them out. That is not entirely clear in MacKinnon's analysis. If, as MacKinnon asserts, power—like work—undergoes alienation and is therefore retrievable to its rightful possessors, it cannot be claimed that feminists regard power as a wholly negative concept and phenomenon. Power may be detached from its 'maleness' and positioned in an idea-environment where it has beneficial consequences. Feminism does not differ from liberalism or socialism in incorporating a theory of control. While opposing male domination, it sees women as controlling, and being responsible for, their own lives. It refers to 'the empowerment of woman as a group',13 and emphasizes the 'collective power of all women... free from all forms of domination'.14 One prominent, if contested, example is Firestone's vision of a technology which will permit 10 12

13 14

Pateman, Disorder of Women, 11, 74, 84. MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 109, 113, 3.

u

Coole, Women, 257.

A. Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (London, 1981), 20. Coole, Women, 254, citing L. Segal, Is the Future Female (London, 1987), 2.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 495 women to regain 'ownership over their own bodies . . . the seizure of control of reproduction' and of child-bearing and rearing.15 The ambivalence towards the worth of power is echoed in equivocation towards the state. First-wave feminism, under the impact of the evolutionary curve of nineteenth-century liberalism, may have regarded the state as the final court of appeal, a potentially benevolent institution whose laws and practices could reflect the enlightened views of its members, even if as a concentration of political power it had to be constrained from overriding the rights of its members. Many second-wave feminists, reacting against the perceived defects of liberalism, have peripheralized the state, moving it from adjacent to marginal positions in their ideological constructs. As Bryson notes, for radical feminists 'the state is but one manifestation of patriarchal power, reflecting other deeper structures of oppression'.16 They have associated it either with male power or with an abstract and distant organization removed from the smaller and more personal fora they prefer as emancipatory social arrangements. But they have frequently done so without abandoning the welfare function seen as part and parcel of a more interventionist state. Welfare, however, as adjacent to the concept of the state, may be decontested either as contributing to women's equality and life-chances, or as locking them in to positions of yet greater dependency on a patriarchal agency. The evident affinities with conservative and libertarian arguments must be tempered by an appreciation of the different idea-environment in which such dependency appears—an individualism that values enterprise and free markets and sees the state as a stifling influence, or the devalorization of a group which sees the state as caught in a net of beliefs and practices that conspire specifically to dimmish women. From a slightly different stance, the respect of advanced liberal systems for privacy and individual rights nevertheless permits an indirect state interventionism. By means of apparently progressive legislation, a series of perimeter notions and practices has emerged which perpetuate arrangements that many feminists see as oppressive to women.17 Each of these cultural interpretations carves out a different path from the core concept of power to conceptions of the state, identifying and evaluating its practices. MacKinnon has summed 15 S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (London, 1979), 19. Cp, also MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 246. 16 V. Bryson, Feminist Political Thought (London, 1992), 194. 17 Cp. M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, revised edn. (London, 1988), 22747.

496 The Assault on Ideological Convention up the problem: 'feminism has been caught between giving more power to the state in each attempt to claim it for women and leaving unchecked power in the hands of men/ There may be more truth to MacKinnon's assertion that feminism has no theory of the state than she had intended,18 Whether it is the rule-observant and inclusivist liberal state or the exploitative Marxist one that inspires feminist analysis, its 'dual role in trying to mediate and therefore coopt the subversive potential of feminism and its incapacity to do so fully'19 makes even its approximate location in feminist morphology difficult to establish. But power also appears in more complex forms. In line with theories that detect power in social structures and practices, often unintentional as well as unobservable, and not merely in deliberate and overt human interaction, contemporary feminists have emphasized the power of silencing women's voices, or rendering them incomprehensible, encompassed not only in social institutions but in human language. As Rowbotham has commented, 'Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one 20of the means through which they conserve their supremacy/ Even in Western societies that pride themselves on freedom of speech, such as the USA, 'the First Amendment protects those who have already spoken'.21 Such silencing can reflect the absence of restrictive legislation directed at the articulately powerful, causing women to concede defeat in the face of heavy institutional odds stacked against them, or it may be that their voices go unheard in a culture dominated by male concepts. More importantly, some theorists contend that women are denied a voice in a language and culture whose patterns and paradigms cannot conceptualize their needs and demands. The intensions of concepts, and the rivalry over shaping those intensions, are so male-controlled as to disable women from giving shape to their own concerns. Second-wave feminism is preoccupied with precisely that enterprise and its discourses demonstrate to the best possible effect that ideologies are competitions over the legitimate meanings of words, and that their morphologies are permanent sites of conceptual reconfiguration. One example of this is the inventiveness 18 M 20

32,21

MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 161, 157. Z, R. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York, 1981), 221. S. Rowbotham, Women's Consciousness, Man's World (Harmondsworth, 1973),

Evans, Feminist Theory, 156, citing J. Stoltenberg, Refusing to be a Man (London, 1990), 168.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 497 22 of Daly in coining new terms or valorizing old ones. It is what Spender terms a 'reclaiming of the right to rename'.23 Another is internal to the family of feminisms, involving the ignoring of black women's history. Silence is imposed on black women by assimilating their experiences into the world of white feminists.24 Spender observes of silencing in general: 'The silence of women has been a cumulative process. Conceptually and materially excluded from the production of knowledge, their meanings and explanations have been systematically blocked and their invisibility has been compounded ... Women's meanings cannot just be added on ... new cerebration, a new way of knowing is required.'25 Silence, in morphological terms, is therefore not just the debarring of certain conceptual patterns from an ideological room. Obviously, it may be that too, whether through disallowing their intellectual validity and legitimacy, by political fiat, or through establishing conditions which prevent the development of such conceptualizations to begin with. But for Spender the importance for women of naming is to reshape conceptual morphology in toto, not just to extend its intension. Even if naming, as we have seen, does not necessarily invent new concepts, it helps in identifying what one wishes to fashion or relocate. Ideological reality, however, has not yet matched that ambition, nor do all feminists share the objectives of this grand project.26 (c) THE POLITICAL DOMAIN

Humm has asserted that 'the single most important feature of second27wave feminism is its challenge to traditional political concepts'. That challenge, albeit, applies not only to redefining existing concepts or introducing new ones but, as has been argued throughout, it entails rearranging their internal relationships. The outcome of that reconfiguration has been a partial reformulation of the notion of the political. It queries the decontesting of the political as the social institutions and conduct located in the public realm. To the extent that this view is paramount in the study of politics, it is associated by feminists with the classic liberal distinction 22 23 24 25 26 27

M. Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London, 1978). D. Spender, Man Made Language (London, 1980), 63, 163-90. Barrett, Women's Oppression, pp. vii-x; Evans, Feminist Theory, 21. Spender, Man Made Language, 59. D. Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (London, 1985), 80-1. M. Humm (ed.), Feminisms: A Reader (Kernel Hempstead, 1992), 55.

498 The Assault on Ideological Convention between the public and the private. We will defer the question to what extent typical feminist representations of liberalism are accurate and to what extent they are made to serve feminism's ideological purposes. What requires prior consideration is the feminist challenge to the public/private distinction and the consequent conceptual alterations that challenge generates. The second-wave feminist contention that politics is not solely to be found in the public domain is hardly new. Marxism politicized human activity in general—at least in its alienated form—by asserting that the state and its ideological apparatuses dominate and pervade all social arrangements and reinforce material and historic economic relations between classes. But post-war American political science also extended the sphere of politics by identifying it closely with power relations, ubiquitous among human beings. As Robert Dahl wrote in the 1960s: 'almost every human association has a political aspect'.28 The novelty of feminism lies in another dimension: its singling out of the family as the prime arena of political practices, whether because these permeate from the broader social environment, or because they are shaped and exported from the smaller institution. This feminist theme aspires to restructure adjacent-peripheral conceptual proximities in a threefold process. First, by establishing close contiguity between the public and the male, the private and the female; second, by a range of reformulations of the concept of privacy, the end result of which is either to remove it from the feminist ideological room, or to devalorize and marginalize it by comparison to its location and status in other Western ideologies; and third, by emphasizing certain human practices, attached to the family and hitherto marginalized at the peripheries of other ideological morphologies. This process runs on parallel paths. The one attempts to break down the dichotomous relationship between the public and the private, though in an inverted way it reconstructs it by standing it on its head: the ostensibly personal/private becomes the core of the political,29 and the public merely derivative of constitutive personal and familial relationships. The other endeavours to locate significant political acts not in general and distant systems and structures, but in the details of everyday (women's) life. The conceptualization of the public as male is achieved by a close liaison between a spectrum of political concepts that, in Pateman's view, include 'freedom and equality, rights, contract, interests and citizenship', all of which pertain to men's activities.30 28 29

R. Dahl, Modern Political Analysis, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), 6. x Cp. Coole, Women, 255-6. Pateman, Disorder of Women, 4.

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It is simultaneously achieved by exposing male exercises of power as consciously or unconsciously directed at containing women and their typical (if not always wished-for) practices within the private sphere. In this feminist historical version of pre-feminist morphology the social construction of public/private simply restricts the population to whom liberal values apply or, as Pateman stresses, tolerates the public personae of women only in conjunction with additional adjacent conceptualizations that do not apply to men. The 'public' political concepts that could have recognized women's status and catered to their socio-economic needs are constantly mediated through and coloured by an awareness of their sexual characteristics and socially constructed gender attributes. Moreover, the terms of membership of the public are such as to deny further political values and concepts advanced by women any centrality in their construction of the socio-political world. Deprived of the possibility of reinterpreting that world in a manner appropriate to their interests and cultures, they operate at a level of disadvantage which—depending on what feminist theory is preeminent—is dehumanizing or dewomanizing. In other words, the privatization of women's activities excludes them from full participation in the public world of politics.31 Specifically, important perimeter practices and activities such as mothering (childbearing and rearing) and domestic work are marginalized, if not totally depoliticized, by their designation as natural/2 and hence irrelevant to the political worlds of social design, individual intention, reward, and status, The reading of the private-public relationship as entirely dichotomous colours feminist interpretations. In their understanding of the divide, the public is the repository for positively connoted (male) values and, dialectically, the private is devalorized in two possible variants. The first, noted above, associates it with the disparaged domain of women, the domain of domesticity. The second, building upon the Hegelian relationship between state and civil society, limits the private to the province of the egoistic, atomized entrepreneur,33 that of the bourgeois. However, the liberalism against which they primarily react34 does not lend itself so easily to such a reading. Specifically, liberalism constructs a robust *' Cp. N. Fraser, 'What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender', in M. L, Shaniey and C. Patemaa (eds.), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Oxford, 1991), 260. 32 33 Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 113. Cp. Pateman, Disorder of Women, 34. 34 '... feminist criticism is primarily directed at the separation and opposition between the public and the private spheres in liberal theory and practice' (ibid. 118).

500 The Assault on Ideological Convention contiguity between the private sphere and individualism and, as has been seen in Chapter 4, the development of individuality is a major cultural decontestation of individualism. Not all feminists, even among the radical variant, wish to marginalize the concepts of individual development or choice in their ideological morphologies. Thus Eisenstein advocates a radicalized right to privacy for women, and Young takes note of the liberal distinction between public as open and private as personal space,35 the merits of the latter being consonant with the kind of values radical feminists would endorse. To assert that the personal is the political—a decontestation that has both logical and cultural plausibility—does not entail that suitable social arrangements cannot carve out an area of private activity.36 The personal can be both political and private—in the decontested senses of, first, participating in and reflecting macrosocial practices concerning power, distribution, and decisionmaking; and second, of providing people with areas over which they may exercise some personal control. Logical consistency can be maintained as long as three cultural constraints are attached to the preservation of the private: it is understood that individual development can be attained by limiting external intervention, that such intervention is occasionally necessary to ensure that development because privacy may be enhanced through the actions of others and can never be total, and that a holistic view of social relationships must necessarily append political significance to private individual development as having consequences for society in general. If feminists are loath to proceed on that path of argument, it is because a particular dichotomous view of the private sustains the internal cohesion of their ideologies, MacKinnon, for example, voices a specific view of the individual solely as a male ideological device that obscures the problems of women as a whole. In so far as the notion of the private as the realm of personal freedom and development can be retained, it can only be so for men. For women the private is the realm of violation and abuse, neither free nor personal, in the sense of the experiences of isolated individuals.37 The 'personal is the political' is thus endowed with negative import, because of a temporal focus on current and dominant male practices and concepts, rather than on accentuating the virtues 35 Z, R. Eisenstein, The Color of Gender (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1994), 172; I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), 119-20. * Cp. Bryson' Feminist Political Thought, 176. 37 MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 95,168.

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already present in the feminist conception of the personal, which future social arrangements and discourses would recentre. This variety of decontestations suggests that for some members of the feminist family there is no possibility of the cultural rehabilitation of either privacy or individuality and that a new political vocabulary would be needed to effect a decisive break with the present. These feminist arguments abandon the concept of the 'private' because of a particular decontestation of the concept of 'public'. In some usages the public is a 'spatial' concept designating social structures and practices external to those of particular individuals and groups. In feminist discourse those groups are narrowed to one—the family. On another dimension, in many ideological usages the public is an ethically laden concept designating the arena of the res public®. In feminist discourse negative ethical import is frequently assigned to that arena on account of its 'maleness'. In addition, given the feminist assertion that motherhood and family life are political, they only become public as well if political is collapsed into 'public'; i.e. if child-bearing and rearing display the universal, rule-bound, citizenship-oriented features of the conventional ideal-type public dimension of politics or, conversely, the conflict of interests and power struggles of its concrete public dimension. On other understandings of the 'public'—that which is open to general access, or a non-divisible good—motherhood and family life are decisively non-public. However, the latter understandings are of little use to feminist arguments, because they imply a dialectic of public/non-public abhorred by most feminists, and would have the effect of reviving the notion of the private by default. (d) PARADIGMS LOST AND REGAINED

The issues of domination, patriarchy, public and private, ultimately extend well beyond the domain and adjacencies of the concepts of power, as well as the nature of the political. For second-wave feminism has engaged a further ideological tool of great import, one whose ramifications are not always consciously realized. It has arrogated to itself some of the key debates about the validity of philosophical and scientific paradigms—questions relating to reason, universality, binary analyses, and the like—without too much awareness of the fact that this is an act of appropriation. It has also valuably contributed to and enhanced those debates, but— by redesignating those questions as features of a male vocabulary

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—it has restricted the image of their purview and detached them from alternative frameworks in which they have been functioning. Feminist thinkers have consequently put into effect a prime device of all ideologies; the absorption of independently available arguments to consolidate their internal conceptual structure; the harnessing of available knowledge to empower the validity of their decontestations and combinations. But in so doing, feminists have also attempted to rebut the method of ordering and relating concepts in prevalent ideological patterns. Their success or failure may tell us something about the enduring, and the pliable, in ideological morphology. Put briefly, radical feminists, in alliance with an important subgrouping, postmodernist feminists, maintain that the oppressive male-female bifurcation is a product of dominant patterns of theory and epistemology which have organized the perceptions and interpretations of the natural and social worlds. Human beings have been prone to present obvious differences—the male-female ones being particularly prominent and fundamental in common perceptions—as opposites, and to extrapolate from these 'opposites' a general and grossly oversimplified reading of both nature and society as dichotomous.38 Furthermore, specific substantive generalizations have been promoted by such dichotomies. Dichotomies are abstracting devices that highlight differences and present them in a zero-sum relationship. Philosophy and scientific theories have consequently developed as detached from the concrete complexities they are supposed to explain, and devoid of historical and temporal anchoring. The greatest abstraction of them all is the dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete itself or, more accurately, between the universal and the rational on the one hand, and the particular and arational on the other. Some of the methodological difficulties with the dichotomy were noted in Chapter 1, Those related primarily to its postulation of either-or situations and its eschewal of gradations and continuums. For the purposes of analysing ideologies the configuration of ideational unite in multiple variations and patterns was considered to have greater explanatory power. Indeed, criticisms of dichotomies are well-established in philosophy and the social sciences and the feminist objections are not novel in themselves. Rather, the incorporation of the concept of dichotomy into feminist ideology, and its identification as a negatively valorized target of criticism, 38

71.

For a criticism of linguistic dichotomies see Cameron, Linguistic Theory, 57-

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decontests that concept itself as pertaining to the male-female binary opposition, and any of its major manifestations as inspired or contaminated by that opposition. As Hurnm contends, 'Feminist theorists ... argue that the Cartesian dualisms of subject/ object and culture/nature categorise women and men in terms of their differences from one another with emotion/nature/body symbolising women and femininity and science/mind/reason being reserved for masculinity.'39 In their extreme form these feminine features are devalorized, as Pateman has acutely suggested, by presenting them as a disorder which prevents women from fully functioning as human beings (=men). This 'means that they pose a threat to political order and so must be excluded from the public world'.40 The public/private dichotomy is hence one of the most insidious features of political theory. For other feminists, as we shall see later, different kinds of dichotomy emphasize the virtues of women as contrasted with men. Justice versus nurture and rights versus responsibilities are some of the more frequent conceptual antonyms employed in these cases. From a morphological viewpoint the role of these dichotomies in feminist ideologies is to keep logical as well as cultural adjacencies firmly apart, by anchoring concepts in non-contiguous areas within its ideological room through challenges to the prevailing manifestations of both logic and culture. The feminist critique of universalism and rationality cannot however be reduced to a reflection of the ubiquity of the men/women divide. Often the reverse happens, namely, feminist arguments subsume within their structure doubts generated outside the feminist family about the viability of universalism and the superiority of reason. Their subsequent attachment to issues of masculine power reinforces the feminist project of marginalizing, if not eliminating, all male attributes whose function it is to perpetuate the inequalities and oppressiveness of gender relations. The decontestations of universalism permit the development of a spectrum of criticisms, amenable but not specific to feminism. Universalism logically implies the existence of a single voice, as it is a viewpoint transcending time and space. As Young has observed, this is 'universality in the sense of laws and rules that say the same for all and apply to all in the same way'.41 The path, she contends, is 39

41

Humm, Feminisms, 59.

*' Pateman, Disorder of Women, 4.

I, M. Young, 'Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Idea of Universal Citizenship', in C. R. Sunstein (ed.), Feminism and Political Theory (Chicago, 1990), 117.

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thus open to a homogenizing totalism42—which of course, while harmful to women, is not exclusive to their situation. The problem (shared with postmodernists) is the linkage between this interpretation and the bestowing of unchallengeable authority on the view from nowhere. Politically, citizenship and rights are expressions of universality, but in effect these contain only the practices of male patriarchy and, at best, women are co-opted into the sphere of the universal as lesser men'.43 A central task of feminists is therefore the severing of the spatial proximity between universality and rights, Tightness, impartiality or neutrality, and objectivity. MacKinnon effects that displacement in one manner, employing a two-step process. In the first instance, universalism-cum-objectivity is unmasked as a particular historical perception and construction of the social world: The problem is that the generalized, universal, or agreed-upon never did solve the disagreements, cohere the specifics, and generalize the particularities ... Situated theory is concrete and changing rather than abstract and totalizing'.*4 This argument is transported from Marxist (and of course hlstoricist as well as postmodernist) theories into feminism. In the second instance, through further decontestation, objectivity is identified as a specific manifestation of oppressive gender relations, by associating it with its Hegelian-Marxist variant of objectifkation—now applied to the transformation of women into (sexual) objects of male power-cum-desire: 'Objectivity is the methodological stance of which objectification is the social process.'45 Hence—reversing the sequence—a distinctive cultural path is privileged among various logical adjacencies, one linking forms of sexual oppression (the perimeter practices) with the adjacent concepts of objectification and universality (interpreted in the light of such perimeter practices) and the core concepts of power and gender relations (interpreted in the light of their adjacent qualifiers). This conceptual configuration stamps the feminist imprimatur on the ideology in question, though the ultimate preferred ideological position is the destruction of that path, 'overthrowing the distinction itself between 'knowing subject and known object' and the emancipation of women from 'subjective inwardness'.46 At the outset of this book some problems with the concept of rationality as an analytical tool of ideologies were examined. Feminists may not object to the contrast between instrumental 42

44 45

Young, Justice, 165.

43 Pateman, Disorder of Women, 20, 197.

MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, pp. xv-xvi. Ibid. 124. * Ibid. 120-1. Italics in original.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

505

rationality and irrationality, but most take strong exception to the mutually exclusive counterposition of the concepts of reason and emotion,*7 The prioritizing of reason over passion has a long pedigree, and one acceptable to an earlier generation of reforming feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft, while insistent on the equality of women with men, did so on the understanding that women, like men, were capable of that superior rationality: 'Make women rational creatures and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives and mothers.'48 This retained the public/private distinction but valorized women's family activities by decontesting them as rational. However, the frequent disparaging characterization of women as emotional has set feminists on a dual path—the one attempting to revalue and legitimate the concept of emotion and its signifiers as worthy members of political language; the other denying the validity of the distinction as yet another instance of a false dichotomy. The former path emphasizes 'feeling, emotion, and nonverbal communication' as well as empathy and intuitiveness.*9 The latter may do so as well but argues that 'if we can be rational in our choices of the good and of values, affectivity becomes a part of, rather than oppositional to, rational thought, choice and action'.50 Contemporary feminists link reason with power, by interpreting it as the control and definition of knowledge by men.51 The sovereignty of reason is hence an exercise, often more unconscious than deliberate, of an epistemological monopoly. It is a further aspect of the silence imposed on women. An alternative strategy is to dismiss the significance of the mind-body distinction, inasmuch as the cultural concern of women with their bodies has suffered from the hierarchy of mind over body. Gilligan's emphasis on the concreteness of caring as an ethic of non-violence is a case in point. It endeavours to introduce the concept of physical and emotional nurture into socio-political discourse as a facet of the mutual responsibilities required by human needs. The notion of human nature undergoes an internal reorganization in which the emotional experiencing of relationships, including sensitivity and compassion, contributes to an assessment of human worth no less than 47

Cp, Ch, 1 above, M. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. M, Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1975), 299, 49 Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 95-7, 50 E, Frazer and N. Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), 126. 51 Bryson, Feminist Political Thought, 16. 48

506 The Assault on Ideological Convention the right and impartial actions of human beings embodied in conceptions of justice,52 The morphological consequence is a distancing of justice from the core concept of gender relations and the converse politicizing of care by anchoring it in an adjacent position strongly supportive of the feminist ideological core. (e) POSTMODERNISM: AN ALLIANCE OF CONVENIENCE?

Any analysis of feminism as an ideology must include a discussion of its postmodernist aspects, often subsumed within—though not identical to—radical feminism. It may well be that feminist ideology has found an ally in postmodernism because the latter is a useful tool in challenging dominant political and social paradigms that cannot be successfully altered from within. Most feminists are not clear-cut postmodernists but harness the critically destructive power of that movement in order to destabilize the scientific, cultural, philosophical, and ideological assumptions believed to disadvantage women. As has been noted in Chapter 2, postmodernism contains an ideological strategy which exposes political concepts as the products of temporally and spatially contingent decontestations. This enables an exercise of intellectual power denied by the very nature of ideological discourse, aimed at redefining the semantic field of politics and reinterpreting the horizons of history. It shakes up existing links and proximities among concepts, offering, in good ideological fashion, a temporary flexibility prior to a new delimitation. As a result, a reordering of meaning is made possible, though the articulation of new decontestations obviously constitutes a decisive break with postmodernist indetermirasm.53 The critique of universalism and rationalism has been partly inspired by postmodernism's insistence on the contingency of social, ethical, and even scientific, viewpoints. This contention has been advanced quite independently of questions of gender and power. In the words of one feminist theorist, 'there is no force or reality outside our social relations and activity (e.g., history, reason, progress, science, some transcendental essence) that will rescue us from partiality and differences ... Feminist theories ... should encourage 52

174,53

C. Gilligan, In a Different

Voice (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 62-3, 97-8,

Thus some feminists plausibly see postmodernism as a transitional episteinology (see S. Harding 'Conclusion: Epistemological Questions', in Humm, Fern-

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

507

us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity'. .. ,54 These views could be construed as negating any semblance of stability in the meanings and interconnections among the concepts constituting an ideology, and point to the potential annihilation of morphology as an attribute of political thought. That approach has already been challenged above. At the very least, irrespective of the substantive structural anchorage provided by enlightened deliberation and factual knowledge, the general theory of conceptual interlinkage which embraces the notions of decontestation, logical and cultural constraints, and quasi-contingency suggests that ideologies will always appear in analysable and durable, though not static, forms. Feminists have themselves queried the tendency among some poststructuralists to reinvent an abstract and 'highly figurative' conception of creative woman because it bypasses the thoughts and actions of real women.55 There is clearly a hostility among most current feminists to essentialism, a position well in line with the methodology adopted in this study, according to which synchrony, diachrony, and morphology are indispensable to understanding political thinking in its ubiquitous ideological containers. But the criticism that 'Feminists . . . tend at times to lapse into foundationalism and essentialism"6 is, from the viewpoint of analysing ideologies, merely a feature of ideologies themselves, and a reminder of the inescapably ideological nature of feminism. The observation that French psychoanalytic feminisms 'propositionally decry essentialisrn even as they performatively enact it'57 is precisely what the analyst of ideologies would expect. The difference among feminists on this question is simply between those who accept it consciously and those who are unaware of the nature of (their) political language. As Evans observes, although postmodernism claims to have no privileged readings, the labelling of the condition of women by second-wave feminists as 'oppressed' is of course a privileged reading.58 It is a normative conclusion derived from the singling out of particular practices involving women. What is known as standpoint theory openly and deliberately takes up particular interpretations by asserting, in Harding's summary, that 'the 54 J. Flax, 'Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory', in L. J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (London, 1990), 56, 55 L. McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Oxford, 1992), 193, 56 N. Fraser and L. J, Nicholson, 'Social Criticism Without Philosophy; An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism', in Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/ Postmodernism, 20. 57 M Ibid. 33. Evans, Feminist Theory, 126.

508 The Assault on Ideological Convention experiences arising from the activities assigned to women, understood through feminist theory, provide a starting point for developing potentially more complete and less distorted knowledge claims than do men's experiences',59 Postmodernism has also been associated by feminists with a subjectivist outlook, and this permits two interpretations of the status of feminism in relation to other ideologies. On the one hand/ subjectivism is employed to designate the absence of an objectivist, permanent, and socially distant perspective,60 and the presence instead of choice and pluralism, so valued by liberals, especially a pluralism that dispenses with the dichotomous distinction, which has undermined gender relations, between a subject and an 'other'.61 On the other hand, subjectivism with its 'anything goes' implications and its indifference to ranking preferences is perceived as wanting the intellectual armoury for social and political change and hence endowed with strong conservative undertones.62 Whether there are more generally conservative elements in feminism is more difficult to ascertain, though the silence of white feminists about the voices of non-white minorities of women has been interpreted as lending support to a social order based on racial hierarchies.63 (/) EQUALITY AND THE FEMINIST TRADITIONS

One of the peculiarities of the feminist family of ideologies, as was observed above, is that its morphology is significantly affected by a single adjacent concept. That concept is equality, narrowly failing to attain core status because of polysemic interpretations within feminism itself. Early versions of feminism concentrated heavily on the achievement by women of full equality with men, a liberal formal and legal universalism that denied the relevance of gender to political practices.64 This notion of sameness has sometimes, but rnisleadingly, been termed androgyny, a concept better reserved for the elimination of or transposal of sexual as well as gender 59 S, Harding, 'Feminism, Science, and the Anti-BnIightenrnent Critiques', in Nicholson (ed,), Feminism/Postmodernism, 95. 60 Ibid. 96-7. 61 A. Yeatman, 'A Feminist Theory of Social Differentiation', in Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, 289-90. & Bryson, Feminist Political Thought, 6. 63 Cp. Humm, Feminisms, 122, and A. Lorde, 'An Open Letter to Mary Daly', in Hurnm, 138-9, 64 Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 37.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 509 differences. Liberal feminism was later trenchantly criticized as abandoning the gendered concept of 'woman' by collapsing it into 'man'; as Coole writes, 'the liberal goal is ... less one of androgyny than of a generalized androcentrism'.66 Adjacent to liberal equality was a conception of universal rights that permitted women, as individuals, full access to the political process, when that process was conceived as participation in national decision-making through the vote. That was the aim of the early suffragist movement, which also entertained some notion of equality of opportunity, predominantly decontested as equality of legal treatment and respect. On the whole, the drive for women's equality in pre-First World War Britain reflected that older liberalism and rarely incorporated the more radical views of equality available at the time from the new liberals.67 For cultural and tactical reasons that option was not pursued, not the least because the terms of suffragist discourse had to be couched in language accessible to the ruling elites.68 Marxist feminism, again caught in the argumentative flow of a host ideology—Marxism's critique of capitalism—followed the Marxists in a different decontestation of equality, extending the concept to include the bridging of social and economic differences by attaching it closely to the concept of need. At the same time, the concept shed other elements from its intension, in so far as the impartiality of the legal system now seemed entirely inadequate to recognize and nourish those needs. The Marxist solution was to advocate a conceptual configuration by which power, freedom, and equality were defined in a mutually supportive manner. If its immediate objective was the liberation of the dehumanized from oppressive human relationships, the logically entailed universalization of power—the empowering of all-—was an act of equalization. Hence a particular decontestation of concepts adjacent to power could lead by means of the conferring of equal power to its annihilation or transcendence. An additional problematic in Marxist feminism arises from the Marxist category of class, which cuts across that of gender. Women are thus equal to men in so far as they are members of the same 65

65

Cp. MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 219-20; Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, 193, ** Coole, Women, 153. 67 See Bryson, feminist Political Thought, 86-98 for other undercurrents. See also O. Anderson, 'The Feminism of T. H. Green: A Late-Victorian Success Story?', History of Political Thought, 12 (1991), 671-93, 68 'Woman Suffrage, whatever it was to feminists and their allies, became to the Liberal cabinet a part of the left-over franchise business of the nineteenth century.' (D. Morgan, Suffragists and Liberals (Oxford, 1975), 151.)

510

The Assault on Ideological Convention

class, while many feminists have construed Marx and Engels as holding to traditional views of women's roles and spheres, regarding women's exploitation too narrowly as a consequence solely of the development of private property, and ignoring the exploitation of women among the proletariat.69 The Marxist contention that the elimination of capitalism—the most advanced system of private property—would remove its subsets of gender oppression and the sexual division of labour has been accused of overlooking other sources of women's inequality and oppression.70 The capitalism/ patriarchy debate has prompted animated dialogue over the central morphological organizing principles of feminist ideology.71 A stress on capitalism means that male dominance is decoded as an adjacent ideological instrument, rooted in the emergence of private property and employed by the capitalist system to ensure its survival, with the consequence that human beings are impoverished and alienated. A stress on patriarchy, as preceding capitalism historically, is interpreted to mean that men have used economic institutions and the division of labour specifically in order to alienate women and control them, though they have also resorted to other means to do so. These institutions and practices become adjacent to power, decontested as the superiority of one gender over the other. In the first case inequality reflects the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small class—capitalists. In the second case inequality reflects the concentration of power in the hands of a large group—men. Hartmarm has pointed out that what makes the task of feminists difficult is that 'the same features, such as the division of labour, often reinforce both patriarchy and capitalism'.72 The analysis of ideologies may contribute to easing that task by clarifying the differential structural positions occupied by the division of labour, and the inequality to which it is logically attached, in each feminist variant, generating different decontestations in each instance. Left-liberalism, to which twentieth-century liberal feminists increasingly subscribed, took aboard some of the deficiencies of the prior liberal understandings of equality It included social and economic inequalities within its ideological remit without adopting the historical materialism or philosophy of alienation of the 69 Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 51-69; Btyson, Feminist Political Thought, 83; Barrett, Women's Oppression, 48-9. 70 MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 5, 9. 71 Cp. Barrett, Women's Oppression, 14-18. n H. Hartmann, 'Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex', in Humm, feminisms, 106.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

511

Marxists, and without abandoning the core liberal concepts. Instead, it employed a perimeter concept to flesh out equality: affirmative action, not as a transformation of human relationships, but as a compensation for the disadvantages suffered by women within existing political systems. If this was equality of opportunity it is undoubtedly the case that, in Evans's words, 'pushed to its limits, the suggestion of equality of opportunity becomes very radical indeed'.73 Additionally, the liberal conception of universal rights was retained, while modified to allow for the protection and prioritization of what was deemed socially necessary for human flourishing. Hence women's rights were now understood to include perimeter notions catering to special needs, such as those of mothers and expectant mothers, as well as guarantees for equal treatment at work. The 'endowment of motherhood' scheme and family allowances74 are prime examples of this more interventionist liberal view of social responsibilities, also shared by moderate socialists. Recent developments in second-wave feminism have exhibited a fundamental affinity with pluralism, inspired by a realization of the diversity of human societies and the groups that constitute them. Against a background of American cultural constraints that accorded increasing significance to the differential claims and needs of such groups, encouraged by similar pressures emanating from the civil rights movement, and later from ideals of multiculturalism, the concept of equality now intersected in feminist ideology with that of difference. The valorization of difference against the homogenizing tendencies of societies—tendencies symbolized in the American image of the melting-pot—accounts for the partial integration of 'difference' within the concept of equality and its struggle for core concept status in some versions of feminism. Within the emerging feminist ideologies it illustrates the migration of a marginal concept, with an objectionable connotation of inequality decontested as negative otherness in comparison to men,75 to a central—if not core—position with a positive connotation of pluralist distinctiveness. And pluralism, as applied to social and cultural units, is of course one construal of equality. In parallel, French feminists were exploring Derrida's notion of differance,76 which refers 73

Evans, Feminist Theory, 32. Cp. E. Rathbone, The Disinherited family (London, 1924); ]. MacNicol, The Movement for Family Allowances 1918-45 (London, 1980). 75 Cp. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London, 1988), 16-21. 76 See Ch. 2 above; I. M. Young, 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference' in Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, 304; Evans, Feminist Theory, 23, 126-7. n

512 The Assault on Ideological Convention to the 'unconceptualizable' deriving from the postmodern impatience with all fixed, binary, or hierarchical identities, as well as the gap between different idioms of signification. The concept of difference, in contradistinction, has deliberately been employed to perform the decontesting function of all ideologies, namely, to determine and prioritize, though not necessarily in binary fashion. Decontesting is on this view quasi-contingent: ineluctable as a category, but open to varying contents. The idea that the notion of difference should be incorporated within the concept of equality is far from new and, as we have seen, one that socialist and left-liberal ideologies have put into effect. The ineliminable components in equality, the according of commutable status and value to all units through the idea of a common humanity, and a comparison which denies irrelevant differences,77 do not rule out the distinctiveness of such units. The novelty of 'difference' as employed by feminists lies, first, in its morphological salience; second, in its de-emphasis or silence concerning—but not denial of—the notion of a common humanity of women and men; and, third, in the indeterminacy which the controversy over its location and its contiguous concepts still imparts among feminist thinkers. That indeterminacy can, in some instances, weaken its association with equality, and may lend itself to innate biological or psychoanalytic views of women. This correspondingly qualifies notions of the social construction of gender,78 and curtails feminism's morphological flexibility through a series of cultural constraints, based on physical facts or psychical assertions about reality. Irigaray, for instance, wishes to maintain difference on the basis of sexual characteristics, and claims that 'equality between men and women cannot be achieved unless we think of genre as sexuate'.79 Occasionally this is coupled with a separatism that marginalizes the notion of equality entirely.80 Alternatively, difference is attacked as an ideological device, when Ideological' is akin to 'masking'. MacKinnon calls it 'the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination' for legitimating the compensation of women 'for what they are or have become distinctively as women'. Difference then designates a distance from the male standard.81 However, that is not the prevalent feminist decontestation 77

n See above, pp. 159-60. Barrett, Women's Oppression, pp. xxiv-xxv. L. Irigaray, 'Equal or Different', in M. WHtford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford, 1991), 33. 80 See e.g. Rich, Compulsory Hetemsexuattty, 22; Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 380-4. Separatism may be bolstered by lesbian perspectives. K MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 216-21. 79

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 513 of difference. Young aptly identifies the distinction between difference and the redistributionism of compensatory equality: 'The political claim for special rights emerges not from a need to compensate for an inferiority, as some would interpret it, but from a positive assertion of specificity in different forms of life/82 Here is the cultural fork in the logical tree, channelling feminism from its common core either towards an equalizing exercise for disadvantaged individuals who just happen to be women, and one in which individual conduct converges on acceptable norms, or towards an equalizing (and occasionally even a separating) exercise for social categories that wish to have their distinctiveness recognized and retained. From the vantage point of ideological morphology, the pursuit of the latter path involves supporting the concept of difference through the emergence of a range of farther adjacent concepts in close proximity to difference. Female values or virtues are identified and advanced to strategic positions in their ideological rooms, forcing (as already noted) their deprivatization. While disparaged features of women have included subjectivity, partiality, passion, and unreason, among the valued and revalorized attributes are nurturing, care, responsibilities, sisterhood and solidarity, the capacity to form and sustain human relationships, as well as the category of emotive attributes already discussed. Are these additions to a political vocabulary? Jaggar rightly suggests that feminism extends the domain of the political to these concepts.83 They enter the sphere of ideologies by contributing to the moulding and changing of the political worlds which feminists inhabit; they have produced perimeter notions and ideas which have informed political practices; and they have competed with other concepts over their legitimacy. However, once in the ideological room, the perimeter concepts quickly move into close proximity to conventional concepts in political theory, such as liberty, individualism, development, sociability, and even the much-maligned reason. The emancipatory logic of difference feminism is after all a decontestation of liberty as the removal of oppressive power. More specifically, the demand for 'reproductive freedom' incorporates individual choice, though it may well be anchored in a vision of transformed social conditions that permit such choice.84 Alternatively, the feminist focus on love and sociability as the spontaneous outcome of self-determination and the abolition of authority 82 83

Young, 'Polity and Group Difference', 138. M Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 7. Ibid, 319.

514 The Assault on Ideological Convention may, as with Emma Goldman, be attached to the language of anarchism.85 Reason, too, is far from being abandoned by difference feminists who would include within the compass of rationality 'forms which contextualize problems and speak explicitly from an articulated point of view'.86 One interesting aspect of the feminist treatment of difference is its close adjacency to the group as the unit of analysis. Structurally, this alone could account for the hostility of most radical secondwave feminism towards an individualist liberalism, though we shall presently note that the version of liberalism serving as feminist foil is itself a highly specific one. The overall perception of oppression—as well as the facts of power relationships that establish perimeter notions such as those concerning pornography, abortion, or the division of labour—initially gave rise among feminists to a cultural self-conceptualization of women as predominantly an undifferentiated group. In MacKinnon's words: 'Feminism sees women as a group and seeks to define and pursue women's interest. Feminists believe that women share a reality ... '.87 The employment of 'interest' and 'reality' in the singular is instructive of this particular decontestation. This concept of 'group' is structural and may alternatively be seen to be the consequence of a pernicious gender categorization in which women dialectically emerge as socially constructed, to their disadvantage. As de Beauvoir observed, from a perspective critically upholding the individual creativity of women:88 'Women belong to the family or group; and not to themselves.' One view of such a group may even be assimilated into standard American pluralist theory, according to which groups are in a competitive relationship, and operate to all effects and purposes as individuals, the question of intra-group pluralism being ignored.89 Sisterhood can consequently be a mirror-image of male solidarity and fraternity.90 Other feminist approaches, however, place concepts such as solidarity and sisterhood in the immediate proximity of 'group', while Unking them to the collective values of interdependence, sharing, and care, 85 Cp. L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism, Liberal Feminism and Anarchism (Montreal, 1993), 138-41. 86 Frazer and Lacey, Polities of Community, 64. See also Bryson, Feminist Political Thought, 263. 97 MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 38, 88 S. De Beauvoir, 'Women and Creativity', in T. Moi (ed.), French Feminist Thought; A Reader (Oxford, 1987), 18. ** See also D. Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', in Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, 200. 90 Pateman, Disorder of Women, 41; Hartmann, in Humm, Feminisms, 103.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 515 91 seen as female virtues. The defining features of community may then appear as a reflection and prime location of women's values. Questions of political representation are then also dealt with through the prism of key groups.92 Recent feminist thinking has retreated from some of the homogenizing and anti-individualist implications of siting the group in a position contiguous to the core concept of gender-based relationships. Young has emphasized the z«£r«pluralist importance of 'difference within and between subjects'. She distinguishes between the 'oppressive meaning of group difference ... as absolute otherness, mutual exclusion, categorical opposition' and its positive meaning as 'specificity, variation, heterogeneity'.93 There is also an increasing interpluralist awareness. Evans has noted that 'middleclass white heterosexual women do not a movement make' and that feminists have not entirely come to terms with variations between groups and categories of women.94 Expressing the identity of women may require more sophisticated analytical tools. As Frazer and Lacey contend, 'within any single society the definitions and expectations of what it is to be a woman will vary greatly, by race, by class, by status, by generation'.* In fact, despite the endeavours of some feminists, and notwithstanding the solidaric features to which feminism aspires, it is difficult to associate the feminist idea of group too closely with that of community. For one, there is no suggestion that anything like a group-will can develop. For another, women as a whole have common gender attributes, but are not necessarily solidaric.96 The concept of the group hovers uneasily and indeterminately between a political unit with shared ends and a classificatory category with overlapping characteristics. (g) AN IDEOLOGICAL READING OP IDEOLOGIES

Like all ideologies, feminism engages in an interpretation of other ideologies that is a product of its own morphology, and that reinforces the conceptual decontestations at its heart. Because feminism emerged most powerfully in societies in which liberalism was a central ideology, and because feminism itself went through 91 92 93 94 95

Frazer and Lacey, Politics of Community, 123. Cp, A. Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Oxford, 1991), 149-56. Young, 'Ideal of Community', 305; Justice, 169-71. Evans, Feminist Theory, 6. % Frazer and Lacey, Politics of Community, 10. Ibid. 132.

516 The Assault on Ideological Convention a liberal phase and its later variants have had to take cognizance of those intellectual foundations, liberalism has been subjected by feminists to particularly critical probing. We have already explored some of the features with which feminists endow it, such as the public-private divide, its universality, and rationality. Those features certainly are in pivotal, even core, locations within liberal morphologies; however, they are decontested by second-wave feminists in ways that give succour to the conceptual arrangements they favour. Put differently, many feminists construct liberalism retrospectively and abstractly to counter their own arguably concrete image, unconsciously internalizing the attributes (abstraction and dichotomization) which they most deplore in that reconstituted liberalism. The critique of self versus other, a disjuncture which they pin on Western thought-paradigms and, politically, on liberalism, resurfaces in the dualism between feminism and nonfeminism, and even more specifically between feminism and liberalism. The constructed world of a dichotomized liberalism unwittingly elicits a feminist reliance on general binary distinctions in order to make sense of the world as experienced. These act as cultural constraints on the logically possible relationships within feminist morphology. A few further examples will suffice. As contended in earlier chapters, the abstractions apparently involved in a universal rights language and in a concern only with processes and formal citizenship are not a feature of the family of liberalisms, but a feature of some of its members. Rights can be concrete and related to human needs evert within the liberal tradition, which has expanded citizenship beyond a narrow political participation to include a broader sharing in social goods and a discharging of social responsibilities.97 Phillip's gloomy conclusion that 'the best98of liberals . . . still find it hard to switch their thinking to groups' is surely more a comment on some current liberals than on liberalism. Of course, if liberalism is conceived as primarily concerned with autonomy, and autonomy is decontested as the capacity for individual judgement in a situation of non-intervention, and as cultivating an individualism based on rational egoism and self-sufficiency," then a feminism which promotes solidarity, care, and concern for others is ipso facto non-liberal. The further ascription of neutrality to liberalism, 97

See M, Freeden, 'Liberal Communitarianisrn and Basic Income', in P. Van Parijs (ed.), Arguing for Basic Income (London, 1992) 185-6, 98 Phillips, Engendering Democracy, 150. 99 Young, 'Ideal of Community', 307; Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 33-4, 44-5.

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

517 100

and of gender-neutrality as one of its manifestations, reinforces the disjuncture between a disinterested liberalism, mired in procedural niceties, and a committed feminism, engaged in the material improvement of the condition of women. This does scant justice to organic liberal theories, in which human agency is enhanced through mutuality—reconeeptualizing the notions of autonomy and individuality—but it also neglects the strong liberal developmental themes still evident in second-wave feminism,101 Not all contemporary feminists have rejected current philosophical liberalism. Witness OMn's adaptation of Rawls's theory of justice which, she claims, has ignored the role of women and the family. Hers is an endeavour to revitalize feminism by fertilizing it with the currently powerful theories of an ostensibly neutral philosophical liberalism. She too questions the gender-neutrality of liberalism with respect to relations within the family, but sees the argument from neutrality as a critical thought-exercise from which to challenge those unequal relations, moving to a 'just future [which] would be one without gender'. Significantly, Okin insists on a decontestation of rights and justice which incorporates care and empathy, rebutting the dichotomy between the former and the latter pairs, and considering the different views of all individuals.102 In general, and unsurprisingly, because liberalism contains multiple variants, their assimilation or rejection by feminists results in complex relationships with the family of liberalisms. While some interpretations of liberalism are unpopular among feminists, liberal themes concerning self-development and libertycum-choice, as well as a politically activist reaction to the poststructuralist 'death of the subject',103 are quite important in feminist debate, even if their location in feminist ideology is less central and hence more specific than in liberal ideologies, and is qualified by a recognition of the commonalities of a group. Eisenstein speaks for these tendencies: 'All feminism is liberal at its root in that the universal feminist claim that woman is an independent being (from man) is premised on the eighteenth-century liberal conception of the independent and autonomous self/ But she is quick to point out that these are necessary though insufficient components of the feminist configuration.104 The case of Marxism and its relation to feminism is slightly different. It incurs not so much the generalization—as with liberalism 100 101 102 103

Ibid. 357-8; Frazer and Lacey, Politics of Community, 47-8, 66. For an argument developing in this dtection see ibid. 180, 206. S, Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York, 1989), 171, 173-80, 15. m McNay, Foucault, 115, 192, Eisenstein, Radical Future, 4.

518 The Assault on Ideological Convention —of one of many variants to represent the whole, as a concentration on a few Marxist tenets on which a feminist case is built. Feminism has not fully confronted the possibility that liberalism may be an ideology in a non-Marxist sense and that feminism itself cannot escape such strictures. On the other hand, feminist Marxist and socialist argument has cultivated internal dialogues which recognize that Marxism itself may, on the Marxist understanding of ideology, be an ideology, while assuming that the ideological mode of thought of Marx and Engels can be overcome by a more aware feminism. Consequently, feminisms reflecting Marxism run into difficulties with respect to the role of ideology. The Marxist notion of ideology induces a view of gender not only as a social construct, but as an inverted reflection of a distorted reality, and the abolition of capitalism—as the epitome of human alienation—entails the elimination of ideology, hence of gender.105 At the same time, feminists wish to argue that ideology, as predicated on power, is grounded in factors other than the predominant mode of production.106 Above all, even though some feminists are prepared to analyse ideology as concerned with meaning, not just with 'false consciousness', the Marxist conception of ideology has blinded them to the ideological status of their own beliefs and theories, as contestable assertions and decontestations,107 Marxism has had considerable impact on feminism through a particular rhythm of discourse, in which the oppression of the proletariat by capitalists has served as an analogy to the oppression of women by men, and the concept of production has found an echo in that of reproduction.108 Many second-wave feminists have been scathing about these analogies, but usually because of their inadequacy in describing the condition and plight of women—especially their implication that women cannot engage in transformative work—and not because of their faulty representation of Marxism.109 The multiple decontestations of reproduction, for instance, lend themselves to strategic associations with or distanciations from traditional Marxism.110 Even then, prevailing perceptions within feminism often involve the reduction of Marxism to a single 105

m See McNay, Foucault, 24-5. Coole, Women, 237, Barrett's measured reflections on different uses of ideology are a case in point. See Women's Oppression, pp. xvi-xix. 108 For a discussion of these issues see respectively MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 3 ff. and Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 152-5 and passim. m See e.g. V. Held, 'Birth and Death', in Sunstein (ed.), Feminism, 105-7; MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 12, 15. 110 Cp. Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 136. 107

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 519 model, based on a critique of Marx and Engels themselves. At any rate, the (negatively appraised) priority of capitalism in Marxist feminist morphology has created a configuration which highlights economic relations as the main arena of gender conflict. That has often entailed reducing these issues to material questions of family work and women's wages, or to the undesirable economic dependence of women on men and—by dint of their receiving the benefits of free domestic labour to facilitate their own careers—of the effective economic dependence of men on women. All these are valuable insights, but they underestimate the multiple forms in which alienation occurs,111 and the role of individuals as well as groups in women's emancipation. On another dimension, a curious parallel is effected between those liberals who interpret all choices as equally valuable and those Marxist feminists who interpret all work (women's work included, of course) as equally valuable."2 In either case, the value of all chokes or all work may be questioned, as may the reduction of women to choice-makers or to creators alone. Then there is the question of the inclusivist perspectives encouraged by Marxism, with its own, non-liberal, dichotomous division of society into classes. In addition, Marxism and its variants encourage feminism to emphasize that power is at the base of human relationships and that exploitation is an adequate term for describing them. It has directed feminists to focus on situated practices, but has promised more from group consciousness than women, as a disparate and differentiated gender, can deliver. By rejecting the accuracy, though not the principle, of Engels's distinction between the oppression of bourgeois and proletarian women-—the first mainly engineered by men, the second by capitalists—feminism has also paradoxically come to ignore other internal divisions within genders."3 More generally, the strong historicism of Marxism, and the transhistorical universalism of the Marxist vision of the future have made it intellectually problematic for feminists under its impact to come fully to terms with revived conceptions of innate difference. Finally, as with Marxism, the focus of feminist analysis is directed at the iniquities of past and present power arrangements, leaving relatively little space for theories of liberation. When these are aired, they appear in a variety of forms such as Firestone's technological 111 But see A, Foreman, Femininity as Alienation: Women and the Family in Marxism and Psychoanalysis (London, 1977), 151-2. 112 Cp. Bryson, Feminist Political Thought, 81-2. 10 Cp. Barrett, Women's Oppression, 132, and her reservations about her own analysis in the preface to the revised edn.

520

The Assault on Ideological Convention

release of women from the role of child-bearer, or in detailed advances in women's self-determination within existing social frameworks, in areas such as wage-earning or independent legal status. Feminism is vague, as is Marxism in its domain, about grander emancipatory schemes which could spell out the revolution in social relations that would fundamentally empower women. (h) THE ROLE OF THE CONCRETE

Feminism has been crucially forged out of women's experiences. Even its postmodernist incarnations rely heavily on an appeal to the concrete. In that sense it is a movement whose objective is the political and social reform of lived practices and institutions, and a number of feminists have concentrated on the activism involved, for example, in the establishing of women's refuges.114 As Christine Delphy has argued, feminism is about changing the reality of women's lives, not their subjective evaluation116of that reality.115 It lays emphasis on the local, on the active. Yet it has also borrowed from Marxism a recognition of the importance of consciousness in supplying the momentum from which critical and proper reform can emerge,117 A tension in feminist morphology is hence evident. While perimeter concepts assume an unusual importance in the self-image of much second-wave feminism, so that its ideological centre of gravity is atypically removed from a generalizing core, the analysis of feminist discourse suggests otherwise: the theoretical conceptualizations of feminism are still the key to its structure, and its periphery is as much shaped as shaping. MacKinnon suggests that feminism is exceptional in that, unlike phenomenology or Marxism, "both the fundamental substantive analysis and episternological approach of feminism, the feminist stance as a formal theoretical departure, are nonetheless embodied in its practice of these principles'.118 But that is to underestimate seriously the role of perimeter concepts in other variants of socialism, or in liberalism, to say nothing of conservatism and green ideology. The periphery of feminist ideology contains a number of marginal 114 115

Humm, Feminisms, 56. C, Delphy, Close to Home (London, 1984), 185. E. Probyn, 'Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local', in Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, 186-7; Humm, Feminisms, 56. 117 Cp. Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, 118 MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 38-9. 116

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

521

concepts which are, as we have seen with respect to the downgrading of some liberal and socialist notions, standard concepts in political theory. Authority and legitimacy have been uncovered as vehicles of male power and deprived of some of their positive connotations, and consequently of their salience. The concept of reason is subject to a tug of war between feminists who have demoted it as reflective of certain (male) thought-patterns, which impose a particular bias on an understanding of the social and political worlds, and between feminists who wish it to occupy a position more prominently adjacent to their core concepts. Feminist perimeter concepts, however, pertain to the social practices expressing male-female relationships, with a strong emphasis on those harmful to women. They may include abortion and rape as practices which indicate (partially) unconscious attitudes towards women and which serve to construct and shore up those attitudes. They will also include work and pay practices, as well as roles women perform in families. Pornography, for instance, is a perimeter concept which identifies practices that negatively sustain feminist arguments. It does, however, perform somewhat disparate roles in different feminist morphologies, so that diverse links are forged with core feminist concepts. Terming certain sexual practices as pornographic may establish a route through the adjacent concept of violence119 (for some this route is endemic to all pornography) and thence to the core concept of power decontested as male force,120 Even detaching pornography from violence establishes routes through which the humiliation of women is attached to the adjacent concept of (in)equality, periodically employing the adjacent concept of formal consent to mask its substantive absence, thus downgrading women's status in society. Alternatively, a path is paved through which the reduction of women to objects of men's sexual pleasure props up adjacent dichotomies—such as passion/reason or passivity /activity—between women's and men's natures. This then ties in with the core concept of the gender-based nature of social relationships. As MacKinnon has written, pornography 'makes inequality into sex, which makes it enjoyable, and into gender, which makes it seem natural'.121 On occasion pornography and rape are highlighted as central social practices and made to underpin all forms of male power, now decontested as sexuality. Thus the perimeter concept 119 120 121

Mfflett, Sexual Politics, 288-92. See A. Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London, 1981). C. A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 3.

522 The Assault on Ideological Convention of rape is decontested negatively as a deliberate and rational act of 'degradation and possession' which can attach it to conscious acts of control/22 that is, construe it as an extension of (male) politics into the sphere of the (hitherto) private. Following from this, reform of laws of rape and pornography are seen as crucial to the elimination of male power, the devastating consequences of which are the focus of feminist ideological conceptualizations.123 For libertarian feminists, pornography may be in a more marginal location, and 124 its legal removal entails a much impoverished conception of liberty. Another significant area relates to the argument that undesirable practices, considered outside the domain of politics, have in fact been endorsed by state activity. Pornography, as MacKinnon asserts, gains legitimacy through applying a liberal conception of state neutrality, whose function it is to transform it into official policy.125 MacKinnon sustains the criticism that such neutrality may be no more than an endorsement of whatever current practices exist, in so far as they are decontested as private. Different rules for women's pay, ostensibly the domain of private employers, or absent in the domain of the household, methods of inheriting property settled in social custom, and discriminatory taxation, also obtain state legitimation—by default or assent—and are removable from their perimeter status only through capturing the state for feminism.126 For reform within a male-dominated state may simply increase the power of men. Forms of medical practice, for instance, intended to improve female fertility or professionalize conditions of childbirth, may utilize technologies in which male doctors impose chokes on female patients.127 Conversely, many perimeter practices are prized by feminists and buttress the conceptual structures they wish to promote. Abortion and contraception may offer important morphological support to liberal feminism, as concrete instances of free choice adopted with some enthusiasm by middle-class women eager to augment their independence,128 and extended in socialist feminism as emancipatory empowerment.129 Eisenstein, for instance, regards reproK2

S. Brownmiller, Against Our Witt: Men, Women and Rape (London, 1975). MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 174-83; 203-21. 124 Bryson, feminist Political Thought, 195. 125 MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 213. 126 See e.g. Barrett, Women's Oppression, 78, 227-47. 127 See A. Oakley, 'Feminism, Motherhood and Medicine—Who Cares?', in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds.), What is Feminism? (Oxford, 1986), 127-50. 128 Cp. ], Lewis, 'Feminism and Welfare', in ibid. 92-3. 129 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 501-10; R. P. Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice (London, 1986), esp. pp. 384 ff; Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 319. 123

Feminism: Recasting Political Language

523

ductive rights as absolute, thus locating the concept of the inviolable rights of women immediately adjacent to the feminist core, but extending its substance far beyond the traditional liberal feminist position.130 Family allowances played vital perimeter roles as steps towards greater equality of opportunity—although, frequently being paid to the male breadwinner, they also sanctioned the sexual division of labour—-or, in early socialist feminism, as the recognition of the social significance of motherhood and child-rearing.131 If domestic work is devalued as demeaning or insignificant drudgery, it will be steered in the direction of a particular cluster of adjacent concepts such as traditionalism, exploitation, a socially constructed division of labour, unequal status, and dependence, and from there attach to the core concept of the male-female power relationship. But if it is revalorized as highly productive labour, it may be guided towards the creation of welfare—that is, individualized and based on care.132 It can then still be assimilated into Marxist or reformist socialist frameworks as expressive of human needs, or into capitalist ones as having a high market value.133 Mothering abilities may be associated with the concepts of care and responsibility increasingly evocative of women's virtues, decontesting the core concept of the centrality of the role of women in terms of the specific contribution it can bring to social life. But mothering is also a deskilling process,134 impinging on the concepts of liberty, independence, and equal economic opportunity intended to bolster the core concept of (restructuring) male-female power relationships. In addition, as will be noted in Chapter 14, the ecofeminist hybrid reinforces the link between mothering and an innate, difference-oriented, conception of women. But the biology of reproduction, as we have seen, may lead to adjacent concepts relating to the innate views of women's capacities or to adjacent concepts of reform and control involving advanced technology. Particularism or universalism, traditionalism or social revolution, may be the alternative consequences. In sum, the same perimeter notions may have diverse functions in different varieties of feminism, when in each case they are linked to different clusters of adjacent concepts. The above examples serve merely as illustrations of a vast network of conceptual configurations within the family of feminisms. 130

Eisenstein, Color of Gender, 171-2. See e.g. H. D. Harben, The Endowment of Motherhood (Fabian Tract 159, London, 1910). 132 Pateman, Disorder of Women, 192-5, 133 Cp. MacKinnon, Feminist Theory, 65-6. 134 Lewis, 'Feminism and Welfare', 96. 131

524 The Assault on Ideological Convention The location of women's issues in a temporal context raises the interesting question of history as a concept informing feminist ideology. Both liberal evolutionism and Marxist historicisni have imprinted their conceptions of time on feminism. There are two aspects of the link between feminism and history. First, for feminists who are not biological determinists, history is appreciated as a concrete arena of the development of practices inimical to the good of women, but therefore also removable in principle. History relates to contingent time. Second, many feminists display an evolutionary view of the history of women's movements and women's theorizing. The perceived transition of feminism through liberal and Marxist phases to various types of second-wave feminism suggests a strong conception of history as developmental and increasing in sophistication; that is to say, structured by means of the concept of progress. Ultimately—and with teleological undertones—that history will witness the liberation of women from former and present oppressive practices and will generate a political language appropriate to that end. In the course of that process, past horizons are diminished by second-wave feminists, although some aspects of liberal equality are retained. A variation on this theme is offered by Julia Kristeva, who identifies within the evolutionary process of women's history a movement from linear time through cyclical time to their transcendence through infinite, monumental, temporality.13' Such interpretations of history are perceived by their articulators as almost entirely the product of the independent development of women's consciousness—aligned with the conception of women as a group—though they may be decoded as profoundly influenced by and dependent on Continental critiques of modernism and by the prominence of politically active new social movements since the 1960s. But women's consciousness too is strikingly influenced by the concern of feminism with the concrete, in particular because current modes of talking about society and politics are inadequate for the expression of women's thoughts. This has led, as noted above, to a suspicion towards theorizing as such. A weighty aspect of feminist projects consists of challenging conventional theory by creating or, at least, attempting to legitimate, different literary forms for expressing women's feelings and thoughts as ways of consciousness-raising.136 Consciousness-raising is itself 135 136

71,

]. Kristeva, 'Women's Time', in Humm, Feminisms, 216-17. See A. Rich, 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision', in ibid. 369-

Feminism: Recasting Political Language 525 a concrete practice as much as a mental activity, involving the formation of women's discussion groups.137 In one crucial way feminism is an ideology par excellence (except that it is loath to accept the term), concerned with the relation between action and its conceptualization and alert to the subtleties of political language and concept-formation and reformation. In its relation with other ideological families it adopts a complex position of emulation, critical evaluation and rejection, and innovation. That last strength surmounts the pitfalls of eclecticism and presents a unique conceptual profile, however indeterminate and contentious some of its components are. Yet here too is feminism's limitation as an ideology. Its indeterminacy is not merely a reflection of internal disputes, but represents a social doctrine that is unspecific when it comes to all members of a society. It is also often indifferent or even silent when it deals with some political concepts-—justice, democracy, rights, political obligation, to name a few138—to which many women and men, not solely liberals, still attach importance. This is not intended as a reproach; it is a comment on a morphology that is insufficiently comprehensive to carry a general ideological programme in direct competition with the major ideological families. 137 138

Cp. Spender, Man Made Language, 108-9, 129-32. Cp. Evans, Feminist Theory, 37.

14

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping

XISTING analyses of green ideology fall into a number of catE egories that are not mutually exclusive. Some classify it under

the heading of new social movements;1 others distinguish between red (socialist) and green (anarchist) forms. Others again define green political thinking as left-ecological, or as neither left nor right There are those who see green ideologies as a postmodern demand for radical democracy, or as a development from nineteenthcentury anti-capitalist and liberationist movements, or as a new rendering of conservatism. Alternatively, they may be seen as a protest phenomenon, issue-led, and possibly ephemeral. It will be suggested here that green ideology may be studied in its own right, while accepting some of the above distinctions, dismissing others, and, most significantly, reorganizing our understanding on the basis of the morphological approach adopted in this book. Green ideology does revolve around core concepts, though it presents a somewhat narrow range relative to the challenges other contemporary ideologies—functioning as socio-political agendas for public policy—have to meet. It draws heavily on existing and familiar spectrums of solutions to some of those broader agendas, but even when that is the case, the specifics of ideological morphology dictate an inevitable adaptation of those borrowed ideological structures. The introduction of idea-sets from other ideologies, however extensive they may be, creates a new conceptual interaction between the distinct green core and its imported adjacencies and peripheries which is bound to invest them with new or subtly changed meaning. Hence,2 while acknowledging the existence of diverse green ideologies, the status of a distinct green ideological family rests on the possibility of identifying a morphologically 1 2

Cp. A. Scott, Ideology and the New Social Movements (London, 1990), 81-107, Cp, L. G. Bermie, M. N. Franklin, and W. Rudig, 'Green Dimensions: The Ideology of the British Greens', in W. Rtidig (ed.), Green Politics Three (Edinburgh, 1995), 219.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 527 singular core and a morphologically singular assimilation of the adjacent and peripheral ideas of other ideational systems. (a) THE CORE CONCEPTS OF GREEN DISCOURSE

The variants of green ideological discourse exhibit the following core components. First, the relationship between human beings and nature, which adopts crucial ontological as well as prescriptive status. Nature becomes an overriding factor in guiding human conduct. Second, the valued preservation of the integrity of nature and of forms of life, including human ones. This is usually associated with a recognition of the finiteness of resources and the irreversibility of some kinds of intervention in nature.3 Hence also the adjacent inevitabilities of imposing constraints on progress, development, and thus on history. Third, the promotion of variants of holism, decontested as the interdependence or harmony of all forms of life. Fourth, an emphasis on the concrete and immediate implementation of qualitative human lifestyles. This is an unusual kind of core concept. It constitutes not only a substantive belief in the value of action through example, but a rare instance of a core ideological notion that emphasizes the indispensable role of perimeter practices in the urgent reaEzation of the other core concepts. Its function is to ensure the elevation of perimeter concepts to close temporal, if not morphological, proximity to the core. Uncommonly among political ideologies, these core concepts are insufficient on their own to conjure up a vision or interpretation of human and social interaction or purpose. Ryle's general remark applies to green morphology as well: 'Ecological limits may limit political choices, but they do not determine them/4 Nor do green core concepts point (as with conservatism) in the direction of a clear method of reacting to such visions and interpretations. The high degree of core indeterminacy necessitates an appeal to a very diverse range of socio-political positions in order to formulate public policy, particularly if based on the kind of general social programme ideologies develop when compering over the legitimate meanings of key political terms. It may well be that greens, like feminists, intend to challenge the existing range of political vocabulary, rather than invest it with new meaning, and 3

A minority view would be to apply technological optimism to a conviction that green issues are soluble, but that is a controversial borderline case for green ideology. 4 M. Ryie, Ecology and Socialism (London, 1988), 8.

528 The Assault on Ideological Convention to do so both on grounds of its paucity in relation to their core beliefs and as a protest against currently dominant political language. But existing and predominant political vocabularies, and the thought-behaviour to which they relate, must always act as constraints on the operational and strategic deployment of language by new ideological groupings if their competitive bids are to succeed. In order to introduce a new vocabulary, they must first control, or eliminate, the meanings employed by the old. The indeterminacy of the green core concepts permits their mutual proximity to take a number of paths, which weave in and out of a wide range of political traditions. A stress on nature invariably invokes the decentring of human action and of the overriding value attached to human societies, though differential emphases are acquired through attaching 'anthropocentric' or 'ecocentric' positions. When combined with the notion of preservation, severe restrictions may be placed upon purposive human action geared to economic and social change. The appeal to nature curbs both planned and unplanned human conduct considered to be inimical to a given relationship between human beings and their environments, while eliciting alternative planned human conduct to safeguard that relationship. Most green ideologists, including both eco-socialists and conservative greens, are uncomfortable with the modernist notion of change and with constructions of the world grounded on that notion. All this is mediated through the prism of holism, the third core concept, which generates various types of organicism, interdependence, and equilibrium as desired ends as well as prerequisites for viable life and for human flourishing. Communality (inter- and intraspecies) becomes a manifestation of preservable (always decontested as beneficial and morally desirable)5 forms of organization. Finally, the above concepts are cemented through the immediate adoption of social practices. These aim at implementing the core concept cluster, including a wide spread of adjacent concepts, and at presenting role models charged with the task of inculcating universal moral norms. Action is central to green ideology, but not because—as with Marxism—the human being is defined per se as homo falter. It is central because the human-nature relationship is one of mutually sustaining and, for humans at least, pleasurable interaction; 5 On the distinction between limits to the actual means to growth and the postmaterialist moral desire to curb growth, see J. Barry, 'The Limits of the Shallow and the Deep: Green Politics, Philosophy, and Praxis', Environmental Politics, 3 (1994), 376.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 529 and because the other green core concepts are perceived as under imminent, constant, and irreversible threat, These are the contours of the semantic field in which green ideologists hold their multiple discourses. It is a field populated by core concepts that, with the exception of variants of holism, do not constitute the nucleus of other major ideological families, Conversely, other concepts central to progressive social and political discourse—liberty, equality, or rationality—are conspicuously lacking at the core. Moreover, the indeterminacy, and social and political thinness, of the green core conceptual cluster allows for an exceedingly diverse range of decontestations when adjacent concepts are brought into play. Some of the most common adjacent concepts (acknowledging the impossibility of an inclusive list) are: biodiversity, community, control, decentralization, democracy, development, emancipation, equality, harmony, organicisin, participation, and self-sufficiency. Additional logical adjacencies to these concepts, such as equilibrium, the state, bioregionalism, rationality, and planning decontest them further. The configurations formed by following different routes among contiguous conceptual arrangements demonstrate some of the complexities of green ideology. Raschke has suggested that the lack of a scale of priorities weakens the consensus problem among the greens. This certainly is a problem of political action, but its basic ideological cause lies not in an unwillingness to forge a consensus but in the inability of the conceptual core to supply a stronger constraining structure for adjacent decontestations.6 Its looseness permits the formation of multiple scales of priority through a variety of conceptual concatenations. Red, anarchist, or conservative classifications are a genealogical method of imposing order on green ideology. The morphological approach assumes, to the contrary, multifarious conceptual intersections—possibly encouraged and constrained by past ideational affiliations but far from reduced to them—that reside in the very structure of ideological argument and whose subtlety and shape cannot be explained through the wholesale grafting of external diachroraes, particularly not in a pure or exclusionary form. Nor is the problem merely that of a failure to eliminate the logical tension among green values and concepts. Wiesenthal, who correctly points out the pluralism of orientations on left-right, 6 J. Raschke, Die Grtinen: Wie sie wurden, was sie sind (Cologne, 1993), 55, 62. Raschke refers to this in the singular as the absence of an archemedal point, although this underplays the plurality of the core.

530 The Assault on Ideological Convention radical-moderate, and lifestyle dimensions, as a barrier to adopting a single principle that could resolve tensions/ implies that an ideological morphology could in principle be constructed to enable such resolution. Saward goes further in bemoaning the tension between the elements of the green 'value-set', as 'given the holism the green imperative is based on we would have the right to expect these goals and values to be thoroughly compatible'.8 This remark is based on a misunderstanding of the epistemology of holism. A holistic relationship entails the mutual interdependence of all the concepts it encompasses, but not the mutual interdependence of all the meanings of all those concepts. In other words, given the core concept of holism, it is still quite possible to construct a number of alternative holistic systems with the same set of concepts at our disposal, each prescribing certain outcomes and proscribing others. Green holism is itself pluralist, not monist, and any of its quasi-contingent concrete instances emphasizes and prioritizes one configuration of concepts and, within it, certain meanings of each of those concepts. No holistic system relating to an operative world can be holistic in the most inclusive sense, for its generality would stretch to vacuity. The goals and values of green ideology cannot be, as Saward suggests, 'thoroughly compatible' in that sense. (b) DEFICIENT DICHOTOMIES

A closer examination of green core components, their adjacent logical implications, and the cultural choices they encourage, may be helpful here. A common fault-line is frequently assumed to run between ecocentric and anthropocentric positions. Commenting on the first core concept, the human-nature relationship, one ecopolitical theorist has observed: 'an ecocentric approach regards the question of our proper place in the rest of nature as logically prior to the question of what are the most appropriate social and political arrangements for human communities.'9 Ecocentrism, broadly speaking, decontests (non-human) nature as endowed with independent status, while asserting its intrinsic value. Anthropocentrism decontests nature as a human environment, its wholesomeness vital to human expression and development, but significantly 7 8

H. Wiesenthal, in Raschke, Die Griinen, 129. M, Saward, 'Green Democracy?', in A. Dobson and P. Lucardie (eds.), The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory (London, 1993), 66. * R, Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory (London, 1992), 28.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping

531

instrumental to those ends. Many forms of ecocentrism adopt one of the most alluring forms of argument produced by ideologists; an appeal to inherent features of the observable world. In Eckersley's terms, 'nonhuman nature knows no human ethics, it simply is'.10 Fox asserts holistically: 'given a deep enough understanding of the way things are ... one will naturally be inclined to care for the unfolding of the world in all its aspects'." O'Riordan talks of a 'natural morality' that displaces the humanist morality derived through human cultural institutions.12 Tellingly, these views may appear in an anthropocization of nature, such as in the phrase 'nature knows best'. Whether or not nature has intrinsic value is a question that cannot be resolved adequately by any of these perspectives: the ecocentric, weak anthropocentric, or strong anthropocentric.13 For as Bookchin has observed, the 'biocentrism' ideology of deep ecology... pivots on an ideological trick: a strict assertion of biocentric 'rights' is sharply counterposed to an equally strict condemnation of anthropocentric 'rights/ as though no body of ethical ideas could be formulated that transcended both extremes... In a natural world from which human beings were absent, no ethics, no concept of 'rights/ indeed, no notion of 'intrinsic' worth could possibly exist.14 The issue must remain ideological inasmuch as we lack access to information that can determine its truth status. Yet again, the truth status of a view is not necessarily a good indicator of the human reactions to it, and when it cannot be ascertained, its use-value lies in another domain—its role in illuminating the political usage of language. Can we then organize green ideology around an anthropocentric environmentalisrn that seeks to generate a nature friendly towards long-term, presumably ethical, human ends? Both ecocentrism and anthropocentrism search for a sustainable harmony; that is, both engage the green ideological core. As would be expected from the complexities of ideological structure, however, the distinction 10

Ibid. 59. W. Fox, Toward a Tmnspersmal Ecology (Totaes, 1995), 247. Whether this has conservative undertones is a question that will be addressed below. 12 T. O'Riordan, Environmentalisrn, 2nd edn. (London, 1981), 10-11. 13 See A. Dobson, Green Political Thought (London, 1990), 63-4. Weak anthropocentrism invokes the inevitable view of the world through human constructs; strong anthropocentrism is an instrumental regard, for nature as a means to realizing human purposes. 14 M. Bookchin, Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh and San Francisco, 1994), 3. 11

532 The Assault on Ideological Convention between the two obfuscates other fissures and combinations, no less important and revealing. The ecocentric-anthropocentric divide is logically arbitrary. It may of course be culturally significant, but mainly from the viewpoint of its producers—themselves green ideologists. There may be additional cultural reasons (such as membership of a class, or sympathies for a political tradition, or geographic location) for preferring other classifications (based, for instance, on considerations of equality, or community, or attitudes towards power and the state). Moreover, what is contained under the heading 'ecocentric' or 'anthtopocentrie' is merely shorthand for a complex range of positions. No construction that might be imposed on oral and written green texts is essentially privileged, though any may be revealing of some facet of green ideology. That is why the philosophical search for foundational green principles is misleading, for it can only be successful at the cost of distorting the meaning, and surplus of meaning, of available texts. The multiplicity of analytical perspectives endemic m. the manner in which green political thought presents itself may be illustrated by examining the conjunction between two of its cores—the human-nature relationship and holism—and inspecting some of their adjacent derivative decontestations. Thus a number of logical paths leading from that base explore the socialist emphasis on human relationships, drawing in adjacent communitarian notions as well as conceptions of human (and non-human) flourishing related to need. Notably, this route of inquiry does not separate ecocentrics from anthropocentrics. The former have allocated high value to their affinity with communitarian views, expressed in the adjacent concepts of bioregionalism and in the integration of local communities set in their particular ecosystems, though not necessarily ruling out larger social structures.15 Thus for Naess, holism is a Gestalt conception that regards nature as a total system of interacting and interpenetrating parts, in which vital needs are satisfied in diverse local communities.16 Anthropocentrics, in one of their leading currents (eco-socialism) follow the socialist morphology that identifies the human relationship as one of its core ideas. Community becomes one of the core's foremost expressions, and decentralization is also advocated, though not so much for its association with bio-locality as with face-to-face direct democracy.17 Clearly, decentralization is not inextricably associated with green 15 16

See Eckersley, Envirvnmentalism, 185. A. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge, 1989), 57-63, 102. 17 Though D. Pepper, Eco-Sodalism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London, 1993), 216-17, has reservations about decentralized eco-socialism.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 533 ideology at all. It may invoke simplicity, bioregionalism, and 'back to the land', but it can be put to work in complex technological urban settings. What identifies decentralization as a component of green discourse is its conjunction with other concepts central to that field. Crucial divergences as well as overlaps may cut across both the ecoeentric and the anthropocentric camps. For example, the concept of community raises a series of periphery-type questions diversely answered by green ideologists. Who is to be a member of the community: human beings and animals/plants/inanimate matter? What is the status of such membership: equal, hierarchical, rights-claiming, or duties-eliciting? What is the intensity of the communal relationship: embedded or instrumental interdependence, monolithic or pluralistic? What are the spatial boundaries of the community: local, regional, national, or some combination of these? What is the time-span of the community: present, present and past, or present and future, generations? Any one of a large configuration of rejoinders may still place the respondent within the ambit of green ideology. The attachment of organicist interpretations to holism also opens up problems with adjacent concepts such as egalitarianism, social change, or individualism. One path involves the decision on whether to include or exclude egalitarianism as an adjacent concept. Some ecocentrics offer a radical rejection of hierarchy in which the human species acquires no priority over other forms of life, so that socio-political arrangements no longer occupy stage-centre but are made to reflect the equal plurality of the 'biotic community',18 That latter phrase presents the core concept of holism as a mutually constituting order that is not specifically human. It contains a notion of ethics as communality that in its maximalist form, in Aldo Leopold's words, 'enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land'.19 As Lovelock phrased it in his famous Gaia hypothesis: 'the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity... endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.'20 The concept of equality also offers a principal means of channelling perceptions of the North-South 18

Eckersley, Emrironmentalism, 28, A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1987), 204, For Leopold, though, human beings are in some ways superior to other components of that enlarged community. 20 J. Lovelock, Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, 1982), 9. 19

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The Assault on Ideological Convention

divide to concentrate on more equal access to global resources, as well as applying to the relations between present and future generations.21 These versions of radical equality forge an obvious link with anarchist thought and with non-statist varieties of socialism, in so far as human organization is retained only in participatory communal forms intended to eliminate invidious types of power. However, such direct participation is predicated on a prior acceptance of other substantive green values, without which direct democracy may not speak in a single voice, or even a green voice at all. The specifically green decontestation of democracy is held in place by associating the latter with a holistic community, with small-scale regionalism, with the human lifestyle most in harmony with nature—and therefore the most liberating—as well as with egalitarian views. A distinct reshaping of conceptual meanings occurs when these proximities are established. Furthermore, trie goal of human emancipation attached to this mode of argument has its equivalent in the ecocentrk desire to free nature from harmful human control and domination, particularly in the form of consumerist hyperaetivity. To the extent that anarchists and some non-state socialists foresee the eradication of politics, green thought does so only in its fundamentalist, as distinct from realist, mode.22 But it is patently possible from the ecocentrk perspective to eliminate equality as an adjacent concept, and to do so for arguably valid reasons. One such reason could be the invocation of the expertise without which rational solutions to ecological problems are virtually impossible. Another could be a distrust, at least in the short run, of interest-based consumer-led democratic decisionmaking. A third could be a deep-rooted antipathy to the human race, identified as the main instigator of environmental harm. If one crucial message of contemporary progressive ideologies is the underlying unity and equal worth of the objects of their concern, an analysis of green ideology must look beyond, and through, some of the conventional categories employed in its investigation. The dichotomy as heuristic tool proves in this case once again to be merely of limited value. The one-to-one relationship between party and ideology also supplies only a partial picture. The standard 'semi-circle' classification from left to right, in which green ideology is located at the left of the spectrum, has related historically to many of its specific manifestations, such as the German 21

22

See S, C. Young, The Politics of the Environment (Manchester, 1993), 14.

Again, this does not distinguish all ecocentrics from all anthropocentrics.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 535 Green party, but not to the logical and cultural possibilities both inherent in green morphology and evident in green thoughtpatterns. Even the famous green slogan, 'neither left nor right, but in front', while correctly eschewing conventional political categories, is unsophisticated in promoting a single-profile approach. Green ideology does not have a distinctive 'front' position. 23

(c) CONSERVATIVE COMPONENTS?

Another path begins to converge on the conservative core concept of invoking the extra-human origins of the social order, though it does so in its own peculiar way: nature is harnessed not with the aim of sanctifying any human arrangement that may control social change—as with conservatives—but in order to select only those arrangements that appear compatible with environmentally friendly lifestyles. Such lifestyles, it is argued, precede in time and in ubiquity the harmful ideational and institutional provisions of modern industrial societies. Moreover, the frequent allusion of green ideologists to organicism papers over a major contested distinction in the meanings carried by that term. As a concept denoting the interdependence of the parts and the mutual support of the partswhole structure, it can be read in ways favourable to the values of mutual responsibility expressed through emancipatory socialism. But once organicism is associated with the concept of growth, we are on another track altogether, emphasizing continuity and drawing in the core concept of preservation to reinforce the privileging of biological change as the role model for social change in general. Preservation and sustainability are in principle entirely compatible with a controlled dynamic equilibrium of social and human development inasmuch as nature itself exhibits replaceable growth. But they can be employed to retard social change by maintaining continuity with the past and through a cautious approach to technology.24 Some ecocentrics regard conservation as deeply linked to a deindustrialization of society, which has both radical and conservative romantic undertones, and they interpret holism as providing a balanced harmony. As Sale has written: 'The first law is that conservation, preservation, sustenance, is the central goal of the natural world—hence its ingenerate, fundamental resistance to a 24

Cp. laschke, Die Grunen, 48-9. Cp. Eekersley, Enoirammentalism, 21.

536 The Assault on Ideological Convention large-scale structural change; the second law is that... nature is inherently stable.' Greens, whether ecocentrk or anthropocentric, are therefore significantly conservative in their principled opposition to progress as 'perpetual change and continual growth... a false and delusory goddess if ever there was one'.25 Often conceptual adjustment is more subtle than that, "The crisis of life conditions on Earth', wrote Naess, 'could help us choose a new path with new criteria for progress, efficiency, and rational action.'26 New decontestations of these concepts allow for their retention within the framework of ecosophy—ecological harmony. Harmony has frequently been a legitimate reading of a substantive rather than instrumental rationality, as von Humboldt and Mill knew. Progress is related to 'ultimate normative objectives'—identification and self-realization within a whole—and efficiency refers to the ability to mesh technologies with self-reliance.27 Notwithstanding, the abstract construction of history evoked by green ideologists rails against history as the arena of increasing human instrumental rationality. In a curious inversion of historical time, the future acts not as the open-ended repository of unlimited human possibilities but as a self-contained constraint upon present conduct, inhibiting technological experimentation and attempting to redirect and close the path of human history by breaking with its cultural modernist postulates. A Koselleckian horizon of expectations is employed atypically not to unlock, but to curb, the present. If progress is decried as a manifestation of human control qua intervention in natural balances, the objection is typically conservative. Progress becomes a manifestation of the replacement of 'true' human and natural values with artificial ones generated by the industrialist-modernist project. To stem it is to appeal to visions of a former rusticism decimated by the folly of human hubris. Even if green ideology is subsumed under the rubric of a Utopia, the attainment of any Utopia will have—by the dint of its realization—conservative implications. In talking about the conservative component in green political thought, there is no need to introduce the more overt conservative green positions that seek to conserve rural tracts for private benefit and consumption, or that appeal to the egoism of the market.28 It is simply an observation that conservative arguments cannot be completely disentangled or 25 2

K. Sale in A. Dobson (ed), The Green Reader (London, 1991), 79. 27 * Naess, Ecology, 26. Ibid. 98, 102, 171-81. 28 As in Nimbyism—the 'not in my back yard' movement to resist transport policies which could devalue private property.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 537 excluded from all green positions. There are obviously differences between a conservatism that is also green and a green ideology that has conservative inclinations. It is again a question of the internal configurations of shared concepts. The conservative traditionalist attack on the 'hubristic rationalist ideology' of the neoliberal market, as well as on the alliance between liberal humanism and science,29 is an example of a decontestation in which a suspicion of progress and reason is associated with the importance of community as the guardians of a shared and inherited culture. Conservatives utilize the human-nature relationship, or the transgenerational bond, or the small community—all elements of green vocabulary—for the Burkean purpose of controlling the pace of change and resisting destructive innovation. They revere nature as an extra-human force underpinning human life.30 Here green core and adjacent concepts are to be found at strategic locations in conservative morphology. Not surprisingly, the strenuous attempts of green theorists to dissociate themselves from conservative interpretations are an act of political self-definition, meant to erect a barrier between them and other components of conservative baggage which currently challenge a whole range of green adjacent and peripheral concepts.31 While the rationale of that analytical position may be appreciated, its claims cannot be categorically assumed on the basis of green thought-behaviour. The frequent replacement of growth and progress with preservation apparently detaches the assessment of human development from an entirely human perspective. This implicit reference to external natural laws, as a form of anthropofugality—when human beings are deplored for their arrogant and insatiable rationality—is, however, central to conservative intellectual agendas. (d) THE INDIVIDUALIST INGREDIENT

The conservative tendency, however, is just another path, even if all green ideologists either walk along part of it, or traverse it in their own chosen route. But what happens when individualism is located close to the green core? Is the concept of holism negated, thus undermining the morphological specifications of green ideology? Discussions of animal rights, for example, have incorporated 29 30

Cp. J. Gray, Beyond the New Right (London, 1993), 124-9. 3l Ibid. 136-7, 176-7. Cp. Eckersley, Envimnmentalism, 30.

538 The Assault on Ideological Convention them both into individualism as against a holistic communitarianism, and into ecologism to the extent that the human view of nature becomes more incktsionist.32 But as we have seen, contrary to what contemporary discourse appears to suggest—particularly in the USA and among opponents of liberalism—rights need not be an anti-communitarian concept.33 To recognize the rights of animals as 'individuals' is not to run in the face of the argument that there exist communal ties which link animals and human beings. Just as new liberals could embrace individual rights within a framework that enhances communal values in a mutually beneficial relationship, and Marxists see true individuality as a function of its communal embeddedness, so can green ideologists argue that individualism, and the liberation of individuals from fettered and unwholesome conduct and interactions with nature, is entirely compatible with the small communities envisaged by bioregionalism. As Bahro, for example, has contended, 'the commune is the basic social form for a new, more economical way of life,.. Economic efficiency is not negated, but subordinated to ecological demands and above all to the development of social relationships and the self-development and self-transformation of individuals.'34 Indeed, the green adjacent concept of self-sufficiency may be employed for the very purpose of amalgamating selfhood with the sustenance accorded to that self by human and natural environments. These green interpretations of self-reliance coalesce with anarchist positions.35 To be sure, an alternative interpretative strategy would be to exclude not the individualism of animal rights, but the entire issue of animal status, from the arena of green thought. To do that would be to argue that the reasons adduced by advocates of animal rights refer to animals as moral agents rather than to animals as part of the natural environment or the biosphere. A further connection between the green ideological core and individualism is mediated through the adjacent concept of biodiversity. If nature is perceived as pluralist (that is, composed of innumerable forms of life, all distinctive, all with a contribution to make and a role to play in the biosphere), then the uniqueness of each species becomes a prized value and the concept of individuality is attached to species variety. As Naess maintained, diversity 32

See T. Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (London, 1988). See Ch. 6 above. R. Bahro, Building the Green Movement (London, 1986), 88. 35 See A, Carter, 'Towards a Green Political Theory', in Dobson and Lucardie (eds.), Politics of Nature, 40, and Pepper, Eco-Socialism, 186. 33 34

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 539 enhances the potential of survival and encourages new and rich forms of life, 'Ecologically-inspired attitudes therefore favour diversity of human ways of life, of cultures, of occupations, of economies',36 a pluralism in which individuality, human and non-human, could thrive. This has some resonance with the feminist-endorsed 'politics of difference', as well as with the immediacy of issuedriven lifestyles. Of course, even if biodiversity is an empirical fact of the natural world, it still remains a construction of a reality in which diversity is the perceived organizing principle. Other constructions might have termed it species-overload (biosuperfluity), or biodisharmony (inasmuch as species depend on consuming other species, unless that too is decontested as part of a balanced food chain). The value of pluralism thus assumes lexical priority over other competing organizing principles. Some may assert that the individualist libertarian anarchism of green theorists such as Bookchin excludes the core concept of holism from its morphology and that, consequently, the identification of core concepts proposed earlier does not have the omnipresence that a core requires. But even Bookchin—who dissociates himself strongly from inegalitarian readings of the organic analogy— couches his arguments in terms of affinity groups and direct democracy. He employs the notion of social ecology in calling for 'new relations between people and nature and within society itself, and stresses mutualism and the systems that maintain life as 'fecund, supportive interrelationships'.37 By arranging a proximity among the adjacent notions of mutuality, self-organization, freedom-cum-spontaneity as the working out of human rationality, and an egalitarian abhorrence of hierarchy, Bookchin's conceptual cocktail allows for a holism interpreted as an 'ethics of complementarity' and as 'unity in diversity'. But Bookchin does not escape the ideological argumentation which he rightly unmasks in others. His ideational configuration is propped up by enlisting the processes of evolution, which enable him to legitimate his analysis by appealing to nature. The introduction of conceptual certainty into this decontestation is abetted through argumentative devices such as the following contention: 'Like the concept of "being," these principles of social ecology require no explanation, merely verification. They are the elements of an ethical ontology, not "rules of a game" that can be changed to suit one's 36 37

71.

A. Naess in Dobson (ed.), Green Reader, 244. M. Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal, 1980), 78; Which Way, 57,

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The Assault on Ideological Convention

personal needs/38 In sum, green individualism may well have its genesis in liberal, socialist, or anarchist traditions, but its introduction into green political thinking readjusts its range of decontestations to serve the universe of meanings of its new ideational cores. (e) THE AMBIVALENCE OF POWER

Power decontested as domination is anotiher adjacent concept logically inferred from the green perspective on nature. That perspective insists on a relatively firm disengagement of human actors from enforcing their own value-laden activities on nature.39 Ecocentrics in particular view human beings as perpetuating the damaging dualism of man versus nature which has justified serious interference with nature's processes and forms. In Schumacher's words, 'modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it'.40 The human devastation visited on nature is only an extension of a more general destructiveness of the species (especially its male representatives), and it coalesces on this point with Marxism as well as with feminism. It also enlists the anarchists' disavowal of power by attempting to neutralize it mainly through a face-to-face participatory and egalitarian community that would realize moral self-direction. The political is diminished, not as in conservative theories out of a sense of the futility of individual rationality in the face of accumulated social wisdom, but because of the need to protect the political, comprehended as imposed rational change, from being diverted to improper functioning. It would none the less be inaccurate to characterize green ideology as centrally opposed to the application of human power. Although in much green debate domination is positioned as a concept identified by its negativity, the elimination of power in all green ideological variants does not follow. One such instance is the anthropocentric argument; another, to be discussed below, is the green authoritarian version. For anthropocentrics, a definite divergence occurs between domination and control, a distinction which many emancipatory ecocentrics are loath to press. Eco-socialists in particular adopt a conceptual configuration in 38 39

Bookchin, Which Way, 74, These connections and dualisms are culturally overridden, or ruled out, in many non-Western societies. * E. S. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London, 1973), 11.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 541 which the adjacent concepts to the green core are arranged so that the semantic field encompasses community, democracy, and participation in a manner compatible with control. Given a Marxist reading of the human-nature relationship, one that regards human labour and activity both as essential to the human condition, and formative of nature, it becomes imperative—as Pepper maintains— that 'collectively, we can exercise conscious social control' over relations with nature.41 He further asserts that eco-socialism must have 'a commitment to genuine bottom-up participatory democracy'.42 The proximity of community, power, and rationality fashions a rationalism decontested not as an instrumental attitude to nature, but as social control over both human activity and (some) natural processes. Rationality underwrites the mutually supportive purposes of human growth and emancipation as well as the sustenance of a physical environment.43 Attached to community decisionmaking, rationality suggests that the unborn (future generations) must also participate in the choices of current individuals. Here individuality is made to give way to communities across time. To that extent, individuals are subservient to claims of community and species. The relationship between socialist and green themes cannot therefore be accounted for in the simplistic terms of overlap, but rather in terms of a different internal ordering and prioritization of shared concepts and notions. There are, however, important senses in which eco-socialism remains a hybrid uneasily straddling the socialist-green boundary, its morphology bearing insufficient family-resemblances to green ideology. The insistence on the immediate implementation of lifestyles, of which more presently, is absent. The core concept of preservation, construed as concrete limits on growth, is embraced by eco-socialists only in so far as it caters to the satisfaction of basic material needs and does not block an escape from poverty. Particularly in non-Western cultures, poverty is highlighted as a function of capitalist colonization. Growth is made to give way to the more complex concept of development, prioritizing consumption central to human needs,44 while detaching the indiscriminate category of consumption from welfare. Moreover, the industrial 'environment' is regarded as no less problematic than the ecological. The ubiquitous adjacent notion of decentralization 41

D. Pepper, 'Anthropocentrism, Humanism and Eco-Socialism; A Blueprint for the Survival of Ecological Polities', Environmental Politics, 2 (1993), 443-4; Pepper, Eco-Socialism, 221, 42 Pepper, 'Anthropocentrism', 444. 43 Ibid. 429. 44 Ryle, Ecology and Socialism, 64, 73-4.

542 The Assault on Ideological Convention is also merely an optional guest of eco-sodaMst circles. Local economies coexist with 'a vital, co-ordinating, planning and enabling role for the state in creating sustainable development', and this requires some measure of universalism. The state, as agent of the collective will, is retained in an adjacent position, although other variants of green ideology marginalize it at their periphery.45 'Anarchistic autarky'—the combination of decentralization, selfsufficiency, and antipathy to power relations, whether or not entailing communal or individual emancipation—is rejected.46 Centralized planning is a consequence not so much of the simple espousal of a class-based emancipatory socialism as of a complex switch of conceptual routes: the human-nature relationship is predicated on a social construction of nature and harmony achieved through 'natural' human-controlled intervention; power is brought back to help furnish the green room and directly attached to communal action (referring back to holism); decentralization, while partially favoured among homogeneous groups, is seen as inadequate in solving the broader problems of social justice and therefore made to share space with its opposite, state regulation (referring back to preservation). Different conceptual patterns rather than clear dichotomous ideational divides establish the identity of all contenders for leadership among environmental and ecological creeds. Specifically, eco-socialism reflects the strains operating on a broader ideological tradition desirous of responding to the whole range of social and political issues for which the 'thin-centredness' of other variants of green ideology is inadequate. For similar reasons the German green movement can be said to display hybrid tendencies, in which the idea of participatory democracy has gravitated from an adjacent to a core position in conjunction with the other cores detailed above.47 Another instance of the retention of power in green discourse may be found in green authoritarian versions. These rest their case on some version of the sovereignty of knowledge, as befits all similar appeals to authority, or on the extreme urgency of the issue at hand. Sale takes the notion of biodiversity to a conceptual extreme by associating it with a pluralism of different political arrangements existing side by side in a fragmented and decentralized manner, to include 'all kinds of aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies'.48 In that case, the concept of equality becomes peripheralized 45

44 47 48

Ryle, Ecology and Socialism, 60,

Pepper, 'Anthropocentrism, Humanism and Eco-Socialism.', 446. Cp. R, E, Goodin, Green Political Theory (Oxford, 1992), 124-5. Sale in Dobson (ed.). Green Reader, 81.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 543 and marginalized. Another fringe variant, termed ecofascism by its opponents, preaches power, decontested as violence, against human beings who offend against certain preservationist tenets,49 All the above attempts to create 'an ecological Brave New World' may simply be dismissed by coining the pejorative concept of eeoryranny.50 From a different perspective, it is clear that even among democratic and communitarian ecocentrics, there must be a point where power is beneficially employed. Human intervention is necessary to protect against any damage that human beings can inflict on the core and non-negotiable green concepts. Power (and hence politics) is not purged in any green argument; those arguments rely on severe constraints on what human beings may do with respect to nature. However much the end of the process is the complete intemalization of those constraints, that would assume a human benevolence more likely to be endorsed by the anarchist subset of green ideologies.51 As with all ideologies, adjacent concepts are introduced, in different combinations, to cope with any contingent activity or idea that threatens to undermine or change the core. Since liberty is not a core component of green ideology, it may justifiably be infringed through the exercise of power in order to realize core green values. Ophuls, for instance, has written of a move from liberty to authority in order to maintain a steady-state society.52 This however can only occur given the following proviso: to the extent that understandings of liberty are contained within the core concepts and alluded to in certain interpretations of those concepts, those understandings will have to be preserved. Other ways in which power may be harnessed by green ideology are through the notion of stewardship, which entrusts the preservation of what is valuable in nature to human agency,53 or through environmental management, which relies in part on technological innovations to reduce environmental damage. The opposition of technocentrism to ecocentrism is itself an attempt to construct an ideological space which dichotomizes the two, and to occupy the moral high ground of debate. As O'Riordan has commented, imparting negative import to a range of adjacent 49 Cp. A. Vincent, "The Character of Ecology', Environmental Politics, 2 (1993), 266-7. 30 E.U. von Weizsacker, Earth Politics (London, 1994), 209-10. 51 Cp. Goodin, Green Political Theory, 50, 152. 32 W, Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco, 1977), 226. 53 See J. Baird Callicott, Earth's Insights (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1994), 16-24.

544 The Assault on Ideological Convention concepts; 'Progress, efficiency, rationality, and control—these form the ideology of technocentrism that downplays the sense of wonder, reverence, and moral obligation that are the hallmarks of the ecocentric mode.'54 Such moralism absolves the intentions, if not the practices, of green ideologists from the postmodern relativism in which, because of their liking for difference and diversity, they are sometimes implicated.55 Even then, as noted above, ecocentrics are concerned with low impact technology' that encourages selfreliance56—allowing for human control, provided the adjacent concepts are decentralization and (small) community. Only hard, destructive, resource-consuming, and centralist technologies are excluded from the domain of green ideology. In the perimeter area of ideological practice such dichotomies may not be evident. Weale has drawn attention to the 'ideology of ecological modernization' which sees environmental protection as a source for future economic growth.57 (/) THE GREEN PERIMETER

Why do different green configurations emerge around a common core? A variety of cultural constraints may account for the specific logical path chosen within the semantic field: historical traditions (for instance, anarchist, socialist, radical, extra-parliamentary), national features (for instance, cultural romanticism, the preponderance of agriculture, or, conversely, urban decay, a large intelligentsia, the role of fauna and flora in mythologies and religions), and, not least in the green case, perimeter-driven crises. Green ideologies are distinctly characterized by the high profile accorded to their perimeter notions and views, which consciously identify facts and events as ideologically significant. The latter are incorporated into the ideological family by tracing a path back from the specific perimeter to the more general core and interpreting the latter in the light of the former. Nuclear disasters or tests (e.g. Chernobyl or the Rainbow Warrior affair), oil spillages (e.g. Exxon Valdese), chemical pollution (e.g. Bhopal), famines in the South (e.g. Ethiopia) are instances of the crisis-driven perimeter notions shaped by the core and reacting back on it. Another prominent idea, pacifism, may both be crisis-driven by the outburst or threat 54 35 56 57

O'Riordan, Environmentalism, 11. Cp. Dobson, Green Political Thought, 158, O'Riordan, Environmentalism, 1; Naess, Ecology, 98, A. Weale, The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester, 1992), 75-9.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 545 of war, and assimilate a tradition that, historically, has united many greens with other dissenting or radical ideologies. The human-nature relationship, preservation, and the concept of holism may loosely help categorize such events as undesirable, if not catastrophic. But the resulting feedback process is complex. Agreement on the perimeter concepts and notions (their identification as significant, their condemnation in terms of ethical values, the need for rapid action to prevent their harmful results and their reoccurrence) need not signify an agreed-upon general structure of argument. Identical perimeter notions may still be linked in diverging paths back to the core (as well as to cores entirely alien to green thinking). For example, the perceived threat from nuclear weapons and pollutant chemicals relates not merely to current human and non-human life but to the forms and possibility of human and non-human life in the future, thus enlisting the concept of social responsibility towards posterity. It may appeal to ecofascist tendencies in its attempt to preserve the green core, or shun the use of force and encourage a rapid, self-sufficient, detachment from advanced technology through a rejection of industrial societies. Different forms of democracy may be employed for these divergent ideological conclusions or democracy may be ditched altogether. The state may be seen as the only means through which environmental disasters can be avoided, or abandoned as the agent mainly responsible for them. The role of perimeter concepts is particularly important in green ideology for two reasons. First, green party internal organization and ideological discipline are insufficient (sometimes deliberately so, as in the case of the German fundamentalists) to carve out anything like a mainstream green position;58 Second, as Raschke has noted, what seem to be missing in green ideological structure are the debates mediating between concrete issues and fundamental principles that play so important a part in other ideological families. Green ideologists have not come to grips with the kind of nature they want, the boundaries of social intervention in nature, or with the contours of a green Utopia.59 In the terminology of this study, the adjacent concepts exist but their intensions and decontestations are underdeveloped. Here we return to the fourth green core concept: the concrete and immediate implementation of human lifestyles. Green ideology is thin-centred both in terms of the cohesive intricacy of the ideological product and in terms of the spread of, and absence of unifying system among, its ideological 58

See Young, Politics, 23, 34-5.

m

Raschke, Die Grunen, 77.

546

The Assault on Ideological Convention

producers. For better or for worse, it lacks a Mill, Marx, or Freud, a central intellectual agenda, or powerful philosophical or theoretical framework, from which to evolve or against which to focus sharply. Its perimeter-driven morphology is centrifugal, frequently more defined at the concrete periphery than elsewhere. That has been seen as a 'greater random element in the structure of attitudes to policy'.60 More accurately, it could account for the multiplicity of paths from the perimeter to the core. One explanation may lie in the fact that, unlike ideologies such as liberalism which grew gradually over time, green ideology is a 'fast-ideology' product. A late twentieth-century ideology that relies heavily on external temporal and spatial events to shape its theoretical conceptualizations is unavoidably a child of the mass media.61 The resultant temporalized and spatialized responses of green ideology are disjunctured. Unlike conservatism; it possesses a constraining core of substantive concepts that are not a mere function of attitudes to change and the prodding of circumstance. But it is weakly connected to that core, and the felt urgency and apocalyptic tone62 of the green case necessitates an association with the instant 'creativity' of the media world. This multiplies and disorganizes its construction as an ideology. It is hence more pluralist, decentralized, and 'democratic' or popular, but less intellectually coherent. It also attests-—unintentionally and in line with the communitarianism of many of its adherents—to ideology as social product. It is a loose creation of partially connected discourses, neither the creation of 'Great Men/Women' nor generated by a close-knit community. The cultural constraints applied to its possible logical decontestations are too diverse to establish an integrated political language, particularly in view of the weak hold its theoretical core has over its morphology. The complement of the movement from perimeter back to centre is the emphasis on prompt action. The concreteness of perimeter notions needs to be matched not with contemplation but with deeds and distinctive practices through example. Lifestyle becomes the very incorporation of Weltanschauung, not its laboriously worked out consequence. That is why it can claim core status in the green ideological configuration. German Greens refer to this tendency as Sofortismus, but it is evident in green ideology outside Germany too.63 This immediacy relates to the 'post-material' switch away 60

Bennie et al, Great Politics Three, 227-8. Cp. Rasdxke, Die Griinen, 131, 62 " Dobson, Green Political Thought, 22, 61

63

Cp, Raschke, Die Griinen, 46.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 547 from consumerism and towards alternative conceptions of the quality of life which have typified the new social movements. It may equally be expressed in private and public fora, the private act being pregnant with social significance. The feminist slogan 'the personal is the political' has been significantly reinterpreted by attaching it not to the recognition of the political nature of spheres of human activity hitherto considered extra-political and private, but to the insistence on the importance of individual grassroots action.64 Indeed, whereas green thinkers regard immediacy as a form of personally acting out a lifestyle, feminism is keen to make the connections between immediacy as concreteness and the development of women's consciousness through common experiences that have forged them as women. The centrality of lifestyle in green ideology is inadequately linked to the other core concepts and has not contributed to firming up a more cohesive structure.65 Cohesion is difficult to achieve, if a ground ideological principle is the localism, spontaneity, and pluralism of personal and group example. Even if the concepts of emancipation and choice run through all of these practices, the specific forms of those concepts will vary, and they cannot account on their own for a specifically green set of arguments. And even if there may be broad agreement among greens on the identification of ecological crises, a diverse range of reactions to them is encouraged by the emphasis green theory accords to perimeterlocated practice. Immediacy in rime is paralleled by immediacy in space. The well-known green slogan 'think globally, act locally' is a case in point. This organicist statement meshes the universalism of environmental issues and the disrespect for humanly contrived boundaries with the possibility of their local solution. Whatever the intentions of the slogan, its implicit meanings raise tensions. If the locus of green action is conceived as the biotegion, and if direct democracy and participation lead to the extolling of the decentralized small group, it could be assumed that green issues needed no international co-ordination. The health of the parts would be sufficient to ensure the flourishing of the whole. Such a view is agnostic with respect to the unequal global distribution of scarce ecological, as well as economic and social, resources, and with respect to the ensuing arrangements necessary to secure whatever 64

For an example of this reconstruction see Bennie et al,, Green Politics Three,

222. 65

Raschke, Die Griinen, 88-9.

548

The Assault on Ideological Convention

view of global social justice societies may wish to promote. Immediacy in space can offer on its own no solution to the North-South problems that currently appear on political agendas, (g) ECQ-FEMINISM: A DISTINCT POSITION?

Finally, what of eco-femirtism and its place in the green ideological family? The feminist core concepts—the centrality of gender to politics, the problematics of gender-based social relations, and the power-nexus which oppresses women—as well as adjacent concepts such as affirmative action (towards emancipation), responsible technology, or the personalization of politics, link up with some of the precepts of green ideology. Like socialism, feminism does not necessarily align itself witih green political thinking. Ecofeminism is however a hybrid form. One of its features is its specific interpretation of the core green concept of the human-nature relationship. By decontesting the traditional depiction of women as analogous to the traditional views of nature, the essence of nature and that of women is brought together. If women have suffered as a result of being constructed through instrumental (male) anthropocentric understandings, and if they have been at the receiving end of a hierarchy of patriarchal power relationships, their emancipation lies partly in adopting the correspondingly emancipated conception of nature offered by green ideology. The eco-femMst view of women thus constitutes a variant of the difference conception of women, accentuating their specific characteristics. Nature as mother earth is easily identified with the nurturing role of women as mothers. Noting the role of the ecology movement in reawakening interest in the values of the premodern world, Merchant has contended that 'the image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings'.66 Furthermore, the dualism typifying male-female relationships finds its parallel in the human-nature dualism, and the domination of nature by human beings matches that of the oppression of women by men. Not only the human-nature relationship but a strong holism are clearly discernible in these positions. Sustainability, too, is catered for through an eco-feminist emphasis on the role of women in 'developing survival strategies and fighting against the threat to their children' caused by damaged environments.67 As for 66 67

C. Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco, 1989), pp. xx, 3. M. Mies and V. Shiva, Ecofeminism (Halifax, 1993), 84.

Green Ideology: Retreat and Regrouping 549 adjacent green concepts, these may present women's work—in non-industrialized and hence greener societies—as an expertise in biodiversity and conservation/8 and thus emphasize the different input of women into both the natural and social environments. Rationality continues its marginalization in contrast to its liberal and socialist ideological hosts, and the theme of female spirituality is specifically enlisted to counterbalance a human instrumentalism that is now, additionally, decontested as male,69 One limit of eco-feminism consists in the underplaying of social forms of patriarchy that concern feminists more broadly. Thus social and economic forms of power are marginalized in the eco-feminist conceptual configuration. Another limit consists in the attachment of the concept of patriarchy to core green concepts, which are then defined by such proximity. As Eckersley has remarked, 'patriarchy may be seen as not the root of the ecological crisis but rather as a subset of a more general problem of philosophical dualism that has pervaded Western thought'.70 Here patriarchy is simply a special case of the negation of holism. The internal conceptual patterns of eco-feminism, both in its core-construction and in a range of culturally adjusted adjacent possibilities, display hybrid features that prevent their neat absorption into mainstream feminism. Nor can green ideology, towards which eco-feminism displays greater affinity, easily contain the relatively new core concept of patriarchy without forfeiting some of the configurations it has attempted to embrace. In that sense eco-feminism is not even a tributary of 'a general ecocentric emancipatory framework', as Eckersley suggests, nor does it nest within that framework.71 On the basis of the innate pluralism of conceptual meaning, and in order to avoid a heuristically unmanageable fragmentation of ideologies into increasingly splintered subgroups, our understanding of ideological morphology would have to endorse Evans's view that 'it makes sense... to speak ... not of ecofeminists, but of ecologists who are feminists too'.72 This is evident in Mellor's summing up of the attributes of a feminist green socialism: Feminist, because it acknowledges the certtrality of women's life-producing and life-sustaining work and focuses upon the predominance of men in destructive institutions. Green, because it argues that we should act and think globally to regain a balance between the needs of humanity 6

* Ibid. 164-5.

69

Ibid. 17-19; J. Evans, 'Ecofeminism and the Politics of the Engendered Self, in Dobson and Lucardie (eds.). Politics of Nature, 182. 70 n Eckersley, Enmronmentalism, 69. Ibid. 70. 72 Evans, 'Ecofeminism', 187.

550 The Assault on Ideological Convention and the ability of the planet to sustain them. Socialist, because it recognises the rights of all peoples of the world to live in a socially just and equitable community,73

Socialism, feminism, and green thought lead here parallel lives as amalgams of the separate cores of other ideological families. The proximity of these ideational packages does not lead to total integration, though it will mutually check the conceptual pluralism each is capable of expressing on its own. What remains unclear is whether this treble combination can be negotiated without determining lexical priority among these distinct ideological languages and, if so, which should be prior to which. Any solution to that issue will inevitably produce a different ideological compound. If feminism is morphologically incomplete as an ideology by its structural exclusion or neglect of political concepts that play major roles in political language, this stricture is even more applicable to green ideology. In its present stage of development, green ideology still lacks the ideational complexity—irrespective of substantive message—to rank it as equal to the main ideological families. Whether this is a mark of youth or a congenital defect is too early to say. Ideologies require both time and extensive implementation in action for a cogent assessment of their features to be made. 73

M. Mellor, Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist Green Socialism (London, 1992), 279.

EPILOGUE

evidence marshalled in this book provides grounds for T HE stating what ideologies are not, as well as what they are. They are not, as critics of ideology have contended, a specifically irrational, arational, or imperfectly reflective manner of handling moral choices, normative principles, or even truth. That would assess them against a standard that simply does not exist in any form of political thinking. Nor are ideologies reducible to, or distinctive as, a practical programme of political action or inaction, though they may be more open and cognizant of this function than other types of political thought, Rather, the main feature of ideologies is the morphological act of decontestation, of prioritizing among options, of accepting or ruling out paradigms that interpret political reality, of competing over the legitimate meanings assigned to political language, of pronouncing not on which political values are true or false, but on which conceptual combinations are available to be applied to the understanding and shaping of the political world. Ideology is one of the most basic of political phenomena, an activity undertaken with concepts and with language, and which plots the parameters of individual and group conduct. Its uniqueness would be insufficiently appreciated by examining its contents simply as catalogues of preference, or through evaluating me quality of its arguments. Its fuller significance is recognized instead by understanding the methods through which its conceptual configurations are formed. Ideology is the product of organizing information, perceptions, beliefs, pre- and misconceptions about the political world, a task rendered necessary by the attributes of language, knowledge, and human comprehension. These pertain centrally to indeterminacy, choice-making, the individual as well as the social need for decisions, and the malleability of concepts fashioned amidst the dual constraints of logic and of temporally and spatially located cultural constructs. Insights to all the above are gained by analysing the internal structures of ideologies, their permutations, groupings, and regroupings, the reasons for these morphological features, and their political consequences. Through

552 Epilogue them generalizations may be formulated, always emanating from concrete and contextualized source-material. An ideological utterance, as well as a full ideological system, cannot be wholly explained as a reflection of cultural, spatial, and temporal occurrences, or as a predictable epistemological response to those occurrences. Nor is it to be explained wholly as an internally sustained grammar or morphology of logical or functional connections, independent of its consumers. It is instead the quasicontingent interplay between these variable factors, and their illumination should be sought through optimizing interpretative perspectives without slavishly following any single viewpoint Hermeneutic views of time, space, and horizons; the relations between texts, their producers, and their consumers; the role of political language in constructing reality and in providing access to the world out there; the unconscious surpluses of meaning; essential contestability and indeterminacy; the notion of family resemblances—all these are grist to the mill that analyses ideologies, uncovering the networks of conceptual components that make mem what they are and suggest what they can be. Consequently, this book offers a modest counterbalance to the approaches to political theory promoted by predominant Anglo-American political philosophers. If we want to understand ideologies, we have to analyse them as systems of broadly held political beliefs, speaking in languages familiar, or accessible to, most members of a society, and none the worse for that. To allude to a mixture of the rational and the non-rational is to refer to the thought-practices with which societies are acquainted, in which decontestation undertaken at least partly on the basis of emotional argument or socially inherited belief wins the day. Reason and logic are significant components of political language, but so are social invocations of norms of right and wrong, of sense and common-sense, of self-evidence, of accepted linguistic usage. So, moreover, are social denunciations of all these, but to a lesser extent, as to challenge them radically is always an uphill struggle. The comprehension of ideologies thus requires a different approach to method, acknowledging them as attempts to supply their own grounds for legitimate decontestation, through the cultural restriction of meaning —the ruling in or out of certain ideas, concepts, and expressions. One corollary of this is an exploration of the ways in which ideologies permeate popular discourse and the mass media. That is an enterprise beyond the scope of this book, but one which could draw in discourse analysis, cultural studies, and explorations of mass politics.

Epilogue

553

There are those who maintain that interpretatiYe scholarship inevitably ends as an exercise in conservatism, in sanctioning existing conventions of political thinking. They are mistaken. The analysis presented in this pages acknowledges the diversity and possibilities for change endemic in ideological morphology. There is no inherent justification for endorsing what is, knowing that it is only one of an indeterminate range of conceptual options. Rather, the resulting pluralism of ideological expression is both an opportunity and a hindrance. It challenges the boundaries and prevailing methods of making sense of ideologies, it comments on the absence of a touchstone to end the rivalry among the contesting political ideas societies confront, and it testifies to the unfailing fertility of the human political imagination. Ideologies may be power structures that manipulate human action, but they are also ideational systems that enable us to choose to become what we want to become. If it be contended that one outcome of this approach is to endorse a concept so general as to be devoid of differentiating capacity, that is not the case. Ideology may feature in all political belief systems, but it is not identical to 'political belief system'. If such belief systems are ideological, they are not solely ideological. Ideology refers to a particular aspect of belief systems or—-inasmuch as a concept shapes reality—to a specific way of interpreting and decoding political reality, to construing political practices as expressions of, and constitutive of, political ideas, with the ultimate goal of formulating a legitimated public policy. If it be contended that a second outcome of this approach is to blur the distinctions between ideological families, that charge must be rebuffed. Ideologies may still be grouped in identifiable families, however plastic and open their membership. The point is that, in their multiple metamorphoses, the differences between ideological families are unceasingly accentuated or moderated. That is the give and take of political discourse, relating to institutional and social environments that, in turn, encourage convergence or divergence. Often, political parties—those prominent sources of producing or reformulating ideologies—impose morphological constraints on a particular ideology that do not reflect its wider diffusion and understanding, or allow the full expression of its variants. But even 'official' party ideologies cannot for long keep their decontestations wholly closed without being socially and politically decontextualized. Furthermore, simplification is essential for public presentation and for electoral and mobilizing purposes, and it is further abetted by the caricaturizirtg onslaughts of

554 Epilogue a party's ideological opponents. The scholar has to steer clear of those pitfalls of public perception, often percolating into scholarship itself, while resisting the temptation of araulling boundaries altogether. If it be contended that yet another outcome of this approach is to confound the possibility of distinguishing among ideologies on a value basis, that assumption, too, is unsubstantiated. Though the prime objective of this book has been to attempt to furnish tools for the analysis and understanding of ideologies as mental products which tell us something important about ourselves, it has also been recognized that certain ways of enlightened discourse may provide better ideological solutions than others. On the whole, however, 'better' or 'worse' in the context of this study does not refer to values and ethical systems. Their investigation is the preserve of a different discipline and can readily be superimposed on the findings in this book. The employment of ideology as a critical concept in the broad Marxist sense has been deliberately eschewed. Better or worse here must refer mainly to the self-understandings of ideological producers and consumers and their capacity to comprehend the messages conveyed by their thought and speech behaviour, or to the quality of analysis that scholars apply to ideologies. To that extent this book, too, awaits contrary argument.

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NAME INDEX

Abercrombie, N. 19 n., 31 n., 43 n. Ackerman, B. 230 n, Adams, I. 31 n., 133-4 Alexander, L, 273 n. Althusser, L. 19, 20 Anderson, O. 509 n. Apter, D, E. 16, 36 n,, 68 n. Arthur, C. J, 456 n, Asquith, H. H. 301 Aughey, A. 318 n,, 338 n,, 339 n., 400 n., 405 n. Austin, }. L. 101, 108 Babeuf, G, 431 Bahro, R. 538 Bailey, S. 158 Bailyn, B, 270 Bakunin, M. 312 Balfour, A. J. 353, 355, 379, 382 n. Ball, S. 143 n., 391 n. Ball, T. 60 n., 271 n. Barker, E, 331 n. Barnes, J. 391 n. Barrett, M. 20 n., 495 n,, 497 n., 510 n., 511 n., 518 n., 519 n., 522 n. Barry, J, 528 Barry, N. 408 Beardsley, P. L. 25 n. Beecher, J. 433 n. Beilharz, R 437 n, Beirter, R. 233 n. Bell, D. 17, 18, 29, 407 n,, 412 n, Bellamy, R, 212 n., 217 n., 218 n, Belsey, A. 413 n. Benewick, R. 32 n,, 62 n. Bertn, E. J. P. 293 n. Benrt, S. I. 27 n, Bennie, L. G. 526 n,, 546 n., 547 n, Bentham, J. 38, 107, 281, 282 n., 338 Berki, R, N. 32 n,, 62 n,, 433 n., 480 n. Berlin, I. 183 n.

Bernstein, E. 437, 439-40, 448, 452, 453 n., 473, 474 n, Bevir, M. 193 n. Biagini, E. E 156 n. Bickel, A, M. 245 n, Biddiss, M, 399 n. Billig, M. 22, 30 n., 85 n., 343 n. Blaazer, D, 460 n. Blackbourn, P. 211 n, Blanqui, A, 424-5 Bliss, W. D. P. 427 n. Bloom, A, 400 Boggs, C. 481 n, Bohman, J. 6, 69 n., 104 n, Bookchin, M. 531, 539-40 Booth, W, J. 233 n, Boothby, R. 409 n. Bosanquet, E. 181 n. Boudon, R. 127 n., 130 Bourgeois, L. 215, 218, 460 Brady, A, 143 n. Bramsted, E. K. 174 n., 213 n. Brinton, C. 180 n. Brooks, F. H. 314 n. Brown, A. 23 n. Brown, K. D. 286 n., 356 n. Brown, L. B. 21, 125 n. Brown, L. S, 514 n. Brownmiller, S. 522 n, Brunner, O, 120 n., 350 n,, 353 n,, 418 n. Bryson, V. 495, 500 n., 505 n., 508 n,, 509 n., 519 n., 522 n. Buchanan, A, E, 250 n. Buck, P. W. 380 Buckley, W. F, 396 n., 401-2 Bullock, A. 280 n,, 282 n, Burke, E. 301-2, 321, 331, 338, 363-5 Burns, J, H. 158 n. Burrow, J. 148 n,, 156 n. Cairns, J. C. 173 n. Callicott, J. B. 543 n.

576

Name Index

Cameron, D. 497 n., 502 n. Campbell-Bannerman, H. 301 Carlsnaes, W. 50 n. Carfyle, T. 154 Carroll, L. 374 Carter, (April) 312 n. Carter, (Alan) 485 n., 538 n. Carver, T, 441 n. Casey, J, 399 n. Castoriadis, C. 20 Cecil, H. 318, 350-1, 375-6 on conservatism 362—9 Cecil, R, A. 381 n. Cecil, R, G, 380 Chamberlain, J. 352, 360, 362, 382 n. Christman, H. M. 451 n. Churchill, R. 352 Coates, W, H. 180 n. Cohen, G. A, 434 n,, 444 n, Cole, G. D. H. 452, 472 n., 476 Cote, M. 436 n. Coleridge, S. T. 154, 160 n, Ceilings, J. 380 n. CollM, S. 156 n., 182 n., 195 n. Comte, A, 156, 157, 215, 301 Connolly, W. E. 56-7, 60 n., 248 n., 254 n, Constant, B. 168-9,171-2,176, 263 Converse, P. E. 21 n., 36 n., 68 n.-69 n. Conze, W. 120 n., 350 n,, 353 n,, 418 n. Coole, D. H. 88 n., 125 n., 488, 494, 498 n., 509 n., 518 n. Cornford, J, 351 n. Cowling, M. 143 n,, 399 n. Cox, A. 246 n. Cox, H. 381 Cox, R, H, 41 n, Crick, B. 476 n. Croly, H, 245, 256-7, 270, 272, 274 Crook, D. P. 436 n, Crosland, C, A. R. 319, 429, 470-2 Crowder, G. 312 n,, 450 n, Culler,J. 49 n., 54 n., 62 n. Dahl, R. 498 Dale, D, 413 n, Daly, M, 497, 512 n. Dant, T, 50 n. Parwin, C. 197, 436 de Beauvoir, S, 511 n., 514, 522 n.

d'Eichthal, G. 156 Delphy, C. 520 den Otter, S. 192 n. Derrida, J. 94, 511 Destutt de Tracy, A, 14 Devigne, R. 394 n., 404, 405 n. Dewey, J. 245, 255 Diamond, M, 244 n. Dicey, A. V. 179 Dickinson, H. T, 142 n. Dilthey, W. 112 Dobson, A. 485 n., 530 n,, 538 n., 539 n., 542 n., 544 n,, 546 n., 549 n. Dolbeare, K. M. 257 n., 400 Donisthorpe, W. 287-8, 290, 376 Dormer, W. 150 n. Douglass, R. B, 237 n,, 248 n, Duguit, L, 215, 219, 222-3 Dumont, L. 148 n., 210 n,, 477 n, Durkheim, E. 219-20, 221 n., 223-4, 417 n. Dworkin, A. 521 n. Dworkin, G. 238 n. Dworkin, R. 84 n,, 227 n., 234-5, 260-5, 267, 269-70 on equality 241-4 Eagleton, T. 54, 94 n,, 136 n. EatweE, R, 312 n,, 319 n., 330 n., 336, 338 n,, 343 n., 481 n. Eccleshall, R. 319 n,, 349 n,, 360 n., 363, 388 n. Eckersley, R. 530 n., 531, 532 a, 533 n., 535 a, 537 n., 549 Eisenstein, Z. R. 496 n., 500, 517, 522, 523 n, Eley, G, 211 n, Eister, J. 428 n. Engels, F, 14,15, 25, 428 n., 456, 458 on control 443-4 and feminism 510, 518-19 on history 435 Ensor, C. K. 451 n., 473 n. Estrirt, S, 478 n. Etzioni, A. 404 n. Evans, J. 485 n., 490 n., 496 n., 507, 511, 515, 525 n., 549 Faguet, E. 245 Farr, J, 60 n., 271-2

Name Index Feinberg, J. 57 n, Femia, }. V, 481 n. Ferguson, A, 301 Ferri, E. 426 n., 433 n., 436, 475 Ferris, J. 485 n, Feuer, L. S. 29 Feuerbach, L. 435 Filipiuk, M, 168 n. Firestone, S. 494-5, 519-20 Flax,}. 507 n. Flint, R. 354 Foley, M. 242 n., 246 n., 270, 372 n,, 399 n. Ford, J, 356 n., 359 n. Foreman, A, 519 n. Porster, H. W. 382 n. Fouillee, A. 215, 218, 221, 222 n. Fourier, C, 422, 428, 458 Fox, W. 531 Francis, M. 163 n., 274 n, Franck, A. 171 Franco, P. 321 n., 323 n., 324 n,, 326 n,, 327 n, Franklin, M. N. 526 n, Frazer, E. 248 n., 505 n., 514 n., 515, 517 n. Frazer, N. 499 n,, 507 n. Freeden, M. 58 n., 63 n., 71 n,, 110 n., 128 n,, 273 n., 306 n,, 515 n. on liberalism 165 n., 184 n,, 191 n., 192 n., 197 n., 204 n,, 208 n., 209 n., 223 n., 244 n,, 251 n., 254 n., 268 n,, 292 n., 293 n,, 396 n., 397 n., 459 n., 471 n. on socialism 450 n., 454 n., 457 n., 467 n, Freud, S. 21 n. Frey, R. G. 38 n. Fried, A. 422 n,, 447 n., 476 n. Friedman, M. 401-2, 405, 406 n., 407 Friedman, R. 405 Gadamer, H.-G. 112 n., 113-16, 117-18 Gallic, W. B. 55-6, 59-60, 117 Galston, W. 141 n., 239 n., 271 n, Gamble, A. 393-4, 396 n,, 408, 409 n., 414 n. Garforth, F. W. 166 n. Garry, P, M. 246 n., 258 n., 259 n. Gaus, G. 128,130,148 n,, 181 n., 186 n.

577

Gay, P, 437, 439 n., 442 n,, 473 n. Geach, P. 43 n. Gedge, S. 358 n. Geertz, C. 20, 21 Germino, D. 132 Gerth, H. H, 282 n. Geuss, R. 15 n,, 135 n, Giddens, A, 478 n. Gilbert, A. 441 n. Giffigan, C. 505-6 Gilrnour, I, 348 n., 385 n. Girard, L, 170 n., 171 n., 172 n. Girvin, B. 392 n. Gladstone, W, E. 160 n. Godwin, W. 313 Goldman, E, 514 Goldwater, B, 399 Goodin, R. 191 n., 471 n., 542 n,, 543 n, Goodwin, B, 430 n. Gore, C. 209 n. Gouldner, A, W. 16, 104, 129 Gramsd, A. 19 Gray, J. 23 n,, 146 n., 278 n,, 302 n., 307 n., 324 n,, 405 n., 537 n, Green, E. H. H, 319 n., 350 n,, 360 n. Green, T. H. 110,142, 255, 301, 462, 469, 509 n. idealist liberalism of 178-89 idealist roots 192-3 on temperance 189-90 Greengarten, I, M. 192 n. Greenleaf, W. H. 179 n,, 284 n., 286 n,, 336 n., 349 n., 353 n,, 364 n. Griffith, G, 463 n, Griffiths, B. 412 n. Gufzot, F, 156, 173-5, 216 Gutmann, A, 243, 253 n. Hacking, I. 29 n. Hagopian, M, N. 125 n. Hall, J. A. 226 n. Halle, L. 17 n, Hallowell, J. H. 148 n., 210 n,, 212 n. Hamburger, J. 151 n., 155 n,, 156 n,, 160 n. Hamby, A. L. 258 Hamilton, M. B. 474 n. Hampshire, S. 417 n,, 442 n., 444 n., 445 n., 473 n., 478 n. Hanson, R. L. 60 n.

578

Name Index

Haraway, D. 514 n, Harben, H. D. 523 n. Harding, S. 506 n., 507-8 Hare, R. M, 158 Harris, D. 251 n. Harris, R, 49 a, 51 n., 62 n. Harrison, B. 189 n. Hartmann, H, 510, 514 n. Hartz, L, 230 n., 239 Harvie, C. 156 n, Hattereley, R, 472 Hayek, F, A, 140 n., 277, 321 n., 403 n., 475 and conservatism 373-6, 377 n. on liberalism 276, 298-311 on libertarianistn 277, 279 Haynes, E. S. P. 288 n., 376 Hayward, J. E. S. 216 n., 218 n., 221 n., 222 n., 223 n. Hazareesingh, S, 216 n. Headley, E W. 381 n. Heamshaw, F. J. C. 318 Hegel, G. W. F. 107, 193, 301 Held, V. 518 n, Heller, A. 428 n, Hess, M. 418 Hill, S, 19 n., 31 n., 43 n. Himmerfarb, G. 154 n, Hinich, M. J. 25 n. Hirsch,H, N. 253 n. Hirschman, A. O. 334 n. Hirst, F. 292-3 Hobbes, T. 110, 281, 457 Hobhouse, L. T, 177 n., 239, 243, 262, 354, 363, 469 on liberty 201-4 on new liberalism 195-7 on the state 206-8 Hobson, J. A. 178 n,, 181 n., 192 n., 196 n., 200, 206 n,, 208, 244 on equality 467-8 and organic theory of society 204-5 Hoeveler, J. D. 401, 403 n., 405 n., 406 n., 407 n. Hofstadter, R. 371-2 Hogg, Q. 342, 386 n. Hohfeld, W, N. 58 Holland, H. Scott 209 n. Hollis, M. 29 n., 31 n., 32 n., 34 n. Holmes, S. 149 n., 169 n,, 171 n,, 172 n., 173 n., 259 n,, 263 n.

Honderidi, T. 319 n. Hoover, K. 393-4, 396 n., 408 Howdl, D. 448 n., 470 n, Hugins, R. 257 n. Humboldt, W. von 146-9, 156, 301 Hume, D. 301 Humm, M. 497, 503, 506 n., 508 n., 514 n., 520 n. Huntingdon, S. 329, 330-1, 335 Ions, E. 372 n. Irigaray, L. 512 Jaggar, A. M. 489 n., 499 n., 518 n. on gender and power 493 n,, 510 n., 522 n, on gender politics 505 n., 508 n,, 513 Janet, P. 171 Jarausch, K, H, 214 n. Jaune, L, 174 n. Jaures, J. 437, 449, 460, 476 it., 477 Jeffries, A. 395 n., 398 n., 412 n. Jennings, J. 312 n, Jones, G. 318 n,, 338 n., 400 n., 405 n. Jones, L. E. 214 n. Joseph, K, 395 Judt, 1, 424 Kant, I. 182, 210, 236-40, 301 Kautsky, K, 439, 473 Kavanagh, D. 398 n., 414 n. Kelly, D. R. 423 n. Kelly, G. A, 172 n., 175 n,, 176 n. KendaE, W. 370 Kent, C. 160 n, Kidd, B, 436 Kiernan, V. 435 n. Kinnock, N. 472 n. Kinzer, B. L. 158 n. Kirk, R. 319, 331, 369 Kirkup, T, 427, 459 Kloppenberg, J. T. 221 n,, 222 n., 421 n,, 437 n,, 439 n., 460 n., 476 n., 477 n. Kolakowski, L, 417, 428 n., 442, 444 n,, 445 n,, 473 n., 478 n., 481 n. Koselleck, R. 52 n,, 117-21, 212 n., 348 n., 350 n., 353 n., 418 n. Koss, S. 200 n.

Name Index Rramnick, M. 505 n. Kristeva, J, 524 Kristol, I. 406-8, 409 n. Kukathas, C. 304 n., 306 n., 307 n., 309 n, Kymlicka, W. 250, 269

Lacan, J. 20 Lacey, N. 248 n,, 505 n., 514 n., 515, 517 n,

Laclau, E. 66, 76 n., 79 n., 82 n. Laine, M. 155 n., 158 n, Landauer, C. 452 n,, 472 n, Lane, R. E. 15 n. Langewiesche, D. 211 n., 212 n., 213 n., 214 n., 263 n, Lai-more, C, 272 Larrain, J. 15 n., 41 Laski, H. J, 223, 459, 467, 469, 470 Laslett, R 64 n. Lassalle, F. 447 Le Grand, J. 478 n, Lenin, V, I. 451 Leopold, A. 533 Leopold, D. 313 n, Leroy-Beaulieu, P. 222 n. Letwin, S. R. 386 n,, 390 n., 411 Levi-Strauss, C. 20, 50, 74, 88, 89, 105 n., 125 Levitas, R. 392, 396 n., 410 n,, 413 n. Lewis, J. 522 n., 523 n. Lichtheim, G, 14 n., 226 n,, 421 n,, 423 n., 431 Lindemann, A. S. 421 n., 425 n, Lippmarurt, W. 244 Lively,]. 175n., 338n. Locke, J. 110, 141, 142, 164, 371 Logue, W. 171 n., 217 n., 219 n,, 220 n., 221 n,, 222 n. Lorde, A. 508 n. Lovejoy, A, 111 n. Lovelock, J. 533 Lowenthal, R. 444 n., 478 n. Lowi, T. J. 258 n. Lucardie, P. 485 n., 530 n., 538 n., 549 n, Ludovici, A, M, 348 n. Ludz, P. C. 473 n. Lukes, S, 29 n., 31 n., 32 n., 34 n., 219 n., 220 n., 221 n,, 456 n. Luntley, M. 459 n. Lyotard, J.-F. 94

579

McBriar, A. M. 181 n., 429 n., 436, 453 n., 454 n., 460 n, MacCallum, G, 64 n. McClelland, J, S. 338 n, McCloskey, H, J, 183 n. McCloskey, R. G, 371 n. MacDonald, J. R. 363, 436, 447, 453, 456 n,, 460, 461, 463 Maclntyre, A. 253, 272 McKibbin, R, 446, 449 n, Mackinnon, C. A. 25 n., 504, 510 n,, 512, 514, 520 on Marxism 518 n,, 523 n. on mens' and womens' relationships 491, 494, 495-6, 500, 509 n. on pornography 521-2 McLelland, D, 435 n. McNay, L. 507 n., 517 n., 518 n. MacNicol, J. 511 n, Maistre, J. de 338 Mallock, W, H. 351, 354 n., 355-9, 363, 365, 381 Manent, P. 174 n, Mannheim, K. 26, 35, 97, 116, 318, 335, 341, 384 n,, 413 n, Manning, D. 126 Mara, G. M, 237 n,, 248 n, Mar&hal, S. 431 n, Marx, K. 14, 15, 25, 422, 444 n. on control 443-5 on core socialist concepts 425-8, 430-1 on democracy 440-1 on equality 432 and feminism 510, 518-19 on history 434-6 on liberation 456, 458 on philosophy 42 on properly 449-50 Mason, A. 128 n. Matthew, H. C. G, 160 n. Maund, J. B, 27 n. Meadowcroft, J. 368 n., 447 n, Medcalf, L. J. 257 n., 400 Melhuish, K. J. 174 n., 213 n. Mellor, M. 549-50 Merchant, C. 548 Merleau-Ponty, M. 88, 94, 125 Meszaros, I. 270 n. Mies, M. 548 n.

580

Name Index

Mill, James 155, 156 Mill, J. S. 38, 85,110, 123, 277-8, 301 and conservatism 318 core of ideology 144-54 on democracy 154-5, 157-64 on free trade 165 and French liberalism 168-77 on libertarianism 277-8 on liberty 166-7 origins of liberalism 142-3 and philosophical liberalism 226, 239, 262, 274 and relativism 92-3 and socialism 457-9, 474 on women 166 Miller, D. 292 n., 311 n., 314 n., 450 n., 478 n. Millerand, A. 475-6 Millet, K, 493, 521 n, Minogue, K. 17 n., 148 n,, 399 n, Miquel, J. von 263 Mitchell, J. 522 n. Moi, T, 514 n. Montefiore, A, 274 Montague, F. C, 294-5 Montesquieu, C. S. de S. 170 Morgan, D. 509 n. Morgan, K. O. 448 n. Moriss, P. 128-9 Morris, W. 430, 472 Morrow, J. 163 n,, 274 n. Mortimore, G. W. 27 n, Morton, A. L. 430 n. Moss, B. H. 420 n, Mouffe, C. 66, 76 n., 79 n., 82 n. Muffins, W. A. 16 n. Munger, M, C, 25 n. Myrdal, A. 319, 454, 474 Myrdal, G. 319, 454, 474, 475 n. Naess, A. 532, 536, 538-9 Nagel, T. 92 n. Naumann, F. 214 Neill, T. P. 148 n. NettlesMp, R. L. 180 n. Nicholson, L, J, 507 n., 508 n., 511 n,, 514 n. Nicholson, P. P. 182 n., 189 n., 192 n. Nisbet, R. 317 n., 331 n., 338, 404 n., 406, 407 n. Novak, M. 406

Nozick, R, 403 n, Nussbaum, M. 237 Oakeshott, M. 320-8, 331-3, 336-7 and American conservatism 403-4, 406 Oakley, A. 522 n. O'Brien, C. C. 331 n. Okin, S, M. 165 n., 236 n., 517 Oilman, B, 82 n,, 443 n. O'Neill, O. 236 n, Ophuls, W, 543 Oppertheim, F. 134 n. O'Riordan, T, 531, 543, 544 n, O'Sullivan, N. 88 n., 125 n., 319 n., 330 n., 336 n., 338 n., 339 n., 343 n., 364 n. Owen, R. 425-6, 428-31, 442-3 Parekh, B. 32 n., 62 n. Parijs, P. Van 251 n., 516 n. Parry, J. 156 n. Pateman, C. 169 n., 489 n., 491 n., 514 n., 523 n, on patriarchy 493-4, 504 n. on public and private domains 498-9, 503 Peel, J. D, Y. 280 n, Peele, G. 392 n., 403 n., 406 Pelczynski, Z, 146 n., 184 n. Pembroke, Lord 287 n., 289 n. Pepper, D. 532 n., 538 n,, 541 Petchesky, R. P. 522 n, Peters, J. N, 287 n., 356 n. Petrovic, G. 444 n. Philips, A. 515 n., 516 Philp, M. 313 n. Plant, R. 193 n., 393-4, 396 n., 408, 479 n. Plato 35 Pocock, J. G, A, 271 n. Polasky, J. 476 n. Pole, J. R. 242, 244 n. Probyn, E. 520 n, Proudhon, P.-J. 422-3, 426, 430, 450 Pugh, M. 352 n, Putnam, H, 31 n. Quine, W. V. O. 50 n,, 71 n,, 80 n. Quintan, A. 334 n., 375 n.

Name Index Raphael, D. D. 76 n. Raschke, J. 529, 535 n., 545, 546 n., 547 n. Rathbone, E. 511 n. Rawis, J. 37 n., 45 n,, 148 n,, 201 n., 517 and American liberalism 226 n., 228-39, 243, 246-9, 259, 264-5, 269-70, 272 Raz, J. 269 n. Rees, J. C. 155 n,, 158 n. Regan, T. 538 n. Renouvier, C. 217, 238 Rich, A, 494 n,, 512 n., 524 n. Richardson, H. S, 237 n., 248 n. Riches, W. T. M. 318 n., 338 n., 400 n,, 405 n. Richter, M. Ill n,, 119, 120 n,, 136 n, on liberalism 184 n., 189 n,, 191 n., 192 n,, 193 n. Ricoeur, P. 36 n., 74, 96 n., 108, 111-12, 116, 261 Ritchie, D. G, 197-8, 203-4, 239, 297, 299-300, 428 Rodrter, W. S. 368 n. Rohe, K. 215 n. Rokeach, M. 22 Rorty, R. 42, 91-2, 135 n., 249 n, Rosanvallon, P. 168 n., 174 n,, 219 n, Rosenberg, S. W, 21 n,, 29 n,, 77 n. Rossiter, C. 317 n., 329 n., 330 n,, 332-3, 337 n., 347 n., 368-70 Roth, G. 212 n., 282 n. Rousseau, J.-J. 110, 168, 172, 175, 176, 421, 432 Roussellier, N. 170 n. Rowbotham, S. 496, 520 n. Riidig, W. 526 n. Ruggerio, G. de 170 n., 173 n., 210 n., 213 n., 214 n., 281 n. Runciman, W. G. 64 n. Ryan, A. 147 n., 170 n. Ryle, M. 527, 541 Sabine, G. H, 181 n. Saint-Simon, H, de: and socialism 421, 426, 435, 442-3 and liberalism 156, 157, 160 n., 171, 176, 301 Sale, K. 535-6, 542 Salisbury see Cecil, R. G.

581

Salvador!, M, 428 n., 429 n., 431 n. Samuel, H. 379 Sandel M. 236 n., 239 n., 248-50, 252-3 Sartori, G. 17, 18, 57 n., 67 n. Saunders, R. 422 n,, 447 n., 476 n. Saussure, F. de 49-50, 62, 73 Saward, M. 530 Say, J.-B. 156, 170 Scarbrough, E. 79 n, Scheider, W. 418 n., 419 n., 423 n, Schleiermacher, F. E, D. 112 Schlesinger, A, M. 244 n, Schneewind,}, B. 135 n., 155 n., 249 n. Schnorr, S.-G. 213 n., 214 n. Schumacher, E. S, 540 Schwarzschild, M. 273 n. Scott, A. 526 n. Scruton, R. 334 n,, 396 n., 413 n. Segal, L. 494 n, Seidman, S. 211 n., 216 n, Seldon, A. 391 n. Seliger, M. 16 n., 122 n. Semmel, B. 156 n., 165 n., 356 n, Shanley, M. L, 499 n. Shannon, R, 166 n, Shapiro, I. 50 n,, 237 n,, 251 n,, 260 n. Shaw, G. B. 431, 436, 462, 463 n., 468 Sheehan, J. }. 210 n., 211 n., 212 n., 213 n,, 214 n., 263 n. Shiva, V. 548 n. Shock, M. 280 n,, 282 n. Shtromas, A. 18 n. Siedentop, L. 170 n., 174 n., 175 n., 176 n. Simhony, A. 181 n., 187 n. Sinopoli, R, C. 237 n. Skinner, Q. 32 n,, 60 n., 64 n,, 74 n., 114, 135 n., 249 on historical contexts 100-4, 106-11 Smith, A, 279, 280 n., 282, 290, 301 Smith, B. G. 423 n. Smith, F. E. 380 Smith, G. W. 146 n. Smith, N. 260 n. Snowden, P. 442 n, Soldon, N, 286 n., 294 n, Soltau, R. H. 217 n,, 218 n., 222 n.

582

Name Index

Spencer, H. 196, 204, 239, 371, 373-6, 475 and liberalism 279-80, 283-7, 289-92, 295-8 Spender, D, 497 n., 525 n. Stalin, J, 85 Stein, L. 418 Stillinger, J. 155 n, Stimer, M. 313 Strauss, L. 400, 406 Stunner, W. G. 372 Sumption, J. 395 n. Sunstein, C. R, 236 n., 503 n., 518 n. Susser, B. 126-7 Sykes, A. 360 n., 361-2 Tannsjo, T. 319 n., 330 Tawney, R. H, 450, 463-8 Taylor, C, 29 n., 31 n,, 42 n,, 51, 67, 445 n. on liberalism 130n., 147 n,, 249, 254 n., 260 n, Taylor, Harriet 154,165 Taylor, K. 175 n., 421 n., 443 Taylor, M. 285 n., 288 n., 290 n., 314 n. Terrill, R, 463 n., 466 n, Thatcher, M. 18, 385 Therbom, G. 77 n. Thiede, P. F, 352 n. Thomas, G. 193 n, Thomas, W. 157 n. Thompson, D, F. 155 n. Thompson, J. B. 20 n., 112 n., 135 n, Thornton, P. 389 n. Tilton, T. 47 n,, 428 n., 447 n., 454 n,, 460 n., 474 n. Titmuss, R. 319 Tocquevffle, A. de 158, 160, 161, 169, 173-5, 407, 469 Townshend, J. 194 n. Treitschke, H, von 212, 213 n. Tucker, B. 314 Tucker, R. C. 432 n. Tully, J. 32 n., 60 n., 74 n,, 101 n,, 108 n. Turner, B. S, 19 n,, 31 n,, 43 n.

Vandervelde, E, 450 n., 475-6 Vedlitz, A, 400 Vierhaus, R. 210 n., 212 n,, 350 n,, 353 n., 364 n. Vincent, A. 193 n., 543 n. Volpe, G. della 421 n, Vorlander, H. 211 n. Waldron, J, 242 n., 274 n, Walsby, H. 13, 45 n. Water, M. 253, 255, 404 Ware, A. 191 n., 471 n. Watkkis, F. 283 n. Weale, A. 544 n. Webb, B. 429, 436, 454, 461-2 Webb, S. 428-9, 436, 454, 459 Weber, M. 30, 212, 282 Weinstein, D. 192 n, Weinstein, W. L. 63 n. Weizsaeker, E, U, von 543 n. Welch, C. B. 169 n., 171 n. Wells, H, G. 455 Wemyss, Earl 379 Weyl, W. 244-5 White, A, R, 134 n. White, H. V. 180 n. White, R. J. 352 n. Whitford, M. 512 n. Wiesenthal, H, 529-30 Wigforss, E. 47 n., 454, 474 Wiltshire, D. 280 n. Winch, D. 156 n. Winch, P. 99-100, 128 Wittgenstein, L. 43, 53, 71-3, 89-91 Wittich, C. 212 n., 282 n. Wolfe, W. 457 n., 458, 463 n. Wollstonecraft, M, 505 Wright, A. 312 n,, 420 n,, 433 n,, 438 n., 452 n., 480 n,, 481 n, Wright Mills, C. 27 n., 282 n. Yack, B. 233 n,, 237 Yeatman, A. 508 n. Young, I. M, 253 n., 500, 503-4, 516 n. on difference 511 n., 513, 515 Young, S. C. 534 n., 545 n. Zizfek, S. 20 n.

SUBJECT INDEX

action-orientation of ideologies 105, 520 adjacent concepts 77, 79, 81, 82 anarchism 312 in conservatism 327, 336 democracy 154—65, 438-42 equality in feminism 508-15 in green ideology 529, 538-9, 540-1 in libertarianism 291 of liberty 201-3 location of 83 range of meanings 83 in Thatcherism 388-9, 391 see also cultural adjacency; logical adjacency agents/agency: in conservatism 328 in history 434-5 of ideologies 101, 104, 106 in political liberalism 238 and property in socialism 449 alienation 443, 494 American conservatism 369-72, 399-407 American constitution 107, 240, 244, 256, 270-2, 370 American philosophical liberalism 226-75 and community 247—59 equality as core concept 241-7 and good, theory of 228-9 and human character 268 and liberal neutrality 259-75 as moral doctrine 268 as moral philosophy 272-3 personal and external preferences 234-5, 263 anarchism 276, 279 and green ideology 538, 539 and liberty 311-14 and socialism 422-3, 443, 462 Anglo-American philosophy 37,44,135

animal rights 537-8 anthropocentrism 530-2, 533, 540 anthropology and ideology 20, 50-1 appraisal in essential contestability 55, 56-8 Aunt Sally syndrome 38, 248 authority: in conservatism 331, 349, 353 in feminism 521 in green ideology 542-3 in Thatcherism 388, 394 authors of ideologies 104, 112-13 autonomy 67, 237-8, 265-6 Begriffsgeschichte see conceptual history Belgian socialism 472-3, 475-6 biodiversity 529, 538-9 boundaries, absence of 87 British Idealists 181, 1,85, 188 capitalism 420-1, 430 certainty in ideology 129 change: in conservatism 329-33, 340, 374-5; gradual 331, 413; as growth 332; organic 327, 333 in history 98 in libertarianism 374-5 in Thatcherism 413 choice in hermeneutic approach 116 citizens rights 199 civil rights in American liberalism 245-6, 264 class 220, 448-9 Clause Four 447-8 closure in ideology 18-19 coercion 51 in American conservatism 405 in Hayek's liberalism 303, 304, 305 and liberal neutrality 266 collectivism 256-8, 457 common good in liberalism 180, 252

584

Subject Index

common interest in philosophical liberalism 250 common ownership 446-8 communality in green ideology 528 communism 442, 444, 480-1 and American conservatism 402-3, 406 communitarianism: in conservatism 362 in German liberalism 214 in philosophical liberalism 247-51, 254-5 community: and American conservatism 404 and anarchism 312 and class in socialism 449 in green ideology 529, 532, 533, 541 in new liberalism 185, 198 in philosophical liberalism 247-59; and common good 252; and human nature 251; and individual rights 254-5; and liberalism 253-4; and rights 251; and social co-operation 253; and social groups 254 comprehensive liberalism 233-6 concepts: as appropriate unit of analysis 136 attributes 65 categories 66 cluster concepts 60-1, 65 context of 72-3 core see core concepts essential contestabfiity in 55-60, 128-9 and ideologies 119, 121 ineliminable 62-5 intension of 56-9, 64, 71 lexicographical theories 128 and linguistics 49-53 morphology of 60-7 optimal realization of 199, 242, 290, 296, 300 in political philosophy see under political philosophy properties of 62-3 quasi-contingency 65-6 and referent 54 relativism in 53 and theories of history 99 and words 48-54

conceptual history 14-19, 117-23 conscious in ideology 21-2 conservatism: anti-intellectual nature of 320-1, 324-5 British, nineteenth century 348-53; change in support for 351-2; and democracy 352-3; and liberalism 351; and socialism 351

of Cecil 362-9 and change 329-33, 344, 374-5 core concepts of 327, 331, 332-47 economics 393-7 and fixed list 331-2, 335, 337 flexibility of 343-4, 345 in green ideology 535-7 as ideology 317-18 and liberalism 351, 360-2, 378-9, 381 and libertarianism 373-8 mirror-image characteristic 336-7, 339, 341-2, 345, 355, 369 morphology of 340-1 Oakeshott on 320-8 and positionalism 329-31, 335, 337, 376, 411 public debate in 378-83 reactiveness of 341-4, 363, 379-80 resurgence of 385-6 short-term rigidity of 345-6 and socialism 354-9, 379-81; and ability 356; and limited power 355 and status quo 329-32 Thatcherism as see Thatcherism constitutionalism 169-73, 210, 216, 231, 234, 237, 263-4, 267, 340, 342, 368, 397-8, 402, 408 constitutions 98, 160, 370, 432, 441 consumption: of ideologies 104, 113, 121 in new liberalism 200 content-analysis 126 contextual history 100—11 contracts 290, 305 control: in feminism 494-5, 522 in green ideology 529, 540 in socialism 444-5; of means of production 446-8

Subject Index core concepts: equality as 241-7 in ideologies 77-8, 82-4; location of 83; multiplicity of 84; production of 107; range of meanings 83 in political philosophy 62-3, 66 see also under individual ideologies cultural adjacency 69-72 in communism 481 in equality 465 historical usage 72 legitimate elements 71 of liberty 147, 159 within logical adjacency 70-1 in new liberalism 186 culture and ideology 20-1 Darwinism 197, 356, 381, 436 decentralization in green ideology 529, 532-3, 541-2 decontested meanings 76 groupings of 82 range of 83 democracy: in American conservatism 401-2 in conservatism 352-3, 369, 409 as essentially contestable concept 56 in French liberalism 168-9, 223 in green ideology 529, 534, 541; direct 532, 539 in history 98 and liberal neutrality 267 in Millite liberalism 154-65 and socialism 438-42; and power 444 in Thatcherism 392 denationalization 398 determinacy in ideology 76 dichotomy 38, 502-3, 530-5 difference in feminism 511-14 discourse analysis 126 division of labour 422 domination 512, 540 ecocentrism 530-2, 533 eco-feminism 548-50 economic exploitation 424 economics: in American conservatism 402, 405-6

585

in conservatism 365 in Hayek's Eberalism 301-2 and libertarianism 280, 289, 292 of new liberalism 200 of philosophical liberalism 256 in TThatcherism 386-7, 393-7 eco-sodalism 532, 541-2 education: in German liberalism 211 and liberal neutrality 267 in Millite liberalism 155, 161-2, 166 efficiency 454-5, 478, 536 egalitarianism 421, 449, 533, 534 elitism in Thatcherism 409-10 emancipation in green ideology 529 emotion in ideology 29-30 'end of ideology' thesis 17-18 enlightened deliberation 92-4, 116, 264, 507, 554 epistemological status of ideology 25-7 equality: as core liberal concept 241-7 and democracy in socialism 440 and feminism 492, 508-15 in French liberalism 173, 175, 223-4 in green ideology 529, 534 in liberal neutrality 262 in libertarianism 291 in Millite liberalism 159-61 in new liberalism 190-1 in philosophical liberalism 231-2 in socialism 84, 423-4, 430-3; and efficiency 454-5; and liberty 464-9 in Thatcherism 412 equality of opportunity: in American conservatism 369-70 in philosophical liberalism 232, 245 in Thatcherism 395 essential contestability 55-60, 117 appraisal of 55, 56-8 characteristics of 55 constraints 66 exemplars in 55, 60 and meaning 131 evolution in new liberalism 197-9 experience 118, 322 exploitation of women 510, 521-3

586

Subject Index

Fabians 356, 359, 436, 437, 453, 460-1 family 390, 498, 499, 501 feminism 488-525 core concepts 491-2 and eco-feminism 548-50 and equality 508-15 gender and power 492-7 and green ideology 548-50 and liberalism 509, 510-11, 516-17 and Marxism 509-10, 517-19 paradigms in 501-6 and political domain 497-501 and postmodernism 506-8 France: conservatism in 338, 342, 364 liberalism 168-77, 215-25; core concepts 173-6, 216-17; liberty in 168, 169-75 socialism 421-5, 476-7 fraternity 245 free choice 392, 396 free trade 165, 282, 360-2, 367 freedom see liberty freedom of bequest 191-2 freedom of contract 190, 201, 370 French Revolution 168, 169, 223, 363, 424 Gaia hypothesis 533 gender 491, 492-7 general interest: in American liberalism 245 and community in philosophical liberalism 252 in French liberalism 170-1 in German liberalism 212 in Millite liberalism 151 Germany: conservatism in 342, 350, 364 green ideology in 545, 546 liberalism 210-15 socialism 473-4 Gestalt theory 88, 89, 532 good, theory of 228-9 government: conservatism on 340, 349, 388-9 liberalism on 148, 151-4 grammar of ideologies 126-7 green ideology 526-50 conservatism in 535-7 core concepts 527-30

dichotomies in 530-5 eco-ferninism in 548-50 individualism in 537-40 nature and human beings in 527, 528, 530, 532, 540-1, 545 and participation 529, 534 perimeter concepts 544-8 and power 540-4 preservation of nature in 527, 528, 535, 545 social order, extra-human origins of 535

and socialism 541-2 group focus: of feminism 514-15 of green ideology 533, 539 of Millite liberalism 157 group-orientation of ideologies 105, 106, 113, 121 growth 234, 333 guild socialism 441, 452 happiness and human welfare 428 harmony 149 harmony in green ideology 529 hegemony and ideology 19 hermeneutic approach to ideology 33-4, 111-17 history: conceptual 117-23 contextual 100-11 in green ideology 536 and hermeneutic approach to ideology 116 inevitability of 97-100 in socialism 426, 433-8 holism in green ideology 527, 528, 530, 532-3, 537-8, 545 horizons: cumulative 118,156, 228, 251, 473 diminishing 118, 171, 201, 211, 228, 524 false 118, 228, 239-40 future 199, 418 historical 114, 116,163, 193, 215, 223, 236-41, 277, 321, 448, 459 of expectation 118, 356 human beings and nature in green ideology 527, 528, 530, 532, 540-1, 545 human creativity 429-30, 435, 478

Subject Index human interrelationships 426 human lifestyles, qualitative 527, 546-7 human nature: and community in philosophical liberalism 251 in conservatism 324-7; not improvable 339-40, 375-6 liberalism on 148-51, 179 in socialism 443 in TTiatcherism 411-12, 413 human rights see rights idea-environments 67, 73, 81, 131 ideas as units 111 identity and community 249 ideological change 122 ideological groupings 82-3, 86-7 ideology: analytical misconceptions 23-5 as belief systems 15-16, 18 components of 33-6 conceptual histories 14-19 concrete, classification of 15-16 core concepts in 77-8, 82-3; multiplicity of 84 as cultural symbols 20 decontested see decontested meanings as doctrinaire system 16-17 epistemological status 25-7 family resemblances in 90-1 general features of 3, 15, 16 grammar of 126-7 hermeneutic approach 33-4, 111-17 and history see history and logic see logic as map 85-6, 128 Mannheintian conception 26, 34, 35 Marxist conception 14-15, 17, 19-20, 25-6, 42, 104, 115, 126-7 meaning in see meaning in ideology morphology of 75-91; and structure 124-7 as multiple constructs 88 objections to analysis 127-30 and philosophy see political philosophy as semantic field 67

587

as single concept 19-23 thin-centred 485, 542, 545 immediacy in green ideology 547-8 individual will 182, 460 individualism/individuality: and anarchism 312-14 in conservatism 339, 357-9, 362; and rise of Thatcherism 388, 390 economic, in American conservatism 370-1 in French liberalism 170, 221 in German liberalism 211 in green ideology 533, 537-40 in Hayek's liberalism 299-302, 308-10 and liberal neutrality 261-3 in libertarianism 289 in Millite liberalism 144-5, 151; differences among individuals 160; and tyranny of majority 158 in new liberalism 179-80, 182, 185; reformulation of 201-3 in philosophical liberalism 232, 239-40, 249 in socialism 458-61 ineliminability in concepts 62-5, 67, 68, 73, 75, 83-4 inequality: in conservatism 331, 362 in socialism 431, 465 in Thatcherism 409 intentionality 100-11 interpretation 3, 5, 42, 113-17, 122, 128 irrationality 29 justice: in conservatism 366-7, 374 and democracy in socialism 440 in libertarianism 291-2, 374 in Thatcherism 391 theory of (Rawls) 228-30, 246-7, 517 knowledge, factual 92-3,116, 264, 507 Labour Party 382, 453, 470 Mssezfaire 282, 285, 302, 352, 369-71 language: in feminism 488, 490; and power 496-7

588

Subject Index

language (cant.)-. as group activity 107-8 structural properties 108 and structure 74 law 302, 331, 365-7 legitimacy in feminism 521 leisure 462, 471 Leninism 481 liberalism: and conservatism 351, 360-2, 378-9, 381 and feminism 509, 510-11, 516-17 French see France, liberalism German see Germany, liberalism Hayek on 298-311 and libertarianism; break with 288-97; comparisons 280-3, 295-6 of Mill see Millite liberalism neutrality of 259-75; choice of values 264, 267; imposition of standards 264; and political decision-making 260; provisos for 260-1 new see new liberalism philosophical sec American philosophical liberalism and socialism 456-64, 469-72 and structural tolerance 159, 177, 206, 215, 224, 231 n., 262, 296 liberation in socialism 456 libertarianism: and conservatism 373-8 as ideology 276-9 individual and liberty 279-85 and liberalism; break with 288-97; comparisons 280-3, 295-6 maximization of values in 288, 290 liberty: adjacencies of 201-3 and adjacency 68-9 in American conservatism 372, 402, 406 and anarchism 311-14 in communism 480-1 in conservatism 368 and equality in socialism 432 as essentially contestable concept 55, 56; ineliminable components 63-4, 65 in French liberalism 168,169-76,223

in German liberalism 210 in Hayek's liberalism 300-5 libertarianism and 276, 290-1, 293 in Millite liberalism 144-6, 154; decontested 146; idea-environment of 147 in new liberalism 181-3, 184, 186-8, 206; and organic theory 204 non-constraint notion in 63-4 in philosophical liberalism 255 in political liberalism 234, 237, 243; exclusion from 242 in socialism 459, 461, 463-4, 469-72; and equality 464-9 and Thatcherism 408, 412 as Whig view 109-10 Liberty and Property Defence League 286-7, 290, 377 linguistics 49-53, 108 logic 36-40 logical adjacency 68-9, 70-1 McCarthyism 402 majoritarianism 267 marginal concepts 78-9, 80 in conservatism 224, 339, 361, 372 in feminism 494, 495, 498-9, 503, 511, 512, 520-2 in green ideology 542-3, 549 in liberalism 84,163,165,166-7, 168, 189, 201, 208, 213, 258, 273, 282 in socialism 430, 462, 480 market socialism 477-80 markets in Thatcherism 395 Marxism 227, 312, 324, 327, 411, 427-8, 445, 479, 498 and community 248, 436 and feminism 489, 491, 494, 504, 509-10, 517-20, 524 and green ideology 538, 540-1 and historical materialism 437 and history 435 and ideology 14-15, 19-20 and revolution 425 see also ideology; Marx meaning in ideology 96—136 contemporary reaction 103-4 hermeneutics and 111-17 in history: conceptual 117-23;

Subject Index contextual 100-11; inevitability of 97-100 integration 123-4 and political theory 131-6 retrieval of 101 and self-definition 103 structure and morphology 124-7 surplus of 74, 108, 188, 209, 219, 247, 259, 325, 444, 488-9, 532 men and women, relationships 491 Millite liberalism: common humanity within 159-60 core concepts 144-54 and differences among individuals 160 origins 141-3 peripheral concepts 165-8 tyranny of majority 158 monetarism 393 moral conduct 323, 324, 406 myth and ideology 20, 125 nationality 166 nationalization 446 neutrality 259-75, 395 New Deal 258, 400 new liberalism 178-225 core concepts 178-9, 181-5, 209 evolution of 194-200 morphology 206-10 and socialism 194 New Right 384, 385, 399, 406 non-constraint: and adjacency 68 in Hayek's liberalism 303 in libertarianism 279-85 in liberty 63-4, 147 in new liberalism 187 objectivity in feminism 504 onomasiology: and conceptual history 119 in Millite liberalism 141, 148 in philosophical liberalism 232 order 166-7, 327 organic change in conservatism 327, 333 organic concept of society 203-6, 331, 349-50 organic growth 333, 408 organicism 103

589

in French liberalism 215, 218, 221 in German liberalism 213 in green ideology 529, 533, 535 in liberalism 185 Oxford Idealists 192, 195 see also Green, T. H. pacifism 544-5 paternalism 264-5, 340, 349 patriarchy 491, 493-4, 549 perimeter concepts 78-80 in conservatism 373, 382-3, 390-2, 398, 405, 409 in feminism 494, 495, 499, 504, 511, 513-14, 520-3 in green ideology 527, 544-8 in liberalism 153 n,, 158-9, 165, 172, 174, 189-94, 218, 222, 226, 247, 258, 360 in libertarianism 290, 295 in new liberalism 199, 201, 206-7, 255 in socialism 429, 431, 440, 450-1, 453, 467, 474-5, 476, 477-80 person, notion of 236-7 personal responsibility 391 philosophical liberalism see American philosophical liberalism philosophy see political philosophy pluralism: and conservatism 323, 341, 398, 400, 403, 404, 414 cultural 71 and feminism 508, 511, 514-15 and green ideology 529-30, 533, 538-9, 542, 546-7 and liberalism 30, 85, 121, 148, 172, 183, 219, 223, 231 n,, 253-4, 258 n, in meaning 95, 107, 117, 124, 549, 553 and socialism 465, 467, 479 political liberalism: and autonomy 237-8 as comprehensive ideology 233-6 and Kant 236-41 of Rawls' 228-33; attributes 231 see also American philosophical liberalism political philosophers 123-4, 128-30 political philosophy 27-33 concepts in see concepts

590

Subject Index

political philosophy (cant,): and ideology: differences between 33-4, 41-2, 44-6, 132; and perimeter concepts 80-1; similarities with 41; superiority over 134-5 and logic 36-40 systems of as ideologies 17-18 political theory and meaning 131-6 pornography 494, 514, 521-2 postmodernism 94, 502, 506-8 poverty 427-8 power 22-3, 51 and anarchism 312 in conservatism 355, 362, 366-7 decontested in ideology 77 as essentially contestable concept 56 in feminism: as core concept 491, 521; and gender 492-7 in French liberalism 174-5 in green ideology 540-4 and liberal neutrality 266 in libertarianism 276, 292-4, 296 in Millite liberalism 152-3,158 in new liberalism 188, 194, 206 and socialism 442-6; and control 444-5; and equality 431, 466 in Thatcherism 394-5 and unconscious 35 private property: in French liberalism 172-3,175 in libertarianism 286 in new liberalism 208 private—public relationships in feminism 499-501, 503 privatization 394 production of ideologies 104-5, 121 progress: in American conservatism 370-1 in French liberalism 168 in German liberalism 210 in green ideology 536 in Hayek's liberalism 299, 302, 306-8 in history 98 in Millite liberalism 145, 147; and equality 160-1 in new liberalism 179, 183-4, 198 in socialism 444 property: in American conservatism 372

in conservatism 358-9, 362, 367, 382 in French liberalism 172-3, 175, 224 in Hayek's liberalism 302, 305-6 in libertarianism 285-8, 293 in Millite liberalism 84, 89, 163-4 in new liberalism 191, 207 in socialism 421, 423, 449-50 in Thatcherism 391, 392 protectionism 360-2 psychology and ideology 21-2 quasi-contingency concept 65-6 and adjacency 68 democracy as 155 of liberty 147 race 497 rationality: conservatism on 339 as core concept 85 in feminism 504-5 in French liberalism 168, 169 in green ideology 541 in Hayek's liberalism 299, 302, 306-7 and libertarianism 281-2, 293, 295 in Millite liberalism 149-50 in new liberalism 183-4, 197 in philosophical liberalism 231, 240 in political philosophy 28-31 in socialism 436-7, 445 reason 149 in conservatism 353 in feminism 505, 514, 521 in French liberalism 174 in Hayek's liberalism 306-7 relationism 26 relativism 53, 91-5, 131 religion in conservatism 331, 364 reproductive rights in feminism 523 revisionism in socialism 469-72 revolution 435 rhetoric 35-6, 447-8 right, theory of 228-9 rights: and community in philosophical liberalism 251 in conservatism 331, 338 and democracy in socialism 440

Subject Index equal, in American liberalism 244 as essentially contestable concept 58-9 in feminism 516, 517, 523 in French liberalism 175 in Millite liberalism 162 in new liberalism 185, 208 in Thatcherism 389-90, 396 security in libertarianism 293 self-definition 103,112 self-determination 147, 154, 457 self-development: in libertarianism 289 in Millite liberalism 147, 155, 172 in new liberalism 183, 187, 196 self-interest in conservatism 357 self-realization 179, 183, 457, 536 self-reliance 394, 538 self-sufficiency 529, 538 semasiology 119, 179 sexuality 491, 494, 521-2 slippery-slope arguments 38 sociability: in French liberalism 171 and libertarianism 281 in Millite liberalism 150, 161 in new liberalism 180, 184; and liberty 203; and organic theory 204 in philosophical liberalism 249-50 social co-operation and community 249, 253 social groups 23, 254 and class 220, 448-9 social justice 390 social order: in conservatism: and libertarianism 374; and rise of Thatcherism 388; and socialism 355, 356-8 extra-human origins of 334-6, 340-1, 344, 352, 357, 360, 370-1, 374, 388, 391, 412, 535 social organisms 204 social planning 255-7 social reform: and American conservatism 400 and conservatism 350, 353, 366 in green ideology 533 in liberalism 291, 471 in new liberalism 197

591

opposed by libertarianism 294 in socialism 471 socialism: and conservatism 351, 354-9, 379-81 core concepts 425-38 and democracy 438-42 diversity in 417-55 and green ideology 541-2 and liberalism 456-64, 469-72 liberty and equality in 464-9 market socialism 477-80 morphology of 82-3, 466-7 pre- and proto versions 420-5 rationality of 30 revisionism in 469-72 socialist clause 446-8 society: in libertarianism 289-90 organic concept of 203-6, 331 in socialism 421, 426 solidarism in French liberalism 215-19, 222 sovereignty 171 specificity of ideology 40-6 speech and thought-behaviour 43 speech-acts 100-1, 108 state: in conservatism 349-50, 366-7 in feminism 495-6 in French liberalism 215-25 in German liberalism 210-11 and liberal neutrality 261, 265, 268-74 in libertarianism 287-8, 292-3 in new liberalism 186, 207 ownership in socialism 446-7 in philosophical liberalism 232 regulation in Millite liberalism 166 in Thatcherism 394 status quo in conservatism 329-32 stewardship in green ideology 543-4 straw man syndrome 38 structural anthropology 124 subjectivism in feminism 508 surplus of meaning see meaning in ideology sustainability in green ideology 535, 548 Swedish socialism 474-5 syndicalism 222, 223, 441

592

Subject Index

taxation: and libertarianism 294 Mill on 164 in Thatcherism 393, 394 temperance 189-90 Thatcherism: as conservatism 385-93 and conservative morphology 387-91 economics of 393-7 and incentives 391, 394 and independence 392, 394 mirror-image characteristic 388, 397, 414 radicalism of 410-11 and socialism 397-8 unity of 408-14 thin theory 228-31, 245, 248, 304 n. thought-behaviour 43, 51, 67, 227 tolerance 172,177, 231, 262, 309, 390 totalitarian dictatorship 481 trade unionism in socialism 451-4 tradition 110, 114-15 in conservatism 327, 333 in Thatcherism 399, 408 tyranny of majority in Millite liberalism 158 ubiquity of ideology 40-6 unconscious in ideology 21, 33-6, 115 universal suffrage 159 universalism 31-2, 173 in feminism 503-4 in German liberalism 210

utilitarianism 37-8 in French liberalism 171 in Millite Eberalism 149-50 in new liberalism 192,196 utility in new liberalism 198 violence and feminism 521 Volk 212-14 voluntary associations in French liberalism 219 want-satisfaction 286 welfare: in feminism 495 human, in socialism 427-9 in new liberalism 196, 209, 469-70 in philosophical liberalism 257 in socialism 427-9, 469-70 in Thatcherism 408 welfare state 385-6, 405 women: and men, relationships 491, 548 rights of 165-6; see also feminism word-concept relationship in ideology 76 work: as creative activity 429-30, 435, 478 in feminism 523, 549 socialism on 422, 462-3 workers' cooperation 451-2, 459 workers' cooperatives 478 working class in French liberalism 220