Amitai Etzioni RIP

Today I want to celebrate the life of one of the most interesting sociologists of the modern age - Amitai Etzioni may have lived to the grand old age of 94 but I was still sad to learn of his death this May. I vividly remember reading his “Social Problems” at University in the early 1960s and being deeply impressed with his 3-fold classification of ideologies; he was one of the architects of Bliar’s “Third Way”; and, on his 90^th birthday, was still convening civil dialogues on the variety of subjects for which he was famous but, generally, had to do with his lifelong search for the good life.

But it was German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck who brilliantly caught the man in this tribute

I first met Etzioni in the fall of 1972. Having just earned my Diploma in sociology at the University of Frankfurt, I was lucky to have been offered a quite generous scholarship that allowed me to study for two years at an American university of my choice, including travel to New York by one of the two remaining ocean liners, the QEII. For me, this was a welcome opportunity to leave behind the intellectual and political confusions of Frankfurt at the time, where I felt hard-pressed to choose between an academic and a political career. As to where in the United States I wanted to study, I didn’t need to think long. Sociology in Frankfurt was then divided between the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics, the so-called “Frankfurt School” being housed in the former. Experience had convinced me that if I wanted to make a contribution to the practical pursuit of democratic socialism – which I definitely did want – “critical theory”, as it called itself, was not enough. So I sometimes took classes in the other, less esoteric branch of sociology, among them a seminar held by the late Wolfgang Zapf that was devoted entirely to Etzioni’s book of 1968, “The Active Society”. That book, scoffed at by critical theorists who at the time were becoming enamored with a normative version of structural functionalism, was a revelation to me. Since with the scholarship I had the means to do what I wanted, I decided to indulge myself and go to Columbia to study with Amitai Etzioni.

Today “The Active Society” is almost forgotten. It never really registered with the sociological mainstream, for which it was too long, too complex, too much political science, too political I presume. To me, it is to this day one of the great books of the sociological tradition, perhaps even its culmination: a heroic attempt to give Parsonian functionalism, the dominant macro-sociological paradigm of the time, an activist twist – conceiving societies as self-governing rather than self-stabilizing, as collective actors rather than collective entities, actively self-transforming rather than passively being kept in a preestablished equilibrium by nature-like mechanisms of social integration. The book, in short, undertakes to explore how a human society should and must be organized to be able democratically to take charge of its future – no longer to be subject to sociological laws which it has no choice but to trust, but rather to discover and discuss alternative futures for itself, choose between them, and make real what it has chosen.

If this was close to themes in the Marxian tradition – the end of prehistory and the beginning of history – Etzioni didn’t really care, and he may not have been aware of it. Capitalism appears in the book’s index only once, pointing to a passage where it is claimed no longer to be a problem as Keynes had devised the tools to discipline it. All that was now required was for society to learn how to deploy those tools to make capitalism serve the collectively determined collective interests of society. The late 1960s when the book was written were the heyday of postwar democratic capitalism, and it was not only Etzioni who was convinced that the issue was no longer to fight capital but to build an effective democracy able to put it to good use. It was in the crises of the 1970s that the political optimism of the Golden Years vanished, and with it the hope for a politicized social theory offering “guidance” – one of Etzioni’s key terms – for a democratic politics in a democratized society.

Soon I found myself hired as research assistant, to work with him on the second edition of his first major book “A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations”, published in 1961, a standard text at the time in the sociology of organizations. I never learned more on the craft and art of doing sociology than in those twelve months or so.

For those who want to know more about the man, this is an excellent 90 page piece which does full justice to him.

And this 2017 retrospective gives a very useful flavour of the breadth of his writing

In the 1990s he became famous for his commitment to communitarianism

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS?

Faithful readers know of my fascination with CHANGE and my relatively newfound interest in global warming. The two came together yesterday with my discovery of a new book “Forgiving Humanity – how the most innovative species became the most dangerous” by Peter Russell (2023) who has gone so far as to give us a video discussion between himself and his AI clone (!!) about the book. Because its so new, I'm not yet able to download it (which I can do for more than half the books which interest me). 

Instead I've put a link in the title which accesses an article which appears as a 

chapter in the book which is one of the best analyses of CHANGE I've ever 

come across – so good that I've just added it to the latest version of my (short)

 Annotated Bibliography of Change which offers notes on some 100 books on the 

subject. It's based on the concept of exponential change/growth which the 

“Blindspot” article explains 

Although we are all well aware of the accelerating pace of change in our own lives, we find it difficult to think in exponential terms. You may have heard the story of the king who was asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the second, four on the third, doubling each time till the 64th square would have how many grains? A mind-boggling 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, about 45 trillion tons, a heap as high as Mount Everest—far more than most people intuitively expect

If the whole of Earth's history were collapsed into one year, then human beings appeared in the last fifteen minutes, civilization thirty seconds ago, and the Information Revolution in the last half second.

A crisis of acceleration

The crisis we are facing is, in essence, a crisis of acceleration. Clearly the human population explosion is the result of exponential-like growth. Thankfully, it is beginning to tail off, nevertheless the implications for food, water, housing, geo-politics, and other issues are major and growing. Oil reserves are running out because we are now consuming it a million times faster than it was created. Similarly with many other resources whose supply is becoming critical—platinum, copper, zinc, nickel, and phosphorus, all of which are crucial for contemporary technology—will have run out, or be very limited, within a few decades. Yet our demand for them continues to grow, especially with the rapidly growing needs of developing countries. On the other side of the equation, rapid growth in industrialization has led to an accelerating growth in the release of pollutants into the air, soil and sea. And they are being released thousands, or in some cases millions, of times faster than the planet can break them down and absorb them. Climate change, for instance stems from our accelerating consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying increased emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Normally the CO2 is absorbed by plants and the oceans, but we are now producing it hundreds of times faster than the these systems can handle.

We known about all this for some 40 years - ”Limits to Growth” of course came in 1972 but people needed some time to get their head around the message of that book but the definitive warning was contained in Overshoot – the ecological basis of revolutionary change by William Catton in 1982 which cropped up in this useful recent video discussion

UPDATE; Still on global warming, this is an interesting discussion on the excellent site "Plant Critical" which interviews thinkers about the issue 

Does the Internet sustain or stifle democracy?

In one corner we have Jeff Jarvis, the optimist – in the other Efgeni Morozov, more of a pessimist although this article of his disputes the very meaning of the terms used in the debate

I'm currently reading Jarvis' recently published The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the internet (2023) of which you can get a very good sense in this interview which gives a marvellous timeline of the history of print. Hopefully these excerpts from the early part of the book will persuade you that it is one of these rare books which throws new light on an issue -

Halfway through the fifteenth century came Johannes Gutenberg with his Bible and the development of movable type. With the printed book, knowledge came to be bound in covers, with a beginning and an end. Text evolved to become fixed, unchangeable, permanent. Eventually, texts were identical, consistent, no longer subject to the idiosyncratic edits, amendments, whims, and errors of scribes. That is how print gained trust. Society gravitated from collective credibility to that of the certified expert, honoring the graduate, the professor, the published writer. Print gave birth to the author as authority. Institutions were challenged: popes and princes. And institutions were reborn: new ideas of publishing, religion, education, childhood, the public, and the nation emerged. It took more than two centuries, but the industry found its economic foundation with the enactment of copyright law in England in 1710. Then writing, text, and creativity were seen as products and property: a commodity we call content. Content is that which fills the container, the book. Society no longer conversed so much as consumed.

Now comes the internet and the closing of the Parenthesis. Today, as the world moves past the Gutenberg era, knowledge is again passed along freely, link by link, click by click, remixed and remade along the way. The value of authorship and ownership of content is diminished—thus we find ourselves in rancorous legal and political battles over the enforcement of copyright.

As the book proceeded, I must confess that I found its historical treatment of the progress of the book from its birth in the 15^th century a bit too detailed for my taste.

Gutenberg was the early industrialist who brought scale, speed, and standardization—an assembly line—to craftsmanship. He was the early entrepreneur who sought risk capital from his partner, Johann Fust, to pay for the paper, metal, labor, experimentation, and space needed to produce books before customers could buy them. Printing is often called a catalyst of capitalism. In Benedict Anderson’s theory of print-capitalism, the market for vernacular publishing standardized dialects as languages, which helped draw the boundaries and concepts of the nation and nationalism. (“A dialect,” in Umberto Eco’s definition, “is a language without an army and navy.”

Thus one of the most momentous decisions made by the first bestselling author, Martin Luther, was to publish in German rather than Latin, gathering a public around his ideas and standardizing the language. The printing of indulgences, starting in Gutenberg’s shop, provoked Luther to wage his Reformation, and print was the weapon he wielded to challenge the authority of the Church. The book seeded new methods in research and science as scholars no longer needed to travel to information; it could travel to them, eventually providing distant minds the same information around which they could compete and collaborate to advance knowledge. Printing— with the important and coincident development of postal networks—opened the way for a culture of news, information, and debate that, according to Jürgen Habermas, fostered the public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of eighteenth-century England and Europe. Others say publics emerged earlier and elsewhere, but print played a role in any case.

Print stoked the engines of bureaucracies in the modern state with forms, records, laws, proclamations, and other ephemeral documentation and data collection. The book revolutionized education—allowing students to read themselves rather than be read to—thus, it is said, transforming our idea of childhood. And reading, once it became silent and solitary, drew us into ourselves, altering our interaction with others and our view of our world.

The history of printing is a history of power. The story of print is one of control, of attempts to manage the tool and fence in the thoughts it conveyed, to restrict who may speak and what they may say through gatekeepers, markets, edicts, laws, and norms. And so the opportunity facing us now is to use our new tools to redress that crime and pay attention and respect to the people too long not heard. Or will incumbent institutions instead succeed in protecting their past, dismissing those the powerful see as rivals, invoking fear and panic, and passing laws—as princes and popes did a half a millennium ago—to restrict who may use these new tools and what they may say and do with them? That is our choice as we decide what the net should be and how we should use it: to what end?

At this point, the language becomes a bit excessive for me -

Again, what is the net? Thus far, I see it as a mechanism of connection. It connects people with information, people with people, information with information, and machines with machines. What is different about that? This, I think: Everyone can be connected. One-to-many is replaced by any-to-any and any-to-many. The mass is dead. Communities and movements rise (and with them sometimes conspiracies and insurrections).

Everyone will be able to speak. When and if connection is universal, speaking need no longer be a mark of privilege, which is just what upsets those who held the privilege. Voices too long not heard in mass media now can speak by new means, raising fresh opportunities and issues. Who will listen? Will all this talk remain cacophony or can it be productive discourse?

And who can really believe that conversation is being reinvented???

Today we think the internet is a story of technology. That is why, in the coming chapters, I will explore the story of print as a technology: its invention, spread, development, exploitation, and control. Yet the real story of print is not about the machines but instead about what people could do with them, what they could invent—from fiction to essays, encyclopedias to dictionaries, newspapers to magazines, bureaucracy to propaganda.

Fundamentally, this is the story of society relearning how to hold a conversation with itself. The early days of print were conversational in nature: Martin Luther in disputatious dialogue with the Church in pamphlets and books; Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus conversing with Sir Thomas More via the Adages and Utopia ; Montaigne deciding whether he was holding a conversation with himself, his friends, or the world in his Essays ; John Milton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Wilkes defending the importance of public debate in their publications—all carrying on the grand traditions of Plato, Socrates, and Cicero in valuing conversation as a tool of friendship, of learning, and ultimately of democracy. The public conversation was drowned out as media became top-down, one-way, one-size-fits-all. That, too, is a story of technology: of steam-powered machines bringing scale to printing to create the mass market, mass media, mass culture, mass politics, and the idea of the mass. For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions? The internet finally allows individuals to speak and communities of their own definitions to assemble and act, killing the mass at last. I celebrate the closing of the Mass Parenthesis. As for Gutenberg’s Parenthesis, I do not cheer its end. Instead, I believe this is the moment to honor its existence and all it has brought us, and to learn from it as we enter a next age.

Efgeni Morozov comes from a younger generation and has a fascinating background – with a couple of books already to his credit the first of which takes a very different view - viz The Net Delusion – the dark side of the internet (2011). The other is “To Save Everything, click here – the folly of technological solutionism” (2015), the subtitle giving the show away.

WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/

ON BIAS

There is a lot of talk in the UK of bias in reporting – whether it's the BBC or simple journalism. The reality is that it's very difficult to find examples of left-wing reporting – although the last post suggested we need to be cautious about this left-right classification, So I've attempted one of my famous TABLES which leads me to conclude that left-wing writing is very much a minority pursuit. But because the blogger site makes a mess of my tables I've attached the table as a pdf file - although I seem somehow to have succeeded in putting it below

People will note that I've drawn my net widely and included some bloggers – as well as someone no longer with us but whose ideas live on. The more names I added to the list, the more difficult it became to apply a suitable label about their “political leaning”

Some years ago I did an even more exhaustive list of good “journalistic” writers which readers may find interesting. It includes a fair number of writers who (in Hamlet's famous phrase) have shuffled off this mortal coil eg Arthur Koestler

Journalists have a reputation for digging up the dirt on people and institutions but John Harris (who figures in the latest table) is unusual in having started a series which celebrates the people doing good work in their UK communities

Writers I respect

	Normal source	Political leaning	Examples and COMMENT
Anthony Barnett	Open Democracy	liberal	A founder of “Open Democracy” and a writer famous for his long essays eg Out of the Belly of Hell (2020) but has also published several books on constitutional issues and on Brexit
Grace Blakely	Tribune	Harder left	Her many contributions can be read at the link at the title of the journal
Diana Coyle	Her blog and academia	liberal	British economist. Author of 9 books eg “Cogs and Monsters”
Matt Flinders	academia	liberal	British political scientist eg Flinders on democracy and a marvellous collection of his blogs in “What Kind of Democracy is this?” See also “Defending Politics”
David Graeber	Academia and activist	anarchist	Sadly David is no longer with us – here is my tribute
John Michael Greer	Current and previous blog	sceptic	One of the most stimulating US writers about the decline of industrial society eg “After Oil” and “The Ecotechnic future” with a strange interest in ancient druidry. This is his take on climate warming
Chris Grey	His brexit blog – and academia	open-minded	British organisational sociologist and author of several non-fiction books – on his subject and also on Brexit
John Harris	The Guardian	open-minded	Also famous for his “Anywhere but Westminster” videos
Chris hedges	Consortium news and his substack	left	Incisive, hard-hitting analyses of the reality of the American Empire
Anton Jaeger	New Left Review	left	His various pieces can be read here
David Jamieson	Conter	Soft left	The Conter site is “Against the Scottish Establishment”. David is its editor and host of its podcast
Owen Jones	The Guardian	Soft left	Author of several books eg “The Establishment”
Naomi Klein	various	open	Canadian writer and activist eg This Changes Everything
Andrew Marr	The New Statesman	liberal	Author of “The Making of Modern Britain”
James Meek	LRB	liberal	Author of several fiction books and of a couple of non-fiction
George Monbiot	The Guardian	Vaguely anarchist	Author of several books eg “Out of the Wreckage”
John Naughton	The guardian	Not clear	The paper's technology correspondent. Writer and academic. Author of several books including “From Gutenberg to Zuckenberg”
Dave Pollard	His blog	Diff to label	Dave is a Canadian – this a very useful post about what motivates him
David Runciman	London Review of Books (LRB)	liberal	David is a British political scientist with many books eg “How Democracy Ends” and “The Confidence Trap”
Jonathan Shafi	Conter site	Soft left	A Scottish free-lance writer
Wolfgang Streeck	New Left Review	Harder left	Wolfgang is a German sociologist and author of numerous important books eg “How will capitalism End?” and “Buying Time”
Gillian Tett	Various – inc Fin Times	Diff to label	Another anthropologist who has turned to financial journalism and author of several books eg “The Silo Effect”
Polly Toynbee	The Guardian	Centre leftist	Author of several non-fiction books eg “Dismembered”

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.