New Labour

A Critique

Mark Bevir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134241743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New Labour is the most innovative and powerful political movement in Britain today. However, New Labour: A Critique argues that its apparent pragmatism disguises an ideological commitment to particular forms of social science, deploying new institutionalism and communitarianism to respond to the New Right.Bevir traces the impact of these forms of social science on the ideas and policies of New Labour, paying particular attention to the welfare state and the economy. New Labour, the new institutionalism and communitarianism typically objectify aspects of the social world to sustain claims to expert knowledge. Bevir defends and enacts an alternative, interpretive approach to social science. This interpretive approach inspires a critique of New Labour as a contingent reworking of a particular socialist tradition rather than the necessary or pragmatic response that it portrays itself as.

1 Political Science

Introduction

On Thursday 1 May 1997, the British electorate returned a Labour government for the first time in over twenty years. Labour’s electoral triumph brought to an end the dismal series of defeats at the hands of the Conservatives in 1979, 1982, 1987, and 1992. Labour’s return from the electoral wilderness was, it seemed, the long-awaited reward for years spent transforming the Party – a transformation that had begun in the 1980s with the launch of the Policy Review and had reached its symbolic peak when the Party revised Clause IV in order to remove the commitment to nationalisation from its constitution.¹ On the morning of Friday 2 May, Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister, explicitly declared that his government had been elected as New Labour and it would govern as New Labour. Social democracy had been refashioned as an ideology and we would see the results in public policy. Out went state ownership, a collectivist welfare state, and Keynesianism. In came public–private partnerships, joined-up governance, and supply-side reforms.

New Labour portrays itself as the future of social democracy. It implies that it has absorbed the lessons of defeat, come to terms with changes in society, and forged ideas and policies suited to our new times. It suggests that other social democratic parties should follow its Third Way if they want to survive let alone prosper.² This suggestion has met a receptive audience since other social democrats are often convinced of the need to rethink some of their cherished beliefs. Throughout Europe, social democratic parties are promoting privatisation, welfare reform, and flexible labour markets.³ If we look across the Atlantic, we find innumerable parallels and links between New Labour and the New Democrats. Perhaps ‘we are all Third Wayers now’, as suggested by Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton.⁴ New Labour is undoubtedly a prominent model for the future of social democracy. To debate this future, we might engage with New Labour. What are its ideas and policies? Where do they come from? What are the alternatives?

Three Contrasts

New Labour advocates joined-up governance as an alternative to the hierarchic bureaucracy it associates with Old Labour and the marketisation it associates with the New Right. The Modernising Government White Paper of March 1999 expressed the government’s vision of ‘high-quality and efficient’ public services.⁵ The White Paper equated effective public services with the attempt to make them ‘more innovative and responsive to users and ensure that they are delivered in an efficient and joined-up way’. It illustrated New Labour’s tendency to associate efficiency, quality, and responsiveness with networks that are characterised by ‘collaborative working across organisational boundaries’, and especially with partnerships between government agencies and the voluntary and private sectors. New administrative institutions – joined-up governance – are said to promise a panacea for the ills of the state.

We get a rather different view of joined-up governance if we adopt the bottom-up perspective of the citizen. Social workers provide an account of the case of Mrs T in the files of a local authority in Northern England.⁶ Mrs T is eighty years old and arthritic. She lives on her own, uses a walking frame, and can no longer manage pans or cooking. She coped well until she fell and fractured her wrist. Then she visited the hospital, which sent her home after treatment. Now a Home Care Manager visits to assess Mrs T, whom she finds to be slow and having problems holding the walking frame because of the arthritis and fractured wrist: Mrs T has difficulty with washing, dressing, using the toilet, bathing, cooking, and shopping. A friend of Mrs T’s will visit her twice a week, collect her pension, and do small amounts of shopping. Mrs T’s three children live away, but they will take it in turns to visit on Sundays when they will keep the house and garden in good repair. The Home Care Manager asks for an urgent visit from Occupational Therapy Services to assess Mrs T for equipment for daily living. While Mrs T waits for this assessment, a home help will visit at mealtimes and help her with dressing in the morning, and the friend will visit at about 7 p.m. to help her undress.

An Occupational Therapy Assistant calls two days later. She finds that Mrs T needs substantial equipment, all of which arrives later that day except for a grab rail. The Gas Board will call within 48 hours to replace dials on the cooker. The council’s housing services will install an emergency warden-call system by the end of the week. The Home Care Manager now rearranges the home help. She provides a morning call from her own services from Monday to Friday and she arranges for a private agency on Saturday. The home help will assist with buttons, collect shopping and pension, do some basic cleaning, and do laundry and ironing. The home care will help Mrs T have a bath one morning a week, and also lay out breakfast and tea and fill the kettle for the day. A twilight service will call sometime between seven and nine in the evening from Monday to Saturday to help Mrs T undress. The Home Care Manager arranges and buys all these different services. The Women’s Royal Voluntary Service will deliver Meals on Wheels to Mrs T from Mondays to Fridays. On Saturdays Mrs T will treat herself to a meal cooked and delivered by a local hotel. The Home Care Manager is busy, so now all the help is in place, she will only make a quick visit to Mrs T every six months to check on the arrangements.

The Modernising Government White Paper provides a top-down account of the properties of a set of objectified institutions, or rather the properties New Labour thinks characterise such institutions. It implies that joined-up governance possesses intrinsic properties such that it is bound to be responsive and efficient. In contrast, the social workers’ account of Mrs T provides us with a bottom-up account of a social practice. It illustrates the operation of joined-up governance by describing the ways in which people act so as to interpret, make, and subvert institutional norms and rules in a particular case. The contrast between objectified institutions and contingent practices is a theme that runs through the ensuing study of New Labour.

Within political science, positivists characteristically objectify institutions, social categories, or human rationality. That is to say, they treat these things as, first, given or fixed and, second, constitutive of human actions. They define institutions by reference to norms or rules that apparently govern the behaviour of the people who fall under them. Or they take a social category, such as class or religious affiliation, as an adequate stand-in, or even explanation, for beliefs and actions that apparently are common to all people who belong within that category. Or they ascribe certain principles of reason to people irrespective of any particular circumstances, beliefs, or motivations. In all these cases, positivists treat institutions, social categories, or rationality as the givens that constitute actions, rather than as the contingent products or properties of actions. I favour, in contrast, an interpretive approach to political science that takes its objects to be contingent practices. Whereas positivists ascribe a fixed content to conventions or norms, I regard them as emergent properties of a practice and so as open to different interpretations within that practice. Whereas positivists portray institutions as fixed by conventions or norms, I think of practices as constantly being remade, with every aspect of them being open, at least in principle, to transformation. Whereas positivists sometimes portray institutions as path-dependent, as if existing norms fix their later development, I believe that every aspect of a practice could change as a result of a contingent contest over meanings.

The contrast between objectified institutions and contingent practices overlaps with that between scientific expertise and democratic dialogue. Whenever positivists objectify institutions, social categories, or rationality, they divorce the objects they study from the contingent beliefs and desires embedded within them: they portray the Labour Party, the working class, or bureaucrats as objects whose properties and actions they can explain, correlate, or model without having to take cognizance of the possibly diverse and conflicting beliefs, desires, and actions of Party members, workers, or civil servants. In doing so, positivists establish the possibility of their claiming a certain expertise. They can claim to reveal how and why political events and processes occur through the application of their abstract explanations, correlations, or models. Sometimes they even claim that their explanations, correlations, or models can predict what will happen under certain circumstances. Hence they can offer expert advice to elite actors about what these latter might achieve and how they might do so. Objectification enables political scientists to claim to possess knowledge of social facts that appear to be given independently of any study of concrete beliefs and desires. It thereby enables them to offer policy advice that appears to be valid independently of any negotiation with those at whom the policies are targeted.

An interpretive approach to political science undercuts the positivist notion of scientific expertise. A concern with practices implies that explanations, correlations, or models are valid only in so far as they happen to capture the beliefs and desires of the relevant actors. It also implies that any policy advice based on explanations, correlations, or models will be effective only in so far as the targets of the policy happen to adopt the beliefs and desires ascribed to them by political scientists. Interpretivism thus shifts our emphasis from expertise to narratives and dialogue. We explain events and processes by ascribing beliefs and desires to actors so as to construct a narrative that locates what we want to explain in its contingent context. And we judge the potential effects of a policy by entering a dialogue with the targets of that policy – a dialogue in which they reveal their beliefs and desires and in which policy-makers negotiate and reformulate the policy to make it fit with those beliefs and desires.

New Labour draws, I will suggest, on an institutionalism that purports to make possible expertise. The contrast between its Third Way and an open community based on a participatory democracy thus constitutes the final theme that runs through the ensuing study of New Labour. Political scientists are not detached experts who neutrally record and explain political events and processes. Rather, they are social actors who intervene in dialogues in ways that have political consequences. We will find, for example, that institutionalism and communitarianism have influenced New Labour. This influence implies that when we challenge the objectification of institutions and the idea of scientific expertise in political science, our critique spills over to apply to aspects of New Labour’s socialism as vision and practice. The Third Way with its institutionalist roots confronts a vision of an open community with roots in an interpretive approach.

The ensuing study of New Labour explores three overlapping contrasts between positivism and interpretivism, between expertise and dialogue, and between the Third Way and the open community. These contrasts are characterised, of course, by fuzzy boundaries, not sharp dichotomies. New Labour provides the site at which I explore the fuzzy boundaries between different political sciences and different social democracies. The resulting book resembles a sandwich. The first and last chapters are the slices of bread: they discuss different political sciences and social democracies. The other chapters are the filling in which the overlaps and differences among these political sciences and social democracies are explored through an interpretation of New Labour.

This chapter explores different political sciences. It concentrates on the contrasts between positivism and interpretivism and between expertise and dialogue. To begin, it provides a historical account of the emergence of various approaches to political science. This historical account provides a critical perspective on several varieties of positivism. It suggests that to understand contemporary political science adequately we have to deploy an interpretive approach at odds with positivism. It also suggests that positivism has acted less as a source of independent expertise than as a way of conceptualising objects so as to make them governable. Thereafter this chapter offers a theoretical version of this critique. It explores the nature of the objectification that characterises the leading varieties of positivist political science – behaviouralism, institutionalism, and rational choice. And it explores different forms of interpretation to show how and why they too sometimes encourage similar types of objectification. Together these historical and theoretical explorations of political science provide an account and a defence of a decentred interpretive approach.

A History of Political Science

The twentieth century witnessed the separation of the study of politics from its antecedents in philosophy, history, and law. In very broad terms, we might divide nineteenth-century political thought into two strands. Enlightenment thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham believed in rational, scientific inquiry. Typically they tried to base social science on an individualistic and hedonistic psychology. Organicist thinkers such as Samuel Coleridge rejected the atomistic analysis of the self as a string of momentary sensations, but unlike pre-Enlightenment thinkers they generally emphasised the unique personality of the individual. The encounter between Enlightenment and organicist ideas opened up the intellectual space in which nineteenth-century philosophers, historians, and jurists wrote on politics. On the one hand, the organicist critique of the Enlightenment reinforced T. B. Macaulay’s rejection of the deductive Benthamite method in favour of an inductive Whig philosophy of history.⁷ Nineteenth-century liberals began to appeal to history, tradition, and culture as well as to rational self-interest. Even John Stuart Mill drew inspiration from Coleridge and Auguste Comte when he modified his Benthamite heritage to champion an inductive method and to stress the importance of culture as a factor in determining what political system suited a particular society. Walter Bagehot likewise appealed to national character as a basis for the scientific study of politics; he described the British as a moderate, steady people who lacked imagination, enthusiasm, and the impulse to grand theorising, and he suggested that the nature and strength of the British constitution derived from this national character rather than the mythic communion to which Whigs often appealed. On the other hand, the influence of organicism on idealist philosophy and sociology prompted a reading of history as exhibiting a moral progress that was linked to reason and harmony.⁸ Bernard Bosanquet and D. G. Ritchie explored the development of moral personality in its social and historical context by appealing to national character, Darwinian processes, and Hegel. Similarly, although L. T. Hobhouse saw conflict as a fact about the world, he insisted that it typically encouraged people to create forms of order that were more in accord with a harmony that also was latent in the world.

Mill, Bagehot, Ritchie, and Hobhouse all exhibited to varying degrees a concern with agency or character, a suspicion of deductive models and scientism, and an awareness of historical contingency. They approached the study of politics through philosophy, history, and law. Politics appears in their work less as a distinct empirical domain governed by its own regularities than as an arena in which character and reason work themselves out, often in an explicitly evolutionary process. The political became established as an empirical domain separate from philosophy, history, and law only when these ideas of character, reason, and evolution began to collapse during the first half of the twentieth century, at first in the wake of modernism and later gaining considerable momentum from the First World War. Theoretical and social dilemmas led to the decline of moralistic and evolutionary approaches and the rise of new ones inspired by an atomistic and analytical empiricism.

The First World War undermined the nineteenth-century faith in reason and moral progress. Observers found it harder and harder to conceive of politics as a realm that expressed moral character or the evolution of reason. Whereas actions had been conceived as conduct infused with the reason and morals of the individual, they now became behaviour to be analysed either apart from any assumptions about mind or in relation to hidden desires and depths which often overpowered reason and morals. The First World War also lent a fillip to forms of scepticism – themselves often responses to the Victorian crisis of faith – that broke the world down into atomistic units instead of making sense of units by placing them in a grand narrative of progress. The resulting modernism focused on discrete, discontinuous elements to be assembled into categories or models rather than moral stories.⁹ In philosophy, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell pioneered an atomistic and analytical style opposed to the speculative and moralistic tone of T. H. Green or Herbert Spencer. In economics, W. S. Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and A. G. Pigou began to separate economics from the moral sciences and history, thereby opening up the possibility of a discrete empirical domain that could be studied quantitatively and through analytical constructions based on atomistic individuals.

Modernism undermined approaches to the study of politics as expressive of grand philosophical or historical processes. Political actions and institutions became discrete units to be investigated individually prior to being assembled into larger sets based on their similarities and differences. Modernist empiricism inspired a quantitative approach to human behaviour as advocated by Graham Wallas and developed by the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO) following its formation in 1937. The BIPO surveyed large numbers of representative individuals on specific issues. It divided people’s views on any given issue from their wider webs of belief, and then constructed public opinion analytically out of these atomised views. The modernist nature of this approach contrasts with the idealists’ reliance on a case-study style of social work and with a Mass Observation that used varied sources, such as diaries, documentary, and observation, to produce micro-studies of individuals, families, industries, and towns, all of which were conceived as holistic in nature.

Modernist empiricism also inspired a search for typologies in comparative politics. Although James Bryce invoked a comparative method, he continued to locate institutions firmly within the whole of the state of which they were a part and even to argue that all societies were evolving towards democracy.¹⁰ The modernist break with such positions appears only after the First World War in the work of Herman Finer. While Finer’s Foreign Governments at Work, published in 1921, contains an analytical index of topics that enables the reader to compare similar institutions in different countries, his major work, Theory and Practice of Modern Government, published in 1932, proceeds topic by topic, treating each institution in relation to similar ones in other countries rather than in the contextual whole of the other institutions in its own country.¹¹ Finer thereby introduced the now-familiar strategy of comparing various legislatures or constitutions to establish typologies, a strategy that embodies the modernist gesture of breaking previous wholes into atomistic units to be located next to similar units understood as separable objects of analysis. Whereas the political had been explored in relation to philosophical and historical narratives, modernist empiricism established an epistemic space in which it could be explained by the discovery of la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Political Science
• 2. Institutionalism
• 3. Communitarianism
• 4. The Welfare State
• 5. The economy
• 6. Social Democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index