Let the Fingers Do the Talking

One of the reasons why this blog continues is that the physical process of writing words – whether on a keyboard or on the pages of a notebook – somehow releases thoughts that take me in unexpected directions.

Let me give an example….On Thursday I came across an article which annoyed me – it was in something called the Stanford Social Innovation Review – so I should have known better!

It seemed to be about community-based solutions to perennial problems like homelessness - but talked of

 “the urgent need to eradicate social and economic ills rather than just manage them”.

Three things annoyed me on my first skim of the article – first the sheer arrogance of such an approach particularly when, secondly, it made no reference to any previous efforts to find such a "silver bullet". And, finally, that a serious university (Hertie in Berlin) seemed to take it seriously enough to offer the authors a platform – who were also claiming in aid a recent British book “Radical Help”.

Bingo, I thought….here’s a peg on which to hang a post about the importance of decentralized approaches – but not before I clear the ground to spell out some of the efforts which others have made to supply alternatives to the centralized delivery of services….

Hence the two previous posts – the first which started with Ralston Saul’s quote about democratic structures being more important than technocratic; my own critique (from 1977) of managerialism and pluralism; then the technocracy of New Labourism; and, finally, the hypocrisy of the Conservative “Big Society” and “mutualisation” programmes from 2010.

The second post was a reminder of the significance of Frederic Laloux’s book on “Reinventing Organisations” and its celebration of worker self-management…

The Kafka Brigade  

But, as I prepared for what I thought would be a detailed critical post about the article The New Practice of Public Problem Solving, I did my usual surfing and came across an amazing book with an unusual title - Dealing with Dysfunction – innovative problem solving in the public sector by Jorrit de Jong (2014). It's written by a Dutchman who had, a decade earlier, been a member of a team called “The Kafka Brigade” (!) - whose work is described in this excellent short article The Kafka Brigade – public management theory in practice; M Mathias (2015). 
This has elements of “action-research” – to which I’ve always been attracted – shades of “learning while doing”……The opening chapter of his book (see title link) puts it more precisely -

“using a bottom-up diagnostic approach, collaborative inquiry, creative problem-solving techniques and a pressure-cooker environment, the Kafka Brigade has tapped into the knowledge and experience of hundreds if public officials and clients”  

At this stage, I would normally clear my throat a bit ironically……but, hey, we all have to make a living …and the jargon isn’t all that difficult …..And he and his team readily accept that his approach has yielded both failures and successes……it is indeed a pragmatic learning process. Indeed he quotes one of the first academics to devote a full-length book about “bureaucratic dysfunctions” – Herbert Kaufman - who wrote (in 1977) that -

“what we need is a detailed clinical approach rather than heated attacks, the delicate wielding of  a scalpel rather than furious flailing around with a meat axe”!

And the heated attacks since then have included (successful) calls for “Deregulation”, “smaller government”. “stronger professional input” and “private sector models of management”.

De Jong makes it clear his approach was influenced by Mark Moore’s concept of Public Value which I discussed (all too briefly) in this post last year about the struggle in the past 20 years to offer a better model for public services than New Public Management

Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value – strategic management in Government (1995) demonstrated how the passion and example of individual leaders could inspire teams and lift the performance and profile of public services. The decentralisation of American government allowed them that freedom.

British New Labour, however, chose to go in the opposite direction and to build on to what was already a tight centralised system a new quasi-Soviet one of targets and punishment – although this 2002 note, Creating Public Value – an analytical framework for public service reform, showed that there were at least some people  within the Cabinet Office pushing for a more flexible approach.

Measuring Public Value – the competing values approach showed that there was still life in the idea in the UK – if only amongst academics eg Public Value Management – a new narrative for networked governance by Gerry Stoker in 2006.

Sadly Public Value; theory and practice ed by John Benington and Mark Moore (2011) offered no clarion call to a better society, it was full of dreadful jargon…..Who in his right mind imagines that networked public governance is going to set the heather alight???

My post also looked critically at some other competing ideas which had been offered – such as “good governance”, the “common good”, “communitarianism”, “service” and “stewardship”

All these concepts have problems – as does “Dealing with Dysfunction” (!!) – but “The Kafka Brigade”?,,,,,now there’s a powerful image!!

I warned you at the start of this post that, more than anything else, I would be trying to “showcase” (what an awful word!!) how I approach the blog first thing in the morning. 
I let the fingers do the talking…..   

Workforce Management – real dignity

You will not generally find me extolling books with titles which refer to “reinvention” – we all had our fingers burned in the 1980s and 1990s with names such as Hammer, Osborne and Gore overhyping that particular concept.

But Reinventing Organisations – a guide to creating organisations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness (2014) by Frederic Laloux is that rare thing - a highly readable and inspiring book. It starts with a strong attack on the alienating nature of so much work in large organisations - and a question about whether it needs to be so.

Highly-automated assembly lines began to appear at the end of the last Century but it is only recently that David Graeber and others have drawn attention to the scale of alienation (a staggering 80% of employees in the developed world find their work brings absolutely no satisfaction). Indeed a new term - the “bullshit job” came into circulation to describe the meaningless nature of most work these days.

Laloux suggests that organisations, until now, can be classified into four types to which he gives colours - Red, Amber, Orange and Green – with the guiding metaphors for these types (p 36 of the book) being

-               “wolf pack”,

-               “army”,

-               “machine” and

-               “family”.

This all reminds me of the four “Gods of management” a joint creation of both Charles Handy and the rather more neglected  Roger Harrison – whose fascinating “final reflections” (accessible by clicking the hyperlink) speak to a wider theme which has become central to the redrafting of my “Dispatches to a future generation”. But that’s for another post so let’s move on…..

The core of Laloux’s book consists of his portrayal of organisations which had broken out of the limits of this typology - and were giving both customers and staff satisfaction. Twelve organisations are identified and their history structure and processes detailed.

They are both profit and non-profit but have one basic feature in common – they are all managed by the workforce - with senior executives (such as are left in a streamlined structure) playing essentially a coaching role…..

The most famous of these is probably the Dutch nursing cooperative Buurtzorg

There’s a lot of thought-provoking material in the book which, after an initial splash 3 years ago, has not been much heard of – despite it being the first management book for a long time to focus on worker control (in a  totally non-ideological way).

Perhaps the thrust of the argument challenged too many people?

-               the theorists – for attributing so little to them. And

-               the ideologues who would have preferred some slogans…..

I referred yesterday to a much-hyped article – The New Practice of Public Problem Solving – which I hope to get around to discussing in the next post. But I felt that readers should first be aware of the history sketched out in these two posts….

main Laloux website

- http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

- You can read the book for yourself here – but you can get the gist in the summary given in the hyperlink in the title above; and some good slides here. And you can see Laloux in action here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA9J-aKkOAI&start=300

Reviews of Laloux book

- https://social-labs.org/is-teal-the-new-black/ 

- https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-critique-of-the-subtle-hierarchism-of-the-teal-organizations-concept-in-the-book-reinventing-organizations/2015/10/29

- http://futureconsiderations.com/reinventing-organisations/

- http://www.organization5point0.com/annexes/review-of-laloux-s-reinventing-organizations

- self-management bibliography http://www.organization5point0.com/literature/books

Other useful reading

-       Alternative Models of Ownership (UK Labour party 2017) - basically about coops, social enterprise and worker-controlled organisations,

-       A Map of Social Enterprises and their eco-systems in Europe (EC 2015)

-       https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295390255_From_third_sector_to_social_enterprise_A_European_research_trajectory

-       Ahistorical article https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42488947.pdf

Wresting the political from the technocrats

The  blog’s masthead carries some quotations which hopefully give readers a sense of the sort of material which will hit them (on the top right – just move the cursor down a bit to the end of the list of titles). This is one of the quotes -

We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes.

JR Saul

John Ralston Saul is a true original – one of the very few who has chosen to carve out his own life of choice, In 1992 he published a blast of a book called “Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West” - which I found at the time simply one of the most brilliant books of the decade. It went on to receive this friendly review which puts the issues in a wider context and turned out to be the first of a series of four books in which he has explored what he identifies as six “human qualities” - of which “reason” is only one.

18 years later, when I started my blog, his words were still in my mind and used for the first-ever masthead quote. I chose the quote, I suppose, because of a certain ambivalence about my own managerial roles.

Feeling the Tension?

For the first 20 years of my adult life, I had been a (fairly scholastic) politician - for the next 20 years an apolitical adviser. It’s perhaps only in the past decade that I’ve been able to go back to being truly “my own man”. In 1973 or so – based on my experience of working with community groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I had written a pamphlet called “From Corporate Management to Community action” (sadly no longer available) which reflected my disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.

A few years later I drew on my reading of the previous decade’s literature (UK and US) about urban politics and community power to challenge (in what is, I grant you, a rather long and academic article entitled Community Development – its political and administrative challenge)  the validity of the “pluralist” assumptions underpinning our democratic practices.

The article looked at how community grievances found voice and power and were subsequently dealt with by political and administrative processes.

I wasn’t a Marxist but the sort of questions I was raising seem now to indicate a greater debt to that sort of analysis than I was perhaps aware of then, I wasn’t just saying that life chances were unevenly distributed – I was also arguing that, from an early age, those in poor circumstances develop lower expectations and inclination to challenge systems of authority. And the readiness of those systems to respond was also skewed because of things like the “old boy network”.

The piece explored the functions which political parties were supposed to perform under pluralist theory – and found them seriously wanting. 

The Technocracy of New Labour

The issue of inequality and poverty was, of course, an important one for the Labour government which came to power 20 years later - particularly one with Gordon Brown in charge of the nation's finances

A Social Exclusion Unit was quickly established in the Cabinet Office as an indication of the seriousness with which this “scourge” would be dealt with. 

But, despite the talk about “community” this was a centralising strategy with a vengeance. The Treasury became a giant machine for minute tweaking of socio-economic processes across the board. PSA (public service agreements setting targets for Departments) were infamous for their detail and optimistic assumptions about the link between technical means and social outcomes. But it showed little understanding of the literature on the perversity of social interventions.

New Labour had 13 years in which to make an impact and first assessments were on the cool side. A more detailed assessment can be found here.

My particular interest is in the “community power” aspect – where it took New Labour some time to move – with a Social Enterprise Unit being set up only in 2002

Scotland has a high profile in the social enterprise world – as evident in this 2014 report

The Big Society Con

When David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 he launched the Big Society idea.

It was quite something for a Conservative Prime Minister to commit his government to deal with poverty and inequality (I think Bill Clinton called it “triangulation”).

He actually quoted from the Wilkinson and Picket book which strongly argues that healthy societies are equal ones. Having proven (to at least his own satisfaction) that big government (spending) has not dealt with the problem of poverty, Cameron then suggests that the main reason for this is the neglect of the moral dimension, refers to various community enterprises, entrepreneurs and goes on –

Our alternative to big government is not no government - some reheated version of ideological laissez-faire. Nor is it just smarter government. Because we believe that a strong society will solve our problems more effectively than big government has or ever will, we want the state to act as an instrument for helping to create a strong society. Our alternative to big government is the big society.

But we understand that the big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action to make it happen. We need to use the state to remake society.

The first step is to redistribute power and control from the central state and its agencies to individuals and local communities. That way, we can create the opportunity for people to take responsibility. This is absolutely in line with the spirit of the age - the post-bureaucratic age. In commerce, the Professor of Technological Innovation at MIT, Eric von Hippel, has shown how individuals and small companies, flexible and able to take advantage of technologies and information once only available to major multinational corporations, are responding with the innovations that best suit the needs of consumers.

This year's Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has shown through her life's work how non- state collective action is more effective than centralised state solutions in solving community problems.

Our plans for decentralisation are based on a simple human insight: if you give people more responsibility, they behave more responsibly.

So we will take power from the central state and give it to individuals where possible - as with our school reforms that will put power directly in the hands of parents.

Where it doesn't make sense to give power directly to individuals, for example where there is a function that is collective in nature, then we will transfer power to neighbourhoods. So our new Local Housing Trusts will enable communities to come together, agree on the number and type of homes they want, and provide themselves with permission to expand and lead that development.

Where neighbourhood empowerment is not practical we will redistribute power to the lowest possible tier of government, and the removal of bureaucratic controls on councils will enable them to offer local people whatever services they want, in whatever way they want, with new mayors in our big cities acting as a focus for civic pride and responsibility.

This decentralisation of power from the central to the local will not just increase responsibility, it will lead to innovation, as people have the freedom to try new approaches to solving social problems, and the freedom to copy what works elsewhere.

Of course one can make various criticisms – one of the best is in a TUC blog.

It is sad that I never found Blair or Brown singing a song like this – despite some of the important steps they took to encourage social enterprise and community banking.

Conclusion

My intention had been to write about an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving” – but got sidetracked instead by these memories. Treat this post as the necessary context which is completely missing from the article which my next post will hopefully address…

A JR Saul Resource

On Equilibrium – six qualities of the New Humanism (2004)

A Doubter’s Companion – a Dictionary of aggressive common-sense; John Ralston Saul (1994)

A review of a Doubter’s Companion; Brothers Judd is a great website I had forgotten about

Power versus the public good – a 1996 lecture

Rethinking Development – Bhutan address 2007

He was interviewed on this great website when a new edition of "Voltaire’s Bastards" came out in 2013.

Full Proceedings of the Bhutan Conference can be read here.

A Transylvanian Dawn – and Victor Orban

I woke early, with streaks in the black. night sky hinting of dawn but in the chill of a mountain house in a village 1400 metres high - with the snow still glowing thick on the two mountain ranges which lie south and north of the house.

I spent a few hours updating an old post on the intellectual disputes of the last century which now lead off the draft book which has occupied me these past couple of weeks – but aware that an article on “the new practice of public problem-solving” awaits my attention. 

It’s by a couple of Americans who presented it recently in Berlin but, worthwhile as it is, it completely fails to recognize that it reflects a “community-control” model which many of us were struggling to put into practice in the 1970s.

And it raises the fundamental question of how exactly the insights and experience so many of us had in those heady days were so easily and quickly trashed by the managerialism which took over our minds in the 1980s.    

I will get round to that post eventually but got distracted by this superb interview by the infamous French journalist celebre - BHL - with Victor Orban – which reminds me of Oriana Fallaci at her best

Because I am preoccupied with memories and am reluctant to ask Orbán right at the start how a former anti-totalitarian militant discovered conservatism and ultranationalism on his way to Damascus (or rather Moscow), or how the recipient of a Soros grant was able to make his former mentor public enemy No. 1 (with Soros’s caricature plastered all over the streets of the capital a while back), and because I did not wish to begin with the mystery of a true dissident who somehow relearned the Stalinist technique of retrospective reinvention of biographies (in this case, it is his own memory that he is purging), I begin benignly with a polite question, simply to buy myself a little time to let everything settle in.

“Why did you choose this monastery? Why such an austere site?”

But his response is curiously intense and sets the conversation in motion.

“Because my old offices were in the Parliament building down the hill on the other side of the Danube, and that wasn’t good from the point of view of the separation of powers.”

He would have been more truthful had he said, Because I wanted to dominate this town, which is the only part of the country that is still resisting me.

But no.

The inventor of illiberalism, the man who uses democracy to torpedo democracy, the autocrat constantly engaged in gagging the Hungarian Parliament, bringing judges to heel, and controlling the media, tells me baldly that he left his former offices out of concern for democratic processes.

I let it go.

I have no idea, at the moment, how much time he is going to give me.

I have no idea that Hungary’s free press is going to observe, the next morning, that I spent with him, in the course of an afternoon, more time than they, collectively, have spent with him in nine years of demotatorship—a term I use to mean a democratic dictatorship. So I prefer to push on.

“You have become the leader, in Europe, of the illiberal strain of demotatorship—”

The term illiberal seems to take him aback.

“Let me stop you there. Because we should agree on our terms. What is the reality? Liberalism gave rise to political correctness—that is, to a form of totalitarianism, which is the opposite of democracy. That’s why I believe that illiberalism restores true freedom, true democracy.”

This time, I feel obliged to tell him how specious I find this line of reasoning.

The last straight?

What I’m hoping is the last stretch for the book proved more arduous than I thought – particularly checking that the 50 mini-essays which form its core actually hang together and give some sort of narrative. These mini-essays were originally drafted as blog posts in the last 5-6 years but have been updated and edited for this book. That’s 50 out of 1,350 posts over the past ten years – so they survived a tough selection process which was based on intuition rather than explicit criteria.

And they are grouped into six Parts (or chapters) whose titles, I hope, are self-explanatory.

”Ways of Seeing” uses the title of John Berger’s seminal book of the 1970s to highlight what seemed to be the main subjects of controversy and debate (at least in America/Europe) from the 1930s - decade by decade. From the 1980s there was a tendency to reduce debate to a few competing “storylines” – reflecting the post-modernist “discursive turn” of the times.

As someone who studied Politics and Economics at Adam Smith’s old University (Glasgow) it is hardly surprising that political analysis should then put in an appearance at this point – ahead of the economics analysis which is the focus of Chapter 3 (“Putting Economics in its Place”).

In the 1960s, politics was an honourable pursuit and the reasons for its dramatic decline in respect is explored in a detailed consideration of one of the few books which has bothered to try to understand this loss of trust. The growth of technocracy is clearly one of the factors as managers and economists have been elevated to the status of high priests of a new religion…..

“Not in Our Name” plots the growth in the past 25 years of social protest and moral disgust.

“Putting Economics in its Place” maps how writers of various sorts have tried to make sense of the post-war world – not least the 2008 global economic crisis – noting that economists somehow seem least able to offer satisfactory explanations…

“Our Exploitative Society”, chapter 4, starts with a reminder that western societies are built on carbon exploitation – and then looks at how some of the key books since 2008 have mapped the efforts these societies have made to cope with the new realities

“Other Ways” contains various essays about social movements and the solidarity economy

Chapter 6, “Changing the World”, return to the moral and political aspects – asking whether the “western model” can survive and how it will all end. It finishes by reviewing the literature on power and change

I’m now experimenting with Dropbox – so the current draft should be accessible here

Welcome Romania

Fascinating that I had 662 hits from Romania yesterday – was that because the post about Seton-Watson mentioned his work from 1910 supporting the downtrodden ethnic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – particularly the Romanians, Serbs, Czechs and Slovaks??

Or was it simply the mention that he had, a century ago, been made an Honorary citizen of Cluj?

Or something to do with the EU Summit this week in Sibiu?

It would be nice to have some feedback…Sometimes I feel a bit lonely….

And assiduous readers of the blog should know that last month’s post on Salad Days was updated today with an important little reading list about depression – which includes at least two full book downloads…..

Scotus Viator

Robert Seton-Watson was a Scot who, in the early part of the 20th century, helped shape central Europe – in the very literal sense that his active journalism contributed to the boundary changes which took place as the Ottoman Empire fell apart. Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Romania were the countries whose struggles for removal of the Hungarian yoke received his warm support.

His articles were penned under the pseudonym Scotus Viator – “the travelling Scot”. I remember coming across an old book (with his writings about Romania) in the British Council library here in Bucharest in the early 90s and would love to find it again

As a Scot who has been living for the past decade in this part of the world, I think he really does deserve to be better remembered. In these days of faceless bureaucrats, he was a wonderful example of what individual effort could achieve. His life would make a fascinating film. I am indebted to Wikipedia for the following info.

Seton-Watson was born in London in 1879 to well-off Scottish parents. His father had been a tea-merchant in Calcutta, and his mother, Elizabeth Lindsay Seton, was the daughter of a genealogist and historian who had been the son of George Seton of the East India Company. His inherited wealth, of Indian origin, later assisted his activities on behalf of Europe's subject peoples.
Robert was educated at Winchester public school and New College, Oxford, where he read modern history, graduating with a first-class degree in 1901 and then studied at the Universities of Berlin, Sorbonne and Vienna from where he wrote a number of articles on Hungary for The Spectator.

His research for these articles took him to Hungary in 1906, and his discoveries there turned his sympathies against Hungary and in favour of then subjected Slovaks, Romanians and southern Slavs. In 1908, he published his first major work - ”Racial Problems in Hungary”

Seton-Watson became friends with the Vienna correspondent of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed and the Czech philosopher and politician Tomáš Masaryk. He argued in books and articles for a federal solution to the problems of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then riven by the tensions between its ancient dynastic model and the forces of ethnic nationalism. 
After the outbreak of the First WW, Seton-Watson took practical steps to support the causes that he had formerly supported merely in print.
He served as honorary secretary of the Serbian Relief Fund from 1914 and supported and found employment for his friend Masaryk after the latter fled to England to escape arrest.
Both founded and published “The New Europe” (1916), a weekly periodical to promote the cause of the Czechs and other subject peoples. Seton-Watson financed this periodical himself.

Seton-Watson's private political activity was not appreciated in all quarters, and his critics within the British government finally succeeded in temporarily silencing him in 1917 by drafting him into the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was given the job of scrubbing hospital floors.
Others, however, rescued him, and from 1917 to 1918 he served on the Intelligence Bureau of the War Cabinet in the Enemy Propaganda Department, where he was responsible for British propaganda to the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He assisted in the preparations for the Rome Congress of subject Habsburg peoples, held in April 1918.

Following the end of the War, Seton-Watson attended the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 in a private capacity, advising the representatives there of formerly subject peoples. Although on bad terms with the governments of the major powers, whom he famously referred to as "the pygmies of Paris", he contributed to discussions of where the new frontiers of Europe should be and was especially influential in setting the postwar frontiers between Italy and the new state of Yugoslavia.
Although the British Government was unenthusiastic about Seton-Watson, other governments were not, showing their gratitude after the conference. Masaryk became the first president of the new state of Czechoslovakia and welcomed him there. His friendship with Edvard Beneš, now Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, was consolidated. Seton-Watson was made an honorary citizen of Cluj in Transylvania, which had been incorporated into Romania despite the claims of Hungary and, in 1920, it was formally acclaimed by the Romanian parliament. Yugoslavia rewarded him with an honorary degree from the University of Zagreb.

He died at the age of 72 in Nov 1951 on the island of Skye. His 2 sons also became well-known historians - Hugh and Christopher – and wrote, in tribute to their father’s memory, “The Making of a new Europe – RSW and the last years of Austro Hungary” (1981)

A Seton Watson resource

Seton-Watson and Nation-Building – clashes in late Habsburg space;

British radicals and Hungary in late 19th century;

Hungarian responses to RWS;

Beyond Balkanism – the scholarly politics of region-making Diana Mishkova (2018)

RW Seton-Watson and the Romanians 1906-1920; Cornelia Bodea and Hugh Seton-Watson (Editura Sciintifica and Encycilopeca 1988)

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/86/5/1118/121726?redirectedFrom=fulltext

British liberals and the Balkans;

articles and books written by Seton-Watson

This site actually contains quite a few examples of his original journalism

The Southern Slav Question; RWS (1911)

The Rise of nationality in the Balkans; RWS (1918)

A History of the Roumanians (1934)

Notes on a Western Crisis

I have known for a long time about the importance of taking a critical approach to one’s own writing - of reading it back as if I was a reader. This helps me not only to find easier ways to say what I mean but also to identify imprecisions and ambiguities…

And whenever I notice that the argument in a text of mine has moved on, whether to another aspect of the same theme or to a new theme, I will tend to mark that change by starting a new paragraph (at the very least) or by inserting a heading – no matter how small. This makes the text easier to read….

But it is the tables I started to use in the blog a year or so ago which are now proving to a powerful tool in the editing the book which I have been trying to finish for the past 20 years…To the extent that I now realise that the focus of the book is not quite what I thought it was.

Initially the book carried the title “Ways of Seeing…the global Crisis” but, some years ago, that changed to “Dispatches to the Future Generation” to convey first the fact that it was structured from blogposts (like “letters”); and, second, the sense that it was the giving of one generation’s account of its “stewardship” of the world (or lack of it) to the next generation (my daughters’)

But, as far as I was concerned, the core of the book was its commentary on the various books written about the global economic crisis…

In the past week, however, I have been adding various posts from the archives which, intuitively, seemed appropriate eg the recent series on the UK power structure, old ones about political roles (which had identified four very distinctive group loyalties or “constituencies” between whom politicians generally have to choose); thinking institutionally; and a conservative philosopher’s musings on the New Left. These, patently, had nothing to do with economics and yet my unconscious clearly saw them as significant. They joined some other commentaries already in the draft which had more to do with social values; and also a significant one about intellectual timelines….And means that the draft has broken through the 200 page barrier..

I was already aware that my draft said very little about the ecological crisis (surely, I argued, it’s all been said?) but that, equally, it focused very much on the reactions of the privileged world. So I am now experimenting with the title “Notes on a Western Crisis”