The Republican Transformation of Modern British Policies

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The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics Geoffrey Foote

The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics

Also by Geoffrey Foote THE LABOUR PARTY’S POLITICAL THOUGHT: A History A CHRONOLOGY OF POSTWAR BRITISH POLITICS

The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics Geoffrey Foote Senior Lecturer in History University of Teeside

© Geoffrey Foote 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries ISBN-13: 978–0–333–73496–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–333–73496–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foote, Geoffrey. The Republican transformation of modern British politics / Geoffrey Foote. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–73496–3 (cloth) 1. Republicanism—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. JN900.F66 2005 320.941⬘09⬘045—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To the memory of my mother, Jean

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: The Republican Idea

1

Part One: Republican Socialism

13

1

Socialist Humanism and Republican Theory

15

2

The Transposition of Republican Thought

43

3

The Radical Republicans

63

Part Two: The Republican Market

87

4

Jo Grimond and the Unservile State

89

5

A Republicanism of the Right

114

6

The Importance of Enoch

139

7

The Republic of the Suburbs

162

Notes and References

191

Index

219

vii

Acknowledgements This book has a long history behind it, most of it too personal to be recounted. It began life in the intense intellectual atmosphere of Holywell Manor, Oxford, with strong support given by Steven Lukes, Kenneth Morgan, David Harvey and Peter Pulzer. A number of people shared their experiences with me, often informally; unfortunately not all are now alive, but I do owe thanks to Stuart Hall, John Merrington, David Marquand and the late Raphael Samuel. My thanks to Gareth Stedman Jones and members of the Social History Group at King’s College, Cambridge; and to Gregory Claeys and members of the History of Political Thought Group at the Institute of Historical Research, who discussed part of this book. None of the above necessarily share the ideas presented here, of course. The History Research Group at the University of Teesside gave financial assistance. I would also like to express my thanks to my editor, Christine Ranft, for the consideration, patience and helpfulness she has shown in dealing with the various stages of my manuscript. My wife, Rowena, provided the practical, intellectual and emotional backing without which this work could not have been completed. Adam, my second son, grew along with the travails of the book’s long gestation; together with Laurie, he brought pleasure and love, even at the most difficult times. Gary Keane, Philippa Kennedy and Sharon Roberts in particular, together with other friends too numerous to name, kept up my morale with psychological and practical support over many years. Who could repay such debts? Two people close to me did not live to see the result they both wanted, Bríg Tully and my mother, Jean; laoth ma chree with you both.

viii

Introduction: The Republican Idea

The years after the fall of the Soviet Union have seen a decline of interest in ideology and conviction in favour of image-projection and career-pursuit – a new ‘pudding-time’ of British politics in which tactical skill counts for more than fundamental differences between parties, and courage is a synonym for foolishness. However, ideas of economics and politics are more powerful than is often understood, lingering as values and prejudices to inform the most practical of men and women, and changing circumstances may once more lead politicians to become identified with political principles. I would argue that the fundamental consensus of the present day is expressed by a republican conception which unites the main political parties on a common terrain of ideas. This conception did not spring from thin air, or even from a New Labour spin-office. It was a language within which all political parties had to operate because it had already been created at a prior point in time and had now become generally accepted. It was a language which had been developing its own momentum from a period before the ideological vacuum of the 1990s. Indeed, an exploration of this republican conception at its gestation could well illuminate its nature and, arguably, its limitations. It may even illuminate the nature and problems of our own age. It is my argument that a major innovation occurred in British politics with the re-emergence in the political languages of both Right and Left of a near-dormant republican tradition in the period after 1956. This occurred as a result of an unhappiness felt on both Right and Left at the consensus firmly established by the post-war Labour Government – a consensus based on a corporate socialist ideology of state planning, public provision of welfare and varied forms of state ownership and control of large sectors of British industry and services.1 Consensus was not the same as total agreement – Britain was not a totalitarian society – but there was a generally agreed framework of politics, to dissent from which was to risk electoral disaster. The fear of upsetting a carefully balanced 1

2


electorate alerted the major party machines to the threat posed by both Left and Right of the political spectrum, accelerating the tendency to centralize the control of the party leadership over rebels. The result of the consensus, a ‘corporate bias’2 whereby the leaders of labour and capital collaborated with the State through its various agencies, worked as long as these leaders remained representative. However in the environment of the 1960s and 70s – one of stagnant growth, high inflation and rising unemployment – this corporatist consensus frayed and lost its persuasive political power. The social conflict which resulted was accompanied by a sharp clash of ideas between a revived Left and Right, a clash which was eventually won by the Right as Margaret Thatcher pushed the nation out of the impasse, forcing it in a particular direction. Ideas have a potential to develop in any number of directions, and dominant ideas in any given situation develop as they do in response to political realities. There was no necessary, fixed path of escape from the crises of the 1960s and 70s – the Italian path of continued political stagnation, possibly resulting in an implosion similar to that which convulsed Italy after 1990, could have taken place. Instead of the direction in which it was actually steered, Britain could just conceivably have taken a turn to the Left in the 1970s (it seemed possible for a brief period), in which case the new ideology would have taken very different contours from the form it eventually assumed. The eclipse of socialism which actually did occur under Thatcher and afterwards, temporary or otherwise, opened up a space for the re-emergence of an older set of republican ideas which had prevailed in English thought (on the Right as much as the Left) before the social issues of class and economics had replaced the traditional fare of liberty, corruption and authority as issues of conflict. This interest was partly derived from the sudden fall in popularity of the British monarchy, but republicanism has always meant something more than the mere absence of a monarchy – the positive conception of republican liberty could never be satisfied by the type of tinkering with the British constitution which would have changed the Executive from a regal to a secular holder. In seeking to restore an interest in the ideas which inform our political language, there is no need to fall into the illusion that history can be reduced to ideas. It is not ‘history’, or the function of ideas in history, but an understanding of ideas in history which is my primary concern. The reasons for changing fashions in ideas and the function of ideas in helping us to understand the actions of people in particular contexts are the concern of the historian of action, just as the conceptual analysis of

Introduction 3

ideas lies within the realm of the political philosopher. It is the connections between ideas and the way in which they change in particular situations which concerns the historian of ideas.3 Intellectual history cannot ignore the socio-historical context altogether, but the primary focus here is on the ideas themselves as they emerge in time. In particular, it is too simple merely to relate ‘text’ to socio-political context. The fact that the republican politics which was being rediscovered by the Left in this period, for example, was often expressed in the terminology of Marxism rather than republicanism makes the question of how those ideas are connected to an intellectual tradition crucial in understanding just what is different about their political ideas. This approach (diachronic, depending on the transformation of ideas over time) provides a valid means of decoding the confusion caused by the emergence of a new politics within an old language,4 enriching the study of ideas in politics.

The ‘mother principle’ It is the precise meaning of the republican tradition which is of central importance in grasping the recent ideological change in British politics, a change which would otherwise remain elusive to the point of incomprehension. The problem is that, as a theory which took different forms in different periods of history, republicanism seems to offer a bewildering variety of interpretations. Indeed, one of the most confusing aspects of Classical Republicanism lies in the fact that it does not mean an opposition to monarchy – the work of the Tudor writer, Sir Thomas Smith, had a place in its vocabulary for royal republics and commonwealths.5 As a result of this imprecision, the popularity of interpreting American history through the prism of republican ideology has recently given way to a growing feeling that republicanism is too vague a term to describe anything.6 In an echo of an earlier debate, where John Adams wrote in 1819 that a republic ‘may signify anything, everything or nothing’,7 the historian Daniel Rodgers has argued that because the idea had been ‘employed for too many ends, and distended too far, it ran the danger of explaining everything’.8 In other words, republicanism had become a pot-pourri into which all manner of concoctions were being mixed, and the unhappiness of many historians with any separate history of ideas was able to express itself with a reminder that social divisions of class, gender and race were being ignored. Bernard Crick is aware of the importance of the republican tradition – as a sensitive historian of political ideas and a good student of Machiavelli,

4


he could hardly do otherwise – but he fails to extract it from that potpourri. He has argued that the republicanism of the past has now become another term for ‘the political’ – ‘as a theory it simply states that advanced or complex human communities always exhibit some variety both of values and interests; and as an operative ideal or doctrine it simply asserts that it is normally best to govern by allowing representation of these diverse ideals and interests’.9 This makes the republic identical with too large a variety of state forms to be meaningful, and would unjustly exclude Rousseau’s intolerant little republic from the tradition. Crick recognizes that republics are not universal political bodies, and that the extension of the franchise had a profound effect in removing their aristocratic element, but like John Adams and Daniel Rodgers he has let the notion of republican liberty be watered down into a weak notion of republicanism, making it identical with the existence of debate and a sense of community in a modern parliamentary democracy. Yet the stronger sense of the idea persists. At a time when nationalist sentiment was brushing republicanism in the United States aside as meaningless,10 Thomas Jefferson defended the republican idea in a series of letters to John Taylor of Caroline and to Samuel Kercheval in 1816. Arguing that the abuses of monarchy at the time of the Revolution had so dominated American thought that they saw anything that was not monarchy as a republic, Jefferson asserted that they had not penetrated to the ‘mother principle’. Seeking to expound this principle, he wrote, ‘Were I to assign to this term a precise and definite idea, I would say, purely and simply, it means a government by citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to the rules established by the majority.’ Such a government, its citizens acting directly and personally, had to be local in character, and could be found in the ward republics of Connecticut, the heritage of the town government of the New England colonies, ‘the nearest approach to a pure republic’.11 It is this ‘mother principle’ of republicanism which has to be isolated – a general concept distinct from the particular conceptions in which it has been manifested at different times – to avoid the confusions which have abounded about the term, and to give republicanism a meaning which differentiates it from other ideas such as democracy and ‘the political’.12 The actual conceptions of republicanism have varied through history, giving the idea a rich variety, but no matter how deceptively simple or thin, the general concept is needed to give a meaning to the republican idea in the stronger sense of the term. To paraphrase Michael Freeden, this concept is the thin ineliminable core of the idea, while the conceptions may be seen as the various meanings which are superimposed on that core.13

Introduction 5

The problem is to separate the historically specific conceptions from the general concept of the republic, a concept that must incorporate elements which have crossed the major social and chronological divides between Classical Athens and Rome, Renaissance Italy, and pre-industrial England and America. The essential nature of the theory needs to be isolated from the contingent forms in which that theory presents itself if a common element can be found which unites its appearances in such widely varying contexts. The intense interest in history shown by republican theorists14 is a mark that they were seeking such a general principle from the Ancients. Indeed, one reason for calling this tradition republican rather than the more general title of civic humanist is the historic link which it provides between modern, early modern and Classical thinkers.15 I would argue that this ‘mother principle’ of republicanism has to be found in the stress on active political participation, which is not necessarily democratic, at least not in the modern sense of universal adult citizenship. Caroline Robbins has pointed out that historically ‘the republicans were in no sense democratic. All mankind, the people, the country . . . meant the independent, the well-to-do, the literate’,16 just as to Aristotle the polity excluded slaves. This participation constitutes republican liberty, in the sense of selfgovernment. In a recent philosophical discourse on republicanism, Philip Pettit has counter-posed republican freedom to participation, arguing that the latter does not constitute a bedrock value of the concept – ‘democratic participation may be essential to the republic, but that is because it is necessary for promoting the enjoyment of freedom as non-domination, not because of its independent attractions’. Apart from Pettit’s understanding of liberty in terms only of individuals, an understanding which necessarily excludes a collectivist notion of freedom such as would prevail in Rousseau’s republic, this approach creates a false dichotomy between freedom as non-domination and participation. In contrast, Michael Sandel has argued that to a republican, ‘liberty is understood as a consequence of self-government. I am free insofar as I am a member of a political community that controls its own fate, and a participant in the decisions that governs its affairs.’17 The republic as a polity governed by active citizens, self-governing because freely accepting the rule of all in the interest of res publica, is the mother principle sought by Jefferson. Such a republic is not inherently democratic, and modern republicanism is so only if democracy is defined in a particular manner, with reference to the active citizenship of the political nation rather than the ‘bare ballot-box democracy’18 of

6


universal suffrage. It is a deceptively simple concept, but it incorporates a complex variety of different conceptions, each conditioned by its particular historical context. Within this generic sense – the republican concept as one of participating citizens – can be included the particular republican conceptions which have been prevalent over time: the direct democracy of the Athenian assembly; the civic participation which marked political life in the Florentine republic, and which guaranteed the republican liberty of Sparta and Rome so admired by such widely differing theorists as Machiavelli and Rousseau; Sidney’s demand that ‘all are equally by turns to participate of the Honours annexed to Magistracy’; and Jefferson’s affirmation of the citizen’s right to be ‘a participator in the government of affairs’.19 Such a polity is communitarian in that it is ‘participatory’, a term which is identical to republican virtue because it implies obligation, duty and commitment to the ‘common good’ (the res publica). Participation in this sense of obligation and duty gives a specific meaning to the notion of virtue and community as the political activism of a citizenry devoted to public good, with its consequential notion of corruption as that pursuit of private interests which constitutes public apathy. This explains Algernon Sidney’s argument that ‘all popular and well-mixed governments . . . can never be upheld otherwise than by Virtue’.20 In this way, republican theorists resolved the traditional problems of authority and liberty by making the citizen participant in the authority by which he was ruled. In this sense of republicanism, corruption emerges as a concomitant of the virtue of participation. Corruption in republican theory was identified with the pursuit of self-interest, whether this was identified with the individualism of private wealth or with apathy.21 It necessarily lies at the heart of republican theory as a contrast to the virtue of civic participation. Thus, the main cause of corruption isolated by Machiavelli was ‘the exclusion of the people from playing a sufficiently active role in the business of government’.22 As such, the pursuit of private interest was the antithesis of a participating citizenry. It was in this sense that Rousseau saw the individual exercise of the private will, where it deviates from the public good, as a lapse of the duties of a citizen which would bring about the corruption of a free republic;23 the German-American republican theorist, Hannah Arendt, has written that in the conflict between private interest and the public good in the American Revolution, the revolutionaries ‘were those who, out of their genuine love for public freedom and public happiness rather than out

Introduction 7

of any self-sacrificing idealism, consistently thought and acted in terms of public affairs’.24 For her, public happiness was constituted by and equated with concern for the common good. In the sense of the term so specified, active citizenship becomes two political concepts – communitarian ‘participation’ and direct selfgovernment – connected in such an immanent manner that they are two aspects of the same concept. The fundamental condition of liberty, which transformed a subject into a citizen, was participation in the political nation; it was an indispensable condition of civic virtue, in which the citizen could act to his fullest capacity in the political life of the community for the common good. It was active citizenship in this fullest sense of the term – where ‘citizenship, liberty, and virtue are thus inseparably intermingled’25 – which could be contraposed to the liberal conception of individual autonomy from public affairs.26 Participation in government through active citizenship is the essential nature, the common element, which constitutes the concept of republicanism. As such, it can be isolated from the contingent forms – the conceptions – in which that theory has presented itself; at the same time it incorporates those conceptions, and that is what prevents it from becoming the meaningless tautology dismissed by John Adams and Daniel Rodgers.

The boundaries of the republic The problem of boundaries has shaped republicanism from its beginnings in the Greek city-states, and was to prove important in the elaboration of a republican politics in contemporary Britain, too. Who was to be included in the republic, who excluded? This question has determined the exact size of the political nation, and has been subject to great dispute within the republican tradition. Was the republic to be composed of men of property, men who bore arms or all adults within the boundaries of a geographical area? Historically, the boundaries of the polity were restricted to the independent. Only if a citizen was free to decide without fear of being punished by his master was he free to participate in government, which meant that citizens had to enjoy a political equality even if they were of unequal wealth. This was the basis of the belief noted by Quentin Skinner that a loss of the freedom to govern by an individual or a community meant virtual slavery, so that independence from tyranny was essential to both public and individual liberty.27 Republican liberty itself could be equated with the boundaries of the political nation because those boundaries were defined by independence.

8


The corollary was that if citizenship was restricted to the independent, those who depended for their living on others were not part of the polity. The excluded groups were dependent, the included independent. Women, servants, slaves, the propertyless had to be excluded because they were dependent on another, and were therefore denied the autonomy – the free reasoning – which was needed to think of the polity itself as the master. They were not equal, they did not rule themselves, and therefore they could not be ruled by their equals. Indeed, the extension of the franchise to the property-less, and then to women, was one of the forces making redundant the old republican politics which had inspired both English and American radicals in the eighteenth century. There was still a geographical distinction between the citizens and their dependents on the one side, and those who belonged to other communities, and this itself helped to shape republican thinking. There was a powerful relationship between the spirit of virtue and liberty which animated the republic internally and the vigour with which that republic presented itself abroad. Thus, Machiavelli saw the Roman Republic’s liberty as dependent upon it success in holding on to its foreign conquests. In England, Harrington saw the virtuous English republic as an oceanic hegemon, in which the conquering and landhungry citizens should colonize a papist Ireland. It was inherent in republican theory, then, to concentrate on the establishment of a virtuous democracy at home – within the city – rather than abroad. It could be imperialist, like the Cromwellians and the Jacobins, but only if it was felt that virtue was already established at home; it could also be an inspiration to peoples elsewhere struggling against tyranny, as Americans saw themselves as an inspiration to the South American revolutionaries in the early eighteenth century. However, if the state was corrupt, as the Roman republic eventually become corrupt, then imperialism would become a force which would destroy virtue (a recurring fear of the American Left).28 If independence was a mark of republican citizenship, then the social inequalities of wealth, marked by an unequal distribution of property, became a serious point of dispute within the republican tradition. For those of an egalitarian bent, it became a question of how citizens could be equal in political terms if they enjoyed an unequal disposition of the power brought by wealth. The answer was to be found in the idea of a ‘property-owners’ democracy’, in which an egalitarian distribution of property guaranteed republican liberty because it gave the individual freeholder an economic independence. James Harrington, a figure lauded by a New Left historian such as Christopher Hill because of his

Introduction 9

awareness of the economic realities underlying the polity, had presented the basic categories of such an economy in his Oceana (1656).29 The ownership of property in this conception was a guarantee of that independence which was the mark of citizenship. To prevent unequal economic power being reflected in that unequal political power which would have spelled the death of the republic, the amount of property to be owned by the individual yeoman was to be restricted in size. This would prevent the emergence of an oligarchy of wealth, of large proprietors who could create a tyranny to serve their particular private ends rather than a public good which could only be guaranteed by a citizenry equal in power, ruling others and being ruled by others. Just as republican politics stressed equal citizenship, so a republican economics stressed a roughly equal degree of property holding. Moreover, the theory could apply to property as such, not merely land. Property was the guarantee of that genuine independence which the citizen needed to follow the common good rather than a particular end. As larger property-holders would have a preponderance of power which would undermine, possibly fatally, the independence of other property-holders, so a rough equality lay behind Harrington’s Agrarian Law as it did Jefferson’s celebration of space in America which would allow independence for the husbandmen of the land. Self-government in the economic realm, allowing the virtue of the independent citizen to express his virtue (and his virtù) in a market economy, paralleled and founded the self-government of citizens in the political realm. Consequently, the society of small property-holders was the ideal of republican economic independence – a sharp contrast to the ‘corrupt squadron’ of stockjobbers dealing with paper capital or the mobs of great cities, the first corrupting parasites on the republic, the second a canker whose ‘dependence begets subservience and venality’.30 It was the basis of the idea of a property-owners’ democracy which was to be given a new republican expression in the late twentieth century. The flexibility of republicanism gives it an ability to adapt to very different historical circumstances. It was long believed that only through decentralization could republican participation find an effective expression, and only in city-states such as Classical Greece and Rome, and Italian city-republics such as Venice and Florence, could decentralization be effective. As expressed by an eighteenth-century American republican, ‘it is obvious that Civil Liberty, in its most perfect degree, can be enjoyed only in small states’ because only there could the people meet and conduct public affairs with personal knowledge of one another; one Pennsylvania radical looked back to the Saxon Age when

10 The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics

England was a society of ‘small republics’ in which the whole population would meet to decide questions of the common good.31 As a result, while republicanism may have found its most comfortable home in the old city-states of Athens and Rome, Venice and Florence, there were major problems in its transposition to a very different social and political environment. Republican ideas had to find a home in an environment dominated by monarchical, legal and theological concepts which were not suited to the definition of England as a polis or the Englishman as a citizen.32 The revolutionary turmoil of the seventeenth century eventually succeeded in implanting the language of republican theory in a ‘radical’ tradition, but the nature of the country’s governmental authority, conditioned as it has been to obedience rather than equal citizenship, condemned republican thought (of both Right and Left) to become the opposition to the Court. The crisis of republican thought emerged with its greatest clarity during the American Revolution, caused by the problem of how a large country such as the United States could retain the republican liberty identified with small states. It was a period which bridged ‘two intellectual worlds’, one world steeped in localist politics and expressed through the language of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance; the other concerned with problems of how democracy is to work in a mass society, expressed through the language of Madison and Tocqueville. Suddenly, republicanism had to redefine its claims in a new revolutionary milieu in which a modern mass democracy was being born, where the elected representative could take decisions with little reference to his constituency apart from election.33 The transition could be seen in Tom Paine’s advocacy of a republic, which conflated republican liberty with the absence of a monarch, ‘the royal brute’. He foreshadowed John Adams’ claim that a republic lacked specific meaning when he wrote that ‘what is called a republic is not any particular form of government’, but merely refers to any government whatsoever which is concerned for the public good – ‘Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interests of the public, as well individually as collectively.’ Similarly, the nationalist supporters of the US Constitution of 1787 appropriated the language of their ‘localist’ opponents to change the meaning of republicanism from its stricter sense of liberty as participation into a more general sense of a government created by and for the people. To Isaac Kramnick, ‘Madison’s brilliant achievement was the appropriation of a word with unmistakeable populist connotations for a governmental structure which . . . involved a serious diminution of popular participation’.34

Introduction 11

A satisfactory history of republicanism since that period has still to be written – no claim to such a history can be made here – but it seems certain that in Britain at least the stronger definition of republicanism embodied in the Saxon Constitution celebrated by Major Cartwright was gradually being replaced by a weaker definition of republicanism as mere anti-monarchism. The two notions were often intertwined (as seen by Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘Venetian’ structure of participation within the National Liberal Federation in 1877 or the participation of leading Liberals such as Isaac Foot in the Cromwell Society), but during the eighteenth century a new conception of democratic thinking was taking shape. It was ‘social’ rather than ‘political’, it was mainly concerned with economics and its stress on popular participation lay outside the polity – cooperative stores, trades unions, the local community. A socialist politics, in which republican language was diluted and sometimes submerged by an apocalyptic utopianism, was shifting its focus as a collectivist and communitarian solution to the failings of the market economy replaced the stress on political freedom. The language of citizenship was shifting from that of political freedom to ‘paternal care for the labouring classes and, with the notion of the “social state”, of a duty to provide a subsistence for the poor’.35 As a result, the notion of citizenship was becoming detached from participation and turned into representation, a shift resulting in a paternalist approach to social reform carried out by a State which somehow embodied the community as a whole. The twentieth-century world had fundamentally changed from that of the city-state in which republicanism had been born and nurtured. The problems of virtue and corruption within the market had long since given way to the problems of avoiding a major slump in demand and employment, or later with maintaining full employment and stable prices. These problems appeared to demand an efficient management of the economy by the mandarins of the Treasury and the Bank of England, modifying the trade cycle through the ‘fine-tuning’ of fiscal and monetary policy, and managing the exchange rate of sterling against other states. It was a necessarily elitist and statist approach, against which the republican demand for citizen participation appeared irrelevant. If the size of the polity posed serious problems for direct participation in a mass society, they were as nothing compared with those posed by this increasingly oligopolistic economy, where local communities as much as individuals were dwarfed by arcane decisions taken by distant bureaucrats, financiers and industrialists. The social power of such


impersonal forces, in a society where contract was replacing community as the nexus between people, was more subtle and less easy to confront than the more transparent rule of the old monarchies and aristocracies. It was in such an apparently inhospitable environment that republicanism re-emerged as an intellectual force in British politics.

Part One Republican Socialism


1 Socialist Humanism and Republican Theory

Paradoxically, it was in the party most committed to the expansion of the centralized state from which a new republican conception was to emerge. Struggling to carve out a politics which decisively broke from their past, a group of radical intellectuals were forced to confront a Marxist analysis which still held much of the Left intellectually in thrall. They did so by attempting to rediscover a lost history of radical politics before it had been tainted with Stalinism or settled into a narrow materialism. At the same time as they elaborated a new republican conception of politics, their attempts to connect to the social problems faced by the Labour Movement in an open and critical manner led the problematic of that politics to emerge with a clarity which was not seen elsewhere. The Communist Party was, from its inception, a vigorous defender of a power regarded by the British political mainstream as an alien tyranny. In order to overcome the pariah status to which it was subject, the party had long sought to prove its respectability. Communists were constantly at pains to stress the British nature of the Party, and to deny the accusations that they were in any sense a culture apart, especially when British troops fought Communists in Korea, and when a witchhunt was taking place against Communists within the British Labour Movement. Eric Hobsbawm, in a 1954 Political Quarterly article, stressed that ‘while the party is unquestionably a novel political phenomenon in this as in all other countries, it has its roots as deeply in British traditions as any other party’.1 In order to overcome their isolation, the Communists had made vigorous attempts to link themselves with the political mainstream since the mid-thirties, when the strategy of the Popular Front had been adopted by the Communist International as a move designed to link Communists 15


with the progressive democratic parties of the bourgeoisie in order to fight Fascism. They sought to establish themselves as true patriots, seeking to lead a popular alliance for peace, national independence, and better living standards against the monopoly capitalists, who had sold the national culture to save their profits.2 Communist intellectuals, seeking to develop Marxist theory as a British phenomenon, had been organized by the Party in special professional sections – for scientists, writers, artists, historians and economists. Within these workgroups, George Thomson demanded the protection of the British cultural tradition against American degenerate taste, while Maurice Dobb provided the intellectual backbone for a theory of state monopoly capitalism. However, the most important of these professional groups turned out to be the Communist Historians Group. Their desire to recapture popular struggles in British history from the Levellers to the Chartists was an expression of their project, which was ‘to reactivate a nationalpopular consciousness . . . a profound sense of Englishness’,3 the historical equivalent of the work of the other Communist workgroups. It was formally established in 1946 and became a flourishing set of mainly London-based historians, including Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton and Raphael Samuel, who were to reshape the writing of history in Britain in the coming decades.4 Their major collection, Democracy and the Labour Movement (1954), edited by John Saville, was ‘a sort of shop-window for the work done by members of the Group’,5 though their journal, Past and Present, was their lasting legacy. In their work, the Communist Historians sought to link the Socialist movement to the democratic, rather than the socialist, tradition in an attempt to show that they were its heirs. A.L. Morton, in a 1953 article on ‘Socialist Humanism’, argued that the establishment of the truth of the vision of More and Milton was now possible, and called for ‘the development of our rich native Humanist tradition with all the additional strength that our struggle for Socialism brings it’.6 It was not the republican nature of this tradition which interested the Group, however. They were interested in a specifically English tradition of the lost rights of a common people living under an alien yoke in the belief that this alien yoke still existed. To Christopher Hill, the Norman Yoke theory ‘made the permanently valid point that the ruling class is alien to the interests of the vast majority of the population’. As a result, the ‘radical’ tradition was seen as reaching out to the Levellers as part of ‘the continuous, popular, patriotic tradition, which links the

Socialist Humanism and Republican Theory 17

working-class movement with the very earliest part of our history’. The popular democratic nationalism which they expressed had its roots deep in English soil, in a Saxon tradition of rights lost when the alien yoke of the Norman ruling classes was imposed, so that ‘men fought for the liberties of England, for the birthrights of Englishmen’.7 To Dona Torr, while ‘John Ball’s theory of lost rights emerged from the realities of fourteenth-century English society . . . there was already in existence a long tradition of such theories’.8 The Communist Historians were concerned with the democratic nature of this ‘Englishness’ (they saw ‘democracy’ as the connecting link with contemporary struggles against Britain’s rulers), but the republican nature of much of this tradition was of no relevance to their needs. Dona Torr could quote the Soviet minister Zhdanov approvingly when he wrote of the new type of democracy existing in Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary; A.L. Morton, in his call for the revival of the Renaissance ideal that man is the measure of all things, saw Stalin as the embodiment of the new Socialist Humanism; and Eric Hobsbawm could describe the Jacobin and Rousseauist ideals as a paranoid version of democracy which reflected an emerging capitalist society.9 Eric Hobsbawm has subsequently written that ‘our work as historians was embedded in our work as Marxists, which we believed to imply membership of the Communist Party’.10 For all their attempts to break from an abstract economic determinism, the Communist Historians remained tied to the base-superstructure model in their method. Dona Torr may have tried to breathe the spirit of the ‘radical’ tradition into her work, but she made clear her belief that ‘consciousness of the conflict between productive forces and social relations, however it might be expressed, was the magic which brought scientific Socialism to birth in Britain two generations ago’.11 Christopher Hill may have stressed his view of Marxism as ‘a technique of analysis, a method of approach, not a dogma’,12 but he accepted as much as the others that the economic structure determined both the political superstructure and ideology.13 It was this method which enabled the Communist Historians to reject the republican notions of democracy at the same time that they were attempting to appropriate the British ‘radical’ tradition. To them, the direct participation of the republic belonged to an earlier period of small handicraftsmen and artisans, before capitalism brought with it the great armies of proletarians and mass machinery. Thus Christopher Hill, while extolling the New Model Army as England’s first democratic army,


wrote that ‘the agitators and the Levellers dreamed of a democracy of small producers because there was as yet no class which could challenge the existence of capitalism as a system’.14 They spoke ‘on behalf of the small proprietors in town and countryside’,15 and their notions of free Anglo-Saxons became irrelevant as the working class began to flex its muscles. Instead, the English ‘radical’ tradition was presented merely as the story of a common struggle for freedom which had now been given a new depth by the growth of Marxism. Previous ‘radical’ thinkers and activists could all be safely slotted into the past, connected with British Marxism mainly by the emotional ties of common struggle against an alien ruling class. As Dona Torr expressed it, the growth of a Socialist movement meant that ‘the backward look to the Garden of Eden or to the free Anglo-Saxons was transmuted into the determination to build a good society on rational principles in the future’.16 The paradox was that however much they might seek integration into the mainstream, the very nature of the Communist Party posed an insuperable obstacle. Their Stalinist ideology made a mockery of the intelligentsia’s aspirations to recapture the British ‘radical’ tradition. Stalin was the symbol of Soviet tyranny to almost all shades of British politics, but to the Communists he was the personification of Soviet popular strength and wartime resistance, the heir of Marx and Lenin.17 The Party’s authoritarian organizational structure also isolated it from the British ‘radical’ tradition. Where radicals and socialists in Britain had always laid great store by dissent and the rights of non-conformity, the Communists imposed a model of democratic centralism (‘the subordination of the minority to the majority, strict party discipline and all members working under the direction of their appropriate Party organization’18) which served to stultify any attempt to think outside the parameters set by the party leadership. Such a structure had a major effect on the development of Marxist theory because it was used to ensure that the intellectuals – a much distrusted section within a party which had a mainly working-class membership – were restrained by Party discipline from wandering into ideologically dangerous territory. Nevertheless, the research into the British radical tradition had focused the attention of a series of gifted young historians, several of whom would be directly involved in the New Left, on the British ‘radical’ tradition, a tradition which placed a stress on a republican democracy which differed greatly from the parliamentary forms they found in twentiethcentury Britain. While the republican nature of that democracy tended to be overlooked, there was an emphasis on democratic struggle as the


object of historical and political concern. When a break occurred with the Stalinist politics of the Communist Party and with the reductionist model of historical materialism, the possibility of a very different politics from the Stalinist version of Marxism could present itself.

The formation of the New Left The destruction of Stalin as the symbol of the Soviet Union, crystallized by Khruschev’s denunciation of the dictator in February 1956, loosened the bonds of discipline which bound Communist parties to the USSR, and which bound the intelligentsia to the Communist Parties. Amid the wave of protest, two of the Communist Historians, John Saville and Edward Thompson, criticized the procedure of party discipline which had prevented open criticism of Party decisions by dissidents, and which had as a result prevented any free elaboration of Marxist theory. Edward Thompson used the party’s commitment to resurrecting a British democratic tradition in history against the party’s Stalinism. He argued that much of British Communism had become out of touch with British conditions, asking ‘how much winter wheat (from seed matured in Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk) have we been ploughing into British furrows . . . when, if we had attended more closely to our own conditions, our own climate, we might have grown rich crops?’.19 Drawing on his work with the Communist Historians, he accused the Party leaders of ignoring the English ‘radical’ tradition of morality, and called for Milton and (oddly) Shakespeare to be recognized along with Marx and Lenin as part of this ‘radical’ tradition. Thompson’s work in the Historians Group was leading him to draw out the contrast between the Party’s practice and its radical nationalist rhetoric. In their unofficial theoretical journal, The Reasoner, Thompson and Saville attacked the rigidities of democratic centralism and elaborated on the need for a more genuine connection to the British radical tradition. They counterposed the need for political morality to the barren formulae of historical inevitability with which they had been fed by the Party. In adopting the amorality of Marxist notions of historical materialism, they admitted that they had betrayed the proud traditions of the British Radical and Socialist movement, with its stress on nonconformity and dissent. In doing so, they felt that they had themselves been responsible for the intellectual failures of Marxism in Britain, because they saw moral and political integrity as being inseparably intertwined – ‘it is no accident that our moral and political reactions have been so feeble, for


the one involves the other, and the weakening of the moral basis of our political life necessarily makes less vigorous our practical judgements and our practical activity’.20 It was the ferocious Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in October–November 1956, which led to the resignation from the Party of the editors of The Reasoner (along with many other intellectuals and trade unionists21). In a painful and impassioned appeal, the editors urged ‘all those who, like ourselves, will dissociate themselves completely from the leadership of the British Communist Party, not to lose faith in Socialism, and to find ways of keeping together’.22 Some dissidents (such as Hobsbawm) reluctantly remained within the Party; others joined the Labour party or passed into the political limbo of Trotskyism.23 However, for those ex-Communists around the defunct Reasoner who felt the need to develop a socialist theory independently of the Labour Left, both Hungary and Suez had confirmed them in their belief that a new Marxism was needed. They participated in the abortive socialist forums which sought to rally ex-Communists in the spring of 195724 and, in the summer of 1957, the ex-editors of The Reasoner decided to set up its political heir, The New Reasoner.25 While Thompson and Saville remained the editors, an editorial board comprised other dissident Communists like the novelist, Doris Lessing and the economist, Ronald Meek. Its theoretical impact was to prove of far greater import than its weak circulation figures (about 2,000 within the first year) at first suggest. Moreover, it was not alone. Close links were forged with The Universities and Left Review (ULR), a journal issued by a small group of Oxford graduates around the Oxford Socialist Club, the successor to the Communist Club which had disbanded itself after Hungary. The Suez crisis had convinced them that British imperialism was on a similar moral plane to the Soviet Union, and many had participated in the ‘Law, not War’ demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square on 4 November 1956, which had ended in violent clashes with the police.26 The new journal was edited by Stuart Hall, a West Indian student of literature; Gabriel Pearson, the editor of Oxford Poetry; Raphael Samuel, a History graduate; and Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosophy graduate; within a year they had raised enough money to open up a highly successful coffee house – billed as ‘London’s first anti-Espresso bar’27 – in Carlisle Street, Soho, in May of 1958. These journals were able to build up a series of links with similar New Left groups appearing in the rest of the Western world, particularly with a faction of the Italian Socialist Party led by Lelio Basso; the neutralist


Union de la Gauche Socialiste in France around Claude Bourdet,; and the New Left American Socialists around Dissent and the Wisconsin Studies on the Left.28 There was a certain amount of political tension between the two periodicals which kept them at a friendly arm’s length for the first two years of their existence. The editors of The New Reasoner were reluctant to break with the Marxism of their past, and declared themselves in solidarity with ‘those workers and intellectuals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are fighting for . . . [a] return to Communist principle’.29 In sharp contrast, the ULR editors (with the exception of Raphael Samuel) were much more heterodox in their approach towards Marxism, and as such were able to provide a sharper and more critical analysis of Marxist theory.30 By the autumn of 1958, the ULR editors were explaining their adherence to a new stance which stressed the importance of culture and community – ‘we have come to it ourselves only in the course of trying to push past the limits of specialized problems, in the attempt to find some vantage point from which to make a deep criticism, not merely of some institutions but of a whole culture’.31 The potentialities of discord between the two journals were held in check by the tolerant approach which stressed the importance of allowing ‘a hundred schools to contend’,32 and the acceptance by both the ULR and The New Reasoner of a commitment to ‘a deep radical critique of our society, a critique informed by humanism’.33 There was more to unite than to divide them. The process by which the two journals merged took place relatively slowly, but in December 1959, the editorial boards of both journals were merged, with Stuart Hall as the full-time editor, and the New Left Review was launched at a public meeting at St Pancras Town Hall.

A flowering of ideas Christopher Hill, in an article appearing in the New Left Review in 1960, wrote of the English Republicans after the Restoration in a manner which appeared to be directly allusive to the young editors of that journal. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Good Old Cause (a parallel of sorts to the Communist collapse after Hungary), ‘what survived of the popular republican tradition in England in the difficult years after 1660 was handed on in discussions in coffee-houses, which emerged as centres of seditious activity’;34 the New Left owners of the Partisan Coffee Bar cannot have missed the parallel.


There were serious differences of approach within the New Left; the New Reasoner writers were much less willing to renounce Marxism, especially the existence of class war, and were more reluctant to break with the USSR than those of the ULR. However, the ex-Communist historians who had concentrated on the British ‘radical’ tradition had found a connection with the young radicals of the ULR in the development of a republican conception of politics in a successful capitalist society. This conception was often expressed in a Marxist language conditioned by their past, but it was the felt need to address the British Labour Movement, the heritage of that past, that made their analysis of contemporary British capitalism such an innovative intellectual force. Freed from the censorship and intellectual constraints of Stalinism, a mushrooming of ideas took place in the New Left, as explorations in history and morality competed with arguments about film, jazz and town planning. To describe such a disparate group as republican may seem too narrow in the light of the diversity of intellectual influences operating.35 The influence of French existentialist philosophy, particularly the stress on individual commitment in an indifferent world, was pursued at one point by Alasdair MacIntyre,36 while William Morris’s ideas of Socialist Fellowship – communitarian and millenarian rather than republican – were openly espoused by Edward Thompson. Later, nihilist and Western Marxist vocabularies were brought into the New Left lexicon. However, a process of merely listing influences and concepts is an inadequate way to approach any cluster of ideas in time. It fails to sift an essential coherence from fashionable trends, and it risks being wrongly perceived as incoherent (as a parallel, the nineteenth-century Fabians contained Marxists, but their coherence as a gradualist form of socialism was not affected by this). Apocalyptic and Western Marxist influences, while certainly present, did not define the New Left in Britain during this period. While existentialist ideas were very fashionable among the British intelligentsia at this time, as signified by the success of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), the individualist basis of those ideas conflicted with the communitarian stance of the New Left. Jean-Paul Sartre’s stress on the hostility of the ego to other egos (‘Hell is Other People’) may have been intensely absorbing for some alienated bohemian intellectuals, but it could not find a political expression in the New Left’s emphasis on community. While MacIntyre and Taylor certainly experimented with existentialist ideas, they were attempting to incorporate notions of commitment in a meaningless universe into their own communitarian


concerns. Indeed, their attacks on liberalism (narrowly defined as the philosophy of the isolated person, the possessive individual) ran directly counter to such an individualist philosophy. It could be argued that Edward Thompson’s enthusiasm for the ideas of William Morris (who was not a republican) and his ideas of socialist fellowship was a more accurate index of New Left theory. However, it was Morris’s communitarian politics rather than his anti-industrial millenarianism which was taken up. Thompson’s concern with the radical artisans and craftsmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one in which an apocalyptic vision was taking a secular form. When he quoted a Sheffield dissenting minister attacking the Establishment in 1808, he heard ‘a voice out of the old England of Winstanley and Bunyan, but of an old England which had begun to read Cobbett’.37 William Morris was seen in the light of this pre-socialist tradition, much of which had absorbed republican concepts formulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, it is precisely at moments of crisis such as that which occurred in 1956 that a dichotomy arises between language and concepts, when new concepts are expressed in terms of the existing normative vocabulary. For the New Reasoner writers, that normative vocabulary was a particular version of Marxism, and it was the limited similarity of the languages of Marxism and republicanism which allowed a republican politics to be expressed in a deceptively Marxist language. For all the multi-faceted influences on the New Left, it could be argued that republican political theory, understood in a particular manner, was their defining characteristic. Even if an argument prevailed that there was no one defining characteristic of the varied New Left proposals, it was the republican idea which was to have a lasting influence on British politics, and it is this characteristic which makes it worthy of abstraction from the varied literary, social and educational themes taken up by the New Left.

Socialist Humanism and morality I have argued that republican political thought can be characterized, at its most general, as two political concepts – communitarian participation and direct self-government – which are connected in such an immanent manner that they are two aspects of the same concept of participatory citizenship. Participation in the political nation was the substance of civic virtue, in which the citizen would act to his fullest capacity in the political life of the community for the common good. As such, it


counterposed itself directly to the corruption of political life signified by the pursuit of private interest at the expense of the common good. The ex-Communist Historians who now gathered around the New Reasoner were particularly susceptible to this republican approach because they had been attempting to recover the British radical tradition as it had existed prior to the growth of Socialism. In sloughing off the adherence to democratic centralism in 1956 and then finding themselves having to confront a society which had appeared to have escaped the old cycles of boom and slump in favour of an endless affluence, they were free to use the attractive elements of this tradition in order to look at British capitalism, or rather British society, with a fresh perspective. The problem was that their Marxist background had led them to reject the republican nature of that tradition as belonging to a pre-capitalist society. With the Communist Party no longer seen as the fulfilment of British radicalism, and with that radicalism no longer seen as relevant to a capitalist society, the New Reasoner editors were left with a potential intellectual and political vacuum. The result was a heart-felt but vague call for morality in left-wing politics, combined with the assertion that Marx’s revolutionary ideas remained relevant. However, the long-standing concern for the recovery of a pre-socialist and democratic politics and the contribution of the ULR editors was to give this morality a substance which amounted to the development of a new republican conception. The superficially Marxist language of class which they used disguised the fact that this Socialist Humanism was a renewal of an earlier, pre-Marxist radicalism which required a new republican conceptual language – alienation and the oligarchy of ‘the insiders’, the Great Apathy and commitment. At first, Edward Thompson’s exposition of the new politics was an extension of his arguments for freedom of thought against the tyranny of democratic centralism. Thus, he defined Socialist Humanism in opposition to Stalinism, which he regarded as an ideology in the traditional Marxist sense; it was a form of false consciousness based on the premise that people and facts must conform to ideas, rather than the old Marxist notion that ideas stem from social reality. The revolt against Stalinism was, then, a revolt against an inhuman doctrine which subordinated people and intellectual integrity to a bureaucratic, instrumentalist approach. Thompson used this revolt to attempt a definition of Socialist Humanism – ‘it is humanist because it places once again real men and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration instead of the resounding abstractions – the Party, Marxism-Leninism . . . It is socialist because it reaffirms the revolutionary . . . potentialities . . . of real men and women’.38


These potentialities were above all realized in the free expression of ideas by the intelligentsia. Thompson argued that thinking is a creative activity which could not be reduced to simple class categories; people with similar class experiences thought differently, and outstanding individuals like Shakespeare and Marx did not merely reflect their own class position. Underlying their particular economic interests were the interests of mankind as a whole, and it was this perception which constituted ‘Humanism’ for Thompson. He argued that the advance which resulted from the interplay of ideas was not ‘a weapon, or a dialectic, or a new class-bound ideology, but the sum of the knowledge of man’.39 It was this break from the traditional Marxist conceptions of ideology which led Thompson to insist that ‘only casuistry could argue that Shakespeare and Blake were “reflecting” the future interests of the working class. They were the tongues which . . . spoke for humanity.’40 Morality was not, therefore, the same as class interest; rather, it challenged or it justified class interests. It was the moral conduct of men rather than abstract economic automata which served as the inspiration of change, and it was Marx’s anguish at the immorality and cruelty suffered by real people rather than the dry formulae of Capital which moved him to argue for revolutionary politics. It was the belief that ‘a moral end can only be attained by moral means’41 which lay at the heart of Thompson’s Socialist Humanism, an approach which would judge the individual person rather than exonerate immoral actions undertaken behind the cloak of class interests. In this way, it was not economic production which was fundamental in history, but the intellectual and moral life of humanity; to Thompson, ‘in the last analysis, ideas matter: . . . it is man’s business, if he is not to be the mere victim of involuntary reflexes or of a pre-determined historical flux, to strive to understand himself and his times, and to make reasonable and right choices. This gives to all our imaginative work a significance at once terrible and hopeful.’42 However, unlike the theorists who served as their immediate inspiration – Leszek Kolakowski and those East European Socialists who painfully adjusted their Marxism to turn it into a critique of the regime against which they felt so disillusioned – Thompson was not arguing against any Stalinist government. Once out of the Communist Party, the Stalinist enemy gradually ceased to be anything more than a convenient windmill to serve as a universally agreed evil. The New Left were not living in Poland or Hungary; they were perfectly free to write and organize without an oppressive authority attempting to stop them. It was very inspiring to hear that the enemy was inhumanity – ‘the


dogmatism and abstractions of the heart’43 – and that the answer was ‘the emergence of a warm, personal and humane socialist morality’.44 However, this would have to be given much more substance if it was not to evaporate into a well-meaning gush of sentiment, and it was his own intellectual creativity which would achieve this. Thompson knew that Socialist Humanism could only be relevant if it could be directed against the much closer enemy of capitalism. Therefore, he argued that the revolt against Marxist determinism in the East was identical in nature to the revolt against the moral myopia and political inertia which had gripped liberal democracy in the West. In both East and West, people felt themselves to be victims of technological change or international accidents over which they exercised no control. They felt impotent in the face of the great bureaucratic institutions of the State, Capital and Labour. In the East, the absence of political freedoms was visible for all to see, but in the West there was a similar lack of genuine freedom. The difference was that this absence was less obvious, coinciding as it did with formal freedoms which appeared to guarantee choice. In fact, real choice was prescribed within very narrow limits by factors such as ‘expert’ opinion, the needs of the economy, and the requirements of national security. The revolt of Socialist Humanism against this subtle ‘philistinism’ was a recovery of the radical tradition; it was ‘the vindication of the right of the moral imagination to project an ideal to which it is legitimate to aspire’.45 The rekindling of moral and intellectual passion in the British Labour Movement could direct it away from the narrow bread-and-butter questions which had so stunted its initiative. Thompson46 described himself at the time as a Marxist and a Communist, but this was a very different tradition which he was trying to revive, with precious little in common with Marxism except the term. His focus on the stultification of the moral imagination by Old Corruption, and the need for active participation in political life to combat the rule of a self-interested elite, was an incipient republican politics (albeit fused with a tendency to apocalyptic, as seen in his continual enthusiasm for William Blake). This politics was to be taken up by the ULR editors.

Apathy and alienation The editors of the ULR quickly grasped the implications of Thompson’s Socialist Humanism and adapted it to their own concerns with alienation, culture and community. Thompson’s damnation of Stalinist ideology, ‘which reduces the moral consciousness to class relativism or to


Pavlovian behaviourism, forgets the creative spark without which man would not be man’,47 fitted in with their own interest in finding a new socialist politics which stressed democratic participation. They were able to equate his call for moral commitment with their interest in the organic community, and his denunciation of apathy with the particular meaning they ascribed to alienation, a term much in vogue in the late 1950s. G.D.H. Cole, whose early writings on Guild Socialism could provide a Socialist link with the republican tradition, adopted them critically,48 but it was Thompson who had the moral authority and the experience to provide a clarion call for the new Socialism they were looking for. Just as the republican traditions of the Renaissance had once identified the corruption of the people as the chief reason for the collapse of republican liberty, so the ULR editors identified the corruption of the working class by affluence as the main cause of the decline of the organic community. Where the civic humanists saw this manifestation of popular corruption in the exclusion of the people from an active role in political life,49 for the New Left it also lay in the exclusion – the alienation in terms then becoming fashionable – of the people from a part in that active political life which characterized a truly democratic state. Thompson and the New Left expressed a disgust at the vulgar commercialism of capitalist society, pointing as it did to the perverted scale of values which made material wealth and commodities into symbols of success in a society marked by cultural sterility. The bright advertising and attractive packaging of consumer capitalism created artificial needs based on material affluence and competitive success. The subjection of the consumer to manipulation and a debased form of persuasion, noted by popular sociologists of the time,50 was seen as a mark of a fundamental degeneration. As Stuart Hall put it eloquently, ‘Has the Labour Movement come through the fire and brimstone of the last fifty years to lie down and die before the glossy magazines? Has Labour no sense of the capacities, the potential of a society – more various, more skilled, more literate, less cramped and confined, less beaten down and frustrated?’51 The corruption of the populace – which the republican tradition had historically expressed in terms of military apathy and purposeless growth of wealth52 – took the form in Britain of what Thompson called ‘the Great Apathy’,53 which had arisen as a result of a growing economic affluence and the military, political and cultural consequences of the Cold War. This general apathy paralysed any prospect of change in society, reducing social grievances into apparently personal problems. To Thompson, a ‘Natopolitan’ culture of quietism and social atrophy had smothered the once radical impulses of a Labour Movement whose


higher goals of a new social order had ossified into a pursuit of consumer satisfaction. He believed that ‘at the heart of a disintegrating imperial system, with weapons of annihilation poised over the earth, the Natopolitan walks carefully down well-known streets, putting his securities in the bank’.54 The Great Apathy was the result of the more fundamental problem of alienation in modern capitalism – a theme coming into vogue in the late 1950s with the increasing interest in Marx’s Paris Manuscripts and the popularity of books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. However, the New Left gave the concept of alienation an interpretation of their own which was beginning to crystallize as a republican rather than a Marxist concept. Charles Taylor pointed to utilitarianism as the ideology of alienation, the Western equivalent of the Stalinist enemy. With its ‘quasi-economic book-keeping model of behaviour’,55 utilitarianism looked to the isolated, atomized individual, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain at the expense of the values of the community as a whole. Utilitarianism regarded work as a means to the end of leisure rather than as a worthy end in itself. Leisure, too, was seen in terms of the atomized individual, a fact which was becoming clearer as society grew to a prosperity which would allow it to shed the anti-social practices of the period of primitive accumulation described by Marx. While the ideals of self-sacrifice and denial had declined, no viable meaning had emerged in their place. Instead, leisure had become a consumption good, and leisure-time merely a vacuum in which the good was to be possessed. The result was a sense of futility and anxiety among society’s youth, degenerating into a search for status and consumer symbols for the married. In the sense that the need for conformity and its search for status expressed ‘the raw feeling of futility periodically slaked in the Dreamland of the mass media’,56 utilitarianism was true to modern society. It did reflect people’s experiences and modes of behaviour, but it also blocked off the fundamental questions of the quality of cultural life or the purpose of work. As a result, Taylor derided it as ‘the philosophy of alienated man’.57 Taylor chose the term ‘alienation’ because of its Marxist connotations, having brought back to Oxford a French translation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, and carefully differentiated the term from the Durkheimian notion of anomie, the absence of social rules, with which it was often confused.58 Marx’s own interpretation of alienation bore little resemblance to the republican notion of the populace excluded from political citizenship – he saw it as a rupture of the relationship between man and


nature mediated by labour59 – but Taylor still argued that Marx’s collective view of humanity and his concern with alienation at work grasped the structure behind anomie. It was Raymond Williams, an unorthodox socialist academic, who helped to complete the New Left interpretation of alienation as political corruption by giving it a cultural form, thereby giving ‘culture’ a new political meaning as the power of and over communication in society. He provided the New Left with a dramatic awareness of the cultural domination of the British working class by their rulers through his influential books, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), decisively shifting the interest of the New Left from questions of economic exploitation to those of cultural domination. Raymond Williams had a major intellectual influence on the ULR editors, particularly Stuart Hall. He saw culture not as appreciation of great works of art and literature, or even as the manifestation of popular entertainment, but as power. To Williams, it was through culture that the working class was dominated. Popular culture in the age of the mass media was controlled by a ruling elite which had little but contempt for the people they were entertaining. The television controllers, advertisers and journalists communicated as equals with the educated bourgeoisie, but regarded the ‘masses’ for whom they wrote as gullible and herdlike. Williams argued that ‘if our purpose is art, education, the giving of information or opinion, our interpretation will be in terms of the rational and interested being. If, on the other hand, our purpose is manipulation – the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, know, in certain ways – the convenient formula will be that of the masses.’60 Williams’s democratic instinct helped to reconcile the burgeoning republicanism of the ULR with the labourist traditions of the British working class, which had always stressed the need to overcome capitalist exploitation by trade union struggles for higher living standards. He did not identify apathy as the corruption of the working class by leisure goods and argued against the theory that cars, television sets and washing machines were corrupting the proletariat. To Williams, ‘few who have ever been poor and badly housed and lacking in personal property have wanted to retain the simplicity which others have assigned to them . . . These changes are changes in the use of personal things, and have nothing to do with becoming bourgeois in any real sense.’61 However, he believed that the corruption of the working class was taking a more dangerous and insidious form. He found the inertia and apathy which had shrouded the Labour Movement since the defeat of the General Strike as profoundly degrading – it should be remembered


in this context that no union conducted a national strike between 1926 and 1957. The strike or the riot of the past had been an indication of the political health of ordinary people in an undemocratic society. Now, with society still marked by inequality and social domination, the working class accepted their place by a withdrawal of interest in public life and a sceptical disbelief in the information fed to them. In describing this situation as a mockery of the democratic processes of government, and a dangerous mood for British society where a degree of common interest and mutual effort was necessary, Williams was developing the emerging republican conception in a new and powerful manner. It was in this analysis that the New Left could see their way towards a theory of alienation which seemed more relevant than that offered by the ‘economistic’ Marx. It was through the institutions of education and communication that public opinion was now believed to be moulded in the ideas of the dominant social images – the eternal nature of the social hierarchy in which working class people had a distinctly inferior position, the natural character of the distinction between an educated elite and an ignorant mass content to be fed with cultural pap.62 Thus, the New Left saw alienation in cultural terms, but cultural in the wider sense of questions of value and meaning as determined by power in society. Hailing the emphasis given to ‘culture’ as opposed to the ‘materialism’ of the Old Left, they were adamant that ‘cultural questions are questions about life . . . These cultural questions are not only questions of value; they are also, in the stricter sense, questions of political power.’63 In this spirit, the New Left attacked the corrupt values of capitalist society, pointing to the liberal individualism which marked that society as profoundly undemocratic, despite the existence of parliamentary democracy. To Raphael Samuel, ‘Britain . . . is a society divided against itself: a democratic society which yet has been unable to create for itself a genuinely democratic way of life.’64 Raymond Williams called for cultural communication to be seen in democratic terms – an offering to equals rather than a proclamation from above. He believed that an undemocratic, elitist class structure which stressed the hierarchy of individual success and esteem had to be replaced by a democratic community based on dignity and respect for all its members.

The New Left and British democracy It was in their analysis of the lack of democracy in British society that the New Left succeeded in elaborating their republican conception of politics. It was the absence of that spirit of citizenship which, according


to republicans, gave life to democracy, preventing its degeneration into a corrupt apathy in which private interests took precedence over the ‘common good’ . Their concern with demonstrating the relevance of a participatory democracy of concerned citizens led them to analyse the undemocratic structures characterizing British political and social life, where they found this self-interested activity among the ruling elite as a mirror reflection of the self-interested apathy of the general people. They were presented with an opportunity to press their case with the Labour Party’s adoption of the revisionist document, Industry and Society, in 1957. This advocated strategies such as the purchase of shares in industry by the state as a substitute for nationalization, based on the then-popular argument that there was a separation of ownership from control in modern industry. The ULR editors (together with Peter Sedgwick, a Balliol psychology student), sought to give a theoretical backbone to the Labour Left opposition to the document by producing a major article, ‘The Insiders’ (later published as a pamphlet), and in so doing they gave a startling expression to the emerging republican critique of British capitalism. The authors recognized that capitalism had changed from Victorian times, forcing a reconsideration of traditional programmes, especially with regard to public ownership. However, arguing on the basis of a wealth of statistical material that ownership had not in fact become divorced from control, they drew very different conclusions from those of the revisionists. While shareholding had become widely dispersed, a minority of large shareholders continued to dictate the policy of firms through a series of inter-locking shareholdings and directorates. To the ULR this small group of ‘insiders’, wielding control of the major financial and industrial institutions, represented anonymous companies or banks which had no concern for the community; instead ‘they serve the purpose of complete anonymity of ownership and interest – a growing characteristic of our corporate economy’.65 It was the selfinterested elite, acting in their own interests rather than those of the res publica, which had long been identified as part of the corruption of the participatory community. If the state bought into these firms, it would become merely a partner in the corporate system instead of challenging the real centres of power and wealth which underlay that system. As an investor, the state would share the same interests as those of the corporatists, especially in the profitable pricing of goods, and would not be able to limit dividends or object to a high level of retained profits because it would itself be hurt by such a policy. The result of the Labour Party’s new programme would


be that, ‘as a private shareholder, the State would legitimize the most anti-social behaviour of the modern oligopolies’.66 It would underwrite the undemocratic structure of capitalist society which Socialists had sought to abolish. This analysis of the consequences of state aid to capitalism pointed to a fundamental difference between the New Left and the traditional Labour Left on the question of public ownership. While the Bevanites continued at this time to stress nationalization while relegating the role of industrial democracy to one of consultation,67 the New Left argued that traditional nationalization had not meant an increase in social control anyway. They denied that the State was somehow in itself the embodiment of the res publica because it did not represent genuine citizens. Indeed, the experience of public ownership in Britain had confirmed the fear that bureaucracy and paternalism would follow the replacement of private by state ownership, an experience corroborated by the development of state planning in the Soviet Union. In contrast, the New Left argued for the replacement of market relations and state efficiency by a humanist ethic as the centre of Socialist aims. In this perspective, it could be seen that while capitalism had changed since Victorian times, alienation had remained at its heart. To the ULR editors, ‘the fundamental criticism of capitalism . . . was that every facet of capitalist civilization combined to impair the wholeness of man’s personality’.68 The alienation of man from the means of production had been increased, not diminished, by the concentration of power in large-scale organizations, presenting a radical threat to community life by taking no account of the individual autonomy and citizenship of its members. To overcome this alienation, the participation represented by industrial democracy would need to be resurrected, with a new and urgent importance. A policy of workers control at the grassroots was needed to revive the citizen democracy which the New Left saw as the essence of a socialist society, and this pointed away from the Labour Left’s emphasis on traditional nationalization. The ULR editors stressed that ‘nationalization is not enough. It expropriates the capitalist, but cannot itself free the worker. We must also have a real participation by the workers in the management of industry and adequate safeguards against the irresponsible use of power or privilege.’69 A similar, essentially republican, analysis of a capitalist society where power had been concentrated in a centralized social elite which was undemocratic despite the existence of universal suffrage was given by Ralph Miliband, a lecturer from the London School of Economics.


In adapting the neo-Marxist sociological theories of the American power elite articulated by C. Wright Mills70 to the British context, he alerted British radicals to the burgeoning intellectual renaissance of the American New Left, which was itself developing a neo-Jeffersonian politics for its own society.71 In a series of articles for the New Reasoner, Miliband first began to attack the weakness of the Left’s reaction to corporate capitalism, drawing a preliminary outline of an analysis which was to bear fruit in his The State in Capitalist Society (1969). To Miliband, it was an axiom that ‘the gay and the splendid, as Robert Owen aptly called them long ago, have always feared popular participation in politics’,72 and liberal democracy was always a luxury which would be withdrawn whenever capitalism was threatened by popular action. In the light of genuine democratic change, the reforms of the 1945 Labour Government could be seen as the pursuit of policies designed to adjust capitalist enterprise to the logic of its own development – a logic defined as ‘the need to regulate capitalism by means of marginal collectivism’,73 or state intervention and control. Marginal collectivism was leading to a strengthening of capitalist industry, rather than a transcendence of capitalism. This was not the result of a vast conspiracy by capitalists to thwart working class demands, but was essential to the workings of the system. To Miliband, arguing against the Fabian tradition, ‘state intervention and capitalist power are not antithetical . . . In fact, it is less and less realistic to speak of State power and business power as distinct, let alone antagonistic, entities; the two are ever more closely intertwined,’74 and even nationalization was of aid to capitalism as long as it remained marginal to the economy. Most importantly, state intervention was leading to a growing integration of trade union activity into a controlled system of economic organization in which the unions were no longer serving the interests of their members. In the corporate capitalism which had been growing apace since the war, ‘private, autonomous, self-regulated trade unionism is becoming as obsolete as private capitalism itself’.75 The unions were becoming a permanent subsidiary component of a capitalist economy, a position seen by union leaders as eminently respectable. The integration of the unions was paralleled by the integration of the Labour Party into a part of the Establishment. Arguing that there was ‘a permanent contradiction between social democratic promise and social democratic achievement’,76 Miliband warned that social democracy had from its origins been primarily engaged in a political brokerage between capital and labour, ‘a function of crucial importance to


capitalism’.77 While promising revolution and an end to capitalism, the reality of Labour’s performance was merely to make life for the workers more tolerable. Miliband did not use the term corruption, but Labour’s acceptance of the rule of the elite made them a living embodiment of that republican idea. The result of the manipulation and social engineering of the economy by Britain’s ruling elite was the consent of the working class to the continuation of capitalism, a consent which testified to a debasement of the democratic political process to the point where democratic governments had a freedom of action which democracy was explicitly intended to deny them. The progressive militarization of Western societies and the increasing expertise of a scientific age had led to a widening gap between the ignorant many and the educated few, with the retreat from citizen participation identified by the New Left as the consequence. Miliband’s adamant opposition to capitalism, together with his fascination with retrieving a Marx who would be relevant to the new politics, should not deflect us from the actual nature of his analysis. Where Marx had seen social class in capitalist society as characterized by the purchase and sale of labour power, Miliband’s interest in exploring the nature of the ruling elites led him to characterize social class in terms of status, kinship, and educational background. Instead of relating social class to the dynamics of capital accumulation, he was exploring the nature of a ruling caste in the social structure of capitalism. The new politics was forcing him, like his mentor C. Wright Mills, into a Weberian rather than a Marxist approach to class, stressing that social power of a narrow elite which had long been categorized in republican thought as corruption; the Marxist notion of class as a vehicle for the dynamics of capital accumulation was completely absent.78 His concern with apathy and participation, reflected in his interest in the social structures of power in capitalist society and the corresponding parliamentary gradualism of the Labour Party, did not extend to an analysis of the nature or limitations of the post-war boom. Like the Keynesians, he accepted – it was integral to his argument – that the economy could be socially engineered by the ruling elites. The difference was that, whereas the Keynesian revisionists in the Labour Party saw this as a solution to poverty, he saw such manipulation as corrupting real democracy. For all the Marxist rhetoric, Miliband was making an important contribution to the emerging republican conception of politics.


Class and community It was the convergence between Thompson’s analysis of moral commitment and apathy and the ULR concern with alienation and communitarian democracy which had created a new republican conception of politics on the Left in the years after 1956. However, the continuing emotional commitment of Thompson and the New Reasoner to class war, inherited from their Marxist past, led to a clash with the ULR editors and an exploration of the relationship between community and class which sharply illuminated the new politics. The local community had long been a concern of traditional republican thought because it was believed that only in a small area could active citizenship become a reality. The slum-clearance programmes necessitated by the war-time destruction of housing gave the idea of the local community a strong contemporary resonance. Traditional working-class areas in Liverpool and East London were severely disrupted as their populations were moved to either makeshift housing or to the New Towns like Corby and Harlow, lacking as they did the historical traditions which had welded people together in the solidarity of the old working-class communities of the past.79 The break-up of these communities, the ironic result of Labour demands for decent housing, was brought to public attention in a sociological study of an East London borough in the 1950s by the Institute of Community Studies. Peter Willmott and Michael Young studied the effects of the movement of families from Bethnal Green to a housing estate in Greenleigh, Essex, and pointed to the severing of deep emotional roots in their extended families – ‘very few people wish to leave the East End. They are attached to Mum and Dad, to the markets, to the pubs and settlements, to Club Row and the London Hospital.’80 Their study became an attack on planners who thought merely in terms of bricks and mortar, forgetting the ties of kin and friendship which were the real basis of a community. The growing concern with this changing working-class life was of particular interest to the ULR editors, who saw the community as the ideal vehicle for the realization of their values of citizenship and active participation. Charles Taylor argued that there was a need to recover the meaning of life as held by earlier generations. However, the meaningful social bonds which had to be forged must not be associated with past tyrannies, while the education and self-conscious choice which had been achieved in modern society had to be retained. To Taylor, this recovery of meaningful social bonds must involve the activity of genuine


citizenship which was crucial to all cultural life – ‘the participation by people . . . in a heritage of meaning, which they take on, shape, whose offered continuations they accept or reject and which they ultimately hand on’.81 It was a very different approach from the regret for the decline of the organic community offered by some communitarian theorists. Taylor placed the New Left concerns with democratization – workers control, educational equality, social control over the mass media – within this communitarian perspective. These democratic (republican) demands ‘all involve the extension of the individual’s power over the collective forces which shape his life, and the creation of a sense of common purpose’.82 Without this sense of common purpose, such democratic reforms would be worthless, and Taylor went so far as to assert that ‘planning which takes no account of the existing meaningful relationships in the primary societies which survive must be set aside, no matter what the views of the planners on the value of these relationships’.83 The New Left saw the Notting Hill race riots of August–September 1958, in which blacks were attacked by white working-class youths, as a symptom of the corruption of working-class community (rather than the consequence of a threat to a close white community). They were not merely the result of Fascist activity, but involved a spiritual and moral malaise which lay at the heart of modern Britain. The ULR editors wrote that ‘it reflects the decline of a number of human responses and values – from fair-minded liberalism to working-class international solidarity – which this country is going to need, more and more, if Britain is to pass peacefully out of colonialism into a new relationship with the nations of Africa and Asia’.84 It was Stuart Hall – one of the ULR editors, whose West Indian background possibly freed him from the constraints suffered by other thinkers of the New Left – who drew out the connections between declining communities and the traditional working class. In a prescient article, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Hall attempted to draw radical conclusions from the major shift in the patterns of social life that was taking place as a result of post-war prosperity and high levels of employment. He was particularly interested in the new patterns of labour employment, which were moving away from the old staple industries like mining and engineering – industries which had traditionally dominated the composition of the labour force – towards new technological industries. In these new industries ‘based upon chemical and automative processes . . . the very nature of work itself, the rhythm and skills involved, have changed out of all recognition’.85 The actual physical


ardour of manual work in such industries was far less than in steel and mining, and was not even repetitive. New technological skills were required, and the alienation of labour analysed by the young Marx was now accepted as a necessary and painless development of work. Where Marx saw production as predominant, Hall argued that a new consumer capitalism was emerging in which the increase in purchasing power meant that ‘the commodities which the worker as producer makes at the factory, he purchases back as a consumer at the shops’.86 He argued that in the new prosperity, the working class had renounced its traditional role of opposition, capitulating to a self-image of man as capitalist society sees him. Commodities had assumed a status value which defined the social position of the family, undermining the old traditions of solidarity which had once marked out the proletariat as the gravediggers of capitalism. The new commodities, through advertising techniques, had created a new style of life which merely intensified class confusion. In a very real sense, ‘the capitalist system has annexed an entire class to itself’.87 Seen in these terms, the consumer capitalism of the 1950s did appear to be marking a major change in class relations. In the new social pattern of consumer capitalism, Hall argued that the old capitalist class was being replaced by a number of inter-penetrating elites or narrow oligarchies who shared a common lifestyle and ideology as well as common economic interests. At the bottom of the society, the old working class was being replaced by ‘a permanently exploited, permanently alienated mass of consumers’,88 enslaved mentally and morally rather than materially. The common sense of purpose which marked a genuine political community (the res publica) was lost amidst the pursuit of private interests. Hall’s article drew down a storm of abuse from the New Reasoner, leading Edward Thompson to accuse the ULR of evading working-class struggles because it had ‘a tendency to view working people as the subjects of history, as pliant recipients of the imprint of the mass media, as victims of alienation, as data for sociological inquiry’.89 Hall gave way under the criticism, perhaps affected by the fragility of the negotiations to merge the ULR and the New Reasoner which were then beginning.90 The whole controversy reflected the emotionally powerful belief in the mission of the working class which still affected much of the New Left, and the tense relationship which existed between Marxist theory and the new republican conception which was emerging. In fact, the differences between Thompson and the ULR were not as great as at first sight appeared. Edward Thompson’s fascination with the


formation of the British working class at the turn of the nineteenth century led him to a major redefinition of the Marxist concept of class which made it far more palatable to the republican idea of a participatory community. This was at first disguised by his traditionalist language. On the surface, Thompson’s definition of the transition to socialism ‘as a transfer of class power, the dislodgement of the power of capital from the “commanding heights” and the assertion of the power of socialist democracy’91 was couched in conventional left-wing rhetoric. However, he was using these terms in a particular way. Unlike Marx, he believed that the English working class became a class because its struggles constituted a decision to do so – ‘I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.’92 If an attempt was made to analyse class without reference to how people perceived class, it would be doomed to distortion – ‘the finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love’.93 In Thompson’s conception, consciousness – seen in cultural terms as ‘embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms’94 – became a central characteristic of class, and it was consciousness as a process of self-discovery and of self-definition which developed over time. This was a major motivation of his monumental study of the English working class between 1780 and 1832, when people made their own political organizations and educated themselves without the help of the type of vanguard party which would, in traditional Leninist theory, bring revolutionary consciousness to them from outside their experience. They were equal members of a community, self-governing through their clubs and unions, rejecting any self-interested elite which sought to rule over them. To Thompson, it was in that period that the radical and socialist traditions of the English working class were formed, as workers themselves ‘formed a picture of the organization of society, out of their own experience and with the help of their hard-won and erratic education’.95 It was a historical example of mass participation in the creation of a community. The new approach to class was couched in Marxist rhetoric, but was at variance with Marx’s own approach. Of course, Marx never wrote any systematic study of social class, failing to complete the chapter on class in Capital. At the same time, a conception of class defined as a vehicle of the laws of motion of a capitalist economy was clearly present.96 In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), where he described how economic conditions had transformed a mass of peasants into propertyless workers,


Marx argued that capitalism had created a common situation and common interests for this mass. In this new situation, ‘this mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself’.97 The fact that the working class may not have recognized itself as a class with opposed interests to capital was irrelevant. It may not have been a class ‘for itself’, but it was a class ‘in itself’, because Marx saw class as a material relationship, not one based on consciousness. Even if class-consciousness never arose – something which Marx found inconceivable – the exploitation of the working class by capital would remain a major foundation of society. Thompson transformed this notion by eliminating the distinction between the ‘in itself’ and the ‘for itself’ established by Marx. When Thompson called for ‘the creation of a new class-consciousness, consonant with contemporary reality . . . with a new definition of the identity of popular interests, with a new language of politics and a new moral temper’,98 he was thus also giving a new definition of class, despite the claims that it was a continuation of Marx. The distinction between class consciousness and actual class relations of production could never have been collapsed by Marx, as it was by Thompson, without severely damaging his whole philosophical method. The distinction drawn by Marx between the essential nature of a phenomenon and the often illusory manner in which that phenomenon manifests itself 99 led to the possibility that workers would achieve only a trade union consciousness, failing to see the social power of exploitation which lay behind the wage they received. In contrast, Thompson’s method was phenomenological, defining reality through the different perceptions of that reality. Consciousness was no longer determined by the economic structure of society, but was a vital aspect of that structure, defining it through will and action.100 Its content was republican, because the Marxist class defined by exploitation was replaced by a political notion of class as a conscious actor in society, its virtue defined by the will of political participation.

Republican liberty and Marx This conflict over class and community, expressing as it did a tension between the new republican conception and an emotional reluctance to break from a Marxist language, was exposed most sharply in a clash between Taylor and Thompson over the nature of Socialist Humanism. Taylor’s sensitivity to ideas ensured that this debate illuminated the difference between the new republican politics and Marxism.


Charles Taylor, one of the ULR editors, saw the commitment to a divisive class war as incompatible with the new concern with the whole community. He argued that Marxism was not enough for a humanist politics because its notion of class emancipation meant that ‘Marxist Communism is at best an incomplete humanism’.101 It was Marxism, not just Stalinism, which could justify violence in order to eventually emancipate humanity, and Taylor tried to demonstrate this by pointing to Thompson’s own admission that a Communist morality contains ‘the attitude of hatred to the enemy, utter repudiation from human fellowship of the blackleg or scab, vigilance against the agent or collaborator’.102 To Taylor, this approach becomes an anti-humanism on which a new Stalinism would be built – ‘Stalinism did not just add itself to Communism, it was not an external development deflecting the mainstream of Communist development. In every real sense it has grown out of Communism’.103 Against Thompson, he argued that Marxism was insufficient as a political and philosophical base for Socialist Humanism, and had to be complemented by the assertion that human life was valuable as human life, irrespective of the part it played in the grand historical process – ‘Marx said: the proletariat cannot free itself without freeing all members of society. Socialist Humanism must add: the proletariat must not free itself by depriving some men of their status as human beings.’104 Taylor had put his finger on a major theoretical problem in Thompson’s argument. His Marxism, propounded with such eloquence and force, contained within itself the demand for class violence, and this could not sit easily with a Humanist philosophy which placed the value of human life at the centre of its approach. Faced with this contradiction, Thompson felt compelled to accept that Marxism was an incomplete Humanism which needed to be supplemented.105 Thompson (and, to a lesser extent, Taylor when he accepted that Marxism was a form of humanism, even if incomplete) chose the easy solution of attempting to retain Marxism as a core concept without investigating the consequences for the theoretical coherence of the new doctrine. The new republican conception of politics had found a formidable protagonist in Charles Taylor, whose theoretical acuity was leading him remorselessly to a rejection of the Marxist notion of the State as incompatible with the political self-rule of the community which constituted republican liberty. To a less acute mind, this would not have seemed necessary. Marx’s stress in The Civil War in France (1871) on the democratic mechanisms of recall, rotation of office and a citizen militia lay in the direct republican tradition.106 No republican could have


disagreed with Marx’s attack on ‘the centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour’ so that ‘the state power, apparently soaring high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions’.107 However, this was never meant as a concession to the decentralizing ideology of the Paris Commune.108 Marx specifically differentiated himself from the republican tradition by stressing that the Paris Commune should not be mistaken for ‘older and even defunct forms of social life . . . Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern state power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the medieval communes’109 – incidentally, the communes from which a notion of republican liberty was reborn. Marx made it clear that for him the Commune was to be merely a lever for uprooting capitalist ownership, and should not be mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization associated with Montesquieu and the Girondins.110 Marx’s whole analysis of the progressive tendency of capital to concentrate and centralize the means of production was essential to his understanding of how capitalism would pave the way towards communism – centralization was the precondition for the socialization of production, establishing ‘a more comprehensive organization of the collective work of many . . . into processes of production socially combined and scientifically arranged’.111 He was a communist, not a republican. As Taylor pointed out, this belief in centralized production ran directly counter to the New Left’s politics of communitarian democracy. He argued that Marx’s reliance on ‘the Jacobin tradition of the single national community, one and indivisible’112 failed to consider the importance of the local community in which meaningful relationships between people could prevail. This was an important point for any republican theory, and goes to the heart of the difference between the two ideologies. Taylor and the ULR looked to Cole and thereby to the Classical Republican theorist, Rousseau, for a theory of human meaning and values found in the small community. The incompatibility of Marx’s vision with that of the republicans is worth pursuing, given the subsequent attempts to stress Marx’s commitment to a political democracy (though Steven Lukes and Sheldon Wolin have noted that Marx was a communist, not a democrat113 ). Indeed, it could be argued that Marx belonged to an antinomian rather than a republican tradition, seeing in the Paris Commune ‘a revolution


against the state itself’,114 a representation of temporary rule by the working class rather than an embodiment of republican liberty. He was not against the centralized state as such, but its class nature; he denounced the bureaucratic state not for its abuse of republican liberty but for assuming the character of ‘the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism’.115 The republican elements praised by Marx were the means to the emancipation of humanity from toil, the prelude to the withering away of the state, distinct from the republican notion that the Commune was the foundation of a new state and a new form of government representing political freedom.116 Where republicans stressed the political rather than the economic arrangements of society, and looked to the fulfilment of the spiritual needs of humanity by citizen participation in the political community, Marx sought social freedom, which took the form of the satisfaction of material needs by an economic arrangement of communist ownership and distribution.117

2 The Transposition of Republican Thought

The fundamental problem of any new republican conception lay in its ability to adapt to the mass society which had grown within a centralized and sophisticated capitalist economy. The limits of the new republican politics in explaining a society so different from the small city-states for which it had been originally developed were laid bare in a series of articles by one of the key figures of the New Left, Alasdair MacIntyre. His exposure of the anachronistic nature of liberal moralism (and, by implication, Socialist Humanism), can serve as an intellectual yardstick against which to measure the limitations of the New Left. Above all, while the New Left were able to recognize the undemocratic nature of British society, they lacked a separate, republican economic theory to understand that society. In failing to transpose republican political theory on to more than the administrative structure of society, they were forced back on the very corporatist theories of the economy from which they had sought to escape.

Socialist Humanism in the moral wilderness In ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, an extended article for the New Reasoner, Alasdair MacIntyre developed a critique of liberal (individualist) morality which could stand as an implicit critique of Thompson’s own philosophy of Socialist Humanism. MacIntyre’s declared object was ‘to find expression at a theoretical level for a moral vision that . . . will lead us out of the moral wilderness’1 in which Western capitalist society had found itself. In doing so, he took up Elizabeth Anscombe’s argument2 that the purpose of having moral rules – bound up as the virtues originally were with the Aristotelian telos of the 43


Good Life – had been lost, leaving those moral rules as a mere formality. Morality was consequently frustrated by its artificial separation from desire, a separation which was fixed by Kant. To MacIntyre, ‘the history of morality is the history of man ceasing to see moral rules as the expression of desire and as something that men have made and accepted for themselves, and coming to see them instead either as an alien, eternal, disembodied yet objective law . . . or as an entirely arbitrary subjective choice’.3 The history of ethics can be traced in this light – and MacIntyre was eventually to trace it4 – as the gradual loss of connection between a moral code and the purpose for which that code was established. The moral rules of modern society were a set of meaningless symbols to which people paid public lip-service, yet evaded at every possible opportunity. Given the rift between these symbols and actual social practice, MacIntyre argued that the liberal moralist had separated the ‘ought’ of morality from the ‘is’ of reality, of objective fact.5 This gulf between the ‘ought’ of principle and the ‘is’ of history, as it could be put, was not necessarily restricted to the history of ethics. When MacIntyre lambasted the moral critic of Stalinism, Thompson’s own rhetoric of Socialist Humanism could fall under critical scrutiny (intentionally or not). MacIntyre argued that the moral critic of Stalinism was a modern Don Quixote, peculiarly prone to an ahistorical romanticism and tilting at the windmills of history – ‘a kind of photographic negative of Stalinism’.6 Where the Stalinist subdued the ‘ought’ of morality to the ‘is’ of history, the moral critics took up the ‘ought’ of morality and made it completely external to the ‘is’ of history. Every issue was judged as to whether it fitted some external moral rule, irrespective of the historical circumstance. As an example, the imposition of one-party rule and of the Cheka by the Russian Bolsheviks in 1918 could be condemned from an abstract moral standpoint, while the historical circumstances of civil war and insurrection made such impositions by any government all but inevitable. Such a morality as would condemn the Bolsheviks for these actions (yet would just as easily support the suppression of Fifth Columnists in the war against Hitler) existed outside historical reality, artificially posing as a necessary and inescapable truth of logic. Of course, MacIntyre’s characterization of such moral criticism could be used to justify Stalinism or any evil perpetrated in the name of good – he became increasingly aware of this7 – but his argument posed a fundamental problem for the new (republican) politics being elaborated by the New Left. Their moral rhetoric disguised their lack of any moral theory to serve as a backbone for their political prescriptions, because ‘on ultimate questions of morality we cannot argue, we can only choose. And our

The Transposition of Republican Thought 45

choice is necessarily arbitrary in the sense that we cannot give reasons for choosing one way rather than another.’8 To give genuine reasons, the moral code had to be bound up with social purpose. To MacIntyre (at the time) the answer was easy. It was class struggle which would heal the gulf, so that ‘means and ends interpenetrate not just in some moral ideal, but in history itself’.9 He soon realized that the bridge he was creating to cross the gulf was built of wishes, but it is not MacIntyre’s personal journey as much as the theoretical problem he raised which is of interest here. This was not merely a problem of ethics; it ran like a fault-line through the republican conception which was being developed. The lack of a moral theory highlighted by MacIntyre can be used to illuminate the lack of a republican theory of the community, foreign policy or the economy. The moral ‘ought’ of Republican political theory would need to demonstrate that it could present a realistic theory of the ‘is’ of the political and economic environment in which it found itself This is not to say that republicanism lacked the ability to develop such a theory; but it is to say that the New Left failed to follow through the implications of the conception they were developing.

The myth of community The artificial nature of the ‘ought’ can be illustrated by the attitude of the New Left to their most treasured discovery, the community. Their intellectual honesty would not let them pretend that the community was radical, or enjoyed an organic bond, but they sought somehow to remove the aspects of community they hated, such as racial intolerance, and somehow reconstruct what should have been. In their rediscovery of the community of the past, they inherited the legacy of the Communist Historians Group, who bequeathed the false hope that the radical potentialities of the present might be found in an appeal to a ‘radical’ tradition which was in fact dormant. When Edward Thompson studied the radical artisans and craftsmen of early industrial Britain, Christopher Hill the Levellers and utopian sects of the seventeenth century, and Rodney Hilton the Peasants Revolt, they were hoping to resurrect a movement which no longer existed. In 1819, 1649 or 1381 the ‘common people’ had been radical; the tradition was there, and somehow it had to be recreated. Thompson sought to recreate this through a romantic view of struggle – ‘from the Leveller corporals ridden down by Cromwell’s men at Burford to the weavers massed behind their banners at Peterloo, the struggle for democratic and for social rights has always been intertwined. From the Chartist camp


meeting to the dockers’ picket line, it has expressed itself most naturally in the language of moral revolt.’10 However, this tradition did not exist in the Britain of the 1950s. The working class struggles that did take place were not conducted on a humanist basis, while the left wing of the working class was more in tune with the hatred of strike-breakers inculcated by a long period of wageconflict than with feelings of human warmth and sympathy towards them. Taylor’s criticism that this was non-humanist could make little appeal to people involved in actual conflict, who saw strike-breakers as taking food from their children’s mouths and as beneficiaries of any strike victory. It was more suited to a harmonious society which had an agreed set of shared values than with strife-ridden industries such as shipbuilding and car manufacturing. Thompson, too, was chasing after a historical chimera in his search for a thriving working class radicalism. While the Labour Movement certainly had a strong left wing, most workers took an instrumental approach to their union and, later, to the Labour Party. Thompson was only too aware of the indifference of most working-class people in Britain to Socialist ideas, and conceded in the ULR that ‘there may be new currents stirring among a minority of socialists, but there is no evidence that they are as yet stirring among the people’.11 A strong case can be made out that class-consciousness was not a powerful factor for the bulk of British workers, though it was an undoubted motive for the Left of the working class. Indeed, if class was defined by struggle, then it could have been pointed out that the working class showed less will to challenge the foundations of the capitalist system in the late 1950s than at any time in the century. Indeed, in defining class in terms of will and action, Thompson laid himself open to the very dangers he wished to avoid. If his definition of class – ‘a very loosely defined body of people . . . who have a disposition to behave as a class’12 – was taken seriously, then it could be argued that the working class was ceasing to exist in the late 1950s (the very arguments of Hall and the Labour revisionists which Thompson was seeking to attack). In creating such a powerful and influential notion of class – republican rather than Marxist – he was laying the seeds for the argument that the Left should cease to concern itself with the working class when that class was quiescent. However, it was the community of the present which concerned the ULR editors, and they resolutely refused to turn their eyes from those features which they found unacceptable. They rejected the nostalgic pining for the traditional community, as expressed in Richard Hoggart’s


influential The Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart, bewailing the decline of the working-class community feeling from his childhood days in Leeds, sought the return of such overlooked qualities as the home-cooked family meal, in which the preferred food was ‘something solid, preferably meaty, and with a well-defined flavour’ (much like the workingclass culture in which Hoggart revelled).13 It was Raymond Williams, whose own roots lay in a Welsh workingclass community, who influenced the New Left in their rejection of such a myth. While he welcomed Hoggart’s fresh look at hitherto neglected areas of working-class life, he disliked the over-sentimental approach to the working-class communities of the immediate past, remembering the harsher aspects of life in such communities which he had himself experienced. Where Hoggart recalled the close warmth and humanity of the past, Williams added the dull narrowness and exploitation – ‘Looking back on life in a working-class family and neighbourhood, what most of us see is a compulsive conformity, which we both value and fear.’14 Stuart Hall, whose own West Indian background may have given him an insight unique among British intellectuals of the time, drew out the implications of this romantic rejection of working-class communities in his notorious article, ‘A Sense of Class’. Hall saw working-class solidarity as not merely being against the employers, but also against all outsiders to their insular communities, to ‘other national and racial groups, towards the “queer” fellow and the “odd man out” . . . or even, sometimes, the militant’.15 It was an honest perception of workingclass people as they were rather than as the intelligentsia wished them to be. The bulk of the working class still voted Labour, but the nature of this Labour support was changing, especially in the South. While there was a strong left-wing activist strain in the Labour Movement, organizing itself in the late 1950s into a shop stewards’ movement in addition to its traditional activities, they held positions of influence only as long as they satisfied their working class constituency’s demands for better living standards. It was ceasing to be based on traditional solidarity and was becoming more instrumentalist in its approach; the ‘secular’ voters detected by Robert McKenzie and Alan Silver among Conservative working-class supporters, pragmatically assessing party policy and performance, were present in Labour ranks too.16 Moreover, outside the factories, the very break-up of local communities noted by the New Left and the Institute of Community Studies was a symptom of major social changes taking place, particularly in the inner


cities. As white working class families moved to New Towns and more suburban areas, the inner city was becoming characterized by immigrant ghettoes and urban decline. The increase in racial tension was marked spectacularly by the 1958 Notting Hill race riots; the Left, with its traditional orientation to the factory workforce, had no answer for this new phenomenon to which Hall was pointing.17 Instead, Charles Taylor’s call for a participatory community free of the prejudices and tyrannies of the past was a reflection of the moral ‘ought’ outlined by MacIntyre. The existing working-class communities, their homogeneity threatened by coloured immigration and the migration of the better-off members, were prejudiced and breaking apart, so an increase in participation could somehow recreate a modern community with modern organic ties of care and cooperation. The manner in which such a journey out of the moral wilderness was to occur remained unanswered.

The New Left and defence The development of a new politics of citizen participation seemed to find its natural home in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Formed in 1958 to demand the unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons as a moral gesture which would point the way to a world free of the threat of destruction, CND’s mobilization of more than a hundred thousand people in some demonstrations in 1960–63 expressed the demand of citizens for a say in the decisions which governed their lives. According to Peggy Duff, ‘it was Stuart Hall, Peter Worsley, Edward Thompson, and young New Left people . . . who provided a political leadership and a hard background of political analysis to what was basically a moral crusade’.18 To the New Left, CND represented for the first time a left-wing movement among young people which was not the prisoner of any political sect or party. It was not just another pressure group, but a mass protest of young people who no longer found the conventional channels of constitutional politics worthy of attention – ‘the political parties have been by-passed by the new radical movement . . . because people insist that issues must be stated clearly, and not muffled or muddled’.19 The republican conception lying behind CND’s demonstrations was brought out by April Carter, the secretary of the Direct Action Committee (DAC) which, with its successor organization, the Committee of 100, conducted a series of non-violent campaigns such as the mass sit-in in Trafalgar Square in September 1961, leading to the arrest of 1,314 people.20 Carter presented this non-violent campaign in the terms of participatory


democracy popularized by the New Left. To her, the ballot-box was not a guarantee of democracy in itself, but only a democratic form which concealed the totalitarian policies upon which elected governments were embarking. She argued that ‘the methods of non-violent action are not concerned with the forms of democracy, they are the means of creating or defending the spirit of it . . . [it] is a method of maintaining the values inherent in the ideas of democracy – values which are more crucial to its reality than such forms as a general election every five years’.21 It was the interaction of the law and the constitution on the one hand, and the protest of non-violent action on the other which constituted a genuinely democratic society. If this was the case, then Britain was a genuinely democratic society, as no attempt was made to prevent such demonstrations by the type of force that would be seen elsewhere, nor were the non-violent action committees made illegal. Ultimately, Carter’s ideas were merely prescriptions for pressure group activity within a parliamentary democracy, rather than a valid republican analysis of the international situation. The failure of the New Left to produce such an analysis led A.J. Groom, the historian of British defence thinking, to state that ‘the protestors never produced . . . a political thinker of sufficient stature to present unilateralism as a tactic worthy of consideration or unilateral nuclear disarmament as a viable strategy’.22 This was ultimately a failure to find a republican theory adequate to the realities of the Cold War. Within the community, the undemocratic power structures could be exposed, pointing to the need for a genuinely participating citizenry. Outside the boundaries of the community, it was more difficult to find anything specifically new in the new politics. The republican tradition had been concerned with the attitude of citizens to those outside the boundaries of the republic, but it was, by its very nature, ambiguous towards domination. The refusal of the New Left to break with the deep-seated antiimperialism of the Left prevented them from developing the republican tradition more fully. In an attack on the Labour Party’s silence over British atrocities in Cyprus, the New Reasoner editors did echo a traditional republican theme (albeit one which had been inherited by the anti-colonial tradition) – ‘the betrayal of human rights and of the rule of law cannot take place abroad without the corruption of public life at home’.23 However, the limits of such a theory quickly became apparent when the New Left turned its attention from its support for colonial struggles – a support common to the whole of the Left of this period – to the


question of how to deal with the defence of Britain against the Soviet Union. The ULR editors merely called on the British Government to work towards a détente with the Eastern bloc, proposing ‘the control of nuclear weapons, disarmament, the reunification of Germany and mutual withdrawal from the Elbe, culminating, perhaps, in the concurrent abolition of NATO and the Warsaw Pact’.24 These proposals – not too different from those of the Labour leadership25 – could hardly be described as particularly republican. Thus when Stuart Hall argued that Britain, as a strategic pivot of NATO and as a possessor of the thermonuclear bomb, had a major opportunity of forcing the leading powers to the disarmament table by the renunciation of nuclear weapons, it was a classic example of the moral rhetoric implicitly criticized by MacIntyre. He was unable to specify the exact manner in which unilateral disarmament would have the practical effect of forcing politicians to any disarmament table or, if they finally arrived there, to an ending of the antagonisms which underlay the arms race. Instead of attempting to analyse these antagonisms, the New Left in this instance appeared to place an inordinate faith in governments which they elsewhere pronounced corrupt, assuming that the same morality which moved them must also move their rulers. There was no evidence that statesmen who had killed millions in the world wars and who had been pronounced corrupt by the New Left should suddenly become different merely because they happened to possess more powerful weapons. The ULR’s support for NATO brought down the fury of the New Reasoner, with their very different tradition. In an article in the ULR, Thompson argued that a realistic socialist foreign policy – ‘a foreign policy which can be imposed upon the government of a capitalist Britain . . . under approximately the world conditions we have today’26 – would need to take the underlying politics of the world system seriously. However, when this was done, it was not really a republican foreign policy which emerged, for all the talk about morality. Instead, it was the policy derived from the Communist Party’s demands for ‘peaceful coexistence’ by dismantling NATO. To the New Reasoner editors, the Warsaw Pact was essentially a defensive organization, an argument which they believed was crucial both to breaking the Cold War mentality and to leaving NATO – ‘since the Warsaw Pact is not aggressive in character, there can be no risk to Britain in taking the first step to liquidate NATO’.27 They did not accept the need to defend every foreign policy pronouncement of the USSR, recognizing that this approach had hung like a millstone around the neck of Communist


Parties since their foundation, but they ultimately accepted the view of the world’s tensions as caused by a militarist Western foreign policy.28 The problem for the New Left was that the evolution of a foreign policy based purely on morality ran aground as soon as the morality had to be given some real content. They could agree on the need to avoid mass destruction – as could most people, even governments – but any move beyond such vacuities ran into the realities of the world power structure. As soon as an advance was made from the basic premise of the need to combat militarism – as soon as the ‘ought’ had to meet the ‘is’ – the New Left fell into disarray. A foreign policy developed from their new republican conception proved beyond reach, though it was to be developed by others.

Socialist Humanism and economic theory The success of a mixed economy run by distant Treasury and City mandarins in securing full employment, a free health and education system and a rising standard of living only underlined the need to show why the conception of politics being developed by the New Left would not disturb an apparently happy equilibrium. While the New Left had developed an administrative model of industrial democracy by which participation in economic life could take place, they did not develop a specific economic theory with which to comprehend the dynamics of the post-war boom, or an alternative to the Keynesian arguments which underlay the rule of the power elite. As a result, they were forced to fall back on the corporatist economic theories of the Old Left, in direct contradiction to their political aspirations.29 There had been, in fact, a republican political economy, and it had flourished at a time when a republican language of virtue and corruption, liberty and tyranny still held sway in English politics. With the establishment of the Bank of England and the growth of stockjobbing and credit at the turn of the eighteenth century, there was a conscious recognition that a profound change in the economic and social foundations of politics was taking place. As commerce and landed property replaced religious zeal and the bearing of arms as a mark of virtue, it was in terms of the republican language of a passing age that men such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun understood the new capitalist economy rising about them. The movement of prices and the fickle nature of the Stock Market were understood in terms of the prudence and foresight of virtuous entrepreneurs, or of corrupt speculators, while the sturdy independence of the men of


landed property stood out as a mark of the honest Country Party. It was not the only language – apart from the quantitative analysis of prices in relation of the amount of bullion, there was a jurisprudential approach which was transposed into the language of markets by Adam Smith – but it demonstrated the possibility of a republican political economy, in which economics was understood in terms of a republican politics.30 The emergence of a society which appeared to separate political power from economic power had long buried such an approach, though a moral condemnation of speculation and calls for the euthanasia of the rentier persisted. Instead, other conceptions of economics had held sway – a focus on the distribution of wealth, or on the marginal utility of goods to consumers, welfare economics or the Keynesian ‘fine-tuning’ of an economy by an expert elite in the Treasury and the Bank.31 The political characterization of a commercial economy in its early flowering had been replaced by different attempts to understand its workings as an economy. The result was that the New Left, concerned as they were not to upset the living standards of working people, developed a theory of democratic participation in the economy while leaving untouched the real power elite in society – those whose control of fiscal and monetary policy was so startlingly successful in preventing a return to the misery of the inter-war years. The republican economic theory which would have been needed to challenge that power lay beyond their ability – or political will – to develop. The consequences of this for the New Left’s analysis became clear in their conception of industrial democracy as a political theory of citizenship in the factory, abstracted from economic laws. While they correctly refused to give an absolute blueprint for their conception of industrial democracy, arguing that this must be worked out in practice, they were aware of the problems of applying their republican theory of citizenship to an increasingly interdependent and centralized industrial society. As a result, the revolutionary language of workers’ control, so reminiscent of the old syndicalist traditions, disguised a much less radical reality. Indeed, in many ways, the New Left were advocating precisely those corporatist policies which they sought to criticize. They were vague on how industrial democracy was to actually affect decision-making in the economy. In a contribution to ‘The Insiders’ (1958), the trade union leader, Clive Jenkins, defined industrial democracy as control over hiring and dismissal, together with a voice in workshop management. However, it did not mean majority control – ‘a modern industrial society could not tolerate each industry’s workers


dominating their own Board and bargaining with the community. It must therefore make clear that a corporation’s workers have substantial – but demarcated – powers. They are entitled to a block of Board seats, but not a majority.’32 Tentatively, the ULR editors stated that ‘our own belief is that to crumble the present hierarchical structure of management, it would be preferable to start with too great a bias in the direction of workers control and the autonomy of individual enterprises than in the opposite direction’.33 Such a statement disguised more than it revealed, as the major problems of industrial control – the need to avoid a new hierarchy extending from those who were to draw up the plan to those who would have to carry it out on the shop floor – were not really confronted. The nearest approach to a practical case study was carried out by Michael Barratt Brown in Yugoslavia, where he wrote that ‘there is much that we can learn already in our struggles, from the Jugoslav experiment, from the decentralization of authority, from the emphasis on self-government, from the success of ordinary workers in mastering the arts of management’.34 However, this stance did little to clear up the crucial question of the role of market forces, while the degree and extent of state management was left up in the air. In particular, the association of industrial democracy with a national plan ‘embodying the basic economic and social priorities which are demanded by the community’35 was not the radical break with the Bevanite version of corporatism that they had been promising. Indeed, the substance of this national plan proved to be startlingly similar to the proposals of the old Keep Left group of Labour MPs of 1947. Any traditional corporatist of the 1930s could have endorsed the calls for a progressive redistribution of purchasing power and a non-inflationary policy of economic growth. In particular, their demands for ‘a rationalization of certain industries so that they can compete in present market conditions . . . and a national wages policy allowing for a planned increase per annum, keeping pace with the rise in productivity’36 appeared to be in profound contradiction to their demands for industrial democracy as a measure to liberate workers rather than to regulate their behaviour. It was precisely these policies that were to be so vigorously opposed by the Left a decade later. If republican political economy offered no guide, the Marxist tradition was next to useless in describing the reasons for and limits to the postwar boom. The Communist Party were confidently predicting a return of the Great Depression, while the Socialist Labour League, the principal Trotskyist group of the time, were busy predicting that a Macmillan


triumph in the 1959 election would mark the beginning of capitalist crisis and dictatorship.37 Small wonder that Stuart Hall expressed great scepticism with regard to the continuing Marxist prognostications of the final crisis of capitalism – ‘I have heard the coming slump predicted on four occasions by so-called militants since coming to England in 1951. I am not impressed.’38 As a result, the New Left fell back on precisely those corporatist theories against which they had set out their new republican politics. The ULR endorsed a programme of state intervention to guide a mixed economy towards public ownership, and an expansion of investment in the Third World in order to expand the world trade on which Britain’s economic prosperity depended. To this essentially Bevanite programme was added the demand, identical to the theory of state monopoly capitalism developed by the Communist Party, that state intervention should be used on a wide scale to support the industrialists against the unpatriotic financiers. Michael Barratt Brown, who was to become a leading left-wing economist, presented this programme in a series of articles which were later to find fruition in his book, After Imperialism (1963).39 He argued that the key contradiction in the British economy lay between her role as a world trader, and her role as an international banker. This contradiction lay at the heart of both the worsening balance of payments problem and the poverty of the Third World – ‘the return on British investments overseas began to exceed by far the level of new investments and so impoverished the overseas markets that they could no longer afford to buy Britain’s exports. Our imports were paid for increasingly by income from past investments to the permanent detriment of Britain’s export industries and investment at home.’40 In a critique of Andrew Shonfield’s argument that trade with the competitive industrial markets of Western Europe should be expanded,41 Barratt Brown argued that the Government should forget about the fetish of maintaining the value of the pound on the foreign exchange markets, which was having disastrous results by crippling overseas markets like India. While the European Economic Community (EEC), set up in 1957, appeared to present a great opportunity for British trade, the reality was to present a threat to strategic industries from the large cartels allowed by EEC regulations and to exclude primary producers by high tariff barriers at the very time when Britain needed new sources of non-American food and raw materials. In the face of increasing Japanese and West German competition, Barratt Brown called for greater control over the economy by the state.


He pointed with alarm to the dismantling of physical controls on trade in 1951, which had left only the control of monetary policy – a crude instrument at best – in the Government’s hands. He argued instead for an expansion of the state controls instituted by the Coalition and Labour Governments of the 1940s, with increased protection for infant and strategic industries, guaranteeing their development in the national interest. At the same time, he called for an increase in state control over capital in order to safeguard national prosperity, a policy he saw as doomed if Shonfield’s prescriptions of increased trade with the EEC were followed – ‘no socialist need be concerned about protecting inefficient firms or industries at home, but we have every reason to demand the retention of sovereignty over our national economy’.42 An alternative foreign economic policy was needed, he argued, which would completely realign Britain’s foreign trade to the Third World. For this, a state direction of British overseas investment was required to reduce the high rates of investment in American portfolios and Australian and South African real estate. Such investment benefited only the bankers, who were interested in profit for themselves rather than the development of British trade. A Socialist Government would, according to Barratt Brown, direct its overseas capital to the underdeveloped nations, ‘where the investment could expand production of incomes, and so guarantee markets for Britain’s exports’.43 In this way, the underconsumptionist analysis of the traditional Labour Left, derived as it was from a mixture of Hobson and Keynes, was used to resolve the problems of Britain’s balance of payments and world poverty simultaneously. These arguments were to form the economic and political mainstay of the bulk of the Left as successive British Governments sought to escape the country’s increasing economic difficulties by negotiating to join the Common Market. They were not ‘Little Englander’ arguments, as some later hostile commentators described them, because they sought to align Britain with the Third World. However, they were couched in very nationalistic language which seemed to give more time to restoring Britain’s trade than to the problems of the Third World – Barratt Brown wrote, for example, that ‘there are very real advantages to be gained from the world division of labour by utilizing British engineering skills and accumulated capital equipment to produce advanced technological manufactures for the foreign as well as for the home market’.44 It was certainly not the case that Barratt Brown was a chauvinist, or that he was unaware of the problem of the continuation of imperialism by financial domination of the Third World. He wrote specifically that


‘an economic dependence between rich and poor countries, maintained at an earlier age by direct rule, continues today as part of the pattern of trade’.45 In this he was at one with the New Left, who had specifically confronted this problem in ‘The Insiders’, where they denounced colonial exploitation for restricting the primary producing regions to a dependent role as suppliers of raw materials by depriving them of the profits which should be used to finance development. They had called on Labour to ‘redirect colonial profits to the development of the territories concerned . . . [and] arrange for the transfer to democratically elected governments in the under-developed regions of control over the exploitation of their own resources’.46 However, the Keynesian analysis – generally accepted in the 1950s and 1960s as an instrument which could overcome the booms and slumps characteristic of capitalism – enabled Barratt Brown to talk both of British investment in the Third World and of helping the Third World without any fear of contradiction. As he wrote in the New Left Review in 1960, ‘we have to convince the British people that they have every possible reason to encourage the economic development of the poor lands of the world, not only as a moral question to make up for the past neglect but from sheer self-interest’.47 The problem of ineffective demand which Keynes had come to see as the cause of slump was simply applied to the under-developed world, so that expansionist policies would ‘revive the flagging economic plans of the underdeveloped lands, and so stimulate a general expansion of world trade’.48 The interesting point here is Barratt Brown’s acceptance of a fundamentally Keynesian analysis, an analysis which was not challenged by the New Left.49 If that analysis was wrong – and events from the late 1960s were to call it into question at the very least – then the consequences of capitalism’s inability to regulate boom and slump could be of far more serious import for the Third World than Barratt Brown would take into account. In particular, the Keynesian analysis was an indication that, for all their innovations in political and cultural theory, the New Left had failed to break with the Labour Left’s (and the Communist Party’s) economic theory, with its corporatist overtones. This emerged at its clearest in 1959 when both the ULR and the New Reasoner produced a joint pamphlet, A Socialist Wages Plan, written by Ken Alexander, an Economics tutor at Aberdeen, and John Hughes, a tutor in Industrial Relations at Ruskin College, Oxford. In advocating an incomes policy as ‘a necessary instrument for the achievement of trade union objectives in the “mixed” economy and as a very important step towards the achievement of socialist objectives in Britain’,50 the authors (and the


New Left) proposed the strategy which was to become a hallmark of corporatist politics for the next twenty years. The authors were not advocating the wage restraint which became the main strategy of the Wilson Government of the 1960s, however. They wanted an increase in real incomes which, together with a strategy of redistributing wealth by taxation and maintaining stable prices, would be central to a Socialist incomes policy. Such a policy would only work in a Socialist manner by means of an alliance of government and trade unions, with both agreeing to operate a coherent prices and incomes policy. In proposing such a strategy, they realized that they were putting themselves in opposition to the Left in the trade union movement. However, they believed that the militants had lost sight of the basic interests of the working class in their pursuit of sectional privileges by means of confrontation. In adhering to the market laws of the survival of the strongest, they were forgoing the chance of a planned economy in which they would have a voice. To Alexander and Hughes, ‘in a mixed economy, the trade unions cannot deny to the state apparatus the right to carry out policies influencing the growth of the economy, distribution of incomes, prices and the very character of wage bargaining. They have instead to develop their own policy towards these matters.’51 They believed that a Socialist wages policy would be able to ensure a real, rather than a nominal, gain in living standards, and that without this gain such a policy would be unable to win the popular support necessary for success. This rise in living standards would be the result of a redistribution of incomes, stable prices and a rise of 5 per cent per year in the real national product. The belief that ‘the main basis on which wages policy must rest is the reasonably balanced growth of the economy’52 was thus essential to their policy (and to its eventual failure). A major assumption of the authors was the presence of a radical Labour Government which would be willing to carry out the policies of redistribution so necessary to win popular support. Such policies, which would include a reduction in rentier incomes by the re-imposition of rent controls, a lower level of interest rates, a higher income tax on unearned incomes and, most importantly, a control on those profit margins which could be identified as monopolistic. The fact that such a radical government might be more likely to cause a major flight of capital and a consequent economic crisis was not really taken into account, yet such a result would have dire consequences for the growth to which the authors looked in order to obtain an increase in real incomes. They did not really investigate the possibility of such a contradiction between radical redistributionist policies and the possibility of higher economic growth.


Indeed, the measures which would need to be taken to obtain such growth would be likely to run into intense opposition from the very forces to which the authors looked for support. As economic growth was essential to their programme, they had to commit themselves to higher productivity which would inevitably take the form of an intensification of labour and changes in working practices – policies which could run into trade union opposition. The fatal dilemma of their plan could be seen in their belief that ‘it will be necessary for a Labour Government to create a system under which higher profits can be obtained by way of improved turnover, greater efficiency, innovation, but not from cartel price-fixing, restraints on entry, etc.’.53 Without such profits, there would be no growth on which to base an incomes policy, and there could be no rise in living standards; with such profits, it would mean a worsening of working conditions and resistance from the Left. This was the dilemma on which such policies would break.54 It was above all an expression of the very corporatism – the alliance between Government, capital and labour – against which the New Left had set their faces. The New Left were being forced, by their very lack of an economic theory specific to their politics, to return to the traditions from which they were trying to escape. In a period when economic growth was relatively trouble-free, the lack of such an economic theory might not matter, of course. It could even serve as an excuse for ignoring economics as symptomatic of the materialism which lay at the heart of the corruption which afflicted both Western capitalism and Soviet socialism. To Thompson, ‘economists are forever priming pumps, politicians meeting consequences, trade union leaders keeping up with the cost of living index. The most challenging issue is reduced to a nice choice of expediencies.’55 Issues far greater than economics called to the republican tradition, but a time would arise when the Keynesian presuppositions of the New Left would be called into question.

Marxism and the exhaustion of the first New Left Despite the high hopes, the New Left Review did not fulfil the hopes it had initially raised as the foremost agency in developing a new politics. The reason for this failure was attributed by some commentators to the absorption of the intellectually exhausted ULR editors by seasoned Marxists. To Bernard Crick, writing in the Political Quarterly, there was a ‘vacuum of ideas in the rank and file of the old ULR. Their fund of inchoate idealism has been taken for a ride by a few old Marxists who


know what they want.’56 This was not really an adequate explanation, however. As has been seen, the Marxism of the New Reasoner was hardly of the orthodox kind and, in its determination to recapture the British Left’s republican past, it was closer to the ULR than at first appeared. Indeed, Ralph Miliband had opposed the formation of the NLR because of his fears that the tradition being established by the New Reasoner would suffer.57 His fears were borne out by the result which, according to Stuart Hall, ‘was never, I think, as a journal, as successful or distinctive as either of its predecessors . . . more of a left “magazine” than a journal’.58 As editor, Hall came under unexpectedly heavy pressure,59 while the journal appeared undecided whether its role was to be one of political organization of the Left Clubs or a continuation of its tradition of theoretical innovation.60 The failure to retain the initiative in theory was marked enough for the NLR editors to notice a problem themselves. They soon admitted that ‘one or two people missed the serious, theoretical article which the New Reasoner did so well: but so did we, and we have taken some trouble to repair this omission in future issues’.61 However, falling sales and lack of both money and personnel crippled the journal and ended plans for a series of New Left books. As membership of the Left Clubs declined, a national conference in the summer of 1961 was filled with recrimination.62 Edward Thompson was busy preparing his magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class; Stuart Hall resigned the editorship after the last issue of 1961, soon to work for the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham; and in the autumn of 1961 Charles Taylor left for Canada, taking with him ‘intellectual and political qualities we shall find it difficult to replace’.63 Thereafter, editorial dissension hampered the journal for a year until Perry Anderson and his young friends, Tom Nairn and Robin Blackburn, took over a journal on the point of collapse and gave it a very different direction.64 The change was marked by a fair degree of animosity, and it is difficult to discern the actual nature of events. Perry Anderson, whose intellectual precocity impressed almost all who met him, appears to have had the enthusiastic blessing of Thompson at first, but turned the journal into the direction of a brand of neo-Marxism imported from Europe. The use of an increasing geometrical imagery and a barbed style gave the NLR an air of intellectual rigour compared with the vagaries and confusions surrounding the first New Left.65 There was no shift back to orthodox Marxism. Indeed, Anderson’s endorsement of Sartre, Lukacs and Gramsci was an endorsement of a tradition in Marxism which stressed the subjective, ‘superstructural’ element rather than the economic reductionism


which had traditionally constituted historical materialism. Far from being obsessed with the economic ‘base’, Anderson protested, ‘the whole bias of our work is just the opposite. It is, if anything, predominantly political and cultural in emphasis.’66 The loosening of the hitherto restrictive categories of historical materialism were retained by the new NLR editors. However, there was a definite shift of interest away from a politics of participation. In his first article for the NLR in the summer of 1961, Anderson had argued that ‘it is difficult to see in what sense the idea of a “collective democratic society” – i.e. a socialist one – is specifically working class: the literal ideas of socialism have historically mostly come from people who were not working class themselves’.67 The central concern was with the intelligentsia rather than the establishment of political freedom. A movement like CND, which had excited contemporary intellectuals like April Carter into the belief that here was a new democracy in action, was declared by Anderson to be merely part of a liberal tradition of altruistic campaigns stretching back to campaigns against the slave trade.68 Instead, the emphasis was placed upon the need to develop a Marxist intellectual tradition, defined in terms of sociological analysis rather than humanist clarion-calls.69 The shift away from a republican politics was expressed with a great degree of animosity in 1964–65, after Thompson (apparently) submitted an article to the NLR which was rejected by the editors. The result was to fuel his fury; it was the censorship of the Communist party over again, and in the journal which he himself had helped to create as a vehicle for open discussion. The result was a famous debate between Thompson and Anderson in which their differing interpretations of British history were aired. It is not for the importance of historical understanding alone for which the debate is significant; the different set of values between the republican politics of community and the new brand of neo-Marxism was laid bare in a demonstration that the former could no longer look to the NLR as its vehicle.70 In their discussion of the radical tradition, extolled by the Communist Historians Group as well as the New Reasoner, Thompson placed his faith in the tradition of native radicalism and anti-imperialism which existed and to which appeal must be made if there was to be progress towards a socialist society. He argued that ‘England is unlikely to capitulate before a Marxism which cannot at least engage in a dialogue in the English idiom’;71 the theoretical Marxism called for by Anderson and Nairn was couched in a language which could never connect with the popular imagination, and was therefore doomed to an intellectual isolation. The


enemy was not any abstract class formation, but the Establishment, characterized as it was for Cobbett as ‘a unique formation. Old Corruption’,72 while the modern State was ‘this Thing, with its vast influence reaching into the Civil Service, the professions, and into the trade union and labour movement itself’.73 Anderson took a very different view. Arguing that a term like ‘Old Corruption’ was ‘the most exquisite frisson of contemporary bourgeois sensibility’, and ‘scientifically’ analysing the Establishment as the expression of the hegemony exercised over the bourgeoisie, he had a much more jaundiced approach to the radical traditions celebrated by the Communist Historians Group. The English Civil War was not an arena in which a democratic and republican ideology was being established to which the modern Left could proudly claim descent, but a clash between two fractions of the landowning class, neither of them economically opposed to one another, into which were inserted more radical antagonisms. To Anderson, the past had to be explored to understand the present, ‘not to give pious reverence to our forefathers, as so many labour historians like to do’.74 He decried Thompson’s invocation of ‘the people’ as sententious, describing it as an abstract moralism in which ‘Socialism . . . gives way to a meandering populism’.75 In its place, he sought to base his analysis on a radical sociology, seeking to understand English history in terms of ‘the global evolution of the class structure’,76 as informed by the Gramscian analysis of hegemony. Hegemony was translated by Anderson as ‘the dominance of one social bloc over another, not simply by means of force or wealth, but by a total social authority whose ultimate sanction and expression is a profound cultural supremacy’.77 This interpretation of Gramsci has been strongly contested,78 but its accuracy is irrelevant to the point being made. To the new NLR editors, the hegemony exercised by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aristocracy over the bourgeoisie was, in its turn, later exercised over the working class. Social distinctions, a traditionalist ideology and aristocratic leadership constituted a political and ideological ascendancy which marked out the working class as having ‘an immovable corporate classconsciousness and almost no hegemonic consciousness’.79 This Gramscian language – in Anderson’s definitions, a hegemonic class shapes society according to its own image, while a corporate class merely defends and improves its own position within an accepted social order – meant that the working class pursued its own ends within a society whose class rule it basically accepted.


The roots of this hegemony of the ruling class lay in that ‘radical’ ideology – an ideology marked by republican politics – praised by Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class. To the new NLR editors, the struggle of the labour movement during the Industrial Revolution was not the heroic spectacle presented by Thompson, but a tragedy because of its lack of a Marxist theory. Anderson wrote that ‘the tragedy of the first proletariat was not . . . that it was immature; it was rather that it was in a crucial sense premature’.80 The reason for this was brought out by Tom Nairn in his critique of Thompson’s work – ‘the formation of the English working class was a major tragedy. It was also one – and perhaps the greatest single – phase of the tragedy of modern times, the failure of the European working class movement to overthrow capital.’81 Anderson and Nairn argued that the integration of the British working class into the political values of capitalist society was the result of its creation at a time when scientific revolutionary theory (i.e. Marxism) was absent. By the time that theory had been formulated, the working class had left behind its revolutionary phase.82 From this time, the NLR was to become the chief weathervane for a sociologically orientated Marxism, whose status was increased by its European origin, rather than the new politics of participation heralded by the first New Left.83 A serious conceptual break with the corporatist and centralist politics of the Left had been made, which was to have farreaching consequences, but a wider-ranging exploration of a modern republican conception would have to come from elsewhere.

3 The Radical Republicans

The radicalism of the republican politics elaborated by the New Left is best gauged by understanding the notions of citizenship prevalent at mid-century, and the manner in which they changed. Continuing debates on how to extend the social privileges of citizenship to the poor, or on the need to prevent a dangerous political participation by the mass of voters, were replaced by a renewed republican interest in the locality – whether it be the city or the workplace – as the best means of making citizen participation active. In his essay, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ (1950), T.H. Marshall had developed the idea of citizenship for a welfare-state Britain, but at the cost of severing all its connections with the republican concept. Presenting citizenship as a historical evolution, Marshall saw the initial civil citizenship – the rights of citizens to own property and conclude valid contracts, together with freedom of speech, thought and faith – as having evolved into that right to participate in political authority through the vote which he saw as constituting political citizenship. The completion of this process through the universal franchise had not exhausted the potentialities of a full membership of the community, however, and the twentieth century had seen the achievement of social citizenship, the right to share to the full the wealth and benefits of society, including health, education and social security in illness and old age. In a developed capitalist society marked by sharp divisions of social class, Marshall argued that political citizenship was the essential nexus between civil and social citizenship, giving the individual the political power to demand social rights irrespective of his or her class position.1 It was also the means by which a ‘class-abatement’ could take place, a modification of social inequality by the use of the State to extend education, social services and employment. 63


The notion of social citizenship had a profound effect on Labour thinkers after 1950, as they sought to develop a conception of socialism more relevant to a society marked by successful planning and private affluence. They wanted to extend citizenship to the excluded, but where in the past it was the ordinary people, the working class, who had been excluded from full membership of the community, now it was the minorities – the mentally ill, the old, the vulnerable – whose social citizenship was denied them.2 This ideal of citizenship was not a republican one, however. It was perfectly compatible with a passive citizenship in a centralized, distant state. If apathy was the cause of the exclusion of the neglected minorities, that apathy was not a corruption of the body politic caused by the selfinterest of a minority in power. Instead, the apathy could be ascribed to social prejudice, the isolation of the vulnerable from the centres of social life or merely the understandable illusion that the welfare state had abolished poverty. The solution to the exclusion of the minorities from their social rights was not active participation, but an extension of the state’s protective network.3 In contrast, the New Left had argued that it was the majority which had been deprived of that active participation which marked out the genuine citizen (women were overlooked by them, to their later embarrasment4). It was not neglect, but the self-interest of a power elite – the insiders – which had deprived the majority of full citizenship, and it was this private, atomized affluence which made the political apathy of the majority a form of republican corruption. In their new approach to citizenship, the solution was not an extension of the state network to protect minorities, but the active participation of all citizens in the political community. This republican approach ran directly counter to the dominant idea that the citizen should be inactive. The mass mobilization of fear and prejudice, which had characterized totalitarian movements in the first half of the century, had led political scientists and sociologists to deliberately minimize direct participation by citizens in a mass society. Instead, democracy was defined as the popular control of elites through party voting and free discussion, or through a peaceful conflict of interest between organized interest groups, a restricted approach which could guarantee a peaceful competition for power in stable societies. Such a limited participation and mass apathy were necessary to prevent a slide into totalitarianism, of the right as much as the left. The political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, specifically singled out the notion of this ‘positive liberty’ as an expression of this interference of the polity

The Radical Republicans 65

into the private lives of individual citizens, differentiating it from the ‘negative liberty’ which guaranteed protection to individuals from interference by the public realm.5 It was feared that most citizens in Western democracies harboured non-democratic and authoritarian approaches to ethnic and political minorities and moral issues, and that mass apathy was needed if such dark prejudices were not to be aroused.6

The republican intelligentsia Crick, Duncan and Lukes W.H. Morris Jones, in a 1954 article in the academic journal, Political Studies, openly defended political apathy, provocatively celebrating abstention at the polls as a positive good in the fight against totalitarianism. While accepting the right to vote as a universal right, gained after a hard-won struggle, he expressed the prevalent concerns about active participation with his assumption that ‘a State which has “cured” apathy is likely to be a State in which too many people have fallen into the error of believing in the efficiency of political solutions to the problems of ordinary lives’.7 However, by the early 1960s, there was evidence of an increasing refusal to let the Cold War be taken as an excuse for political apathy. Bernard Crick called for a greater popular interest in politics, attacking the idea that political activity had anything at all to do with the chiliastic aims of totalitarianism, in either its Nazi or Soviet models. He saw politics (as he was later to define republicanism in a democratic society8) as a celebration of a freedom which depends on tolerance and a willingness to compromise conflicting interests.9 In this light, he took up this constitutionalist challenge to the centralization of power by a focus on the increasing power of the Executive against the House of Commons. He argued that the British lack of public awareness of affairs had reached such an extent that Parliament, the traditional mediator between government and people, had gone into a worrying decline as a check on the power of the executive. The gulf between government and people was made deeper by the system of party discipline in the Commons, reducing the independence of Members to a point where the system of government ‘may work against the public interest, even prove corrupt now that the economy can be so easily managed in short periods’.10 The conditions of secrecy and informality within the Establishment demanded an extraordinary honesty on the part of politicians if they were not to become insensitive to the people they represented.


Crick’s advocacy of independent parliamentary committees with an enhanced power of scrutiny to counteract this trend lay at the centre of his proposals of reform, which also included demands for a more effective second chamber and an increase in the experience and adaptability of civil servants by their integration with other professions as a means of increasing participation. While his arguments were to have an important future in British constitutional discussion and reform, their restricted concern with Parliament did not address the political power of the social elite highlighted by the New Left.11 The republican critique of the strong central state based on public apathy was really taken up by Graeme Duncan and Steven Lukes, two young academics who had been much influenced by the communitarian ideas of the early New Left, as expressed by Charles Taylor. Writing in 1963, they called for a return to classical political theory in the belief that a more satisfactory model of democracy could be developed than the apathy and unresponsive government accepted by orthodox political science. That science, behind the shelter of its purely empirical analysis of voting behaviour, was in reality merely a conservative defence of the existing system against individual citizens. At a time when the verities of the Cold War were being increasingly challenged by non-Communist intellectuals, Duncan and Lukes argued that the need to prevent totalitarianism had led political theorists like Berlin too far in a conservative direction, and they directly opposed Morris Jones’s call for apathy as an approach which had to be countered by a more intense democratic life – an active citizenship. Specifically pointing to a tradition in classical political theory which saw public apathy as a threat to freedom, they sought to retrieve a very different John Stuart Mill from the theorist of negative liberty praised by Berlin – a Mill who saw public activity and intellectual controversy as central to democratic life. The right to vote, or particular institutional mechanisms, were not sufficient in themselves to constitute a genuine democracy, they argued; such rights had to be based on a fundamental (and, note, a republican) political principle – ’in general a democratic society is treated as one in which all the citizens (the people) continuously and actively participate in the various community affairs, and above all in political affairs’.12 It was an effective attack,13 and a sign of a new mood among the intelligentsia. The analysis of a self-interested power elite which manipulated public opinion to sustain its own corrupt rule became increasingly popular as disillusionment with the Wilson government in Britain, and with the US war in Vietnam which that government


supported, led to a radicalization of the Left. In many ways, the counter-culture and the romantic flourishes of the anarchism and revolutionary Marxism brandished by students in Britain was an exuberant game of épater le bourgeois, but the interest in ‘student power’ and other forms of participation also led to an intellectual effervescence which produced the clearest theoretical accounts of the radical republicanism developed by the early New Left. Steven Lukes, who had earlier called for a return to political theory in order to challenge the notions of democracy as apathy, now sought to point to the necessity of radical change in his analysis of the ability of a self-interested power elite to thwart that participation which allows genuine citizenship in the polity. Seeking to go beyond both the pluralist view, which focused on behaviour in an observable conflict of interests, and its critique, which pointed to those whose exclusion from the polity prevented them from acting on their own behalf, he argued that there was another dimension of power which minimized political participation. This concerned the manner in which powerful groups were able to avoid conflict by excluding uncomfortable issues from the public realm of debate; as an example, he pointed to the failure of one US city (Gary, Indiana) dominated by a powerful steel company, to control air pollution because the issue was not given public exposure. In this, Lukes argued the radical case that men’s wants themselves may be a product of a system that works against their own interests.14 It was a prime example of what was called an instrumental or protective approach to participation, in which republican liberty was a defence against the possibility of tyranny, but a developmental approach which looked to participation as a means of moral and political education of hitherto excluded citizens was as yet absent.15 The inability of theorists to find a vehicle to make the ‘ought’ into the ‘is’, the dichotomy noted by Alasdair MacIntyre, was not as yet overcome. The citizen It was Carole Pateman and Dennis Thompson whose exploration of participation in political theory and practice constituted the most thorough account of the republican idea, and with the writings on local government of William Hampton to relate the classical republican model of the local self-governing community to the social and economic realities of Britain in the late 1960s. In her book, Participation and Democratic Theory (1970), Carole Pateman elaborated the 1963 Duncan/Lukes essay (she was then Lukes’s postgraduate student) in seeking to retrieve classical political theory from the


dominance of empirical political science. In doing so, she presented a frontal assault on what she termed ‘the contemporary theory of democracy’, with its limited view of participation and its conception of elites competing for power in free elections. In taking on this prevalent theory, she drew on a classical account of democracy (republican in all but name) which she felt had been unfairly neglected, and attempted to use the modern approach of political sociology to underpin this older republican tradition. Pateman sought to draw out a genuinely participatory theory of democracy by tracing a line of descent from Rousseau to G.D.H. Cole by way of John Stuart Mill’s interest in producer democracy. All three of her thinkers held that a rough economic equality and economic independence was necessary to guarantee political liberty and political independence. No polity could be genuinely participatory without this economic egalitarianism, and through this independence citizens could reach a genuine interdependence which would prevent the isolated individual from seeing his liberty destroyed by powerful combinations. In this way, each individual would be his own master (Pateman was not yet a feminist), ruling though being ruled, and establishing a close connection between participation and control. In this context of popular and participatory institutions, an active public-spirited character could be developed with a powerful sense of communitarian belonging – ‘the experience attaches the individual to his society and is instrumental in developing it into a true community’.16 However, Pateman’s attempt to strengthen a participatory polity as a realistic alternative by the use of the empirical models of political sociology turned out to be anti-climactic. Using the analysis of the American sociologists, Almond and Verba, as her source of evidence, together with Socialist accounts of workers self-management in Yugoslav industry,17 she concluded that a close correlation between political participation and political efficacy indicated the possibility of an alternative institutional arrangement to that offered by the ‘contemporary school’. The demonstration that the psychological effects of being treated like children leads to apathy, while that of being treated like adults leads to a sense of greater public awareness, is not particularly startling for sociologists – the Human Behaviour school of management theory in the 1920s was based on this intuitive truth – while the empirical evidence of Almond and Verba has been called into question as demonstrating no causal link between participation in job decision-making and political efficiency.18 Moreover, her claim that the empirical evidence of Yugoslav industrial democracy and of British firms such as the John


Lewis Partnership indicates a ‘clear’ general conclusion – ‘the claim of the participatory theory of democracy that the necessary condition for the establishment of a democratic polity is a participatory society, is not a completely unrealistic one’19 – seems hardly conclusive. The tangled syntax hardly conceals the lame nature of the conclusion – in the words of her critic, Michael Freeman, she had ‘not shown that the participatory ideal is possible; only that it is possibly possible’.20 In his book, The Democratic Citizen (1970), Thompson echoed Pateman as he sought to demonstrate the possibility of a radically different type of political community whose structures reflected a more responsible and active citizenry than the existing structures of representative democracy could allow. In doing so, he sought to reconcile two contradictory demands which would meet the criterion of participation which he saw as so crucial. On the one hand, the size of the new political units had to be as small as possible to make power more accessible and the issues more comprehensible; but on the other hand, they had to be as large as possible so that the local units could have effective jurisdiction to deal with the major problems of a modern mass industrial society. It was not the federal institutions but the measure of republican participation and shared values which were important to Thompson; the institutions were only important insofar as they were able to express these values. Thompson accepted that a model of direct democracy was difficult to envisage in a mass industrial society, but he insisted that democratic leaders should express the values and beliefs of the informed citizenry – ‘to activate the inactive citizen’21 – rather than attempting to manipulate opinion through drawing a veil of ignorance over the people. Citizenship had to be more than a particular set of institutions, direct or representative, but an attitude of active responsibility, involving a society of ‘autonomous and improvable men’22 (the absence of any mention of women should be noted; a feminist movement was in the process of being born in 1970). This radical republican politics led Thompson to point to the continuing social inequities of wealth and power which created a de facto discrimination between active citizens and the apathetic mass. While a moderate reformist approach (‘constructive’ in his words) would define a free press as privately-owned means of communication, strongly guarded against government control, the republican approach (‘reconstructive’, as he called it) would point to the oligopolistic control of the media which actually served to deny effective pluralism of discussion.


In the light of this radical republican outlook, Thompson was able to suggest different policies to meet the criteria of citizenship. While using the example of a timid BBC to reject the public ownership of the media, he called for a more ‘multi-level, multi-directional’ broadcasting system, so that ‘every representative and important administrator at every level of government would be able to talk to citizens in his district’. While accepting that citizens already vote rationally according to their own social status or partisan attitude, Thompson called for an increase in choice through an increase of the alternatives open to voters by means of a change in the electoral or party systems to those at present prevailing.23 The problem, as for Pateman, is that the certainties of the empirical methods of the social sciences are left behind as an exploration of future possibilities takes place. The more radical the reforms, the more problematic they became in demonstrably increasing the chances of a genuinely participatory society. While Thompson’s tentative suggestions for the enlistment of ‘lower-status citizens’ into participation through trades unions and housing groups may encourage the political education necessary for active citizenship, how was he to stop more educated citizens organizing to shape the agenda which determined just what the general interest was – the problem to be highlighted by Lukes’s new dimension of power? This creation of a two-tier society in a transition may prove permanent, or it may not. The attempt to defend a republican model of political liberty left the critical issues of the possibilities and consequences of increased participation open. Like Pateman, Thompson’s attempt to show that a participatory ideal was possible within the terms of the empirical social sciences was a failure; they had both merely shown that it was possibly possible.24 The city In the republican tradition, the city or the small community lent itself to the maximum participation which constituted self-government. However, it was the size of the centralized state in a mass society which had made the small republican community both necessary and difficult to achieve.25 With economic decline hitting particular regions from the 1930s onwards, central government had become increasingly involved in planning industrial development and encouraging new investment to stimulate depressed local economies, while the increasing size of conurbations made regionalism a synonym for town planning rather than community participation. W.W. Robson, the most important theorist of local government, bemoaned the collapse of the civic spirit since the time of the medieval


city, but accepted that that age had now gone and that the financial weakness of small units of administration meant that the general commercial trend to larger units had to be reflected in local government, too. Working within the parameters of the modern state with its welfare policies and recognizing that the ‘vast extension of the executive powers of government is a necessary consequence of these policies’, Robson argued that the problem of citizenship was purely and simply one of controlling an unresponsive and unelected bureaucracy, safeguards which could be met by the appointment of an Ombudsman to investigate complaints.26 However, with the developing interest in participation, and especially with the growing demands in Wales and Scotland for self-government, there was a parallel growth of interest in theories of local citizenship. John Mackintosh, a political scientist at Edinburgh University who had been elected a Labour MP, took up this call for participation in local government as a primary concern to any theorist of active citizenship. He saw a revived local democracy as the solution to the increasing elitism and remote rule of the party system, the civil service, industry and nationally organized pressure groups. He saw the resulting centralization of the state as imposing a single pattern of administration on the whole country regardless of local variety, reinforcing the growing power of the Executive in British politics. He sought a devolution of power to the regions not in terms of efficiency in the provision of local services, but as necessary to a viable local democracy which would stem ‘the tide of centralization, uniformity and suspicion of popular, elected government’ which had been rising with increasing strength in the country.27 William Hampton, a lecturer in Sheffield University’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies, was very aware of the work of Carole Pateman and Dennis Thompson.28 In Democracy and Community (1970), he used the arguments on participation in political theory as a criterion against which to measure the reality of politics in Sheffield, a city which was large in population and financial resources, well-defined in area and unified as a political entity. His research indicated dangerously low levels of political participation by the citizens and a serious lack of interest in the activities of the city council. Against this actuality, the ‘is’ of political reality in the city, Hampton drew the ‘ought’ of what should be. The liberty constituted by self-government was not possible on a national scale – ‘the people cannot govern a large industrial society in any meaningful sense: the issues are too complex and the number of citizens too great’. However, at the local level, people had the opportunity to know of the decisions taken on


their behalf. Citizens may well complain of actions taken by the council after the event, but this constituted grounds for hope – ‘it implies a wider view of democracy than is taken by those who maintain that the sole right of a democratic population is to elect a government periodically’. At the local level, people were able to take a continuing interest in matters of public concern, enjoying a level of knowledge and participation which minimized the apathy which posed such a great danger to a free society. Pluralism and popular participation was essential to this republican conception of an active citizenship, dependent on a free flow of communication between governors and governed.29 However, local democracy was only a link in a chain of governing institutions and public decision-taking. A national economic plan, shaped by a response to international as much as national events, had of necessity to be administered centrally. In such a situation, where the republican idea of local self-government was frustrated by the unitary state, the structure of local government became problematic. Reform could certainly take place to give the local polity more power, as not all events were national in their scale, and where reform could take place then ‘decisions should be taken at the lowest level commensurate with the degree of consistency necessary in that area’. This did not mean a republic at this local level, though – local initiative and local participation could be effective only ‘as long as these can be accommodated within the budget’.30 As with Pateman and Thompson, the gulf between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ was too wide. The reality was that the local authority in which active citizens provided a check to the omnipotence of the central state was nullified in modern Britain because the influence of local government over the lives of ordinary people was in practice no different from that of distant authorities such as the National Health Service or the banks. Indeed, local government was more circumscribed than they, because it was directly subject to control through Whitehall – its provision of grants, its insistence on approving capital projects before providing the money for them, and the maintenance of an inspectorate to check standards of service in the locality. The central government’s control of expenditure levels minimized the power which was so essential to active citizenship, and was the cause of the apathy which Hampton saw in his city. Hampton’s final call for a local government system in which large executive authorities were supplemented by a mass of small bodies only underlined the failure to break the circle which denied an effective republic. Hampton was forced to acknowledge that the mass of small authorities had to be mainly non-executive. The low


levels of participation in city politics were unlikely to be broken by such a system, where local government lacked effective power.31

From Cole to International Socialism The stress on industry as the crucial area for a participating polity connected the republican intelligentsia with the most important political movement of the New Left – the movement for workers’ control. In doing so, the figure of G.D.H. Cole, the doyen of radical democratic socialism who had so inspired the Oxford editors of the ULR, loomed large. Cole had sought to create a new republican conception out of the industrial democratic theories of syndicalism in his writings for the periodical New Age prior to the Great War. He had combined the demand for industrial democracy with a republicanism inspired by Rousseau to argue that the factory was a political unit where participatory democracy could be established through the guild system. It was this republican view of the factory and workshop as political units which differentiated his ideas from the apolitical anarcho-syndicalism of Fernand Pelloutier and from the centralism of the Industrial Unionists. Cole described the differences between his own theories and those of syndicalism by his insistence on the decentralized political unit ‘within the framework of a wider control of policy formulated and executed as democratically as possible, and with the largest diffusion of responsibility and power’.32 Industrial reorganization involved a new polity – a new political system – in its own right, so that the structures of authority at the workplace were as much a subject of political analysis as the state. The modification of those structures of authority provided the political and economic equality which allowed individuals to ‘learn democracy’ more than any other area of life. While never renouncing his Guild Socialism, Cole had long concentrated his work on a left-wing form of corporatist planning, and on delving into the history of the British and international labour movements. However, in a series of articles in the left-wing weekly, Tribune, in 1955–56, he challenged the traditional notion of industrial democracy as joint consultative committees between management and unions. Reviving his earlier ideas of workers’ self-management as a subject of political discourse, Cole argued that workers’ control was needed ‘not only to put an end to the private appropriation of surplus value, but also to compel the technocrats to take proper account of the rights and interests of those who work under their orders’;33 workers had to be able to decide at the level of the workshop about the everyday activities in which they


were involved. In a perceptive awareness of the potential power of a new shop stewards movement, he demanded a fuller recognition of shop stewards and workshop committees in pursuit of these ends.34 The revival of interest in industrial democracy at the end of the 1950s was reinforced by Cole’s influential introduction to a book by a Yugoslav research student at Nuffield College, Branko Pribicevi ´ c. ´ In The Shop Stewards Movement and Workers Control (1959), Pribicevi ´ c´ documented the struggles of the movement for workers’ control in the engineering industry after the First World War, a movement in which Cole had been intimately involved. In the foreword, Cole agreed with Pribicevi ´ c´ that the movement had been ill-defined and impractical on means, and divided on ends. In particular, it had not resolved the problem of reconciling large industry with genuine democracy, which ‘had to be small, or broken up into small groups, in order to be real’.35 This seemed a quixotic argument – in an industrial society where a large and undifferentiated mass was the rule, there appeared to be little hope for such republican ideas of a small democracy. However, Cole argued that industrial democracy was once again becoming relevant to the affluent mass society of the day. Automation was possibly bringing the day of the large industrial unit to an end, and increasing hopes for a revival of workers’ control at the level of the workshop and individual factory. This was a question of a new type of republican polity, not merely one of business organization – ‘mass democracy, I feel sure, is bound to be unsound unless it can be broken up into units of normally manageable size and complexity. We made, no doubt, many errors; but in that respect we were right and our critics wrong.’36 Cole was calling for the resurrection of a republican conception of workers’ control, which he had first elaborated in his Guild Socialist days. The technical problems of management were ultimately irrelevant to him. It was the political nature of the enterprise which concerned him – whether it was a despotism or a democracy, a unit encouraging the apathy which arises from a lack of concern about the public realm or a unit of direct democracy encouraging participation by the industrial citizenry. Where Marxists looked to the concentration and centralization of capital as creating the preconditions for communism, this republican conception saw the small unit of the workshop as an expression of the Aristotelian polis. The occasional similarity of language with Marxism concealed profound conceptual differences. While thoughtful articles explicitly endorsing Cole’s foreword to Pribicevi ´ c’s ´ book appeared in the NLR,37 a more radical interpretation of workers’ control in terms of an eclectic attempt to combine Leninism


with a republican version of Marxism was taken by those former New Left writers who helped to establish International Socialism (IS) in 1960. The editorial board included Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Sedgwick, who had written for the New Reasoner, and Ken Coates, who was to be so important in the Institute for Workers’ Control. Alasdair MacIntyre was to be the sole editor of the journal for two years,38 though Trotskyists like Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron provided the political drive. IS was soon in the forefront of attempts to develop Marxism with theories of industrial democracy and the mass strike, introducing Rosa Luxemburg and George Lukacs to British readers. The first issue of IS made its avant-garde approach to questions of socialism clear. Where the Labour Left sought to defend Clause Four, and the early NLR to develop a communitarian case for public ownership, IS attacked the Left’s obsession with nationalization. To them, the question was whether public ownership was for the benefit of Capital, as had been the 1945 Labour Government’s measures, or for the benefit of Labour. Nationalization was necessary, but not in order to replace capitalists with bureaucrats, as had occurred in the Soviet Union. The problem was not merely one of ownership, but of control – ‘our case for nationalization rests then primarily on its efficacy as a tool for workers’ control and as a precipitant of the conscious desire for workers’ control, not on any argument of efficiency’.39 Peter Sedgwick was foremost in developing a republican form of Marxism within the IS group. He stressed the contemporary importance of Christopher Hill’s analyses of the British republican tradition in the English Civil War, writing that ‘there can be no better tonic for those disgusted with what passes for politics in present-day England than a brief but total immersion in the age of Winstanley and the New Model Army’.40 He was particularly concerned with soviet democracy and workers’ control as expressions of the self-activity and self-government of the working class. In contrast to many of the early New Left, he criticized the Yugoslav experiment in industrial democracy because the workers’ councils there were no more democratic in substance than the mir of nineteenth-century Russia, co-existing as it did with Czarist tyranny. To Sedgwick, ‘workers’ control has no meaning in the absence of political democracy for the working class. Many of the choices which have to do with overall economic programmes affecting more than one industry must inevitably be expressed at a national, electoral level.’41 To Sedgwick, industrial democracy did not exist alongside the state, but had to be the foundation and essence of the state.


IS in the 1960s was a meeting place of republican, Luxemburgist and Leninist theories rather than a particular attempt to develop a republican theory of industrial democracy, but its open and eclectic approach led E.P. Thompson, usually a scourge of Trotskyists, to welcome IS as ‘the most constructive journal with a Trotskyist tendency in this country’.42 Michael Kidron made clear the journal’s relationship to the New Left in a sympathetic review of Out of Apathy in 1960, in which he welcomed the passion for human creativity displayed in the book, while noting that ‘it shies away from a class analysis; it is blind to the material power of working class consciousness; it belittles the factors which impinge on that consciousness’.43 The qualification proved to be crucial in the long term, and IS later mushroomed into the present-day Socialist Workers Party, which is more noted for its Leninist commitment to democratic centralism than for any libertarian or republican leanings.44

The importance of the IWC The New Left Review and IS may have been intellectually stimulating, but in political terms it was the Labour Party which had the weight to make the new republican conception effective. That was what made the Institute for Workers Control (IWC) of such importance, as it combined a specifically republican account of industrial democracy derived from Cole and the New Left with tremendous influence within the Labour Party through its prominent trade union members. The IWC was established in April 1964, at a relatively small conference in Nottingham sponsored by Voice of the Unions, a journal founded by Ernie Roberts of the AEU and Frank Allaun, the Labour MP for Salford East. The second conference, sponsored by the London Cooperative Society, was held in London in May 1965; it was larger and more impressive in its organization, with a range of seminars devoted to the discussion of workers’ control in specific industries like steel and the docks. This concentration on specific industries rather than general theoretical questions was to be a marked feature of the conferences which followed. The IWC conferences of 1966–68 were far larger gatherings of several hundred people, a mixture of shop stewards and prominent figures in the Labour Movement, including Jack Jones of the TGWU, Hugh Scanlon of the AEU, and Lawrence Daly of the NUM as well as such luminaries of the New Left as E.P. Thompson, John Hughes and Robin Blackburn.45 The ideas expressed in such large gatherings were bound to be diverse, but Ken Coates and Tony Topham stand out as the moving spirits.


Coates was editor of The Week, a Trotskyist-orientated newspaper which had gained the support of Bertrand Russell, Ernie Roberts and Lawrence Daly,46 and he was expelled from the Labour Party in 1965 for supporting the Vietcong (he waged a five-year struggle for reinstatement); Topham was a lecturer in adult education at Hull University. It was these two who wrote and edited a series of books and pamphlets publicizing the IWC’s ideas of industrial democracy. These ideas had much more in common with republican notions of political freedom within the workplace than with the Leninist concern with expertise and economic efficiency or the syndicalist doctrines of Industrial Unionism. Thus, Topham argued that Yugoslavia was building a social system ‘which seeks to interpret democracy in terms of the participation of the whole working population of a country in the process of decision-taking at all levels of the social organization’47 – an argument which unfortunately ignored the fact that the state lay outside democratic control.48 Like Cole, Topham believed that political theory could be applied to the administration of the factory as well as the state, and argued that the Yugoslavs were demonstrating that ‘the concept of Workers’ Control is essentially a political one’.49 He believed that Yugoslavia, unlike Britain, was a full democracy because decisions were taken by workers at the local level every day rather than indulged in at five-yearly intervals, a clear expression of the republican tradition of participatory democracy. In Britain, too, industrial administration had to be recognized as a political rather than a merely technical concern, and Topham demanded ‘the complete transformation of the government of the nationalized industries, so that authority at all levels, from top board to local plant or pit, resides in elected workers’ councils’.50 The IWC explicitly singled out the New Left’s republican theories of apathy and commitment as the basis of their advocacy of workers’ control. Thus, they argued that while the people of Coventry, Dagenham or Mansfield may appear fortunate beside the Third World, the apathy of the industrial metropolis was the precondition for imperialist exploitation because it allowed that exploitation to occur without resistance. The starvation of adequate capital for education and health and the maintenance of imperialism both had their ultimate root in the abdication of responsibility by the working class. If people were going to assert control over their destiny, however, it had to be in the workplace, the real site of a genuine community; it was here rather than in the neighbourhood that the brutalizing implications of power were at their most intense. In the suburb, social status was transformed into


petty snobberies, but ‘the place where status has teeth is beyond all doubt the factory, the office, the enterprise’.51 Unlike Charles Taylor and Stuart Hall, who had rejected a narrow class interpretation of community, the IWC stressed that ‘men relate themselves to their community firstly and primarily in their work. It is therefore necessary that democracy should begin at work.’52 Ken Coates argued that while workers were materially better off than in Marx’s day, their status in moral terms was no better, as the figures for strikes and feigned sickness demonstrated. Wage slavery was still the predominant fact in Britain, as in 1917 when Cole had asserted that slavery rather than poverty was the major problem facing British society. The IWC argued that capitalism had mutilated people intellectually by compressing them into the confines of jobs without responsibility; as a result, the moral status of the worker was degraded within ‘this given capitalist society, which is not a true community, but a conflict of interests’.53 The deformation of humanity which resulted could only end when the subordinate classes asserted a demand for a truly human stature, a stature which necessarily involved the development of the labourer’s freedom. This freedom, which ‘is a capacity for self-realization or it is nothing’,54 rested on the recognition that a true community could be founded only by equals, never within a hierarchy of authority. In the light of this conception, a republican interpretation of Marxism emerged. The exploitation of the worker as a wage slave was seen as political rather than merely economic. In presenting the argument that through the sale of labour power the worker lost control of the product, the IWC theorists were reviving a particular aspect of Marxist theory. The theory of value, whereby the sale and purchase of labour power was the basis of the laws of motion of capital, was set aside in favour of the writings of the young Marx, the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts who had so excited the early New Left. The old belief that insecurity and poverty were produced by the capitalist economy appeared to be belied by the realities of life in an affluent Britain regulated by Keynesian techniques of economic management. Instead, it was the inhumanity of the division between management and labour which became the primary symptom of human distress; this segmentation of labour denied ‘the limitless potential which lies latent in humanity, to be released when men are able to act because they choose to do so’.55 Like Cole, the IWC were stretching republican theory from its traditional concern with the state as polis to a view of the factory and the workshop as polis. They were concerned with the spirit of democracy as


a participation of equals, which they translated in terms of day-to-day struggles within the factory, and they saw the trade union bureaucracies, which had grown remote and unresponsive to the rank and file, as having been corrupted, incorporated into the Establishment which ruled over the very workers they were supposed to represent. To Hugh Scanlon, in a 1967 interview with the New Left Review immediately after his election as President of the Engineering Union, ‘the leadership of the trade union movement is now almost a part of the Establishment – more important still, is a recognized part of the Establishment’.56 It was in order to avoid such entanglements that the IWC rejected workers’ participation in managerial decisions. They regarded participation as an alternative to, not a form of, industrial democracy, acting to regulate workers’ living standards and industrial behaviour rather than to serve their class interests. It was workers’ control which was needed to challenge the power structure of capitalism. There was also a general agreement on the instrument by which the goal was to be achieved – the shop stewards movement.57 As Hugh Scanlon told delegates to the 1967 IWC conference, ‘I bring greetings from the industrial Left . . . We fight in the Left through the shop stewards movement, which is like no other section of the working-class movement.’58 In this movement, concentrated in a few important industries like engineering, the car industry and the docks, the IWC saw a genuinely democratic fellowship at the most localized level, demonstrating by their very existence a rapidly accelerating drive for direct workers’ representation – ‘the shop steward’s constituency is of a size which renders him properly subject to democratic procedures from below; he is dealing with people who know the situation’.59 The movement was the modern expression of the directly elected delegate of the Rousseauist republic, the Guild, the industrial Commune. This was why, to the IWC, the programme of corporatist planning and industrial efficiency endorsed by both Harold Wilson and the Labour Left had to be rejected – ‘the basis of the Wilsonian programme is the unleashing of an “engineers’ culture” upon industry, whilst the new shop-floor movement is essentially humanistic in its inspiration’.60 Against this technocratic and elitist politics, workers’ control was to be a school in which consciousness was to be raised while working-class living standards were to be simultaneously defended. The tactics by which this could be achieved – whether the use of incomes policy as a means of extending workers’ control, or the extension of workers’ bargaining power – obviously differed according to circumstances.61 However, all served to train workers ‘to think not in terms of profit and


at plant level, or industry level, but in global, political terms, about the national sectors of wages and profits’.62 In this way, the road to full workers’ self-management of industry would be paved. However, this represented a restriction of the cultural definition of consciousness held by the early New Left to a view of consciousness as determined simply by struggles at the point of production. The ULR theorists of the late 1950s had considerably enriched socialist theory by pointing to the much wider category of the community, including as it did such determinants of social consciousness as the family and the neighbourhood as well as housewives, the poor, the unemployed and the old who were unable to participate in the workplace community. This was particularly important given the upsurge of immigration and the movement of white working-class people to the suburbs, both of which were transforming the inner cities. Eventually, the decline of manufacturing industry and of the old industrial working class was to prove a fatal blow to the IWC politics.

A New Labour Left The importance of the IWC ideas lay in their impact upon the Labour Left and, in the conditions of radicalization in the late 1960s, on the Labour Party as a whole. Since the 1930s, Labour had espoused the neo-corporatist politics of Morrisonian nationalization and central planning, while the Labour Left (organized around the weekly periodical Tribune) had merely called for a more vigorous application of this corporate socialist ideology. Notions of workers’ control had continued to be heard, but it was mainly expressed in occasional protesting speeches at the Party Conference, or in trade union outposts such as the Railwaymen. The popularity of central planning, derived from admiration for the Soviet Five Year plans and Roosevelt’s New Deal, ensured that workers, control as a decentralized community had ceased to be a viable political option on the Left.63 The rise of the New Left had not changed this situation, at least initially. For Tribune, the students around the ULR seemed to represent a youthful movement of middle-class radicalism which they were anxious to appropriate; the moral language of commitment and the espousal of radical causes such as unilateral disarmament and community politics coincided with the Tribune Left’s own attempts to recover from the desertion of the charismatic Nye Bevan from their ranks. A special issue of Tribune was devoted to the New Left and their following in the universities, and a passing interest was expressed in the


ULR/New Reasoner pamphlet, A Socialist Wages Plan, which called for a radical prices and incomes policy, to be accompanied by a major redistribution of wealth. This did not lead politicians such as Michael Foot and Steven Swingler to reject their models of central planning in favour of any republican conception of politics; on the contrary, they organized the Victory for Socialism (VFS) Group in 1958 to urge a more vigorous pursuit of the corporatist model.64 However, the beginnings of a genuine debate between this traditional corporatist approach and the new republican conception embodied in Cole’s ideas of industrial democracy appeared very briefly in the aftermath of the disastrous 1959 election defeat for Labour. In an atmosphere of recrimination and a search for new ideas among all sections of the Labour Party, Tribune launched a wholesale attack on the Morrisonian model of nationalization in favour of full-blooded workers control, totally different in conception from the Bevanite version of industrial democracy as consultation committees. In an editorial under the rubric ‘What Tribune Thinks’, and defiantly entitled ‘Let Them Answer This If They Can’, Tribune affirmed that only public ownership of the essential equipment and resources to create a planned society could bring about the communitarian purposes and values of which the editors had written immediately after the election. However, in a sharp move away from previous thinking, a direct attack was launched on the over-centralized and bureaucratic corporations created by nationalization. Dominated as they were by men trained in and devoted to capitalist principles, the Boards of these corporations treated both customers and the workforce with disdain, as though no real social change had been brought about from the old private companies. Indeed, in some ways these Morrisonian corporations were examples of state capitalism rather than genuine socialism – ‘ask any miner or any railwayman; though he would fiercely resist any return to the old companies, he will tell you that he has merely exchanged one boss for another. A whole reservoir of working class experience, ability and enthusiasm has been allowed to run to waste.’65 The result was an attack on the whole model of central planning. Vic Allen, a lecturer at Leeds University, wrote a series of articles on workers’ control to accompany the new campaign.66 Attacking the giant oligopolies which dominate the economy as a threat to democracy,67 he called for the decentralization of industry, so that direct democracy could become a reality. Since each decision had social consequences for people, the people affected must have a voice in shaping them, so that ‘the devolution and spread of decision-making in the interests of social


justice become more important as firms grow bigger and as their actions become more interdependent’.68 Allen argued that the possibility of this had increased as a result of the dilution of the old managerial prerogative, which had shifted to the laboratory, market research divisions, and other areas in the industrial division of labour as a result of the new information technology. There seems to have been some sort of conflict. Tribune saw these articles on industrial democracy as a definite new direction in which the Left’s politics were turning. They were described as ‘more than the re-statement of a socialist ideal; they will be the starting point of an all-out campaign for the incorporation of the principle of industrial democracy into Labour party and TUC policy’.69 However, a week later the VFS group reasserted their faith in a corporatist socialism, with only a vague reference to the need for possible changes in the nature of the public corporations.70 No evidence is to be found in the pages of Tribune of any internal political conflict within the Left over republican and corporatist strategies, and editorial minutes are apparently not kept. After raising the issue and pointing to its vital importance for the Labour Movement, Tribune dropped the whole campaign and serious discussion of the issues fell out of sight. According to Richard Clements, then Tribune’s editor, the campaign was ended because of lack of trade union interest; for a campaigning paper, it was one more campaign which had turned out to be a damp squib. However, whatever the political situation, it is plain that a republican challenge to the traditional corporatist politics of the Labour Left had been mounted but, for some reason, had been quickly discontinued.71 The main emphasis shifted once again towards state control, not workers’ control, of the commanding heights of the economy. When, in the spring of 1960, the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, finally admitted defeat in his attempt to modify Clause Four of Labour’s constitution (committing the party to common ownership), Tribune was exultant about the new Statement of Aims proclaiming the need for a mixed economy. Under its terms, ‘the commanding heights would have been conquered. The public sector would have been made dominant. The whole motive-power and nature of society would have been changed. This practical objective is good enough for us.’72 By the spring of 1960, the Tribune Left had dropped all interest in industrial democracy and had turned to the ideas of John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian economist. Galbraith was a New Deal liberal – a corporatist par excellence. He sought to permit and even encourage the concentration of industry into a small number of large and flourishing companies, with any abuse of power which they may be tempted to make prevented by the countervailing restraints of


government and trade unions.73 It was a corporatist conception which had little in common with the assault on oligarchy and centralization made by the New Left authors of ‘The Insiders’.74 The new elaboration of industrial democracy as a republican conception did not attract the traditional leaders of the Tribune Left. Michael Foot continued to hold that the only thing wrong with the Labour Government’s corporatist strategy was that it had not been carried through with enough determination in the face of resistance from international financiers. Rejecting the new free-market ideas welling up on the Right, Foot still argued in the spring of 1968 for a corporatist form of socialism – ‘the expansionist-plus-state interventionist policy on which Labour was elected . . . which offers the best hope of saving the Labour Government from its failures and timidities’.75 However, a different strategy was already being put forward by the new intake of Labour MPs after the 1964 and 1966 elections.76 Eric Heffer gave public vent to the differences of many of the new MPs with the old VFS group soon after the 1966 election; while denying a split within the Left, he stressed that ‘new ideas are welling up, and some impatience is being felt with old methods and old tactics’.77 In particular, he called for the extension of public ownership to be linked with industrial democracy, which was much more radical than mere consultation. He pointed to Rosa Luxemburg, the German libertarian Marxist, as an example of a socialist who was more concerned with the involvement of people in a socialist society – a participatory democracy – than with economic efficiency, and he attacked the bureaucratic managerial structure of the nationalized industries – ‘certainly public ownership . . . is a necessary prerequisite to establishing Socialism, but Socialism is something more than that . . . The need today is to extend our political democracy into industry.’78 The republican promise of the New Left and of Cole’s ideas of industrial democracy were about to be fulfilled. It was the individuals concerned as much as the ideas in themselves which made such an important impact on the Tribune Left. The Left was not a seminar where ideas were sharpened, inconsistencies ironed out, and counter-examples tested. It was a political movement, aware that the realities of power had to be taken into account in any political struggle. In the case of the Labour Party, those realities meant the support of the trade union leaders. That was why it was so important that Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, both prominent figures in the IWC and emerging as the leadership of a powerful union axis (the Transport Workers and the Engineers) should have supported industrial democracy against corporatism. To Jones,


management needed the injection of a new driving spirit which practical men and women from the shop floor could give. By forcing companies to recognize unions, and ‘opening the books’ to the scrutiny of trade union representatives, ‘the dam of industrial apathy can be burst’.79 It was a challenge to the corporatism which had hitherto dominated the Left, and Jones was quick to point out that economic efficiency and its benefits for the workforce were subordinate to the participatory democracy which was the essence of trade unionism. He wrote at the end of 1966 that ‘trade unionism is a movement of self-government or it is nothing. Production or efficient bargaining locally gives reality to slogans about worker control; it is the starting point of industrial democracy upon which the Socialist blueprint can be based.’80 It was the election of Hugh Scanlon, a prominent IWC activist, as President of the powerful Engineers Union, and the alert that this gave to the Left on the question of industrial democracy that led to a startling change of approach. In May 1968, in an article on steel nationalization which appeared, significantly, after a series of extracts from Scanlon’s speech to the IWC on industrial democracy, Ian Mikardo, of the traditionalist Labour Left, wrote that ‘as long as the decisions about higher production and the disposal of the resultant benefits remain at the unilateral disposal of managements, the workers aren’t going to play a game where rules are rigged against them’.81 This was ambiguous, but it was symptomatic of a general change that was taking place in the Labour Left’s response to Britain’s economic problems. Initially, industrial democracy played no part in their programme; instead they advocated increased public ownership together with a system of greater controls as an alternative to the wage freeze.82 Indeed, as late as January 1968, when cuts in social services accompanied the withdrawal of British troops from East of Suez, the Left responded by presenting a new economic strategy, which failed to mention industrial democracy. The plan was vague on the question of increasing public ownership, but the proposals for strict controls on imports, capital movements, and foreign exchange, together with more cuts in defence expenditure, were predicated on a programme of public ownership which was no different from the corporatist model advocated by Morrison.83

Benn and the Left Militant At the height of despair over the failure of Wilson’s corporatist strategy, the general strike and occupation of factories in France in May 1968 placed the question of workers’ control in the forefront of the radical


Left’s thinking. As French workers played scrabble with the nameplate ‘Berliet’ to make ‘Liberte’, an excited Tribune editorial singled out the German-American republican, Hannah Arendt, as a theorist of the new type of democracy which was being heralded by the occupations. Workers’ control had been put on the political map in Britain as well as France, according to the editorial – ‘the truth is that the workers who have been occupying their factories, like the students who have been in control of the Sorbonne, are not merely protesting about specific injustices, or making limited demands . . . The hoisting of the Red Flag over factories and shipyards, the creation of “Soviets” – workers’ councils in the factories, students councils in the colleges – are the natural signs of an authentic revolutionary feeling.’84 In late May, as the workers’ occupations in France were reaching their climax, Wedgwood Benn, the Minister of Technology hitherto seen as a mainstay of corporatism, expressed his disenchantment with the political values of the Government. Benn’s enthusiasm for technological expertise and meritocracy had been long-standing, though his awareness of some republican sentiment in the nation had already been expressed in 1965 when he put forward the idea of ‘a Britain that was republican in every meaningful sense, but still recognized the Crown as Head of State’.85 This idea of a crowned republic, in which the Royal Prerogative would be removed and the Church disestablished, was republican mainly in the narrow sense of the absence of a monarchy; in terms of citizen participation, Benn’s politics was still tied to state planning in the interests of economic efficiency, and his idea of a Citizens for Labour group was seen in terms of a recruiting agency with no policy function.86 However, in late May 1968, in a speech criticizing the lack of democracy in society, Benn raised specifically republican demands for a popular democracy to supplement parliamentary democracy. Calling for increasing participation and involvement in Government, he argued that ‘in a world where authoritarianism of the Left or Right is a very serious possibility, the question of whether ordinary people can govern themselves by consent is still on trial . . . Beyond Parliamentary democracy as we know it, we shall have to find a new popular democracy to replace it.’87 It was the appearance in June 1968, of the Socialist Charter, the statement of aims produced by the Tribune group, which witnessed the major breach in the wall of corporatism on the Left. The demands for national independence from foreign capital, an independent foreign policy and a national plan were predicated on a programme of public ownership defined in terms of industrial democracy. There was a specific call for


‘full public accountability of private and public institutions and growing democratic control by workers and employees over the decisions which determine their working lives’.88 It was not so precise as to exclude the definition of industrial democracy held by the old Keep Left and VFS groups, but this was probably necessary because of the differences within the Left. The important point to note is the appearance of industrial democracy in the programme. Previously, the Left had held to a notion of industrial democracy in terms of participation rather than control, and had not bothered to mention it as important enough to figure in their campaigns. Now, in spite of a terminology so vague that ‘industrial democracy’ could mean participation or control, it had become an explicit part of the Left’s programme. A major shift in the transition from corporatist to republican politics had occurred. By 1968 a major shift had taken place in the political language of the Left. A form of republican politics was in the process of supplementing the Labour Left’s traditional set of ideas, with the vital political support of the leadership of the two biggest unions. A new leader had emerged in Wedgwood Benn, who was to symbolize the new politics of participation and direct democracy which was to replace the Morrisonian approach to public ownership. Such a politics had emerged at its clearest in the writings of the New Left and of a radical intelligentsia which was concerned with increasing popular participation in the community and in industry. However, it was not free of the problematic involved in accepting the benefits of affluence and low unemployment which was seen to flow from an elitist Keynesian commitment to managing the economy. The inability to develop a republican politics to its fullest extent derived from the commitment of this Left to a socialist politics which was as concerned with economic efficiency as it was with participation. Others, less trammelled by any commitment to public ownership and economic management, were developing the contours of the new republican conception in a manner not yet welcome to these republican socialists.

Part Two The Republican Market


4 Jo Grimond and the Unservile State

It was not merely the Socialist Left which was exploring a republican politics of participation. In an interview in the Observer immediately after the 1959 election, Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, called for radicals in the Liberal and Labour Parties to make a new appeal to ordinary people to take an active part in political life. Asked how a Socialist party could cooperate with a non-Socialist one, he replied that ‘there might be a bridge between Socialism and the Liberal policy of co-ownership in industry through a type of syndicalism coupled with a nonconformist outlook such as was propounded on many issues by George Orwell’.1 Industrial democracy and a tolerance of dissent, which were also distinctive marks of the New Left, were symptoms of a change in ideological thinking in Britain which was not confined to the socialist movement. Where the socialist politics of the New Left prevented them from moving beyond a Keynesian-corporatist approach to the management of the economy, the Liberal circle around Jo Grimond were able to develop a fuller republican conception of the economy, based on a politics of citizen participation free from any socialist trappings, without the need to reconcile it with public ownership or a centrally directed planning apparatus. The idea of an unservile society, where citizenship was based on property, was also distinct from the laissez-faire approach of other Liberals who saw the market as the crucial mechanism for individual choice, irrespective of and antagonistic to the res publica. In doing so, the idea of a republican political economy which had evaded the New Left was realized, although the theoretical innovation was obscured by the tentative policy conclusions. There was a reversion to a belief in technocratic expertise and state planning in the early 1960s, but Grimond’s continuing faith in the citizen politics of the local community operating within a market economy was to survive. 89


Liberals and the active State The victory of Jo Grimond as Liberal party leader in October 1956 has long been perceived as a success for the dirigiste, state-interventionist wing of the party, represented by his Radical Reform Group, over the free-market People’s League for the Defence of Freedom, led by Edward Martell.2 In fact, he was moving in a new direction, away from the activist state and towards the active citizen. The Liberals had long been committed to a philosophy of state interventionism to secure welfare and full employment, relegating the believers in a minimal state and a free market to minority status in the party. Where the responsible citizen had once been seen as fighting for political reform, social reform had moved to the fore, bringing with it a collectivist and statist approach to the relationship of the individual to society. The birthplace of this New Liberalism lay in the philosophical Idealism of nineteenth-century Liberal academics such as T.H. Green, but the result was seen in the burst of social reform of the Liberal Governments of 1905–14, encompassing trade union rights, pensions and national insurance. Liberal intellectuals in the inter-war period saw the State as the appropriate vehicle of social action, supplementing and even supplanting the ‘negative freedom’ by which the individual citizen’s liberty was protected from coercion with a ‘positive freedom’ by which the activist State intervened to help the poor and excluded – in the words of Michael Freeden, the historian of the movement, the State was viewed ‘not as a necessary evil, but as the just and right way of attaining human ends’.3 Although Sir William Beveridge, the key figure in the development of the idea of a Welfare State, stressed the need to preserve local government and private enterprise against the encroachments of state power, his arguments were mere qualifications to his central belief in the necessity of state intervention to secure full employment and overcome abject poverty. Beveridge’s nostalgic concern for older ideas of citizenship was not allowed to interfere with his endorsement of the central state – ‘Full employment cannot be won and held without a great extension of the responsibilities and powers of the State exercised through organs of the central Government. No power less than that of the State can ensure adequate total outlay at all times, or can control, in the general interest, the location of industry and the use of land. To ask for full employment while objecting to these extensions of State activity is to will the end and refuse the means.’4 It is in this light that T.H. Marshall and W.W. Robson had expressed regret over the passing of

Jo Grimond and the Unservile State 91

the community-life of local and parish government, while accepting as a fact of life the centralized, paternalist state concerned with efficiency and welfare.5 This was combined with the recognition that capitalism had passed beyond the golden age of free competition between small entrepreneurs towards a market economy regulated by cartels and oligopolies. John Maynard Keynes argued that Liberals who still looked to political reform, individual liberty and free enterprise were fighting on a terrain which had gone forever. Their refusal to recognize that a conservative and unimaginative group of usurers were present in the modern economy had resulted in an acceptance of mass unemployment and a criminal waste of social and human resources. To Keynes, only the State could counter these effects, while maintaining the freedoms associated with private enterprise – ‘we are brought to my heresy – if it is a heresy. I bring in the State. I abandon laissez-faire – not enthusiastically, not from contempt for that good old doctrine, but because, whether we like it or not, the conditions for its success have disappeared.’6 The liberty of the individual to conduct his affairs free from interference by others was being replaced, in the economic realm at least, by the freedom of the State to intervene on behalf of the more vulnerable members of the community. However, it was not this ‘New Liberalism’ which Grimond sought to embrace in his attempt to give the Liberals political relevance in the new circumstances of an affluent and successful mixed economy. He refused to accept the truism that in Britain ‘class is the basis of party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’,7 believing that such ideas were ceasing to express the full political reality of the mid-1950s. The dominance of Conservative and Labour reflected the informal integration of organized capital and labour into the decisions of the State on economic and social questions (what was later called the ‘corporate bias’ in British politics), but it was the very isolation of the Liberals from this system which placed them in a favourable position. An increasingly numerous professional class, congregating in the suburbs and feeling neglected by the more powerful interests of capital and labour, was beginning to assert itself politically in by-elections such as Tonbridge in June 1956; a ‘middle class revolt’ (especially in the more prosperous southern counties) was emerging.8 To appeal to this class, Grimond turned to a new politics of citizen participation (there was a similar revival of citizen politics by American liberals, rallying to Adlai Stevenson, at about the same time). Far from embracing dirigisme, he rejected the centralist State as


remote and increasingly irrelevant to the needs of ordinary people. His youthful and sincere charisma allowed him to present this new politics with panache, but he was aware of that fundamental flaw, one which had prevented the New Left from fully developing their republican politics. Citizens were inherently unable to participate in ‘fine-tuning’ the national economy – the expertise required to determine monetary and fiscal policy at any one time, to regulate the trade cycle or the foreign exchange markets, inevitably lay with a small group of mandarins in the Treasury and the Bank, making any citizen participation effectively irrelevant to the main determinants of the national well-being. While elitism and the remote State were to be rejected, however, the affluence and full employment enjoyed by the new middle classes as much as the old working classes appeared to depend on that fine-tuning. It was Grimond’s attempts to resolve this problem, by encouraging the development of a new republican political economy (something which the socialist politics of the New Left prevented them from doing), which was to play a crucial role in the development of a modern republican conception. It was not an unambiguous advance, and it proved not to be a conclusive advance, but it demonstrated both the inability of the New Left to break from their commitment to central planning and of the Liberals to make the decisive break with the Welfare State required for a fully developed republican politics.

The break from the modern state Initially Grimond avoided the problem of state intervention in the economy by claiming that it was no longer relevant. In a 1953 article for Political Quarterly, he attacked the obsession of Liberals with economics which had turned them away from their distinctive identity into a concern with economic abstractions – ‘it seems to me that between John Stuart Mill and Walter Lippman, the party came adrift from its philosophical moorings. It ceased to study experience. It took to abstraction. It forgot that man is a social animal who has always lived in communities and who has never been moved by purely economic considerations. Some Liberals, just as much as some Marxists, seemed to think of men only as abstract lay figures who must be abandoned to the force of economic laws.’9 Rather than concern themselves with ideal systems, as did Labour (and the free marketeers), he argued that the Liberals should concern themselves with practical problems.


Calling at the Southport Liberal Assembly in 1957 for ‘a constructive protest against Conservatism’, Grimond placed the Liberals on the centreleft of the political spectrum, stressing balance, reason and honesty in the face of the big battalions of labour and capital. At the 1958 Party Assembly in Torquay, he described the Liberals as ‘a redbrick party . . . [who] want to bust open the patronage and privilege by which both socialists and Tories manipulate our politics’. The ramshackle nature of the party organization was exposed, however, when the Assembly came close to collapse through bad chairmanship and an over-lengthy agenda, giving the impression of a party of amateur enthusiasts with no sense of the political realities of power. That organization could be, and was, repaired, but it was the enthusiasm aroused by a new political approach which inspired Liberal activists. The new concern with style, appealing to the growing middle class revolt in the suburbs, was matched by a substantive development in a particular type of republican politics, adapted to a new and affluent capitalism. Grimond pointed to the political system in which capital and labour were ranged against each other as sterile, with both Conservatives and Labour entrenched as sectional parties, intent only on office and incapable of even trying to find a solution to the real problems of Britain – ‘They are class parties, have neither of them mobilized the democratic will of the country.’10 The words chosen are interesting. They indicate that the existing parties are thwarting the democratic will, that they are undemocratic in some way and that the Liberals can somehow give voice to this new democracy. The idea of sectional and self-interested groups, holding back the common will of the people, is not far from the republican language of corruption and virtue. The novelty of this should not be overstated. Grimond was still arguing for the idea of ‘a strong guiding state enforcing the law, standing for the common good’.11 When he talked of co-ownership as being a democratic force in industry, replacing the old strife between labour and capital, he was saying nothing new; it had long been a Liberal political demand. But the novelty of his political stance should not be overlooked, either. He was seeking to present Liberal politics in a manner which was likely to appear dynamic and relevant to an affluent society where unemployment had become a thing of the past, and this determined the new way in which Liberal politics were presented, with hints of a new republican politics. Such a politics had existed in different forms in the party’s history, but this was a new context, demanding a new republican conception adapted to contemporary conditions.


The Unservile State In doing so, he was reflecting the politics of the Unservile State Group, formed in Oxford in 1953 to reinvigorate Liberal ideas. It was not an advocacy of the libertarian conception of the isolated individual free from State coercion, as held by free marketeers; it was a conception of republican liberty, an assertion that the State was legitimate if based on the responsible citizen acting freely for the public good – in such a state the citizen ruled because he accepted the rule of his equals. George Watson, who edited The Unservile State (1957), the seminal collection of essays by the Group, argued that Liberalism should recognize that it was a political philosophy, not a theory of economics – ‘Its watchword is liberty, and it rests upon the faith that all men are equally worthy of consideration. This faith we derive ultimately from classical humanism as this was made fruitful, dynamic and universal by the religion of the Bible.’12 Whether this was a reflection or an unconnected parallel to the New Left’s proclamation of socialist humanism made at this time, such a call was seen as a vigorous alternative to Conservative paternalism and to Labour’s belief that the central state at Whitehall and Westminster knew best. Elliot Dodds, the Vice President of the Liberal Party, in his introduction to The Unservile State, did write of ‘the creation of opportunity for men and women to become self-directing, responsible persons’,13 but, despite the language, his approach remained mired in paternalism. He certainly rejected the libertarian commitment to the isolated individual as the foundation of society, arguing that the prime inspiration of politics was concern for the individual as a member of a complex network of relationships. However, this was couched in terms of the need of the intellectual and moral minority for whom ‘it is essential to maintain the “higher” liberties – of thought, worship, research, etc. . . . since their use by this minority makes for intellectual, moral and even material progress and creates an atmosphere encouraging to the pursuit of liberty generally’.14 This division between an elite which led and the mass which was led merely recreated the divorce between the State and society which the modern republican idea of the active citizen was intended to overcome. However, the other writers in The Unservile State were much more forthright in developing the new republican politics. George Allen, in a critique of urbanization as a symptom of centralization, argued that civic and national duties were losing all substantive meaning as a result of the trend towards conformity brought about by the megalopolis, and that


sectional interests were taking power (the classical republican analysis of corruption) – ‘large cities and centralized government, like other large organizations, offer greater scope to the few for personal aggrandizement; but in the process many must be placed in situations they regard as servile’.15 It was in reaction to such centralized government that Allen called for the relocation of people to small towns, linked to the reform and revitalization of local government. This required not the central direction of ‘town and country planning’, associated as this concept was with Development Areas, but the devolution of power to the locality in a process of geographical and administrative decentralization. He made clear that he saw the creation of regional government as part of this process of dismantling centralized power rather than another agency which would absorb and stultify the locality – ‘it cannot be too strongly emphasized that we see in it a way of removing power from the centre, not of further drawing the lifeblood of Local Authorities’.16 Peter Wiles developed the new politics in a different direction in his analysis of property. Accepting that the old socialist concern with inequalities of income had diminished enough as a result of the Welfare State to remove any threat to liberty, Wiles argued that the distribution of property remained ‘gross, unjust, and practically unchanged since Victorian times’.17 In a startling Liberal parallel to the New Left’s analysis of property in ‘The Insiders’, he argued that the growth of regulation and taxation, together with the rise of absentee ownership through limited liability, had led to public indifference to the injustice of property maldistribution. At the same time, according to Wiles, this maldistribution generated most of the social tensions in the country, throwing labour and capital, landlord and tenant, into opposition to one another. While a wider group of small investors had moved into the market, the result was that ‘the large corporate body becomes more and more a legal entity separate from its individual owners’.18 It was this abstract body, rather than any particular owners, which now stood as the threat to liberty. Capitalism was as much of a threat to property as socialism.

Grimond and the Unservile State It is in Grimond’s book, The Liberal Future (1959) that the republican conception starts to emerge in a clear shape. On the surface, this was a recapitulation of old and respected Liberal doctrines – the importance of individual choice within the polity, toleration of minorities, respect for different views, and a reliance on reason tempered by tradition and emotion, leading Grimond to claim Edmund Burke as ‘the essence of


Liberal rationalism’.19 This was uncontroversial to the point of banality; the repetition of the ideas of John Stuart Mill may have been useful at a time when they were abhorrent to political and social practice, but they had long become platitudes in intellectual discourse within Britain. It was the implicit attack on the New Liberalism which was new, expressing an attempt to move forward into a modern age. Reviewing the evolution of the Liberal faith in humanity and progress in the Empire, charity and enterprise at home, Grimond noted the decline in Liberal philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn to state intervention to provide welfare which had marked the New Liberalism. However, far from repeating comfortable platitudes about the Liberal contribution to the Welfare State, he argued that Liberals had committed a grave mistake – blind to the dangers around them, they had used the State without probing the root causes of the ills which the State was meant to cure. They had failed to define the proper limits of a central government; they had failed to recognize the high level of social responsibility required before such powers could be entrusted to government; ‘above all, they lost sight of their main purpose, which should have been to give back power and choice to the people themselves, to reconstitute Society, not to enthrone the state’.20 It was the Liberals of the inter-war period, men such as Keynes and Beveridge, who had been responsible for fuelling State Socialism. The time had now come to strengthen the social bonds connecting citizens, and to turn back the power of the State. This was not because Liberals should be against planning as such, but that planning should be made responsibly. The problem with State Socialism was that ‘the planned state had become the irresponsible state’,21 by which he explicitly referred to the tendency of the modern State to be run by Ministers and state bodies which were unable to exercise responsibility because they were divorced from the citizen. While accepting that the State had to be used in a directive role, both to reduce an inflation which sapped individual savings and to maintain full employment of resources, it had to be a different type of State from the remote body it had become, reflecting a participating citizenry rather than an apathetic and dependent mass. In a strong echo of New Left critiques of apathy, Grimond criticized the ‘proletariat’ as the obverse side of the Welfare State. They were means, not ends; ‘hands’, statistics, rather than individuals; equal but uniform, the epitome of an irresponsible society. Their surrender to the bribery of material goods like washing machines, television sets and cars was making a mockery of a ‘real’ democracy – ‘and yet in so far as they have sacrificed all effort to reach individual perfection in exchange for


an overall mediocrity, and when they submerge their identities to present a target for more and more dish washers and motor cars rained down on them by a heavier and heavier barrage of advertisements, they are a proletariat. They are in danger of losing control of their own destiny.’22 They accepted that they were the ruled, whether the rulers be big business or big government. In criticizing their apathy, Grimond was presenting a republican politics of corruption (in the sense of the pursuit of sectional, private interests) and virtue (in the sense of the pursuit of the common good, the ‘public thing’) against corporatism. However this republican language as a critique of an affluent capitalism, already being adumbrated by the New Left, led Grimond to turn away from the economic questions which had dominated radical, Liberal as well as socialist, politics towards a more narrowly political conception – ‘The root of our troubles is political.’23 The powerful corporate interests of capital and labour, represented by the two main political parties, were seen as a more suitable enemy of democracy than the capitalism which had so worried the labour movement in the first half of the century. In the course of two major wars and the triumph of collectivist thinking, the State had ceased to represent the public good and had become skewered towards powerful pressure groups. A form of political degeneration had resulted in Britain, leading the State to favour sectional interests rather than the public good. In an attempt to constrain this centralized state machine, Grimond demanded an end to the sponsorship of MPs by outside bodies, whether they be the Aims of Industry group or the unions; the use of proportional representation in the electoral system to restore the independence of MPs who had been turned into ciphers of the party machine; and the ending of the secrecy which shrouded government, stifling public understanding and intensifying a dangerous apathy towards democracy. Such reforms would help return Britain to the living polity, which was far more than (to use Cole’s phrase) ‘a bare ballot-box democracy’. In a clear elaboration of the republican critique of an eliteled democracy, linked to the Liberal concern for the individual, Grimond argued that ‘the essence of democracy is neither the vote, nor the debate, it is the creation of a field for every individual in which he makes his own decisions and the creation of a system in which he can properly form his own opinions and if he wishes make them heard’.24 The return of government to the local community was the means by which the traditional distinction in Britain between the state and society was to be overcome by seeking to make Government serve its people, but an ambiguity persisted. Grimond continually stressed the


importance of self-government in the local and regional community, demanding that government be returned to the people in the locality, a republican conception which led him to argue that local affairs must be left to local government, so that ‘some of the vitality which we should all like to see at the grass roots, at the street and district and parish level, can surely thrust forward again on practical matters’.25 This republican conception was then linked to the old Whig demands for the rescue of legislation from the Cabinet and its restoration to the legislature. It was this Whig belief that ‘Parliament should be the traditional watchdog which should be ready to drive an encroaching executive from our liberties’26 which led him to advocate a strengthened and elected second chamber, or to demand the weakening of the tightly whipped party system by the alteration of the single member electoral system. Local government was to be direct, but national government was to be indirect, concerned with the checking of the power of the Executive. However, Grimond’s belief that local government expressed the popular will was not reflected in the extension of this republican idea of liberty to the national government. While he stressed the devolution of power from central to regional and local government, he never forgot where the balance of power in a modern, interdependent British polity should lie. In his contribution to The Unservile State, Grimond called for the revivification of democracy at the grass roots by allowing more participation, but he also argued that ‘it is important, however, that the central Government should not be left with all the unpopular jobs. Further, it must retain its primacy’27 (my italics). Grimond, unlike the New Liberals, was reviving a republican politics of participation, but while the responsibility of citizenship was universal, there were limits on the power of citizenship when it came to directly participating in government.

A republican political economy Where the New Left were still hamstrung by a commitment to state planning, which stood in sharp contradiction to its interest in the local community, the Liberals had no such trappings with which to contend. As a result, they were able to move much more freely away from a Keynesian determination of the level of economic activity by technical expertise towards the elaboration of a distinctively republican political economy. In the jurisprudential economic model of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, liberty had been defined primarily in terms of the returns to one’s property, of the natural right to enjoy that property free from


the interference of others. It was justice which determined its parameters.28 In contrast, it was the virtue of the property-owning citizen whose independence was anchored in his ownership of property which determined the parameters of a republican political economy.29 Such an approach had flourished in the eighteenth century – in the agrarianism of the independent country squire celebrated by Addison and Steele in The Spectator, and in the participation in the market of the responsible tradesman. It thrived in an age when the new economic categories were interpreted in terms of political concepts of virtue and corruption, liberty and servitude. The economics was political, not mathematical or jurisprudential; the economy was understood in terms of political rather than technical concepts. The Liberals, with their historical commitment to the market and individual smallholdings, were better placed to retrieve this conception than the New Left, trapped as they were by a socialist politics which shied away from the market within which independence could be manifested. The new ground being broken in their attitude towards politics determined the new ground being broken in the Liberal attitude to the economy. It was not any particular economic system per se which was at fault here, but a failure to define the ends which the system was meant to serve. The Liberals rejected collectivism, but they were not uncritical admirers of the market – ‘the Free Enterprise system is fundamentally unsuitable for a people which wants its Government to make up its mind for it. It is suitable for a people who are prepared to decide themselves what they want and what is right or wrong.’30 Thus, while Grimond accepted free enterprise and the market determination of prices and wages,31 he simultaneously presented a critique of competition – it distanced him both from those Liberals who sought a market as essential for the isolated individual’s freedom to choose and from the social Liberals who sought an activist State. The selfishness engendered by private enterprise led Grimond to argue that Liberals should submit their beliefs in the market system to a radical criticism. Competition was a good when its aim was worthy; indeed it was a safeguard against tyranny, as the individuals who made decisions in the marketplace had far more knowledge of the particular economic environment than a State in which economic power was being dangerously concentrated.32 However, ‘the chief fault of the competitive system, as I see it now, is not that it leads to jungle warfare in which the weakest go to the wall, but that it is becoming an end in itself’.33 The market was a vehicle which guaranteed freedom; the participation of active citizens in the local community should be the end.


To Grimond, it was the idea of the common good which distinguished the new Liberal politics from that simple faith in the self-correcting mechanism of the market which had inspired many nineteenth-century Liberals. Without this idea, he believed that there could be no political philosophy, no purpose in political debate, no meaning in freedom. This concept was distinguished from private, sectional interests in a classical republican manner – ‘a common good offered an aim for political action, an aim above the goods sought by various interest groups and above the private goods sought by individuals’.34 In economic terms, this was not the language of the free market of self-interested consumers as much as the political economy of free and responsible citizens. The problem lay in how to adapt a political economy elaborated within an eighteenth-century commercial capitalism to a modern twentieth-century economy whose workings appeared to be guaranteed by the Leviathan of the State working with its giant partners of Capital and Labour. The Liberals believed that a relevant alternative to this Leviathan lay at hand in their idea of the co-ownership of industry – a long-standing policy dating back to the Yellow Book of 1928 but now presented in the new context of an affluent and apathetic society. They also began to challenge the idea of the Welfare State that they had themselves once developed. Nancy Seear, who chaired the Liberal Party Ownership for All Committee, had presented the case for a new economic participation in The Unservile State essays of 1957. She related the demand for co-ownership to the affluence of the working class by arguing that the exploitation of the worker had been ended by the Second World War, resulting as it did in full employment, strong trades unions, and a fully developed Welfare State. The new complaint was no longer poverty, but the organization of industrial life. Major changes may have taken place in the distribution of income, but not in the distribution of power. In a similar argument to that of the New Left’s critique of ‘The Insiders’, she pointed out that the ownership of industry, like the ownership of property in general, was in the hands of a tiny minority – a small number of large owners of capital and a small but highly influential group of managers. Their power may have been regulated by the State and countered to a certain extent by the unions, but it remained ‘remote from the great mass of people in industry, both workers and executives’.35 The vitality and responsibility so central to the citizens of an unservile state had died as a result. Her solution of co-ownership was taken up by Donald Wade, who sought to give the slogan of a property-owners’ democracy reality by detaching it from the paternalist politics of the Tories and placing it at


the heart of a call for participatory democracy. He presented the idea of industrial democracy as a third way between a capitalist society where ownership and wealth were concentrated in a few hands, and a collectivist socialism where it was in the hands of the remote State. Nationalization was rejected as failing to give a sense of belonging to employees, failing to change a self-interested attitude, failing even to be efficient. In accepting private ownership, Wade was calling for an approach which placed the idea of co-ownership by workers of the enterprises in which they worked in a context which was essentially republican. He argued that the ownership of small-scale property was important for the independence that constitutes true liberty – ‘for he who has something to fall back on in time of need is in a stronger position and better equipped to face the hazards of life than one who is solely dependent on his wage-packet’.36 Co-ownership of industry could achieve this because it preserved the large-scale units of production and distribution so necessary to a complex economy, while motivating the individual worker with the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. However, Wade was not content to restrict the idea of providing economic independence through the ownership of shares in industry, even when provision for knowledge was made through joint consultation boards (such had been the approach of the Labour Left since the 1930s). In a prescient argument, he called for the economic citizen to be vested with powers of ownership in a wide variety of enterprises, not least by ownership of homes through the large-scale selling of local authority property. He attacked both Conservative and Labour approaches to the landlord–tenant relationship, accepting as both sides did the indefinite continuation of a relationship of dependence for working-class people, while owner-occupation was restricted to the middle classes. In contrast, he argued that the Liberals wanted an end to the tenant’s dependence on the landlord, and the widespread responsibility and benefits which arose from owning their own homes. This could not be restricted merely to home-ownership, either; instead there should be a genuinely enterprising society in which employees could build a portfolio of investments through tax reforms such as greater mortgage relief for new home-owners, and the substitution of Estate Tax by a new Inheritance Tax, graduated according to the size of the gift to allow wider division of the estate of a testator. The politics, rather than the technicalities, of these reforms, were significant. Wade argued that ‘political liberty involves duties as well as rights. A successful democracy requires politically conscious citizens


with a sense of responsibility.’37 While the increased productivity which came with a greater sense of responsibility was not neglected, Wade stressed the importance of a more ‘democratic’ economy, in which the small private interests of a minority would be replaced by the wider public interest of a majority with a stake in society. Avoiding the concentration of capital and property in the hands of oligopolies, and providing a diffusion of property to the population at large, could achieve this. The working class as a commodity to be hired by capital would be ended; ‘in this new era every citizen will have a “stake” in the country’s prosperity, but it will be in a form that is most personal, namely individual ownership’.38 It was this policy of co-ownership of industry which Grimond saw as providing a link to the Socialist Left in 1959. He believed that ‘we must either accept a very great concentration of power in the hands of our rulers or find new ways of spreading property’. The concentration of economic power in the hands of the State posed a threat to freedom, so Liberals had to look to property as ‘the bulwark against tyranny if spread sufficiently widely’.39 The idea of profit-sharing was not in itself republican, but the ends for which co-ownership existed was; it was the diffusion of property over the people as a whole, in such a manner as to prevent the concentration of power in either state or oligopoly, which guaranteed liberty in the republican sense of an economy of independent citizens. Whether he knew it or not, it was an echo of the republican tradition of Harrington and Jefferson which led Grimond to argue that the small property-holder ‘will have more chance of standing up to tyrannies, whether they be small or great, if they have some property upon which they can stand’.40 The belief in self-government, rather than higher economic growth or increased industrial production, lay at the heart of Grimond’s support of the co-ownership of industry as the key to solving the conundrum. While the Socialists sought to concentrate property in the hands of the State, and the Conservatives in the hands of the few, Liberals called themselves ‘distributists’, seeking to use changes to company law to end a system of ownership which led to class antagonism and hindered economic advance. In writing of ‘the transition from an industrial oligarchy to an industrial democracy’,41 he was presenting a critique of modern democracy which was being made by the New Left at that time. This explains the reaching out to the new trends in Labour thinking after the 1959 election in the Observer interview noted above, and echoed much later in his Memoirs when he wrote that ‘I believed then as now in some form of cooperation or syndicalism within a free market’.42 It was within the free


market that self-government had to flourish, however. This was not due to any celebration of the movements of price in relation to changing patterns of demand and supply, but to the belief that ‘the possession of some property is essential if a man is to enjoy full liberty’.43 Yet there remained ambiguities. Grimond’s commitment to self-government and active citizenship militated against the necessarily elitist nature of Keynesian demand management, dependent as it was on the opinion of expert economists in the Treasury and the Bank – the men in Whitehall – to determine the particular mix of monetary and fiscal policy which would regulate the business cycle. The prosperity and full employment of the 1950s made a rejection of Keynesian economics unthinkable; the mores and successful practices of the time were profoundly antipathetic to the republican idea of ‘political’ decentralization of power and active participation in government. Thus, he justified the state direction of industry in the country – a palpably illiberal measure of state coercion – in order to maintain full employment of resources, which ‘may from time to time mean the direction of some of our effort to an end chosen by the community’.44 State coercion could not be avoided on questions of slum clearance, road building, aid to poorer regions; but the concern with citizen politics did lead him to advocate a change to the bureaucratic management of regulatory bodies covering such work. To Grimond, ‘many of the boards should be run by the people, consumers or producers who stand to gain or lose by their activities, and working in conjunction with national or regional government’;45 the key example of such a body was the Highland Development Authority, composed of farmers, fishermen, weavers and other local groups. It was a paradoxical approach, combining a politics of citizenship with an economics which necessitated elitism (the same paradox which lay at the heart of New Left politics). He recognized the problem later in his life when he equated the policy of bureaucratic nationalization with the elitist stress on the State made by Keynes and Beveridge, accepting the role that Liberals such as himself had played in the trend towards the managed economy. Even so, in this self-criticism of his acceptance of Keynesianism, he raised the caveat that ‘Liberals at least raised the possibility of more democratic participation’.46

Alan Peacock and the Welfare Society In fact, the Keynesian ideas of demand management held little appeal even then for a politician seeking a new type of politics for a society which


appeared to have settled the problems of the Depression – ‘I always thought this [demand management] a policy of little significance. Arthur Holt pointed out that no one could find any close correlation between fine tuning and the way the economy behaved.’47 In seeking an alternative, Grimond turned to unconventional economists like F.W. Paish, whose anti-statism led him to advocate the avoidance of an incomes policy through a greater degree of unemployment, and Alan Peacock, one of the first British economists to analyse critically the apparently ineluctable growth of state expenditure in twentieth-century Britain. In fact, Alan Peacock’s theoretical analysis of the state’s role in the economy, and of the alternative of individual responsibility in the local community, was seminal in the emergence of a new republican political economy. It ran against the prevalent orthodoxy in British economic thought, tied as it was to the central manipulation of individual economic choices through changes in government fiscal and monetary policy; and his concern with the small political unit led him to point in the direction of a republican politics as much as in that of a free market. In a lecture at the Liberal Summer School at Girton College, Cambridge, in July 1960, Peacock argued that poverty in Britain would largely disappear within about twenty years, bringing the preconditions of a genuinely Liberal Society to the verge of achievement. He believed that individual freedom and responsibility would take on a new meaning in such circumstances, and that the main political question would shift from how wealth was produced and distributed to who allocated that wealth. He argued that this problem of allocation was inherent in a complex society where no scientific means existed of evaluating the desires of those who pay the taxes for their services. This posed great dangers, as the experts who could provide details of what could be achieved in education, health, housing and town planning would have a dangerous tendency to make choices for the consumer of such services – ‘we may be influenced by their personal judgement, but we cannot let them dictate to us. To think otherwise is to accept paternalistic government.’48 Their technical knowledge was indispensable to a knowledge of the relative efficiency of public and private bodies in providing services, but somehow these experts had to become servants rather than masters. This meant that public expenditure itself had to be subject to a rigorous control so that it could express the values of citizenship rather than the arbitrary opinions of the experts. Peacock stressed the need for a ‘pragmatic’ approach to government expenditure, parsing the different sectors from defence and law and


order to environmental services and public amenities like parks and libraries to show that an important part of society could only be financed and organized effectively by central government. Elsewhere, he insisted on using rule of thumb to determine how much should be left to the market; thus, permanent subsidies such as those to agriculture were looked at sceptically, while welfare services were seen as a case where government provision was absolutely necessary in times of depression but could be gradually replaced by private provision with the growth of prosperity. In short, he was reluctant to impose an absolute but artificial limit on government expenditure because some government activity was crucial – ‘what I am concerned about is the lack of critical appraisal of the position of government as a supplier of countless of our everyday needs’.49 However, this pragmatic approach was always fed by a philosophical principle which made Peacock’s political economy so distinct – ‘the Liberal must, as a matter of faith, assume that the large majority of people, given that they are emancipated from poverty, should be free to make their fundamental decisions for themselves . . . The true object of the Welfare State, for the Liberal, is to teach people to do without it.’50 This belief that as poverty declined, so the state provision of welfare should decline in direct proportion, stood in sharp contrast to the statist view that individuals were incapable of taking control of their own lives.51 His radical rejection of the idea of the Welfare State – an idea integral to the New Liberalism of the positive state held by Beveridge and Keynes – could not have been made by socialists of the New Left. In this modern conception of a republican economy, Peacock sought to square the traditional Liberal concern for the poor with an opposition to state intervention into the affairs of the citizen; the Welfare State was creating a child-like dependence instead of the sturdy self-reliance which would enable the citizen to make decisions on a responsible, confident and informed basis. Thus he argued that ‘nothing but a very radical reform in the existing structure of social services would make them conform to Liberal requirements’,52 and looked to the abolition of food and housing subsidies as well as some form of tax relief for private education. It was more tentative than it seemed. The problem was that while poverty existed, Liberals were very unwilling to withdraw the facilities of the Welfare State. The desire for fully responsible citizens, self-reliant in their ownership of property, remained no more than a desire – the ‘ought’ remained separate from the ‘is’. It was accepted that, as real incomes rose, social services would be gradually withdrawn, but in the interim they needed to be used to overcome the gross inequalities


which frustrated the individual’s ability to develop his particular gifts. A similar approach was taken to the National Health Service – the cost of medical technology made a public service necessary, but eventually the NHS would be greatly reduced in scope and expense.53 Eventually, in the future, at some undefined point, the Welfare State would wither away, but for the present there would be no change. Yet the theory underlying the policy was a powerful component of an economics fitted to the new politics. It was the theoretical framework which lay behind the hesitant policy approach, republican rather than libertarian,54 which marked Peacock’s innovatory work. This framework underlay Peacock’s Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (1961, a seminal work on the subject, co-written with Jack Wiseman). This work was much more than a compilation of statistics charting government spending on defence, education, social welfare and production from 1890 onwards; it also marked an important turn away from those conventional economists whose studies had hitherto been based on taxation, or on the effect of state expenditure on employment and prices. Peacock argued that there was a need to explain levels of government spending in a world where it took up from 25 to 40 per cent of community output. It was not a policy or empirical problem, but a conceptual question which had to be clarified.55 In a striking departure from the statistical bias of positive economics then prevalent, he argued that no bald presentation of data could explain any trend without conceptual analysis because ‘no general statistical measures can be expected to give unambiguous answers to all the kinds of questions which we wish to ask’.56 In a subtle shift towards a new political economy, Peacock (using the conceptual approach of the nineteenth-century German economist, Adolph Wagner) argued that government expenditure in any society would grow at a faster rate than community output. However, while an increasingly prosperous country with a more sophisticated state machinery would tend to increase government spending, such an increase was neither desirable nor inevitable. Instead, he argued that national characteristics shaped state expenditure, and that consequently ‘changes in the size of the government sector and hence of public expenditure are bound to be affected by the political nature of the society concerned and by current views about the role of government’.57 It was politics, not economic efficiency, which was crucial in the rise of state expenditure (though he acknowledged wider sociological influences on public spending, like the rise in population and the tasks of maintaining law in a larger society).


This recognition led Peacock to analyse the reasons for the growth of this remote, centralized State. He pointed to the displacement effect, whereby crises like war and slump led people to accept changes in taxation levels and government expenditures which they would normally resist. Significantly, these changes tended to persist once the crises which had led to them had passed. The ‘concentration process’ (as Peacock called the concentration of power in central government) was explained by this effect. Improved levels of transport and communication increased the knowledge of particular groups about standards of public service and living in other parts of the community, and thereby generated pressure for improved and uniform levels of public services, achieved through greater centralized control of finance and administration. The result was a restriction of the powers of local government and an increase in the size of the governmental unit. The dislocation which accompanied the resulting changes in society, together with the gradually increasing dependence of local government on a higher authority for revenue, made these changes acceptable, and therefore gave them the appearance of permanence. However, Peacock argued against the prevailing (Fabian) belief that such changes were permanent. It was a political, not a technical, problem in a society where voters make decisions about the level of taxation needed to provide the revenue for government spending, and political choices of citizens qualitatively differ from market choices – ‘it is inherent in the nature of choices made through the political process that the ideas of citizens as to what is politically desirable public expenditure can be separated from the ideas of those same citizens as to the reasonable burden of taxation’.58 If citizen choice were to change again in a reverse order, a similar displacement would be needed. It was the belief that the rise in central governmental power could be reversed which divided Peacock from the Keynesians and corporatists in the Britain of 1960. He saw the secular (long-term) trend in the growth of state spending in modern society as an illusion. It was the time-pattern of growth, caused by changes in social and political ideas and institutions, which was crucial. These changes had been the cause of a major rise in government expenditure in the twentieth century, but in different circumstances they could possibly lead to a fall in state spending.59 The idea of a time-pattern sounds very arcane, but it was crucial to Peacock’s argument that economics was essentially political economy, not a mere technical presentation of data. In his work for the Unservile State group, he argued that a new situation had arisen which had made the reverse in centralized power possible. It was in the ownership of property that the possibilities of change lay, and this was undergoing a change.


In the past, it was the power of the restricted group of property-owners which had determined the small level of government expenditure – ‘it is no accident of history that Gladstonian traditions of economy in government expenditure flourished at a time when voting power was restricted to those with property’.60 As the franchise was extended to a propertyless proletariat, so the level of government expenditure increased in inverse proportion to the decline in power of the citizen. Now, as propertyownership expanded and the problem of poverty was moving to a solution, the possibility existed of a reversal in this trend. It was not a question of technical economics, but one of politics – ‘only a major change in the attitude of the electorate to public spending will force any present-day government to take effective action’.61 It was precisely this view of citizenship applied to a modern economy which makes Peacock’s work distinctive. He argued that ‘anyone who attempts to work out a logical scheme of expenditure reform is handicapped by the remoteness of the governmental process from the ordinary man and his understandable bewilderment at the complexity of its machinery, both of which produce fatalism and apathy’.62 The rejection of centralized power was specifically connected to the need for social responsibility in the ‘Unservile State’, founded on active citizenship and manifested in local participation. Peacock and the Unservile State group were criticized by Friedrich Hayek, the free-market Austrian economist, because their radical rejection of centralized government in terms of theory was too cautious in terms of policy-making. Hayek argued that while they talked about the end of the Welfare State, they retained it in practice.63 The point has some validity. There was talk of a citizen activism, but the electoral implications of withdrawing social services and welfare, even in a society of full employment and increasing affluence, prevented the Liberals from giving the theory political teeth. Eventually, in the future, at some undefined point, the Welfare State would gradually disappear, but not yet. Peacock acknowledged the criticism when he admitted, ‘the reader may well doubt the possibility of applying our logic to a realistic policy of social reform. This scepticism is well founded.’64 It would take a more courageous politician to turn the theory into political reality.

Technocracy and the Liberals The Liberal revival, personified by Grimond’s youthful sincerity and dynamic charisma, was marked by spectacular by-election victories such as Torrington (1958) and Orpington (1962), and by a growth in party


membership to 350,000 by 1963. It was only the increasing political relevance of the Labour Party, especially under Harold Wilson after 1963, which restricted the Liberal resurgence, as new challenges arose which temporarily eclipsed the attractiveness of the republican politics of citizen participation. The need to overcome economic stagnation and the sudden if temporary rise in unemployment in the winter of 1962–3 meant that the Liberals were forced to think about how to renew the energies of the dynamic forces in a basically oligarchic economy, rather than merely present calls for radical political change. The problems of slow economic growth and balance of payments deficits, reinforced by the electoral popularity of Harold Wilson’s appeal to technocratic efficiency, forced many Liberals into a renewed interest in a Keynesian economic management which was by its dirigiste nature anti-republican. In Radical Alternatives (1962), a group of Oxford Liberal intellectuals (many involved in the original Unservile State group) called for a statedirected technocracy as a solution to Britain’s increasing economic problems, moving away from Grimond’s republican politics.65 There was a reassertion of the old Liberal faith in individual property rights, with no mention of the politics of citizenship within the market. Peter Wiles, who had originally called for a society of small, independent property-owners, now reluctantly accepted that the need to mobilize capital resources meant that ‘the possibility of rapid growth without more effort and more “planning” [is] remote’.66 He continued to hope that the free market, abandoned because of poverty in the early twentieth century, might well return with affluence in the twenty-first century. However, his belief in the effectiveness of the statist conception of ‘planning’ and the need for central government to deal with a sophisticated capitalist economy if full employment and economic growth were to be maintained meant that he ended up posing questions and expressing hopes rather than giving realistic Liberal answers.67 The Unservile State group was itself failing to keep the faith. In a 1963 paper, Desmond Banks called for a traditional strategy of planning and incomes growth, with a call for co-ownership as a palliative to anticorporatist consciences. This was one of a series of papers from the group attacking protectionist barriers which prevented the benefits of foreign trade from improving British standards of living, or demanding a common European foreign and defence policy. With the exception of a paper calling for local authorities to be given the power to choose their own constitutions, it was part of a movement away from active citizenship, towards a more technocratic and statist approach.68


Grimond himself did not escape the pressure entirely. When he dealt with the problems of economic stagnation and declining exports in 1961, he continued to express the belief that ‘the problem of giving Britain a higher rate of growth is essentially political rather than economic’.69 His denial that a mere technical problem was involved did not prevent him from endorsing the dirigisme he had once seen as a threat to (republican) self-government. The diagnosis was still one of apathy, of course, but now the solution was a five-year plan to raise industrial production and increase standards of living, not participation in decision-making. In an uncharacteristically corporatist denial of citizen participation, Grimond drew an explicit parallel with the French Commissariat du Plan as a model of planning. Co-ownership in industry was still advocated, but as a means to greater productivity,70 along with the reform of the taxation system, the reduction of defence spending on nuclear arms and free trade in Europe through joining the EEC. His demand for a higher degree of competition in British industry to meet the European challenge was set in an elitist, not a republican, mode. The competitive framework for industry was to be set from above, through the elitist structure elsewhere condemned by Grimond – he argued that the adoption of a target for growth ‘would provide an opportunity for the Government to coordinate the long-term plans of private industry’.71 For the ordinary citizens, increased productivity merely meant greater effort, and this effort could only be called forth by a sharper definition of social objectives by the Government, ‘so that the benefits of a growing economy are clear to all’.72 The profit motive of the private sector rather than the need for active citizenship was seen as the key to economic growth. However, the Liberal Party’s historic roots, its lack of substantive contact with major unions or employers’ organizations, and its electoral base in the commuter belt and the Celtic fringe curbed the vogue for planning economic growth through the centralized direction of resources. Despite the growing concerns with technocracy and the popularity of the Labour’s Party’s marriage of science and corporate socialism, Grimond remained a defender of the faith of citizen participation. By 1963, he was returning to the argument that the answer to the stagnation in economic growth lay in a radical conception of democracy. Grimond did not so much applaud or condemn Keynesian demand management as ignore it, alerting the public instead to the dangers of centralization. He continued to argue that Liberalism was not just about freedom and equality; participation was just as important. Moreover, and within the republican tradition, Grimond insisted that participation was


not to be confined to the exercise of the vote. It was also ‘the right and the obligation to take some part in the running of affairs’.73 He remained deeply worried about the subtle sense of unease in Britain, where people did not believe that political or economic affairs had anything to do with them because their needs as citizens were not being met by the political system. Where the New Left had seen the interlocking directorates of an oligarchic capitalism as the cause of apathy, Grimond argued that it was the result of a peculiarly British failure of government to discharge its supervisory duties, the lack of opportunity for participation in policymaking, and the secrecy of its bureaucracy. Both Grimond and the New Left bemoaned the withdrawal of the British people from the desire to participate – a failure of true citizenship. Through local and regional government, through the decentralization of power to Scotland, Wales and the English regions, Grimond was continuing to develop an explicitly republican politics.74 Thus, he saw Scotland not as a nation-state, which he regarded as an impossibility in modern times, but as a democratic culture. Arguing that ‘this Scottish commonality requires no executive provided from above’,75 he saw in the place of the present rule from Whitehall a diffused and dispersed democracy based on the small meeting place, as real in the boats of Scottish fishermen as among students. It ‘depends upon people being willing to exercise democratic responsibilities. Without a will to do that, any such scheme would fail in its main object.’76 It was not any democratic franchise, but democratic responsibilities which were the key to self-government. It was the republican virtue of political liberty, based on genuine participation, rather than a centrally imposed obligation, which lay at the heart of Grimond’s vision of regional devolution. It was Grimond’s republican notion of citizenship which alerted him to the problems of a supra-national government when he took up the demand that Britain turn outwards towards Europe and the Common Market. He saw entry into the EEC as a major and progressive step in the movement towards wider association, but he was highly sensitive to the argument that Europe was extremely distant from local democracy, and feared that it would thereby encourage the centralizing tendencies of government and the consequent loss of genuine citizenship. In order to avoid this fate of excessive centralization, Grimond called for a new political philosophy and new democratic institutions for Britain in a Europe which was integrated politically.77 Instead of an outmoded and unitary sovereignty, a genuine federal system was needed in which power would be dispersed to European as well as British structures of government – ‘we shall have to release sovereignty


downwards as well as upwards’.78 Areas of responsibility had to be spread across a pluralist society from the familial to the global, from local and regional to national and European. It appeared to Grimond as the only way to preserve democracy and citizenship in a world where the omniscient and omnipotent nation-state was disappearing forever.79 Even so, Grimond’s hopes of a new progressive party appeared to be in ruins; John Vincent, a Liberal historian, declared that the succession of Jeremy Thorpe as Liberal leader in January 1967, was a sign that ‘the hopes of the Grimond years are as dead as the liberal conservatism of the Macmillan era’.80 In fact, to the consternation of the Liberal Establishment and with the enthusiastic support of Grimond, the Young Liberals had emerged as a force at the 1966 Liberal Assembly in Brighton, with their (republican) demands for a participatory democracy and workers’ control, and their embarrassing success in referring back a resolution on NATO. As the Young Liberals came into increasing conflict with Jeremy Thorpe’s more orthodox leadership, Grimond openly identified himself with their support of direct action as an expression of a new type of democracy at the 1968 Liberal Assembly in Edinburgh.81 It was more an expression of hope than despair that Jo Grimond elaborated his political approach after 1967. His increasing radicalism, consolidating Young Liberal admiration for him, now led him to attack Parliament as a body which no longer reflected democracy, in which a dangerous growth of executive power was intimately connected to a new corporate structure of power and prestige. Democracy was being thwarted by a hierarchical bureaucracy, entrenched in the Civil Service, commissions and committees set up to deal with the problem of people who had no say in their lives. This bureaucracy was non-elected, secretive and rigid, basing its exclusiveness on its supposed expertise. However, the result of its narrow, sectional rule was inefficiency, with a misdirection of resources, a confusion of priorities and a conservative attachment to outdated priorities.82 Grimond called for a serious reduction of power in the Executive and the bureaucracy, demanding that information about its structures and mechanisms of power be given to empowered representatives of local communities. This was an affirmation of his idea of the local nature of participation, which he counterposed to the ‘series of self-perpetuating elites’ which governed Britain from a monolithic centre. A real democracy, he stated in republican terms, was ‘open, mobile, elective and participating . . . it is diffused so that the same person may take an active part in many aspects of government’.83 Despite his disappointment with the Liberal leadership, it was in hope, not despair, that he now saw


an increasing demand for local autonomy against the centralizing state and the big battalions of capital and labour. The idea of a republic as an unservile society, where the independence of the citizen was based on the local community within a market economy, had been given voice by the Liberal circle around Jo Grimond because the socialist politics of the New Left prevented them from moving beyond a Keynesian-corporatist approach. The hostility of the New Left to the capitalist market may have held them back from a fuller development of the idea of a republican political economy, but the Liberals were only too willing to anchor a politics of active participation in the polity to the ownership of property in a free market. They had been forced by political circumstance into a dichotomy between the ‘is’ of the Welfare State and the ‘ought’ of an unservile society, but the work done by them was to be taken up by less hesitant minds.

5 A Republicanism of the Right

Where the New Left talked of destroying the oligarchic Establishment that ran Britain, it was to be the Right which actually did so, recasting British political language as much as it did British society. It was within the Tory Party – long mistyped as the ‘stupid party’ – that the most politically effective version of republicanism was developed. The vehicle of republican virtue was certainly different. For the New Left it was ‘the people’ and occasionally ‘the proletariat’, with industrial democracy and community participation as the aim; for the Right it was the entrepreneur, with a property-owners’ democracy as the aim. It was the independent property-owner, not the local community, which was to be the guardian of virtue against a centralized state. The idea of a ‘property-owners’ democracy’ was familiar on the mainstream Right of the 1950s, but it had been presented within a paternalist approach. A new, more republican conception of that term was to emerge which saw the citizen as a small property-owner, embedded in a custom-based community, his independence anchored in his capital, his republican virtue tested in the market. There is no reason why the republican tradition as described in these pages should be at all alien to the complex blend of political ideas which make up Conservatism.1 The republican idea, with its roots in the Aristotelian polity, transcended the old distinctions between the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ of the traditional political spectrum. Of course, the argument that a republican politics of the Right emerged during this period must compete with the prejudice that there was a deep hostility to intellectualism on the Right – a hostility so great that the dominant view of the intellectual renaissance of the New Right associates it with free-market liberalism. Indeed, Michael Oakeshott’s attack on Rationalism stressed the importance of custom and behaviour – the 114

A Republicanism of the Right 115

practical knowledge that has to be imparted rather than taught – when he wrote of the critical intellectual that he remained alien to even the lesser guardians of custom and hierarchy who lived their lives as a part of a tradition and order – ‘a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him’.2 To Lord Hailsham, arguing the Conservative case for the 1959 election, ‘Conservatives do not believe the political struggle is the most important thing in life . . . the simplest among them prefer foxhunting – the wisest, religion.’3 However, while Conservatism may reject an ideal political order based on rational calculation and abstract notions of equality, this should not obscure the substantial body of intellectual argument expressing the custom-based respect for hierarchy, standards of moral behaviour, and obedience to the institutions of Church and State on which a prescriptive social and political order rested. The failure to find a consistent set of principles that could be called Conservatism may have led more than one writer to surrender any attempt to find any set of key concepts that could be called a core of Conservative ideology.4 Nevertheless, a Conservative intellectual tradition did exist, and it rejected rationalism, not reason.5 Surprisingly this tradition, despite its association with social hierarchy and a prescriptive obedience to monarchy, contained within itself a strong republican strain. Lord Bolingbroke, the eighteenth-century statesman and thinker who stands alongside Edmund Burke in the conservative pantheon, ‘was called indeed a tory; but his writings prove him a stronger advocate for liberty than any of his countrymen, the whigs of the present day’(Jefferson).6 Bolingbroke appropriated the republican language of the Whig Commonwealthmen in his attacks on the corruption of Walpole’s ‘Robinocracy’, which he saw as a systematic undermining of Parliament by the Executive. He warned that, if such corruption were left unchecked, the foundations of political liberty would be eaten away. It was a Country conception of the virtuous owner of property (mobile and landed), as opposed to the corruption of the Court, which gave Bolingbroke’s politics its republican cast and linked his language to that of the radical Whigs such as Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of Cato’s Letters (1720–23). It has been argued that he was only seeking to further his own political ends, but what remains significant is the ability of a republican language to serve as a weapon in the Tory arsenal of ideas.7

‘A property-owners’ democracy’: Eden to Thatcher The manner in which the Right transmuted the idea of propertyownership as a central element in their politics, thereby developing


a republican political consensus, is best understood in terms of the ‘paradigm shift’ of the Thatcher years. This change in the terms of political debate, noted by both Shirley Robin Letwin and Michael Freeden,8 established a new reference point, one in which the virtues of vigour and a self-sufficient property-holding citizenry could give a new dynamism to the nation through the market. For all the continuities of language, something fundamental had changed conceptually. This is not to deny the direct influence of liberal market theories on economic policy, or of writers such as Alfred Sherman and Alan Walters, together with the role of the Institute of Economic Affairs, on the economic strategy of the government.9 Margaret Thatcher herself reacted with great scepticism to the vogue for participation in the late 1960s, arguing that it would increase rather than diminish the power of the state – ‘the way to get personal involvement and participation is not for people to take part in more and more government decisions but to make the government reduce the area of decision over which it presides and consequently leave the private citizen to “participate”, if that be the fashionable word, by making more of his own decisions’.10 Indeed, her later statement that there is no such thing as society, albeit quickly retracted,11 only underlines the influence of liberal-market thinking rather than the republican commitment to active participation, as the touchstone of her politics. However, ‘Thatcherism’ as it emerged was a politically engaged set of approaches and ideas, whose rhetoric was conditioned by the hurlyburly of democratic politics rather than by any logical consistency. The sale of shares in publicly owned companies and of council housing, both at massively discounted prices to ensure popular acceptance and participation, could hardly be fitted into a strict market approach to society. Any attempt to interpret the ideological meaning of the profound changes in society occasioned by her government would uncover an interlacing of liberal economics, social authoritarianism, and commitment to a republic of property-owners. The argument that the new ideology of the Right involved a disjointed combination of a free economy and a strong state, a liberal market economics and a centralized attempt to destroy local autonomy has its merits but suffers ultimately from a failure to recognize the coherent political attitude and sense of purpose which marked the revolution in British politics under Thatcher’s government.12 It is this coherent political attitude, rather than any abstract theory, which has to be singled out if the shift in political meaning behind the language of a ‘property-owners’ democracy’ is to be understood.


This attitude embraced different theories – of liberal economics, of individual enterprise, of a strong family, of a crusading nationalism – but all these theories were merely means to the end, and the end was a vision of Britain as a particular kind of country – one where the ‘vigorous virtues’ were embodied in individuals. Such virtuous individuals did not exist as isolated consumers related only through exchange in some hypothetical market, but within a community of families whose self-sufficiency was guaranteed by the ownership of property, and who together would strive to make Britain a strong nation in a competitive world.13 In this interpretation, the ‘Thatcherism’ which emerged involved more than the establishment of a dynamic economy; it involved a major change in the language and concepts with which we perceived the social world – a ‘paradigm shift’ in the elaboration and execution of policy. Economic policy was a means of ‘changing both the reality and the perception of the relation between government and governed’14 – of establishing a framework for independent citizens to operate free of the corrosive pressures of inflation and trade union monopolies. As a result, the rejection of state sponsorship and the separation of government from industry were a means of ensuring that dependence on a paternal authority was destroyed and a society of independent individuals created. It was the (republican) relationship of the self-reliant, independent individual to society through the community rather than through free exchange that made this strand in Thatcherism so distinct. However, this interpretation (by Shirley Letwin) failed to confront a serious problem. The notion of a property-owners’ democracy in which the citizen existed through the institutions of family and nation was actually a long-established part of the political thought of the British Right. Noel Skelton, in a series of articles for The Spectator in 1923, had argued that ‘until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy, neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of life of the individual will be restored’.15 The central role of a property-owning democracy in reviving the family and the nation had been made the centrepiece of Tory politics by Harold Macmillan, the arch-demon of the Thatcherite Right.16 The wide-ranging rhetoric on property as balancing the liberty of individual ownership with the responsibility of obligation to the common good was not an innovation of the Thatcher revolution – it had been there a long time. Something had changed to give these terms a new meaning under ‘Thatcherism’. A transmutation of concepts within an older language had taken place, much as the New Left effected a transformation of


concepts within a Marxist language. Vigour was an obvious attribute, but energy in itself is not enough to characterize a distinct politics – the New Left and their Bennite heirs were also marked by a sense of vigour. In the words of the historian, E.H.H. Green, ‘Thatcherism existed long before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party.’17 If a specifically republican strand within the British Right is to be identified, then it is necessary to examine the nexus of post-war Conservative ideas within which it could grow.

Post-war Conservativism The most energetic forces in the Conservative Party after 1945 (such as R.A. Butler and Quintin Hogg) followed the ‘Middle Way’ tradition established by Harold Macmillan in the 1930s, seeking to align themselves with the moods and aspirations of post-war Britain. While strong grassroots opposition to state intervention remained,18 the mainstream of the party realized that a new political agenda had been set, and that the party had to adapt to the Attlee consensus that had emerged from the war. The Industrial Charter (1947), intended by Butler as a new Tamworth Manifesto for a modern Conservative party, accepted public ownership of transport and energy, along with tripartite planning, although there was more emphasis on individual responsibility within the mixed economy than in Labour philosophy; an annexe promised the trade unions that the Conservatives would be friendly, proceeding by consultation rather than legislation, and even hinted at measures against poor management. To Butler, it gave ‘the assurance that modern Conservatism would maintain strong guidance over the operation of the economy in the interests of efficiency, full employment and security’; Harold Macmillan himself wrote of this Charter that it ‘proved our determination to maintain full employment, to sustain and improve the social services, and to continue the strategic control of the economy in the hands of the Government, while preserving wherever possible the tactical function of private enterprise’.19 There was a concern with citizenship inside the Conservative party of the early 1950s, as there was within the Labour Party of Crosland and the New Fabians. Under the auspices of Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, the One Nation group sought a new Conservative philosophy for a welfare state, with an emphasis on citizenship and individual responsibility, in opposition to the bureaucratic attitude fostered by Socialism.20 They stressed the importance of duty and obligation to the nation as a community at the expense of rights. In its call for private beneficence


in the social services, private means to an education and opposition to state controls on rents, the One Nation group saw itself as asserting private property and wealth in terms of a guarantee of liberty – ‘private property is an equipoise to political power. If it ceases to exist, rank in the bureaucracy or perhaps in the party, will be the sole means by which men can fulfil their natural ambition. When this happens, personal liberty is gone.’21 Property was seen as a counter-balance to power, a guarantee of individual liberty from government. This language of citizenship as duty and individual liberty from authority, like that of Crosland and the New Fabians in the Labour Party, was not republican because it was elaborated within an acceptance of central state intervention in a mixed economy. In Change is our Ally (1954), Angus Maude and Enoch Powell accepted that the government’s fiscal and monetary policy were the keys to Britain’s survival in a world of competition. The free market, based on consumer choice and on economic costs competitively determined, would be the mechanisms that would coordinate the economy efficiently, but both Maude and Powell took for granted the necessity of state intervention in markets to mitigate the effects of economic change.22 These contrasting languages of state interventionism and citizenship were expressed in the party’s call for a property-owners’ democracy. This was not a Conservative expression of republicanism, however. Anthony Eden demonstrated the manner in which the phrase was intertwined with a statist and hierarchical politics in a series of influential post-war speeches that established the idea as the cornerstone of Conservative philosophy. Thus, in his speech at the 1946 Conservative party conference, Eden argued that ‘Our objective is a nation-wide property-owning democracy . . . Whereas the Socialist purpose is to be concentration of property in the hands of the state, ours is the distribution of ownership over the widest practicable number of individuals . . . Upon the institution of property depends the fulfilment of individual personality and the maintenance of individual liberty.’23 In a commonplace statement of Conservative thought of the time, Eden argued that the family and individual liberty were vital to the health of the state, and the duty of Conservatives was to guard and encourage them. Michael Fraser, in a lecture at the 1952 Conservative Political Centre summer school in Oxford, presented a variety of arguments for a propertyowning democracy, based on the Eden speeches of 1946. They ranged from the basic instinct to own one’s own home through the need for incentives and status within society to the fundamental political arguments for liberty – ‘property confers power. If all property is centralized in


the State, it meant that political and economic power is concentrated in too few hands and freedom is in danger. We believe that it is the purpose of government not to concentrate but to diffuse power.’24 However, as with Eden, the (ostensibly republican) language of liberty belied the actual politics of deference and order that lay behind the notion. To Skelton, Macmillan and Eden, it was obedience to the customary social hierarchy and social stability that underlay the idea of a property-owners’ democracy; the extension of property from the few to the many lay in the distant future. As Eden expressed the ideas of such a democracy in the late 1940s, the working classes had to respect the institutions of authority, work hard and save so that eventually and gradually they, too, would one day own homes of their own. There was to be an expansion of wealth through hard work by individuals so that they could earn enough money from the general growth in income to become property-owners. Such expansion of wealth was to be achieved by the use of the central state – ‘we will seek to achieve the proper balance between the organizing power of the State and the drive and force of free enterprise’.25 The language of individual independence was a veneer to cover a politics of state intervention that, with the aid of a benevolent body of employers and unions working together for harmony and partnership, sought to ensure economic growth, welfare and full employment. In short, the idea of a property-owners’ democracy current in the Eden–Macmillan Conservative party served to underline and reinforce the dependence of individuals on a paternalist state. It was in this period, however, that a major ideological change – a ‘paradigm shift’ – took place, and the language of a property-owners’ democracy began to take on a new, republican, meaning.

Michael Oakeshott The gradual emergence of a new republican conception of the Right had its origins in the elaboration of an intellectual Conservatism after the war which was libertarian in its rejection of the state interventionism of the post-war Labour Government, yet at the same time sought to retain the respect for authority and the Establishment which was in danger of being lost in the surge of egalitarian sentiment after the war. This Conservatism, despite an ambiguity towards republican liberty, constituted an intellectual bedrock on which a new politics could be built. While there was a resurgence of libertarian free-market principles in revulsion at the bureaucratic centralized power inherent in totalitarian


statist regimes, there was a distinct difference with the new thinking arising within post-war Conservatism.26 Intellectuals within this Conservative tradition were less concerned with the abstract rationalist reasoning associated with planning for an economic utopia, or with the abstractions of an economics obsessed with supply-and-demand equations and with indifference curves as an expression of consumer choice, as much as with the moral and intellectual imperfection of man.27 The demands for the freedom of the market from the state were understood in terms of the community rather than the isolated economic individual. There were differences – writers such as Richard Law looked to the Church of England as the embodiment of the connection between nation and religion, while others such as Michael Oakeshott espoused the more secular conservatism of an organic community based on custom and order. However, they were united in a belief that society was not a mechanism or a mere aggregate of atomized individuals, but a living community whose social and political institutions are immanent within it, essential to its functioning. Richard Law, the son of a former Tory Prime Minister, emerged as a leading political figure in this movement as a result of his popular and influential book Return from Utopia (1950). He called for ‘the widest possible diffusion of power and responsibility, [which] cannot easily be reconciled with an economic system in which both must be centralized in the highest degree’.28 This was not a republican political economy, however, as much as it was the restoration of a particular type of moral order. Such an order was not that of a society ruled by republican liberty any more than it was an order based on the arbitrary will of the state; it was a Christian order as natural as the solar system, in which the ‘kingdom of free men’ (to borrow a phrase from the Cambridge academic, Kitson Clark29) was based on a submission to God, and in which the price mechanism was an expression of the invisible hand of God rather than that of a secular economic mechanism. To Law, Humanism was the seedbed of modern political evil that had destroyed the religious belief that underlay a moral order. It was Humanism which had led Man to seize power from God, destroying the ultimate cohesion of society in favour of an artificial humanity governed by the laws of secular reason.30 The community which had to be restored was the Anglican communitas – the freedom was Christian, not republican, liberty. Michael Oakeshott was to be the more important intellectual influence on the new ideology. This was paradoxical, as his political philosophy was neutral to republicanism at the general level. In being neutral, however, it was not inconsistent with a republicanism of the Right, and at a more


specific level, it was Oakeshott who was to provide a contemporary idea of a property-owners’ democracy in distinctly republican terms. Shirley Robin Letwin, who was preparing a biography of Oakeshott before her death, speculated that ‘more than anyone else, MO [Michael Oakeshott] articulated the philosophical foundations of Mrs Thatcher’s policies. Yet he had no direct influence on her and she was disposed to consider him irrelevant to her purposes.’31 Apparently, Thatcher saw his philosophical subtlety as arcane and bearing no relationship to the practical politics which concerned her. However, Letwin was concerned to point to the change in paradigm which was occurring as a result of those policies, and rejected Thatcher’s own neoliberal rhetoric about markets as hampering a true understanding of her project. Oakeshott’s secular ideas transcended the usual categories of Left and Right to such an extent that at least one respected student of his thought has come very near to a denial of his conservatism.32 Where his intellectual influence has been acknowledged, it has been a result of his hostility to Rationalism, so that the impact of his wider ideas has been unjustly neglected.33 His writings are fragmentary, and his hostility to systematization meant that it was only towards the end of his life in his book On Human Conduct (1973) that he brought his ideas into some sort of coherent form34 which serves as a framework for understanding his view of citizenship and the State. The account of citizenship was not republican in itself, but it was not antagonistic to republicanism either. Instead, there was an agnostic approach from which would emerge a republican political framework of the Right. Citizenship The particular approach to citizenship and the State elaborated by Oakeshott was one of passive, rather than active citizenship, owing far more to Hobbes than to Machiavelli. Bernard Crick criticized Oakeshott’s political philosophy for inherently rejecting republicanism by its denial that civil association could enjoy a purpose in a free society; Crick argued that Oakeshott’s citizens took part in politics merely to protect the law – ‘his citizens seem far removed from what Pocock, Skinner and others call civic republicanism; Oakeshott’s citizens are not really citizens at all’.35 Oakeshott did call the political form of the state a respublica, but in the sense of the term used by John Adams and by Bernard Crick himself – a republic that means everything and therefore nothing – rather than in the specific sense of republican virtue and corruption. Oakeshott’s respublica referred to the comprehensive conditions of any civil association, not


to any common purpose or good – it was ‘a manifold of rules and rulelike prescriptions to be subscribed to in all the enterprises and adventures in which the self-chosen satisfactions of agents may be sought’.36 Its authority was attained by the mere acknowledgement of respublica as a system of moral rules, its power resting on civil obligation from its citizens. This expression, ‘civil obligation’, is itself an acknowledgment of the authority of law (lex, like John Adams’s ‘empire of laws’) as embodying respublica. In the sense described, in which citizens were defined merely by obligation, any discussions of monarchy or republic, capitalism or democracy, were irrelevant because all of them embodied lex.37 The republican tradition which would look to that civic participation which constituted the active citizen was not what interested Oakeshott; indeed, he saw liberty in terms of the citizen as not being coerced into pursuing an enterprise – ‘this “freedom” cannot be increased by the enjoyment of a right to participate in the care and custody of respublica; it is not decreased by the absence of such a right’.38 He was less interested in the free republic than he was in the relationships between the citizens. Oakeshott’s approach to the state and citizenship was totally agnostic towards republican notions of freedom. The republics identified by Montesquieu as communities (Sparta or the Roman Republic so beloved of the republican tradition) devoted to renunciation of the individual and ‘l’amour de la republique’ were singled out as examples of undesirable associations.39 However, the desirable association in which the ruler exercised lex incorporated a diversity of monarchist and republican governments, including British Old Whigs, American Federalists and French constitutionalists – ‘it is the common assumption of such otherwise divergent writings as The Trewe Law of a Free Monarchy, Locke’s Treatises on Government and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses; it is what joined the otherwise discordant writings of Burke, Paine and Lord Salisbury; and it informed Ireton’s argument with Buffcoat about civil rights’.40 The range of political traditions, both republican (Sidney, Paine) and anti-republican (James I, Salisbury) indicates the agnostic approach to the republican traditions of virtue and corruption at this general level. Oakeshott’s politics were conservative, but they were not in themselves republican; on the other hand, a republican conservatism could be perfectly compatible with them. His notion of civil society was tangential to republican ideas of virtue and corruption, of active and passive citizenship, but not opposed to them.


Property It was in Oakeshott’s conception of property that a republican politics could be seen. In the final summary of his approach, he stressed that the pursuit of business was a matter of private association rather than citizenship.41 Business was active, while citizenship was a passive acceptance of the rule of the polity (a classical Hobbesian account). This highly restricted definition of citizenship meant that politics was an act of management rather than one of rule,42 and allowed Oakeshott to retain his long-established belief that property had a political nature. Within his analysis of citizenship as constituting order, he developed a model of political economy in which the collectivist State was a threat, and the ownership of property was crucial to freedom. The result was to present a particular politics of a property-owners’ democracy which was essentially republican, despite his passive view of citizenship. In an analysis of British politics in 1948, Oakeshott wrote that ‘the general name for all forms of political disease is the concentration of power in the hands of a part, whether that part is a private individual, a corporation, a union, a party, a majority, a minority, or a government. And consequently those charged with the guardianship of a society . . . have a first duty to preserve a diffusion of power.’43 The problem of liberty was that of the citizens exercising their public authority in such a manner that they furthered their own interests in doing so; the tyranny of the modern state was that of the exercise of an authority that should be public by a mere section of its citizens (a classical republican expression of corruption). Tyranny did not lie in the fact that citizens were bound by law, but in their forced obedience to the will of a body that exercised authority over rather than through them. Like Cole and the New Left, Oakeshott rejected state socialism in favour of a diffusion of power. The concentration of power in the hands of a few which strangled active citizenship was as inimical to his politics as it was to that of the New Left. However, where the socialism of the New Left excluded any role of citizenship expressed through the private possession of property, Oakeshott believed that in a community defined by established practices, property was a particularly important mode in guaranteeing political liberty. He singled out the ownership of property as a political rather than an economic category – ‘property is a form of power, and an institution of property is a particular way of organizing the exercise of this form of power in society’.44 It was a major foundation of English freedom because, being distributed so widely over such a multitude of associations, property-ownership created a diversity of power-centres to balance the power


of the centralizing State. Along with free association and freedom of speech, the freedom to own property was a condition of that political liberty which constituted a voluntary civil association (he was later to call such an association a societas, as opposed to the corporate and purposive universitas45). However, this was only the case with private property; properties in slaves or a monopoly over resources in a society represented forms of despotism. Private property – in which the right of each person to enjoy the ownership of his personal capacities and its fruits was an equal right – was that which was most conducive to political freedom. Such a political conception of property was a guarantor of liberty because it required the power of ownership to be self-limited, excluding slavery because the right to own another man by definition could never be a right equally enjoyed by all in society. However, the freedom of a man to choose between employers was eroded by the ability of those who had a monopoly of power to impose arbitrary limits and exclusions; it was ended once the means of production and distribution came under the control of a single power, whether it be the State, the trades unions or big business. Collectivism, under its variety of modern forms, rejected the whole notion of diffusing power by imposing the monopoly of the State over the multitude of voluntary associations through which private property embodied freedom. Competition, which integrated the free associations into society, was devitalized and distorted as a result. Labour unions represented an even greater threat to liberty because of their power. They represented only a particular element of society, but they were able to stand against both the collectivism of the State and the widespread dispersion of power by which the voluntary associations embodied freedom. With the State degenerating from a protective umbrella into a congeries of competing interest groups, organized labour stood out through its ability to mobilize power in a perpetual civil war between functional minorities. Worst of all, Oakeshott believed that the power of labour led to the concentration of power in big business – the two sections were complementary to one another as they fought over the division of the public spoils, while working together to exploit the consumer through monopoly prices.46 Thus, the freedom of a man to own his personal capacities and his labour could only exist if there were many potential employers of that labour. Power as property had to be devolved to become ‘one which allows the widest distribution [of property], and which discourages most effectively great and dangerous combinations of this power’.47 This was the reason that the right to private property represented the


best guarantee of political liberty – ‘it is by this means only that the maximum diffusion of the power that springs from ownership may be achieved’.48 It was the question of power that was central to political economy. The diffusion of power over a wide variety of centres was freedom; monopolies of any sort represented a threat to that diffusion of power, and therefore a threat to liberty. No individual, group or union could be entrusted with such power without the danger of abusing it. Consequently, free competition between private property-owners was the only mechanism through which freedom could be maintained, because ‘the greatest single institution which stands between us and monopoly is private property’.49 It followed that all private monopolies in business must be actively suppressed as a criminal restraint of trade, a move Oakeshott saw as the key to the gradual disappearance of union monopolies, too.50 Freedom would rise as the powerful in capital and labour retreated. It was the dependence of the weak, corruption in the republican sense, which was as much of a threat to liberty as the power of capital and labour. To Oakeshott, the modern Welfare State was merely a reincarnation of that medieval ‘lordship’ by which the weak sought safety through the protection of the strong, and in doing so gave the strong power over them. The invitation to government to take on a managerial role of protection from the vagaries of the economy had led to the growth of the ‘anti-individual’, an unthinking proletariat looking to the powerful for their opinions. The resulting dependence was a threat to the civil association because ‘the masses’ lay outside that circle of obligation, willing instruments of ambitious demagogues and trade union barons bent upon subverting the State. This dependence had deep roots in the flight from the cold modern world in which strangers conducted transactions, and against which stood the memory of intimacy and warmth provided by the old communal solidarities, united as they were by a sense of collective purpose. The resulting attempt to recapture a lost sense of ‘community’ had led to a surrender of individual independence and responsibility which spelled the end of freedom itself – ‘the urge to impose upon a state the character of a solidarité commune . . . is easily recognized as a relic of servility’.51 In its use of the categories of independence and servility, this was a very different conception of a property-owner’s democracy from that advocated by Macmillan and Eden. It had implications of citizen activism that were far removed from the traditional Conservative politics of hierarchy and orderly stability. It was a resurrection of the republican political economy of the old Commonwealthmen, when economic categories were


expressed in the political language with which the world was interpreted. The laws of supply and demand, the guarantee of consumer choice through indifference curves, and the price equilibriums that were so beloved of positive economics had vanished, to be replaced by a politics of independent small property-owners as guarantors of political freedom. Outside this civil association stood the dependent ‘masses’, easy prey to the enemies of liberty. It was this conception of political power and corruption from which a republican notion of freedom was to develop. In his general model, he rejected the identity between a property-owner and a citizen because he did not have a republican notion of citizenship, at least insofar as republicanism involved a sense of social purpose. However, within this agnostic approach to citizenship, he did identify freedom in republican terms by means of the independence given to the individual through the ownership of property. In the actual respublica which was post-war Britain, this freedom was challenged by the power of a centralizing state which represented only a part of the community; it could be maintained only by that liberty of individual property fixed by the rules of the custom-based community. It was a republican notion of freedom (within a Hobbesian view of citizenship) and as such it was to be taken up in the new politics of the Right. Custom and community Oakeshott’s paean to the freedom embodied in private property was couched in the libertarian terms which were so familiar to his contemporaries from their reading of Hayek, but it was cast in a fundamentally different mould.52 The independent property-owning individual was not the atomized figure existing in isolation from his fellows, united only through the exchange of utilities. Oakeshott’s individual was constrained by custom – a submission to law as convention and rules, though it remained ‘voluntary’ in that it entailed an active acceptance of a particular customary framework of such rules and conditions. However, the importance given to custom as framing the community was elaborated at a time when the old customs which had ruled British society in its imperial heyday were beginning to lose meaning, a problem with which Oakeshott’s intellectual heirs would also be faced. To Oakeshott, as to pluralists like Cole, the individual existed in relation to other individuals in the multifarious transactions of life – as husband and wife, teacher and pupil, landlord and tenant, subject and ruler – with each role as ‘participation in a distinguishable practice’. It was the learning of these practices which constituted Oakeshott’s


rejection of the rationalism of the Left as an intellectual conceit, an abstract construction alien to a behaviour which had accumulated over time immemorial, better understood by the butler and observant housemaid than by the bohemian arrivé. This learning allowed endless opportunity for individual style, but within an already established set of conventions, rules and languages through which the individual could learn about and fulfil his potential. Within these practices, the whole problem of choice between moral alternatives was reduced to a relativist question of ‘taking the prevailing winds into account’ rather than any calculated observance of absolute ethical rules.53 The importance of community rather than individual – or rather, the individual as existing within the community – led Oakeshott to a communitarian view of morality which was also relativist.54 In ‘The Tower of Babel’, he argued that social conduct was not to be guided by individual sincerity, but through standards imposed by the community to which the individual belonged – through this community, individual integrity as well as social stability could be fostered through the preservation of the individual from the dangers of rationalist criticism of social custom. Moral behaviour, not moral criticism, was to be the standard of social conduct. The moral autonomy of an isolated individual was denied in favour of a morality rooted in the practices of the community, although there was certainly room for moral eccentricity ‘so long as it remains the activity of the individual and is not permitted to disrupt the communal life’.55 Oakeshott’s concern with the individual as a member of a community was closer to the ideas of the New Left – who also saw citizenship as expressed through the community – than it was to those liberals who saw the individual citizen as the fundamental unit of society.56 Alastair MacIntyre’s argument that the loss of fundamental values had made capitalism a moral wilderness was echoed by Oakeshott’s belief that morality had become a Tower of Babel. The contemporary world was for Oakeshott ‘dizzy with moral ideals’ in which our knowledge of how to behave was being lost; indeed, the moral ideals which had replaced moral behaviour had led to ‘a hollowness of our moral life . . . a pitiless wedding which we have celebrated with our shadowy ideal of conduct’. While such ideals had their origin in the Greco-Roman world, moral behaviour for Oakeshott (as for MacIntyre) was losing its meaning in the contemporary world – ‘it merely covered up the corruption of consciousness’.57 To sum up, Oakeshott’s politics were not republican at the abstract level, but they contained a republican conception within them. At the general level, he was hostile to the Rationalist nature of many


republican polities: he saw the United States as being ‘an instructive chapter in the history of Rationalism’ which was nevertheless tainted by the European Enlightenment, and he rejected Montesquieu’s examples of republics as tyrannies aimed at the obliteration of individuality.58 While he looked to private property as the foundation of independence and freedom, he later separated such enterprise from that of citizenship; he was to argue with logical rigour that citizens were defined in terms of their common recognition of the rules which constituted a practice of civility, of citizens being just to one another, while as property-owners citizens merely went about their private business with each other.59 However, as a result of this agnosticism, Oakeshott’s political thought was perfectly compatible with a republican conservatism. Warning against the dependent servility of the masses and pointing to the need for citizens to be independent, Oakeshott highlighted the importance of property and custom as crucial modes in which that independence was to be rooted. They were modes that were ceasing to be meaningful when faced with the changes experienced by British society, as the virtues of the nation’s Establishment and the rules of deference and order within Britain’s class-structure began to undergo a serious corrosion. It was his attacks on the anti-individual created by the collectivist power of the centralized State and his attempt to anchor the individual independence of the small property-owner within the framework of a custom-bound society which were to be taken up in the particular political context in which the Conservative party found itself in the mid-1950s.

The inadequacy of representative democracy That context was conditioned by the rising ‘middle-class revolt’, first manifested in the 1956 Tonbridge by-election, and noted with increasing urgency within the Conservative Research Department shortly afterward. It was the discontent of the suburban middle classes, excluded from influence by the corporate battalions of capital and labour, to which Jo Grimond was to appeal after 1956 (indeed, it has been argued that the more radical children of the middle classes formed the natural constituency of the New Left Clubs60), but it was the Conservative party which suffered particularly badly at its hands. With more than two million new homeowners since the pre-war period, many resentful of rising interest rates, angry at the ‘appeasement’ of manual workers who threatened strike action for higher wages, and aware of a declining status as inflation eroded their savings, they constituted a powerful and unpredictable group.61


The commitment to independence of this social group had already been analysed in an amusing and idiosyncratic account by Angus Maude (of the One Nation group) and Roy Lewis. In a paean to the middle classes that gave a bemused account of its quirkiness and petty snobberies, Maude and Lewis discerned an ancient yeomanry in the terms of the Good Old Cause, of political liberty as well a higher standard of living – ‘it has stood for liberty against the State, upholding Common Law against the Roman Code, Parliament against absolutism, militia against standing army, private enterprise against public or private monopoly’.62 They constituted a recruiting ground for talent and a national social ladder to prevent the ossification that would otherwise result in a rigid class society. They made the social structure complex, and in doing so they had prevented the State from falling under the control of a single interest such as capital or labour. Indeed, they had made the class structure the reason for a free State rather than an obstacle to such a State. It was in such terms of independence from authority (including from the natural authority of the hierarchy traditionally upheld by the Tory leadership), that a new conception began to insert itself into political debate within the Conservative party, a conception sharpened by Oakeshott’s intellectual influence. In the late 1950s, this anti-centralization – a legacy of the continuous anti-Socialist tradition – took on the form of a questioning of the meaning of democracy in a collectivist age which was as searching as that undertaken by the New Left on the other side of the political divide. As with the New Left, this questioning took the initial form of a rewriting of British history. The CPC The growing concern for a constitutional response to centralization led to a series of papers at the 1957 Conservative Political Centre (CPC) summer school on the need to rethink the Tory tradition, going beyond Disraeli and Burke to find a concern with political liberty as much as with order and stability. Unlike some speakers, who urged Tories to rethink their tradition by rejecting Burke, the intellectual and journalist T.E. Utley sought to revive the Edmund Burke of the Ancient Constitution, the advocate of political liberty and Revolution Principles rather than the reactionary critic of the French Revolution. However, while Utley used the language of political liberty to meet the contemporary problems of inflation and unemployment, this was defined in strictly liberal terms as the toleration of diverse interests which involved imposing a restraint on one’s own will.63


Other speakers were more adventurous. Peter Goldman, the CPC Director, stressed in his foreword to Liberty in the Modern State (containing the debates of this 1957 school) that the resistance to bureaucratic regulation made necessary a rejection of the old canon of Conservative heroes in favour of Hampden and Sidney (the latter a figure in the republican canon); he looked to private property as a counterpoise to political power.64 Diana Spearman inveighed against the authoritarian nature of majoritarian democracy, tied as it inevitably was to the rule of the bureaucratic expert. Interestingly, she followed her close friend, Enoch Powell, in rejecting nowantiquated notions of Empire, calling on Tories to think of politics in terms of the eighteenth-century Country tradition of Bolingbroke and the radical Junius, with their celebration of balanced government.65 This concern with political liberty and the constitutionalist responses to the fears of centralization was much in vogue in Tory circles after 1956, though it was not connected to a wider questioning of democracy. In The Conservative Case (1959), Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) connected political to economic liberty, the diffusion of power over the whole community to the diffusion of property in a property-owners’ democracy. It was an approach to property which was anchored in a religious rather than a republican conception of politics – to Hailsham, the individual had a duty ‘to develop the property as a thing of beauty or utility for the honour of God’.66 Moreover, Hailsham supported Macmillan in seeking to balance freedom and state centralization, rather than developing a specifically republican politics.67 Diana Spearman A stronger advocate of the politics of decentralization could be found in Diana Spearman, who related the threat to the political liberty of the independent citizen to the whole meaning of democracy in a collectivist age. She was particularly significant (if underrated) as the conduit for Oakeshott’s ideas within Tory political circles. As the first female researcher in Conservative Central Office, she had gained a formidable intellectual reputation in Tory circles for her delight in argument and her erudition. Her role as a political hostess left an indelible stamp on politicians and intellectuals such as Richard Law, Oliver Lyttelton, John Wood and Enoch Powell. Her close friendship with Oakeshott (and the free-market economist, Lionel Robbins) allowed her to provide a bridge between intellectual Conservatism and the party politicians.68 She was to argue strongly for the spontaneous order of a market economy free from state interference, but in this period her concern lay with the manner in which democracy had been emptied of content.


In her paper to the 1957 CPC summer school, and in her Democracy in England (1957), Mrs Spearman sought to resurrect the Commonwealth ideas of Bolingbroke, rejecting the idea of democracy as a simple rule by the majority in the same way that G.D.H. Cole had rejected the formal nature of the bare ballot-box democracy. Instead, she looked to the ‘Old Constitution’ as the key to liberty because of its emphasis on checks to an over-mighty power. It was liberty rather than democracy with which she was concerned, and political liberty of the republican kind, with its emphasis on participation at the local level. Her concern with the increasing power of the central state in crushing individual freedom in every aspect – political as well as economic – led her to turn to the balanced constitution, as celebrated by Bolingbroke. The checks on power provided by the balance of this constitution were the key to liberty then; the equal and independent nature of the three powers of government – Crown, Lords and Commons – were guaranteed by the Bill of Rights which had resulted from the 1688 Glorious Revolution. This liberty was not democracy, however – ‘with all this, of course, the Government of Great Britain was unlike that of any modern state; sufficient has been said to show that if it was not despotic, it was not democratic either’.69 This was of more than historic interest – liberty was not identical with democracy as such. The liberties of local government had a longer continuity than any parliamentary suffrage, and the liberty of the person flourished because ‘individual liberty means also individual responsibility’.70 The 1832 Reform Act was seen as decisive in creating the conditions for democracy, and in thereby destroying the balance within the Constitution, freeing the Lords and Commons from Crown control (she acknowledged the influence of Enoch Powell’s work on the House of Lords, the manuscript of which she had read with Powell’s permission71). While lauded as a step to freedom by the Whig interpretation of history, the Reform Act had actually created the conditions for a tyrannical party system that would eventually end the independence of the Private Member (heir of the Country member lauded by Bolingbroke) and lead to the rule of mere number (long denounced by Cole from the Left). It was this rule by number that founded the centralized power of the ‘Modern State’.72 By the time of the 1884 Reform Act, Britain had reached the happy condition of a democracy which had retained liberty; it was ‘a political democracy, a democracy as the early Radicals had imagined it’,73 retaining the liberty of local government while extending the franchise in such a manner as to maintain the traditional safeguards against centralized power.


It was the dangers posed to liberty by the very triumph of this democracy, rather than any arcane historical interest, which concerned her. With the government machinery unchecked, as admiration for Germany flourished, and the Hegelian State-worship of the New Liberals triumphed, the State’s power over the individual loomed large. The reason for this lay within the democratic ideal itself – ‘there are authoritarian elements in democratic theory. The whole tendency of modern life is to strengthen the collectivist aspect of society.’74 It was this association of democracy and ‘collectivism’ – by which she meant the power of the central state – that led her to call for a rethinking of Tory attitudes to the British polity. In a clear parallel to the ideas then emerging on the New Left, Diana Spearman attacked a mass society in which individuals were left powerless and at the mercy of the State. The scientific theories and intellectual arguments that constituted the framework of modern life lay outside the understanding of ordinary people, leading to an elitist rule of the experts – ‘a curious authoritarianism in the fabric of modern society’75 which undermined that crude self-confidence which had characterized the eighteenth-century Englishman. The democratic process of elections, highly valued as it still was, left the citizen with a sense of resigned acceptance to authority. The contemporary implications of this were clear to her – ‘all this may seem remote from politics, but submission to the demands of experts for only half-comprehended reasons makes people willing to accept the orders, legislation or policy of any properly elected government’.76 Under the guise of democracy, true political liberty was dying. The growth of a Welfare State that needed to be administered by a bureaucracy only reinforced this, making the apparatus of government against private charity and individual choice more powerful. The central government was absorbing many of the old functions of local government, industry, and the market economy itself. Such interventionist measures gave the state a paternalistic relationship to the dependent individual, leading naturally to a disregard for the individual’s property-rights (as manifested in the Crichel Down affair of 1954, the compulsory acquisition of powers to site hospitals, municipal housing schemes, and atomic energy stations without sensitivity to the environment or the community). This disregard was most explicit in the use of taxation to lessen inequality without any real concern for suffering or genuine hardship – ‘the idea that taxation should be used to promote economic equality gives the state unlimited powers’,77 leaving the citizen no property-rights at all. People owned property only at the leisure of the State’s will.


This change in the nature of government had tilted the constitutional balance from Parliament, where it had rested in the eighteenth century, to the Executive, whose power now extended to nationalized industries, the BBC, and a host of public bodies independent of parliamentary control. The modern means of communication, the growing power of economic interest groups such as oligopolies and trade unions, the increasing prominence of trade and professional groups meant that the Commons had become a mere vehicle to legitimize the power of the Cabinet. The use of the party whips to ensure compliance with Cabinet decisions and the decline of the independent Member ensured that democracy had become a cover disguising the real power of a central body, unaccountable to the citizen. It was an unusual approach to parties and interest groups. To contemporary pluralists, competitive pressure groups could function to the benefit of all while pursuing their private interests – a political version of the market; but to Mrs Spearman (as to Oakeshott) there had been a reversion to an earlier model, that a group which pursued its private interest could not have the good of all in mind, that corruption could occur as participation in power was removed from the individual citizen to the centralized state by means of the interest groups and the party machine. Participation had been destroyed by the rise of the central State and the economic interest groups, so that mere numbers had eroded the genuine democracy of active citizens in favour of rule. In the eighteenth century, Britain had a liberty that allowed industry and empire to grow. Such liberty, which she stressed was not necessarily tied to democracy, was needed again if the dynamism and intellectual achievement that had once made Britain pre-eminent were to be revived. In these circumstances, there was a need to reintroduce the principles of mixed government. A stress on fundamental rights was no longer open to Britons, as no institution existed which embodied those rights. Such rights had no real meaning to people, as they once had meaning to free Britons of the eighteenth century. Reforms such as proportional representation were rejected because it would merely give permanent power to a minority that could balance between larger parties, as with the Free Democrats in West Germany. Pure democracy was a noble ideal, but it was not an ideal that really suited the custom-conscious British people (any more than Machiavelli saw autocracy as suited to the fiery Florentines). Instead, there had to be a conscious and deliberate attempt to limit the power of majorities, to be achieved firstly by the creation of a second chamber (the present Lords was totally inadequate for the task)


with a genuine power to check the Executive and its creature, the Commons. She saw constitutional change – a resurrection of the opposition to Executive power held by Bolingbroke and the Country party of the eighteenth century – as essential to resurrect old British liberties. The Left was certainly able to poke fun at this move to appropriate their language of liberty in a substantive democracy. A.J.P. Taylor, in a review of Democracy in England for the New Statesman, pointed out that shop stewards fighting against the tyranny of the factory boss were as much engaged in a fight for freedom as that of the wealthy owner of Crichel Down – ‘Freedom would be in a more cheerful state in this country if wealthy Conservatives were having a whip-round to support the shop-stewards.’78 Amusing as this comment might be, it overlooked the republican political idea which had always been embedded within the rich Tory tradition, refracted by Bolingbroke (Jefferson’s ‘advocate for liberty’), and in so doing failed to detect a stirring in the thinking of the Right. The masses in representative democracy In 1961, Michael Oakeshott echoed this concern with modern democracy expressed by his follower. He argued that political association gained no additional legitimacy from democratization – indeed democracy was antagonistic toward the liberties guaranteed by a settled political order. The reason for this was the rise of the anti-individual, which he located in the movement of agricultural labourers into the cities, where they formed a proletariat whose attitude was contrasted with those of the true individual – the anti-individual ‘had feelings rather than thoughts, impulses rather than opinions, inabilities rather than passions’.79 To the anti-individual, ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’ were the key terms, not the ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’ which were crucial to the individual. The anti-individual was that submissive mass dreaded in republican thought as allowing the tyranny of the part to triumph over the whole – it needed leaders to give their community a purpose, not the rulers who would preside over an association of genuine individuals. This mass was naturally submissive, an instrument to be played, lacking any individual responsibility. It was dependent, in republican terms. It conceived of the public good as an abstraction, separate from the good of individuals, and therefore was careless of the rights of property on which liberty thrived. Within this mass community, the individual was lost, an anonymous number in a radically egalitarian collective. Oakeshott’s approach to mere universal suffrage bore a marked similarity to the denunciation of a bare ballot-box democracy offered by


Cole and the New Left.80 In a political democracy where the individual participates in a mass vote, ideally through a plebiscite, universal suffrage gives ‘the illusion without the reality of choice; choice without the burden of having to choose. For, with universal suffrage have appeared the massive political parties of the modern world, composed not of individuals but of anti-individuals.’81 This critique of a formal democracy which was submerging the individual within a custombased community paralleled in many ways the account of alienation which was being developed by Charles Taylor on the other side of the political divide. Brogan The Peterhouse historian, D.W. Brogan, presented a similar analysis of the decline of British liberty in Citizenship Today (1960). Brogan’s influence was acknowledged in 1963 as ‘so much the outpourings of a hard-headed, exuberant sophisticated impressionist as to defy methodological interpretation’ (Maurice Cowling, then a keen enthusiast for Oakeshott).82 Whatever his politics (they were apparently Asquithean), Brogan’s interest in American republicanism led him to a very similar analysis of the ills of British society as those of Oakeshott and Diana Spearman. In using the examples of citizenship in the very different American and French republics, Brogan was able to look at British society and politics in distinctly republican terms. He believed the individual had a right ‘to be consulted on the conduct of the political society and the duty of having something to contribute to the general consultation’, and thereby the duty to be bound by the results of that consultation.83 His awareness of the fuller American notion of citizenship as a republican approach allowed Brogan to see the ambiguous nature of citizenship in Britain. The Briton was a subject rather than a citizen, but a subject defined in peculiarly British terms – ‘it is a status based not so much on a general doctrine of the relation of a member of a political society to the government as on a series of claims made over a long historical period against a government based on indefeasible rights given by divine authority, by the right of conquest, or by a vague and undefined “law of the land”, to a hereditary monarch’.84 This subject was still a free citizen, but the freedom was that of a subject embedded in a particular custom-based community – the crowned republic of the eighteenth century described in Bolingbroke or in Cato’s Letters. The subsequent evolution of British freedom had led to an inheritance of rights and duties that was constituted as much by the


London mob of the eighteenth century as by the Dissenting churches and innumerable societies ‘beneath and beside the limited body politic, in the narrow sense’.85 Brogan even argued than an Englishman who abstained from the life of such societies and remained totally indifferent to public affairs ‘is not a true-born Englishman; he is displaying an indifference to his duty as a subject (or citizen) that makes him, whether he votes or not, less than a full and deserving member of the commonwealth’.86 It was as vigorous an assertion of a polity based on participation as any put forward by the New Left. In looking at the contemporary world, Brogan (in an echo of Diana Spearman) noted a serious decline in public participation in local affairs, as local government was emptied of real meaning in the increasingly centralized society that was being brought about by the need for efficiency in delivering services. A fundamental change in citizenship had occurred as the citizen became increasingly unable to directly participate in his affairs – ‘unwillingly idle, he could protest by his vote against the inadequacy of aid given him. Then, more and more, the central and remote government decided how he should be treated.’87 Local government reform (the 1929 Act was what Brogan had in mind, but the later 1975 Act would have deepened his sense of foreboding) had brought efficiency, but it had also given more power to large authorities, taking away the autonomy of the locality that had given meaning to citizenship. Local politics, ceasing as they did to be meaningful, had been subsumed in national politics, a condition intensified by the stricter discipline within the political parties and the gradual disappearance of the genuine Independent Member. Participation in its fullest sense, once the lifeblood of English liberties, had become sterile. This sterility found its echo in national politics, where power had shifted from the Commons to an all-powerful Executive that used the discipline of the party system to rule behind a facade of democracy. The result was apathy and indifference on the part of the elector – ‘as a citizen, this elector is certainly not worked physically or mentally! He is not educated either.’88 In a similar manner, private societies had declined as vital living organisms, a result of the decline in religious belief that had led to the erosion of the role of churches as ‘educators for citizenship’.89 Religion in England had always played a role in teaching the virtues of citizenship, providing the individual with a wider range of duties and interests than the narrow spheres of household and workplace. Even the trades unions, powerful as they were at the national level, had found themselves in a terminal decline in terms of active participation, as witnessed by attendance at union branch meetings.


Brogan rejected any programme of vague reforms as an inadequate answer to the apathy that now characterized British life. Instead, he looked for hope to the healthy scepticism of the average citizen towards central authority, while recognizing that a new conception of citizenship was needed to go beyond that scepticism. He argued that ‘we must build into our institutions points of resistance to the never-ending audacity of non-elected persons, in government bureaus, in union headquarters, and in the boardrooms of business, big and not-so-big’.90 Both Diana Spearman and D.W. Brogan shared a concern with citizenship in the wider sense, a sense that was republican in all but name. The inadequacy of democracy, the concern with the liberties embodied in Bolingbroke’s Country politics, and the decline of such liberties in the face of the centralization of power away from citizens had led to apathy and indifference. A new type of citizenship was needed, yet both still saw that need as being satisfied only in political life. Mrs Spearman had been incorporated as one of the original members of the free-market Mont Pelerin Society in 1949, but her economic views had not yet been expressly connected to her belief in political liberty. That was about to change.

6 The Importance of Enoch

It was the changing political mood of the early 1960s that spurred the rethinking within the Tory party. The customs which had long held British society together – the virtues of the Establishment, the stout independence of the middle classes, the deference and determined courage of the lower orders – was beginning to erode quite rapidly in all areas of British life by that time.1 While the immediate political effect was the initial triumph of a technocratic style of corporatism in all parties, this erosion of custom presented a particular problem to those more traditional Conservatives who were alive to the changing realities of the nation around them. After 1960, with the slowing of economic growth and the initial failure of the Macmillan government’s application to join the European Common Market, there was a growing sense among the intelligentsia and the media that the Establishment was becoming increasingly corrupt. The political satirists of Beyond the Fringe and Private Eye, with Gerald Scarfe’s cartoons cruelly dissecting the aging sexual decadence of the Establishment, found a ready audience in the increasingly critical mood that was undermining Britain’s custombased society. The sexual scandals of the 1963 Profumo Affair, the resignation as Prime Minister of a sick Harold Macmillan, and his replacement by the Earl of Home through the antiquated and unsatisfactory mechanism by which Conservatives chose their leaders, only seemed to underline a growing sense of corruption – a concern with a hedonism at the very top of British society, a sybaritic immorality within the Established elite which had been entrusted with the guardianship of the public good. Just as the corruption of the Walpole era had called forth the stinging attacks of Commonwealth writers of Left and Right, of Cato and of Bolingbroke, 139


so the corruption of the early 1960s gradually brought forth critics who called for a renewed sense of purpose. Those critics were to be of the Right as well as the Left. In these circumstances, with Harold Wilson advocating a technocratic response to the problems of stagnation in Britain (copied by the Liberals), there was an increasing demand that the Tory party modernize itself with a similar meritocratic and technocratic response. T.E. Utley, whose concern for liberty had been to the fore in the late 1950s, now believed that Britain’s declining economy could only be revived through corporatist policies. He applauded the National Economic Development Council (NEDC), which grouped capital and labour as corporate interest groups with the Treasury as economic decision-makers, as providing a vehicle for ‘a smooth and rapid development of the economy’.2 Pressure groups such as the Bow Group and PEST (Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism) emerged to support a new brand of Tory leadership, centred on the ‘classless’ figure of Edward Heath, whose technocratic politics combined free market arguments with a restatement of progressive, ‘One Nation’ Conservatism.3 While calling for individual responsibility in the sense of self-restraint, Timothy Raison, in one of the New Tasks pamphlets aimed at modernizing the Tory party, accepted the State’s role in the provision of social welfare, and demanded a more active state intervention in industrial disputes, supporting dynamic managers and employers in their conflict with old-fashioned unions.4

An end to trimming In seeking to interpret the corruption of the Macmillan era, the Cambridge academic Maurice Cowling pointed to the existence of Rationalist principles in a political realm which had lost contact with the community; they were arbitrary positions that held man in thrall, blind to the realities of the political world and to the moral realm (which he saw as essentially a Christian one). Strongly influenced by Oakeshott at that time (1963), Cowling held that this Rationalism had led politicians to adopt a set of ‘principles’ to suit every occasion, echoing Oakeshott’s argument that moral choice had become a ‘Tower of Babel’ without any relationship to the custom-based community. The result was the sapping of any genuine meaning from the social framework. However, unlike Oakeshott, Cowling traced this moral anomie to the surrender to secular Rationalism by Christians who had lost their faith in a mysterious God.

The Importance of Enoch 141

Just as Alasdair MacIntyre was to point to the moral wilderness where rules had been emptied of meaning, so Cowling pointed to liberty in the liberal sense as the canker at the heart of modern society. Hayek’s attempt to provide a set of abstract principles on which to ground Western society was a quixotic affair, based essentially on his own lucidity in explaining his system of ideas rather than on the laws and customs of any actual civilization; a commitment to such principles ‘frees neither men nor societies from the accidents of historical development’.5 Only convention could do that – ‘the committed intelligentsia took liberty to pick and choose, religion was judged according to standards that now appeared more fundamental [than an unselfconscious faith] and it no longer seemed reasonable for anyone to believe anything without claiming to reconcile it with the beliefs of everyone else.’6 The constant adaptation to events – the trimming of the Macmillan government – was a natural consequence of a society where custom and order had been replaced by argument and abstracted ‘principles’. Longbow However, there was also a continuing protest against this faith in the activist state based on the republican politics developed since the mid-1950s. Diana Spearman was at the centre of attempts to set up an intellectual alternative based on the citizen whose political independence was defined by property-ownership, seeking to establish a journal, Longbow, as an answer to the Bow Group’s journal, Crossbow. In a manifesto written in 1965, she sought to ground free market policies – free school vouchers to give parents choice, an end to incomes policy to free workers from tied wages, and the restriction of taxation to the sole purpose of raising revenue – as the values of a particular kind of individual freedom. These values were an application of the principles put forward in Democracy in England eight years earlier to the economic sphere of public life – a sphere more important than that of the narrow sense of political activity. The fundamental reason for this was the directly proportional manner in which wealth and freedom grew together, and the effects that state intervention in the economic sphere had on other spheres of life. The tendency of the state to direct economic affairs led inexorably to arbitrary decisions in political and social affairs, and thereby to an erosion of the rule of law. It was here that she began to develop a republican extension of politics to the economy, seeing in the State a positive nature denied by


libertarians such as Hayek. While the erosion of the market was where the problem began, the erosion of the independence of the citizen was the effect – ‘Here the problem is whether the citizen is to be utterly dependent on the central power. For this must be the ultimate result of collectivist policies.’7 In denying the existence of ‘society’ or ‘the community’ because they were ideal objects whose existence depended only on theoretical assumptions, she also denied that the State was merely a set of men who formed a government and manned the Civil Service. The State was much more than this – in the terms set by Michael Oakeshott, it was the guarantor of the rules holding the social framework together. Where the liberal sought to restrict the State, she lauded it as the protector of the real foundation of society – ‘the ideal of freedom, with responsibility, centred on the family, is undoubtedly accepted by the vast majority of people in this country. It is the task of Conservatives to show that only Conservatism can provide conditions which make it possible.’8 She sought to ground the argument for economic freedom ‘the superiority of the spontaneous order, created by the uncoordinated efforts of individuals, over the imposed order of authoritarian direction’.9 This would allow the individual to develop his own faculties. The State itself was to be restricted in its domestic activities to the legal framework – the maintenance of law and order, the provision of currency, and the delivery of help for the individual case of misfortune. Few governments, if any, performed such restricted functions in the contemporary world. In the economy, the role of the nationalized industries posed the greatest threat to freedom. They represented an ‘enormous concentration of economic power . . . The total disregard of the Electricity Board for the English landscape clearly arises largely from their monopoly position and their powers of compulsory acquisition.’10 These industries were a microcosm of the problems facing state direction in the economy as a whole. The demand for economic growth absorbed the whole of the State’s activities, blocking out the alternatives of leisure or protection of the landscape. To overcome this, she argued that in economic policy ‘the law should be framed so as to discourage all forms of monopoly and price-fixing’,11 private as well as public. Only the local community would show the regard for the land on which it depended; a distant monopoly, State or private, would have ulterior concerns. In withdrawing the State from the direction of the economy to encourage simple growth, prices could be stabilized, thereby allowing the individual to order his own life in accordance with his own


ideas – ‘For the Government to substitute some imaginary state of “growth”, or technological advance, for this basic requirement of civilized life is monstrous.’12

Enoch Powell Enoch Powell, who was to set Tory politics in the new mould cast by the intellectual approach of Michael Oakeshott and Diana Spearman, was also disgusted with the corruption and decay of the Macmillan government. He gave this discontent an expression in the political arena – first in the Conservative party, then in the country at large – and in so doing he made a decisive contribution to the emerging republican politics of the Right. This was an ironic role, as his ambiguity towards that politics was as great as that of Oakeshott. A formidable intellect (Cowling would later attempt, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to accept nomination as Master of Peterhouse13), Powell had been one of the founders of the One Nation group of Tory politicians in 1950 and had established his strong sense of conviction, both with his resignation as Financial Secretary to the Treasury in January 1958, and with his refusal to serve in the Home cabinet in 1963. The latter freed him to campaign for a very different type of politics from that represented by Macmillan – ‘as if a spring in my mind snapped back into action’.14 Thereafter, he excited the discontented right-wing of the Tory rank and file with a series of speeches and articles attacking state planning of the economy and incomes policy, and demanding a return to the free market as a solution to Britain’s economic problems.15 It was the novelty of Powell’s reinterpretation of old ideas which made his thought so difficult to interpret. To T.E. Utley, Enoch Powell ‘is at least as much of a Whig as of a Tory. He is by instinct as well as doctrine a libertarian, sometimes to the point of fanaticism. He believes, as a good Whig should, in hierarchy.’16 Powell himself did not accept this category, later characterizing himself as a High Tory,17 but such a characterization was not so simple at the time. Powell was himself very aware of the political traditions within which he operated, of the innovations being introduced into those traditions, and of the difficulty in defining his stance – at one point he said to reporters, ‘I don’t know if this is old Toryism or new Conservatism’.18 This was corroborated by Iain Macleod who, while acknowledging Powell’s brilliance in establishing a new intellectual agenda, wrote in July 1965, that ‘Powellism is not wholly or even mainly a right-wing


creed. Typically, Powell declines to be typed. He does not fit into any political slot.’19 His Toryism was of a less conventional kind than met the eye, as could be seen in his eccentric attitude to Christianity.20 Powell never described himself as a republican, of course, and in a fundamental sense it would be pointless to argue about whether he can be slotted into a republican mould. It is a republican conception that is being delineated, not a list of thinkers who belong to just one particular tradition. Moreover, the crowned republic had long been seen as an accurate description of English liberties. As one of Powell’s heroes, Joseph Chamberlain, said in 1870, ‘there is really not any great practical difference between a free constitutional monarchy such as ours and a free republic’.21 It has been argued22 that he expressed the language of the Country Toryism of Bolingbroke, but this is to obscure what was new in his thinking. Even so, Powell’s concern with the mystique of the Crown, the prescriptive nature of the Royal Prerogative that demanded natural obedience, and the hereditary nature of the House of Lords as intrinsic to the British Constitution, was distinctly un-republican. Much of Powell’s panegyric to an Old England of church spires, green fields, rivers and hills, as given in a St George’s Day dinner in 1961, appeared to be derived from the conception of England presented by that archAnglican, T.S. Eliot, in ‘East Coker’. He specifically singled out ‘the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible’ as the force which unified Englishmen; it was the symbol of kingship as the source of English power, ‘the crown itself and that sceptred awe’,23 which stood at the heart of his nationalist ardour. In fact, the republican concept was not inconsistent with a hierarchy in which each order practised its virtues. However, there was a fundamental difference between a society which could lay a claim to republican status because of its kinetic balance of social orders and the monarchist hierarchy espoused by Powell in which there was a descending chain of authority. The important point to note is that Powell’s politics would never have found any echo, either within the Tory party or in the nation at large, if it could be simply reduced to the desire to return to a descending chain of ancient authority, even if that authority were the eighteenthcentury mixed constitution desired by Brogan and Diana Spearman. As with Oakeshott, the conflict between the languages of custom and liberty were made more tense in a society where custom was being undermined by the growth of a centralized corporate state, and where the nature of the community itself was being challenged by a modern


world of population movements. Powell was presenting a politics of a particular kind of liberty – of citizenship in a customary order which was vanishing. At a time when the Conservative Party was changing its character, with the aristocratic style of Macmillan and Home giving way to lower middle class leaders such as Heath and Thatcher, and when working-class voters were beginning to doubt their traditional Labour attachments, Powell’s politics were to have a catalytic effect on political allegiances.

Market and nation Powell’s campaign for the free market appeared to place him firmly with the economic liberals of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Hayek wrote to the IEA Director that ‘it seems all our hopes for England rest now with Enoch Powell’.24 In fact, as noted by William Rees-Mogg in a perceptive article in The Sunday Times in 1965,25 Powell’s ‘simple’ sympathy for a free market coexisted with a more ‘complex’ nationalism. Rees-Mogg did not see the connection between these levels of approach – the market and the nation – yet it was in their inherent relationship in Powell’s thinking that the clue to his new politics lay. In his days as a leader of the One Nation Group, Powell had accepted the necessity of state intervention in the market in the interests of long-term planning, but he appears to have been persuaded of the virtues of laisser-faire by Diana Spearman. The two were certainly close26 and if, as is alleged by Powell’s biographer, Mrs Spearman served as the intellectual conduit through which the influence of Michael Oakeshott as much as Lionel Robbins was brought to bear,27 then the distinctive nature of his ideas on capitalism should start to become clearer. It was the nation rather than the market that was fundamental to Powell – the nation defined in terms of custom and even race28 – and his belief in capitalism only makes full sense when seen within the context of the nation. In particular, it was a nation in crisis as the Empire that had given it glory and meaning was withering away quickly. He had been one of the first Tories to accept that the Empire was doomed by the very existence of democracy in Britain itself – no nation ruled by a representative assembly could rule a population by force without denying the very assumptions on which its own claim to authority rested. Complete political separation from the Empire had become unavoidable, and Britain would be forced to look inward to rediscover the dynamic and the inspiration that had brought its Empire about in the first place.29


It was not a passive race of subjects, born to obey silently, which characterized the English nation for Powell. He had a mystical vision of the English people which gave him hope despite the end of Empire, and he called on them to search within the ruins of the disappeared glory of their nation’s history if they were to discover the instinct which had once led to greatness – to find ‘like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring’.30 It was time to discover affinities with earlier generations of Englishmen whose home was in England itself, whose bonds that once gave England meaning had to be reforged. It was the impulses generated in the pre-Imperial days of the Old English that had created a united people, and the English now needed to find once again the roots that had led to that greatness. Ultimately, it was the dynamic and democratic nature of his conception, grounded in the idea of a free market, which prevented this romance from becoming an antiquarian oddity. In one of the first of his speeches seeking to change the intellectual parameters of Tory politics in 1963, he argued that ‘the collective wisdom, and the collective will of the nation, resides not in any Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people’.31 It was a democratic conception of politics, but one that specifically defined the people as producers, investors, savers and consumers. It was not merely a view of the people as actors in the marketplace, though. To Powell, the Conservatives were a capitalist party because they were a party which believed in freedom – ‘We believe that a society where men are free to take economic decisions for themselves – to decide how they will apply their incomes, their savings, their efforts – is the only kind of society where men will remain free in other respects, free in speech, thought and action.’32 Powell was not an individualist in the Hayek mould. He believed, as did Michael Oakeshott, that the individual was not an isolated consumer but could only exist in the community, a community of custom. To Powell, ‘society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inward, as a community, to its own members; it looks outward, as a nation, into a world populated by other societies.’33 There was a complex relationship between the ‘corporate imagination’ which makes a nation and the individuals through whom that corporate imagination exists, so that ‘I believe that the nature of a people’s corporate imagination always goes far to determine the quality of life for the individuals who compose it.’34 The ‘simple’ belief in


capitalism noted by Rees-Mogg was actually firmly grounded in the ‘complex’ belief in a post-Imperial nationalism to provide a new conception of individuals within a particular type of corporate community – a property-owners’ democracy. It was to be a very different conception from that put forward by Eden and Macmillan. The market was the arena in which individuals expressed their energies and sought their own rewards, and in doing so the instinct that had given England an empire would be awoken once again. This was not the orthodox liberal belief in capitalism, but a conception of propertyowners (people who make an effort, who earn incomes and make savings) active in the public realm – a political economy of virtue as much as a positive economics of reward.35 The supply-and-demand mechanism was the vehicle by which the customary community could express itself through free individuals. It was modern, in that the citizenry comprised a fluctuating and mobile class of entrepreneurs in a competitive economic environment; it was customary, in that the individuals who responded to that environment were inspired by that instinct which had once made England such a dynamic force in the world. It was not liberal market economics, though. Powell stressed that the market was not important for any abstract theoretical reason, still less for any materialist calculation whereby Gross National Product could be lifted by a percentile. Competition was a test for the national community, in which the country’s pride and self-respect would face a harsh trial from which they could be forged once again. To Powell, ‘Britain today needs desperately for its own sake . . . to regain the confidence and the conviction that it can hold up its head in competition with all comers in the world.’36 Competition was less a market than it was a political battle, where Britons would be tested as they had been at Agincourt and Waterloo. It is the relationship between these two sides of Powell’s political thinking that needs to be understood. Although his opposition to immigration was to puzzle and dismay his liberal market allies, Powell’s commitment to the mechanism of supply-and-demand in these campaigning speeches after 1963 was impeccable from the liberal market standpoint. Regional planning, price and wage controls, the manner in which ‘the twin evils of rent control and housing subsidies have inflicted incalculable hardship and squalor on the people of this country by destroying the mechanism of supply and demand which would otherwise have met this need’37 were all expressions of his belief in laisser-faire. His rigour in this approach led him to reject even partial


attempts to regulate the market – an incomes policy applying only to public sector workers, as attempted by the Macmillan government in 1961, was impracticable ‘for it must speedily be rejected as unjust by that sector of the economy in which alone it applies. Unless regulation of incomes, except in a brief period of emergency, is universal and seen to be so, it cannot be sustained at all.’38 Like Hayek, he saw the partial application of state controls on the market as propelling an economy to totalitarianism merely through its interruption to the laws of supply and demand. Powell’s critique went much further than a liberal market economics, though. The market was the context within which England was to become great again, and competition was the vehicle through which the nation would be tested. The ownership of property was the guarantee of individual independence, and the custom of the community the bond which gave that independence a social meaning. There was a political economy of a property-owners’ democracy which sought to rediscover the dynamism of the citizen and which pointed to the powerful countervailing forces of sectional interest groups that prevented Englishmen from seeking to tap their buried instincts. These countervailing forces were the sectional interests that stood in the way of the common good. Powell attacked the employers for being anti-capitalist – they had accepted a culture of accommodation with the government instead of competition, bought by government offers of knighthoods or peerages awarded as a result of compliance. Their spokesmen were proud to represent industry to government, suppliants at their master’s feet who were terrified of being pilloried as ‘unpatriotic’ for not living up to the State’s demands. In accepting their ‘responsibility’ to keep prices in check, they were betraying the nation as a whole in refusing their function within the market.39 The result was an erosion of the spirit of dynamism to the point where businessmen had ‘all the pathos of the baby in the presence of the ruthless candy-stealer’.40 They had failed the test of battle before even fighting, choosing an uncritical silence in the face of anti-capitalist governments rather than sacrifice their narrow self-interest. Their selfishness was a (republican) corruption, a failure of their social function of serving the public good in the economic sphere. Workers who looked to their unions to obtain increases in their incomes were certainly derided as blind to the laws of the market, believing that their solidarity and militant leaders could bring them higher wages, unaware that they could no more affect the demand schedule for their services than they could vary the cycles of nature.


However, union activities were not merely restrictive practices on knowledge, as ‘it cannot be good for a country that any considerable section of its citizens should be deceived as to the causes which determine the national income’. They were a restriction on freedom itself, so that ‘the individual citizen has to be coerced into withholding or restricting his labour against his own judgement and wishes’.41 For both employers and workers, the market was the natural environment for allowing Englishmen to show their dynamism and ability to succeed. It was a national test, and the cause of their failure to live up to it was a narrow self-interest, corruption in the Old Republican sense of the term. The result of that failure was a political catastrophe of the most profound kind – ‘the enemy is within already, and has only to open the gates to let in the main body’.42 This was not a simple restatement of the neoclassical dogma of the market’s dynamic equilibrium. It was a step beyond that dogma, as it went beyond the social categories of distribution which animated Classical political economy. Instead, the political discourse of the eighteenth century, the categories of economic independence and virtue which were so important to Bolingbroke’s thinking, were emerging underneath the neoclassical framework of supply and demand in a free market. To the economic categories of labour, enterprise and land which was central to this new political economy was added a moral dimension of virtue as independence and corruption as venal dependence. The corruption of the Establishment Powell’s political values involved a prescriptive monarchy that was distinctly un-republican. His belief in the Crown-in-Parliament stressed the pomp and rituals of monarchy as embodying a structure of tradition and custom that was adapted to the genius of the English people. The authority of the elite commanded obedience from the intelligence and dynamism of the national community, as the heroism of Henry V commanded the allegiance of the sturdy yeomen who seized victory from the jaws of defeat at Agincourt in the spirit that won an Empire. There was a paradox, as that community was one of free Englishmen whose liberty constituted civic virtue, a virtue which had manifested itself in military glory and could, if allowed, manifest itself once again in the market. The glory of the prince was balanced by the free property-owner, so that there was a republican element within the hierarchy, whose obedience was earned by respect for their freedom – in a sense, deference could connect aristocracy to democracy through the function of property. This approach of the mixed government had lost


its relevance for Western political thought in the nineteenth century, however, as the state had become detached from what was seen as an increasingly complex social structure. By the 1960s, it had become an antiquarian curiosity. What prevented Powell’s approach from being an archaic oddity were the historical circumstances in which it was tested, circumstances in which the custom-based national community that had been lauded by Oakeshott was disintegrating. Just as the republican notion of New Left historians who looked to God’s Englishman and the Chartists as expression of republican vigour were facing circumstances in which that radical demand for liberty was disappearing, so the commands of authority were ceasing to be respected within British society. The elite had lost the respect of the free people, and thereby the hierarchy of deference had broken down. The people of England were unable to speak because their prince was no longer giving them voice. The republican element within the hierarchy had been left without a head, crowned or otherwise – a political vacuum had been created in which the republican element waited for leadership. The failure of leadership, which was leading to a loss of respect for the elite, could be seen in the failure of Conservatives to accept the consequences of Britain’s changed role in the world, a change so powerful that it compelled a wholesale revision of ideas in the country. While this involved an acceptance of capitalism, and a commitment to denationalize industries that had become publicly owned monopolies, this was because the freedom of the market was an ideal arena in which the instincts of the national community could find its dynamic. Powell demanded that a new defence and foreign policy needed to take into account the fact that Britain was a European, not a world, power. Her prowess had to express itself on the Continent rather than attempting to uphold the old imperial pretensions in Asia and the Middle East. The end of Empire had made the Commonwealth an encumbrance, forcing the Crown to play an alien role in an absurd charade and allowing a massive immigration of West Indians and Asians to cause grave social and political damage to the community. There had to be ‘a Britain which has made a clean break with the imperial past and looks to a future dependent on the competitive development of her own abilities and resources’.43 This was not a right-wing commitment to the market, or rather nothing so simple. While he was committed to the denationalization of publicly owned monopolies, and attacked state direction of the market through NEDC, Powell’s domestic policy was geared towards a common


purpose, as well as a competitive purpose. This allowed him to say that, ‘harsh though the judgement may seem, it is in the relief of poverty that the biggest failures of Conservative policy in the past 12 years lie’.44 The answer to poverty did not lie in the market, but in the need for clear thinking about how to restore the poor to the position where they could operate as property-owners. Subsidies in the form of below-market rents for local authority housing were criticized, but not in the terms of freemarket ideology. Instead, they were seen as the payments in kind which belonged to a primitive society, ‘the wayfarer’s dole at the monastery gate’; cash payments should be used to help individuals buy houses, the best guarantee of knowledge of the market and also of ‘freedom and dignity, the power within limits to choose the composition of his living standard and not have it dictated for him by the donor’.45 The dependence of living in subsidized houses was to be replaced by the independence of a property-owner within the market, but the means were charitable, not market-determined. Ultimately, the reasons for this lay in the corruption of the elite, a corruption which had led to state subsidies, regulation of the market and capitulation to union restrictive practices. It was a corruption laid bare by Powell in an anonymous set of articles for The Times in the spring of 1964,46 where he pointed to the post-war consensus as the result of a loss of faith by the Conservative party. Although the people had tired of the apparatus of war and socialist planning which restricted their lives and the country’s potential, the Conservatives had been frightened into accepting the Welfare State and mixed economy created by the Attlee government. Harold Macmillan, that showman whose aristocratic pose disguised a profoundly un-conservative temperament, personified the result. Macmillan, obsessed by a nowobsolete hatred of unemployment, demonstrated a cynical passion for modernizing the country without ever thinking of the direction in which the country should be changed. It was not lack of principle that was at fault – modernization for its own sake had become a principle in itself – but a lack of direction concealed by a technocratic, ‘can-do’ veneer. Preoccupied with change, the party had no clue as to ‘what kind of change was desired, how it should be judged as good or bad, and by what means it was proposed to cause, or allow, it to come about’.47 The disasters of incomes policy and formalized state direction of the economy, of regional planning and capital taxes, of Common Market failure and sexual scandal, had culminated in the appointment as prime minister of Lord Home, who belonged to no recognizable strand of Conservative thought. It was time for


Conservatives to begin again – ‘for fundamentally any party depends for survival on clean hands and a good conscience’.48 Virtue was needed to defeat the corruption of the age.

Angus Maude Angus Maude was one of those who warned Powell that the harshness of his views on the market, which had caught public attention to the exclusion of all other ideas, was creating the danger that his wider political viewpoint would be lost.49 In doing so, he demonstrated the flexibility of the new political conception that was emerging. Maude was a long-established ally of Powell, co-author of a nationalist history of Britain and co-founder of the One Nation Group. However, he distanced himself from Powell’s pro-market politics, arguing instead that a new conception of a property-owners’ democracy adapted to modern times was necessary.50 From the beginning of Powell’s campaign within the party in 1963, Maude argued that there were a number of problems – centralization of decision-taking, the growing complexities of scale, and the accelerating technological advances – which ‘raise doubts whether the market mechanism can be made as sensitive as Mr Powell believes’.51 Before long, Maude was attacking Powell as ‘the prophet of the neoclassical economics . . . a high priest of the original dogma’.52 Maude’s constant demands for the party to rethink its values gradually shaped themselves into an attack on the technocrats who appeared to dominate the party leadership under Heath. In an article in The Spectator in January 1966, which led to his instant dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet, he argued that the Tories should recognize the bureaucracy of a centralized State as the main problem to be tackled if they wanted to align themselves with middle-class opinion. He warned that the ordinary bemused man and woman would see in Tory calls for technocratic modernization ‘still more size and complication, with their attendant remoteness and frustration. Therefore we should begin with a genuine effort to devolve rather than centralize, to consult rather than prescribe, to identify the individual with society and its processes rather than intensify his dissociation.’53 In other words, there was a need for a (republican) politics of citizenship. Maude went on to demonstrate that a new politics of citizenship could develop in right-wing but non-market directions in The Common Problem (1969 – ‘an unjustly neglected work of political thinking’54), developing a Conservative parallel to the New Left’s calls for socialist humanism. It was a clear expression of the linking of a republican politics of


citizenship to an anti-technological, anti-market view of society. The market was seen as an urban encroachment on the traditional customs of the British people, and as such was to have a resonance with an agrarian Toryism later represented by intellectuals such as Roger Scruton. Maude argued that Powell’s militant economic liberalism overlooked the control exercised by managers who did not merely meet demand, but created it. It was this control of people’s desires and wants by a new technical Establishment – the ‘total conditioning of human beings to its requirements’55 – which posed the real problem of the age, compared to which such ideologies as laissez-faire were meaningless. To Maude, ‘the Conservatives must admit the desirability – even the necessity – of interfering for social reasons in the operations of a free market economy’.56 Tories had once done so in the days of Shaftesbury to protect people from exploitation; they now had to do so in the contemporary world to protect people from the ravages of the elitist management of ‘technique’. It was a critique of the Enlightenment, which had undermined all established faiths and institutions in the name of a sceptical reasoning power. The philosophical vacuum that the Enlightenment expressed had been created by the break-up of the Catholic Church, and a theory of sovereignty had emerged, associated with Hobbes and Locke, which had provided a minimal ethical content to justify the workings of an acquisitive society. In particular, the family as the basic social unit had been undermined, as the religious framework within which it operated had been abandoned and its relevance had been minimized by the social and economic changes. The public realm had destroyed the private through the use of legislation, with the disappearance of the individual personality as the cost. Man was seen in terms of the mass, and a ‘social behaviour’ that could be studied with statistical techniques was now seen as more real than the old bonds and loyalties. The result had been to leave the family a shadow of what it had once been, a mere form clinging on to life amidst the disappearance of traditions. The result was a narrow, unimaginative conformism, enhanced by technological development. The ‘productivity of labour’ had become valued ‘not for the particular things made by men, but for its contribution to “economic growth” and the “gross national product”. Depersonalization can hardly go further.’57 This transformation of society into an economic universe based on selfish instincts led Maude to reject Adam Smith’s ideas of the market. It was Smith, not Marx, who had created the illusion that society as a whole had interests, from which followed the logic that those interests could be analysed and


understood. Once the invisible hand of the price mechanism lauded by Smith failed in practice, as it tended to do, then the way was open for the State to intervene on behalf of those ‘interests’. The result was the emergence of utilitarianism, for ‘just as Adam Smith assumed a “natural identity of interests” in constructing his science of economics, so Bentham was driven to an “artificial identification of interests” by the government’.58 Maude’s communitarian approach shared with that of Charles Taylor of the New Left a horror of utilitarian individualism. It was in this cold and selfish ideology that the seeds of State control over the individual lay, as the conformity enjoined by ‘society’ had no ethical content – ‘the behaviour enjoined is not a moral code, nor even a set of conventions deliberately chosen to facilitate social living; it is no more than a kind of abstract statistical average of the ways in which people do behave already’.59 The result, for Maude as for Oakeshott or for MacIntyre, was a bewildered individual who had lost all sight of a moral code that had any genuine personal meaning. Despite the admirable efforts of conservatives like Michael Oakeshott and the American, Russell Kirk, the Conservatives had replaced ideas, replaced philosophy itself, with technique. The result was an abdication of individual responsibility – ‘a lack of confidence in the individual’s ability to cope with life; a lack of standards which are felt to be adequate to the demands made on individuals . . . a renunciation of action, because there seems no point or purpose in action’.60 These were indeed notes from a moral wilderness. Prosperity was meaningless; foreign affairs so much an obedience to greater powers that it had become a ‘circle of futile reasoning’.61 The result was a major crisis – ‘The spiritual partnership had already been dissolved. The nexus with the past had been severed.’62 For an explanation, Maude looked to the ideas of the republican theorist, Hannah Arendt – ‘to her, politics are becoming more and more a matter of administration, of bureaucracy, of “government by nobody” ’.63 The need was for a return to political philosophy for our answers. This philosophy had to be based on the individual, not on society – ‘individual men can act; mass society can only behave’.64 Where rational men could make decisions through moral deliberation, society made real politics pointless, indeed meaningless. The behaviour of mass society could be analysed and statistics formed to delineate a norm, which was then imposed on the lives of individuals who become passive in the face of the encroachments on their lives and responsibilities.


Political philosophy provided a counterweight to this, denying the universality and sufficiency of the social sciences. It asserted the ethical ends in politics and the need for rational individuals to make moral choices within the public realm. Such choices were only effective in a participatory community in which individuals were genuinely consulted, leading Maude to express a preference for small units of government as more conducive to individual choice within the public realm and more resistant to mass society. As a result, he demanded a limited government – ‘in the last resort, it does not matter very much whether we say that the Queen in Parliament is sovereign, or that the people is sovereign. In fact, each has a limited sovereignty of a limited kind.’65 This was a far cry from Powell’s more traditional Tory approach to the Constitution. Instead of mass society determining individual responsibility, the life of the community had to be looked at from the opposite viewpoint – ‘that is to say, with the object of creating conditions in which individual men and women can enjoy the maximum independence to exercise the maximum of personal choice’.66 This was not an endorsement of the free market – Maude specifically distanced himself from Powell’s economic liberalism.67 His demand was for a substantial decentralization of control and decision-making so that the personal role and involvement of the individual, together with the protection of the environment, would be the motivating force of politics. Politics would then have ethical ends, grounded in society not as an abstraction but as a vast and intricately connected skein of relationships, ideas, institutions – a custom-based community built on the slow deposit of centuries of social evolution. This revolt against the technological control of modern life was contrasted by various Conservatives with the communitarian values of an agrarian community based on propertied independence. To Sir Cyril Osborne, a Tory MP, the village was seen in positively Jeffersonian terms – ‘Village life still retains much of England’s traditional virtues – self-reliance and self-respect, and a willingness to work. Our big cities are breeding a tiny but growing minority of spongers who, lacking roots, are not ashamed to eat the bread of idleness.’68 Diana Spearman, in a memoir of the end of the 1960s, remembered a time when country life was still anchored in the past, embodying the code of living of a once-great nation – ‘the English countryside is like the landscape seen in some exile’s dream, the more lovely because the beauty is transient. Look on it while you may, it will soon be morning and time to wake up.’69 It was an arcadian view


for all its connotations of Jeffersonian agrarianism, a whimsical expression of what could have been, rather than the modern conception of a property-owners’ democracy for which Angus Maude had once called. Russell Lewis, then Director of the CPC, called for a modern propertyowners’ democracy in Principles to Conserve (1968). He argued that the erosion of constitutional safeguards in the face of a centralizing state – the decline in power and prestige of parliament, the increasing central control over local government – was intimately connected to the decline of the national heritage of custom. As ‘the main structural requirement of a free society is diffusion and variety in the sources of power’, he argued that the undue concentration of power in a centralized Executive posed a serious threat to liberty. To prevent this threat to liberty, Lewis called for the invention of new private property through the destruction of old monopolies, especially in housing, to develop a roughly equal distribution of property. He argued that, while property in a free market enables the maximum freedom of choice for consumers, ‘yet its greatest value is that it furnishes the foundations of personal independence’.70 The counterposition of power and liberty was in the old republican tradition – the independence given by small property-ownership from monopoly linked that tradition to a modern conception of the republic. Such a conception had to somehow find a resonance in the popular mood, however, and this was what was so difficult. Enoch Powell might well attack the debate on whether the Prime Minister was becoming a President as a fatal diversion from the real problem of the Commons becoming a mere branch of the Executive, but such archaic arguments were failing to ignite any popular passion. Much play was made of an article by Tibor Szamuely in the Spring 1968 issue of the Swinton Journal, which criticized the Tories for their refusal to provide a home for intellectuals disillusioned with ‘pop’ leftism. The Conservatives certainly recruited intellectual advisers, but to Szamuely these were glorified technicians rather than genuine intellectuals because of the party’s uninspiring accommodation to the existing state power – the party ‘should stress principle as the basis of policy, developing a clearly defined alternative to Socialist doctrine, especially its devotion to the principle of private property as the basis of individual liberty and of a humane, enlightened and democratic society’.71 The problem was not the rethinking – this republican politics had been elaborated for more than a decade, but the need to strike a chord in the popular mood.


‘Rivers of blood’ That chord was struck by Enoch Powell, and in striking it his analysis of the corruption of the elite found its fruition. The attempt to return the Conservative party to an allegiance which it had lost was now subsumed in an attempt to give the people of England the voice which had been denied them, and in giving them that voice, to return the sense of national destiny which had been lost in the ending of Empire. Powell’s campaign to change the party had been muted once Heath had appointed him shadow Defence Secretary in 1965, but his disagreement with Heath’s support of incomes policy, East of Suez defence policy, and the United States’ war in Vietnam alienated him from the Tory leadership. Then, in April 1968, in a speech to the West Midlands Conservative Association in Birmingham attacking the growth of an immigrant subculture in the heart of Britain’s cities, Powell touched a nerve which sent a shock through the body politic. Warning that Britain would become like the Tiber, ‘foaming with much blood’; Powell appeared to accept a constituent’s opinion that the black man now had ‘the whip hand’, and called for the ‘voluntary’ repatriation of immigrants and their descendants. Powell’s use of racist language, albeit through quotations from some of his constituents, led to his immediate dismissal from the shadow cabinet and an instant opprobrium from the Establishment. Tony Benn, an old friend of Powell’s, was so dismayed by the language that he was to launch vituperative attacks on him which served as a rallying-cry for the Left. At the same time, the 5,000 dockers who struck and marched on Downing Street in raucous approval of Powell were a testimony to his success in touching a popular chord. In a palpable wave of support that alarmed anti-racists, Powell received 110,000 enthusiastic letters, and led a powerful opposition campaign against Heath on immigration that gathered 954 votes at the 1969 Conservative conference (against 1,354 in support of Heath’s simple support for tighter controls on immigration). It was the issue that was so significant. It had nothing to do with the market, and everything to do with Powell’s conception of the custom-based national community, touching as it did on the boundaries of that community which separated the citizens within from the alien without. Powell had argued in his controversial anonymous articles in The Times in the spring of 1964 that the massive coloured immigration of the previous decade had inflicted serious social and political damage on the country,72 and his concerns had deepened after a visit to the


United States during the bloody ghetto riots of the summer of 1967. The existence of relatively large concentrations of West Indians and Asians in the inner cities disturbed his homogenous view of the national community, despite a long-held commitment to the free mobility of labour upheld by liberal economists. The altercation between Ralph Harris, of the IEA, and Powell in March 1968 over this was a prelude to the dismay felt by Powell’s allies over his stance, which they felt tainted their free market views with racism.73 The fact was that Powell’s concern for the market was consistent, but based upon a different set of values from those of a strict laisser-faire liberal. A resistance to the free movement of labour when that movement threatened the customs of the community was in concordance with those values. If ‘we are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet’,74 the problem lay in why the people had not spoken. Who, or what, was the force that stood in their way? The politics of Powell’s speech expressed through racist slurs a sense of the betrayal of the national community by its leaders, a betrayal that had alienated people within their own homeland and was leading to the destruction of their community by alien forces. These leaders – the Church and the liberal Establishment – were blind to the impact of immigration on that community, with the result that ordinary white people were no longer really represented – ‘for reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuit of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country’. Powell constantly stressed that the racist slurs were the views of ‘decent ordinary Englishmen’, such as the woman who had lost her husband and both sons in the war.75 It was a theme which came increasingly to the fore as Powell’s campaign developed. The reaction of the Establishment ‘illuminated like a lightning rod the gulf between those who do not know or want to know and the rest of the nation’; it was a dangerous gulf ‘between the overwhelming majority of people throughout the country on the one side, and on the other side, a tiny minority, with almost a monopoly hold on the channels of communication’.76 By the time of the 1970 election campaign, the Establishment had become the ‘enemy within’, linked with student leftists in a conspiracy against the community – those in the Church and the media who controlled knowledge and propagated the norms of society, who had cruelly misled the nation until ‘one begins to wonder if the Foreign Office was the only department of state into which enemies of the country had been infiltrated’. The people had become passive, and thereby helpless, in the face of


those who controlled the means of communication, and thereby controlled the terms of acceptable debate within the country – ‘Our danger is that the enemy has mastered the art of establishing a moral ascendancy over his victims and destroying their good conscience’ through slogans of race, student power, and guilt over the plight of the Third World.77 The betrayal of the Establishment was taken up and linked to Powell’s expression of the popular instinct to present the High Tory believer in natural deference as a tribune of republican virtue against the corruption of the Establishment. To Diana Spearman, who claimed to have analysed 4,000 letters in support of Powell after his dismissal by Heath, the most remarkable thing about them was ‘that they do not express resentment against immigrants themselves but only against those who the writers regard as responsible for the situation and those who refuse to discuss it in a rational manner’.78 To Angus Maude, the whole Powell controversy underlined ‘the gap between opinion at the grass roots and current political dialogue in Parliament and the press’.79 In an attack on the progressive intelligentsia, Maurice Cowling argued that far from being a conventional figure of the Right, Powell’s ideas ‘are in fact the expression of a feeling, which is to some extent present in all classes, that the language used by politicians is not the language the body of the people understands and that the distance between politicians and the public is growing’.80 Cowling, in common with the other Powellites, argued that there had been a sundering of the relationship between the elite and the democracy that had to be restored, and he later bewailed the incomplete mission of Powell, who had been unable to re-establish the broken links between the elite and the people.81 T.E. Utley, like Mrs Spearman, saw Powell as the political champion for the new thinking of the Right. He had begun to shift from his support of corporatism after the 1964 election defeat,82 and participated in the 1965 attempt to set up Longbow. Now, in a series of articles for the Sunday Telegraph, he linked Powell to the dream of a particular type of Conservative politician (presumably the young Disraeli or Lord Randolph Churchill) of forging a genuinely democratic Tory movement – ‘to present themselves not in the characteristically Conservative role of safe men with their feet on the ground but in the role of prophets expressing the native sentiments of simple people in vigorous and intelligible language’ – a vision he saw as repellent to most Tories but as essential for the revival of a politically and intellectually moribund movement. A week later, he described Powell’s mission as a conversion of the Conservative Party: ‘He is seeking . . . to transform it from a “safe” party,


to be turned to for sound administration in a crisis – into a positive and dynamic party with a defined political and social faith.’83 Immigration was only the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of the argument that the people had been betrayed by a corrupt Establishment which had forgotten the interests of the community, and which continued to hold to post-imperial delusions instead of holding ‘the safety, the well-being and the wealth of the people of these islands [as] the sole criterion of our policies and engagements’.84 Angus Maude, in the Spectator, linked the whole Powell controversy to the corruption of an Establishment which denied a voice to the citizens, pointing as evidence to changes in legislation on moral and educational reform as ‘all changes which a great many people did not want, about which they feel they have never been consulted, and which seem somehow to have been imposed on them by stealth’.85 It was the nation’s institutions that had become corrupt. Just as Michael Oakeshott had stressed the importance of custom and tradition at a time when custom was crumbling around him, so Enoch Powell had taken on the High Tory belief in authority at a time when the elite was betraying the nation. His language blended hierarchy with republic as a result. However, the great arch of hierarchy and order based on custom had broken down with the decay of its keystone. There had been a balance between order and liberty in Powell’s model, but it had crashed to the ground under the pressure of the social dynamics operating in a changing British society. The elite, the Establishment, to whom the people had entrusted authority over them and to whom the people owed obedience, had grown corrupt and were betraying the very identity of the community, through immigration and the EEC. This was the answer to Shirley Letwin’s paradigm shift. Powell and his ideological allies did not see ‘the people’ as the hard-working yeomanry of Baldwin and Eden; they were property-owners in a market that was being thwarted by the Establishment to which Baldwin and Eden had demanded obedience. If freedom meant independence, it followed to men who had no need to read the classical writers of the republican tradition that freedom and independence consisted in property. The freeholders were entitled to see themselves in terms of a community of virtue, and to define their virtue as their freeholds. But it was at that very point that corruption entered the realm – for there also came a threat from a State that sought to plunder their freehold through taxation, turning them into dependents. The language of balanced government, constitutionalist in itself, became republican when it presented its basis as virtue and liberty, the corruption of an Establishment which had lost its direction, lost its confidence in its own mission.


The actual imbalance in the constitution was a symptom of a more general centralization. The indifference of the English middle classes to the language of balanced government was a product of corruption; but they were not indifferent to the idea of liberty as freehold. Immigration – the idea of being strangers in their own land – was as much of a threat to their identity as high taxation and state direction of the economy, or of the housing subsidies that turned a people into dependents rather than property-owners. It threatened the very boundaries of the community, blurring the lines separating those within – with their demand for liberty as freehold citizens – from the enemy without. It was a popular symptom of the new republican conception of a property-owner’s democracy emerging on the Right. Enoch Powell had played the crucial role in developing this conception, although his comments on race (together with his later advice to his supporters to vote Labour to prevent EEC entry, and his final desertion of the Tories for Ulster Unionism) were to prevent him from ever realizing it. That task belonged to others.

7


The ferocity of the ideological and social conflict between Left and Right in the 1970s – engaged as they were over the direction Britain should take to travel out of the economic stagnation in which she was mired – has masked some underlying similarities. Both sides were so polarized in the conflict that they regarded each other as deadly enemies, yet the consensus politics that emerged in the 1990s with regard to the market and citizenship bore the imprint of the New Left as much as of the Right. There had been a shift in the terms of political debate, as a corporate politics was replaced by a politics in which a particular relationship between state and society – a republican relationship – became important in all political parties. Both Left and Right had reacted against the empty forms of a democracy; both had argued that the State had become detached from civil society; both had pointed to the corruption of the Establishment; and both had called for a change in social power relationships. The Left had talked for a long time about destroying the Establishment of public schools, Oxbridge, the BBC and the corporatist structure of business–labour relations, but the Right set about actually doing it. The resulting political landscape has been conditioned by a set of ideas and political languages which had been established before the changes effected by the Thatcher Government. The new consensus – the replacement of a directed economy, full employment and public welfare by a privatized economy, a flexibly employed workforce and movements towards privatized welfare – is expressed in these languages, as demonstrated by the ‘New Labour’ government which was swept to power in a landslide victory in May 1997. This was a government very different from any of its Labour predecessors, both in its electoral 162

The Republic of the Suburbs 163

success and in its apparent acceptance of the major social and economic changes established by its opponents. It was also a government whose values were shaped and expressed by the anterior languages of the Left as well as the Right. To Richard Heffernan, political debate since 1990 has been cast in the mould of the Thatcherite project, but is not reducible to it. He has argued that ‘the politics of the contemporary Labour Party exemplify the Thatcherite reform agenda and the ability of the Thatcher and (to a lesser extent) the Major government to help recast the political agenda upon which current economic, political and ideological debates take place’.1 The success of this policy agenda can be seen in Tony Blair’s acceptance of Thatcher’s pro-business and anti-union stance. This is presented as an adaptation to a framework of politics which had become firmly established in the public mind; indeed, he had little alternative in the wake of the profound changes worked on British politics and society in the 1980s. The concentration on the policy agenda can be misleading. Heffernan has a model of consensus politics which, for all his use of the taxonomies and graphs of political science, is essentially a reworking of the ideas of hegemony championed by Stuart Hall. Indeed, Richard Law, who had become Lord Coleraine, had explicitly formulated such a model of consensus being shaped by decisive action in For Conservatives Only in 1970. This does not mean it is not a useful model – it is – but the policy agenda reset by the Thatcher governments is continually developing and evolving in reaction to changing circumstances. These have moved on from the agenda set in the 1980s, and, in the specific case of New Labour’s acceptance of the legislation on unions, the relationship between the Labour party and the trade union movement ensures a continual dynamic tension which has yet to fully reveal itself. It is the values on which the policy agenda is understood, not the agenda itself, which have been set, and these cannot be simply reduced to the neoliberal politics of the market. An endorsement of the market economy can be made from a varied set of positions, of which the neoliberal agenda set by Hayek and Friedman is but one. A different endorsement of the market was embodied within a set of republican values, which emphasized community and participation. This had been established prior to the conflicts of the 1970s, and it conditioned the language of markets in a manner which survived the turmoil of the changes fashioned by the Thatcher governments. It is not enough to say that the revolution in our political understanding was shaped by the New Right politics of the Thatcher government. In fact, the change in


political language and understanding was effected prior to that government as much as it was of New Labour.

Bennism, even without Benn There can be no denial of the antipathy between Left and Right. They represented very different roads along which the country could travel, and the victory of either would signify a very different type of society – an egalitarian socialist society dominated by Labour, committed to social justice, directed by a state more interventionist than hitherto known in Britain; or a market-driven society dominated by Capital, committed to economic opportunity, in which social welfare and full employment were subsidiary to property and freedom from State domination. It was not a republican choice, however, but a choice between socialism and the market. This had in a sense been the choice facing Britain for much of the century, though it had often been muted by a general commitment to consensus and gradualism. The novelty of the polarization which emerged in the crisis of confidence faced by corporatism in the 1970s was that, between the hard choices of capitalism or socialism, a republican political language born in the intellectual turmoil of the 1950s and 60s was used by both Right and Left. That language was read differently – it had to be, as the republican politics of the Left usually pointed to socialism and therefore was involved in tensions between its commitment to participation and a Keynesian economics which was ceasing to provide an escape from the terrors of inflation and unemployment; while the republican politics of the Right pointed to a property-owners’ democracy, and was therefore involved in tensions with a sense of hierarchy and custom which was collapsing around them. However, this republican language was not in itself socialist or neoliberal – republicanism adapted, more or less uneasily, to a socialist or a neoliberal strategy of markets and remained ready to emerge from the victory of one of those camps. There were limits to the malleability of the language, as Jefferson had pointed out to John Adams nearly 200 years earlier in a debate about the meaning of republicanism. Nevertheless, it was malleable, able to adapt to the choices of socialism or market which appeared to face the country in the social conflicts of the 1970s. Instead of a simple demand for economic planning by a bureaucratic state or a reliance on market equilibrium, the new republican politics of Right and Left stressed opposition to a central State, the


power of which led to dependence and apathy, in favour of independence and participation. There was no preordained direction which Britain might take – while the odds were against it, there was the possibility for a brief period that the Left could have directed the nation towards a form of socialism, for good or ill.2 The social conflicts which came to a climax under the Heath government – the passage of the Industrial Relations Act in 1971 and Britain’s entry into the Common Market in 1973 served as a focus for a militant anti-capitalist rhetoric – carried the Labour Party to the Left. Within this Labour Party, the language of participatory democracy heralded by the New Left was firmly established, underlined by the occupation and work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1971. Tony Benn came to act as a symbol of the calls for increased democracy in the party and in society, walking arm-in-arm with the Communist leaders of the UCS sit-in and telling enthusiastic delegates at the 1972 Labour conference that capitalist crisis, which had always led Labour to postpone change, actually demonstrated the need for a radical socialist transformation of society. Labour’s radical shift was embodied in Labour’s Programme, 1973, adopted at that year’s party conference. Calling for a major extension of public ownership and a measure of industrial democracy, that Programme stated Labour’s main aim was ‘to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’.3 As Industry Secretary in the 1974 Labour Government, endorsing workers’ cooperatives and preparing a powerful National Enterprise Board to direct capitalist industry, Benn became an object of fear and loathing to the Right, as well as finding himself in a damaging conflict with Michael Foot, the Employment Secretary whose more corporatist approach was disdainful of the ‘New Politics’ of direct democracy.4 A history of this period would look at the way that this republican politics was intertwined with other languages – of public ownership, class warfare, a centralized welfare system, the Keynesian commitment to economic growth and full employment, the newer language of feminism as it emerged from the early 1970s. Some of these languages complemented the republican politics quite easily – feminism, despite attempts to show its anti-contractarian attitudes, had risen from the American New Left as a protest against the exclusion of women from participation. Such an exclusion, scandalous as it now appears in retrospect, could be healed without challenging any republican ideal – it involved an addition, rather than a challenge, to the polity of citizenship. The idealized view of the industrial working class – male,


aggressive and insensitive – or the Marxist commitment to class warfare could withstand the challenge less easily.5 However, other languages did not sit so easily with a republican politics. The Morrisonian formula of a centralized public ownership could be countered by a politics of industrial democracy derived from the pluralist Guild Socialism of G.D.H. Cole, as recognized by his disciples of the Universities and Left Review. But the Keynesian commitment to growth and full employment not merely involved leaving the ‘finetuning’ of the economy to a group of mandarins in the Treasury and Bank whose expertise in an arcane science left them fundamentally unaccountable to a populace who would be unlikely to master the graphs and computer simulations of econometrics. The contradiction between the two approaches was highlighted by the crisis of stagflation, which exposed the increasing bankruptcy of the post-war Keynesian consensus on economic direction and forced the Left to rethink their attitudes to economic policy. The failure to escape from the tension between a republican politics and a centralist economics was reflected in the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES),6 but in theoretical terms it could be seen with particular clarity in the influential writings of Stuart Holland, whose The Socialist Challenge (1975) cogently expressed the ambiguity of the Labour Left to republican thinking. He pointed to the erosion of the Keynesian foundations of modern Labour economic thinking, locating the reason for this in the decline of the nation-state as a new, ‘meso-economic’ sphere in the economy had developed. Multi-national companies were now able to enjoy a near-monopolistic power, forcing small firms to the economic periphery and undermining the traditional control exercised by the State. In doing so, they had pushed the British government and British firms into a subordinate position, destroying any substantive national sovereignty. In his argument, any government which seriously wished to counter the trend to meso-economic power must harness the market power of leading manufacturing companies to its own purpose by an extension of state intervention. This intervention would take the two main forms of public ownership and a state agency which would directly guide private investment into socially useful sectors of the economy through planning agreements. This appeal to British national interests against a foreign capitalism certainly contained some serious thinking about democratic control of the state, but in the end Holland was more concerned with economic growth and efficiency than with constructing a republican politics. While he peppered his writings with allusions to Rousseau, the IWC and


the need to use democracy to overcome alienation, his concern with democracy was restricted to the idea of a Social Audit which would make Planning Agreements transparent should workers put forward their own plans for ‘self-management’. The nature of the democratic state was problematic, as both central government and private management would remain in control of the level and direction of investment, prices, the location of production units, the contribution to foreign trade, and all the other aspects of modern economic life. The workers’ management envisaged by Cole or the IWC was thus downgraded to a form of consultation, with workers having the ability to take any disagreements directly from the shop floor to the committee rooms and corridors of Whitehall, where the overall strategic decisions were taken. Planning Agreements were the best vehicle for this, he argued, because they ensured that workers would be brought into the planning process when the leading public and private companies were obliged to submit their corporate strategy to the government. Whitehall was the arbiter when disagreements between unions and management took place.7 This was a serious problem for Holland, whose analysis sought to reconcile state planning and democracy. However, the republican idea of industrial democracy developed by the IWC was complementary to Holland’s analysis, embodied in a Social Audit. For all his tentative proposals for the devolution of a degree of power to the regions, it was a looser and more accountable form of corporatism that he was seeking – a more democratic version of the Italian IRI in which ‘a tripartite bargaining of workers, management and government in firms of strategic national importance in the mesoeconomic sector can bridge the gaps between the shop floor, boardroom and the Whitehall corridors’.8 The rationale for public ownership was planning rather than democracy. It was the breakdown of planning by the nation-state in the face of the trends to multi-national power which was his concern – ‘the real issue is the government’s previous impotence to ensure positive intervention in the economy’.9 The market socialism being advocated by journalists such as Peter Jay in The Times was rejected by Holland as irrelevant in this light – state planning to harness the market economy was the key. Indeed, the Yugoslav model advocated by IWC theorists such as Ken Coates and Tony Topham was rejected because its undercentralized structures led to a failure of effective strategic planning of the economy – ‘decentralized decision-making in British and Yugoslav enterprises means insufficient government power’.10 Whatever the theoretical tensions between republican politics and central planning, the possibility of a movement towards some form of


socialism, however distant, was effectively ended by Harold Wilson’s success in marginalizing the Left. Once the referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market, long advocated by the Bennite Left as an expression of popular democracy, had taken place, Wilson moved decisively to demote Benn by moving him from the sensitive Industry Department to the Energy Department, effectively isolating him. While the Bennite Left made a strong if unsuccessful attempt to capture the Labour Party in 1979–81, thereafter it faced increasing marginalization as a political force. The Left’s hopes of a republican form of socialism were effectively ended.

The Grimond heresy There were radical political groups less trammelled by the need to keep in alignment with the trade unions than were the Bennite Left. In particular, the Young Liberals remained committed to a republican politics of community participation, free of any socialist problematic. Like the Bennites, they had surged into prominence within the Liberal party from the late 1960s, taking up Jo Grimond’s calls for a participatory democracy. However, while they had won the Liberal Assembly to a strategy of ‘community action’ in 1970, this had been left vague enough for the Liberal leadership to turn it into a successful electioneering slogan, as seen in the local elections in Liverpool in 1973.11 Even so, the slogan was successful enough for Peter Hain to champion the electorally less rewarding community projects and squatting movements of the early 1970s, describing the Young Liberals as part of the New Left. Attacking the closed world of corporatist politics, whereby big business and big unions monopolized the attentions of a centralized state, and describing the main political parties as a reflection of a remote structure of power, Hain called on the Liberals to heed the new social movements and support workers’ cooperatives and the direct action of the homeless as the only means by which a decentralized society could be built. Using the republican language of participation, Hain saw such a society in terms of ‘a series of self-managed communities through which people can control the decisions which affect them’.12 Hain’s views were echoed by other Young Liberals such as Bernard Greaves, whose call for residential neighbourhood centres would be both a vehicle for creating a bond of community and centres of resistance to the centralized and authoritarian power-structures which were denying local democracy to the people in the inner cities. Such centres, informed by the new democratic information technology, could


provide a new way of life, free from the corruption of the old, because they would be autonomous and decentralized, human in scale and able to offer an alternative power structure in society.13 The republican nature of this radical politics, distinct from a mere constitutionalism, was particularly brought out in Hain’s attacks on the state-sponsored initiatives to decentralize society, such as the Skeffington Report (1969) and the Kilbrandon Report (1973), recommending devolved regional assemblies. He argued that such local structures did not represent a genuine form of democracy because they involved the distribution of power down to local institutions rather than local communities; in contrast, he believed that ‘the aim is to create a participatory spirit, a spirit which encourages people to question authority themselves, to take action to defend themselves, and to evolve local structures through which they can best control those decisions affecting their communities’.14 It was the nature of the decentralization which was at stake – the popular spirit of participation was far more important than merely bringing the institutions of local government closer to the people. However, despite their activism, the Young Liberals were forced to the margins of politics by the Liberal leadership. The success of the Liberals in the 1974 elections, strengthening the desires of much of the Liberal leadership to move to a less threatening style of politics in order to cultivate electoral support, led to a gradual breaking of radical control of the Young Liberals (Hain himself left the party in September 1977). The most disturbing signs of all came from the one-time hero of the radicals, Jo Grimond. With political life polarizing between a sullen Bennite Left and a resurgent Right under Mrs Thatcher, Grimond bitterly attacked the Liberal alliance with the Labour Party, and appeared to show his sympathies for the Thatcher government. It was not the direction of that government which was wrong, but its consistency in travelling along the correct path with sufficient vigour and courage. Where Thatcher had become the bête noire of any self-respecting radical in the early 1980s, Grimond was arguing that the ill-judged measures her government was taking – from the refusal to exert any real control over the credit base to the refusal to challenge the power of the pension funds and trust funds – were problematic only because they were not going far enough, and were consequently failing in her task of tackling the power structure of the country.15 This favourable attitude toward Thatcherite values appeared on the surface to have been a serious volte-face which dismayed all those who had looked to Grimond as a refreshing and progressive force in British politics.


In fact, this was a logical development of his earlier republican politics. He was angry with the electoral opportunism of the Liberals which had led them into an alliance with Labour in the late 1970s instead of developing the changes to the party’s thinking over which he had presided. When a radical break with corporatism was needed, the Liberals had allied themselves to a strategy of social engineering. The Liberal leaders had ignored the proliferation of books and pamphlets in the market tradition, with the result that the radical politics of the 1950s and 1960s had atrophied. Instead of an alternative radical political programme, ‘Liberals had accepted social engineering’.16 They had been absorbed into the very corporate order which had been Grimond’s foe in his days as Liberal leader. It was this corporatist foe, identified with the Labour Party, which Grimond saw as the real problem. He had long been unhappy with the economics of Keynes, refusing to confront it only because of the economic benefits which it had appeared to bring, but by the 1970s such benefits were no longer so obvious. State Socialism had failed in its task – social inequality had not been ended, the cooperative energies which were so needed by the community were not being harnessed, and the commanding heights of the economy – steel, coal, rail – were not commanding anything any more. The system of free capitalism was showing no sign of collapse; on the contrary, it was the planned economies of Eastern Europe which were visibly failing their people. In such circumstances, it struck Grimond as the ideal time for Liberals to develop the radical politics of his heyday. He now expressed his deep criticisms of the post-war Liberals for accepting the consensus economics which had appeared to guarantee social stability but in fact had concealed Britain’s economic decline. In a rethinking of Liberal history, and of his own place in it, Grimond argued that the Liberals had been deeply enmeshed in a politics whose managerial elitism conflicted with the approach he had sought to develop – ‘I believe now that the Liberal party accepted “Butskellism” without sufficient questioning. They should have been more inquisitive about its workings. They might have foreseen that unless sharp brakes were put on it, government interference would stifle enterprise and foster inflation.’ 17 The apparent success of public ownership, underpinned by Keynesian demand management, had created a managerial politics which the Liberals had not always been able to resist, though they had at least raised the possibility of more democratic participation. Grimond claimed that he had never regarded Keynesian demand management as a significant policy,18 but the refusal of the Liberals to


make an effective challenge to economic planning in the post-war period had prevented them from fully elaborating a (republican) politics in the decisive economic sphere. Now, he believed that the time had come to call for a major rethinking of Liberal political economy, using the ideas of Hayek, Jewkes, and above all Alan Peacock, by then Economics Professor at York University.19 Indeed, he argued that the Liberal acceptance of social engineering had made them part of the problem; that ‘if the positive side of Hayek and other liberal political economists had been followed up and married to a defence of the common interests which must inspire any democratic society, then we should have had an alternative liberal political programme’.20 However, in discussing this ‘positive’ side of the market, Grimond does not emerge as some fledgling Thatcherite. While he supported the denationalization of industry, he was critical of the manner in which pension and trust funds, remote from the activities of the firms concerned, were allowed to take a controlling share of ownership; as an alternative he sought the fostering of workers’ cooperatives. Similarly, his opposition to an incomes policy was based not on a simple freemarket opposition to state intervention in the labour market, but on a concern over the collapse of the ‘common feelings, the bonds of a liberal society’ which should make such centralized restrictions of liberty unnecessary.21 In short, it was his concern for society rather than a simple market of atomized producers and consumers which determined his disagreements with the Liberal leadership. He remained a Liberal of a particular sort, rejecting the paternalistic hierarchy of the traditional Tories as well as the contempt for the individual manifested by extreme socialism. He affirmed the continuities of his reaction to the Thatcher Government with his politics of the 1950s – ‘I believed then as now in some form of cooperation or syndicalism within a free market’.22 The minimalist state he supported was self-consciously Whig, concerned with a constitutional limitation of political power in an overmighty Executive; but his view of society was still based on his belief that a democratic state could only exist on the basis of a democratic society – ‘that is to say, a society run for the most part by individual choice and voluntary cooperation, a society of democratic communities’.23 This was what he meant when he stated that the Thatcher government was on the right path, but suffered from misplaced policies. The market was a necessary means to this end of a democratic community, but it was not enough. There had to be a continuing concern with participation to ensure that the consumer was a citizen. It was the


republican spirit of citizenship at a local level which had long informed Grimond’s political thinking which led him to say that ‘nevertheless, I cling to my belief in local autonomy’.24 His opposition to the granting of more power to local government was based purely on the bureaucratic structures and attitudes of local government, not on any opposition to a genuine local community. Although his arguments attracted a certain amount of opprobrium from his former admirers in the Young Liberals, Grimond’s shift was not merely consistent with the republican politics he had espoused during the heyday of Liberal rethinking of the 1950s and 1960s. It also illuminated the shift which was gradually changing the whole of the progressive Left. The opposition of the New Left to capitalism had prevented them from fully developing their republican politics, creating theoretical tensions within their thought concerning the elitism of Keynesian demand management. Grimond, who had not been restrained by a socialist politics or a concern for the labour movement, had endorsed a new thinking of a market based on a republican politics, and the success of the Thatcher government allowed him to develop this without fear of the accusations of the threats to full employment which may ensue. In this light, Grimond’s statement that he still saw himself as belonging to the New Left becomes a mark of prescience rather than eccentricity.25

The Thatcher moment Grimond’s reaction to the failures and conflicts of the 1970s was a symptom of the complex nature of the Thatcher revolution, which was always more than an expression of neo-liberal ideology. It could not be reduced to ‘Thatcherism’, but its republican commitment to citizenship in the market was in harmony with an important strand in ‘Thatcherite’ ideas. Margaret Thatcher’s own reputation as the ‘iron lady’ of British politics was a mark of her courage rather than her intellectual consistency, as her confrontational approach often masked a political caution which aroused the strong criticism of Enoch Powell, among others.26 She certainly sought to raise the level of political debate above the routine clash of tactical manoeuvre,27 but it was her early ally, Sir Keith Joseph, who was the more rigorous advocate of the New Right politics. By 1974, he had emerged as a leading economic libertarian, accepting the full blame for his share in the policies of collectivism pursued over the previous thirty years in a famous mea culpa, ‘I had thought that I was a


Conservative but now I see that I was not really one at all’.28 However, what he meant by a Conservative amounted to a belief that wages and prices were the result, not the cause, of inflation; and that government spending, particularly on bureaucracy, subsidized industries, and the dependent poor, was the culprit. Angus Maude took a different, republican, approach to social and economic problems. In a 1975 debate, Joseph defined the Conservative goal as freedom in the negative sense of freedom from political and economic coercion, with discipline provided by the competitive pressures of the market. However, Maude pointed to a very different goal – ‘we must encourage the individual to feel himself a free and full citizen’, sharing responsibilities within the community. This could only be secured by the ownership of small parcels of property, ensuring a real economic democracy – ‘let me emphasize that it is not part of the philosophy of the Conservative Party to encourage and protect accumulations of great wealth. It is an essential part of the philosophy of the Conservative party to own some wealth.’29 This wealth should not be restricted to the ownership of houses, which was only a part of the property of society. To ensure a true propertyowners’ democracy, it was necessary for individuals to also own a moderate amount of capital on which they could live independently without feeling in constant danger of state appropriation. It was this ownership of wealth which would give the individual a feeling of belonging to the community. The marginalization of Maude and his fellows, symbolized by the loss of their political hero, Enoch Powell, to the farther shores of Ulster politics, led to attempts to maintain that alternative (republican) approach. In Conservative Essays (1978), writers such as Maurice Cowling, T.E. Utley and Shirley Letwin sought to preserve the inheritance of Powell, looking to Thatcher to roll back the frontiers of a centralized state to restore the claim that ‘the governing conception should be of an ancient community’.30 With Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton and the ubiquitous Diana Spearman, they had already formed the Salisbury Group, and in 1982 Scruton and Mrs Spearman founded the Salisbury Review to develop the broad philosophical position elaborated in the preceding two decades. It is ironic that Scruton should have become identified as a leading Thatcherite intellectual, given his opposition to neo-liberalism; but that does not mean that Scruton’s ideas can be reduced to a traditional, hierarchical and authoritarian Conservatism.31 That is to miss the ferment of non-liberal ideas on the right since Oakeshott.


The republican politics of the Right did not receive an original formulation in Scruton’s writings, but they did receive a consistent theoretical one. Of course, Roger Scruton did not call himself a republican, but that was because he identified republicanism with the narrower sense of anti-monarchy, ignoring its broader, Classical definition.32 Nevertheless, like Maude (and unlike Powell) he rejected the market in favour of citizenship. The self-interest which governs the actions of a capitalist who seeks labour, and of a labourer who seeks money, leads to an exchange in the marketplace which was pernicious to a sense of social order. That social order was not the feudal one of lord and serf because it had to be founded on citizenship, on ‘the citizen, whose fulfilment lies not in the pursuit of self-interest, but in the condition of society’.33 The market had to exist, but it would no longer be central to the values of society. If the market was not central to society, the ownership of property was. Instead of reducing citizenship to mere consumption, Scruton sought to ground citizenship in membership of the community, a membership founded in individual property. Through ownership, the individual could discover himself as a social being because he was able to imbue his world with will, creating ‘a deep connection between private property and self-realization’34 within the community, from which all social rights, responsibilities and freedoms were based. The Classical republican politics of the Right was completed by Scruton’s contrast between the bare ballot-box democracy of Western liberalism and the actual living polity of the community. In a direct echo of the writings of Michael Oakeshott and Diana Spearman, he argued that the contagion of democracy was fragmenting the organic community into warring parties, because it was based on the view that political legitimacy relied on a quasi-contractual agreement rather than established usage. Such democratic choice was artificial, as the vote was effectively limited to a small range of party candidates already incorporated into the political order, and once one of those candidates was elected he had to submit to party discipline. The idea of democracy had lost touch with the reality of power in society. The answer was not to reject democracy, but to value an idea which gave democracy life – ‘which is the individual’s ability to participate in government, and at the same time to oppose the encroachments of arbitrary, unconstitutional power’.35 This was a classical republican formulation, an echo of Jefferson’s definition of a republic. It was a republican politics of participation in government by the property-owner advocated by Scruton, so that his ideas were hierachical


in a particular way. Like the Classical republicans, Scruton looked to the small community as the ideal polity in which the individual propertyowner could become a citizen, and the hierarchy of society (praised by Powell) had to be built gradually and voluntarily on the basis of these small units. They are the ‘immediate forms of social participation’,36 forming the first links in the chain of the polity on which the social bonds of allegiance and the natural stratification of society could be developed. As such, they had to be autonomous from the State, endsin-themselves, so that any attempt to subjugate them to external purposes would subvert the genuine social participation of individuals. This participation, developed and congealed through usage and custom, would mean that a genuine local government would be ‘pursued, not as a delegation of power, but as an institution of citizenship’.37 Local government would arise from below rather than be imposed as structures of power from above. It had an intellectual clarity in its presentation of a Classical republican polity, albeit a conservative one more in keeping with Guicciardini’s aristocratic than with Machiavelli’s popular republicanism. It was also an artificial, Arcadian construct whose need for usage and custom bore little relationship to the rapidly changing urban society from which he was becoming alienated. Others took a different route. Enoch Powell might no longer have been seen as their political saviour, but Margaret Thatcher would do. Maurice Cowling had already written of her as ‘entering into Mr Powell’s inheritance at the point at which he had left it’,38 and Shirley Letwin, who saw Oakeshott’s political philosophy behind Thatcher’s policies,39 argued that a clear and coherent direction was being set by Thatcher which amounted to a change in the character of government control rather than its amount. However, there was no doctrine to guide the change, so that Thatcherism suffered from a serious lack of selfunderstanding. A preference for a market economy demanded a different type of government intervention – a shift from the direct intervention to set wages, prices, dividends, exchange rates, and housebuilding to measures which designed a new framework of appropriate laws and the maintenance of the value of money, making it easier for individuals to pursue their own projects. This ‘was never explained nor properly understood by most Thatcherites. The distinction was a profound lacuna in Thatcherite thinking.’40 There are a number of ways of interpreting the significance and meaning of the Thatcher Government, and Letwin has made a strong case that, despite the crucial role played by monetarists and neo-liberals


within the government, its record was not a simple attempt to translate a doctrine into reality. The sale of shares in publicly owned companies and of council housing, both at massively discounted prices to ensure popular acceptance and participation, could hardly be fitted into a strict market approach to society, based on pure supply-and-demand schedules. It could not be fitted into a republican community of small property-holders either, as Grimond had complained when he pointed to the domination of the privatized industries by pension funds and money trusts. Nevertheless, the idea of a ‘democratic capitalism’ symbolized by ‘Sid’, a popular figure who was portrayed as buying shares for the first time in his life, indicated the complex changes in the language of political economy which was emerging. Any attempt to interpret the ideological meaning of the profound changes in society occasioned by her government would uncover an interlacing of liberal economics, social authoritarianism, and commitment to that ‘property-owners’ democracy’ which can be seen as lying within the republican tradition. In this context, there is no need to follow Andrew Gamble in attempting to show the contradictory nature of Thatcherism through its combination of a strong government and a free market, even in the terms posed by Letwin and accepted by Gamble that one depended on another.41 Given the understanding of a property-owners’ democracy rooted in the thinking of Michael Oakeshott, as developed by Diana Spearman and Enoch Powell, the two can be seen as two sides of the same coin, a consistent republican politics of the Right. It was a radical politics distinct from the idea of a property-owners’ democracy earlier established by Skelton, Macmillan and Eden in that it challenged the Establishment and the oligarchies which had dominated Britain. Shirley Letwin, together with her husband William, expressed this new conception of freedom in the positive terms of economic independence and self-sufficiency. They pointed out that ‘Jefferson, following Locke and Montesquieu among others, maintained that a republic – by which he meant a representative democracy – could remain free and stable only if most of its citizens were self-reliant proprietors, independent of plutocratic citizens and, more important, capable of refusing to become clients and then dependent creatures of the government.’42 The ownership of homes, which became widespread under the subsidized sale of council-houses to tenants in the 1980s, was only part of the move towards such a new democracy, as the ownership of shares was even more important in making individuals feel part of the community. Such a policy of Universal Share Ownership, achieved through equal state subsidies towards the popular purchase of shares, was a modern form of


the property-owners’ democracy, overcoming the polarized class divisions within earlier capitalism and illuminating the nature of profit as benefiting the worker rather than standing in inverse relationship to wages. Within this new society, government would be an umpire presiding over a community of voluntary, civic virtue. In this way, the old Country model of the independent gentleman would take a new form in the shape of small owners within a new, capitalist society, in which ‘the ideal of independent proprietor-farmers has yielded to the ideal of a property-owning democracy’.43 It was a republican conception of property, similar to the belief of Harrington and Jefferson that small property was the anchor of that liberty which lay at the heart of a true republic.

The new consensus Mrs Thatcher told the 1983 Conservative Party conference that ‘we have entered a new era. The Conservative Party has staked out the common ground and the other parties are tiptoeing onto it.’44 It was the radical Right which had emerged as the ultimate victor of the conflict over which direction Britain was to take. In doing so, they reshaped British society and with it, political language, according to the importance of a property-owners’ democracy, rather than a communitarian/industrial democracy trumpeted by the New Left in their various guises. Indeed, in the face of the increasing electoral success of the Thatcher government, there was a major exodus of leading Bennites from the Benn camp as Neil Kinnock and his successors sought to adapt Labour to the new era. Despite the accusations of some on the Left of a cowardly desertion,45 the brute fact was that the Left had lost its faith – both in the inexorable power of the industrial working class, which had suffered a marked decline as manufacturing industry shrunk in size, and in the faith that planning and public ownership were superior to the market as a means of allocating resources. The defeat of the radical potential of the Mitterand presidency in France and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union and its satellites only sealed this loss of faith. The belief that socialism had a progressive inevitability about it suddenly appeared to be empty and uninspiring to most of the Left themselves, while the loss of the role of Marxism both as a regimeideology and as a predictive science was not matched by the redemption of its role as radical inspiration. The result was that the republican socialism personified by Tony Benn ceased to be a politically viable alternative.


The competitive values which triumphed under Thatcher, not the market economy which generated those values, came to be seen as the ethical and political weak points of the Conservatives. The illusion of great wealth which accompanied the house-price boom of the 1980s, coinciding with a gross celebration of material riches at the expense of a large minority of unemployed and homeless people, made both Left and Right in the 1990s feel that a moral as well as a political lead to the nation must be presented. In these circumstances, a republican politics and a communitarian set of values were found to be an ideal language in healing the social divisions of the Thatcher period. In seeking a way of expressing their politics in the new era, progressives did not jettison the republican language with which they had grown. They did, however, extract the republican politics from its militant socialist trappings (unlike Benn himself, who continued to work with radical allies such as Hilary Wainwright for a republican socialist politics46). Many politicians, it has been noted, did not feel the need to explain or justify their political shift from the Bennite Left,47 but Patrick Seyd pointed to the phenomenon of ‘hard’ Left politicians such as David Blunkett and Michael Meacher distancing themselves from the militants to work with the Labour leadership – Seyd called this ‘Bennism without Benn’.48 Intellectually, the shift found a clear expression in 1984, with Gavin Kitching’s incisive criticism of the romantic anti-capitalism of the Left, as well as its moralistic and narrow ‘workerism’. In its place, he called for a socialist society which would be ‘permeated at every level with what the Athenians called the principle of “civic virtue”, where citizens’ duties are stressed as much as their rights’.49 He was not inventing the call for a civic culture; such a politics, relevant to the ‘post-industrial’ society which was emerging, had already been created on both Left and Right. David Marquand presented a particularly influential exposition of the modern republican conception in The Unprincipled Society (1985), in which he argued for a sense of public purpose. The lack of this purpose in Thatcherism, as in the selfish Establishment of post-war Britain, was a symptom of a fragmented society of possessive individuals (in the sense used by the Canadian political theorist, C.B. Macpherson). This celebration of private, partial interests had led to ‘an intellectual and moral vacuum at the heart of the political economy’,50 and to overcome it neither the New Right’s commitment to a market of competitive individuals nor the fears of popular participation held by administrative liberals such as John Rawls were of use. Instead, an older notion of politics as concerned with the common wealth, the classical republic of active and equal citizens, had to be rediscovered.51


This idea of a civic culture was tied by both Left and Right to the middle classes of the English suburbs, whose revolt had led to the Liberal revival of Orpington in 1962 and the triumph of Thatcher herself. Long ago regarded by Angus Maude as the backbone of the nation, for which a civic culture was admirably suited, it was a class which was in the vanguard of the property-owners’ democracy, anxious that its achievements not be taken away, whether by a centralized state or over-mighty barons of capital and labour. To Andrew Marr, these Middle English were the harbingers of a new revival of citizenship, demanding a devolution of power from Westminster and Whitehall.52 To David Willetts, (a rising Conservative politician), the suburban middle classes stood in sharp contrast to the inhabitants of the inner cities, who lacked any civic culture. He believed that ‘the British suburb is not a place of rootless, miserable apathy . . . Suburbs comprise rich networks of voluntary association, from Rotary Club to British Legion.’53 The intimate connection between ownership and belonging, recognized by the homeowners of the suburbs since at least the days of The Grove Family, had strengthened the bonds of neighbourhood and communities. Labour politicians were also looking to its values to rescue their party electorally.54 Philip Gould, a pollster for Bill Clinton who became one of Tony Blair’s leading advisers, pointed to Woking, Surrey, the unexceptional suburban town in which he had grown, neither deprived nor particularly privileged, as the archetype of Labour’s natural supporters. Having struggled successfully to rise from the ranks of the old working class, seeking nothing more than social advancement and security for their children, such people as his parents had been abandoned by a party which had been formed to serve them, but had instead been captured by radical socialists outside the British tradition. Kinnock and Blair were returning Labour to the values of these people – ‘ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives . . . These people wanted sensible, moderate policies which conformed to their understanding and their daily lives.’55 Whatever the political differences, a shared republican language of citizenship and civic virtue came to the fore in the 1990s, stimulated by the activities of pressure groups such as Charter 88, founded to institutionalize open government and a Bill of Rights. Douglas Hurd, then Conservative Home Secretary, in a speech to his constituency at Witney in April 1988, called for a campaign around the idea of active citizenship, which he identified with institutions such as Neighbourhood Watch, a campaign given its imprimatur by Mrs Thatcher herself at the 1988 Party Conference.56


Ferdinand Mount, the former adviser to Mrs Thatcher, had already distanced himself from the neo-liberal approach to privatization as a maximization of consumer choice by 1986. He now believed this was unimportant compared with the need for a limited government to restrain an ‘elective dictatorship’.57 His fears of centralization led Mount to align himself to Charter 88 in the hope that Right and Left could unite against an over-centralized state which was destroying citizenship. He now denied that Parliament had a simple sovereignty, seeking instead a pluralist politics with a written constitution and a Supreme Court to guard liberty against an over-mighty State.58 This constitutionalism was to be rooted in British customs of liberty, guaranteed by a wider distribution of power and influence through the community in order ‘to intensify participation and representation’.59 The republican idea of active citizen participation was in this way anchored firmly in Oakeshott’s politics of property and custom. In Modern Conservatism (1992), David Willetts openly supported Mount in his view that the centralized state had undermined the checks and balances which sustained liberty in the Constitution. He saw the powerful state as a lethal threat to the civil institutions of society, whose rich values had been all but lost in the inner cities, while the network of voluntary charities and self-help institutions in the suburbs themselves were under assault. To protect these institutions, Willetts looked to local rather than nation-wide organizations to sustain civic values. He stressed the Conservative view of community (derived from Oakeshott’s ‘political economy of freedom’) against both centralized state socialism and the libertarian celebration of the atomized individual which had attached itself to the (recently ended) Thatcher government. He sought to ground Conservative politics on the idea of the ‘good life’ which made the individual a citizen, and he believed that such a life could be given meaning through a custom-based civic culture. A pluralist community of family, trade union, neighbourhood and firm, club and church was the fount of a moral obligation which was rooted in civil society.60 His call for an end to the dependence of the Welfare State in favour of a society of active and independent citizens, echoing the Unservile State Liberals of the late 1950s rather than libertarians, was identified as ‘civic conservatism’, a suitable ideology for post-Thatcher Conservatives to rally around.61 This was echoed, perhaps more persuasively, by the Left, which sought to give the republican politics of civic virtue and participation a more egalitarian shape. The market as a mechanism for the production


of wealth was not questioned; merely the competitive values which appear to have accompanied that mechanism. This was the philosophy underlying Raymond Plant’s view of the market economy as governed by the moral principles of citizenship. In opposition to the free market doctrines of the neoliberals, Plant stressed the opposition between the virtue of active participation and the corruption of private interests as a crucial determinant of the economy. He argued in a series of pamphlets and articles from the mid-1980s that the selfish underpinnings of a market economy had left the individual’s relation to the State obscure – ‘we lack a rich conception of political community, and with it a sense of membership and citizenship, and therefore of the way in which the State could embody the moral purpose of the community’.62 He believed that the market had to be supported in terms of morality rather than consumer choice because of the mutual interdependence and the differentiation of social function on which it relied; he argued that a State more responsive to its citizens could free the market from its competitive trappings of indifference to the public good. However, to do so, ‘the market itself needs a framework of civic responsibility within which to operate . . . Unless such a civic vision is articulated and defended, not just as a matter of altruism but as something which is in all our interests, then the political community will fall victim to strong special interests, whether in politics or markets.’63 It was an attack on markets more akin to the republican politics which had been elaborated by Maude than by Benn. This communitarian republicanism informed much of the new thinking emerging within the Labour Party as it struggled to make itself a viable political force in the new framework created by the Thatcher government. Bernard Crick, producing an unofficial statement on Labour’s aims and values with David Blunkett in 1988, argued that the egalitarian society desired by socialists had to be a democratic society in the fullest sense of the term, ‘one in which popular participation was maximized and people are helped not just to help themselves but to interact with and to help each other’,64 while Peter Hain took his own politics of participatory democracy into the Labour Left.65 Tony Wright, one of the more acute of the intake of Labour MPs who entered Parliament in the post-Thatcher elections, gave an unusually clear account of the new republican politics when he sought to place it in the context of the historical absence of any real notion of citizenship in Britain. Like Mount and Willetts, Wright pointed to a centralized state, not a capitalist economy, as the main threat to liberty, and like


them he sought to remedy this with a civic community based on the rights and duties of citizens who would be both rulers and ruled at the same time. To Wright, (made familiar with the ideas of the New Left by his studies of the writings of G.D.H. Cole under the tutelage of Steven Lukes), Britain had been a profoundly authoritarian society under the shell of a formally democratic state. As the hierarchical social structure and rigid class system had been challenged by popular protest, democracy had been ceded half-heartedly, grafted onto the existing institutions so that it became a mere system of electoral arrangements. The doctrines of representation and responsibility to the people were fictions, concealing an increasing shift towards centralized power in the Executive through the party machine, the result of which was to conceal an essential political truth, because ‘in the relationship that is governing, the citizen is a participant while the subject is a recipient. The difference matters.’66 Britons had become subjects, not citizens; ruled rather than rulers. To turn subjects into citizens, to turn members of a privatized domain into a participatory membership of the public realm (the res publica), democracy had to become a living organism, embodying popular and effective participation. The community had to become one of active citizens, relating to one another through civic responsibility. A written constitution, such as existed in the United States, founded upon checks and balances to prevent centralized power from taking away that civic responsibility, had to replace the existing parliamentary system (on the Right, Ferdinand Mount was making the same point). In this way, a genuinely democratic society could grow, transforming the State as it did so. Such a society would be a plural community of citizens, living in a dense network of interests and associations, protected by a Bill of Rights. Parliament would be the ultimate register of this complex social web, based upon a civic community whose members were both rulers and ruled at the same time. Wright had deleted Cole’s radical anticapitalism, but in all other respects his republican politics was directly descended from that of those New Leftists who had learned their politics at Cole’s feet. In accepting the market, the Left was able to resolve the tension between republican politics and Keynesian economics which had prevented them from developing their political ideas in a consistent manner. Peter Jay had sought to combine monetarism with a market socialism in his columns in The Times in the mid-1970s, and the compatibility of such a conception of socialism with a republican politics


based upon communitarian values was expressed by the Oxford political philosopher, David Miller.67 However, it was Will Hutton who paradoxically heralded a republican economics for Labour through his passion for Keynesian ideas. To Hutton, Keynes was not the expansionist figure who had become accepted as the essential element of corporate socialism; he argued that demand management and the management of public spending was less important than the demand that the State change the behaviour of financiers and businessmen in the interests of the public good.68 It was a political approach to Keynesianism which dovetailed with the stress on the supply side of the economy presented by the Labour economists of the 1980s, and with the republican stress on citizenship of Labour’s political philosophers. In doing so, Hutton revived in a particularly sharp form the old categories of political economy characteristic of its birth at the end of the seventeenth century, when ‘political arithmetic’ was seen as an expression of republican virtue as opposed to private corruption. He saw Britain’s economic decline in moral rather than economic terms – it was the absence of commitment and trust which was lacking in monetarist Britain. These virtues had been the hallmark of successful capitalist economies such as the United States, which selflessly held up the world economy, and East Asia where the family firm predominated, but in neo-liberal Britain the private realm held sway. The cause of this triumph of the private over the public good (of corruption over virtue in Classical republican terms) was the predominance of a centralized banking structure, the parallel to the centralization of political power in Westminster and Whitehall. To Hutton, the social injustice and economic inefficiency which had become such a hallmark of British society could be traced to this financial centralization – ‘the disintegration of family life and the decline in the public realm that disfigure contemporary Britain may seem far removed from London’s financial markets, but they are as linked to them as remote shocks are to the epicentre of an earthquake.’69 It was a republican economics, dependent on the creation of a novel type of British State, which was needed to counter this decline – ‘Britain needs what might be called a republican attitude to its culture and institutions’.70 This did not necessarily involve the abolition of the monarchy, but it did involve a civic culture based on citizens rather than subjects. This civic culture was not opposed to the idea of a propertyowners’ democracy, but was its embodiment. A republican central bank should be established, based on regional banks whose chief executive


would be appointed by the elected parliament of the appropriate region; its federal structure (apparently based on the US Federal Reserve) was to match the republican structure of the new state. The shareholders would be stakeholders, responsible to the community rather than to short-term gain.71 The economy was now seen in narrowly political terms, understood as a form of active participation rather than as a mechanism for satisfying material needs. The need to understand the forces which drive the economy, a need shared in their different ways by Marx, the neoclassical economists and by Keynes, had reverted to an older paradigm of political economy. As at the dawn of the stock-jobbing world and the Bank of England after 1688, the political categories in which the State’s relations with its subjects were interpreted were uncritically transferred to the market. The shift of power from Westminster to Brussels signified by the 1991 Treaty of Maastricht heightened the ongoing discussions of the meaning of citizenship within a British polity which appeared to be losing its sovereignty. However, the problem of how to attain a genuine citizenship within a modern international economy, in which effective power over the economy cannot lie at the national level, was not questioned.72 The is/ought relationship isolated by Alastair MacIntyre in the 1950s – the wish for citizenship and its impossibility within a modern economy – remained to haunt the successors to the radical language of republicanism inaugurated by the New Left. The consequences of this, involving a surrender of control over the basic economic environment in which people live and work, were dramatic. Where twentieth-century state planning (of the social democratic or Stalinist variant) had sought control over this environment to attain stability and security, the market of capital movements and shifting exchange rates was now seen as outside real human control, a natural chaos which can only be controlled momentarily, just as in the Augustan age it was seen as a ‘coy dame’, as an expression of fortuna.73 Where socialists sought to control the business cycle through public ownership, and where Keynesians believed that state intervention would correct any imbalances within the market, the new republican political economy had surrendered control of the economic environment. Now the argument was to bring the financial institutions and companies under some sort of popular control, to make them more republican through decentralization. It was the bankers, not the economy, which had to be controlled. Capitalism had apparently transformed itself from a system of labour allocation to a political system through which a person became a


genuine citizen through the acquisition of property. The new information economy, which appeared to have abolished the industrial working class (countries like Brazil and China were always excluded from post-modern arguments), had provided equivalents for republican participation in the form of ‘empowerment through choice’. The complexity of an economy, which had advanced well beyond the stage where labour could be seen as the source of its wealth, had mystified its workings. Marx had sought to unveil this mystery by pointing to the labour-power which lay at the heart of all production, but Marx had for long been seen as unconvincing, metaphysical, especially in a ‘postmodern era’; in the absence of a convincing successor or any successful attempt to develop his arguments, the workings of the economy remained hidden from ordinary people, and thereby effectively removed from their participation. Bringing economic decisions under the control of more local bank managers, even at a regional level, was not going to resolve that problem.

The enemy without – and within Within the boundaries of the polity, the appropriateness of a republican model within a capitalist society was put to a severe test with the election of a New Labour government in 1997. A radical programme of separating the Bank of England from state direction, of attempts to force single parents to work to achieve social independence, and of constitutional reform of the Lords and regional government were not necessarily happy experiments in terms of attaining greater democracy or care for children. Indeed, the sheer exhilaration of attaining office after 18 years in the wilderness appeared to confirm the wisdom of manipulating public opinion and of increasing discipline over the party machine behind a veil of greater ‘dialogue’. Bernard Crick quickly expressed his worries that the pluralism and decentralization which appeared to have been accepted at all levels appeared to have disappeared at the first whiff of power.74 His own participation in work for Home Secretary David Blunkett on the nature of British citizenship may have allayed his fears a little, but other individuals who had helped to formulate the republicanism of the Left in its first days were more critical. Stuart Hall, one of the founders of the first New Left, was strongly critical of a government which seemed to pay little heed to social equality, while Steven Lukes pointed to the vague language of New Labour as evidence of an obscuring of some fundamental conflicts – over the nature of equality, over the conflict between liberal


rights and community, and of the problem of whether an elite still held power in the polity.75 The question of who was excluded from the boundaries of the polity, together with that of their rights and duties, was particularly disturbing. The question of what constituted citizenship demonstrated the continuing influence of Enoch Powell. Few outside the explicit racists in British society would exclude from citizenship anyone whose colour was different – indeed, Powell’s stress on the racial nature of a polity was the exception which proved the rule, as his 1968 Birmingham speech effectively distanced from him those of his natural allies (such as Margaret Thatcher) who had any political ambitions. However, there was a continuing concern over ‘aliens’ to the polity, linked to a conception of the ‘national character’ which was a common debating ground between Left and Right, for all their differences. Raphael Samuel, another founder of the first New Left, had long been influenced by the Communist Historians Group to be sensitive to the nature of British citizenship as a product of British History. He was active in the political debate about the place of history in the national curriculum, emphasizing the ‘unofficial’ knowledge of ‘the people’, as expressed in myth, ritual, childhood memory and fiction. He was particularly excited by the growth of a popular enthusiasm for the national past, a patriotism which he saw as a radical phenomenon as much as a conservative one.76 Such interest had developed, by the end of his life, into a celebration of ‘theme parks’ and ‘living museums’ as genuine expressions of national democracy, which seemed to many a gentle declension from the radical stirrings of Edward Thompson and Christopher Hill forty years earlier.77 The sense of belonging to the community had as its corollary a sense of exclusion of those without, irrespective of whether that exclusion was xenophobic or not. The ‘strangers’ were outside the community, and therefore the boundaries of the community had to be defined if citizens and strangers could be safely delineated. That definition need not be strictly geographical. In a modern property-owners’ democracy, the franchise would have to be universal in terms of the population. However, the whole concept of a stakeholders’ democracy meant that there was a potentially fundamental difference between the person who enjoyed the formal citizenship of voting, and the actual citizen whose stake in the community, anchored in his or her property, necessitated a more active part in that community, with a higher set of rights and responsibilities. It implied an effective social and economic ‘tiering’ of citizenship.


David Selbourne, Samuel’s ‘colleague’ at Ruskin College, Oxford, had a strong sense both of the power of the community and of the need to point to the enemies of the community, both without and within. The boundaries of the polity in his view were not geographical, but were defined by a moral sense of belonging. The ‘liberal orders’ which had corrupted Britain’s civic culture, and had eroded the bonds of community, were the cause of the corruption which had taken hold of Britain. The geographical size of the community was less important to him than the moral bond which the individual shared with other individuals in the civic order. That order was a republic, or a ‘commonwealth’ as he preferred to call it,78 because the civic ends for which it existed served to make the isolated individual into a citizen, whose relations with other citizens was regulated by that civil bond which was really a moral bond. This was a constellation of moral and practical duties which bound the citizen in an ethic of duty towards the family, the community and the civic order. The ring of exclusion drawn by Selbourne around this civil bond defined the community against ‘the other’, the strangers who were not fit to be citizens. This was not a strictly geographical community. If citizens did not belong within this ring, they had lost their rights in principle, as rights depended on duties. This was particularly true of citizens within the polity – they had ceased to be citizens if they did not have the sense of belonging which defined them as such, and the civic authority had to exert its authority as a collective body over them. It was not a question of creed, because faith merely divided the God-fearing from the secular; it was the secular principle of duty which bound them together in the civic order. The dissident who refused such duty was cast out into a ‘moral vacuum’, and became ‘the moral stranger to the civic bond’. As a person who had refused the duties and therefore lost the rights of citizenship, s/he was subject to the special penalties, controls and deprivations to be imposed by true citizens.79 In this way, Selbourne drew the essential distinction which divided the citizens of a republic from the strangers without, a distinction which he saw as the fundamental element of any civic order at all times and in all places. He admitted that cruelty was always possible within such a distinction – as a Jew, perhaps he had to admit that – but from the barbarian and the metic in Ancient Athens to the alien and the gastarbeieter of today, the distinction established the integrity of the civic order as a body politic, determining that citizens had rights, while


non-citizens did not. Non-citizens might become citizens (as nonproperty owners could become property owners), but at the same time a citizen might become a non-citizen through a refusal of the civic bond.80 By refusing to act as a citizen, such a person became a moral outcast, ‘a stranger among strangers, whether they be fellow-citizens or not’.81 They had refused the principle of duty. The latter-day Antigone, denying the duties of citizenship to obey a deeper duty, has always existed at the margins of political life. However, the property-owning democracy of our own day has its own strangers in those who have no stake in society – a useless section of the population who are a weight on the public purse, and who can therefore be stigmatized as ‘welfare dependents’, pregnant teenagers, asylum-seekers and the idle who, it is said, are not so much excluded from the community as exclude themselves by their anti-social attitudes. In this way, the creation of apathy and despair in the ‘underclass’ is turned from a social into a ‘moral’ problem. As Michael Ignatieff noted, the archetype of the Jew, hand outstretched in a vain appeal for mercy to the abstract humanity of the camp guard, is still the chilling image of a world divided into citizens and strangers.82 These were the boundaries of a property-owners’ democracy. Whatever the formal nature of citizenship may be, the actual exercise of citizenship was restricted to those who accepted and participated in the polity.

In seeking to delineate a republican conception which has given a language to the politics of the past decades, I have sought to contribute towards an understanding of the categories in which we interpret the society around us in political terms. Such a conception is not a totalitarian ideology, however. Like socialism, it has a varied shape, and the republican socialism which was formulated by the New Left was very different from the property-owners’ democracy formulated by the New Right. It is a particular conception of the republic which has emerged, based on the suburban ideal. Its roots lie in the two different streams: that of a decentralized community based on industrial democracy, and that of a freehold citizenry. As Jo Grimond and the Unservile State Group could see in the 1950s, when the new conception was struggling to light, these were not necessarily inconsistent notions of a polity. They could be united to reflect a changing Britain, in which


class divisions and a centralized state could be replaced by the liberty of the individual property-owner who could find meaning through participation in the community. The industrial democracy demanded by the New Left had not been a simple class dictatorship, but an expression of a local community in which individuals could find citizenship through that participation in the polity of work. Similarly, the individual property-owner for the followers of Oakeshott was not the isolated consumer who was connected to other consumers through the market nexus, but participated within the community through his citizenship in a custom-based society. The divisions that certainly existed between Right and Left – divisions over class, gender and race – cannot be underestimated. However, they were also united by a sense of hostility to the centralized, corporate state in which a particularistic group constituted an Establishment which was pursuing its own interests against those of the community. Both sought to destroy that Establishment in an attempt to find a polity based on the common good, defined by a sense of belonging which necessitated participation. That Establishment was eventually undermined, if not effectively destroyed, by the actions of the Thatcher Government. The Left had talked of dethroning the Establishment; the Right did it. It was the success of the Thatcher governments in taking socialism out of the political equation which had created the political conditions in which these two streams could meet. The politics which emerged – a freehold citizenry within the local community modelled on the values of the suburb – meant that the individual was independent through having a stake in the community, both local and national. Such a conception had come into being from the confluence of a republican language whose essential patterns had been formed in the crucible of ideological transformation in the 1950s and 1960s, when a new politics thrust itself forward through old languages. How far it met the ideals of a genuine participating citizenry can be disputed. Sheldon Wolin (one of those responsible for developing the idea of an engaged democracy in American political thought in 1960), has written of the ‘post-modern’ polity as a system of elections in which a manipulable populace, misinformed, fragmented and polled, is bound to its rulers through the language of participation. The genuine dissident, marginalized and ignored rather than physically destroyed, is linked with those outcast from the established polity as part of a ‘fugitive democracy’,83 appearing ephemerally rather than through a settled political system subject to bureaucratization.


The new republican conception may not have overcome the problems of equality or power which remain in our society. It may have great potentialities for cruelty against the dissenting individuals within, and against the strangers and aliens without. However, the sense of belonging which it asserts in a world of great dangers, where security and a sense of humanity which extends beyond any narrowly-drawn community appear elusive, could well prove a powerful force in the future.

Notes and References

Introduction: the Republican Idea 1. I coined the term ‘corporate socialist’ as a parallel to the term ‘corporate liberal’ adopted by radical historians to describe a version of the trend in the United States – see Martin J. Sklar, The Reconstruction of American Capitalism 1890–1916 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 34–40. 2. As categorized by Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society (Andre Deutsch, 1979), chapter 13. 3. See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: a Methodological Inquiry’, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, Philosophy, Politics and Society (second series, Basil Blackwell, 1967), pp. 194–5; Michael Freeden, in Ideologies and Political Theory: a Conceptual Approach (Clarendon Press, 1996). 4. See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited’, Journal of Modern History, 53:1 (March 1981), 51–2 – his interest in time has led him to write a series of narratives in the history of political thought which have concentrated on the transmission and transformation of conceptual vocabularies over different historical periods; much thinking on this has been shaped by the use of paradigms, or controlling concepts and theories, by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), chapter V. 5. J.H. Hexter, On Historians (Collins, 1979), p. 293. 6. See Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Random House, 1991) for a recent restatement of the republican thesis. 7. John Adams, Works, Vol. X, p. 378, quoted in Correa Maylan Walsh, The Political Science of John Adams (G.D. Putnam and Sons, NY, 1915). Walsh points to the confusion in Adams’s terminology on the subject, p. 31. 8. Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Republicanism: the Career of a Concept’, Journal of American History, 79:1, 38. 9. Bernard Crick, ‘Republicanism, Liberalism and Capitalism: a Defence of Parliamentarianism’, in Graeme Duncan (ed.), Democracy and the Capitalist State (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 63. 10. See Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America 1790–1820 ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), Ch. V, VI; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815–46 (Oxford University Press, 1991) Ch. 3, 4. 11. Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816; Jefferson to John Taylor, 28 May 1816, in Merrill Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson: Writings (Library of America, 1984), pp. 1396, 1392–3; Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation and University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 40–4; Joyce Appleby, ‘What Is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?’, William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982), 287–309. 191

192 Notes and References 12. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 5 for the distinction between a concept and conceptions. 13. See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 69–75. 14. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One, The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 35–41, 49ff. 15. See Z.S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 1945). 16. Caroline Robbins, Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 49. 17. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 8, 27–30, 109; Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents (Belknap Press, 1996), p. 26. 18. The phrase is that of G.D.H. Cole, in The World of Labour: a Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade Unionism (G. Bell and Sons, 1913), p. 17. 19. Algernon Sidney, Discourses on Government (London, 1698 edn), p. 65; Thomas Jefferson, letter ‘on the republic of the wards’, Joseph C. Cabell, to February 2nd, 1816, Writings p. 1380. 20. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, p. 147. 21. See Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One, pp. 84, 149–50, 164–7. 22. Ibid., p. 166. 23. See Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. Maurice Cranston (Penguin, 1968), pp. 63–4, 131–4; Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: a Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1985 edn), pp. 100, 156. 24. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin, 1973 edn), pp. 135–46. 25. J.H. Hexter, On Historians, p. 294. 26. For a modern elaboration of this opposition to the liberal conception, see Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (Basil Blackwell, 1984), Introduction; also Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982). 27. Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36–57. 28. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 78, 80, 124–5, 190, 392. 29. See J.G.A. Pocock, Ibid. pp. 383–400 and passim for a compelling argument of the central importance of Harrington to the Anglo-American republican tradition, marking a turn froms arms to property ownership as a mark of political independence. 30. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, p. 290. 31. See Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 25, 227–8; Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press, 1967), pp. 296–7. 32. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 334, 423. 33. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds (Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 71; Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 285. 34. Tom Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (The Citadel Press, 1974 edn) pp. 369–70; Isaac Kramnick (ed.) The Federalist Papers (Penguin, 1987), p. 4; Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic Ch. XIII for ‘the Repudiation of 1776’.

Notes and References 193 35. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in early British Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 325; this is an excellent account of the changes taking place in radical thinking, especially the decline of republican thinking; also see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge University Press, 1983); for the earlier British republicanism and its close relationship to the American Revolution, see J.R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (Macmillan, 1966), Part Four.

1

Socialist Humanism and Republican Theory

1. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The British Communist Party’, in Political Studies, XXV:1(1954) 30. 2. George Thompson, ‘Our Cultural Work in the Light of Our Party Programme’, Communist Review (September, 1951), 272; Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism (Routledge, 1944); also see Stephen Wren, ‘State Monopoly Capitalism Part One’, in Communist Review, (April 1951), 125 and Sam Aaronovitch, Monopoly: a Study of British Monopoly Capitalism (Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), p. 75. 3. Bill Schwarz, ‘ “The People” in History: the Communist Party Historians Group’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (Hutchinson, 1982), p. 54. 4. The best source for the origins of the group is Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians Group in the Communist Party’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes (Lawrence and Wishart, 1978); Bill Schwarz, ‘ “The People” in History’ is a particularly useful account of the evolution of the group. 5. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians Group in the Communist Party’, p. 34. 6. A.L. Morton, ‘Socialist Humanism’, Communist Review (October, 1953), p. 300. 7. Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement (Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), pp. 11, 24. 8. Dona Torr, Tom Mann and His Times Volume One 1856–1890 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), pp. 120, 123. 9. Dona Torr, ‘National and International’, Communist Review (March, 1948), 72; A.L. Morton, ‘Socialist Humanism’, p. 300; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Who is for Democracy?’, review of J.L. Talmon’s book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), in Modern Quarterly, 8:2, 103. 10. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians Group in the Communist Party’, p. 26. 11. Dona Torr, ‘Productive Forces; Social Relations’, Communist Review (May, 1946), 16. 12. Christopher Hill, ‘Marxism and History’, Modern Quarterly, 8:2, 52. 13. Ibid., p. 53. 14. Christopher Hill, ‘England’s First Democratic Army’, Communist Review (June,1947), 178. 15. Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, p. 28. 16. Dona Torr, Tom Mann, p. 110. 17. John Lewis, in writing of the moral strength of the Soviet people, argued that ‘they owe much in this finely human attitude to Stalin, whose deep wisdom

194 Notes and References

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

and broad humanity has long inspired the Party’, ‘The Moral Complexion of our People’, in Modern Quarterly, 6:1 (Winter 1950–51), 65; also see R. Palme Dutt, ‘Stalin and the Future’, in Labour Monthly (April, 1953), 145. Reuben Falber, ‘Democratic Centralism’, Communist Review, (January, 1951), 19. Edward Thompson, ‘Winter Wheat in Omsk’, World News (30 June 1956), 408; also see John Saville, ‘Problems of the Communist Party’, World News (19 May 1956), 314. Editorial, The Reasoner, 1, ( July, 1956), 4. Steve Parsons, ‘1956 and the Communist Party’, Society for the Study of Labour History (Bulletin 47, Autumn, 1983), 9. Editorial, The Reasoner, 1. Interview with Eric Hobsbawm, Marxism Today (November, 1986), 21; Rodney Hilton, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals Four’, Universities and Left Review (ULR), 2 (Summer, 1957), 20. See Tribune, 22 March 1957, 3. Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh University Press, 1993); and Michael Kenny, The First New Left (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995) present a history of the New Left, though the obscurities of its break-up remain obscure. See Tribune, 9 November 1956, 6–7 for an account of this demonstration, particularly for the active role played by Oxford students. See the advertisement in the inside cover, ULR, 3 (Winter, 1958). See Lelio Basso, ‘The Italian Left’, ULR, 2 (Summer, 1957), 23–6; see Claude Bourdet, ‘The French Left: Long Run Trends’, ULR, 1 (Spring, 1957), 16; see ‘Letter to our Readers’, New Reasoner, 10 (Autumn, 1959) for the US connection. Editorial, New Reasoner, 1 (Summer, 1957), 2. ULR, 2 (Summer, 1957), 80. Editorial, ULR, 5 (Autumn, 1958), 3. Editorial, ULR, 4 (Summer, 1958), 3. Editorial, ULR, 4. Christopher Hill, ‘Republicanism after the Restoration’, New Left Review, 3 (May–June, 1960), 51. See Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), Chapters Three and Four. See Alasdair Maclntyre, ‘What Morality Is Not’, Philosophy, 32:123 (October, 1957), 335 for Sartre’s influence. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968 edn), p. 513; pp. 24–6. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism: an Epistle to the Philistines’, in New Reasoner, 1 (Summer, 1957), 109. E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, p. 115. Ibid., p. 124. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, New Reasoner (Summer, 1957), 125. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, ULR, 1 (Spring, 1957), 33. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, pp. 115–16. Ibid., p. 116. E.P. Thompson, ‘Agency and Choice’, New Reasoner, 5 (Summer, 1958), 91. A large number of books and articles on Thompson have appeared, especially since his death in 1993; see John Rule and Robert Malcolmson, Protest and Survival: the Historical Experience (Merlin, 1993); also see the interesting

Notes and References 195

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

essays in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, E.P. Thompson: Critical Persepectives (Polity Press, 1990). E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, New Reasoner, 1 (Summer,1957), 125. See the expression of debt to Cole on his death in ULR, 6, p. 72; Stuart Hall has singled out Cole as being a major influence on the Oxford Socialist Group (personal information). Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One, especially pp. 164–8. For example, Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (David McKay Co., 1957). Stuart Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, in E.P. Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy (Stevens, 1960), pp. 95–6. E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, New Reasoner, 9 (Summer, 1959), 3. See Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One, pp. 42–3,76, 81,170–5; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 135, 136. E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Out of Apathy, p. 181. Charles Taylor, ‘Alienation and Community’, ULR, 5 (Autumn,1958), 12. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 13 See Steven Lukes, ‘Alienation and Anomie’, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds) Philosophy. Politics and Society (Third Series, Basil Blackwell, 1967) for a discussion of the two concepts. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Early Writings, ed. Lucio Colletti (Penguin, 1975), p. 329. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1850 (Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 303. Raymond Williams, ‘Working Class Culture’, ULR, 2 (Summer, 1957), 30. Dennis Potter, the playwright who was then an Oxford graduate, drew out the images of domination painted by Williams in his The Glittering Coffin (Victor Gollancz, 1959). E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, New Reasoner, 9 (Summer, 1959), 11. Raphael Samuel, ‘Bastard Capitalism’, in Out of Apathy, p. 55. Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel and Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Insiders’, ULR, 3 (Winter, 1958), 30. Ibid., p. 32. A notable exception was Richard Crossman, Socialism and the New Despotism (Fabian Tract 298, 1956), an attempt to break away from traditional Bevanite notions of public ownership. ‘The Insiders’, p. 61. Ibid., p. 25. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956); also Ralph Miliband, ‘C. Wright Mills’, New Left Review, 15 (May–June, 1962). See Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (Wesleyan University Press, 1989 edn), pp. 249–61, 390–91; the republican nature of this politics is brought out in James Miller, Democracy Is In The Streets (Harvard University Press, 1994 edn). Ralph Miliband, ‘The Politics of Contemporary Capitalism’, New Reasoner, 5 (Summer, 1958), 39. Ralph Miliband, ‘The Transition to the Transition’, New Reasoner, 6 (Autumn, 1958), 38.

196 Notes and References 74. Ibid., p. 43. 75. Ibid., p. 42. 76. Ralph Miliband, ‘The Politics of Contemporary Capitalism’, New Reasoner, 5 (Summer, 1958), 45. 77. Ibid., p. 46. 78. See Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: a Bourgeois Critique (Tavistock, 1979), p. 25; for Marx’s definition of class, as distinct from the Weberian, see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, (Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), pp. 20–1. 79. See Pauline Gregg, The Welfare State (Harrap, 1967), pp. 221–5. 80. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Kinship in East London (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 155; see also Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People: an Inquiry in East London (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). 81. Charles Taylor, ‘Alienation and Community’, ULR, 5 (Autumn, 1958), 12. 82. Ibid., p. 17. 83. Ibid. 84. Editorial, ULR, 5 (Autumn, 1958), 4. 85. Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ (URL 5, Autumn 1958), p. 26; see John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society: a Study of Contemporary Britain (Heinemann, 1975), p. 293 for the changing occupational structure which was gathering pace by 1961. 86. Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, p. 28. 87. Ibid., p. 29. 88. Ibid., p. 31. 89. E.P. Thompson, ‘Commitment in Politics’, ULR, 6 (Spring, 1959), 51. 90. Stuart Hall, ‘The Big Swipe’, ULR, 7 (Autumn, 1959), 50. 91. E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution’, New Left Review, 3 (May–June,1960), 7. 92. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968 edn), p. 9. 93. Ibid., p. 9. 94. Ibid., p. 10. 95. Ibid., p. 782. 96. See particularly the ‘Communist Manifesto’, in Karl Marx, Political Writings Volume 1 (Penguin, 1973), p. 67 n.12; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), pp. 20–1. 97. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Progress Publishers, Moscow,1973), p. 150. 98. E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution Again’, New Left Review, 6 (November–December, 1960), 27. 99. See, for example, Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, pp. 76–87; Capital, Volume 3 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), p. 817. 100. Also see G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of History: a Defence (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 73–7. 101. Charles Taylor, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, New Reasoner, 2 (Autumn, 1957), 98. 102. EP. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, New Reasoner, 1 (Summer, 1957), 127. 103. Charles Taylor, ‘Socialism and Intellectuals’, ULR, 2 (Summer, 1957), 19. 104. Charles Taylor, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, p. 97. 105. E.P. Thompson, ‘Agency and Choice’, New Reasoner, 5 (Summer, 1958), 93. 106. See Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, in The First International and After (Penguin, 1974), p. 209.

Notes and References 197 107. Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, pp. 206, 208. 108. See Mikhail Bakunin, Letter to the Editorial Board of la Liberte, 5 October 1872, quoted in Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (Centre International de Recherche sur l’Anarchisme,1971), p. 8 – as an anarchist, Bakunin had a good appreciation of this point; also Karl Marx, ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s State and Anarchy’ in Karl Marx, The First International and After, pp. 335–8. 109. Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, p. 211. 110. Ibid., p. 211. 111. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 588; also see pp. 585–9, 714–15, and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ in Karl Marx, Political Writings Volume One, pp. 69,79, 86. 112. Charles Taylor, ‘Alienation and Community’, p. 17. 113. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton University Press, 2004 edn), pp. 440–50; Stephen Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1985) points to Marx’s concern with communist emancipation from labour rather than political rights, but see pp. 92–3 for his failure to follow this through to understanding why Marx was so careless about the actual operation of direct democracy. 114. Karl Marx, First Draft of ‘The Civil War in France’, in The First International and After, p. 249 (Marx’s stress). 115. Ibid., p. 207. 116. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 261. 117. See Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, p. 347, and Grundrisse (Penguin, 1973), pp. 156–60, 712; Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (New Left Books, 1971), Chapter 4; Steven Lukes, in Marxism and Morality (1985), points to Marx’s commitment to emancipation at the expense of any theory of rights; I agree – Marx was a communist, not a republican.

2

The Transposition of Republican Thought

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’, New Reasoner, 8 (Spring, 1959), 98. 2. See G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, 33:124 (January, 1958). 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’, p. 90. 4. See Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 469. 6. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’, New Reasoner, 7 (Winter, 1958–59), 91. 7. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Is Patriotism a Virtue? (University of Kansas, 1984). 8. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’, p. 92. 9. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’, p. 96. 10. E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution’, in Out of Apathy, p. 308. 11. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals: a Reply’, p. 21.

198 Notes and References 12. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, The Socialist Register, 1965 (Merlin, 1966), p. 357. 13. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Chatto and Windus, London, 1957), p. 37. 14. Raymond Williams, ‘Working Class Culture’, ULR, 2 (Summer,1957), 32. 15. Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, p. 27. 16. See Robert McKenzie and Alan Silver, Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (Heinemann, 1968); for ‘secular’ Labour support, see John Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge University Press, 1968). 17. See, for example, Brian Elliott, ‘Social Change in the City: Structure and Process’, in Philip Abrams (ed.), Work. Urbanism and Inequality (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978). 18. Peggy Duff, Left. Left, Left. A Personal Account of Six Protest Campaigns: 1945–65 (Allison and Busby, 1971), p. 128. 19. ‘Editorial – Will Mr Gaitskell Miss the Boat?’ in ULR, 6 (Spring, 1959), 1. 20. The Times, 18 September 1961, p. 10. 21. April Carter, Direct Action (Housmans/Peace News, 1962), p. 22. 22. A.J. Groom, British Thinking About Nuclear Weapons (Francis Pinter, 1974), p. 413. 23. ‘Editorial – John Stuart Mill and EOKA’, New Reasoner, 7 (Winter,1958–59), 11. 24. ‘Editorial’, ULR, 2 (Summer, 1957), 4. 25. See the Labour Party, Disengagement in Europe (1958). 26. ‘Editorial – Can We Have a Neutral Britain?’, New Reasoner, 4 (Spring, 1958), 3. 27. Ibid., p. 9. 28. Both approaches were rejected in the last issue of the ULR in a penetrating analysis by Peter Sedgwick which equated NATO and the Warsaw Pact as aggressive power-structures – see Peter Sedgwick – ‘NATO, the Bomb and Socialism’, ULR, 7 (Autumn, 1959). 29. Michael Kenny’s admiration of the New Left prevents him from charting the tensions within the New Left’s political economy, or between its economic and political ideas, which leaves him with the statement that they had created a position which was neither traditional Labour Left nor Stalinist; – Michael Kenny, The First New Left, p. 120. 30. See the essays in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatiev, Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: the Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York University Press, 1984), pp. 95–101; Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992) Ch. 2; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, Chs XIII–XIV. 31. ‘To determine the laws which regulate this distribution [of wealth] Is the principal problem in political economy’, David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Cambridge University Press, 1986 edn), p. 5; see Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1973). 32. ‘The Insiders’, p. 59. 33. Ibid., p. 63. 34. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Workers Control in a Planned Economy’, New Left Review, 5 (March–April, 1960), 31.

Notes and References 199 35. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Workers Control in a Planned Economy’, p. 64. 36. Ibid., p. 34. 37. See George Thayer, The British Political Fringe (Anthony Blond, London, 1965), p. 133. 38. Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, p. 31. 39. Michael Barratt Brown, After Imperialism (Heinemann, 1963). 40. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘British Economic Policy Since the War’, ULR, 4 (Summer, 1958), 40. 41. See Andrew Shonfield, British Economic Policy Since the War (Penguin, 1958). 42. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘A New Foreign Economic Policy’, New Reasoner, 4 (Spring, 1958), 44. 43. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘British Economic Policy Since the War’, ULR, 4 (Summer, 1958), 42. 44. Ibid. 45. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Imperialism, Yesterday and Today’, New Left Review, 5 (September–October, 1960), 46. 46. Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel and Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Insiders’, ULR, 3 (Winter, 1958), 37. 47. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Imperialism, Yesterday and Today’, New Left Review, 5 (September–October, 1960), 48. 48. Michael Barratt Brown, ‘A New Foreign Economic Foreign Policy’ p. 52. 49. See, for example, Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, p. 28. 50. Ken Alexander and John Hughes, A Socialist Wages Plan: the Politics of the Pay Packet (ULR/New Reasoner pamphlet, 1959) 6. 51. Ibid., p. 15. 52. Ibid., p. 45. 53. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 54. This was pointed out by Michael Kidron, ‘The Limits of Reform’, New Reasoner, 10 (Autumn, 1959). 55. E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Out of Apathy, p. 181. 56. Bernard Crick, ‘Socialist Literature in the 1950’s’, Political Quarterly, 31:3 (July–September, 1960), 372. 57. See Ralph Miliband, ‘John Saville: a Presentation’, in David Martin and David Rubinstein, Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (Croom Helm, 1980), p. 27. 58. Stuart Hall, ‘The “First” New Left: Life and Times’, in Oxford Socialist Discussion Group, Out of Apathy: Voices from the New Left Thirty Years On (Verso, 1989). 59. See Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, (Verso, 1979), p. 365; also E.P. Thompson interview in David Holden, ‘The First New Left in Britain 1956–62’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1976. 60. See ‘Notes for Readers’, New Left Review, 11 ((September–October,1961), 72; also successive Letters to Readers and reports on Left Club activities in issues of the NLR during the next two years; see Caroline Bamford – ‘The Politics of Commitment: the Early New Left in Britain 1956–62’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1983 for documented accounts of the political and organizational activities of the New Left in this period.

200 Notes and References 61. ‘Letter to Readers’, New Left Review, 2 (March–April, 1960), 69. 62. ‘Notes for Readers’, New Left Review, 12 (November–December, 1961), inside covers. 63. ‘Notes for Readers’, New Left Review, 12. 64. See Caroline Bamford, ‘The Politics of Commitment’; Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), p. 135. 65. Michael Kenny, while noting the confusion surrounding the change in New Left, blurred the theoretical differences between the two New Lefts by denying anything more than personal acrimony, The First New Left, pp. 3–4. 66. Perry Anderson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, p. 23, p. 30; also see Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Marxist Political Theory in Great Britain’, New Left Review, 43 (May–June, 1967), 60. 67. Perry Anderson, ‘Sweden, Mr Crosland’s Dreamland’, New Left Review, 9 (May–June, 1961), 36. 68. Perry Anderson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, p. 22. 69. See Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, 50 (July–August, 1968), 15. 70. For the original critiques of the first New Left, see Tom Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review, 24 (March–April,1964); Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23 (January–February, 1964), 27; see E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), Socialist Register.1965, for the onslaught on the NLR editors; Perry Anderson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, New Left Review, January–February,1966) and Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), p. 140. 71. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, p. 337. 72. Ibid., p. 323. 73. Ibid., p. 330. 74. Perry Anderson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, p. 32. 75. Ibid., p. 34. 76. Perry Anderson., ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, p. 28. 77. Ibid., p. 39. 78. See, for example, Joseph Fernia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 35–50, 257n.1. 79. Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, p. 41. 80. Ibid., p. 33. 81. Tom Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, p. 52. 82. See, for example, Tom Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, New Left Review, 27 (September–October,1964) and 28 (November–December, 1964); Tom Nairn, ‘Labour Imperialism’, New Left Review, 32 (July–August,1965). 83. See Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (Merlin Press, 2004) for the latest intellectual biography. Many of the other figures associated with the first New Left similarly failed to bring out the republican implications of industrial democracy. John Hughes, the New Left co-author of A Socialist Wages Plan (1959), continued to be interested in industrial democracy but he defined this in terms of increasing trade

Notes and References 201 union influence in the decision-making of government, even seeing the ultra-corporatist Prices and Incomes Board and the 1965 Monopolies Act as the beginning of such a role. Ralph Miliband, another writer for the early New Left who, with John Saville, co-edited The Socialist Register, after 1964, appeared more concerned with the failure of the Labour Government to pursue nationalization measures than with the lack of industrial democracy.

3

The Radical Republicans

1. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and other essays (Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 8, 10–11 for the three definitions of citizenship; Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, in English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R.H. Tawney (Clarendon Press 1988) pp. 125–6, points to the innovative nature of Marshall’s work on citizenship. 2. See Stephen Taylor, ‘Democratic Socialism: a Restatement’, Research Department 356, May 1950; C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (Jonathan Cape, 1956). 3. See William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society: a Report (George Allen and Unwin, 1944) para. 44, p. 36; Jose Harris sees Beveridge’s belief in citizen entitlement as a republican vision – William Beveridge: a Biography (Clarendon Press, 1997 edn), p. 484. 4. See Caroline Bamford, ‘The Politics of Commitment’. 5. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 7, 19. 6. See Robert Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1956); this and other contemporary theories of democracy are critically discussed in Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1970), Chapter 1. 7. W.H. Morris Jones, ‘In Defence of Apathy: Some Doubts on the Duty to Vote’, Political Studies, II (1954); see also John Plamenatz, ‘Election Studies and Democratic Theory’, Political Studies, VI:1 (1958), – ‘we have learnt that the people’s part in government is essentially negative’, p. 4; A.H. Birch, who argued that discretion among office-holders depended on preventing people from knowing too much of public affairs, on the exclusion of the people from the res publica, believed that ‘the British people still like being governed’, Representative and Responsible Government: an Essay on the British Constitution (George Allen and Unwin, 1964), p. 245. 8. See pp. 3–4 in this volume. 9. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962), p. 156. 10. Bernard Crick, The Reform of Parliament (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968 edition), p. 43; also see Bernard Crick, Reform of the Commons (Fabian Tract #319, 1959). 11. To Michael Foot, schooled in the eighteenth-century Country Party republicanism of writers such as Swift, democracy was threatened, but not from the exclusion of the people from a direct say in power. It was the exclusion of the people’s representatives from power by the party – see Michael Foot, Parliament in Danger (Pall Mall Press, 1959).

202 Notes and References 12. Graeme Duncan and Steven Lukes, ‘The New Democracy’, Political Studies, IX:2 (1963), 158. 13. Isaiah Berlin corrected them on the accuracy of their comments, writing to them that he was in sympathy with their view (private information). 14. See Steven Lukes, Power: a Radical View (Macmillan, 1974), pp. 42–4; also see Anthony Arblaster and Steven Lukes, The Good Society: a Book of Readings (Methuen, 1971), Introduction, and Anthony Arblaster, ‘Participation: Context and Conflict’, in Geraint Parry (ed.), Participation in Politics (Manchester University Press, 1972) p. 55. 15. Geraint Parry, ‘The Idea of Political Participation’, in Parry (ed.), Participation in Politics, elaborated this dual approach of instrumental and developmental; it may well have had an influence on David Held’s models of protective and developmental republicanism, in Models of Democracy (Polity Press, 1996 edn) Chapter 2. 16. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, p. 27. 17. G.A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture (Little Brown and Co., Boston,1965). 18. See Michael Freeman, ‘Social Science and Democratic Theory’, Political Studies, XXI:1 (1973). 19. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, pp. 102, 106. 20. Michael Freeman, ‘Social Science and Democratic Theory’, pp. 72–3. 21. Dennis F. Thomson, The Democratic Citizen (Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 27. 22. Ibid., p. 13. 23. Ibid., pp. 117, 147. 24. Michael Freeman, ‘Social Science and Democratic Theory’, pp. 72–3. 25. See T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, p. 78. 26. W.W. Robson, The Governors and the Governed (George Allen and Unwin, 1964), pal. 34; also see his classic, The Development of Local Government (George Allen and Unwin, 1948 edn) pp. 30–1; T.H. Marshall also saw this centralization as a sad inevitablity, Citizenship and Social Class, p. 78. 27. John P. Mackintosh, The Devolution of Power: Local Democracy, Regionalism and Nationalism (Chatto and Windus, 1968), p. 46; Ioan Bowen Rees, who worked for Pembrokeshire County Council, argued (in the Classical Republican tradition) that local government could only be made articulate by concentrating power at the parish or ward rather than the county level; his pessimism about the possibility of this made him look to Wales – ‘that collection of localities’ – where the mountains and mining valleys had preserved a sense of family and community, as the last refuge of genuine local democracy – Government by Community (Charles Knight and Co., 1971), p. 230. 28. See William Hampton, ‘Review of Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory and Dennis Thompson, The Democratic Citizen’, Political Quarterly, 42:2 (1971), 208–10. 29. William Hampton, Democracy and Community: a Study of Politics in Sheffield (Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 6, 7. 30. Ibid., p. 22. 31. Ibid., p. 302.

Notes and References 203 32. G.D.H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, Volume III, Part 1, p. 247; also Volume IV, Part 1, p. 454. 33. G.D.H. Cole, ‘Workers’ Control in Industry’, Tribune, 27 January 1956, 3. 34. G.D.H. Cole, ‘Apathy in the Unions’, Tribune, 6 January 1956, 5. 35. G.D.H. Cole, Foreword to Branko Pribićević, The Shop Stewards Movement and Workers Control 1910–1922 (Basil Blackwell, 1959), p. vii. 36. Ibid., p. viii. 37. See Royden Harrison, ‘The Retreat from Industrial Democracy’, New Left Review, 4 (July–August, 1960), 34; also Denis Butt, ‘Workers’ Control’, New Left Review, 10 (July–August, 1961). 38. MacIntyre was editor from No. 3 (Winter, 1960–61) to No. 8 (Spring, 1962), before being succeeded by Michael Kidron. 39. Editorial, ‘Socialists, Labourites and Clause 4’, International Socialism, 1 (Spring, 1960), 3. 40. Peter Sedgwick, ‘Review of Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution’, International Socialism, 7 (Winter, 1961–62), 29. 41. Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Fight for Workers’ Control’, International Socialism, 3, 2. 42. E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution Again’, New Left Review, 6 (November–December, 1960), 22. 43. Michael Kidron, ‘Review of Out of Apathy’, International Socialism, 2 (Autumn, 1960), 33. 44. It should be noted that Ian Birchall, the official historian of the group, later claimed that the IS leadership, if not most of the members, was Leninist from its inception – ‘History of the International Socialists Part 1’, International Socialism, 76 (new series, March, 1985), 17, 20. 45. The fullest account of the IWC in its earliest phase is given by Tony Topham, ‘Introduction’, Report of the 5th National Conference on Workers’ Control and Industrial Democracy (IWC, 1967); also see Ken Coates and Wyn Williams (eds), How and Why Industry must be Democratised (IWC, 1969). 46. See John Callaghan, The Far Left in British Politics (Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 120–1. 47. Tony Topham and Fred Singleton, ‘Workers’ Control: the Latest Phase’, New Left Review, 18 (January–February, 1963), 73. 48. See Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, Chapter V for an account of industrial democracy in Yugoslavia. 49. Tony Topham and Fred Singleton, ‘Workers’ Control’, p. 84 (Topham’s stress). 50. Tony Topham, ‘A Strategy for Workers’ Control’, Tribune, 3 July 1964, 6. 51. Ken Coates, ‘Democracy and Workers’ Control’, in Perry Anderson (ed.), Towards Socialism (Collins edn, 1966), p. 296. 52. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain: a Book of Readings and Witnesses for Workers Control (MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), Introduction, p. xvii. 53. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, ‘Participation or Control’, in Ken Coates (ed.) Can the Workers Run Industry? (Spherre Books, 1968) p. 233. 54. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, ‘Participation or Control’, p. 408. 55. Ken Coates and Tony Topham (eds) Industrial Democracy in Great Britain, p. xxxvi. 56. Hugh Scanlon, ‘Interview’, New Left Review (November–December, 1967), p. 4.

204 Notes and References 57. A.I. Marsh and E.E. Coker, ‘Shop Steward Organisation in the Engineering Industry’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 1:2 (1963), quoted in Ken Coates and Tony Topham (eds), Industrial Democracy in Great Britain, pp. 202–3; for an official view of the shop stewards movement, see W.E.J. McCarthy, The Role of Shop Stewards in British Industrial Relations (The Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, Research Papers 1, 1966). 58. Report of the 5th National Conference on Workers’ Control, p. 48. 59. Tony Topham, ‘Shop Stewards and Workers’ Control’, New Left Review, 25 (May–June, 1964), 6; also see Hugh Scanlon, ‘Interview’, New Left Review, 46, p. 5. 60. Tony Topham, ‘Shop Stewards and Workers’ Control’, New Left Review, 25, p. 13. 61. See, for example, Ken Coates, ‘Incomes Policy – a Strategy for the Unions’, in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds) Socialist Register1965; Tony Topham, ‘New Types of Bargaining’, in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn, The Incompatibles. 62. Ken Coates, ‘Incomes Policy and Class Power’, International Socialism, 26 (Autumn, 1966), 20; also see Ken Coates,’Incomes Policy – A Strategy for the Unions’, p. 177; see A.J. Topham, ‘Incomes Policy – The Background to the Argument’, in The Socialist Register 1965, p. 167 for his differences with the early New Left’s Socialist Wages Plan. 63. Richard Crossman regarded the Soviet Union as economically superior to capitalism – Richard Crossman, Labour in the Affluent Society, p. 9; for Tribune’s agreement see, for example, ‘Russia – an Increase of 90 per cent in Production and Freedom’, Tribune, 22 January 1960, 5. 64. See especially Editorial, ‘The Rebels with a Cause’, Tribune, 3 April 1959, p. 1; Norman Birnbaum, in ‘Counter-Attack in the Universities’, Tribune, 27 March 1959, p. 10, noting the influence of the ULR on radical students, pointed out to Tribune readers that nuclear weapons and colonial liberation rather than wage struggles were the main areas of interest for the new middle class radicals; for A Socialist Wages Plan, see Ian Mikardo, ‘The Facts About Inflation’, Tribune, 20 February 1959, p. 3; Ian Mikardo, ‘Wages and the Labour Party’, Tribune, 6 March 1959, p. 5; A great debate was promised by Tribune on the idea of a socialist incomes policy, with leading trade unionists expressing their opinions, but it did not materialize – Tribune, 13 February 1959, p. 5. 65. Editorial, ‘Let Them Answer This If They Can’, Tribune, 23 October 1959, p. 6; also see Editorial, ‘What are we going to do?’, Tribune, 16 October 1959, pp. 1, 6. 66. Vic Allen, who was much later revealed to be passing information to the Soviet Union, said that Cole was not the direct source of his ideas on industrial democracy; the ideas were ‘in the air’ – personal information. 67. V.L. Allen, ‘Democracy in Industry’, Tribune, 6 November 1959, p. 5. 68. V.L. Allen, ‘Control Has Moved Back to the Top’, Tribune, 13 November 1959, p. 7. 69. Announcement, Tribune, 30 October 1959, p. 6. 70. Victory for Socialism, ‘The Age for Socialism’, Tribune, 13 November 1959, p. 5. 71. Personal information; Vic Allen affirmed the lack of reader response, though he added that it was difficult to remember the exact events of so long ago.

Notes and References 205 72. Editorial, ‘Clause 4 and the Commanding Heights’, Tribune, 25 March 1960, p. 5. 73. J.K. Galbraith, American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power (Houghton Miflin, 1952), p. 91. 74. Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?’, New Left Review, 2 (March–April, 1960), 9 sought to incorporate Galbraith’s ideas about public squalor and private affluence within a communitarian perspective. 75. Michael Foot, ‘Can We Save the Government?’, Tribune, 29 March 1968, p. 12. 76. Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (Macmillan, 1987), pp. 77ff. 77. Eric Heffer, ‘What’s Wrong with Labour’s Left?’, Tribune, 6 May 1966, p. 7. 78. Ibid., p. 7. 79. Jack Jones, ‘A Plan for a Breakthrough in Production’, Tribune, 11 February 1966, p. 1; see also, Jack Jones, ‘Labour and the Trade Unions’, Tribune, 15 April 1966, p. 7. 80. Jack Jones, ‘The Unions in 1967’, Tribune, 23 December 1966, p. 7. 81. Ian Mikardo, ‘My Reply to Barbara Castle’, Tribune, 24 May 1968, p. 5. 82. See Tribune, 15 July 1966, p. 1. 83. The Tribune Group, ‘A New Economic Stategy for Labour’, Tribune, 12 January 1968, p. 12. 84. Editorial, ‘France: Things Will Never Be the Same Again’, Tribune, 24 May 1968, p. 1; John Gretton, in Students and Workers: an Analytical Account of Dissent in France May–June 1968 (Macdonald, 1969, is an excellent account of the operation of this direct democracy). 85. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, The Regeneration of Britain (Victor Gollancz, 1965), p. 92. 86. Ibid., p. 28. 87. The Times, 27 May 1968, p. 2; ‘Benn Starts the Debate’, Tribune, 31 May 1968, p. 1; also see Tony Benn, Parliament, People and Power (Verso, 1982), p. 10. 88. ‘The Socialist Charter’, Tribune, 6 June 1968, p. 1.

4

Jo Grimond and the Unservile State

1. The Observer, 11 October, 1959, p. 1. 2. See William Wallace, ‘Survival and Revival’, pp. 43–73, and Andrew Gamble, ‘Liberals and the Economy’, p. 202, both in Vernon Bogdanor (ed.) Liberal Party Politics (Clarendon Press, 1983). 3. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism (Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 257. 4. William H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society: a Report (George Allen and Unwin, 1944), para. 44, p. 36; it is this commitment to a central state which has led me to disagree with Jose Harris’s argument in William Beveridge: a Biography (p. 484) that Beveridge lies in the republican tradition. 5. See pp. 70–1. 6. J.M. Keynes, ‘A Drastic Remedy for Unemployment – A Reply to Critics’, The Nation, xxxv:4 (7 June, 1924), 312. 7. Peter Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections in Britain (Allen and Unwin, 1972 edn, p. 102. 8. Contemporary accounts of this middle-class revolt are numerous, but an interesting sociological account from a longer-term historical perspective

206 Notes and References

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

is given by Harold Perkins, The Rise of Professional Society (Routledge, 1989). Jo Grimond, ‘’The Principles of Liberalism’, Political Quarterly, 24 (1953), 237. Jo Grimond, The New Liberal Democracy (Liberal Publication Department, 1958), p. 19. Ibid., p. 92. George Watson, ‘The Challenge of Liberalism’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State: Essays on Liberty and Welfare (George Allen and Unwin), p. 311. Elliot Dodds, ‘Liberty and Welfare’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State, pp. 15, 25. Ibid., p. 23. George Allen, ‘The Geography of Liberty’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State, pp. 134, 132. Ibid., p. 144. Peter Wiles, ‘Property and Equality’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State, p. 109. Ibid., p. 90. Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future (Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 13. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 44; see also Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto (Martin Robertson, 1983), p. 62 on the need for citizens to check government, an indication that they are not direct participants. Jo Grimond, ‘The Reform of Parliament’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State, p. 52. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983) underline the growing intellectual acceptance that Adam Smith is best understood in his intellectual context. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations’, pp. 6–7, for an account of the differences between the jurisprudential and civic humanist discourses in economics. Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future, pp. 59–60. For his opposition to statutory wages policies, see Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future, p. 48; also Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto, p. 75 for a republican formulation of the question. See Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future, p. 65 for his critique of pricing policy by nationalized industries. Ibid., p. 56. Jo Grimond, People Count (Liberal Publications Department, n.d. 1961?), p. 2. Nancy Seear, ‘Relations in Industry’, The Unservile State, p. 188. Donald Wade, Towards a Nation of Owners (Liberal Publications Department, n.d. 1959?), p. 7. Donald Wade, Our Aims and Purposes (Liberal Publications Department, 1961), p. 6; also see Liberal Party Ownership for All Committee, Ownership for All (Liberal Publications Department, 1959), pp. 5–6. Donald Wade, Towards a Nation of Owners, p. 40.

Notes and References 207 39. See Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future, p. 60. 40. Jo Grimond, Industry, Profits and People (Industrial Co-Partnership Association, 1960), p. 5. 41. Grimond, The Liberal Future, p. 85. 42. Jo Grimond, Memoirs (Heinemann, 1979), p. 152. 43. Ibid., p. 79. 44. Ibid., p. 67. 45. Ibid., p. 76; see also Donald Wade, Towards a Nation of Owners, p. 39, and Roger Fulford, The Liberal Case (Penguin, 1959, p. 54. 46. Jo Grimond, Memoirs, p. 132, where he writes at length of this paradox. 47. Ibid., p. 211. 48. Alan Peacock, The Welfare Society (Unservile State papers, 1960), p. 7. 49. Ibid., p. 12. 50. Ibid., pp. 9, 12. 51. Alan Peacock, ‘Welfare in the Liberal State’, in G. Watson, The Unservile State, p. 130. 52. Ibid., p. 129. 53. Jo Grimond, The Liberal Future, pp. 102, 106. 54. See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 276–7, 296–7 for a clear distinction between the libertarianism of Hayek and Liberalism. 55. See his Introduction to Heinrich von Stackelberg, The Theory of the Market Economy (William Hodge and Co., 1952), p. xvi. 56. Alan Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 4. 57. Ibid., p. 24. 58. Ibid., p. 26. 59. Ibid., p. 28. 60. Alan Peacock, ‘Economic Analysis and Government Expenditure’, Journal of Scottish Political Economy, X:1 (February 1963), 4. 61. Ibid., p. 16. 62. Alan Peacock, The Welfare Society, p. 12. 63. See Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 262, 304, for a libertarian critique of the Unservile State Group. 64. Alan Peacock, ‘Welfare in the Liberal State’, p. 130. 65. Mark Bonham-Carter did write of the needs for regional government using the republican language that ‘if an affluent democracy is to be civilized, it must be totally self-governing’, Mark Bonham-Carter, ‘Liberals and the Political Future’, in George Watson (ed.) Radical Alternatives – Studies in Liberalism by the Oxford Liberal Group (Eyre and Spotiswoode, 1962), p. 38. 66. Peter Wiles, ‘The Economy and the Cold War’, in George Watson (ed.) Radical Alternatives, p. 51. 67. Ibid., p. 66. 68. Desmond Banks, Liberals and Economic Planning (Unservile State papers, No. 8, 1963), pp. 3, 15; see also Bryan Keith-Lucas, The Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors (Unservile State papers, No. 7, 1961); Christopher Layton, Europe After The Wreck (Unservile State papers, No. 7, 1963); Heather Harvey, The Wealth of the Nation (Unservile Paper No. 10, 1965). 69. Jo Grimond, Growth, Not Grandeur (Liberal Publications Department, 1961), p. 6.

208 Notes and References 70. See Jo Grimond, Industry, Profits and People (Industrial Co-Partnership Association, 1960) for evidence of the continuing importance of this. 71. Ibid., p. 11. 72. Ibid., p. 6. 73. Jo Grimond, The Liberal Challenge (Hollis and Carter, 1963), p. 26. 74. Ibid., pp. 58, 70. 75. Ibid., p. 62. 76. Ibid., p. 70. 77. See Jo Grimond, Europe: Britain must Join (New Directions, nd), pp. 5–6 for his commitment to the political unity of a European federation. 78. Ibid., p. 125. 79. Ibid., pp. 127–8, 132. 80. Quoted in Chris Cooke, A Short History of the Liberal Party 1900–1984 (Macmillan, 1984), p. 146. 81. See Michael McManus, Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire (Birlinn, 2001), pp. 261, 303–08. 82. Jo Grimond, The Nature of Politics (Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 2–3. 83. Ibid., p. 3.

5 A Republicanism of the Right 1. See Philip Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 134–5. 2. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’ (1947), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962), p. 31. 3. Viscount Hailsham, The Conservative Case (Penguin, 1959 rev.edn), p. 12. 4. W.H. Greenleaf, in R. Benewick, R.N. Berki and B. Parekh, Knowledge and Belief in Politics (Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 173; W.H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, Volume Two, The Ideological Heritage (Routledge, 1988 edn), pp. 189–92; R.J. Bennet, ‘The Conservative Tradition in Thought’, in Neil Nugent and Roger King (eds), The British Right (Saxon House, 1977), p. 23. 5. Philip Norton and Arthur Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism (Temple Smith, London, 1981), p. 119; see also Noel O’Sullivan, Conservatism (J.M. Dent, 1976), p. 12; Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, Ch. 8. 6. Jefferson to Francis Eppes, 19 January 1821, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings (Library of America, 1984), p. 1451; the radical Burdett in 1819 saw himself as the heir to the Toryism of Queen Anne’s reign – see J. Dinwiddy, ‘Sir Francis Burdett and Burdettite Radicalism’, History, 65 (1980) 17–31. 7. For Bolingbroke, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Harvard University Press, 1968); J.C.D. Clark, ‘The Politics of the Excluded: Tories Jacobites and Whig Patriots 1715–1760’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 209–22 points to the similarity of language of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in that time; for an alternative view, see Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in N. McKendrick, Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J.H. Plumb (Europa Publications, 1974) pp. 93–128. 8. Shirley Robin Letwin, Anatomy of Thatcherism (Fontana, 1992), pp. 38–9; Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 411ff; neither Letwin


9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

nor Freeden identified the stress on the independence of the citizen as republican, but it bears all the hallmarks of the republican tradition. Richard Cockett has presented an excellent account of the liberal influence of Hayek in Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic CounterRevolution 1931–1983 (Fontana Press edn, 1994); also see E.H.H. Green for the best conventional account of Conservative ideas in the ‘Thatcherism: an Historical Perspective’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 17–42. Margaret Thatcher, What’s Wrong With Politics? (Conservative Political Centre, 1968), p. 9. See Shirley Robin Letwin, Anatomy of Thatcherism, p. 32 on this paradox. See Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: the Politics of Thatcherism (Macmillan, 1994 edn); for other interpretations, see Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (Lawrence and Wishart, 1983) and Bob Jessop et al., Thatcherism (Polity Press, 1988). See Shirley Robin Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism, Chapter 2, esp. pp. 33, 37, 44. Ibid., pp. 107, 113. Noel Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 17. See Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp. 326–8; John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940–1957 (Longman, 1995), p. 141; Harold Macmillan Winds of Change 1914–1939 (1966 edn), p. 178, pays a tribute to Skelton’s importance to Conservative thought. E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 238, though Green sees Thatcherism as more than the product of a mere battle of ideas. To Martin Francis, ‘the ideology of the Conservative Party has long been a blend of paternalist and libertarian traditions’, ‘Set the People Free? Conservatives and the State 1920–1960’, in Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, The Conservatives and British Society 1880–1990 (University of Wales Press, 1996) p. 58; Nigel Harris has noted the deep conflict between étatistes and libertarians throughout this period in his excellent Competition and the Corporate Society: British Conservatives, the State and Industry, 1945–1964 (Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1972), Part One and pp. 141–5. R.A. Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 145; Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune 1945–1955 (Macmillan, 1969), p. 302. The One Nation Group’s ambiguity was in keeping with the group’s membership, The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940–1957, pp. 221–2; also see Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998, pp. 154–7). Iain Macleod and Angus Maude (eds), One Nation (Conservative Political Centre, 1950), p. 20. Angus Maude and Enoch Powell, Change Is Our Ally (Conservative Political Centre, 1954), pp. 7, 97. Anthony Eden, speech to Conservative Annual conference, Blackpool, 3 October 1946, quoted in The New Conservatism: an Anthology of Post War Thought (Conservative Political Centre, 1955), p. 76. Michael Fraser, ‘The Ownership of Property’, in The Good Society (Conservative Political Centre, 1952), p. 51.

210 Notes and References 25. Anthony Eden, speech at Hull, 7 March 1946, quoted in The New Conservatism, pp. 72–3. 26. See Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, Chapters 2–3; Nigel Harris, Competition and the Corporate Society, points to the libertarian language dominant within the Conservative party in the ten years after the war; see F.A. Hayek, ‘Why I Am Not A Conservative’, in The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960) pp. 397–411 for his account of the sharp differences between his own market-driven approach and the organicist approach of conservatism; also see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 373–6. 27. See Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (Faber and Faber, London, 1978). 28. Richard Law, Return to Freedom (Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 93. 29. G. Kitson Clark, The Kingdom of Free Men (Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 201, a more liberal argument within the British Christian political tradition. 30. Richard Law, Return to Freedom, p. 28. 31. Shirley Letwin, incomplete typescript, papers of Michael Joseph Oakeshott, 1901–1990, British Library of Political and Economic Science, 15/9/1. 32. W.H. Greenleaf argues that if Oakeshott was a conservative, he was a very odd one, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (Longman, 1966), p. 82; Paul Franco argues that Oakeshott is a liberal in The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (Yale University Press, 1990) pp. 158–60, disagreeing with Charles Covell’s belief, expressed in The Redefinition of Conservatism (Macmillan, 1986), Chapter 4, that Oakeshott was restating a coherent conservative doctrine; also see Kenneth Minogue, ‘Michael Joseph Oakeshott’, in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 online edn). 33. Both Andrew Gamble, in The Free Economy and the Strong State pp. 158–61, and E.H.H. Green, in Ideologies of Conservatism, pp. 281–5, restrict their discussion to Oakeshott’s attack on Rationalist ideologies, with the former author in particular engaged in an over-sinuous discussion on Thatcher’s Rationalism. Since the manuscript went to press, I have found out that David Bouchier is exploring the relationship of Oakeshott to the republican tradition, taking a very different route – see ‘Oakeshott, Freedom and Republicanism’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7:1 (February 2005), pp. 81–96. 34. This may have been an intentional reluctance to betray his approach to ideas through a distorting systematization – Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), p. 4; it should be borne in mind, perhaps, that the philosophical distinction he later drew between citizenship and property probably did not exist for the readers of his earlier writings. 35. Bernard Crick, ‘The Ambiguity of Michael Oakeshott’, Cambridge Review, 112:2314 (October, 1991), 123. 36. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, p. 148. 37. Ibid., pp. 181, 243; also see Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), p. 41. 38. Ibid., p. 314. 39. Ibid., p. 248. 40. Ibid., pp. 244–5. 41. Ibid., p. 119ff, esp. p. 128, where he stresses that citizens are not enterepreneurs but related purely through their common recognition of lex; I don’t believe there to be an inconsistency, but if there was it was not unique – see


42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Oakeshott’s comments on the US Constitution as an expression of the disasters of rationalism in Rationalism in Politics (Methuen, 1962), p. 26, while he sees that same Constitution and its defenders as a desirable expression of lex in On Human Conduct, pp. 244–5. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 166–8. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Contemporary British Politics’, Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 486. Oakeshott, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’, Rationalism in Politics, p. 45. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 199–206, 206–16 gives an exhaustive discussion of these categories. Oakeshott, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’, Rationalism in Politics, pp. 50–4. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., pp. 56–8. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, p. 321; also see p. 277, 304n.3. Charles Covell, The Redefinition of Conservatism, p. 119; Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, pp. 221, 230ff; W.H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 67, 82–3 points to the similarity of Oakeshott’s views with those of Hayek. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 31, On Human Conduct, pp. 57, 62, 70, 75–7, 99. Maurice Cowling’s worry on this was expressed in Religion and Public Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 279–82. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics, pp. 65–6. Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, pp. 230ff locates Oakeshott’s communitarianism with that of Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel; W.H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, p. 59, compares Oakeshott’s conception of the individual with the pluralism of G.D.H. Cole, one of the mentors of the New Left. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics, p. 74. Ibid., p. 26; On Human Conduct, pp. 247–9. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, pp. 128, 144. See Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: the Social Bases of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester University Press, 1968). See John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940–1957 (Longman, 1995), pp. 297–301; John Ramsden, The Winds of Change 1957–75 (Longman, 1996), p. 45; Alistair Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986 (Macmillan, 1989), p. 62. Angus Maude and Roy Lewis, The Middle Classes (Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1973 edn), p. 105. T.E. Utley, ‘Liberty or Equality’, in Liberty in the Modern State (Conservative Political Centre, number 166, 1957), p. 81. Peter Goldman, ‘Foreword’, Liberty in the Modern State, p. 9. Diana Spearman, ‘Democracy and Liberty’, Liberty in the Modern State, p. 34. Lord Hailsham, The Conservative Case, p. 99. See Macmillan’s speech to the CPC in March 1958, quoted in Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way (Macmillan, 1966 edn), p. xxii; Hailsham’s association with the dirigiste policies of state intervention in the local and regional economy in the early 1960s belied any rhetoric on the dangers of centralization.

212 Notes and References 68. Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p. 164, mistakenly identifies her anti-statism with the libertarian tradition; also see pp. 98–9, Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell, p. 212, underlines her importance as an intellectual conduit of Oakeshott’s ideas; also see the obituary by Enoch Powell (section 1, file 5, 1/5 of the Papers of Dr Richard Cockett, British Library of Political and Economic Science). 69. Diana Spearman, Democracy in England (Rockliffe, 1957), p. 29. 70. Ibid., p. 40. 71. Ibid., p. 234.n.4. 72. Ibid., p. 131. 73. Ibid., p. 136. 74. Ibid., p. 160. 75. Ibid., p. 161. 76. Ibid., p. 162. 77. Ibid., p. 165. 78. A.J.P. Taylor, New Statesman, 1 June 1957, p. 714. 79. Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, in Arnold Huneld (ed.) Freedom and Serfdom: an Anthology of Western Thought (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland, 1961), p. 160. 80. W.H. Greenleaf astutely saw the similarity in Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, p. 59. 81. Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy, pp. 166–7. 82. Maurice Cowling, The Nature and Limits of Political Science (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 16; Cowling was later to drop this compliment, describing Brogan as an Asquithean Liberal full of cant – Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 194–5. But by then (1980) Cowling’s passion for Oakeshott’s ideas had gone. 83. D.W. Brogan, Citizenship Today (University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 4. 84. Ibid., p. 9. 85. Ibid., p. 14. 86. Ibid., p. 14. 87. Ibid., p. 19. 88. Ibid., p. 27. 89. Ibid., p. 28. 90. Ibid., p. 38.

6 The Importance of Enoch 1. Harold Perkin presents an interesting analysis of this in The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. 2. Spectator, 10 May 1963. 3. For a classic statement of this by Heath, see his speech at Carshalton, The Times, 10 July 1967, p. 3. 4. Timothy Raison, Conflict and Compromise (Conservative Political Centre, 1965); Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism, Will the Tories Lose? (PEST, n.d) attacked the high proportion of peers and ‘Old Boys’ from the public schools. 5. Maurice Cowling, The Nature and Limits of Political Science (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 15.

Notes and References 213 6. Ibid., p. 9. 7. Diana Spearman, Manifesto for Freedom, section 1, file 5, 1/5 of the Papers of Dr Richard Cockett, British Library of Political and Economic Science, p. 2; also see Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p. 165. 8. Diana Spearman, Manifesto for Freedom p. 3. 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 8. 12. Ibid., p. 9. 13. See Simon Heffer – Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell, p. 442. 14. Enoch Powell, Reflections of a Statesman (Bellew Publishing, 1990), p. 57. 15. John Ramsden, The Winds of Change, pp. 276–8; Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, pp. 346–59. 16. T.E. Utley, Enoch Powell, The Man and His Thinking (William Kimber, 1968) p. 169. 17. Enoch Powell, ‘Superwhig’, Spectator (1 March 1980); also see Maurice Cowling, ‘Intellectuals and the Tory Party’, Spectator, 8 March 1968, pp. 292–3. 18. Quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, p. 348. 19. Iain Macleod, ‘Enoch Powell’, Spectator (16 July 1965), p. 71. 20. Despite an appearance of Anglo-Catholicism, his critical approach to the Gospels marked him out as a man who refused to subordinate his own critical intelligence to any Church doctrine; once, when asked if he was a Christian, he replied carefully he was an Anglican (see John Mortimer, In Character, Penguin, 1983), p. 48. 21. Speech at Birmingham Town Hall, 12 September 1870; also his speech at St Paul’s ward, Birmingham, 6 December 1872, quoted in J.L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, Volume 1 (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 152, 153. 22. Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (Hutchinson, 1996) p. 383. 23. J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, ed. John Wood (Batsford, 1965), p. 256. 24. 8 January 1965, quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, pp. 367–8; Richard Cockett regrets that Powell’s economic liberalism was ‘besmirched’ by his views on immigration, as though the two were unconnected, Thinking the Unthinkable, p. 167. 25. William Rees-Mogg, ‘Powellism is not enough’, The Sunday Times, 18 July 1965. 26. In Democracy in England, Diana Spearman acknowledged having benefited from having read Powell’s history of the House of Lords, then in manuscript form, with Powell’s permission (p. 234 n.4); also see Powell’s obituary of her. 27. Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, p. 212. 28. See Enoch Powell, ‘Nationalism’, in World Perspectives (Conservative Political Centre, 1955), p. 39. 29. Enoch Powell, ‘The Empire of England’, in Tradition and Change (Conservative Political Centre, 1954), p. 51; To Andrew Roth, the decision to evacuate the Suez Canal in 1954 was the turning point in his approach to Empire, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (Macdonald, London, 1970), pp. 115–17. 30. J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, p. 255. 31. Speech at Bromley 24 October 1963, quoted in John Wood (ed.), A Nation Not Afraid: the Thinking of Enoch Powell (Batsford, 1965), p. 3. 32. Speech at Bromsgrove, 6 July 1963, quoted in A Nation Not Afraid, p. 25. 33. Speech at Bromley 24 October 1963, quoted in A Nation Not Afraid, pp. 4–5.

214 Notes and References 34. Speech at Trinity College, Dublin, 13 November 1964, quoted in Freedom and Reality, p. 245. 35. See Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue. 36. Speech at Aylesbury, February 1965, in John Wood (ed.), Freedom and Reality, p. 16. 37. Speech to East Renfrewshire Unionist Association, The Times, 4 April 1964, p. 6. 38. Enoch Powell, ‘In Pursuit of a Mirage II’, The Times, 18 December 1964, p. 16. 39. The Times, 29 January 1964 p. 6; see also Enoch Powell, ‘The Irresistible Market’, New Society, 6 February 1964, in which he attacked the corporatist attitude to profits and incomes taken by employers. 40. ‘Capitalist Spokesmen and Socialist Government’, The Director, Feb. 1965, quoted in Freedom and Reality, p. 45. 41. Speech to the City of London Young Conservatives, The Times, 30 July 1964, p. 5. 42. ‘Capitalist Spokesmen and Socialist Government’, Director, Feb. 1965, quoted in Freedom and Reality, p. 49. 43. A Conservative, ‘A Party in Search of a Pattern 2’, The Times, 2 April 1964, p. 13. 44. A Conservative, ‘A Party in Search of a Pattern 3’, The Times, 3 April 1964, p. 13. 45. Ibid. 46. For final confirmation that these articles by ‘A Conservative’ were written by Powell, see Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, p. 351. 47. A Conservative, ‘A Party in Search of a Pattern 1’, The Times, 1 April 1964, p. 11. 48. A Conservative, ‘A Party in Search of a Pattern 2’, The Times, 2 April 1964, p. 13. 49. Angus Maude, ‘Seek not to Smother It’, Spectator, 19 November, 1965, p. 652. 50. Angus Maude, ‘Attitudes and Slogans’, Spectator, 22 March 1963, pp. 349–51. 51. Angus Maude, ‘Seek Not to Smother It’, Spectator, 19 November, 1965, p. 652. 52. Angus Maude, The Common Problem (Constable, 1969), pp. 34, 38n. 53. Angus Maude, ‘Winter of Tory Discontent’, Spectator, 14 January, 1966, p. 652; to the description of Maude as a member of the shadow cabinet was scribbled ‘not for long’ in the margins of the LSE copy, one can only idly speculate by whom, though it appealed to my sense of humour. 54. Mark Garnett, ‘Angus Maude’, in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 online edn). 55. Angus Maude, The Common Problem (Constable, 1969) p. 291. 56. Ibid., p. 290. 57. Ibid., p. 36. 58. Ibid., p. 39. 59. Ibid., p. 40. 60. Ibid., pp. 54–5. 61. Ibid., p. 56. 62. Ibid., p. 45. 63. Ibid., p. 62. 64. Ibid., p. 89. 65. Ibid., p. 100. 66. Ibid., p. 101. 67. Ibid., pp. 197–201, 290. 68. Quoted in Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) p. 113; the sentiments are similar to Jefferson’s attacks on the


69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

7

mobs of great cities as degenerate and dependent, compared with the independence of those who labour on the earth, in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Diana Spearman, A Time You Remember 1969–70 (Merlin, 1989), p. 23; also see her article, ‘Romantics to Revolutionaries, The Times, 17 April 1971, p. 14. Russell Lewis, Principles to Conserve (Conservative Political Centre, 1968) p. 13. Tibor Szamuely, Unique Conservative (CPC/Bow Group, 1973 – a reprint of the original article) p. 26; also see Maurice Cowling, ‘Intellectuals and the Tory Party’, Spectator, 8 March 1968, pp. 292–3. A Conservative, ‘A Party in Search of a Pattern 2’, The Times, 2 April 1964, p. 13. For selections from this correspondence see Simon Heffer – Like the Roman, pp. 445–6. G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Silent People’. Rex Collings (ed.) Reflections of a Statesman: the Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (Bellew Publishing, London, 1991), pp. 377, 374. Speech to the Annual Conference of the Rotary Club of London at Eastbourne, The Times, 18 November 1968, p. 3; also see The Times, 12 November 1969, p. 6 on the need for the Commons to be responsive to the voice of the people. Speech at Birmingham 13 June 1970, quoted in Rex Collings Reflections of a Statesman, pp. 246–7; Heffer, Like the Roman, pp. 559–63. Diana Spearman, ‘A Dangerous Attitude’, The Times, 14 June 1968, p. 9. Angus Maude, ‘The End of Consensus Politics’, Spectator, 10 May 1968, p. 627. Maurice Cowling, ‘Mr Powell, Mr Heath and the Future’, in John Wood (ed.) Powell and the 1970 Election (Elliot Right Way Books, 1970), p. 13. Maurice Cowling, ‘The Right Position’, in Cowling, Conservative Essays (Cassell, 1978), p. 19. Daily Telegraph, 28 January, 1967, quoted in Charles Moore and Simon Heffer – A Tory Seer (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1989), p. 22. Sunday Telegraph, 8 and 15 September 1968, quoted in Charles Moore and Simon Heffer – A Tory Seer, pp. 33, 44. Speech at Market Bosworth, The Times, 2 September 1968, p. 3. Angus Maude, ‘The End of Consensus Politics’, The Spectator, 10 May 1968, p. 628.


1. Richard Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain (Macmillan, 2001), p. 26. 2. See The Times, 10 October 1974, p. 1 for an alarmist analysis which yet contained the germ of possibility. 3. Labour Party, Programme for Britain, 1973, p. 7. 4. Personal information. 5. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Polity Press, 1988) discusses the difficulties feminism faced with the ideas of social contract. 6. See Noel Thompson, Political Economy and the Labour Party (UCL Press, 1996), Ch. 16. 7. Stuart Holland, Strategy for Socialism (Spokesman Books, 1975), p. 70.

216 Notes and References 8. Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge (Quartet Books, 1975), pp. 294–5. 9. Ibid., p. 29; also see Stuart Holland, The State as Entrepreneur (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), for his concern that the allocation of resources was the crucial concern of a modern economy. 10. Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 282. 11. See Peter Hain and Simon Hebditch, Radicals and Socialism (Institute for Workers Control, 1978). 12. Peter Hain, ‘The Future of Community Politics’, in Peter Hain (ed.), Community Politics (John Calder, 1976), p. 25; also see Peter Hain, Radical Liberalism and Youth Politics (Liberal Publications Department, 1973). 13. See Simon Hebditch, ‘The Ideology of Grass Roots Activism’, and Bernard Greaves, ‘Communities and Power’, in Hain (ed.), Community Politics; also see Young Liberals, Industry and the Community: a Young Liberal Approach (Economics and Industry Commission, National League of Young Liberals, 1976). 14. Peter Hain, Radical Regeneration (Quartet Books, 1975), p. 166. 15. Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto (Martin Robertson, 1983), pp. 26–7. 16. Jo Grimond, Memoirs (Heinemann, 1979), p. 257; also see Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto, pp. 24, 27. 17. Jo Grimond, Memoirs, p. 186. 18. Ibid., p. 211. 19. For Grimond’s continuing appreciation of Peacock, see The Common Welfare (Temple Smith, 1978), p. 239; Memoirs, p. 209–11. 20. Jo Grimond, Memoirs, p. 257. 21. Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto, pp. 19, 75. 22. Jo Grimond, Memoirs, p. 152. 23. Jo Grimond, The Common Welfare, p. 31. 24. Jo Grimond, A Personal Manifesto, pp. 37, 62, 92. 25. See Jo Grimond, The Common Welfare, p. 33. 26. See Simon Heffer, Like the Roman, pp. 782–83, 889–90; also see Alfred Sherman, ‘The Thatcher Era in Perspective’, Currents of Modern Thought, (April 1989), 611. 27. See Gillian Peele, ‘British Conservatism: Ideological Change and Electoral Uncertainty’, in Brian Girvan (ed.) The Transformation of Contemporary Conservatism (Sage, 1988). 28. Sir Keith Joseph, Reversing the Trend: a Critical Reappraisal of Conservative Economic and Social Policies (Barry Rose, 1975), p. 4. 29. Sir Keith Joseph, Angus Maude and Ian Percival, Freedom and Order (Conservative Political Centre, 1975), p. 32, italics in the original. 30. Maurice Cowling, ‘The Present Position’, in M. Cowling, Conservative Essays (Cassell, 1978), p. 16. 31. See Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, pp. 219–20. 32. Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (Pan, 1983 edn), p. 402. 33. Roger Scruton, The Politics of Culture (Carcanet Press, 1981), p. 204. 34. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Macmillan, 1984 edn), p. 100. 35. Ibid., p. 56. 36. Ibid., p. 142. 37. Ibid., p. 163. 38. Maurice Cowling, ‘The Present Position’, in M. Cowling, Conservative Essays, p. 7.

Notes and References 217 39. Shirley Robin Letwin, incomplete typescript, 15/9/1, Papers of Michael Oakeshott, British Library of Political and Economic Science. 40. Shirley Robin Letwin, ‘The Fall of Mrs Thatcher’, typescript #1, p. 15, 15/9/3, papers of Michael Oakeshott, BLPES. 41. Shirley Robin Letwin, ‘The Fall of Mrs Thatcher’, p. 16; Andrew Gamble, Free Economy and the Strong State, p. 161. 42. Shirley and William Letwin, Every Adult a Shareholder: the Case for Universal Share Ownership (Centre for Policy Studies, 1986), p. 22. 43. Shirley Robin Letwin and William Letwin, Every Adult a Shareholder, p. 6; also see Norman Tebbitt, Britain’s Future: a Conservative Vision (Conservative Political Centre, 1985), pp. 12–14, and Norman Tebbitt, Upwardly Mobile (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 267. 44. The Times, 15 October 1983, p. 2. 45. See Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (Verso, 1992), p. 68. 46. See Tony Benn, Common Sense: a New Constitution for Britain (co-written with Andrew Hood, Hutchinson, 1993); Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (Blackwell, 1994). 47. Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, p. 68. 48. Patrick Seyd, ‘Bennism without Benn: Realignment on the Labour Left’, New Socialist, 27 (May, 1985); Heffernan and Marqusee, in Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, pp. 65–6 note that Seyd’s name was used without his permission by Stuart Weir, the editor of New Socialist, but the phenomenon was occurring regardless of the author’s identity. 49. Gavin Kitching, Rethinking Socialism: a Theory for a Better Practice (Methuen, 1984), p. 45; also see Nicholas Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics (Routledge, 1994), p. 155. 50. David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society: New Demands and Old Politics (Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 11. 51. David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society, p. 11. 52. Andrew Marr, Ruling Britannia (Michael Joseph, 1995), pp. 302–15, 349. 53. David Willetts, Modern Conservatism (Penguin, 1992), p. 108. 54. See Giles Radice, Southern Discomfort (Fabian pamphlet 555, 1992). 55. Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution (Little, Brown and Company, 1998), p. 3. 56. Anthony Quinton, ‘Citizens, to the Bureaucades’, The Times, 8 October 1988; also see ‘Editorial, Citizen Hurd’, New Statesman, 15 April 1988. 57. Ferdinand Mount, The Practice of Liberty (Conservative Political Centre, 1986); also see Lord Hailsham, Elective Dictatorship (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1976) and The Dilemma of Democracy (Collins, 1978). 58. Ferdinand Mount, The British Constitution Now: Recovery or Decline? (Heinemann, 1992), p. 86. 59. Ibid., p. 257. 60. David Willetts, Modern Conservatism (Penguin, 1992), p. 67; the reference to Oakeshott’s political economy of freedom is on p. 166. 61. John Gray and David Willetts, Is Conservatism Dead? (Profile Books, 1997), p. 172. 62. Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (Blackwell, 1984), p. 165.

218 Notes and References 63. Raymond Plant, Citizenship, Rights and Socialism (Fabian Tract 531, October, 1988), p. 19. 64. David Blunkett and Bernard Crick, The Labour Party’s Aims and Values: an Unofficial Statement (Spokesman pamphlet #87, 1988), p. 12. 65. See Peter Hain, Ayes to the Left: a Future for Socialism (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995). 66. Tony Wright, Citizens and Subject: an Essay on British Politics (Routledge, 1994), p. 127. 67. Peter Jay, The Times, 1975 passim; David Miller and Saul Estrin, ‘Market Socialism: a Policy for Socialists’, in Ian Forbes (ed.), Market Socialism: Whose Choice? (Fabian Tract 516, November, 1986); David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Socialism (Clarendon Press, 1990). 68. Will Hutton, The Revolution That Never Was: an Assessment of Keynesian Economics (Longman, 1986), p. 188. 69. Will Hutton, The State We’re In, (Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 168. 70. Ibid., p. 256. 71. For an attempt to relate the idea of stakeholding in corporate life to the guild socialist tradition of Cole, see Paul Hirst Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Polity Press, 1994), Chapters 4, 5. 72. See Stephen Tindale and David Miliband, Beyond Economics: European Government after Maastricht (Fabian Society discussion paper, 1991). 73. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–6. 74. Bernard Crick, ‘Still Missing: a Public Philosophy’, Political Quarterly, 68:4 (1997), 344–52. 75. See Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Nowhere Show’, in Marxism Today (November–December, 1998); Steven Lukes, ‘More than Words?’, in Stephen Pollard et al. (eds) The Third Way (Social Market Foundation, 1999), pp. 17–20. 76. Raphael Samuel (ed.) Patriotism, 3 volumes (Routledge 1989). 77. See Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Volume I (Verso, 1994). 78. David Selbourne, The Principle of Order: an Essay on the Foundations of Civic Order (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), pp. 23, 39, 277; also see David Selbourne, The Spirit of the Age (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), p. 345. 79. David Selbourne, The Principle of Order, pp. 47, 276. 80. Ibid., pp. 105–08. 81. Ibid., p. 108. 82. See Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (The Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 53; Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (Routledge, 2002), Chapter VIII, takes a more optimistic view than I do of the potentialities of the republican tradition towards the excluded. 83. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton University Press, second edn, 2004), pp. 601–06.

Index The descriptions of people generally refer to their role during the period covered by the text. Adams, John, 18th century US Federalist, 3–4, 10, 122, 123, 164 Addison, Sir Richard, 18th century editor of The Spectator, 99 Alexander, Ken, New Left writer, 56–8 Alienation, confused as apathy, 27, 28–9, 32 Allaun, Frank, left-wing Labour MP, 76 Allen, George, Unservile State Liberal, 94–5 Allen, Vic, left-wing activist, 81–2 Almond, G.A., American sociologist, 68 Anderson, Perry, editor of NLR: active participation, 59–60 Thompson debate, 60–3 Anscombe, Elizabeth, philosopher, 43–4 Antigone, Greek heroine, 188 Arendt, Hannah, republican intellectual, 6–7, 85, 154 Baldwin, Stanley, Conservative leader (1923–37), 160 Ball, John, medieval religious radical, 17 Banks, Desmond, Liberal, 109 Barratt Brown, Michael, New Left writer, 53, 54–6 Basso, Lelio, Italian New Left intellectual, 20 Benn, Tony, left-wing Labour politician: and New Left, 85, 165, 168, 177, 178 and Powell, 157 Berlin, Isaiah, philosopher, 64–5, 66, 202n13 Bevanites and Labour Left, 32, 53, 54, 75 and New Left, 80–1 Beveridge, Sir William, Liberal writer on the welfare state, 90–1, 103, 105 Beyond the Fringe, 139

Blackburn, Robin, NLR writer, 59, 76 Blair, Tony, Labour leader (1994–), 163, 179 Blake, William, 18th century Romantic poet, 25, 26 Blunkett, David, left-wing, then New Labour politician, 178, 181, 185 Bolingbroke, Lord, 18th century Country Tory: and Powell, 144, 149 and republicanism of the Right, 115, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139 Bonham-Carter, Mark, Liberal politician, 207n65 Bourdet, Claude, French New Left intellectual, 21 Bow Group, 140 Brogan, D.W., academic writer, 136–8, 144 Burke, Edmund, 18th century intellectual: and Grimond, 95–6, in Tory pantheon, 115, 123, 130 Butler, R.A., Conservative politician, 118 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 48, 60 Carter, April, New Left activist, 48–9, 60 Cato’s Letters (1720–3), 115, 136, 139 Chamberlain, Joseph, 19th century republican politician, 11, 144 Charter 88, 179–80 Chesterton, G.K. poet, and ‘the people of England’, 158n74 Citizenship Today (D.W. Brogan, 1960), 136–8 Clements, Richard, Tribune editor, 82

219

220 Index Cliff, Tony, IS founder, Trotskyist, 75 Clinton, Bill, US President (1993–2001) politician, 179 Coates, Ken, IWC founder: and IS, 75 and IWC, 76–80, 167 Cobbett, William, 19th century Tory radical, 61 Cole, G.D.H., 20th century republican socialist writer, and New Left, 27, 68, 166, 182 and Oakeshott, 124, 127, 135–6 republicanism, 27, 41: ‘bare ballotbox democracy’, 97, 132; industrial democracy, 73–4, 76, 78, 166–7 Communist Historians Group, 16–18, 24, 45, 60, 61 Communist Party, 15–20, 53–4, 60 Conservative Party, 114, 118, 139–40, 145 Conservative Political Centre (CPC), 130–1 Corporate Socialism, 1, 2, 80, 191n1 and Liberals, 91, 93, 97 and New Left, 81–3 Cowling, Maurice, right-wing academic: and Brogan, 136 and corruption, 140–1 and Oakeshott, 140 and Powell, 143, 159, 173 and Thatcher, 175 Crick, Bernard, radical political scientist, 3–4, 58 and executive dominance, 65–6 and Oakeshott, 122 and participation, 181, 185 Crosland, C.A.R., Labour politician and intellectual, 118, 119 Crossman, Richard, Labour politician, 195n66, 204n64 Daly, Lawrence, New Left Miners Union official, 76 Defoe, Daniel, 18th century writer, 51 Democracy and Community (William Hampton, 1970), 71–3, Democracy in England (Diana Spearman, 1957), 132–5

Democratic Citizen, The (Dennis Thompson, 1970), 67, 69–70 Direct Action Committee, 48 Disraeli, Benjamin, 19th century Tory Democrat, 130, 159 Dobb, Maurice, Communist intellectual, 16 Dodds, Elliott, Liberal Vice-President, 94, Duff, Peggy, left-wing Labour activist, 48, Duncan, Graeme, radical political theorist, 66 Eden, Sir Anthony, Conservative leader (1955–7): and property-owners’ democracy, 119–20, 126, 147, 160, 176 Eliot, T.S., Anglican poet, 144 European Economic Community (EEC) and Liberals, 110, 111–12, 151, 160–1, 184 and New Left, 54, 55 Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 18th century political economist, 51 Foot, Michael, left-wing Labour politician, later Labour leader (1980–3), 201n11 corporate socialism, 81, 83, 165 France, the May Days, 84–5 Fraser, Michael, Conservative writer, and property-owners’ democracy, 119–20 Freeden, Michael, Oxford historian of ideas, 4, 90, 116 Freeman, Michael, academic, 69 Friedman, Milton, American market economist, 164 Gaitskell, Hugh, Labour leader (1955–63), 82 Galbraith, John Kenneth, American Democrat intellectual, 82–3 Gamble, Andrew, political scientist, 176 Goldman, Peter, CPC Director, 131 Gordon, Thomas, 18th century British commonwealthman, 115

Index 221 Gould, Philip, New Labour adviser, and suburban civic culture, 179 Gramsci, Antonio, Italian Marxist intellectual, 59, 61 Greaves, Bernard, Young Liberal activist, 168–9 Green, E.H.H., Oxford historian, 118 Green, T.H., 19th century Liberal intellectual, 90 Grimond, Jo, Liberal Leader (1956–67), 90: and corporatism, 110, 170 and New Left, 89, 96–7, 172 republicanism as active citizenship, 91–2, 96–8, 110–12, 171–2: through decentralization, 111, 112–13, 171–2; and political economy of unservile state, 99–100, 102–03, 170–2 and Thatcher, 169–70, 171, 172, 176, 188 and Young Liberals, 112, 169, 172 Groom, A.J., writer on defence, 49 Guicciardini, Francesco, Renaissance aristocratic republican historian, 175 Hailsham, Lord (Quintin Hogg), Conservative politican, 115, 118, 131 Hain, Peter, Young Liberal activist, 168–9, 181 Hall, Stuart, New Left sociologist, 20–1, 29, 59, 164, 195n47: and apathy, 27 and capitalism, 54 and class, 36–7, 47 and defence, 48, 50 and New Labour, 185 Hampden, John, 17th century English Parliamentarian, 131 Hampton, William, writer on local government, 71–3 Harrington, James, 17th century republican: and property-owners’ democracy, 8–9, 102, 177, 192n29 Harris, Ralph, IEA intellectual, 158 Hayek, F.A., free market libertarian, 163

and Conservatism, 127 and Powell, 145, 146, 148 and Unservile State Group, 108, 171 Heath, Edward, Conservative leader (1965–75), 140, 145 and Maude, 152 and Powell, 157, 159 Heffer, Eric, left-wing Labour MP, 83 Heffernan, Richard, political scientist, 164 Henry V, King, 149 Hill, Christopher, Communist historian, 16–18, 20, 75, 186 Hilton, Rodney, Communist, then New Left historian, 16 Hobbes, Thomas, 17th century political philosopher, 122, 124, 127, 153 Hobsbawm, Eric, Communist historian, 15, 20 and Communist Historians Group, 16, 17 Hogg, Quintin, see Hailsham, Lord Hoggart, Richard, Leeds sociologist, 46–7 Holland Stuart, Bennite intellectual, 166–7 Holt, Arthur, Liberal politician, 104 Home, Earl of, Conservative leader (1963–5),139, 143, 145, 151 Hughes, John, New Left economist, 56–8, 76, 200n84 Hurd, Douglas, Conservative politician, and active citizens, 179 Hutton, Will, republican political economist, 183–5 Ignatieff, Michael, radical academic, 188 Industrial Charter, The (1947), 118 Industrial democracy: as independence/liberty in Cole, 73–4: and IS 74–5; and IWC 76–80; and Liberals, 89, 100–01, 102–03; and New Left, 52–3; and Pateman, 68–9; and Tribune 73, 81–3, 85–6 Insiders, The (1958), 31–2, 56 and Unservile State Group, 95, 95

222 Index Institute of Community Studies, 35, 47 Institute of Economic Affairs, 116 and Powell, 145, 158 Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC), 75, 76–80, 84, 166 International Socialism (IS), 74–6, 203n45 Ireton, Major-General Henry, New Model Army general, 123 James I, King, 123 Jay, Peter, market socialist, 167, 182 Jefferson, Thomas, 18th century US republican politician and intellectual, 4, 6, 9, 164 and Bolingbroke, 115, 135 and property owners’ democracy, 102, 156, 176, 177, 214n68 Jenkins, Clive, left-wing trade union leader, 52 Jewkes, John, free market economist, 171 Jones, Jack, left-wing IWC and trade union leader, 76, 83–4 Joseph, Sir Keith, Conservative politician, free market libertarian, 172–3 Junius, 18th century radical writer, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 18th century German philosopher, 44 Keynes, John Maynard, and Keynesianism, see political economy Khruschev, Nikita, Soviet Communist leader, 19 Kidron, Michael, IS Trotskyist, 75, 76 Kitching, Gavin, republican critic, 178 Kinnock, Neil, Labour leader (1983–92), 177, 179 Kirk, Russell, US conservative political theorist, 154 Kitson Clark, G.B., Christian academic, 120 Kolakowski, Leszek, Polish dissident, 25 Kramnick, Isaac, US historian, 10 Labour Party, 31, 32, 55, 75 and Bennism, 164–8 and radicals, 80–6

Labour’s Programme, 1973, 165 Law, Richard, Conservative intellectual: and consensus, 164 and Humanism, 120 and Diana Spearman, 131 Lessing, Doris, New Left writer, 20 Letwin, Shirley Robin, Conservative intellectual: and Oakeshott, 122 property owners’ democracy, 176–7 and Thatcher, 173, 175–6 and transmutation of debate within Right, 116–18, 160 Letwin, William, Conservative academic, 176 Lewis, Roy, Conservative writer, 130 Lewis, Russell, CPC Director, 156 Liberal Future, The ( Jo Grimond, 1959), 95–8 Liberal Party, 89–90, 93, 108–09, 110, 112, 168 Liberty in the Modern State (CPC, 1957), 130–1 Lippman, Walter, US liberal, 92 Locke, John, 17th century liberal philosopher, 123, 153, 176 Longbow, 141–3, 159 Lukàcs, George, 20th century Hungarian Marxist, 59, 75 Lukes, Steven, radical sociologist, 41, 182 and New Labour, 185–6 and participation, 66–7, 70 Luxemburg, Rosa, 20th century German libertarian Marxist, 75, 83, Lyttelton, Oliver, 20th century Conservative politican, 131 Machiavelli, Niccolo, Renaissance democratic republican philosopher, 3, 6, 8, 122, 134, 175 MacIntyre, Alasdair, New Left philosopher, 22, 48, 50 and IS, 75 ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, 43–5, 141, 184 and Oakeshott, 128, 154 Mackintosh, John, Labour academic, 71 Macleod, Iain, Conservative politician, 118, 143–4

Index 223 Macmillan, Harold, Conservative leader (1957–63), 53, 139 as demon of Right, 117, 118, 120, 126, 141, 143, 147, 148, 151, 176 Macpherson, C.B., Canadian communitarian political scientist, 178 Madison, James, 18th century US politician, 10 Major, John, Conservative leader (1990–7), 164 Marquand, David, progressive writer, 178 Marr, Andrew, political commentator, 179 Marshall, T.H., sociologist, 63, 90–1 Martell, Edward, free market Liberal, 90 Marx, Karl, 19th century German communist, 24, 25, 184–5 and alienation 28–9, 37 and class, 34, 38–9 and republicanism, 40–2, 78 ‘Masses in Representative Democracy, The’ (Michael Oakeshott, 1961), 135–6 Maude, Angus, Conservative politician, 118–19: markets, 152–4, 173 and New Left, 152, 154 and Powell, 152, 153, 155, 159, 174 republican tradition, 152–3, 155–6: and corruption, 153–5, 160; middle classes and citizenship, 130, 179; debate with Joseph, 173 and Scruton, 174 McKenzie, Robert, political scientist, 47 Meacher, Michael, left-wing, then New Labour politician, 178 Meek, Ronald, Communist economist, 20 ‘Middle-class revolt’, 91, 93, 129, 179 Mikardo, Ian, left-wing Labour politician, 84 Miliband, Ralph, New Left sociologist, 59, 200n84 corporate capitalism, 32–4 Labour Party, 33–4

Mill, John Stuart, 19th century Liberal political philosopher and economist, 66, 68, 92, 96, 98 Miller, David, market socialist, 183 Mills, C. Wright, US New Left sociologist, 33, 34 Milton, John, 17th century republican and poet, 16, 19 Mitterand, François, French Socialist President (1981–95), 177 Mont Pelerin Society, 138 Montesquieu, 18th century French philosophe, 41, 129, 176 Morris, William, 19th century English Romantic and socialist, 21–2 Morris Jones, W.H., political scientist, 65 Morton, A.L., Communist Historians Group, 16, 17 Mount, Ferdinand, Conservative intellectual, 180, 182 Nairn, Tom, NLR writer, 59, 60, 62 New Labour, 1, 162–3, 185 New Left: defining characteristic, 21–2 formation, 19–21: and Communist Historians Group, 18; and ‘middle-class revolt’, 129 and IWC, 76 and Liberals, 92, 98, 99, 100, 102, 105, 111, 113 and Marxism, 22, 28–9, 39–42 and Oakeshott, 124, 128, 154 and radicals, 66 republican tradition, corruption as apathy 27–30: corruption as oligopoly, 31–4; and class, 36–8; independence/liberty as community 35–7, 45–8; independence/liberty as direct action, 48–9; independence/ liberty as industrial democracy, 52–3, 189; and imperialism, 49–51, 54–6; and inconsistent political economy, 52, 54–8; and Right, 114, 130, 150, 152, 154

224 Index New Left Review (NLR), 21, 56, 58–62, 74, 79 New Liberalism, 90–1 and rejection by Grimond, 91–2, 95–8 New Reasoner, The, 20–2, 24, 37, 43, 50–1, 58–9 ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ (Alasdair MacIntyre, 1959), 43–5, 141, 184 Notting Hill race riots (1958), 36, 48 Oakeshott, Michael, Conservative philosopher: and Diana Spearman, 131, 134, 142, 173 and New Left, 128, 128, 154 political philosophy, 121–9, 154 and Powell, 143, 144, 145, 146, 160 and Rationalism, 114–15 republican tradition, neutrality, 121–3, 128–9: dependence as oligopoly, 126–7; dependence and mass democracy, 135–6; community as custom, 114–15, 127–9, 154; independence/ liberty as property owners’ democracy, 122, 124–7, 176, 180, 189 and Scruton, 173–4 and Shirley Letwin, 122, 175 One Nation Group, 118–19, 140, 145 Osborne, Sir Cyril, Conservative politician, and agrarianism, 155 Paine, Tom, 18th century British radical, 10, 123 Paish, F.W., Liberal economist, 104 Paris Commune, 40–2, 197n107 Participation and Democratic Theory (Carole Pateman, 1970), 67–9, Pateman, Carole, radical intellectual, 67–9, 71, 72 Peacock, Alan, Liberal political economist: republican political economy, 106–08, 171 Welfare State, 104–06

Pelloutier, Fernand, 19th century French anarcho-syndicalist, 73 People’s League for the Defence of Freedom, 90 Pettit, Philip, academic, 5 Plant, Raymond, Labour political philosopher, 181 Political economy: jurisprudential model, 52, 98–9 Keynesian model, 55, 78, 91, 98, 103–04, 108, 166, 184 republican model, 99, 100, 103, 106–08, 124–7, 183–5 Potter, Dennis, radical dramatist, and corruption, 195n61 Powell, J. Enoch, Conservative politician: and Diana Spearman, 131, 132, 143, 145 and Hayek, 145, 146, 148 and Joseph Chamberlain, 144 and Maude, 152, 153, 159, 174 and Oakeshott, 143, 144, 145, 146 and One Nation, 118–19, 143 and republican tradition, ambiguity, 144–5, 146, 149–50, 160–1: custom as community, 143–45, 146–7, 155; corruption of the Establishment 149–52, 158–61; corruption as immigrants within the community, 157–61, 186; independence/ liberty as market arena for the nation, 145–9, 150–1, 157; independence/liberty as property-owners’ democracy, 147 and Thatcher, 172 and Ulster Unionism, 173 Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism (PEST), 140 Pribićević, Branco, Yugoslav writer, 74 Private Eye, 139 property-owners’ democracy: and the Liberals, 95, 101–02 and republican concept, 7–9

Index 225 transmutation of meaning within Right, 114, 115–16, 117–18: Skelton/Eden/Macmillan approach, 117, 119–20, 176; and Diana Spearman, 133, 141–2 Oakeshott’s approach, 122, 124–7: and Powell, 147; and the excluded, 186 Radical Alternatives (1962), 109, 204n65 Radical Reform Group, 90 Raison, Timothy, Bow Group Conservative, 140 Reasoner, The, 19–20 Rees, Ioan Bowen, Welsh local government writer, 202n27 Rees-Mogg, William, Sunday Times editor, 145, 146–7 Republicanism: concept defined as ‘the mother principle’ ( Jefferson) 3, 4–7, 23–4: not anti-monarchy, 2, 3, 144; vagueness alleged, 3–4; corruption as dependence 6–7, 8, 11; virtue as independence/liberty, 5, 6, 7–9, 11; independence/ liberty through decentralization, community and the city, 6, 9–10; independence/liberty within boundaries, 7–11 conceptions 4–5, 6: transposition to mass society, 10–12, 43, 51–2; and political economy, 51–2, 56, 58, 99, 100, 103, 106–08, 141–2, 164–5; and social citizenship 64–5; corruption as dependence 26, 27–31, 37, 61, 126–7; corruption as apathy, 27–30, 96–7; corruption as ballot-box democracy, 5–6, 132–3, 135–6; corruption as oligopoly, 11–12, 31–2, 81–2, 126–7; corruption of the Establishment, 29, 33, 139–40, 144–5, 148, 149–52, 160–1, virtue as independence/liberty, 51–2, 124–6; independence/liberty as active

citizenship, 30–1, 48–9; independence/liberty through decentralization, community and the city, 35, 48, 70–3, 111–12; independence/liberty as industrial democracy, 52–3, 67–9, 73–5, 77–80, 81–6; independence/liberty as propertyownership, 7–9; independence/ liberty within boundaries, 48–51, 157–61, 185–6; and imperialism, 8, 55–6; aliens and propertyless as those excluded from independence/liberty, 8, 157–61, 186–8; and crisis of 1970s, 164–5; new conception, 188–90 relations to Marxism, 17–18, 24–6, 40–2, 60–2, 78: to market libertarians, 120–1; to Right, 114–15, 117–18; Oakeshott’s ambiguity, 121–3, 124–6, 128–9, 176, 180, 189; Powell’s ambiguity, 144–5, 146, 149–50, 160–1; to New Labour, 163–4 Riesman, David, US sociologist, 28 Robbins, Caroline, academic, 5 Robbins, Lionel, free market economist, 131, 145 Roberts, Ernie, left-wing trade unionist and Labour MP, 76 Robson, W.W., local government writer, 70–1, 90–1 Rodgers, Daniel, US academic, 3–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18th century French philosophe, 4, 5, 6, 17, 41, 68, 73, 79, 166–7 Russell, Bertrand, British philosopher and peace activist, 77 Salisbury, Lord, 19th century Conservative politician, 123 Salisbury Review, 173 Samuel, Raphael, New Left historian, 16, 20, 21 active democracy 30: and British citizenship, 186 Sandel, Michael, US academic, 5

226 Index Sartre, Jean-Paul, French existentialist philosopher, 22, 59 Saville, John, Communist, then New Left, historian 16, 19–20 Scanlon, Hugh, left-wing IWC and trade union leader, 76 and corporatism, 79 and Labour, 83–4, Scarfe, Gerald, cartoonist, 139 Scruton, Roger, Conservative intellectual; and Diana Spearman, 173, 174 republican tradition, 174–5: corruption as mass democracy, 174; independence/liberty as agrarianism, 153 Sedgwick, Peter, IS libertarian Marxist, 31, 75, 198n28 Seear, Nancy, Liberal activist, 100 Seyd, Patrick, political scientist, 178 Selbourne, David, ex-Ruskin College academic, 187–8 ‘Sense of Classlessness, A’ (Stuart Hall, 1958), 36–7, 47 Shakespeare, William, dramatist, 19, 25 Sherman, Alfred, Thatcher adviser, 116 Shonfield, Andrew, political economist, 54 Shop stewards, 74, 79–80, 135 Sidney, Algernon, 17th century republican martyr, 6, 123, 131 Silver, Alan, political scientist, 47 Skelton, Noel, 20th century Conservative politician, 117, 120, 176 Skinner, Quentin, Cambridge historian of ideas, 7 Smith, Adam, Classical economist, 52, 98, 153–4, Smith, Sir Thomas, 16th century writer, 3 Socialist Charter, The (1968), 85–6 Socialist Humanism and inconsistent economic theory 51–2, 56–8 as morality, 16, 24–7, 35, 39–40, 43–5

Socialist Wages Plan, A (Ken Alexander and John Hughes, 1959), 56–8, 80–1 Spearman, Diana, Conservative intellectual: and Oakeshott, 131, 134, 142, 145 and Powell, 131, 132, 143, 145, 159, 213n26 republican tradition, corruption as decline of participation, 133–4, 137: corruption as mass democracy 131, 132–5, 144; independence liberty through the market, 138, 141, 142–3; independence liberty as agrarianism, 155–6; political economy, 141–2, 176 Salisbury Review, 173 Spectator, The, 99, 117, 152 Stalin, Joseph, Soviet Communist leader, 17, 18, 19 Steele, Joseph, 18th century editor of The Spectator, 99 Sunday Times, 145 Sunday Telegraph, 159–60 Swift, Jonathan, 18th century Country Tory, 51 Swingler, Steven, left-wing Labour MP, 81 Swinton Journal, 156 Suez crisis, 1956, 20 Szamuely, Tibor, Conservative intellectual, 156 Taylor, A. J.P., radical historian, and Diana Spearman, 135 Taylor, Charles, New Left philosopher, 20, 59, 67: and Maude, 154 republican tradition, corruption as apathy, 28–9: independence/ liberty as active community, 35–6, 48 Socialist Humanism and Marx, 39–42 Taylor, John, of Caroline, US republican writer, 4 Thatcher, Margaret, Conservative leader (1975–90), 2, 145, 163, 164 and Grimond, 169–70, 171, 172 and Oakeshott, 122

Index 227 on participation, 116: and active citizens, 179; and the Establishment, 189 and Powell, 172, 186 and Thatcherism, 116–18, 177 Thompson, Dennis, radical sociologist, 67, 69–70, 71, 72 Thompson, E.P., Communist, then New Left historian, 16, 22–3 and defence, 48, 50 and IS, 76 and IWC, 76 The New Reasoner, 20, 59 and Perry Anderson, 59, 60–2 The Reasoner, 19–20 Republican tradition, corruption as ‘The Great Apathy’, 27–8, 60–1: and irrelevance of economic theory, 58; independence/liberty through class struggle 37–40, 45–6, 60–1 Socialist Humanism, 24–7, 39–40, 186 Thomson, George, 16 Thorpe, Jeremy, Liberal leader (1967–76), 112 Tocqueville, Alexis de, French writer on democracy, 10 Topham, Tony, IWC activist, 76, 167 Torr, Dona, Communist historian, 17, 18 Trenchard, John, 18th century British Commonwealthman, 115 Trewe Law of a Free Monarchy ( James I), 123 Tribune, 80 and May Days, 85 post-1959 debate, 81–3 The Socialist Charter, 85–6 Trotskyism, 20, 53–4, 75, 77, 203n45 Universities and Left Review (ULR), 20–2, 24, 58–9 and Cold War, 49–50 corporatism, 31–2, 54, 56–8 republican tradition, corruption as alienation and apathy, 26–7, 31–2: independence/liberty as community, 35–8; independence/liberty as industrial democracy 53, 166

Unservile State, The (George Watson ed., 1957), 94–5, 98, 100 Unservile State Group, 94–5, 98, 100, 107–08, 180, 188 and erosion of republican politics, 109 Utley, T.E., Conservative intellectual: and Burke, 130 corporatism, 140 and Powell, 143, 159–60, 173 Verba, S., US sociologist, 68 Victory for Socialism (VFS), 81, 82, 86 Vincent, John, Liberal historian, 112 Voice of the Unions, 76 Wade, Donald, Liberal politician, 100–02 Wagner, Adolph, 19th century German economist, 106 Wainwright, Hilary, British radical activist, 178 Walpole, Sir Robert, 18th century Whig politician, 115, 139 Walters, Alan, Thatcher adviser, 116 Watson, George, Unservile State Liberal, 94 Week, The, 77 ‘The Welfare Society’ (Alan Peacock, 1960), 104–5 Welfare State: and Diana Spearman, 133, and Grimond, 96–7 and Oakeshott, 126 and Peacock, 104–06 Wiles, Peter, Unservile State Group writer, 95, 109 Willetts, David, Conservative politician, 179, 180 Williams, Raymond, New Left writer, 47 corruption, 29–30 Willmot, Peter, British sociologist, 35 Wilson, Colin, British existentialist writer, 22 Wilson, Harold, Labour leader (1963–76), 57, 66–7, 79, 109, 140, 168 Wiseman, Jack, British economist, 106

228 Index Wolin, Sheldon, US communitarian political theorist, 41 ‘fugitive democracy’, 189 Wood, John, Conservative intellectual, 131 Worsley, Peter, New Left activist, 48 Wright, Tony, Labour MP, 181–2

Young Liberals: and Grimond, 112, 169, 172 republican tradition, 168–9 Young, Michael, British sociologist, 35 Zhdanov, Andrei, Soviet ‘scientist’, 17

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