Beyond Left and Right E-Book

Anthony Giddens

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 498

Beschreibung

How should one understand the nature and possibilities of political radicalism today? The political radical is normally thought of as someone who stands on the left, opposing backward-looking conservatism. In the present day, however, the left has turned defensive, while the right has become radical, advocating the free play of market forces no matter what obstacles of tradition or custom stand in their way. What explains such a curious twist of perspective? In answering this question Giddens develops a new framework for radical politics, drawing freely on what he calls "philosophic conservatism", but applying this outlook in the service of values normally associated with the Left. The ecological crisis is at the core of this analysis, but is understood by Giddens in an unconventional way - as a response to a world in which modernity has run up against its limits as a social and moral order. The end of nature, as an entity existing independently of human intervention, and the end of tradition, combined with the impact of globalization, are the forces which now have to be confronted, made use of and coped with. This book provides a powerful interpretation of the rise of fundamentalism, of democracy, the persistence of gender divisions and the question of a normative political theory of violence. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking a novel approach to the political challenges which we face at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Beyond Left and Right

The Future of Radical Politics

Anthony Giddens

Polity Press

Copyright © Anthony Giddens 1994

The right of Anthony Giddens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1995, 1996, 1998 (twice), 2006, 2007

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Globalization, tradition, uncertainty

Socialism, conservatism and neoliberalism

A framework for radical politics

Coda: the question of agency

1      Conservatism: Radicalism Embraced

Old Conservatism

Conservatism, conservatisms

Conservatism and neoliberalism

Conservatism and social change

Conservatism and the concept of tradition

2      Socialism: the Retreat from Radicalism

Socialism and the question of history

Socialism and democracy

Revolutionary socialism

Limits of the cybernetic model

Socialism and the welfare state

3      The Social Revolutions of our Time

Simple and reflexive modernization

Structural consequences

The advent of life politics

Social change and the role of active trust

Manufactured uncertainty and global risk environments

4      Two Theories of Democratization

The popularity of democracy

An alternative view

Participation, representation, dialogue

What is democracy?

Dialogic democracies

Democracy and the problem of solidarity

Democracy, inequality and power

5      Contradictions of the Welfare State

Structural sources of the welfare state

Problems of welfare: work and class

The question of the underclass

The future of welfare: a preliminary orientation

6      Generative Politics and Positive Welfare

Welfare systems and manufactured uncertainty

Arguments from global poverty

An alternative development

The structural diamond

7      Positive Welfare, Poverty and Life Values

Work, productivism, productivity

From the welfare state to positive welfare

Welfare in a post-scarcity society

Class divisions and social conflicts

The affluent against the poor? A generative model of equality

8      Modernity under a Negative Sign: Ecological Issues and Life Politics

Thinking about nature

Nature: living in and with it

Questions of reproduction

The order of high-consequence risks

Environment, personhood

Conclusion

9      Political Theory and the Problem of Violence

The state and pacification

Masculinity and war

Violence, ethnic and cultural difference

10      Questions of Agency and Values

Notes

Index

Preface

This book began life some fifteen years ago, as the planned third volume of what I then termed a ‘contemporary critique of historical materialism’. That third volume was never written, as my interests moved away in somewhat different directions. The present work is based on the ideas I sketched for the third volume, but also draws extensively on concepts I developed in subsequent published writings.

I should like to thank those colleagues and friends who have read and commented on initial drafts of the book, or have otherwise assisted in its preparation. Thanks, therefore, to Ulrich Beck, Ann Bone, Montserrat Guibernau, Rebecca Harkin, David Held, David Miliband, Veronique Mottier, Debbie Seymour, Avril Symonds and Dennis Wrong.

Introduction

What can it mean to be politically radical today? For the spectre which disturbed the slumbers of bourgeois Europe, and which for more than seventy years took on solid flesh, has been returned to its nether world. The hopes of radicals for a society in which, as Marx said, human beings could be ‘truly free’ seem to have turned out to be empty reveries.

The idea of political radicalism has long been bound up primarily with socialist thought. To be a ‘radical’ was to have a certain view of the possibilities inherent in history – radicalism meant breaking away from the hold of the past. Some radicals were revolutionaries: according to them revolution, and perhaps only revolution, could produce that sharp separation which they sought from what went before. Yet the notion of revolution was never the defining feature of political radicalism; this feature consisted in its progressivism. History was there to be seized hold of, to be moulded to human purposes, such that the advantages which in previous eras seemed given by God, and the prerogative of the few, could be developed and organized for the benefit of all.

Radicalism, taking things by the roots, meant not just bringing about change but controlling such change so as to drive history onwards. And it is that project which now seems to have lapsed. How should one react to such a situation? Some say that the possibilities of radical change have been foreclosed. History, as it were, has come to an end and socialism was a bridge too far. Yet couldn’t it be claimed that, far from the possibilities of change having been closed off, we are suffering from a surfeit of them? For surely there comes a point at which endless change is not only unsettling but positively destructive – and in many areas of social life, it could be argued, this point has certainly been reached.

Such a train of thought appears to lead well away from what are usually thought of as radical political philosophies, towards, in fact, conservatism. The main thrust of conservative thought from the days of Edmund Burke has been a suspicion of radical change in most or all of its forms. Yet here we find something very surprising, which demands explanation. Conservatism, in certain of its currently most influential guises in Europe, and to some extent elsewhere in the world, has come to embrace more or less exactly what it once set out to repudiate: competitive capitalism and the processes of dramatic and far-reaching change that capitalism tends to provoke. Many conservatives are now active radicals in respect of that very phenomenon which previously they held most dear – tradition. ‘Away with the fossils we have inherited from the past’: where is such a sentiment most commonly to be heard? Not on the left, but on the right.

Conservatism become radical here confronts socialism become conservative. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many socialists have come to concentrate their energies on protecting the welfare state in the face of the strains to which it has become subject. Some socialists, it is true, continue to say that authentic socialism has never been tried, arguing that the disappearance of Communism is a windfall rather than a disaster. Communism, in this view, was a form of authoritarian dogmatism, deriving from a revolution betrayed, while reformist socialism of the sort found in Western Europe was dragged down by trying to accommodate to capitalism rather than surpassing it. However, this thesis is threadbare indeed and socialists have mostly been thrown back on to the defensive, their position in the ‘vanguard of history’ reduced to the more modest task of protecting welfare institutions.

Of course, radicals on the left do have another direction towards which to turn their eyes: to the new social movements, such as those concerned with feminism, ecology, peace or human rights. The ‘universal proletarian’ cannot bear the weight of the left’s historical aspirations; perhaps these other agencies will take over? For not only do such groups seem ‘progressive’, their chosen mode of political organization, the social movement, is the same as that which was supposed to convey the proletariat to its ultimate victory.

But it is plain enough that the new social movements cannot readily be claimed for socialism. While the aspirations of some such movements stand close to socialist ideals, their objectives are disparate and sometimes actively opposed to one another. With the possible exception of some sections of the green movement, the new social movements are not ‘totalizing’ in the way socialism is (or was), promising a new ‘stage’ of social development beyond the existing order. Some versions of feminist thought, for example, are as radical as anything that went under the name of socialism. Yet they don’t envisage seizing control of the future in the way the more ambitious versions of socialism have done.

The world of the late twentieth century, one must conclude, has not turned out as the founders of socialism anticipated when they sought to give direction to history by overcoming tradition and dogma. They believed, reasonably enough, that the more we, as collective humanity, get to know about social and material reality, the more we shall be able to control them in our own interests. In the case of social life in particular, human beings can become not just the authors but the masters of their own destiny.

Events have not borne out these ideas. The world we live in today is not one subject to tight human mastery – the stuff of the ambitions of the left and, one could say, the nightmares of the right. Almost to the contrary, it is one of dislocation and uncertainty, a ‘runaway world’. And, disturbingly, what was supposed to create greater and greater certainty – the advance of human knowledge and ‘controlled intervention’ into society and nature – is actually deeply involved with this unpredictability. Examples abound. Consider, for instance, the debate about global warming, which concerns the possible effects of human activities on climatic change. Is global warming happening, or is it not? Probably the majority of scientists agree that it is; but there are others who question either the very existence of the phenomenon or the theory advanced to account for it. If global warming is indeed taking place, its consequences are difficult to assess and problematic – for it is something which has no real precedents.

The uncertainties thus created I shall refer to generically as manufactured uncertainty. Life has always been a risky business. The intrusion of manufactured uncertainty into our lives doesn’t mean that our existence, on an individual or collective level, is more risky than it used to be. Rather, the sources, and the scope, of risk have altered. Manufactured risk is a result of human intervention into the conditions of social life and into nature. The uncertainties (and opportunities) it creates are largely new. They cannot be dealt with by age-old remedies; but neither do they respond to the Enlightenment prescription of more knowledge, more control. Put more accurately, the sorts of reactions they might evoke today are often as much about damage control and repair as about an endless process of increasing mastery.

The advance of manufactured uncertainty is the outcome of the long-term maturation of modern institutions; but it has also accelerated as the result of a series of developments that have transformed society (and nature) over no more than the past four or five decades. Pinpointing these is essential if we are to grasp the altered context of political life. Three sets of developments are particularly important; they affect especially the industrialized countries, but are also to an increasing degree worldwide in their impact.

Globalization, tradition, uncertainty

First, there is the influence of intensifying globalization – a notion much bandied about but as yet only poorly understood. Globalization is not only, or even primarily, an economic phenomenon; and it should not be equated with the emergence of a ‘world system’. Globalization is really about the transformation of space and time. I define it as action at distance, and relate its intensifying over recent years to the emergence of means of instantaneous global communication and mass transportation.

Globalization does not only concern the creation of large-scale systems, but also the transformation of local, and even personal, contexts of social experience. Our day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of the world. Conversely, local lifestyle habits have become globally consequential. Thus my decision to buy a certain item of clothing has implications not only for the international division of labour but for the earth’s ecosystems.

Globalization is not a single process but a complex mixture of processes, which often act in contradictory ways, producing conflicts, disjunctures and new forms of stratification. Thus, for instance, the revival of local nationalisms, and an accentuating of local identities, are directly bound up with globalizing influences, to which they stand in opposition.

Second, and partly as a direct result of globalization, we can speak today of the emergence of a post-traditional social order. A post-traditional order is not one in which tradition disappears – far from it. It is one in which tradition changes its status. Traditions have to explain themselves, to become open to interrogation or discourse. At first sight, such a statement might seem odd. For haven’t modernity and traditions always been in collision? Wasn’t overcoming tradition the main impetus of Enlightenment thought in the first place?

As expressed in the expansion of modernity, Enlightenment thought did destabilize traditions of all sorts. Yet the influence of tradition remained strong: more than this, in earlier phases of the development of modern societies a refocusing of tradition played a major part in consolidating the social order. Grand traditions were invented or reinvented, such as those of nationalism or of religion. No less important were reconstructed traditions of a more down-to-earth kind, to do with, among other areas of social life, the family, gender and sexuality. Rather than being dissolved, these became reformed in such a way as to plant women firmly in the home, reinforce divisions between the sexes and stabilize certain ‘normal’ canons of sexual behaviour. Even science itself, seemingly so wholly opposed to traditional modes of thought, became a sort of tradition. Science, that is, became an ‘authority’ which could be turned to in a relatively unquestioning way to confront dilemmas or cope with problems. In a globalizing, culturally cosmopolitan society, however, traditions are forced into open view: reasons or justifications have to be offered for them.

The rise of fundamentalism has to be seen against the backdrop of the emergence of the post-traditional society. The term ‘fundamentalism’ has only come into wide currency quite recently – as late as 1950 there was no entry for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. In this case, as elsewhere, the appearance of a new concept signals the emergence of new social forces. What is fundamentalism? It is, so I shall argue, nothing other than tradition defended in the traditional way – but where that mode of defence has become widely called into question. The point about traditions is that you don’t really have to justify them: they contain their own truth, a ritual truth, asserted as correct by the believer. In a globally cosmopolitan order, however, such a stance becomes dangerous, because essentially it is a refusal of dialogue. Fundamentalism tends to accentuate the purity of a given set of doctrines, not only because it wishes to set them off from other traditions, but because it is a rejection of a model of truth linked to the dialogic engagement of ideas in a public space. It is dangerous because edged with a potential for violence. Fundamentalisms can arise in all domains of social life where tradition becomes something which has to be decided about rather than just taken for granted. There arise not only fundamentalisms of religion but of ethnicity, the family and gender, among other forms.

The transformation of tradition in the present day is closely linked to the transformation of nature. Tradition and nature used to be relatively fixed ‘landscapes’, as it were, structuring social activity. The dissolution of tradition (understood in the traditional way) interlaces with the disappearance of nature, where ‘nature’ refers to environments and events given independently of human action. Manufactured uncertainty intrudes into all the arenas of life thus opened up to decision-making.

The third basic change affecting contemporary societies is the expansion of social reflexivity. In a detraditionalizing society individuals must become used to filtering all sorts of information relevant to their life situations and routinely act on the basis of that filtering process. Take the decision to get married. Such a decision has to be made in relation to an awareness that marriage has changed in basic ways over the past few decades, that sexual habits and identities have altered too, and that people demand more autonomy in their lives than ever before. Moreover, this is not just knowledge about an independent social reality; as applied in action it influences what that reality actually is. The growth of social reflexivity is a major factor introducing a dislocation between knowledge and control – a prime source of manufactured uncertainty.

A world of intensified reflexivity is a world of clever people. I don’t mean by this that people are more intelligent than they used to be. In a post-traditional order, individuals more or less have to engage with the wider world if they are to survive in it. Information produced by specialists (including scientific knowledge) can no longer be wholly confined to specific groups, but becomes routinely interpreted and acted on by lay individuals in the course of their everyday actions.

The development of social reflexivity is the key influence on a diversity of changes that otherwise seem to have little in common. Thus the emergence of ‘post-Fordism’ in industrial enterprises is usually analysed in terms of technological change – particularly the influence of information technology. But the underlying reason for the growth of ‘flexible production’ and ‘bottom-up decision-making’ is that a universe of high reflexivity leads to greater autonomy of action, which the enterprise must recognize and draw on.

The same applies to bureaucracy and to the sphere of politics. Bureaucratic authority, as Max Weber made clear, used to be a condition for organizational effectiveness. In a more reflexively ordered society, operating in the context of manufactured uncertainty, this is no longer the case. The old bureaucratic systems start to disappear, the dinosaurs of the post-traditional age. In the domain of politics, states can no longer so readily treat their citizens as ‘subjects’. Demands for political reconstruction, for the eliminating of corruption, as well as widespread disaffection with orthodox political mechanisms, are all in some part expressions of increased social reflexivity.

Socialism, conservatism and neoliberalism

It is in terms of these changes that we should look to explain the troubles of socialism. In the shape of Soviet Communism (in the East) and the Keynesian ‘welfare compromise’ (in the West), socialism worked tolerably well when most risk was external (rather than manufactured) and where the level of globalization and social reflexivity was relatively low. When these circumstances no longer apply, socialism either collapses or is turned on to the defensive – it is certainly not any more in the vanguard of ‘history’.

Socialism was based on what might be called a ‘cybernetic model’ of social life, one which strongly reflects the Enlightenment outlook mentioned at the beginning. According to the cybernetic model, a system (in the case of socialism, the economy) can best be organized by being subordinated to a directive intelligence (the state, understood in one form or another). But while this set-up might work reasonably effectively for more coherent systems – in this case a society of low reflexivity, with fairly fixed lifestyle habits – it doesn’t do so for highly complex ones.

Such systems depend on a large amount of low-level input for their coherence (provided in market situations by a multiplicity of local pricing, production and consumption decisions). The human brain probably also works in such a manner. It was once thought that the brain was a cybernetic system, in which the cortex was responsible for integrating the central nervous system as a whole. Current theories, however, emphasize much more the significance of low-level inputs in producing effective neural integration.

The proposition that socialism is moribund is much less controversial now than it was even a few short years ago. More heterodox, I think, is a second assertion I want to make: that conservative political thought has become largely dissolved just at the point at which it has become particularly relevant to our current condition. How can this be, for hasn’t conservatism triumphed worldwide in the wake of the disintegrating project of socialism? Here, however, we must distinguish conservatism from the right. ‘The right’ means many different things in differing contexts and countries. But one main way in which the term is used today is to refer to neoliberalism, whose links with conservatism are at best tenuous. For if conservatism means anything, it means the desire to conserve – and specifically the conserving of tradition, as the ‘inherited wisdom of the past’. Neoliberalism is not conservative in this (quite elemental) sense. On the contrary, it sets in play radical processes of change, stimulated by the incessant expansion of markets. As noted earlier, the right here has turned radical, while the left seeks mainly to conserve – trying to protect, for example, what remains of the welfare state.

In a post-traditional society, the conserving of tradition cannot sustain the sense it once had, as the relatively unreflective preservation of the past. For tradition defended in the traditional way becomes fundamentalism, too dogmatic an outlook on which to base a conservatism which looks to the achievement of social harmony (or ‘one nation’) as one of its main raisons d’être.

Neoliberalism, on the other hand, becomes internally contradictory and this contradiction is increasingly plain to see. On the one hand neoliberalism is hostile to tradition – and is indeed one of the main forces sweeping away tradition everywhere, as a result of the promotion of market forces and an aggressive individualism. On the other, it depends upon the persistence of tradition for its legitimacy and its attachment to conservatism – in the areas of the nation, religion, gender and the family. Having no proper theoretical rationale, its defence of tradition in these areas normally takes the form of fundamentalism. The debate about ‘family values’ provides a good example. Liberal individualism is supposed to reign in the marketplace, and the purview of markets becomes greatly extended. The wholesale expansion of a market society, however, is a prime force promoting those very disintegrative forces affecting family life which neoliberalism, wearing its fundamentalist hat, diagnoses and so vigorously opposes. This is an unstable mix indeed.

If socialism and conservatism have disintegrated, and neoliberalism is paradoxical, might one turn to liberalism per se (capitalism plus liberal democracy, but shorn of New Right fundamentalisms) in the manner, say, of Francis Fukuyama? Although I don’t deal in the book with liberal political theory in any detail, I don’t think so, and for reasons documented at greater length later. An ever-expanding capitalism runs up not only against environmental limits in terms of the earth’s resources, but against the limits of modernity in the shape of manufactured uncertainty; liberal democracy, based on an electoral party system, operating at the level of the nation-state, is not well equipped to meet the demands of a reflexive citizenry in a globalizing world; and the combination of capitalism and liberal democracy provides few means of generating social solidarity.

All this reveals plainly enough the exhaustion of received political ideologies. Should we therefore perhaps accept, as some of the postmodernists say, that the Enlightenment has exhausted itself and that we have to more or less take the world as it is, with all its barbarities and limitations? Surely not. Almost the last thing we need now is a sort of new medievalism, a confession of impotence in the face of forces larger than ourselves. We live in a radically damaged world, for which radical remedies are needed.

There is a very real and difficult issue to be faced, however: the problematic relation between knowledge and control, exemplified by the spread of manufactured risk. Political radicalism can no longer insert itself, as socialism did, in the space between a discarded past and a humanly made future. But it certainly cannot rest content with neoliberal radicalism – an abandonment of the past led by the erratic play of market forces. The possibility of, even the necessity for, a radical politics has not died along with all else that has fallen away – but such a politics can only be loosely identified with the classic orientations of the left.

What might be called ‘philosophic conservatism’ – a philosophy of protection, conservation and solidarity – acquires a new relevance for political radicalism today. The idea of living with imperfection, long an emphasis of philosophic conservatism, here might be turned to radical account. A radical political programme must recognize that confronting manufactured risk cannot take the form of ‘more of the same’, an endless exploration of the future at the cost of the protection of the present or past.

It is surely not accidental that these are exactly the themes of that political force which can lay greatest claim to inherit the mantle of left radicalism: the green movement. This very claim has helped to obscure the otherwise rather obvious affinities between ecological thinking, including particularly ‘deep ecology’, and philosophic conservatism. In each case there is an emphasis on conservation, restoration and repair. Green political theory, however, falls prey to the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and is dogged by its own fundamentalisms. In other words, it depends for its proposals on calling for a reversion to ‘nature’. Yet nature no longer exists! We cannot defend nature in the natural way any more than we can defend tradition in the traditional way – yet each quite often needs defending.

The ecological crisis is at the core of this book, but understood in a quite unorthodox manner. That crisis, and the various philosophies and movements which have arisen in response to it, are expressions of a modernity which, as it becomes globalized and ‘turned back against itself’, comes up against its own limits. The practical and ethical considerations thus disclosed, for the most part, are not new, although novel strategies and proposals are undoubtedly required to resolve them. They express moral and existential dilemmas which modern institutions, with their driving expansionism and their impetus to control, have effectively repressed or ‘sequestered’.

A framework for radical politics

Our relation to nature – or what is no longer nature – is one among other major institutional dimensions of modernity, connected particularly to the impact of industry, science and technology in the modern world. While this dimension forms a focus for ecological concerns and debates, the others are equally significant as contexts for the reforming of radical politics. One such dimension is that of capitalism, defined as a competitive market system in which goods and labour power are commodities. If the oppositional force of socialism has been blunted, must a capitalistic system reign unchallenged? I don’t think so. Unchecked capitalistic markets still have many of the damaging consequences to which Marx pointed, including the dominance of a growth ethic, universal commodification and economic polarization.

The critique of these tendencies surely remains as important as it ever was, but today it cannot be derived from a cybernetic model of socialism. On the ‘other side’ of capitalism we see the possible emergence of a post-scarcity order, defined in a very particular way. Analysing the contours of a post-scarcity order means looking as much to the combined influence of philosophic conservatism and ecological thought as to socialism. The critique of capitalism, as I develop it here at any rate, continues to be focused on economic oppression and poverty, but from a different perspective from those characteristic of socialist thought.

Political and administrative power, a further dimension of modernity, does not derive directly from control of the means of production, whatever Marx may have said on the matter. Depending on surveillance capabilities, such power may be the source of authoritarian rule. Standing opposed to political authoritarianism is the influence of democracy – the favourite term of the moment, for who is not a democrat now? But what kind of democracy is at issue here? For at the very time when liberal democratic systems seem to be spreading everywhere, we find those systems under strain in their very societies of origin.

The problem of democracy, or so I shall argue, is closely bound up with a further dimension of modernity: control of the means of violence. The management of violence is not these days part of conventional forms of political theory, whether left, right or liberal. Yet where many cultures are thrust into contact with one another, as in current social conditions, the violent clash of fundamentalisms becomes a matter of serious concern.

On the basis of the foregoing comments I propose in the book what might be summed up as a six-point framework for a reconstituted radical politics, one which draws on philosophic conservatism but preserves some of the core values hitherto associated with socialist thought.

(1) There must be a concern to repair damaged solidarities, which may sometimes imply the selective preservation, or even perhaps reinvention, of tradition. This theorem applies at all the levels which link individual actions not just to groups or even to states, but to more globalized systems. It is important not to understand by it the idea of the revival of civil society, now so popular among some sections of the left. The concept of a ‘civil society’ lying between the individual and state is a suspect one, for reasons I explain later in the text, when applied to current social conditions. Today we should speak more of reordered conditions of individual and collective life, producing forms of social disintegration to be sure, but also offering new bases for generating solidarities.

A starting point here is a proper assessment of the nature of individualism in present-day society. Neoliberalism places great stress on the importance of individualism, contrasting this with the discredited ‘collectivism’ of socialist theory. By ‘individualism’, however, neoliberals understand the self-seeking, profit-maximizing behaviour of the marketplace. This is a mistaken way, in my view, of interpreting what should more appropriately be conceived of as the expansion of social reflexivity. In a world of high reflexivity, an individual must achieve a certain degree of autonomy of action as a condition of being able to survive and forge a life; but autonomy is not the same as egoism and moreover implies reciprocity and interdependence. The issue of reconstructing social solidarities should therefore not be seen as one of protecting social cohesion around the edges of an egoistic marketplace. It should be understood as one of reconciling autonomy and interdependence in the various spheres of social life, including the economic domain.

Consider as an illustration the sphere of the family – one of the main arenas in which detraditionalization has proceeded apace. Neoliberals have quite properly expressed concern about disintegrative tendencies affecting the family, but the notion that there can be a straightforward reversion to ‘traditional family values’ is a non-starter. For one thing, in the light of recent research we know that family life in earlier times often had a quite pronounced dark side, including the physical and sexual abuse of children, and violence by husbands against wives. For another, neither women nor children are likely to renounce the rights they have gained, rights which in the case of women also go along with widespread involvement in the paid labour force.

Since once again there are no real historical precedents, we don’t know how far family life can effectively be reconstructed in such a way as to balance autonomy and solidarity. Yet some of the means whereby such an aim might be achieved have become fairly clear. Enhanced solidarity in a detraditionalizing society depends on what might be termed active trust, coupled with a renewal of personal and social responsibility for others. Active trust is trust which has to be won, rather than coming from the tenure of pre-established social positions or gender roles. Active trust presumes autonomy rather than standing counter to it and it is a powerful source of social solidarity, since compliance is freely given rather than enforced by traditional constraints.

In the context of family life, active trust involves commitment to another or others, that commitment implying also the recognition of obligations to them stretching across time. Strengthening family commitments and obligations, so long as these are based on active trust, doesn’t seem incompatible with the diversity of family forms now being pioneered in all the industrialized societies. High rates of separation and divorce are probably here to stay, but one can see many ways in which these could enrich, rather than destroy, social solidarity. Recognition of the prime importance of rights of children, together with responsibilities towards them, for instance, could provide the very means of consolidating the new kinship ties we see around us – between, say, two sets of parents who are also step-parents and the children they share in common.

(2) We should recognize the increasing centrality of what I call life politics to both formal and less orthodox domains of the political order. The political outlook of the left has always been closely bound up with the idea of emancipation. Emancipation means freedom, or rather freedoms of various kinds: freedom from the arbitrary hold of tradition, from arbitrary power and from the constraints of material deprivation. Emancipatory politics is a politics of life chances and hence is central to the creation of autonomy of action. As such it obviously remains vital to a radical political programme. It is joined today, however, by a series of concerns coming from the changes analysed earlier – the transformation of tradition and nature, in the context of a globalizing, cosmopolitan order. Life politics is a politics, not of life chances, but of life style. It concerns disputes and struggles about how (as individuals and as collective humanity) we should live in a world where what used to be fixed either by nature or tradition is now subject to human decisions.

(3) In conjunction with the generalizing of social reflexivity, active trust implies a conception of generative politics. Generative politics exists in the space that links the state to reflexive mobilization in the society at large. For reasons already discussed, the state can only function as a cybernetic intelligence to a limited degree. Yet the limitations of neoliberalism, with its idea of the minimal state, have become very apparent. Generative politics is a politics which seeks to allow individuals and groups to make things happen, rather than have things happen to them, in the context of overall social concerns and goals.

Generative politics is a defence of the politics of the public domain, but does not situate itself in the old opposition between state and market. It works through providing material conditions, and organizational frameworks, for the life-political decisions taken by individuals and groups in the wider social order. Such a politics depends on the building of active trust, whether in the institutions of government or in connected agencies. A key argument of this book is that generative politics is the main means of effectively approaching problems of poverty and social exclusion in the present day.

Generative politics is not a panacea. The shifting character of the state, and the fact that more or less the whole population lives in the same ‘discursive space’ as state and government agencies, produce major new political dilemmas and contradictions. For example, where the national polity has become only one among other points of reference for an individual’s life, many people might often not ‘listen’ to what is going on in the political domain, even though they may keep mentally ‘in touch’ on a more consistent basis than before. ‘Tuning out’ may express a distaste for the antics of politicians, but may also go along with a specific alertness to questions the person deems consequential. Trust here might mingle with cynicism in an uneasy combination.

(4) The shortcomings of liberal democracy in a globalizing, reflexive social order suggest the need to further more radical forms of democratization. Here I stress the importance of dialogicdemocracy. Among the many forms and aspects of democracy debated in the literature today, two main dimensions of a democratic order can be distinguished. On the one hand, democracy is a vehicle for the representation of interests. On the other, it is a way of creating a public arena in which controversial issues – in principle – can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue rather than through pre-established forms of power. While the first aspect has probably received most attention, the second is at least equally significant.

The extension of dialogic democracy would form one part (although not the only one) of a process of what might be referred to as the democratizing of democracy. Where the level of social reflexivity remains quite low, political legitimacy continues to depend in some substantial part on traditional symbolism and pre-existing ways of doing things. In a more reflexive order however – where people are also free to more or less ignore the formal political arena if they so wish – such practices are liable to become called into question.

Greater transparency of government would help the democratizing of democracy, but this is also a phenomenon which extends into areas other than that of the formal political sphere. Outside the arena of the state, it may be suggested, dialogic democracy can become promoted in several main contexts. In the area of personal life – parent–child relations, sexual relations, friendship relations – dialogic democracy advances to the degree to which such relationships are ordered through dialogue rather than through embedded power. What I call a ‘democracy of the emotions’ depends on the integrating of autonomy and solidarity mentioned earlier. It presumes the development of personal relationships in which active trust is mobilized and sustained through discussion and the interchange of views, rather than by arbitrary power of one sort or another.

To the extent to which it comes into being, a democracy of the emotions would have major implications for the furtherance of formal, public democracy. Individuals who have a good understanding of their own emotional makeup, and who are able to communicate effectively with others on a personal basis, are likely to be well prepared for the wider tasks and responsibilities of citizenship.

Dialogic democracy can also be mobilized through the activities of self-help groups and social movements. Such movements and groups express, but also contribute to, the heightened reflexivity of local and global social activity. In contemporary societies, far more people belong to self-help groups than are members of political parties. The democratic qualities of social movements and self-help groups come in large part from the fact that they open up spaces for public dialogue in respect of the issues with which they are concerned. They can force into the discursive domain aspects of social conduct that previously went undiscussed, or were ‘settled’ by traditional practices. They may help contest ‘official’ definitions of things; feminist, ecological and peace movements have all achieved this outcome, as have a multiplicity of self-help groups.

Some such movements and groups are intrinsically global in scope, and thus might contribute to the wider spread of forms of democracy. Given that the idea of a world government is implausible, mechanisms of dialogic democracy working not just through states and international agencies, but through a diversity of other groupings, become of central importance.

(5) We should be prepared to rethink the welfare state in a fundamental way – and in relation to wider issues of global poverty. In many countries what remains of socialist ideology has become concentrated on protecting the welfare state against the attacks of the neoliberals. And indeed there may very well be basic features of the welfare state which should be preserved against the potential ravages of cutbacks or of privatization. In terms of trust and solidarity, for example, welfare provisions or services quite often embody commitments that would simply be eroded if a more market-led, ‘business’ orientation were introduced.

Yet the welfare state was formed as a ‘class compromise’ or ‘settlement’ in social conditions that have now altered very markedly; and its systems of security were designed to cope more with external than with manufactured risk. Some of the major problematic aspects of the welfare state have by now been identified clearly enough, partly as the result of neoliberal critiques. The welfare state has been less than wholly effective either in countering poverty or in producing large-scale income or wealth redistribution. It was tied to an implicit model of traditional gender roles, presuming male participation in the paid labour force, with a ‘second tier’ of programmes directed towards families without a male breadwinner. Welfare state bureaucracies, like bureaucracies everywhere, have tended to become inflexible and impersonal; and welfare dependency is probably in some part a real phenomenon, not just an invention of neoliberalism. Finally, the welfare state was consolidated in the postwar period at a point where chronically high levels of unemployment seemed unlikely to return.

A new ‘settlement’ is urgently required today; but this can no longer take the form of a top down dispensation of benefits. Rather, welfare measures aimed at countering the polarizing effects of what, after all, remains a class society must be empowering rather than merely ‘dispensed’. They must be concerned with just that reconstruction of social solidarity mentioned earlier, on the level of the family and that of the wider civic culture. And such a settlement has to be one that gives due attention to gender, not only to class.

Coping with manufactured uncertainty creates a whole new spectrum of problems – and, as always, opportunities – for the reform of welfare. Here one should think of reconstruction along the lines of models of positive welfare. The welfare state grew up as a mode of protecting against misfortunes that ‘happen’ to people – certainly so far as social security is concerned it essentially picks up the pieces after mishaps have occurred. Positive welfare, by contrast, places much greater emphasis on the mobilizing of life-political measures, aimed once more at connecting autonomy with personal and collective responsibilities.

(6) A programme of radical politics must be prepared to confront the role of violence in human affairs. The fact that I leave this question until last in the book doesn’t mean at all that it is the least important. It is, however, one of the most difficult of issues to deal with in terms of received political theory. Neither socialist thought nor liberalism have established perspectives or concepts relevant to producing a normative political theory of violence, while rightist thought has tended to think of violence as a necessary and endemic feature of human life.

The topic is a big one. The influence of violence, after all, stretches all the way from male violence against women through casual street violence to large-scale war. Are there any threads which connect these various situations and which therefore might be relevant to a theory of pacification? I think there are, and they bring us back to the themes of fundamentalism and dialogic democracy.

In any social circumstances, there are only a limited number of ways in which a clash of values can be dealt with. One is through geographical segregation; individuals of conflicting dispositions, or cultures hostile to one another, can of course coexist if they have little or no direct contact. Another, more active, way is through exit. An individual or group which does not get along with another can simply disengage or move away, as might happen in a divorce. A third way of coping with individual or cultural difference is through dialogue. Here a clash of values can in principle operate under a positive sign – it can be a means of increased communication and self-understanding. Understanding the other better leads to greater understanding of oneself, or one’s own culture, leading to further understanding and mutuality. Finally, a clash of values can be resolved through the use of force or violence.

In the globalizing society in which we now live the first two of these four options become drastically reduced. No culture, state or large group can with much success isolate itself from the global cosmopolitan order; and while exit may be possible in some situations for individuals, it is usually not available to larger social entities.

The relation between dialogue and violence, strung out along the edge of possible fundamentalisms, thus becomes particularly acute and tensionful for us. This reduction of options is dangerous, but it also offers sources of hope. For we know that dialogue can sometimes replace violence, and we know that this can happen both in situations of personal life and in much larger social settings. The ‘gender fundamentalism’ that violent men sustain towards their partners, and perhaps towards women in general, can at least in individual cases be transformed through greater self-understanding and communication. Dialogue between cultural groups and states is both a force acting directly against fundamentalist doctrines and a means of substituting talk for the use of violence.

The dark side of all this is obvious. Violence plainly often stems from clashes of interest and joustings for power; hence there are many quite strictly material conditions which would have to be altered to contest and reduce it. Moreover, the centrifugal forces of dispersal within and between societies in the present day might prove too great to manage without explosions of violence, on the small and larger scale. Yet the connections I have explored between autonomy, solidarity and dialogue are real; and they correspond to observable changes in local settings of interaction as well as in the global order.

Coda: the question of agency

Finally, what of the question of agency? If it be agreed that there is still an agenda for radical politics, who is to implement it? Seemingly even more difficult: what values might provide guidance for such an agenda? For it appears to many that we must now deal with an irremediably pluralistic universe of values, and indeed that the suspension of all value judgements, save for contextual or local ones, is the condition of cosmopolitanism. Critics of value relativism, on the other hand, regard the very term ‘cosmopolitan’ with some despair: if all ways of life are condoned as equally authentic, how can any positive values remain at all?

As against both such views, however, one could say that this is probably the first time in history that we can speak of the emergence of universal values – values shared by almost everyone, and which are in no sense the enemy of cosmopolitanism. Such values are perhaps first of all driven by what Hans Jonas calls the ‘heuristics of fear’ – we discover them under a negative sign, the collective threats which humanity has created for itself.1

Values of the sanctity of human life, universal human rights, the preservation of species and care for future as well as present generations of children may perhaps be arrived at defensively, but they are certainly not negative values. They imply ethics of individual and collective responsibility, which (as value claims) are able to override divisions of interest. Responsibility is not duty and some have suggested that it therefore lacks that imperative power which the call to duty draws out in the ‘true believer’.2 As compared to duty, however, responsibility implies the spelling out of reasons, not blind allegiance. It runs counter to fanaticism, but has its own compelling power, for commitments freely undertaken often have greater binding force than those which are simply traditionally given.

Responsibility is also the clue to agency. Today we must disavow providentialism – the idea that ‘human beings only set themselves such problems as they can resolve.’ With it, we have to discard the idea that there are agents sent to fulfil history’s purposes, including the metaphysical notion that history is ‘made’ by the dispossessed. Recognizing the irreducible character of risk means having a critical theory without guarantees. Yet this recognition is also a source of liberation. There is no single agent, group or movement that, as Marx’s proletariat was supposed to do, can carry the hopes of humanity; but there are many points of political engagement which offer good cause for optimism.

1

Conservatism: Radicalism Embraced

The word ‘conservatism’ today conjures up an odd, but interesting, diversity of associations. To be a conservative is, in some sense or another, to want to conserve. Yet in current circumstances it is not only, or even mainly, those who term themselves conservatives who wish so to do. Socialists more often than not find themselves trying to conserve existing institutions – most notably the welfare state – rather than to undermine them. And who are the attackers, the radicals who wish to dismantle existing structures? Why, quite often they are none other than the conservatives – who, it seems, wish to conserve no longer.

How did such a situation come about? How can it be that conservative thought, which, one might think, is by definition opposed to radicalism, should have ended up by embracing it? Does the so-called New Right, the progenitor of such radicalism, share anything in common with the old?

In this chapter, I shall not attempt to offer anything like a comprehensive account of the development or present status of conservative thought. Although perhaps not as complex and diverse as socialism, conservatism varies widely between different countries and includes various contrasting strands. In many continental European countries, for example, ‘conservatism’ suggests the political influence of Catholicism. Christian democratic parties and the intellectual influences which have nourished them have sometimes favoured outlooks and policies generally associated only with left parties in the English-speaking countries.

Special mention, right at the outset of this analysis, must be made of the distinctive position of conservatism in the United States. American ‘exceptionalism’ has usually been discussed in relation to the non-existence of a major socialist party in the US. But, of course, as most interpreters from at least the days of Louis Hartz have recognized, the absence of socialism has been accompanied by the relative absence also of a certain style of conservatism – that style which I shall call below Old Conservatism.

American conservatism, in some of its major forms at least, has almost from its beginnings been aggressively procapitalist in ways that its European counterparts have not. Conversely, the struggle to establish certain sorts of welfare systems long found in most other industrial societies, most notably universal state provision for health care, is still happening in the US.

Since I want to situate my discussion in this chapter and the next in the context of changing relations between conservatism and socialism, I do not analyse the position of conservative thought and practice in the US at any length. I don’t discuss the history of European christian democracy either. In this chapter and the succeeding one I have concentrated mainly, although not wholly, on British perspectives on conservatism and socialism. I hope, nevertheless, that American and Continental European readers will read on. For while there might be important divergences between the political histories of different industrial countries, the basic dilemmas now faced by conservative and socialist thought are everywhere similar.

An important terminological note has to be made. In speaking of those conservatives who favour the indefinite expansion of market forces, I have used the generic terms New Right or, more often, ‘neoliberalism’. Neither of these terms means the same thing in an American as in a European context. The New Right in the US tends to be associated with the Protestant religious right. ‘Liberals’ in the United States have not been the Manchester liberals, but instead those who during the New Deal and subsequently favoured the expansion of the welfare state. In the book I don’t follow these usages, but rather the ones that are more or less universal outside the US.

Old Conservatism

Conservatism, it is often said, opposes rationalism, with its advocacy of clear and definite principles; hence conservative thought resists exposition. It is bound up with feelings and with practices, not with the imposition of logic on a refractory and complex social world. As one author puts it, ‘Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae, or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when compelled, sceptical … It is capable of expression … [but] not always with any confidence that the words it finds will match the instinct that required them.’1

Given that this is not just a call to obscurantism, or anti-intellectualism, there are two senses in which such an observation might be taken. One is somewhat technical, and I shall come to it later. The other sense is to suggest that conservatism cannot be developed as a systematic philosophy – and in this guise the comment is surely mistaken, at least when we enquire into the history of conservative doctrines.

Conservatism in Britain and the United States has rarely been overly ‘theoretical’, it is true, but then much the same applies to other political views in an Anglo-Saxon context. The aversion to theorizing in matters political was an expression of that love of empiricism that was, until fairly recently at any rate, something of a mark of English-speaking culture as a whole. Elsewhere, in France or Germany for example, conservatives have been no more loath than anyone else to theorize. What did conservatism mean in these countries, if one goes back to its point of origin?

It was, of course, in some large part a defence of the ancien régime, and especially of Catholicism, against the aggrandizing forces of the French Revolution. But conservatism was more than just a reaffirmation of how things used to be before progressivism took a hold. In its more elaborated forms, conservatism both took issue with the Enlightenment and developed theories of society that challenged those of emerging liberalism. The more sophisticated forms of conservative thought did not simply dismiss the new in favour of the old; they countered progressivism with contrasting theories of history, tradition and moral community.

Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, for example, provided an interpretation of the revealed truth of tradition in counter-posing the lost harmony of medieval times with the disorder of the revolutionary society. The human individual is intrinsically social, deriving that social being from sedimented history and from the larger cultural community. There is no state of nature, such as posited by Rousseau. Society, including the individual’s social being, is of divine origin and reflects God’s authority; thus obligations always take precedence over rights.2 Moral truth is intrinsic to the social order and transmitted to the individual through language, which is a creation not of humans but of God. Continuity of the social order is guaranteed by the moral communities of the family, church and state. Bonald rejected the ideas of a social contract, popular sovereignty and representative government. He was scathing about the expansion of commerce and industry and developed a hard-hitting critique of bourgeois society. Industrial production leads to social disintegration and to the breakup of the organic wholeness characteristic of an agrarian order.

The more capitalism and democracy spread, the more Old Conservatism did in fact breed radicalism – but this was always above all a radicalism of re-establishment, looking back towards the past. There are clear links here between French and German conservatism: as the German maxim put it, ‘too conservative not to be radical’. It is not surprising that progressive liberals such as Émile Durkheim drew on Bonald and de Maistre just as Marx did on Hegel, or that for a period of more than a century left and right made use of many common sources.

What did Old Conservatism stand for? Briefly put, it stood for hierarchy, aristocracy, the primacy of the collectivity, or state, over the individual, and the overreaching importance of the sacred. All of these traits are present in Burke, even if he did retain misgivings about closed philosophical systems. In Burke’s writings we find much the same disparagement of the individual as appears in the works of his continental counterparts. Burke’s writings are complex and, like those of the more challenging of Continental authors, are by no means wholly backward-looking.

Tradition is never static, and needs to be balanced by correction, or reform: ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’3

However, looking forward must always be based on looking back: ‘people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.’ Innovation, as opposed to reform, is dangerous because it flouts the ‘stupendous wisdom’ contained within institutions that have stood the test of time. ‘Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years.’ The idea of society as an organic community is strongly developed in Burke, as in Bonald and de Maistre. The idea that the individual and individual rights should be prime values is for them a nonsense. The state cannot be founded on a contract and the individual has no abstract rights; rights and their accompanying duties come from the collectivity, which represents an endless chain of generations. Society is ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born.’ Democracy betrays that partnership. The idea that ‘a majority of men, told by the head’ should determine political decisions would be nothing short of disastrous.

What has happened to Old Conservatism? Not to put too fine a point on things, it is dead. In the nature of the case, conservative thinkers like to trace their ideas back to an established heritage – in other words, to Burke and his contemporaries. This can be done plausibly enough with some of Burke’s themes, such as organicism, the ‘test of time’ and the emphasis on reform; but in several basic respects such a procedure makes little sense. Old Conservatism, at least in its more principled forms, is, as has been aptly said, the ‘other God that failed’ alongside Communism and radical socialism.4 Old Conservatism was destroyed because the social forms it sought to defend came to be more or less completely swept away; and, in Continental Europe, because of its ties to fascism.

The beliefs that have effectively disappeared with the disintegration of Old Conservatism are quite easy to list. No one any longer sees in feudalism a social order that is politically instructive for the modern world. Correspondingly, no one seriously puts up a defence of aristocracy, of the primacy of landed property, or of the forms of hierarchy linked to aristocratic rule. Perhaps more relevant to current debates, few if any conservative authors persist with the idea of the overweaning state or with Romantic conceptions of the Volksgeist. Among conservatives now, if states are still supposed to be ‘strong’, they are envisaged as (in principle) ‘minimal’ rather than overarching. Conservatives have become either reconciled to democracy (in some form or another) or are even in some instances fervent advocates of it. Hierarchy is justified in terms of functional inequality rather than inherited fitness to rule, even though some conservatives might continue to support the notion of a ‘political class’ having distinctive qualities of statecraft.