How did it Happen? The fashion for reform part II

We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders. An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....

In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative organisational change

Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara

And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it. There is an important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into two basic questions –

-       Where did the urge to reform come from?

-       How on earth did managers become the new Gods?

In the late 90s I wrote a little book I wrote for a central European audience - “In Transit – notes on good governance” – which tried to capture the change….

The life-cycle, pragmatism and attention-span of Ministers and local government leaders (in the post-war period) caused  them generally to adopt what might be called a "blunderbuss" approach to change: that is they assume that desirable change is achieved by a mixture of the following approaches -

·       existing programmes being given more money

·       issuing new policy guidelines - ending previous policies and programmes

·       creating new agencies

·       making new appointments

Once such resources, guidelines or agencies have been set running, it was assumed that politicians would move quickly on to the other issues that were queuing up for their attention.

Of course, they needed some sort of guarantee that the policies and people selected will actually enable the resources and structures used to achieve the desired state. But that was seen as a simple implementation issue. Politicians tend to think in simple "command" terms: and therefore find it difficult to realise that the departments might be structured in a way that denies them the relevant information, support, understanding and/or authority to achieve desired outcomes.

Increasingly, however, in the 1970s and 80s people began to realise that large "hierarchic" organisations - such as Ministries - had serious deficiencies which could and did undermine good policies eg

·       their multiplicity of levels seriously interferes with, indeed perverts, information and communications flows - particularly from the consumer or client.

·       they discourage co-operation and initiative - and therefore good staff. And inertia, apathy and cynicism are not the preconditions for effective, let alone creative, work!

·       they are structured around historical missions (such as the provision of education, law and order etc) whose achievement now requires different skills and inter-agency work.

To move, however, to serious administrative reform is to challenge the powerful interests of bureaucracy itself (on which political leaders depend for advice and implementation) demanding an eccentric mixture of policy conviction, single-mindedness and political security which few leaders possess.

Whatever the appearance of unity and coherence at election time, a Government is a collection of individually ambitious politicians whose career path demands making friends and clients rather than the upsetting of established interests which any real organisational reform demands.

The machinery of government consists of a powerful set of "baronies" (Ministries/ Departments), each with their own (and client) interests to protect or favour. And Governments can - and do - always blame other people for "failure": and distract the public with new games - and faces.

What one might call the "constituency of reform" seemed, therefore, simply too small for major reforms even to be worth attempting. For politicians, the name of the game is reputation and survival. 

COMMENT – looking at this now, 20 years later, this analysis smacks of the influence of the public choice ideologues – also evidenced in the 1997 World Bank Development Report on the State in a Changing World .

The invisible power of the managerial ideology

For some 50 years I’ve been chewing over the question of how the organisations that run our public services might be “managed better”. Indeed, some might say that I “have a bee in my bonnet” about “public management” (ie that I’m fixated about it). To which the only appropriate answer is the Churchillian…

”some bee!….some bonnet”!

Amongst all the confusing talk there has been about “neoliberalism” in the past decade, another animal has lurked ……..multiplying and changing shape until it has insidiously penetrated our very minds…..and that is of “managerialism”. In this post (and others to come) I want to look first at how this has happened; then at the nature of the virus; and finally at what we can do about it.

Over the past decade I have several times alluded to managerialism as the new ideology – the first time as far back as 2009 and, to take another example, in 2014.
But the references have been casual - it is time to do a serious analysis!

It was, of course, James Burnham who first set this ism running with his The Managerial Revolution - published as far back as 1942. When I read his book in the early 60s it was, therefore, still fresh - particularly from the way it had been used by Anthony Crosland to argue that the managerial revolution had transformed the nature of capitalism.... 

Management first came to my attention when I found myself a town councillor in 1968 – representing a neighbourhood whose public services aroused constant complaints and were managed in an off-hand if not arrogant manner by the municipality.

My town had been one of the first to designate its Chief Officer a “Town Manager” or CEO – they had previously been “Town Clerks”! But it was the idea of citizen participation rather than management which was attracting interest in the country – the UK Liberal party indeed used an electoral/tactical form of it known as “pavement politics”.

I decided to beat them at their own game by launching various ward-level campaigns, self-help projects and town-level participation processes (in my capacity by that time as the Chairman of a Social Work committee).

I was also reading up on the community development and organisational change literature and producing academic reports with titles such as “From corporate planning to community action”, “community development – its administrative and political challenge” and, in 1977, a little book called “The Search for Democracy”

In the mid 1970s (at the age of 33) I became one of the leaders of a Region which covered half of Scotland and employed no fewer than 100,000 professionals (teachers, social workers, police, water and sewage engineers etc). Making officials pay attention to “citizen voice” became the core of the innovative Social Strategy for the Eighties which a few of us developed in the late 1970s. I, for one, had been profoundly affected by Ivan Illich’s critique of professionalism 

Management training for officials didn’t really exist in those days (!!) – although the Institute of Local Government Studies (or INLOGOV) had been set up in Birmingham University in 1964 – with John Stewart as an inspirational force. In my dual capacity as an academic and change agent, I made repeated trips there to absorb their thinking….Almost certainly it was that spirit which gave me the confidence to launch in the mid 1970s a new approach called the “member-officer group” which had small groups of middle level officials and politicians jointly assess the quality and effectiveness of a range of council services…

We knew that the majority of the professionals in our service had strong prejudices and myths about the people who lived in the disadvantaged housing estates  and started to build what was almost a “counter culture” not only amongst the community workers but in some younger managers in what was an important new Chief Executive Office which was set up

The 1970s had seen the quiet start to a range of managerial initiatives in national government – triggered by the Fulton Report into the Civil Service commissioned in 1966 by Harold Wilson,

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she brought not just management ideas but business people whom she let loose on a mission to bring a more business-like approach into government. Her huge privatisation programme, of course, involved getting rid of a large range of activities completely from the government sector - but a lot remained and was massively restructured into free-standing Agencies….

By now, the world was beginning to sit up and take notice of what it loosely called “Thatcherism”. It was academic Chris Hood who first suggested (in 1991) that it was more than a political programme of public asset disposal and had become a new managerial doctrine to which he gave the name “New Public Management” and whose 7 features he analysed in this table

New Public Management (NPM) according to Hood (1991)

No.	Doctrine	Meaning	Typical Justification
1	Hands-on professional management of Public Organisations	Visible management at the top; free to manage	Accountability requires clear assignment of responsibility
2.	Explicit standards and measures of performance	Goals and targets defined and measured as indicators of success	Accountability means clearly stated aims
3.	Greater emphasis on output controls	Resource allocation and rewards linked to performance	Need to stress results rather than procedures
4.	Shift to division of labour	Unbundle public sector into units organised by products with devolved budgets	Make units manageable; split provision and production; use contracts
5.	Greater competition	Move to term contracts and tendering procedures	Rivalry as the key to lower costs and better standards
6	Stress on private sector styles of management practice	Move away from military- style ethic to more flexible hiring, pay rules, etc	Need to apply "proven" private sector management tools
7.	Stress on greater discipline and parsimony	Cut direct costs; raise labour discipline	Need to check resource demands; do more with less

Like bees to a honey-pot, such a designation was irresistible to academics who have since spawned a veritable industry on the subject….

It would be wrong to say that NPM is the same as “pop” or “guru” management” which has been the subject of ridicule since such books as Huczynski’s Management Gurus (1993); and Micklewait’s “Witch Doctors” (1996) – but arguably it has played the same ideological role in the ranks of senior civil servants and Think Tankers as Peter Drucker’s and Tom Peters writings did in previous decades for business leaders…

It is impossible for new generations to understand the excitement in those days – Wordworth captured the mood when he wrote these lines in celebration of the French revolution –

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, 

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 

The attraction of a country in romance! 

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, 

When most intent on making of herself 

A prime Enchantress—to assist the work 

Which then was going forward in her name! 

Not in front of the children!

If ever there was a subject calculated to divide opinions and families in europe, it is immigration. It is not one which this blog often covers – although the political fall-out over Brexit saw me reading at the end of last year (and commenting about) both The Strange Death of Europe – immigration, identity, Islam by Douglas Murray (2017); and The Road to Somewhere – the new tribes shaping British politics; by David Goodhart (2017).

And, in anticipating the Brexit vote in 2016, I did spell out why immigration was the only issue in the referendum.

It was, however, the horrific images in 2015 of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, scaling the fences and marching to Germany which brought home to most people like myself the scale of the global exodus. But I readily confess that I thereafter ignored the issue – although I was well aware that prevailing liberal (for which read economists’) opinion dismissed people’s fears.

It was therefore only this week that I discovered that there was at least one writer who had – as long ago as 2013 - demonstrated in his forensic examination of the issue the even-handedness you expect of a real professional. And that is Paul Collier whose Exodus – immigration and multiculturalism in the 21^st century (2013) tells us on its very first page that his own grandfather had migrated from a German village a hundred years earlier.

You  would therefore expect Sir Paul (for he was knighted a few years back) to be one of the globalists very much in favour of migration.

But far from it – his decades of working in Africa as a development economist have made him painfully aware not merely of the increasing attractions of rich European cities to poor people but of the social costs involved in such upheavals - for both host societies and those left behind.
His “Exodus” is a painstaking attempt to separate out various arguments – social and economic – and to explore the dynamics of the relevant “stocks” and “flows” and is essential reading for those who would dare to venture into the policy debate.
He looks at the migrant (both skilled and unskilled); at the costs and benefits incurred by the society he leaves; and at the costs and benefits to the host society in a variety of scenarios. 
One interesting feature of his analysis is the focus on the diapora - and the rate at which immigrants are “absorbed” or socialised into the host society….easier in America than in Europe.

The book was a change of focus for him – trying to understand the impact of immigration on a society like the UK and bringing a sensibility unfortunately all too rare amongst economists. 

When a year or so later he received an invitation to help Lebanon brainstorm about how it should deal with the increasing pressures of refugees from surrounding countries, he agreed only because the colleague who accompanied him was a refugee expert – the result is as strong a critique as you will find of how countries have dealt with the refugee crisis…Refuge – transforming a broken refugee system; Betts and Collier (2018)

Further Reading

http://www.ceemr.uw.edu.pl/vol-3-no-1-june-2014/book-reviews/paul-collier-2013-exodus-immigration-and-multiculturalism-21st

https://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2013/11/new-exodus

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-dream-review-and-authors-response/

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/too-diverse-david-goodhart-multiculturalism-britain-immigration-globalisation

Changing the Beast – being part V of a series

In certain circles, to be accused of trying to reform – rather than transform – capitalism has long been one of the gravest criticisms. Not only this accusation but the very distinction has, however, always seemed a bit ridiculous. What would “transformation” actually mean? And who on earth could be attracted to the notion of wholescale nationalisation and associated bureaucratic power – to say nothing of even worse scenarios?? 

Temperamentally, I grant you, I’ve always been an incrementalist – rather than a revolutionary – influenced first by Tony Crosland’s 1956 revisionist “The Future of Socialism”; then, at University, by Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” and, in the early 80s, by Charles Lindblom – who got us all to respect incrementalism.
  
Although Margaret Thatcher kept assering that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable

By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control. Pages 57-66 of my Dispatches to the Next Generation plot the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles

But a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things – first the suggestion that the entire engine of the system (profitability)was reaching vanishing point; and, second, a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs.

Now the titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism” 

Paul Collier’s book – “The Future of Capitalism – our present anxieties” to which I have devoted 4 posts – touches only very briefly on the second of the changes. But I recommend the book for its rare moral – rather than technocratic - tone and for it being the first book I can remember which takes as its starting point the concerns of ordinary people and tries to identify practical policies which might actually deal with issues such as the decline in social trust

Essential follow-up reading

I realise the previous reading list was too long. The following are they key bits of writing I would recommend for those who want to know more

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..(google sample only)..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). A short, overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas - more than a decade after his death

Associationalism for 150 years – and still alive and well in Denmark; Kaspersen (2002)

Communitarianism Revisited; Amitai Etzioni (2015) The father of the modern movement revisits the issues

Those curious about the “Varieties of Capitalism” literature and able and willing to subject themselves to the torture of academic writing can skim one of the following..

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/db5f/97bbe6f769bdf8ca138a89bd090f35e3a39d.pdf

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~phall/VofCIntro.pdf

http://web.unideb.hu/jkapas/pdf/Kapas_varieties%20of%20capitalism.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328807093_Rhine-and_Anglo_Saxon_Capitalist_Models_and_the_1960-1993_Automotive_Industry_in_Germany_and_the_United_States/link/5be427cc92851c6b27af5c67/download

https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-socialism.pdf

The Future of Capitalism - IV

“Acknowledgements” are normally the least-read section of any book – into which are pored often embarrassingly-excessive expression of thankful debts. Indeed if the book is American, the section will read like an Oscar speech.

But Paul Collier’s “Acknowledgements” (unusually in the end-section) made me think about the whole issue of who an author thinks (s)he is writing for – and how that affects the style and content of a book

He explains that, having started with a review of some books, he realised that what was really needed was

“a synthesis of moral philosophy, political economics, finance, economic geography, social psychology and social policy”   

and that he then proceeded to identify and work with a small “brains trust” of individuals in these various fields he was able to find within the enclaves of Oxford University

We imagine that an author is writing for us – if not personally, that he has a mental picture  of the sort of person likely to pick the book up…But Collier reveals here that the people whose opinion he sought and  listened to were a small group of specific individuals. This perhaps explains a couple of things - one of which I only noticed when I went back to reread the book. First, as I had signalled last week, I found it curious that he failed to acknowledge the range of others who have explored similar themes – from GDH Cole, through Paul Hirst to the Third Way and beyond. I’m sure Collier is familiar with those strands but perhaps not the specialists he consulted….

It’s rare for me to return to a book for a second, closer reading within a month of the first read. But it’s perhaps something I should do more often since, this time around, I found myself scribbling quite a few question marks and remarks against sections that I simply couldn’t understand. I had the feeling, quite frankly, that one of the experts on his Brain’s Trust had advised him to include something which he didn’t quite feel he could explain properly….

And, as several of the reviewers have noticed, there were too many sections which aere too scrappy and need a lot more thought….particularly in Part II in the chapters on the “ethical company, family and world”

Future of Capitalism - Useful References and follow-up reading

The wide ranging nature of Collier’s book threw up an unusually wide assortment of papers and blogs….

Branko Milanovic honoured it with two separate posts – the first suggesting that it smacked of “nostalgia for a past that never was”; the second exploring what he has to say about healthy families, organisations and worlds

The radical American economist James K Galbraith (son of JF) reviews it along with a new book from Joseph Stiglitz and a forthcoming one from Branko Milanovic

The author of “TheThird Pillar” can be heard discussing his book in transcript and on podcast

The Denmark Lesson; short piece commenting on Collier’s Danish comments

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). An overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas more than a decade after his death

Associationalism for 150 years – and still alive and well in Denmark; Kaspersen (2002)

Beyond the Third Way (Geyer 2001)

Can Democracies tackle illiberal and “inward-looking” drives?; Daniel Danaiu (Romanian Jounral of European Affairs June 2019) A broad-ranging overview of recent trends and writing by an ex-Governor of the Romanian National Bank

The Fix – how nations survive and thrive in a world in decline; Jonathan Tepperman (2016) one of the positive analyses selected by Collier

There’s a useful discussion here on how the concept of meritocracy has become obsolete…

Can the genie be put back in the bottle? part III of the discussion of Collier's Future of Capitalism

Half-way through writing this post I discovered that the great Branko Milanovic was also these days thinking and writing about Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism” but beat me by a day!

And another book has appeared suggesting that markets and the state (alone or combined) are not sufficient to deal with our social needs – by an ex-Governor of the Bank of India. It is The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Community Behind; Raghuram G. Rajan (2019) the main thrust of which can be found in this article,

To someone with my background, this critique is an obvious one. Indeed its relative rarity reflects the grip which technocrats have developed on our minds these past few decades.  

Our collective memories have become so short these days, people need to be reminded of the “Big Society” (Cameron 2010) and “The Third Way” (Blair 1997) both of which were doomed to failure by virtue of their elitist support and origins - although the “Third Way” was more philosophically grounded by the writings of Anthony Giddens. It was also less focused on Britain – with support from not only Bill Clinton but also Gerhard Schroeder (as witness this 1998 manifesto)

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..

The last post reminded us all that the discussion about the respective roles of state and market goes back at least a hundred years (and was evident in deeds if not words in the late 19^th century as both the UK and Germany started to respond to working class pressures); and suggested that there were two ways we could look at what might be called the “communitarian” option – as a set of policies and beliefs; or as an historical settlement reflecting specific conditions.

My suggestion of “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly sensible propositions was, I appreciate, a bit opaque. In phrasing it in this manner, I was conscious of the charge which the famous Angus Deaton had already made of Collier’s and Rajan’s books – that the “genie (in this case of “meritocracy”) could not be put back in the bottle”… meaning exactly what?? It’s odd that he just leaves the (obvious) question dangling at the end of his comments..

Does he perhaps mean that we have as a society experienced certain new things we will not readily give up? If so, what things?

Or has something contaminated the appreciation we had previously for certain values and behaviour? If so, what exactly is this contaminant of “meritocracy”? Michael Young wrote his famous “Rise of Meritocracy” as a satire in 1958 - its full title is actually The Rise of Meritocracy 1870-2033 – an essay on education and equality).

Is Angus Deaton really saying that human nature has changed so dramatically since 1970 or so that we no longer have the capacity to choose our own future? Whatever happened to “free will”?

It is understandable that Etzioni was unable to persuade his fellow north Americans to adopt “communitarianism” in the 1990s – in “the land of the free” its emphasis on social responsibilities perhaps smacks too much of the country’s early Puritan settlers – the decline of whose spirit I discussed last week - and of the contemporary Amash sect

I sense a lot of historical whitewashing going on in these exchanges. Paul Collier is quite open about his contempt for leftist writing (and seems particularly hostile to Wolfgang Streeck, a favourite of mine) – which explains the absence of some obvious names from the index to his book.And the “Third Way” scribblers are also absent (despite their centralist position) presumably because they have been guilty of ideological sloganizing….
But why is Paul Hirst and his associationalism missing from the book  - despite a recent celebration of his work? Perhaps the publisher is too left-wing? Or the phrase “associative democracy” too narrow for the scope of Collier’s book? Such excisions from the history book don’t do anyone any favours…

Collier refers to a talk he was invited to give to the Danish social democrats in 2017 where he met the new leader whom he recently praised in this article – which also suggests their party as a good example of the sort of pragmatism which he considers European social democracy needs these days - although a lot of us thought that New Labour's emphasis on "triangulation" and "evidence-based" approach was as pragmatic as you get......
 Remarkably, my googling had just unearthed this fascinating history of the development over a 150 year period of “Associationalism” in Denmark

My point therefore about “stress tests” is that clearly some countries are more disposed to communal ideas than others. Take, for example, my own country – Scotland. We may be part of o United “Kingdom” but the “1707 settlement” expressly retained our educational and religious freedoms in which schooling, for example, has always been more open; one of the most famous books about this bears the title “The Democratic Intellect”. And we have also been more open to ideas of support for community endeavour – with community planning and social enterprise being amongst the central planks of the Scottish government for the past 20 years.

Indeed there is an argument that it is the smaller countries who are most able to offer the sort of support for civilised ideas of the healthy family, organisation and society which Collier has made the core of his book.

Communitarianism, anyone?

Is a communitarian agenda a possibility for British – or any – politics these days?

This question arises from the appearance in the past year of both Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2019) and Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” (2018) - and of similar ideas being expressed in a variety of places over the past decade, including The “Kafka Brigade” (de Jong); clumsy solutions (Grint); “Reinventing Organisations” (Laloux); The “Big Society” (Cameron); and Red Tory/Blue Labour (Bond)

And, of course, behind all this lies the shadow, of the millenium’s “The Third Way” (admittedly more of a rhetorical than real moment); Paul Hirst’s writings of the 1990s on “associationalism”; the communitarian movement embodied in Amitai Etzioni’s writings and activities in the US in the latter part of the 20^th century; and those of GDH Cole in the pre-war period.

So there have clearly been a set of powerful – if peripheral - ideas with which we have been very reluctant to part ……could it be that their time is coming?

I want to explore this question – using three approaches

-       identifying the common, distinctive features of policies, values and behaviour which can be found under these various labels

-       reminding ourselves of the original debates more than 100 years ago around “community”

-       setting up some “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly relevant propositions

1.  The common agenda

Collier’s critique of “utilitarian technocrats and Rawlsian lawyers corroding” the values of cooperation is, for me, very apt  

As far as I am aware, no one has so far attempted to extract (from the disparate elements I’ve sketched above) a common agenda. This is my first, very rough attempt -

- a dramatic change in the balance of rights and responsibilities – with more effort put into strengthening citizen “obligations” and less into “rights”

- Increased role for voluntary organisations – and cooperative activity

- Greater role for mutualised societies; and for (smaller) local authorities

- Municipalisation of services such as water

- More support for social enterprise
- and for local banks
- taxation of rent-seeking activities

- less emphasis on university education and more on vocational education

- development in youth services of “role model” (mentoring)

- rethink on aspects of state regulations in health and safety field

- importance of values of “respect” and “trust” being developed (by example!)

2.   The original debate about “community”

Movement from the close, if not stifling, “community” of towns and villages of past centuries (governed by social norms of respect, trust and acceptable behaviour) to modern “society” - where relationships are looser and anonymous – was a product of industrialisation. And industrialisation took a good two centuries to work through – it was in the late 1980s that the term “post-industrial” was first heard.

It was German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) who gave us the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” with which to make sense of that movement. And the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) first used the term “anomie” in 1893 to describe this feature of modern society.

The blog has several times this year found itself exploring issues of community solidarity - which had been one of the priorities of my political activity between 1968 and 1990. Some social scientists were telling us, in the 1960s, that the process of clearing the old slums had broken a crucial system of mutual neighbourly support (although other forces were also at work); and that a new system of social support was needed.

This coincided with the establishment in the early 1970s of a new department in local government for such things which, in Scotland, was given a quite explicit “preventive” objective. I became Chairman of such a committee in 1971 and used it to ensure the appointment of community workers to try to build more of the spirit of community in areas whose residents were suffering from what was called in those days “multiple deprivation”

In 1977 the UK national weekly "Social Work Today" commissioned me to write a substantial article which argued that our democratic system was failing such citizens - and that political parties no longer performed some of the functions we had attributed to them. In the meantime a few of us had managed to develop a strategy which saw support for these communities deepening – a strategy which has been continued by successive Scottish governments… 

Only one of the reviews I’ve read so far of the Collier book questions its realism – but does so in a rather smart way which reveals all that’s worst in a book review –

Collier’s paragon of the wise and ethical centrist is Emmanuel Macron, a man who, fewer than two years into his presidency, has disastrously low approval ratings, is widely seen as a tool of the wealthy, and just endured the most destructive burst of popular outrage France has seen since 1968. If that analogy didn’t already look foolish when Collier was writing The Future of Capitalism in 2017 and early 2018, it certainly does now.

The dream of a post-ideological pragmatism is itself ideological, of course, but what’s most interesting about Collier’s proposals is that if implemented, they would require not a variety of business-friendly Macronism but something closer to the redistributive politics of Bernie Sanders. The blunt policy instrument Collier most regularly suggests wielding is taxation. But because he’s a serious economist writing a book and the imagined remit of the serious book-writing economist is to rise above politics, to “move beyond the tired binary of Right and Left,” in the equally tired phrase you always find in works like The Future of Capitalism, Collier can’t bring himself to subscribe to a leftist budgetary project. Il faut être absolument centriste.

In the end what emerges most forcefully from The Future of Capitalism is its past — namely, Collier’s deep nostalgia for the collective purpose of the postwar West, which he himself experienced as a child and young adult growing up in Britain. That sense of collective purpose was forged in the fire of World War II. The institutions that defined the postwar liberal order gained legitimacy from their incorporation within a collective project to preserve peace.

What project exists today that could command a similar consensus and simultaneously revive growth throughout the developed world? Even though consensus is proving enragingly tough to secure, the answer is obvious: climate change. But Collier has little to say on the issue, or indeed several of the other major gyrations affecting the global economy today. The threat of automation, for example, which surely demands at least some consideration if your subject is the future of capitalism, is confidently brushed aside in one sentence: “Robotics is, I think, unlikely to reduce the need for work — our wants are probably insatiable.”

But Nobel-ish Prize-winning economist George Akerlof has called The Future of Capitalism “the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes,” which is both generous and wrong.

Collier says we need “radical new thinking” to get out of the mess we’re in — and we do — but he himself offers little more than tut-tutting social regressivism. Whatever good ideas The Future of Capitalism does contain struggle to emerge from the crush of their author’s monomania for the Trente Glorieuses.

Taxing the metropolis to fund the revitalization of small cities, giving tenants the right to buy houses at deep discounts: these aren’t bad ideas on their own, but how do we make them happen? The answer, of course, is through the political process, but on that The Future of Capitalism is by turns silent or blithely optimistic.

Collier’s good ideas remain undercooked because they have the misfortune of nesting in a book of political economy that has nothing useful to say about politics.

As I say, this is a good example of a bad book review - my definition of which is one which tells us more about the reviewer than the book! 

The post is already too long. Collier’s book is so important that that I will try to deal with the third of the “approaches” the post talk about in the next post 

update; just come across an essay on communitarianism on an amazing blog

https://theworthyhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/On-Communitarianism-PDF.pdf