The New Right

Norman P. Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1987. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of thinking about politics, economics and society referred to variously as the 'New Right', the radical right, neo-conservatism, economic liberalism or libertarianism. Although the New Right is not a single coherent movement it represented a clear alternative to the prevailing social-democratic consensus and had had considerable influence on government policy in both America and Britain.

This book presents an introductory survey of the New Right worldwide. It examines the varieties of free-market and 'monetarist' economic thought and introduces the reader to the public-choice critique of public policy. In political philosophy the book analyses American and British conservative thought and compares conservatism with neo-liberalism. The author pays particular attention to the New Right's analysis of constitutionalism and its critique of the dominance of 'politics' over 'economics' during the high-point of the consensus period. The author assesses the success which the different schools of the New Right have had in influencing public opinion and in the formation of government policy. He does not argue for or against the New Right but presents a dispassionate survey from which the reader can draw his or her own conclusions.

1

Against the Consensus

I

In almost all of what may be loosely called the Western democratic world (the notable exception was West Germany), the period from the late 1940s to about the mid-1970s experienced a remarkable era of intellectual stability. This is not to under-estimate the grave political and economic crises that regularly occurred, but only to suggest that they took place within the context of an ideological consensus comprising economic, social and political thought. The ‘ends’ of social and political life seemed not to be in dispute, though debate about the means to achieve those ends, and even about the precise meaning of the ends themselves, could be fierce as well as erudite. The ideological consensus might well be labelled as ‘social democracy’, except that this would imply that it was attached exclusively to the Labour Party of Great Britain and the Social Democratic parties of Europe. However, its most remarkable feature was the fact of its acceptance by the mainstream of conservative political opinion. There persisted an intellectual ancien regime of the ‘reactionary Right’, as well as of the Marxist Left and an almost senescent classical liberal stream, but the ideas of these groups, especially the last, were distinctly unfashionable.

The outlines of this consensus can be briefly summarised here (though the details will emerge later). The consensus begins with a rejection of the idea that spontaneous social forces, and the consequent traditional or customary modes of behaviour, are themselves sufficient to guarantee that level of economic development of which a community is capable. The experience of the Great Depression, with material and human resources lying idle for long periods of time, was sufficient to convince a whole generation of economists that an unhampered market economy would periodically generate mass unemployment, which would not be eliminated spontaneously. The organisation of a market economy, at the macro-level at least, required a more active state than most European democracies had hitherto experienced (outside war-time).

It is no accident that the role of the state should be further extended into the interstices of economic and social life: for the existence of mass unemployment also highlighted problems of social welfare. Once again it was assumed that the state was superior to the private insurance market in fulfilling the role of protecting individuals against the vicissitudes of economic life. It was assumed that without the state people would be helpless victims of the ‘blind’ and unpredictable forces of the market. Furthermore, it seemed ‘natural’ that the state’s welfare role should be extended into education and health. The rationale for this was not merely the relief of suffering (after all, state aid for the indigent had been accepted as an essential feature of public policy for centuries) but the creation of more equal opportunities. ‘Social justice’, where this term refers to the correction of a pure market determination of income so as to produce some desired social ‘outcome’, became perhaps the most predominant feature on the masthead of the new consensus. This contrasts markedly with the earlier idea of justice and equality — an idea much more limited, and confined to the guarantee of equality before the law and the application of fair and non-discriminatory rules to cases arising out of the relationship between essentially private agents.

It should be pointed out, however, that the extent to which social justice and equality should be pursued produced the most dissent amongst the adherents of the new orthodoxy. However, even here the critics of too extreme an egalitarianism were more concerned, in a utilitarian manner, to point out the effect this would have on incentives and economic performance, than to embark on any sustained defence of individual rights and claims to legitimately acquired property that were threatened by equality.

A further important element in the consensus was the acceptance of the power of organised labour and the attempt to incorporate trade unions more closely into the political decision-making process. Of course, the legal privileges accorded to unions, especially their exemption from the law of tort in relation to industrial disputes, preceded the period under discussion (in Britain the crucial legal land-mark is the 1906 Trades Disputes Act), but the post-war period witnessed the transformation of unions from economic agencies concerned with protecting the interests of their members in the workplace into bodies of great significance in legislation and politics. However, it was only in Britain that the political influence of trade unions was of great significance. In America the number of unionised workers has always been low (at present little more than 20 per cent of the workforce — and this figure includes a significant number of public-sector employees); and in Europe the division between communist and non-communist unions prevented the organised labour movement from achieving that unity which is required for lasting political influence.

The greatest effect of the new union power was felt in the nationalised industries. The new consensus did not advocate the wholesale socialisation of the means of production but it did maintain that certain ‘key’ industries, primarily in the areas of energy, communications and transport, were too important to be left to the ‘vagaries’ of the market. However, this had the unintended effect of taking wage determination in these industries out of the impersonal market and increasing the power of the unions to secure ‘economic rent’ for their members — a process enhanced by the monopoly or quasi-monopoly status of publicly-owned industries. The emergence of the ‘mixed economy’ also brought unanticipated and unintended sources of conflict.

The major elements of the post-war period taken as a whole may be said to constitute an ‘ideology’. It consists partly of a scientific (or perhaps pseudo-scientific) explanation of the way the social world works, and partly of a set of values, or more accurately, policy prescriptions, claimed to represent in concretised form the general agreement about the ends that exist in society. The particular strength of the post-war consensus was thought to lie in the fact that the policy prescriptions were validated by the conclusions of genuine scientific enquiry: a prosperous, harmonious social order became possible rather than merely ideal.

Another way of expressing this would be, to borrow a pretentious term from the philosophy of science, to say that it resembled a ‘paradigm’.¹ To avoid getting involved in the complexities of this concept it is sufficient to say that a paradigm consists of a comprehensive and internally coherent explanation of the world which, although in large part supported by impressive scientific evidence, is, in its basic and fundamental tenets, impervious to rational refutation or demonstration. Research consists of puzzle-solving and amending work conducted within the confines of the paradigm rather than challenging the basic postulates of the system of ideas itself. The overturning of one paradigm and its replacement with another is thought to be not a rational event, a revolution in a theory brought about by the conclusions of objective enquiry, but a change in attitudes of the intellectual class. Although this change is generated by continuing dissatisfaction with the growing failures (in predictions and so on) of the old paradigm and the belief that a new one is superior, the switch of the intelligentsia to a new way of thinking seems to be very subjective in nature.

In social thought there are some similarities to this process. The post-war ideological consensus that we are describing did broadly seem to come about in this way, though it is doubtful if there are any clear-cut and unambiguous paradigms in social enquiry. Certainly, however, the dissatisfaction with the hitherto prevailing ‘model’ of economic explananation, the neo-classical theory of the market determination of an equilibrium set of prices (of goods and factors of production) was generated largely by the apparent failure of this theory to account adequately for the experience of the 1930s. The Keynesian theory of the management of the economy by macro-economic methods looks suspiciously like an alternative paradigm: indeed a whole generation of economists seemed to be as much entranced as intellectually convinced by it.

Other aspects of the ideological paradigm, although they lacked the sophistication of the economic part, were nevertheless effective in attracting almost overwhelming intellectual support. Political scientists, sociologists and public administrators were almost entirely occupied in either the ‘dispassionate’ study of the new collectivist state or in seeking new and improved ways of administering its unchallenged goals. Thus, for example, in government and public administration, practitioners were far more interested in perfecting the administration of state services than in discussing the fundamental issue of whether these should be delivered privately or publicly. In Britain especially, the seemingly endless rounds of reforms of central and local government and welfare organisations from 1945 to the mid-1970s, although of an administrative rather than a substantive kind, faithfully reflected the prevailing research interest of the social-science profession.

Not only did the more traditional academic social-science disciplines devote much of their attention to the exploration of the implications of the consensus, but new subjects were in effect ‘invented’ for this very purpose. Thus social administration and the other academic off-shoots of the burgeoning concern with social policy became the mechanical adjuncts of the normative ends of the consensus.

At the same time as the acceptance of the social thinking of the new consensus became virtually complete, the influence of logical positivism, and its successor, the ‘ordinary language’ school of analytical philosophy, began to dominate academic political philosophy.² In fact, the rigour of conceptual analysis cut through the pretensions of traditional metaphysics (which underlay much received political philosophy) so successfully that the subject was proclaimed to be ‘dead’.³ In accepting the post-Humean view of reason as being impotent in the construction and justification of political and moral value systems, and incompetent to adjudicate between rival Weltangschauungen, the positivists virtually consigned political philosophy to the task of the dry analysis of concepts. An analysis of language that castigated all normative statements as ‘emotive’⁴ and designated empirical science and mathematics as the highest (if not quite the only) form of human knowledge was bound to have catastrophic effects on a discipline hitherto concerned with, for example, understanding the relationship between the individual and the state and demonstrating the nature of fundamental human rights.

In fact these philosophical movements had little effect on practical politics (despite the claims of many Marxists that philosophy’s dismissal of political theory was a thinly disguised defence of the status quo). The argument that ultimate political principles could not be grounded in reason, that they rested on feelings and emotions rather than logic and metaphysics, did not tarnish the intellectual integrity of social democracy. Indeed, many of the analytical philosophers were overt advocates of the post-war semi-collectivist state and welfare society — though they were eager to point out that this advocacy had nothing to do with their professional philosophical interests. In effect, public opinion (as interpreted by the intellectuals — an important qualification, as we shall see) rather than reason became the source of political and moral value; and political thought replaced political philosophy as the formalised expression of that value.

However, analytical philosophy, and especially its positivist variant, left one important legacy for social science generally and for the rationale of the new consensus in particular: this was the emphasis on empirical investigation as the only genuine, incorrigible source of knowledge. The original, and extremely crude, positivist philosophy of social science had not only put a prohibition on value judgements acquiring any rational status, but had also limited scientific propositions to empirical generalisations: any statement of purported causality which was not, in principle at least, verifiable was dismissed as mere a priori speculation.⁵ Whatever its epistemological shortcomings⁶ (and there were many), this injunction was eagerly obeyed by the practising social scientists within the consensus. The literature of economics, political science and sociology soon began to abound with empirical studies; and while such ‘information’ that was acquired did not (as a matter of logic) convey any normative implications, it was undoubtedly used to buttress the prescriptions of the new moderate collectivism.

One classic example is always worth quoting: this is the case of homelessness, in which the cataloguing of vast amounts of empirical data about rising trends in the numbers of homeless people is always used to license demands for more public spending on housing. Yet scarcely any attention is given to the theoretical explanations of why this regularly occurs: in fact it is largely as a result of previous interventions in the housing market, normally by way of rent control and security of tenure legislation, which disrupts a potential equilibrium between the supply of and the demand for the housing stock.⁷

One lacuna in the theory of the consensus was to have very serious implications for its long-term viability: this was the lack of any real understanding of the nature of the state, coupled with a naïve belief in the efficacy of ‘politics’ as a problem-solving method. It was here that the withdrawal of political philosophy from substantive issues had perhaps its most damaging effect. In fact, the most important contributions to the theoretical understanding of state and politics were made by economists rather than political scientists or philosophers.

In this century the general view of the state in social democratic and moderate collectivist political thought has been benign. Its coercive features have been underplayed and it has been regarded as the purveyor of welfare and general beneficence rather than the embodiment of legalised force. Of course, the position was not quite as naïve as this simple statement might imply. No advocate of the mixed economy thought that all state action was necessarily good, but rather that the state was in some important sense neutral and therefore capable of being used for virtuous ends. As R.H. Tawney put it: ‘Fools will use it, when they can, for foolish ends, criminals for criminal ends, sensible and decent men will use it for ends which are sensible and decent.’⁸ There was little consideration of the possibility that the state might have its own mode of operation (which could be analysed by the social sciences) and that it might develop in such a way that it fails to reflect the prescriptions of ‘sensible and decent men’.

This point, perhaps more than any other, serves to distinguish almost all varieties of social democracy or the new consensus, from their rivals on the Marxist Left and from the laissez-faire classical liberal school. The Marxists maintain an essentially ‘exploitative’ theory of the state: its institutions serve to preserve the (basically property) interests of the ruling class. The e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Against the Consensus
• 2. The Liberal Alternative — Economics
• 3. The Liberal Alternative — Politics
• 4. Conservatism
• 5. Britain
• 6. America
• 7. West Germany
• 8. Conclusion
• Index