what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query left and right in politics. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query left and right in politics. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

55 years in a couple of pages

I always like a bit of intellectual history ….and last week I alighted on a conversation with Roger Scruton around a revamp of a book which this English Conservative philosopher first issued in 1985
We have been told for several decades that the left-right spectrum no longer has any basis in reality although it remains a label very much in evidence 
Now 71, Scruton has been the bĂȘte noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book “Fads, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left”. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’.
In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.

A copy of the book was lying in Bucharest’s English bookshop when I popped in there on Sunday -  giving me the chance to read its opening pages which, I have to confess, made a great deal of sense even to an old lefty like me. 
Why, he asks, use a single term to cover anarchists such as Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Zizek and US liberals like Dworken, Galbraith and Rorty? Two reasons – they call themselves this and they all have an “enduring outlook” – some belonging to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and others to the post-war thinking according to which the state is or ought to be in charge of society and  empowered to distribute its goods…..”   

This - the dimension of economic ownership (monopoly through oligopoly to cooperatives/shared ownership to private owners) - is indeed one of the axis you need to make sense of world views. But it is not the only one – particularly these days when the social dimension has become so important. Class (rarely talked about now) is only one form of group identity – with race and sexuality being the new entrants. So an additional axis is needed for the strength of social norms - with totalitarianism being at one axis and anarchy at the other. There is a third – for the role of the state, for example, in welfare provision and general regulatory measures – but that’s a bit complicated for this blog.

So I will start with four quadrants which we can use, for example, 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 for 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” started all of 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a few years earlier..

We 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 as a first shot…..

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

 See also the Acorn Guide to Consumers

 You can actually read the entire “Thinkers of the New Left” here

 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.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’.
More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.
So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

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,’ Rodgers writes, ‘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.’
Yet, as Rodgers points out, 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; 

One recent analyst on the “ideological roots of populism” suggests that there are now 4 tribes – liberal and conservative centrists and left and right anarchists.

For more, read –

Sunday, September 3, 2023

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.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Reform – and the neglect of context

Today’s highlight was a fascinating story by a Peruvian of how local technocrats – trained at US universities – returned to Peru to peddle solutions to the country which were lapped up from 2000 but are now being rejected by the prevailing power structure - a strange blended mix of left and right.    

Since taking office in July 2021, the so-called “left-wing” government and the ostensibly “right-wing” National Congress have been working together to dismantle the weak scaffolding that held our infant liberal democracy. This regression’s happening against the backdrop of a savage rollback in the state’s capacity. The government has removed career civil servants, reneged on the expectation that key ministries should be withheld from political appointees and acted to undermine the transparency and accountability gains.

This year, the Congress passed two crucial pieces of legislation: removing oversight of higher education standards and giving parents the right to approve all school teaching materials.

This move has been promoted by conservative groups, who want to stop the government from allowing educators to teach important topics in schools, like sex education or encouraging informed assessments of the roles that the Shining Path and the Peruvian State played in the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In May 2022, the National Congress elected new members of the Constitutional Tribunal – Peru’s version of the US Supreme Court. Four of its six members are aligned with supporters of the previous laws. Many other liberal reforms made during the previous 20 years are also at stake:

·       Transport reforms (tackling informal transport providers).

·       How parties can use resources during political campaigns (the basis of several money laundering cases, involving the leaders of most parties).

·       Hard-earned minority rights.

·       Freedom of information and expression.

·       Environmental protection policies.

 

You may well think that a self-styled “left wing” government and a primarily “right wing” congress should be at loggerheads. The reality is more complex and interesting.

“Left” and “right” in Peru, as in much of the world, are now meaningless political labels. Political power provides economic and social opportunities – that’s what matters now in Peruvian politics.

Peruvian parties are mercantilist operations – public prosecutors have even accused some of being criminal organisations, with clear private interests. This shift in priorities has made it easy for them to come to a tacit, multi-party understanding to undo the progressive reforms. It’s a new elite bargain. 

I’ve never worked in South America – but, for some reason, the article struck home. I recognised the issue because, in 1990, I found myself invited by the WHO (Europe) Director of Public Health to help her develop a network of health promotion in the newly-liberated countries of Central Europe. It was a short-term contract of some 6 months but proved to be a launch-pad for my new career as consultant in “capacity (institutional) development” in both central Europe and central Asia. This was a fascinating experience which I’ve written about in Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors? (2007) and The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) - presented to NISPAcee Conferences in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats  were making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes  making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy  or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.  

Basically my criticism was that project for institutional change failed to understand the local contexts and cultures - and assumed that “good practice blueprints” from elsewhere could be easily replicated – with a bit of training.

One of the reasons I enjoyed my eight years in Central Asia from 1999 was that I had the freedom to take account of the local conditions and to design strategies which the local European Delegations had confidence would actually work. The “conditionalities” which governed the “candidate countries” of aspiring EU members in central Europe patently didn’t apply in Central Asia – and the “counterparts” with whom I worked had the intelligence and ability to be able to insist on “workable” strategies. In Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, this produced results. 

Last year I came across a rare book which helped me understand why – this was Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance by David Ellerman (2006) which I wrote about at the time here - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/06/helping-people-help-themselves.html 

In my next post I hope to develop the theme

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Are Centrists Evil?

The older I get, the more radical my opinions become. This is not how its supposed to be – although this fascinating analysis of 40 years of plotting british attitudes does say that -

The public first began to look to government rather more in the wake of the financial crash of 2008-9, though in the event that mood appears eventually to have dissipated. However, the same cannot be said, so far at least, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations of government in the wake of that public health crisis have never been higher. The public shows no sign so far of wanting to row back on the increased taxation and spending that has been part of the legacy of the pandemic, not least perhaps because of their dissatisfaction with the state of the health service. Meanwhile, there are now also record levels of support for more defence spending. So far as the public are concerned at least, the era of smaller government that Margaret Thatcher aimed to promulgate – and which Liz Truss briefly tried to restore in the autumn of 2022 with her ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ – now seems a world away.”
Ultimately any political party that wants to survive has to respect these trends and work within them. Public opinion may well swing back in the other direction in the future, but for now anyone who thinks the Truss programme is one voters will buy is entirely delusional.

Duncan Green of Oxfam has a useful post about the report which focuses more on the increased libertarianism of the UK rather than on expectations about the State

This blog has, on occasion, confessed my erstwhile liberalism or “centrism”. For example I did recently find that this Rory Stewart video interview about “the truth about British politics” just before the UK general election of 2019 was “brilliantly thoughtful” – not least for the care with which he treated the questions; hardly the most common of a politician’s responses. But a devastating profile in The New Statesman about Stewart’s book tour promoting “Politics on the Edge” has made me realise how shallow that reaction was.

It’s a book of recrimination, anger, shame and oblivion. It is about the failures of the Conservative Party, the failures of Britain, and the failures of Rory Stewart who said “he kept coming back to Tacitus” as he wrote. The Roman historian’s Annals describe the eclipse of the senate: its powerlessness under successive emperors and its descent into servile degeneracy. “Politics on the Edge” has the same message: parliament once knew better days. Its members are squandering a precious inheritance. Their failures are moral. Stewart thinks it will “make a lot of people angry”.

Stewart’s big mate these days is, of course, Alastair Campbell – the two of them have presented for the past year what has become the UK’s favourite podcastThe Rest is Politics” which I find a bit too smug and self-satisfied but which does exude a good sense of the “centrism” which is the focus of my concerns. Campbell actively promotes The New European weekly which has gone so far as to feature an excerpt from Stewart’s new book

But why do I find this “centrism” so objectionable?

Is it just GUILT about my previous incarnation?

Perhaps this post from 12 years ago gives a sort of an answer

In 2011 I was invited by a Romanian journal to write a piece about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. My article was entitled “The Dog that didn’t bark” but the editors carried the warning that it was “a view from the left”. At the time I posted that certain issues arose from such labelling -

  • Do the editors not realise that use of such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about freedom of expression?

  • It has been recognised for a long time that the left-right labelling makes little sense. Wikipedia has an excellent briefing on this. And I recommend people do their own test on the political compass website - which uses two (not one) dimensions to try to situate people politically.

  • Criticism of the logic and effects of “neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least the ordo-liberalism which has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.

  • Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly signals that I have no truck with statism. All my political life I have supported community enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions. My business card describes me as an “explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last 20 years as the open nature for my search for both a satisfactory explanation of how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to be unacceptable trends. I admit to having been attracted in my youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late 1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level, by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.

More recently I have generally been a fan of the writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM). As an academic I was convinced by the critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation” and was the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional economics.

But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s (which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the political compass). I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an influential Scottish regional politican, used my role to create more open processes of policy-making. Indeed community activists and opposition politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party.
I held on to my leading political position on the huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The definitions I give in Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power reveal the maverick me.

For the past 20 years, however, since I left the UK to work as an adviser on institutional development in central europe and central asia , I have not been involved in politics. My interest is to find some common ground in all the critiques of the current social and economic malaise – and to develop some consensus about the actions which might be taken.

Conclusion;

The heading to this post was deliberately eye-catching – meant only to challenge the all-too-easy liberal acceptance of the way things are. “So isst die Welt und musst nicht so sein” is still my watchword. Rory Stewart may have too high a profile for me but still remains a very interesting guy – this interview has him paarse UK politics in a quite fascinating way  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6ZyJ-3H8g&ab_channel=NovaraMedia

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Whatever happened to Rationality?

I was deeply affected by the “rationalistic turn” in the social sciences which coincided with my University days from 1960-64. My initial field of study had been modern languages simply because I had been good in school at French and German but I was soon seduced by economics and politics and duly switched in my final two Honours years to those subjects 

It’s only recently that some books have started to appear pointing to just how much military funding and the Cold War had contributed to the new focus of the social sciences on rationality. Robert McNamara best embodied the spirit of calculation first in the Ford Company, then in the US Department of Defence – where he introduced the idea of PPBS during the Vietnam war - and finally in the World Bank

But it was to be a decade later before I got properly into the works of people such as Herbert Simon, Etzioni, Lindblom and Wildavsky and indeed I studied them closely only in the 1980s as part of the UK’s first MSc course in Policy Analysis with Lewis Gunn in which I enrolled in the early 1980s

And it was 1992 before I came across “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of Reason in the Western World” which I barely understood but loved - and was to be an early warning shot across the bows of the technocrats in what has, since the onslaught of populism in the past 5 years, become a continuous salvo. 

So it’s about time we sought some clarity - and perhaps balance – in this fraught debate about rationality and The Enlightenment. Particularly because the latest knight to present himself in the lists - in all his shining armour – is none other than Steven Pinker, the Panglossian Optimist and author of Enlightenment Now who has a new book called “Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters” with the embedded discussion thread being fairly useful. 

I sense, however, that getting through the bibliography below is going to be a long haul – so let me just flag the key reading up and we’ll see how it goes 

Background Reading

Crisis of expertise CEU 2021 syllabus A fascinating outline of a recent course run by the Central European University

The Dialectic of Enlightenment; by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) It was these German emigrees of the 1930s who brought to America the critique of the enlightenment which arguably sparked the recent right-wing backlash. Ironic that they did so at a time when scientism was taking off with a vengeance!

The Origins of American Social Science Dorothy Ross (1990) Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally. 

Reclaiming the Enlightenment – toward a politics of radical engagement by Stephen Eric Bronner (2004) The start of the left’s comeback 

Shaky Foundations – the politics-social science nexus in post-war america Mark Solovey (2013) embraced a strategy that rested on two key commitments, to scientism and to social engineering. The first commitment involved accepting, in a broad sense, a unity- of- science viewpoint, which assumed that the social sciences lagged behind the more mature natural sciences and which posited that the former should follow in the footsteps of the latter. Often this viewpoint meant the social sciences needed to rid themselves of their involvement with a wide array of humanistic forms of inquiry, including “soft” qualitative, philosophical, historical, and normative forms of analysis. Just as importantly, social scientists had to establish a clear distinction between scientific social inquiry and other value- laden spheres of social action, such as politics, social reform, and ideology, and especially Marxist or socialist perspectives.

More positively, this viewpoint implied that the path to scientific credibility and progress lay in the pursuit of more rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations that promised to yield accurate predictions about what individuals, social groups, and social systems, including economic and political systems, would do under stated conditions. The other key commitment, concerning the social sciences’ practical value, indicated that this work would contribute to the national welfare and human betterment more generally through social engineering applications. This commitment often rested on an instrumental viewpoint, which regarded social science knowledge, techniques of analysis, and expertise as apolitical, nonideological, and value free. A very common idea associated with this position suggested that basic or pure scientific inquiry, whether in the social or the natural sciences, produced value- neutral knowledge of a fundamental sort. Such knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for realizing desired practical goals in a couple of ways, depending on the specific domains of investigation. Certain lines of investigation sought to place the processes of decision making on a rational basis. Other lines promised to facilitate control over individuals, social groups, and social systems. Both manners of realizing social sciences’ practical value rested on a technocratic outlook, as their proponents generally assumed that leaders and managers in various sectors of society, especially in government, comprised the most relevant audiences for social science knowledge

As the first chapter’s consideration of the NSF debate indicates and as subsequent chapters explain more fully, basic questions about the scientific identity, practical utility, and political import of the social sciences attracted extensive attention and provoked considerable controversy in the early postwar years. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine the stories of the military, the Ford Foundation, and the new NSF, respectively, to describe how each patron staked out its importance within the context of a transformed and largely new Cold War patronage system, to analyze the ways patrons and the scholars who worked most closely with them addressed long- standing questions and contemporary disputes about the social sciences and their funding, and to illuminate pointed challenges that arose as these patrons sought to advance scholarship grounded in scientistic and social engineering commitments.

By midcentury nobody doubted that the recently unified Department of Defense (DOD) was and would remain the dominant patron of American science for the foreseeable future. So for social scientists seeking support for their work in the Cold War years, the enormous defense science establishment naturally had great significance. Building on a sizable body of work about the military– social science partnership that includes many excellent accounts of specific disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, chapter 2 focuses on the development of military funding policies and programs and examines the struggles of social scientists to establish their presence in the natural science–oriented defense science establishment. These scholars encountered persistent conservative suspicions and often found it hard to gain support from their superiors in the defense science establishment, including skeptical physical scientists.

Under these conditions, social scientists had little choice but to argue strongly for scientistic forms of inquiry and their social engineering applications. Such ideas then became pervasive in military social science agencies and programs, thereby providing valuable support to many influential fields of research in ways consistent with those social engineering commitments. Moreover, these developments stimulated the growth of the military– social science partnership, which became increasingly important to American military operations and Cold War strategy by the time of the Kennedy administration. 

Cold war social sciences – knowledge production, liberal democracy and human nature  ed M Solovey and H Cravens (2012)

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/10/book-review-cold-war-social-science-knowledge-production-liberal-democracy-and-human-nature/

https://www.academia.edu/7398929/Cold_War_Social_Science_Specter_Reality_or_Useful_Concept

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis; Aaron Wildavsky (originally 1979) but special edition with foreward by B Guy Peters (2018). This was the analyst who almost single-handedly held the rationalist school up to ridicule and showed how political judgement came into every key decision....

Nervous States – Democracy and the decline of Reason; William Davies (2019) A Fantastic and highly original book - reviewed here by one of my favourite political science writers - David Runciman

"When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an “Oxbridge Trump”. Davies’s book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn’t really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new – the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries.

Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying – and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad.

Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying. This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn’t happen any more. As Davies writes: “The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment.” Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise.

The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. “The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn’t suffer the same alienation because its ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings.” Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. “As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical.”

These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon.

For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. “This is a political vision,” Davies writes, “in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family.” But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn’t sound like the basis of a political vision to me.

The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where “around 50% of people go to university and 50% don’t”, something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account.

This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval – from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Ruling a Void

OK - the last 2 posts gave the 10 golden rules for corrupting the political class – at least according to Anthony Jay the highly successful scriptwriter of the "Yes Minister" television series of 35 years ago.

The question is whether these in fact give us the basic reasons for the “hollowing out” of British (and European) democracy……during that period. 

Voters and citizens no longer consider that parties and politicians represent their concerns – they vote in decreasing numbers and with increasing cynicism. 
  • Centralise revenue
  • Centralise authority
  • ensure the Prime Minister is captured
  • Insulate the Cabinet
  • Enlarge constituencies
  • Overpay MPs
  • Appoint rather than elect
  • Ensure that civil servants are permanent – but Ministers highly temporary
  • Appoint more staff
  • Keep state affairs secret – whatever the laws about Open Government may say
I’ve read a hell of a lot about democracy during this period. You might indeed say that its been my bread and butter since, between 1970 and 1990, I got my cash variously from state coffers - a combination of Polytechnic and local government sources - operating as a local government politician and writing about the various efforts to improve its practice.
My (much better) fees since then have come overtly from commercial sources – but all of the companies I have worked for since 1991 have been under contract to the European Commission. And the focus of my work in the last 20 years has been the building of the capacity of local and central government systems in central Europe and Central Asia…….Its ironic that the democratic models we held up to those “transitional systems”  for emulation proved to be disintegrating even as we spoke……Talk about hubris!

I find it curious, first, that I seem to have been the first to upload Anthony Jay’s piece – and therefore to subject it to analysis. The academics who write about democracy (and there are thousands!) clearly view the satire as beneath their dignity….
But Jay score 8 out of 10 in my reckoning for his analysis – I would fault only his points about staffing. Civil servant contracts have actually become highly contractual – and also the subject of fairly severe cutbacks. But the fact still remains that it is the senior (rather than junior) staff who have been laughing all the way to the bank…….with inflated salaries and pensions.  

The question remains, however, whether his points (however satirically meant) actually capture the true reasons for the collapse of political legitimacy? 
One point, for example, commonly made in discussions is that the political class has now become younger and very incestuous – moving quickly from academia into think-tanks and positions as aides to politicians before themselves becoming politicians. In short, they accumulate favours and networks which make them highly dependent and malleable….. And they use a managerial language which not only alienates but reflects a consensual ideology about the limits of state action enshrined in “neo-liberalism”.

Peter Oborne is a British journalist who wrote a critical book on this subject in 2008 called The Triumph of the Political ClassA month ago he enthused about a new academic book about the “hollowing of democracy” and it is to his views I want to devote the rest of this post. The basic question about the reasons for the degeneration of politics will be continued in future posts.
Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.
Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” 
The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government. All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment.
However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.
Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position. To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so. 
The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”. I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties.
The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland. These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.
Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.
His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.
The painting is Daumier's "Belly of the Beast"