Remembering the post-war giants

Its gloomy and wet in the mountains these days - indeed right now its actually snowing outside - and so over the weekend I was looking at some documentaries on Scottish Independence – specifically a three-part series on STV late last year subtitled “the route to the Referendum” - this is the last part

The series exhausted the capacity which my internet supplier allows me - but brought back strong memories from the first 48 years of my life there. Its story started in the immediate post-war period, with some great shots of street life in those years. 

Characters I had known in my schooldays and university years flooded my mind – these were the days before television took over our lives and when, therefore, flesh and blood individuals standing before us could (and did) inspire.  For very difference reasons, five people who taught me at Glasgow University came to mind – Thomas Wilson benign Professor of Economics and well-known exponent of Keynesism, then the new religion of intellectuals; and Ronald Meek - a severe Marxist economic historian who worked with the Professor of Politics D Daiches Raphael on the editing and interpretation of Adam Smith’s papers

But the two who made the biggest impact on me in the last two years of my Master’s Degree were John Mackintosh (Lecturer in Politics) and Zevedei Barbu, Lecturer in Sociology and Social Psychology. Both had fascinating backgrounds and the sort of careers you don’t tend to see so often these days - Mackintosh had spent almost a decade teaching in Africa before he came to Scotland and quickly combined his career in academia (his book on Cabinet politics became a classic) with one as a prominent Labour Westminster politician (representing a seat on the eastern border of Scotland). He became a fervent proponent of Scottish devolution - his book on the subject inspired me and led me to visit him at the House of Commons by when I had taken a senior position myself in a Scottish Region – but he was to die in the late 1970s at the tragically young age of 50.

Barbu was Romanian and his central European presentations made his exposition of people such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim really come alive for me. And he has remained in the magical repository of mind from which we all permitted to draw at later moments in our lives. 

Mackintosh is the better known figure – there is an active lecture series in his honour - with the chairman of the current Better Together campaign recently delivering one of the lectures 

I had tried once before to find out about Barbu and had drawn a blank – but there is now an entry on the University of Glasgow website. Even better Google Romania now directs me to a long article in his memory available on the site of the journal Apostrophe - one of so many literary journals with which Romania is blessed. And, in 2018, I at last found this short biography

He was born in Reciu (Alba), a 700 year-old Saxon village near Sibiu, Romania, in 1914, son of Marcu, a farmer. He would become a world-renowned Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology and began his academic career at the University of Cluj, where he obtained a PhD in Psychology in 1941, and subsequently assisted Florin Ştefănescu-Goangă of the Psychology Department and the renowned Lucian Blaga (Romanian philosopher, poet and playwright) of the Department of Philosophy of Culture.

Arrested in 1943 accused of engaging in left-wing political activity, he spent2 years in prison and then became Nationalities Minister in the first post-war government before the Communists take-over happened in 1947. He became cultural attaché in the London Embassy before seeking political asylum in 1948 in the UK. 
In 1949, Barbu enrolled as a PhD research student at the University of Glasgow. His PhD, "The psychology of Nazism, Communism and Democracy", was one of the first comparative psychosocial approaches of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. After graduating, he worked on two books: "Democracy and Dictatorship. Their Psychology and Patterns of Life" (1956) and "Problems of Historical Psychology" (1960), before returning to the University of Glasgow in 1961, where he lectured in Sociology and Social Psychology until 1963, laying the foundations for the Department of Sociology. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Sussex, lecturing Sociology, and established the Department of Sociology there. 

In 1976, Barbu was invited to lecture at the University of Brazil by then principal, José Carlos Azevedo, where he died in March 1993.

Few in the present generation of young scientists, philosophers or sociologists, psychologists and historians, intellectuals (whether British or Romanian) have now even heard of him. One recent writer has tried to make up for this -

Zebedee Barbu was born the Reciu village. In 1914, at his coming into the world, the village belonged, in administrative terms, Sibiu. Reciu mentioned in documents as belonging since the XIV century in Alba county. In a list of the localities around Sibiu Saxons lived since the beginning of their settlement in Transylvania, The house in which Barbu was born was built by his grandfather, Andrei Barbu at the "top lane" of the village, near the church. Those who knew him in Cluj and Sibiu, the young professor, a man of elegant manners "townsman" all those who were left spellbound, physically or intellectually, by Professor gentleman as easily conquered the hearts of ladies and subsequent Anglo-Saxon academic colleagues would have hardly imagined his origin; with his inclination towards art and music
His leftist beliefs - accused of subversive activities against the Antonescu regime - led him to two years between 1942 and 1944 in prison Caransebes. Barbu Zebedee believed in a new world…… After the war, many of the young philosopher’s associates (he was only thirty years) became important figures in the new regime about to be set up in the country. 

The first PM, Dr. Petru Groza, whom Barbu had met in the war, was not a Communist and was used by the new regime as an easily manipulated puppet. Barbu was called immediately after his installation as Prime Minister on March 6, 1945, to serve as Secretary of State in the newly created Ministry of Nationalities.  His mission in this post was to help develop a constitutional status for all "nationalities" of Romania post - war settlement.During the six months as was involved in this project met Patrascanu Barbu, " a rara avis , the only intellectual in the Politburo of the Communist Party, "as he characterizes himself in his autobiographical pages. 

A few months later he was appointed to the post of cultural attaché in London. From here, he travelled often to Paris to attend the Peace Conference as a member of the Romanian delegation. For two years, Barbu increasingly worried about the deteriorating situation in his homeland.When he heard a new ambassador appointed by Ana Pauker was to arrive in London in the summer of 1948, Barbu request a leave for a month……. 

His book "Democracy and Dictatorship" presents an exhaustive discussion on the origins of democracy, against the backdrop of fine psychological analysis. But it does not stop here; the first part of the book, the author responds to questions and began to put them into the maze searching the exit. The second part of the paper is devoted to study the forms and substance of the various systems of dictatorial government, whether of the left or right, Communist or Nazi-fascist; Barbu has lived within a single decade both. It is very interesting to note the author's premise: "The transition from non-democratic to a democratic period" write Barbu, "is [...] closely connected with degree of flexibility Increasing year in the mental structures of man" ("The transition from phase nondemocrată at that democracy is intimately linked to an individual's mental development flexibility ") 

“Normal service” resumed?

For every reader I’ve lost in last month’s more or less exclusive focus on the Scottish referendum, it appears I’ve gained at least another. I think readers will understand why, a month ago, I abandoned my usual subjects to try to give you all a sense of the arguments which were going in the small country I abandoned in 1990…..

Although the blog will now return to other themes, it will follow events in Scotland with more regularity. What happened there these past few years is part of the outflowing of anger and hope we have seen in other parts of the world in recent years as citizens have taken to the streets to object to the way their world was being governed.

Each outburst – whether in Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt…- had its specific reasons and shape but all focused on the misuse of power. My new readers in Turkey and the Ukraine know they belong to a wider movement which may use slogans – but know that social change needs more than that. They are keen to learn from one another – and to go beyond the simplistic manuals of protest and regime change that people like Gene Sharp perfected (with American cash) a decade or so ago. 

I remember tantalising the Uzbek officials who attended my classes at the Presidential Academy in Tashkent with what I called the “opportunity theory of change” – namely that political change happens suddenly and fortuitously and requires individuals (who may not fit our images about leaders) who have prepared rigorously and who have the capacity both to inspire followers but (most difficult) to manage the building of the organisational capacity which will follow success.

Social change requires a challenging combination of emotion, preparation…and opportunity. The emotion has to be channelled; the preparation both analytical and political; and the opportunity calculated and managed…. The new website which I will (hopefully) be inaugurating in October when I get back down to Sofia will be focusing on social change – initially the more neglected analytical elements of that process…..

I wanted yesterday to explore how my countrymen were dealing with the outcome of the vote – and what better way than to look at some of the 100 or so sites which Bella Caledonia - one of the most famous Scottish bloggers - identifies on her blogroll. Her Saturday post was a good one -

My anger is not that we voted to remain under a UK flag, it’s that we voted not to give the power back to the people. Whilst we will remain locked in a system that is demolishing our human rights and our society, my hope remains, because unless we choose to let them can never have power over our imagination.

We don’t need anyone’s permission, so lets just start building it anyway and let us build it not on binaries, but with depth, diversity, and humanity.

Let us not replicate the model that distributes power so unequally, lets not go back to party politics, adversarial posturing and divisiveness. Let’s take our time to build it, and bring everyone with us this time.

It can be done, if we can learn from what was most valuable about the YES movement and realise that it is not leadership from above, but individual innovation towards mutual benefit that was our strength. This will be our most productive and powerful tool.

Scotland is now light years ahead of the rest of the UK in terms of understanding our identity and our democracy. It’s going to be long and it’s going to be hard work, but we must bring them with us, and whilst I applaud those celebrating the #45 we must bring the 55% with us too because if we don’t do that, we will always lose. Divide and rule…

We have all become citizen journalists, researchers, debaters and campaigners, we have collectively undertaken a journey which has brought us to a level of political maturity which I don’t think anyone could have predicted. It’s astonishing, it’s innovative, and it belongs not to our ‘leaders’ but to each and every one of you.

As a society we have evolved into something new, something knowledgeable, an information sharing and commentary network which has turned us into something very powerful, and very exciting indeed. We had purpose. We forgot to eat, we forgot to sleep, we were energised by something bigger than ourselves.

We became voracious in our consumption of the latest opinion or analysis on the latest development. We researched economic theory, constitutional legislation, social policy, renewable energy potential, and we wrote stories shared our questions and fears, and found the answers amongst ourselves. 

We have found our own leadership potential and we are still using it in a collective murmuration that is flocking, forming and reforming, in a gathering momentum towards what I hope will be real structural change. We can’t remain in this state of fight or flight, we won’t survive if we do. We need to find a way to entwine these new behaviours into our culture from ground level. Fight or flight is necessary for a revolution, but what we need now is evolution. We need to be the drops in the ocean.

We’re facing a political system that’s become a zero sum game and the very thing that’s caused the race to the bottom of careerist politicians and neoliberal consensus, is our insistence on binaries. Yes or No. Labour or Tory. Westminster or Holyrood. Right or wrong. We KNOW the world doesn’t work like that, so why do we keep voting for it? Because we haven’t seen what the alternative might look like, we haven’t been able to imagine it yet. I’m going to propose that we imagine it now, that we make it anyway.

We don’t need anyone else’s permission to be creative, but we need to give ourselves permission to bring humanity back into politics and put politics back into our lives. How can we make political behaviour part of our every day culture?

One new website I came across - Frankly Independent - is one I wish I had encountered earlier. Apart from the original historical and European slant it brings, it is an amazing compendium of resources

Another thoughtful post on the aftermath of the vote comes from Gerry Hassan

Something has shifted in Scotland which will never be the same again. This in the words of Fintan O’Toole is the belief that, ‘Ask an important question and people will respond with dignity and recognise they have power’…. The emergence of ‘the third Scotland’, the phrase I coined to describe the glorious, multi-various explosion of self-organising radical currents such as Radical Independence Campaign, National Collective and Common Weal, will have enduring significance beyond the referendum.

They have brought many young people and twenty-somethings into politics and activism for the first time.A host of English centre-left writers such as John Harris and Jason Cowley, editor of the ‘New Statesman’ (and Paul Mason), have expressed an admiration for this tendency and the term. They have both commented that they would love to see a ‘third England’ emerge which forged a space beyond the political parties and traditional ways of doing politics, but know for now it is far off.

They recognise the gathering storm of a problem around the British state as it strips back public services, undermines the public good, and engages in a systematic project of social engineering, openly redistributing income, wealth and power from the poor to the rich. Will Hutton has observed that all of this is one of the main drivers of the independence debate; but he still has concerns about how sustainable a viable social democracy is in a small nation of five million people, sitting next to one of nearly 60 million. He thinks it is possible, but that such a settlement would require a very different, more bold politics than the SNP’s existing version of independence.

This isn’t just about currency union, but charting a different course from the economic straightjacket and orthodoxies of the Treasury and Bank of England.Such writers want to reclaim the radical traditions of England and challenge the idea of ‘the conservative nation’. In this they recognise the power of myths, folklore and imagination in how you go about creating and mobilising a radical community. They note from England that Scotland has travelled quite a distance on this road; and more than we may sometimes care to recognise. 

The difficult ways of navigating centre-left ideas in today’s economic and social world poses huge problems. It is ridiculous to pose that it is anti-solidarity, selfish and about self-interest, to support independence. The debate in Scotland has coalesced on how to give modern expression to such ideas and sentiment: putting the values of solidarity into a lexicon of inter-connectedness and interdependence to produce a politics of inter-independence.One way to aid this debate north of the border is for the non-nationalist voices to come together in a variety of ways to offer competition and hold the SNP to account. A culture of self-determination has to become a vibrant ecology and nurture and support an infrastructure: one with institution building and resource creating.

 Three other thoughtful post-mortems are from

- A famous song-writer and writer - Pat Kane

- National Collective - and

- the rather crabbit Lallands Peat Worrier 

Masterclasses in reviewing non-fiction books

This is the first of a couple of posts looking at the lessons we can learn from two great practitioners of the reviewing non-fiction books – UK historian Richard Evans and German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck. 

Back in Bucharest, I took the opportunity yesterday to walk down the famous Calea Victoriei Bvd to the Kretzulescu Humanitas bookshop for the first time in many months and browse in the generous selection of English books it has. One of the titles which caught my eye was the rather fat The Empire of Democracy – from the 1970s to the end of the Cold War.

This is almost exactly the period I have been trying to cover in the current draft of Dispatches to the Next Generation which I uploaded a few days ago.

This called for the test to which I now subject interesting titles – namely check

- its “user-friendliness” (which nowadays includes size of font)

- whether it bothers to explain why yet another book should be inflicted on us (which requires the author to gives us a brief survey of the relevant literature and identify what’s distinctive about his/hers)

- its list of recommended reading

- make a note of the title and return home to google the reviews

In this case, the book claimed to be the 

“the first full account of the way the political life of Western democracies have been going for most of the past half-century” 

– a rather questionable claim given the scale of books about the crisis in western liberalism pouring from the presses in the past few years – let alone such books as Contesting Democracy – political ideas in 20^th century Europe by Jan-Werner Mueller (2013) which warrants only an endnote on page 794).

Nor is there is a recommended list of reading and, although the text certainly looked highly readable, I returned home reasonably clear that this was a 900 page book which would add little to my understanding of this important period in my life. 

Google gave me the excellent news that not only had historian Richard Evans reviewed The Empire of Democracy (in “The Nation”) but that he had given us a masterclass in the art of reviewing.

I should make it clear that Richard Evans is well known as a caustic reviewer – who gets as good as he gives, particularly in the London Review of Books which gives him full scope for both critical reviews of his own work and his own reviews of others. His 1998 book “In Defence of History” was mauled by a reviewer in LRB – occasioning eventually his own strong reply. One review of his brought forth energetic responses – as did this one 

In this case, too, Evans does not pull his punches – although he gives credit where it’s due. The review covers so many important points that I am reproducing it more or less in full……. 

Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the west since the cold war tells us how we got to where we are today - tracking the rise and fall of an economic, social, and political order that now seems to be under fundamental and potentially lethal pressure.

Despite, however, the convincing nature of his overall diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of neoliberalism, however, there are many problems with how Reid-Henry tells this story, starting with the narrative style in which he has chosen to cast it.

To put it bluntly, he doesn’t seem to be aware of even the most basic rules of historical narrative.

 

- Individual actors in the story, from Mitterrand to Trump, are introduced with only scant background information; important dates are missing in dense chapters; and statements and observations are ventured without any attempt to ground them in evidence. For a more or less random example, near the end of the book we are told that

 

      “Dodd-Frank had belatedly been passed in 2011, along with its famous Volcker rule.”

 

You have to read back more than 60 pages for any explanation as to what these things are. At roughly that time, Reid-Henry tells us on the very same page, 

“amplified by the extended reach of new media, the culture wars…leapt back into life as never before, as tirades blared out across the raucous and indiscriminating airwaves of shock-jock radio and Fox television.”

 He makes no attempt to unpack this sentence, simply assuming that readers will understand the references. But it’s not a safe assumption to make, and terms such as “culture wars” and “shock-jock radio” really do need to be explained for the uninitiated.

There are more substantive problems as well. For quite long stretches of the book, I found it difficult to understand the sweeping generalizations that pepper the text. For instance, what was “the distinctive sense of ennui that had haunted the Western democracies during the 1990s”? Among whom? Bored with what?

“Americans in particular,” we read a couple of pages earlier, “found themselves in a confusing place.” All Americans, and what place? “They were concerned about growing inequity,” the text continues, but we aren’t told how or why or which Americans were concerned or in what way.

 

Similar generalizations occur about other peoples, such as “the French,” who apparently “felt that they were immune from the troubles that had struck the United States, because their banking system was more prudent.”

Actually, most likely the vast majority of “the French” neither knew nor cared very much about their banking system, prudent or not. Later, we are told that a “declining sense of trust within society” in the early 21st century meant that “left and right now converged upon a resolutely anti-state ethos.”

Leaving aside the question of precisely which countries this applies to, one can think of myriad issues where this is simply untrue, from the introduction of the Sure Start program in the UK in 1998 to the British left’s growing demand for the renationalization of private utilities, including the railways (now part of the official program of the Labour Party), to the pressure exerted in the US by the right for the expansion of the state security apparatus in the “war against terror” and the persistent advocacy by Republicans of more state expenditure on the military.

 

Often, Reid-Henry’s use of the passive voice disguises an almost complete absence of detail: 

“the balance between freedom and democracy that Western liberal democracies had struggled for forty years to maintain was now rejected altogether.”

 What is the evidence for this struggle? Why should freedom and democracy be treated as opposites between which a balance needed to be maintained? And was this balance actually rejected by everyone? Or if only partially rejected—or not rejected at all—then by whom and when and where? It’s not even true of Poland and Hungary, where substantial forces remain in opposition to the right-wing nationalists currently in power.

 

In many sections, the book reads more like a commentary on events than an analytical narrative. The description of the election that put Barack Obama in the White House is a good example. There are some interesting observations on Sarah Palin, but we’re not told what public office she held before becoming a candidate for the vice presidency; the Tea Party is brought into the narrative, but we’re apparently expected to know what it was, who helped launch it, and what policies it advocated; and no statistics are provided for the election to indicate how many people voted for Obama and who they were.

 

The nature of Obama’s appeal is also largely left unexplored (his powerful catchphrase “Yes, we can!” isn’t even mentioned), and running throughout the book is also the highly dubious assumption that street politics exercise a profound effect on political systems, from the anti–Vietnam War movement, which the author tells us inaugurated the remaking of the West in the early 1970s, to the Occupy movement, which flared up briefly in 2011 and is now almost completely forgotten. Yet the more than 1 million people who marched through the streets of London on February 15, 2003, to protest the impending invasion of Iraq achieved precisely nothing, nor did the similar number of people who marched through the same streets on March 23, 2019, to demand that Britain remain in the European Union.

 

There are still many passages in this book that can be read with considerable profit: The account of the 2008–09 financial crisis is particularly perceptive, and one could mention many other examples. But there is a more fundamental and perhaps more interesting respect in which the book rests on a highly questionable assumption. Chief among these is the concept of “the West” itself and its linkage with liberalism and democracy.

Empire of Democracy falls into a long tradition of historical writing centred on predictions of the downfall of the West. In the 19th century, the idea of the West became a foil against which political theorists developed their recipes for progress and change. Russian Slavophiles rejected what they saw as Western individualism and the Western advocacy of material progress based on industrial capitalism, for example, while Russian Westernizers saw their country’s future very much in embracing these things. In the early 20th century, right-wing nationalists in Germany and Central Europe offered similar warnings, excoriating what they saw as the decadent materialism, spiritual weakness, and moral corruption of a West that was no longer able to prevent its own decline.

Foremost among them was Oswald Spengler, whose book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, usually translated as The Decline of the West, became hugely popular in Germany during the 1920s, largely because it was read as a prophecy of Germany’s resurgence under a future nationalist dictatorship and then was taken, not entirely accurately, as a prediction of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933.

The way we live now

This blog has mentioned several times the advantages of the semi-nomadic life. Since renting the flat in Sofia last April, I’ve accumulated a fair number of books and paintings and may well end the rental shortly (the delight of the Carpathian mountains in spring beckons). So each trip north means a box of books, of clothes and a pile of at least 10 paintings. And therefore an opportunity to dip into some books as I travel. Yesterday I started to read, for the second time, Tony Judt’s short Ill Fares the Land (2010). The link gives the book's entire Introduction and is therefore well worth reading. It starts very powerfully "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," Judt begins - We are obsessed with money and have lost any sense of community.

In the 30 years following the Second World War, there was a widespread belief that the state could do a better job than the unregulated market. A benign welfare state would keep us from the poverty of the 1930s. It would protect us from cradle to grave. These assumptions underpinned Butskellism in Britain, the Great Society in the United States and European social democracy. In the 1970s, confidence in the state and a larger public realm fell apart. Since then, many have lost any sense of the state as either efficient or benign. Instead, we have come to believe, as Margaret Thatcher said, that: "There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families."

Judt pulls no punches. This new obsession with wealth, privatisation and the private sector is disastrous. The evidence of public squalor is all around us: "Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will." The first chapter, "The Way We Live Now", is a passionate argument against the rise of inequality, the collapse in social mobility and the "pathological social problems" that follow. "Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority," he writes, "translates into ill-health, missed educational opportunity and - increasingly - the familiar symptoms of depression." Inequality is "corrosive". "It rots societies from within," he says.
I suspect we can all save ourselves a lot of time by asking about the motives which spurred an author to write – mostly it has to do with academic reputation, money or hubris. When a man is on his death-bed and takes incredible trouble (and pain) to draft a book for posterity it will generally be worth reading. Here is how historian Judt explains its origins in the Introduction -

For thirty years students have been complaining to me that ‘it was easy for you’: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. ‘We’ (the children of the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘aughts’) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us — just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a ‘lost generation’.

If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: ‘we’ know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?
This is an ironic reversal of the attitudes of an earlier age. Back in the era of self-assured radical dogma, young people were far from uncertain. The characteristic tone of the ’60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed; if the Left is to recover its fortunes, some modesty will be in order. All the same, you must be able to name a problem if you wish to solve it. This book was written for young people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The title of his book is taken from these lines of Oliver Goldsmith’s famous 1770 poem -

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.''

and, for me, one of significant things about the book is that each of its chapter headings echoes a famous book of the past century thus eg The World We Have Lost;  What is to be done?; Shape of Things to Come – thus subtly emphasising the recognition (as Google Scholar puts it) that we "stand on the shoulders of Giants”. Our selfish world has too few writers who properly spell out the relevant work by other writers and too many who pretend to have blazed a unique trail (modern book publishing seems to require such hyperbole). The academics go the opposite extreme of referencing so much and so generally that you are left with no real sense of intellectual development.
One extensive review summarised the book’s arguments thus -

He is the most important contemporary representative of a nearly extinct political tendency – the anti-communist, social-democratic Left. His manifesto is driven by his conviction that in rejecting social democracy 30 years ago the West stumbled badly, and by his hope that the social-democratic tradition can now be revived. His manifesto is sober but also urgent, written by a man who knows that time is not on his side, and for this reason deeply moving.

For Judt, social democracy is multifaceted and complex. Originally, social democracy was a response to the barbarity of communism, where the utopian socialist dream was moderated by a commitment to liberal democracy and where eventually a historic compromise with capitalism was struck. After the shock of the Great Depression, social democracy became, in addition, a distinctive form of political economy, inspired by Maynard Keynes. For a generation, under the Keynesian consensus, worldly wisdom triumphed over neo-classical academic orthodoxy. Social democracy was, accordingly, no longer merely one kind of politics but the animating spirit of an era lasting from 1945 until the election of Margaret Thatcher. During this era, social democracy was associated with a series of policy prescriptions: progressive taxation and the “mixed economy” of public and private ownership. It was also primarily responsible for the creation of the protective social-welfare state, its greatest achievement. Yet, for Judt, social democracy is even more than this. It is the most humane moral–political idea, in which, for once, both the two great values unleashed by the French Revolution – freedom and equality – are valued and pursued.
What went wrong for social democracy? Although Judt rather perfunctorily recognises that in the mid-1970s the social-democratic state hit unanticipated economic troubles, his explanation of the collapse places greater weight on cultural factors. By the 1970s, a younger postwar generation had begun to take the achievements of the postwar social-democratic era for granted, and even to chafe at the dullness of the security it had delivered. In addition, the New Left was by now more interested in the politics of personal identity – of race and gender, rather than class – than it was in defending the achievements of the postwar Left. Both factors made the social order vulnerable to an intellectual attack that was mounted by the Austrian émigrés – not only Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, but also Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker – who were mesmerised by the interwar collapse of liberalism throughout central Europe and who, grotesquely, mistook the creation of the social-democratic welfare state for a way station on “the road to serfdom”.
There is strength in Judt’s explanation of the fall of social democracy, but also weakness. Judt underestimates the degree to which the ‘stagflation’ crisis knocked the confidence of the conventional Keynesian economists, whose thought was premised on the idea that inflation and stagnation were the alternative illnesses to which the capitalist economy might succumb. He is also rather unbalanced about the legacy of the New Left. Even if there was a narcissistic tendency in identity politics, it is also true that the eruption of the ’60s helped trigger a vast cultural revolution that shook centuries-old habits of mind on issues related to gender and race. Not only did this transform Western sensibility unambiguously for the better, it also extended to women and non-whites one idea that Judt places at the heart of social-democratic values: equality.
For Judt it is because of the victory of neo-liberalism, especially in the UK and the US, that the land now fares ill. Most important for him is the toleration shown for the return to pre-Great Depression levels of inequality. Judt begins with tables taken from a remarkable recent study, The Spirit Level. They show that measuring almost everything we value – health, mental wellbeing, social mobility, trust, levels of crime – the more equal societies of north-west Europe perform notably better than the less equal societies of the UK and, especially, the US.

Because of the return of gross inequality, the participatory element of democratic politics has withered. For too long citizens have watched as the wealthy have fashioned the world according to their desires. Without the feeling of belonging to a common world, participation has no point. For Judt, the rise of the “gated” community is a potent symbol of the loss of this common world. Even political leaders – “pygmies”, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, compared to their predecessors, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt – have become passive, leaving decision-making to the neo-liberal economic “experts” (the descendants of the Austrian school) whose central role has been to make the world safe for the bankers and brokers. The orthodox economists have, long ago, displaced political thinkers and convinced the world “there is no alternative” to their nostrums. Although discredited by the Global Financial Crisis, so far nothing has filled the void. At the coming of the crisis, Keynesianism made a return of sorts, but this was little more than a neo-liberal “tactical retreat”. At the moment of crisis everyone looked to government for action. Yet, according to Judt, no one is presently thinking afresh about the role of the state.

It is clear that for him the damage done will not be easy to repair. Although the welfare state has proven somewhat resistant to the neo-liberal assault – even Margaret Thatcher could not abandon the National Health Scheme – privatisation has made rapid gains in many areas, especially social services and transport, where its influence has been negative, or worse. But the spirit of neo-liberalism has also paralysed the vital organs of the culture. Universities are now overwhelmed by an economistic language of “outputs” and “impacts”. We have taught the young to value nothing more than the pursuit of wealth. Even intellectuals do not escape his scorn. Most are conformist and afraid to dissent. Even when they are not, they prefer to speak about morally straightforward issues rather than the complexity of public policy. (Ouch!) No one now seems capable of expressing, or indeed of feeling, the appropriate anger. Perhaps dangerously, Judt calls on intellectuals and others to trust their “instincts”.

Judt knows that contemporary social democracy is feeble. Since the collapse of communism, the Left no longer believes that its goals are, in the words of Bernard Williams, “cheered on by the universe”. More deeply, it has lost its language; its crisis is thus “discursive”. But he is still convinced that a rebirth of social democracy is possible. In part this is because neo-liberalism has been discredited. In part it is because the quest for equality has not lost its grip on our moral imagination. And in part it is because we live at a time of unprecedented uncertainty – about the economic future, about the dangers of global warming, about the pace and unpredictability of change. The Right is certain to try to exploit the mood of deep uncertainty. Yet, there is on the Left a long tradition of fighting to conserve the human world from the forces that threaten it. If there is to be a return to social democracy, it is almost certain to be what Judt calls “a social democracy of fear”.

Some Notes on a Crisis

I left several books in the mountain house last week about the global crisis which I need to retrieve and get into eg

·         Austerity – the history of an idea by Mark Blyth - a Brit who is now a Prof In "Political Economy" (no less) at an American University and who actually writes clearly and powerfully! See this lecture of his.

·         European Spring – why our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and how to put them right  by Philippe Legrain - who has a rather dubious CV as an adviser to Barroso and Think-tanker but whose book - if a bit repetitive - looks a useful narrative.... 

·         Crisis without End – the unravelling of western prosperity; Andrew Gamble - see below

·         17 Contradictions and the end of capitalism ; David Harvey - see below

·         Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism ; Wolfgang Streeck - also see below

·         Capitalismand its alternatives; by leftist Chris Rogers - a decent review of which I haven't yet been able to unearth

·         Utopia or Bust - a guide to the present crisis - a small book by American writer Ben Kunkel who has reviewed in excellent prose for the London Review of Books and who, like James Meek, looks at economic issues from a non-specialist point of view

·         The End of the Experiment?  by Andrew Bowan which has an accompanying blogsite- Manchester Capitalism -  which helpfully offers explanations of the key parts of the book

But a different sort of book distracted me this last couple of days - Together – the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation produced a couple of years ago by the famous sociologist Richard Sennett. For a good sense of both the man and the work, this interview in Brick Magazine is quite excellent.

Much as I appreciated the freshness and elegance of the discourse – and the references to Tonnies, Robert Owen, Saul Alinsky et al - I could have done with some recognition in the book of the role of cooperatives.

I wrote some years ago about the Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque country – which rarely gets proper credit for its amazing employment record (employing more than 80,000 people in that mountain area). I was sad to see that it hit a bad patch last year and had to close one of its affiliates.

But let me again raise the question I posed in my review last month of Phillip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste – how neo-liberalism survived the financial meltdown;

Where, amongst the hundreds of books produced in the last few years about the global crisis, is the annotated bibliography to help us sift and classify them? 

Mirowski’s book has a 41 page list of books and posed these questions –

·       What were the key causes of the crisis?

·       Have economists of any stripe managed to produce a coherent and plausible narrative of the crisis, at least so far? And what role have heterodox economists played in the dispute?

·       What are the major political weaknesses of the contemporary neoliberal movement?

·       What lessons should the left learn from the neoliberals, and which should they abjure?

·       What would a counter-narrative to that of the neoliberals look like?

But the book only really touches (and briefly) on the second of these questions – the others he suggests “demand lavishly documented advocacy and lengthy disputations” and maybe an alternative left project. His book, he concludes with surprising modesty for such a pyrotechnic writer, simply “dispels some commonplace notions that have gotten in the way of such a project”. Neoliberals have triumphed in the global economic crisis, he suggests, because -

·                     Contrary evidence didn’t dent their world view

·                     They “redoubled their efforts to influence and capture the economics profession”

This conclusion, frankly, left me feeling a bit let down - after I had devoted a couple of days to wading through his verbiage……surely a guy with his experience and reading can do better??? What we need are comparisons and classifications of this reading…..

The titles of the books on my little list are significant – and three of them seem to promise a bit more –Wolfgang Streeck of Koln; David Harvey of New York; and Andrew Gamble of Sheffield – so let me just share some of the reviews before I actually get into them

You can get a sense of Wolfgang Streeck’s writing from this article from New Left Review. He writes in his latest book - Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism -

Previous crisis resolution instruments are not available anymore. The traditional toolbox containing inflation, increasing sovereign debt levels or making cheap credit available to private households and corporates has exhausted itself. At different junctures of post-World War II development these policy instruments served as short-term fixes – or capital injections – to support redistributional objectives. The original twist in Streeck’s line of argument is that such objectives and the means to achieve them chiefly served to benefit those market actors who needed them the least.

When focusing on Greece Streeck’s ire is not only reserved to the troika’s activities and misjudgements. He has a keen eye for the domestic origins of the fiscal crisis in Athens. Streeck emphasises that this crisis is primarily the result of a state that is forced to turn to sovereign indebtedness as a mechanism to replace taxes, which the authorities fail to collect from its better off citizens. Streeck highlights the extensive capital flight beginning in 2009 and the privileged tax status that shipowners, farmers, various liberal professions and the Orthodox Church continue to enjoy in Greece.

But the flight crew sitting in the ECB tower in Frankfurt fundamentally lacks the key ingredient of democratic legitimacy for their costly and risk-prone interventions. While these operations allows decision makers to again buy some time, Streeck does not consider this arrangement to be more than a short-term form of financial doping. And the cost for the ECB’s reputation is considerable as evidenced by various resignations of German members from its governing council during the past three years and the challenges it faces from the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany.

Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that Streeck’s book has unleashed a fierce debate, predominantly so far in Germany. His domestic critics, including the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the former SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Joschka Fischer from the Greens, have either accused him of nostalgia for national currencies, being naïve about the merits of currency devaluations or lacking a workable alternative scenario outside the cornerstones of EU integration and euro area membership.

The polemical reactions of many of his critics only serve to confirm that Streeck appears to have hit a raw nerve among many in Germany. He emphatically rejects the national consensus demanded by the political and economic establishment in Germany and its prominent academics, who equate Europe with the EU and consider the single currency as a fait accompli of TINA politics, i.e. ‘There Is No Alternative’.

Indeed, the policy alternatives that Streeck offers are controversial. That is their purpose and they merit a thoughtful debate. He wants the euro to become an anchor currency parallel to the reintroduction of national denominations. Streeck is in favour of giving back to national governments the option to devalue their currency and thus creating leverage for discretionary policy intervention. A return to an orderly and flexible currency exchange system is equally part of his recommendations as are capital controls to stem recurring capital flight and tax dodging in the euro area.

But his underlying argument about policy alternatives is that contemporary capitalist societies in Europe urgently need an infusion of democratic oxygen, citizens’ involvement and a public willing to articulate different options. How this can be voiced is anybody’s guess, not least Streeck’s. Given that numerous democratic institutions have been reduced to mere bystanders in the course of the past crisis management years, Streeck formulates a rather pessimistic, but entirely reasonable alternative.

He pointedly asks why should only markets be allowed to panic and follow herd instincts? What happens when civil society threatens to do the same? Streeck argues that democratic mobilization and civic engagement should be the orders of the day. The protests may be desperate, loud, display a makeshift air and be highly disorganized but they are absolutely necessary. The ‘’αγανακτισμένοι’’ in Greece or the “indignados” in Spain are examples of a growing constituency across Europe who feel they are being treated with contempt and that their dignity has been hurt.

David Harvey, although a geographer, is the world’s best- known exponent of Marx. His Origins of Neo-Liberalism can be read online. His latest book is a small one which tries to compress his extensive work into 17 Contradictions and the end of capitalism

Drawing on his previous commentaries on Karl Marx’s Capital, David Harvey’s latest book is a brave attempt to translate that monumental work into the simplified language of the 21st century. It is beautifully written, persuasively argued and – in these dismal times – refreshingly optimistic about the socialist future awaiting us all.

The author begins by drawing “a clear distinction between capitalism and capital”. “This book”, Harvey explains, “focuses on capital and not on capitalism.” More accurately, the topic is the hidden engine that drives capitalism, not the rickety vehicle as it trundles along bumpy roads. Harvey is not only interested in finding out how the engine works and why it sometimes fails. “I also want to show”, he adds, “why this economic engine should be replaced and with what”. No shortage of ambition, then.

Although it might seem force, I can see why this distinction is necessary. To write a short book – or indeed to do any kind of science – you have to simplify, abstracting away from reality in all its complexity. “How does the engine work” is, I suppose, a different question from “Where are we going?” or “Will we ever arrive?”

Focusing simply on the engine, Harvey’s 17 contradictions are exclusively internal ones – tensions intrinsic to the hidden mechanisms driving the circulation and accumulation of capital. It’s a convenient strategy that allows him to set aside such “external” factors as, say, changing gender relations, epidemics or warfare. But I couldn’t quite understand the basis on which some topics were excluded and others discussed at length.

Harvey’s 16th contradiction – entitled “Capital’s Relation to Nature” – includes the looming prospect of catastrophic climate change. It’s an excellent, scientifically well-informed chapter and one of the highlights of the book. Harvey claims it as an “internal” contradiction on the basis that capital is a working and evolving ecological system embracing both nature and capital. I agree with that. But in accepting that point, aren’t we including the bumpy road as part of the engine? If climate change counts as “internal”, what justification is there for excluding race and gender? Harvey explains: “I exclude them because although they are omnipresent within capitalism they are not specific to…capitalism”. Well, no, but then neither is environmental degradation. The consequences might be more terrifying today, but humans have been triggering extinctions since the beginning of farming and probably before. Mammoths once roamed across Europe…

My other criticism is that while Marx wrote quite a lot about revolution, Harvey goes strangely silent on the topic. As a result, the book’s final pages remind me of going to the wishing well and asking for 17 nice things that ought to happen – solidarity everywhere, no alienating work, everyone creative and fulfilled. It’s an inspiring list. But it does little to help us think about how to get there or if it would really work. Marxists need to do more if we are to sound convincing.

But the book I am most looking forward to is Andrew Gamble’s Crisis without End – the unravelling of western prosperity

This is not a book on the financial crisis per se, but one that uses the crisis as a point of departure to consider how our world has been ordered over the past century, along the way displaying in-depth understanding of the events leading up to the crash and the actions taken to respond to it.

Before analysing the consequences of the crisis for neoliberalism, Gamble lays out his notion of a neoliberal economic order and details how the current international economic system was set in place after the Second World War. This section is extremely valuable, as most scholars connected to post-structuralist or post-Marxist schools of thought are content to use neoliberalism as a kind of bogeyman-placeholder for all that is wrong with the predominant political and economic system in the West without ever defining the notion.

While one does not have to agree with the anti-neoliberalism rhetoric, Gamble’s introduction ably sets the pace for what follows by showing that while the crisis wounded the neoliberal order, five years on it seems remarkably unscathed. He then embarks on answering his main question: Why has the neoliberal order proved so resilient, and can it renew itself in the face of the challenges to its effectiveness, sustainability and legitimacy that the crisis revealed?

Gamble lays out three hypotheses – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – about why we haven’t seen much change in the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis.

1) The crisis was just a blip. Although it seemed serious, it has no long-term significance for the functioning of the present economic system because it is not structural.

2) The 2008 crash revealed not just a serious malfunctioning of the financial system but deeper underlying problems that need fixing before recovery is possible.

3) And most plausibly, in Gamble’s view: the crisis has revealed an impasse. The fundamentals governing the international economic order have changed, but since the immediate crisis was contained, incumbent policymakers could stave off radical change. However, the neoliberal order has become highly unstable and postponing change will lead to further breakdown or deadlock. Hence the “crisis without end”.

A compelling line of argument appears in Gamble’s second step, where he discusses the three fundamental conflicts underlying the functioning of the neoliberal economic order that the crisis has not only revealed but intensified. He compares the current crisis’ characteristics to those of the two major crises in the 20th century in light of the dilemmas that he sees as inherent in the international neoliberal order: governance, growth and fiscal trade-offs.

- The governance dilemma lies in the tension between a unified international market order and a fragmented state system, between international connectedness and national sovereignty, in which the emergence of new powers poses severe challenges to the existing order.

- The growth trade-off manifests itself in the tension between the incentives needed for maximising private gains and the social conditions necessary to facilitate private accumulation. The question of how sustainable growth can be achieved in the face of prolonged stagflation and environmental risks is at the heart of this dilemma.

- Finally, the fiscal dilemma concerns the legitimacy of markets, as uncontrolled competition undermines social cohesion and solidarity, especially with increasing debt and falling living standards.

Gamble paints his picture in broad strokes, and in arguably overly gloomy shades. The welfare state may be more resilient than he might admit, especially its continental and Scandinavian versions, because different primary mechanisms of redistribution were originally put into place. While the Anglo-Saxon variety relies mainly on redistribution through taxation, the continental version is contribution-based. Since the fiscal dilemma implies difficulties of raising revenues from taxes, inequality is more of a problem in the tax-based redistributive systems prevalent in liberal market economies.

The fundamental dilemmas underlying neoliberalism raise the question of what has to change before a new era of prosperity in the West can be established, and Gamble considers four scenarios.

The first is the default, where nothing much changes and rising internationalisation leads to further shocks and a perpetual crisis.

The other three scenarios move away from a unipolar economic order; in scenario 2, to a bipolar situation in which US-Chinese competition over resources and markets spurs protectionism and a decline in trade with renewed fiscal and monetary problems.

Scenarios 3 and 4 involve multipolar situations, with either multilateral cooperation including emerging powers leading to a more diversified new market order (scenario 3), or with conflictive and bloc-building tendencies bringing more fragmentation and decline in international flows (scenario 4).

Evidently, scenario 3 is most likely to restore confidence and build conditions for sustainable growth.

Alas, Gamble leaves the question of how to achieve scenario 3 unanswered, and concludes that the future is likely to include aspects of all four. Like me, the reader may be left wishing he had taken a few more risks in identifying conditions that make different outcomes more likely.

This is clearly not a book that crunches numbers and draws conclusions based on well-identified empirical evidence, but Gamble gives his own account of the general feeling that there is something wrong and lethargic about the way the West is dealing with the aftermath of the financial crash, and that only more radical change can lead us back to sustainable growth and prosperity.

Like Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Gamble shows that the global financial crash and its effects are not just manifestations of the normal capitalist cycle, but extraordinary, and will affect the world and the international economy for decades to come. Although he analyses the crisis through the lens of a critique of neoliberalism, this does not distract from his insights into the challenges for economic and political systems at both transnational and domestic levels.

Where Piketty’s book convinces with myriad historical data and empirically derived evidence, Gamble’s gripping narrative persuades via insight and anecdotal evidence.

My personal quibble with Gamble’s approach is that we must have faith in his analytical brilliance and persuasive argumentation, because none of us knows the counterfactual – what type of social and/or economic system would generate better societal outcomes, and better from what perspective? Arguably, more rigorous empirical identification and quantitative evidence would have helped the momentum and credibility of some of his arguments.