Political Ideas in Modern Britain

In and After the Twentieth Century

Rodney Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415161664
• eBook ISBN: 9781134910663
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The rise of the New Right and the collapse of state communism in 1989 has fundamentally changed political thinking in the late twentieth century. Rodney Barker has revised and extended his classic text - Political Ideas in Modern Britain - in the light of these changes. His accessible account of political thinking in Britain since the 1880s now includes detailed analysis of:
* the demise of traditional conservatism and socialism
* the rise and decline of the New Right
* the growth of feminism, liberalism and pluralism
Political Ideas in Modern Britain charts the changing intellectual landscape of political thinking, illustrating how contemporary political thought is both rooted in tradition and a radical transformation of it. Whether the future is liberal, communitarian, pluralist, or simply uncertain, this is an essential guide for students of British politics.
Rodney Barker is Senior Lecturer in Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

1 Two introductions

INTRODUCTION 1996

Less than a year after the publication of the first edition of this book, a Conservative government under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher took office. Mrs Thatcher was to remain premier and party leader for another eleven years, and the government was to survive for a further eighteen. During that time not only did a Conservative Party converted to what was swiftly labelled ‘Thatcherism’ make major changes to the structure of government and the provision of public services, but the broad network of thinking which had already been termed the ‘New Right’ enjoyed increasingly substantial intellectual influence. Those years had a dramatic effect on political thinking in Britain, even more so than did the careers of similarly ‘New Right’ governments and the advance of New Right ideas in the United States under Ronald Reagan, in France under Jacques Chirac, or in what was still then West Germany under Helmut Kohl. But it was not the New Right alone which transformed the agenda. The 1980s came to a close with the even more dramatic abdication of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe in the 1989 revolutions, and the replacement of managerial communist despotism with a variety of regimes mixing democracy, capitalism, democratic socialism, and nationalist authoritarianism.

Both domestically and internationally the reference points had been moved out of all recognition, so that the old maps no longer referred to any recognizable terrain. The framework of politics was shaken twice, and the course of political thinking reflects on and shapes that fact. One account describes our contemporary location as post-modernism. The old universals of human nature, rights and needs have been replaced by a series of historically specific or contingent values, identities and conventions. Postmodernism thus becomes a theory to explain why no single theory will do any more, and why the best we can do is expect variety, change and uncertainty. Another way of describing where we now are and how we have got there is to speak, as Eric Hobsbawm has done, of a ‘short twentieth century’ which came to a close around 1989. If Hobsbawm’s periodization is accepted, we are now not nearing the end of an era, but moving forwards from the start of one (Hobsbawm 1994). The chronological millennium is still to come but, in terms of a calendar shaped by significant events and historical change, we are already at the beginning of a new century, rather than at the end of an old one.

Whichever view is taken—although they are not incompatible with each other—that we face either an unpredictable twenty-first century or an equally unpredictable postmodernity, everything that defined the previous era, not just in Britain but at the very least in the whole of the western/northern/industrial world, has changed. The world of socialism and conservatism has come to an end, and new concepts and titles, different labels, different explanatory patterns are needed for new times. Because the things we consider to be important now will shape the accounts we give, the categories inherited from the past are not so much incorrect for understanding the fluid and transitional present, as simply less helpful. The old categories no longer fit, or rather they may not be the categories which are most illuminating for present, as opposed to past, concerns. Much of the discussion of Hobsbawm’s periodization has thus been not a matter of criticizing its accuracy or cogency, or his use of evidence, but simply of proposing alternative perspectives which throw different events into both light and shade (Therborn 1995; Mann 1995; Nairn 1995). None of this is to say that an account of political thinking or of any other activity can only be and should only be a working out of contemporary intellectual concerns. There is a real task in recovering the differences between the thought of the present investigator and the past, however recently past, object of her account, but at the same time the constraining, and enabling structure within which the observer operates can never be escaped. There is a dialogue between the two, and the shifting of analytical and descriptive perspectives does not simply subordinate data to the present.

But whatever the uncertainties about the application of a new vocabulary to the past, it is clearly necessary to develop new terms, or at least to recover and refurbish some underused old terms, for the present and future. The choice of left and right as, albeit vague, more serviceable terms than conservative, liberal, and socialist is a tentative attempt to refurbish old terms without being didactic in either an empirical or theoretical sense about either of them.

But the implications for the understanding of political thought before the end of the short twentieth century, or before the emergence of postmodernity, cannot be avoided. Old categories may not be the best for understanding even old events. When the intellectual and political landscape is transformed, as it has been since the beginning of the 1980s, it is not only the politics that follow that have to be written about in a new way: the politics that preceded the upheavals of the 1980s must themselves be reassessed. There is a clear relationship between the declining importance accorded to class in the analysis of contemporary politics at the close of the short twentieth century, and the usefulness accorded to it as a conceptual category by historians. At a time when ethnic, religious and national identity are increasingly prominent, an account of the earlier twentieth century which gave priority to class is being rewritten. An active debate is now going on over the relative appropriateness of class and political aspirations as vantage points for giving an account of the popular politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of the arguments over social and economic, and political, reform and preservation (Joyce 1994; Biagini and Reid 1991; Belchem 1996; Barrow and Bullock 1996). This does not mean that history has to be reworked with the benefit of hindsight, or in the light of the ideas that eventually ‘won’. Quite apart from anything else, ‘eventually’ is a constantly moving vantage point. It is rather a matter of different arguments seeming important or interesting from different perspectives, which is in part a matter of looking for the roots of the present, but also simply of creating a different account of the past.

One aspect of the change that has taken place in political thinking in Britain lies not in the aspirations of political thinkers, but in their aversions. Political argument, like other forms of politics, is shaped in part by the enemies it identifies for itself just as much as by the friends with which it allies itself. The 1990s saw the disappearance of traditional enemies, and a search for new ones. The polarities of the Cold War, of communist totalitarianism or western imperialism, of collective economic tyranny or market exploitation, of the denial of politics or their manipulation under the threat of nuclear war, all these faded away with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European satellite states, and the achievement of a settlement in the nuclear arms race. E.P.Thompson observed that after 1989 ‘Western commentators are bemoaning the loss of a convenient enemy’ (Thompson 1990:142). The irony of the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe was that at the very moment at which they seemed to vindicate the analyses of New Right economics, they deprived the right of its traditional, defining antagonist. We knew who the old enemies were. It is still far from clear who the new ones are or will be, though there are many candidates.

But whilst the absence of clear enemies for either the right or the left has meant that political thinking remains more fluid and more unpredictable than over the previous hundred years, for the ‘short twentieth century’ running from around 1917 to around 1989, the enemies do not necessarily have to be re-written, even if they have now departed. An observer beginning her account with the year 1990 and with no knowledge of what had gone before, and unfamiliar with the words ‘socialism’ and ‘conservatism’, would not find it necessary to invent them, nor would she be likely to construct images of socialism and capitalism with which to arrange or represent the contemporary political debate. As soon as the preceding period is examined, however, both those two giants are very evidently present both as protagonists and as demons.

But there is more to the change at the beginning of the new ‘long century’ than a shift of dramatis personae. The very nature of the drama and its location have changed. Religion and community, in both their benign and malevolent forms, have reasserted themselves. And as they have taken up new positions in the present, so too have they assumed growing importance in the lenses through which we look at our constructed narrative of the past (Collini 1991; Nicholls 1989, 1994; Wolffe 1994). The old protagonists are not thereby dismissed, but they are joined by others. The politics of identity, of setting the context within which politics takes place, have become as important as the politics of detail, of arguing within a demarcated political, cultural space.

The attention which Political Ideas in Modern Britain received included various criticisms, including some lengthy ones from various standpoints within Marxism (Peregudov 1980). At the time, the Marxist criticisms seemed the least weighty, and the least troublesome to deal with. The close cousin of this view, that political expression is mere ‘rhetoric’ which should not be taken seriously, was neatly hit on the head within a year of the book’s publication by Stefan Collini who, in his study of L.T.Hobhouse, commented that

It is one mark of the cynic that he sees other people’s expressions of their principles as a kind of smokescreen for their putative ‘real interests’, but even were he always correct it would not follow that the study of such statements was devoid of explanatory power. Even the most disingenuous legitimation involves an appeal to existing characterisations.

(Collini 1979:10)

A different view arises when the disagreements are considered from the vantage of the 1990s. The Marxist account which dismissed the study of ideas as merely examining the froth on the pudding of capitalism can now be seen as the simplified and distorted representative of a wider body of thinking for which the allocation of economic powers and resources, and the government and politics of that dimension of human life, was indeed the principal theme of politics. Most writers were not Marxists. But most, whether conservatives, liberals or socialists, worked within a perspective to which Marx and Marxism had been major contributors.

From a variety of directions, though principally from a scepticism about political thought very loosely and very distantly and very indirectly derived from Marxism, the relevance of political thought was called into question. The first edition set on one side the general question of the nature of political thinking, its relation to other aspects of political life, the relation between ‘thought’ and ‘action’, or the nature of ideology. The ascendancy of the New Right has demanded that new attention be given to this question. Whatever qualifications there may be about the effect of New Right campaigns, there is a sound prima facie case for accepting that ideas in politics changed other aspects of political life, that laws were passed, policies pursued, and institutions changed, transformed, introduced or abolished as the result of a vigorous exercise in political thinking and political argument.

The relative weight of thought and action has been discussed both amongst those who have studied the organized campaigns of think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, and amongst those seeking to give an adequate account of aspects of political thinking such as feminism. There has been renewed interest in the broader intellectual penumbra within which government and politics operates. Some, such as Michael Freeden, discussing the New Liberalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, make the fairly modest claim that ‘at the very least, the mental climate of an age defines and constrains the options open to the politician’ (Freeden 1978:248–9). Others, such as Rosalind Delmar, have claimed a little more in arguing that an incomplete account is given of feminism if the description concentrates on movements and action, and ignores the shaping role of theory, and that it is political thinking, rather than movements and campaigns, which provide and illuminate political continuities (Delmar 1986:23–4, 13–18). But it is possible, and beneficial, to pursue the argument further, and to insist that political thinking is itself a major form, perhaps the major form, of political activity, that politics ‘is, amongst other things, an essentially linguistic activity’ (Sparkes 1994:1).

Precisely because political thinking is a major part of politics, political ideas are not found in isolation, but are associated with institutions and organizations. Ideas may cluster around parties (R.Barker 1994), but they do not follow the same paths as those pursued by party politicians. Not only are the issues which are of importance to parliamentary politicians frequently different in emphasis from those which concern voters and citizens, but the issues around which political thought takes place can equally be partly or entirely removed from those to which organized parties give priority. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the two questions of national economic management and relations with Europe frequently preoccupied and divided parties. They did not have the same place in political thinking. Nor is any relationship between party fortunes and political thinking guaranteed. The Social Democratic Party appeared to be changing the party landscape in the early 1980s; it made no similar impact, even briefly, on political thinking.

The place of political thinking in the activities of political parties is only one area where that part of politics which sets out and argues for a case is of central importance. All forms of politics involve political thought, and I have elsewhere (R.Barker 1996a) suggested that this reciprocal relationship—the ‘Constantine relationship’—lies close to the heart of politics. But though it is impossible to write an account of one part of politics without touching on others, and though I have attempted in the present book to locate political thinking wherever possible in relation to other aspects of political life, the emphasis in the following pages is nonetheless principally on political thinking per se, and particularly on its written form.

The first edition of this book was written in one ‘century’; the second was written in the next. Writing in 1996 there are good reasons for not adding to or revising an existing book, but for writing a new and different one. At the very least, this means that any revision will now be with such benefits as hindsight brings. A framework constructed around attitudes towards the expanding state is less adequate to encompass the political thinking of the short twentieth-century’s end, and thence in retrospect may seem to have limitations for the preceding period as well. Ideas which seemed interesting but marginal at the earlier date may appear in retrospect to have been the recessive themes which, in the last decade of the chronological century, have acquired an enhanced importance as contributors to new, post-twentieth-century political thinking. The word ‘theme’ is more expressive of what is involved here than other familiar terms such as ‘ideology’, ‘concept’, or ‘argument’. Ideology suggests either some-thing normatively and descriptively comprehensive, or suspectly instrumental. ‘Concept’ suggests something precise, even academic, but lacking the penumbra of politics, rhetoric, policy, and the aversions and aspirations which characterizes the thinking described in this book. ‘Argument’ comes closest, and is frequently used. ‘Themes’ does best of all, however, for it suggests a cohering or unifying concern, form of argument, or intellectual predilection whose character is historical rather than logical, and which has a coherence which can be rhetorical or aesthetic, as much as logical. The identification of some of these themes as ‘recessive’ is a borrowing, for the purposes of analogy, from biology, where a gene may pass from grandparents to grandchildren via the intermediate generation in whom it has no great consequences, where it is recessive. In the same manner themes in political thinking can be dormant, subordinate, or recessive, yet become powerful components of the thinking of later generations.

Different accounts need to be given of the present, and it is necessary to avoid restricting understanding by the employment of images and categories which were developed to describe earlier, different situations. At the same time the roots of present concerns may be seen for the first time or in a new light by applying new accounts to the past. Yet if this is done in a wholesale manner, the very particularity of the past, and hence of the present, will be dissolved in an inappropriately universalized paradigm. The recessive genes of the present can be discerned in our ancestors. But they were recessive, and only now do they contribute to our characters. So change occurs by paradigmatic shifts, but not by magical transformations. The ingredients of the new, but not its outcomes, are already there in the old. The problem is a familiar one. On the one hand an account must differ sufficiently from the available accounts which people give, or gave, of their situation, beliefs, intentions and activities to be illuminating and not simply repetitious. On the other it must stand in sufficiently close relation to the culture of which it seeks to give an account to be comprehensibly about that culture, and not some alien culture of the writer’s fancy.

One further issue, which arose in connection with Political Ideas in Modern Britain and is of even greater relevance today, is the question of how typical is the tradition of argument discussed in this book, how particularly ‘British’? W.H.Greenleaf, in his monumental The British Political Tradition (1983a and b) has suggested that the character of British politics as a tension between libertarianism and collectivism is not a ‘phenomenon of merely domestic occurrence but of European and even world-wide scope; any modern state is to be understood as a more or less unresolved tension between two irreconcilable dispositions of this sort’ (Greenleaf 1983a:15). Certainly the discussion about the length and character of the twentieth century, the fate and future of the working class, the role of gender divisions and of women, of intellectuals and students, of religious and national identity, of information, technology, and information technology, has been conducted with global reference, even when it reflected narrower cultural experiences, whilst the discussion of global politics has incorporated a debate over the relative position of the west, of Europe, and of the industrial north, all of which have provided a setting for more particularly British reflections. Political thought may not have become global, but it had certainly become more international. But however the account is qualified, it is still about the self conceptualization of western Europe, north America, the industrial first world. Self-conception involves the contrast of a created self with opposites, and what has changed at the beginning of the long twenty-first century is the disappearance of well-established opposites, and the fluid possibility of a variety of antagonist identities against which to create ourselves. God may not be dead, but Satan is.

Amongst the substantial amount of scholarly writing that has occurred since the publication of Political Ideas in Modern Britain,there are several questions which require recognition or response in the present book, and others which do not. Some new work increases knowledge and understanding, without significantly changing interpretation. I have in some small degree included references to such work in the text, but not in a way that requires any major alteration of what I have previously written. Other work, which puts f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Two introductions
• 2 Friends of the modern state
• 3 Pleas for liberty
• 4 Neither state nor individual: the defence of communal and group politics
• 5 The pale of the constitution: the idea of citizenship
• 6 Accommodations to the modern state: political ideas in the second quarter of the twentieth century
• 7 Arrivals and departures: political ideas in the third quarter of the twentieth century
• 8 The death of conservatism and the dispersal of liberalism
• 9 The death of socialism and the rise of the left
• 10 Definitions and doormats: the rise of feminism
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index