Our Desperate Need for Humility

This blog may strike many readers as an opinionated one but let me assure you that I am more of a hesitant mugwump – with my bum on both sides of the fence. I am loathe to choose sides – not least because I can see so many. Indeed it’s why the blog carries the name it does. It’s a celebration of the benefits from looking at the world from different angles. An article by Agnes Callard n the current issue of the Boston Review impressed me both for the clarity of the language and the message it contained about the importance of questioning loose thinking.

This blog may strike many readers as an opinionated one but let me assure you that I am more of a hesitant mugwump – with my bum on both sides of the fence.

I am loathe to choose sides – not least because I can see so many. Indeed it’s why the blog carries the name it does. It’s a celebration of the benefits from looking at the world from different angles. An article by Agnes Callard n the current issue of the Boston Review impressed me both for the clarity of the language and the message it contained about the importance of questioning loose thinking.

Socrates did not write philosophy; he simply went around talking to people. But these 

conversations were so transformative that Plato devoted his life to writing dialogues 

that represent Socrates in conversation. These dialogues are not transcripts of actual 

conversations, but they are nonetheless clearly intended to reflect not only Socrates’s 

ideas but his personality. Plato wanted the world to remember Socrates. Generations 

after Socrates’s death, warring philosophical schools such as the Stoics and the 

Skeptics each appropriated Socrates as figurehead. Though they disagreed on just 

about every point of doctrine, they were clear that in order to count themselves as 

philosophers they had to somehow be working in the tradition of Socrates
Over and over again, Socrates approaches people who are remarkable for their lack 

of humility—which is to say, for the fact that they feel confident in their own 

knowledge of what is just, or pious, or brave, or moderate. You might have supposed 

that Socrates, whose claim to fame is his awareness of his own ignorance, would 

treat these self-proclaimed “wise men” (Sophists) with contempt, hostility, or 

indifference. But he doesn’t. The most remarkable feature of Socrates’s 

approach is his punctilious politeness and sincere enthusiasm. 
The conversation usually begins with Socrates asking his interlocutor: Since you 

think you know, can you tell me, what is courage (or wisdom, or piety, or justice . . .)? 

Over and over again, it turns out that they think they can answer, but they can’t. 

Socrates’s hope springs eternal: even as he walks toward the courtroom to be tried

—and eventually put to death—for his philosophical activity, he is delighted to 

encounter the self-important priest Euthyphro, who will, surely, be able to say what 

piety is. (Spoiler: he’s not.) 

Her article resonates with those of us who are sceptical of the mainstream media (MSM) and the polarisation brought by the social media

Most people steer conversations into areas where they have expertise; they struggle to admit error; they have a background confidence that they have a firm grip on the basics. They are happy to think of other people – people who have different political or religious views, or got a different kind of education, or live in a different part of the world - as ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think.

Socrates saw the pursuit of knowledge as a collaborative project involving two 

very different roles. There’s you or I or some other representative of Most People, 

who comes forward and makes a bold claim. Then there’s Socrates, or one of his 

contemporary descendants, who questions and interrogates and distinguishes and 

calls for clarification. This is something we’re often still doing—as philosophers, 

as scientists, as interviewers, as friends, on Twitter and Facebook and in many 

casual personal conversations. We’re constantly probing one another, asking, 

“How can you say that, given X, Y, Z?” We’re still trying to understand one another 

by way of objection, clarification, and the simple fact of inability to take what 

someone has said as knowledge. It comes so naturally to us to organize ourselves 

into the knower/objector pairing that we don’t even notice we are living in the 

world that Socrates made. The scope of his influence is remarkable. But equally 

remarkable is the means by which it was achieved: he did so much by knowing, 

writing, and accomplishing—nothing at all. 
And yet for all this influence, many of our ways are becoming far from Socratic. 

More and more our politics are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of 

collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially 

collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any 

more than you expect to be persuaded. 
By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, 

and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate 

a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious enough, you’ll resort to enforcing 

your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure 

to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility 

involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party 

would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. 

By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply 

uninquisitive. 

But the additional message it contains is the value of geniune exchanges – of real conversations and here we enter the realm made famous by Theodor Zeldin (who will be 90 in a few weeks and is perhaps best known for his encouragement of the art of conversation). He is also a maverick historian whose books have searched for answers to three main questions

• Where can a person find more inspiring ways of spending each day?

• What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology, or therapy?

• What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or those who feel isolated, different, or are sometimes labeled as misfits?

His work has brought people together to engage in conversations in a variety

 of settings – communal and business – on the basis of some basic principles
His latest book is The Hidden Pleasures of Life It's an epub so does need 

conversion

Socrates did not write philosophy; he simply went around talking to people. But these conversations

 were so transformative that Plato devoted his life to writing dialogues that represent Socrates in 

conversation. These dialogues are not transcripts of actual conversations, but they are nonetheless

 clearly intended to reflect not only Socrates’s ideas but his personality. Plato wanted the world to 

remember Socrates. Generations after Socrates’s death, warring philosophical schools such as the 

Stoics and the Skeptics each appropriated Socrates as figurehead. Though they disagreed on just 

about every point of doctrine, they were clear that in order to count themselves as philosophers they 

had to somehow be working in the tradition of Socrates.
Over and over again, Socrates approaches people who are remarkable for their lack of humility—which 

is to say, for the fact that they feel confident in their own knowledge of what is just, or pious, or 

brave, or moderate. You might have supposed that Socrates, whose claim to fame is his awareness of 

his own ignorance, would treat these self-proclaimed “wise men” (Sophists) with contempt, hostility, 

or indifference. But he doesn’t. The most remarkable feature of Socrates’s approach is his 

punctilious politeness and sincere enthusiasm. 
The conversation usually begins with Socrates asking his interlocutor: Since you think you know, can 

you tell me, what is courage (or wisdom, or piety, or justice . . .)? Over and over again, it turns out that 

they think they can answer, but they can’t. Socrates’s hope springs eternal: even as he walks toward 

the courtroom to be tried—and eventually put to death—for his philosophical activity, he is delighted 

to encounter the self-important priest Euthyphro, who will, surely, be able to say what piety is. 

(Spoiler: he’s not.) 

Her article resonates with those of us who are sceptical of the mainstream media (MSM) and the polarisation brought by the social media

Most people steer conversations into areas where they have expertise; they struggle to admit error; they have 

a background confidence that they have a firm grip on the basics. They are happy to think of other people - people 

who have different political or religious views, or got a different kind of education, or live in a different part of 

the world - as ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think. 

Socrates saw the pursuit of knowledge as a collaborative project involving two very different roles. 

There’s you or I or some other representative of Most People, who comes forward and makes a bold claim. Then 

there’s Socrates, or one of his contemporary descendants, who questions and interrogates and distinguishes and 

calls for clarification. This is something we’re often still doing—as philosophers, as scientists, as interviewers, as 

friends, on Twitter and Facebook and in many casual personal conversations. We’re constantly probing one another,

 asking, “How can you say that, given X, Y, Z?” We’re still trying to understand one another by way of objection, 

clarification, and the simple fact of inability to take what someone has said as knowledge. It comes so naturally 

to us to organize ourselves into the knower/objector pairing that we don’t even notice we are living in the world 

that Socrates made. The scope of his influence is remarkable. But equally remarkable is the means by which it was 

achieved: he did so much by knowing, writing, and accomplishing—nothing at all. 
And yet for all this influence, many of our ways are becoming far from Socratic. More and more our politics 

are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an 

essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect 

to be persuaded. 

By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue 

people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious 

enough, you’ll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the 

pressure to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility involved genuinely 

opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle 

on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, 

and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive. 

But the additional message it contains is the value of geniune exchanges – of real conversations and here we enter the realm made famous by Theodor Zeldin (who will be 90 in a few weeks and is perhaps best known for his encouragement of the art of conversation). He is also a maverick historian whose books have searched for answers to three main questions

• Where can a person find more inspiring ways of spending each day?

• What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology, or therapy?

• What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or those who feel 

• isolated, different, or are sometimes labeled as misfits?

His work has brought people together to engage in conversations in a variety of settings 

– communal and business – on the basis of some basic principles
His latest book is The Hidden Pleasures of Life It's an epub so does need conversion

A Zeldin Resource

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/book-conversation

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263330798_Zeldin_Theodore_1998_Conversation

http://www.oxfordmuse.com/media/muse-brochure[final].pdf

hidden pleasures of life http://www.anilgomes.com/uploads/2/3/9/7/23976281/gomes_tls.pdf

http://delarue.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/OLC-April-2011_DeLaRue_Art-of-Conversation.pdf

Wising up with old age

Earlier this month I tried to do a post on what I had learned about power – but it rather petered out when I realised how many of the books to which I had given hyperlinks I had actually gone on to read. And I then compounded the felony by adding a few more relevant book titles I had come across. My only excuse, as I mentioned in the last post, is that publishers deluge us with too many books and that authors lack discipline and are too long-winded.   

In fact I have learned more than I let on – as this short video clip about the core theories of International Relations reminded me. The academic, one Steve Smith, makes the useful point that such theories are like coloured lens through which we look at and make sense of the world. He mentions four such perspectives -

School	explanation
Realism	Struggle for power
Liberalism	Belief in consensus, in rules and norms
Marxism	Economic interests, class position
Postmodernism	Socially determined – depending on how we look at the world

Of course this is too cryptic and Smith and other authors have explained this further in their big book on the subject.

I readily confess that, for much of my life, I was a typical social democrat/liberal too hypnotised by ideas - and it is only fairly recently that my eyes have been opened to the scale of economic interests ruling the world. It was probably J Michael Greer who helpd awake me from my dreamworld – you can still find his blogs archived here

I owe the references in the early part of the post to one of the most original books I have come across in the past few years Change and the politics of certainty (2019). The author, Jenny Edkins , was a physicist but then changed, after her children grew up, to the world of social science and is now a Professor of Political Science. Her book is an amazing mixture of memoir and provocative analysis which very clarly sides with the opressed – as was evident in her 2004 book Sovereign Lives – power in global politics. One quotation conveys the thrust of the book's argument

We need to consider the possibility that famines happen because the social and political system in which they are embedded is working all too well rather than because it has failed.

Bonus Video; I loved this commencement speech about the idiocy and cruelty around these days and the need for empathy

The Fundamental Flaw in the Economists’ view of the world

I once called myself an economist – it was something graduates of 1960’s British Universities did then. It was sufficiently unusual to be worn as a mark of distinction. However I can remember only the following lessons from my four years engrossed in economics books -

- the strictness of the various preconditions which governed the idea of (perfect) competition – making it a highly improbable occurrence;

- the questionable nature of the of notion of “profit-maximisation”;

- the belief (thanks to the writings of James Burnham and Tony Crosland) that management (not ownership) was the all- important factor

- trust (thanks to Keynes whose work was dinned into me) in the ability of government to deal with such things as “exuberant expectations”

- the realization (through the report of the 1959 Radcliffe Commission) that cash was but a small part of money supply. Financial economics was in its infancy then and debt - household and country – had not become the problem it now is.

By the mid 1970s I had seen the error of my ways and moved, somewhat unsuccesfully, into the field of “political science” (the penis envy of real science was already evident). By the 1980s we had all fallen - hook, line and sinker - for the new economic religion. When I first came to Romania in the early 90s, I was amazed at the number of “economists” I came across – for them it meant no more than an “accountant”!

This blog has been very critical of the economic profession – only economists like Steve Keen, Mark Blyth, Yanis Varoufakis and Dani Rodrik have managed to escape its ire, although it has recognised the stirrings in the new millenium of remorse for its erstwhile arrogance. What most economists have a temperamental disinclination to discuss is...POWER – which even this little overview ignores. 

This fantastic article offers a very useful discussion of the sort of criticism economics has received in the past decade or so - setting it against some alternative models.

A couple of economists have just come out into the open about the subject - “Power and Progress – our struggle over technology and prosperity” by Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson comes in at a whopping 550 pages. Acemoglu is a developmental economist from Turkey who has published, with political scientist James Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” (570 pp 2012) and “The Narrow Corridor – states, societies and the state of liberty” (800pp 2019)

I mention the number of pages simply because I have an ongoing campaign against long-winded authors and have appealed to publishers and writers alike to exercise more discipline before they inflict yet another title on the poor reader. The reviews are interesting although I think Acemoglu would have been better advised to continue his partnership with a political scientist. I think I will wait for a graphic version.

Reviews and interviews

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/07/power-and-progress-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-review-formidable-demolition-of-the-technology-equals-progress-myth

• https://economics.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Markus-Academy-Daron-Acemoglu-June-14-2023.pdf

• https://cepr.org/system/files/2023-06/Power_and_progress.pdf interview

• https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg/publications/research/econ_focus/2023/q2/interview.pdf

• Institutions and Growth Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2004

Political Culture makes a Comeback

“Heaven is where the police are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Countries have become ultra sensitive these days - attributing such national characteristics has become unacceptable, politically incorrect. But regular readers will know that my experience since 1990 of living and working in a dozen different countries has given me a fascination with national traits and their effects on institutional behaviour. I’ve spent most of my life trying to improve the way government bodies interact with citizens from which I’ve tried to draw the lessons analysed in Change for the Better? a Life in reform

All this has given me a certain fatalism about the prospects for real democracy in central and eastern Europe - where I presently live. The transitologists (and sociologists) made frequent use of the term “path-dependency” by which they meant that institutions tended to be stuck in historical and cultural behaviour – viz it wasn’t just the experience of communism which governs Bulgarian and Romanian mentalities, it was the centuries of Ottoman influence.

My thoughts about all that are gathered in a short piece - Puzzling Cultural Values -which I published last year but which will need updating in the light of material I have just come across. The article tried to analyse some 50 books and concluded with a quotation from one of the most accessible Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance in 2014

1. Political-cultural explanations often have a number of weaknesses: vagueness, imprecision, stereotyping, and lack of clear definition or methodology. They also tend to ignore both class/structural factors and outside, international, or globalization factors.

2. But political culture also has its strengths. It gets you at first causes, the essence of things, the basics. And in Almond and Verba’s or Inglehart’s work, it gets you closer to an empirical, scientific explanation.

3. Studying political culture is both hard work and fun to do. It enables you to travel, go abroad, and learn about other countries and cultures.

4. While political culture is important, it is not, in my view, the only explanation. Other factors, as above, are also important. So political culture should not be reified or elevated into an exclusive or single-causal explanation. Political culture explains a lot but not everything. My own preference is for a more complex, multi-causal explanation. Culture should thus be used in combination with other explanations: geography, social structure, resources, and institutions. These factors can now best be weighed and evaluated through correlations and multi-variate analysis. Such analysis can give us the explanatory weight of each factor or variable.

5. At the same time, we must recognize that cultures do change. They are not deterministic or fixed for all time. They adjust, adapt, get altered, even undergo at times revolutionary transformations. Societies change; modernization and globalization go forward; and culture change both drives and is a product of these other changes. After all, culture is mainly a human and a societal construct; it has not yet been proven that it is genetic, inherited, and organic. As cultures change, so also will societies and political systems.

The new material includes stuff from highly respected Daron Acemoglu, Paul Collier, Ben Fine, Joseph Stiglitz and Sydney Tarrow and has me questioning my erstwhile fatalism. Perhaps there is indeed still hope for central Europe and the Balkans!

But, first, I have to read and absorb that new material – the table below lists the material and indicates my feelings after a quick scan

Article	Initial response
Sydney Tarrow on Robert Putnam 1996	A superb eample of a truly honest and professional review – of Putman’s analysis in “Making Democracy Work” of the reasons for the huge differences in institutional strengths of south and north Italian Regions
social capital and civic culture (Fukuyama IMF 2000)	A cool assessment by one of the world’s foremost political thinkers of the explanatory power of the concept which has grabbed the attention of the World Bank
Theories of Social Capital – researchers behaving badly; Ben Fine 2010	An excoriating analysis – as you might expect from the subtitle. A Click on the title will give you the full book
Culture, Politics and economic development Paul Collier 2010	Paul Collier is one of the best developmental conomists and explores in this article the role of culture in explaining economic development
Italian Political Culture at 50 2010	Edward Banfield’s use of “amoral familiasm” in his 1950s book has profoundly affected our perception of Italy. An Italian sociologist assese the damage
Italy’s Divide 2017	A rather academic treatment of the issue
Particularism thro the looking glass 2019	This is one of the terms used for “alien” cultures
A comment on Banfield 2020	One historian’s view
The Wicked problems of Social Capital 2021	A useful overview of the literature
The Long Shadow of History Stiglitz 2022	A chapter of a book called “The Other Invisible Hand: The Power of Culture to Promote or Stymie Progress” he and some others will produce next year. Not very original
Culture and Institutions Daron Acemoglu 2023	Acemoglu is a developmental economist who has published “Why Nations Fail” (2012) “The Narrow Corridor” (2019) and “Power and Pogress – our struggle over technology and prosperity” (2023) This long article looks to be a definitive piece on the subject – although it is a bit academic

Snippets

Whenever an item on the internet catches my eye, I copy its url and transfer it to a special file which has now grown to 40 pages. Time therefore to share some of these treasures with my readers - I've grouped them thematically – thus

• Good Writing

• Central and Eastern European

• The Nordic Model

• Social Scientists

Good Writing

• First a confession – I’m not familiar with the novels of Cormac McCarthy who died last week but he was, apparently, a great word artist and his obituaries certainly tempt me to check that out. The only connection I have with his work is the Ridley Scott film The Counselor which I watched a decade ago in a Sofia film theatre and which impressed me.

• At another level, I was excited to download Edward Said's "Reflections on Exile and other Essays" which shows a completely different side of the man than the earnest enemy of the West shown in "Orientalism" - with its 46 vignettes of figures ranging from Foucault to Hobsbawm.

• C Wright Mill’s “Intellectual Craftmanship” is a favourite of mine for the pedagogical insights it contains and this is a great commentary from one of the most wonderful of sociological sources

• and finally this Romanian who recently edited a fascinating journal (called DoR) has been developing a profile with his blog which takes me nicely on to

Central and Eastern European

I write from Romania about whose political culture I often comment. But the country is simply one of many which are subsumed under a label which is, apparently, losing its meaning

• "The Idea of Central Europe – geopolitics, culture and regional identity" by Otilia Dhand 2018 is an interesting recent book which explores the history of the concept
• From Peoples to Nations - a history of East Europe by John Connelly (2020) is a long-overdue treatment of the region. But be warned! It's 967 pages long
• "Central Europe – imaginary geographies, geopolitics and security" is an article which emphasises how the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 spread disillusionment with the EU in countries such as Poland and Romania. 
• "The Curse of the Margin – central europe before and after communism" is another effort by a central european to make sense of events. 
• Anticipations of the failure of communism is an extended essay from 1994 by the famous american sociologist SM Lipset as he attempts to answer the question why social scientists failed to anticipate its collapse

The NORDIC MODEL moves the geographical focus north to Scandinavia and tries to explore whether the Nordic Model is managing to live up to its myths. The Nordic model is a 2007 publication from economists from the region. This article from Jacobin suggests that Norway was, in 2021, still on track but other reports paint a darker picture.

Social Scientists Look Ahead. In 2019 I paid tribute to clutch of social scientists who had got together to form the International Panel for Social Progress. I have since discovered a whole range of other work they have done

https://www.ipsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IPSP-Executive-Summary.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GSJ9_Summit-2023-Edition.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Global-Solutions-Journal-Issue-8.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Global-Solutions-Journal-7-Summit-2021-Edition.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GFRE-Noble-B-Economics-Society-and-the-Pre-eminent-Role-of-Values-2023_05_24_DN_GE.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Long-Shadow-of-History_DRAFT.pdf

https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A-long-shadow-of-History_Karla-Hoff-11-Oct.pdf

https://www.ipsp.org/download/chapter-13 communications

https://www.academia.edu/37311829/Chapter_20_Belonging_Pp_779_812_in_Rethinking_Society_for_the_21st_Century_Report_of_the_International_Panel_on_Social_Progress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg8mu2-mJj4

The multiple directions of social progress https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161102602.pdf EO Wright et al

What’s Left of the Left?

I do understand that many readers dislike wading through chunks of text and like to get to the “bottom line”. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I started these famous TABLES - which try to extract the core messages from a dozen or so books. Today’s post starts positively – moves into more critical vein but ends with extolling a book which seems to strike all the notes this child of the 60s has been desperately looking for

The last post ended with an excerpt from Jacobin’s review of Thomas Pikety’s “Time for 

Socialism” which had me returning to the future of the British and, indeed, European Left

- on which so many anguished columns have been devoted in recent decades. 
This article from 2013 I found very thought-provoking  Labour – left and right; party positioning and policy reasoning

 - in that it made me realise that we needed to explore the links between different levels -

• the working class/precariat – whose interests left-wing parties are supposed to further 

• parliamentary representatives – who have to balance considerations of feasibility, legitimacy and support

• party programmes – which need to appeal to the floating voter

• public perceptions – very profoundly affected by mainstream media (controlled by corporate power) 

Liam Byrne (a Labour MP) has an article in (Political Quarterly - a famous Social Democrat journal establised a century ago) which, in so many ways, indicates the impotence of the breed. His piece -

• repudiates nationalisation

• prioritises educational opportunity

• and aspiration

• wants more punitive welfarism

• supports (ill-defined) “de-inflationary measures”

and continues -

The conservative response to the pandemic was in many ways extraordinary, but confined within the bounds of what was deemed acceptable in the post-GFC fiscal and monetary framework. But, there is little evidence that social democrats would have acted in a manner that was drastically different.

Since the end of the Third Way era, little has been done by the party family to develop a new political economy—a way of comprehending the world and the possibilities for rupture—specific to the creed. Social democrats have differentiated themselves by proposing specific progressive policies, but when it comes to broader ideas about the economic and political framework, they tend to replicate the core tenets of the governing orthodoxy, formed as it is through the institutional networks of power that shape established social relations. But more generally, the stark reality is that social democratic politicians are often indistinguishable from progressive technocrats

Centre-left parties have sought to distinguish themselves by their probity, loyalty to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy and fidelity to correct parliamentary process. They have done so while the ‘political centre of gravity [h]as shifted leftwards’, with a greater general acceptance that higher rates of government debt are acceptable if it is being used to create ‘the industries and jobs of the future.’24

Social democrats who pledged too far-reaching a vision of social reform routinely found themselves disciplined by the merciless mainstream media conglomerations, leading policy experts and the markets themselves. Now, in a period of tightened economic and fiscal constraints, jumpy markets and endemic low growth across the developed world, social democrats have again raised adherence to the orthodoxy to a principle. The bounds of the politically possible are being policed not by their opponents, but by social democrats themselves.

The social democratic project needs to be more than the reallocation of budgetary expenditures; it needs to be about the rebalancing of social power. To do this, the creed must develop a consistent and coherent alternative political economy—one that reflects the interests of a social constituency of labouring people as they exist today. It is insufficient to retrofit an economic agenda suited for a class structure that existed forty years ago.

The political cynicism that has become endemic in the neoliberal era poses challenges for all democratic parties, but is particularly potent for social democrats. Social democracy is the political force of social transformation—albeit within constitutional and electoral bounds. A generalised belief that democracy is failing, that politicians constitute an alien and self-protecting class, and that change is not possible—all rebound significantly on the left’s political prospects.

The challenge for social democracy is to utilise government to undercut this disillusionment through practical and immediate changes that can be identified in local communities and individual workplaces, but which also compose a larger picture on social change for general betterment. Through this, social democrats can create social constituencies for their policies and construct long-term governments. This is a transformative project that can only be pursued with a coherent and distinctive vision of the type of society the creed seeks to create, but one that is perceived as realisable. As British Labour discovered to its detriment in 2019, it is not sufficient to present a bundle of individually popular polices.

Somewhere beyond both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair there is a social democratic means to comprehend the political economy of modern capitalism, and a strategy to change it. The challenge is to find it.

And I think I’ve found it!! It’s by an Italian sociologist now living in London and it’s called 

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021

Recent Assessment of the Left
What’s Left of the Left – democrats and social democrats in challenging times ed James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch 2011
Endgame for the Centre-Left?  Patrick Diamond 2016

The Socialist Ideas of the British Left's Alternative Economic Strategy Baris Tufekci 2020

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021
Toward a Social Democracy Century? ed K Hofman de Moura, A Skrzypek, R Wilson 2022