A Restatement Of Economic Liberalism Prologue: Capitalism and the permissive society Introduction :: The Historical Context :: Reasons For Suspicion :: The Rise Of The Word Man :: The Dilemma Of The Economic Liberal :: The New Left Attack :: Poverty And Equality :: 'Alienation' :: Student Dissent :: Contemporary Radicalism :: A turn of the tide?

These economic influences, although important, are not the whole story. There are certain ideological and cultural aspects of contemporary radicalism which deserve at least a brief examination. The collectivist movements, about which Schumpeter and Hayek wrote, stretch from Marxism of various sorts to the 1945-50 Labour Government - although the arguments were later extended by Hayek to the conscious pursuit of egalitarian policies in the 'Welfare State' of the 1 950s and 1960s. Even Friedman, whose work on the subject is of most recent vintage, directs his fire against schemes for increasing the authority and the role of the US Federal Government.

The latest outbreak of radical fervour, after a period in which ideological conflict was supposed to have died down, is, in many respects, different. The emphasis is on personal freedom and not on the state. The apostles of the 'Alternative Society' do not see salvation through the boards of state corporations; and they do not believe that a mixture of Old Etonians, professional managers, officials, generals and retired trade unionists become agents of radical change by means of the magic word nationalisation. Nor do they set much store by state economic plans; and they are repelled rather than attracted by many aspects of the technocratic dream of transforming society by means of science. All this is a change for the better.

Associated with this is a great stress on personal sensual gratification and on giving free reign to instincts , emotions and feelings. The older socialist movements had their roots in the puritan tradition and were nourished by a moral or aesthetic disapproval of the conspicuous consumption of the rich; and many people who were attracted by socialist theories felt, like Mr Harold Macmillan, that the right wing was much more fun. Today the position is reversed. The leaders in consumption, the film makers, and the leaders of fashion tend to be on the left; and although they may be economically better off under a Tory government, there is little love lost on either side.

Of course reality is far more complex. The puritan tradition lingers on amidst the new hedonism - this is the kindest explanation of the otherwise hypocritical campaign against the Macmillan government at the time of Profumo, in which so many people, from Bow Group sympathisers to Private Eye, worked themselves up into such a state of delighted indignation. The early twentieth-century British Labour Movement comprised the beery heartiness of the trade unionist as well as Mrs Webb's sense of sinful indulgence in the occasional cup of tea or coffee after a meal. The establishment, whether Whig or Tory, always contained a respectable aldermanic element as well as the more hedonistic 'society' figures. Moreover, the technocratic passion for quantification and 'hard facts' is, if anything, still a growing force in the professions and among the generation of academics now coming to the fore - and it is still a religion among politicians of the generation of Wilson and Heath and even those slightly younger, although it reflects a set of values that is now passing. Such cultural lags are among the platitudes of history. But nothing at all can be said on social trends if one is not prepared to simplify or generalise; and the contemporary New Left - and even more the less overtly political 'youth culture' - are both hedonistic and suspicious of authority.

The removal of inhibitions and barriers, so evident in the more casual and comfortable style of contemporary clothes, is highly desirable. It is the end road of the libertarian and utilitarian ideals professed by the bewigged philosophers of the eighteenth century and the Victorian political thinkers in their frock coats. The artificiality and conventionalism of the eighteenth century and the repressive respectability of the nineteenth century did produce the tensions and anxieties discussed, for example, by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents (although Freud carefully refrained from prescription).

Unfortunately, although perhaps inevitably, the emphasis on instinctual gratification has been associated with a revolt against rational thinking - whether of the empirical or the logical type - in favour of 'thinking with the belly'. Bertrand Russell rightly remarked that 'reason is and should be the servant of the emotions'; and it was necessary to dethrone reason from the exaggerated point of esteem in which it was then held. The trouble is that reason has been dismissed even as a servant and many apostles of the 'Alternative Society' are impatient of it in any role. This leads to a total sweeping aside of any but the most superficial and short-term approaches to, say, bad housing conditions or poverty; and it is not a climate in which belief in a market economy - or any other rational approach to policy - is likely to flourish.

Anyone who believes these observations exaggerated should turn to that extremely useful publication, Nicholas Saunders' Alternative London.¹⁷ Its second longest chapter is entitled 'Mystical' (coming behind 'Crafts' but in front of 'Drugs' in terms of length). This opens with a lament that the Christian churches have lost the essence of religion, which is 'to let the pure light inside flow out freely rather than ooze out discoloured'. Another analogy is to see oneself 'as God suppressed by being encased by layers of shit'. We read of Meher Baba who promised in 1935 to give his disciples the secret of the world after 35 years. He died after 34, 'yet his following is growing still'.

The present reaction against the artificialities of civilisation in favour of the instinctive, the physical, the sensual and the mystical, has been foreshadowed for a very long time. The immediate predecessors of the present romantic sensualists were, in fact, the New Right that grew up, especially in Continental countries, towards the end of the nineteenth century, and which openly proclaimed 'thinking with the blood'. This New Right may have drawn inspiration from the myth of an uncorrupted past, but it vied with the Marxists in demanding a sweeping overhaul of national life. It was an attempt to escape from the frustrations of urban and industrial life to move to a more emotional and physical plane of existence, usually accompanied by intense nationalist feelings. It can be traced in writers such as Nietzsche, Kipling, d'Annunzio or D. H. Lawrence. It would be absurd to identify these men with the perversion of the gas chambers, even though the Nazi period is a warning of the direction in which these ideas can lead in unscrupulous or unsophisticated hands.

The perennial argument on the connection between Wagner's music dramas and Nazism illustrates the essential point. It is because they appeal to basic emotions, instincts or archetypal patterns, that his works have their strange power and fascination - even for those who think that they are responding to the music only and ignoring the Nordic myths. These very deep-seated human drives are capable of producing both the worst and the best in the species - the sublimest love, the greatest heroism, and also the lowest depths of cruelty and lust for death.

We have, of course, moved away from Lawrence and Wagner. The more extreme beliefs and practices of present-day opponents of the 'system' were perhaps foreshadowed by much that went on in the late Roman Empire. The third century writer Plotinus, far and away the leading philosopher of the age, is described by as level-headed a senior historian as Professor Michael Grant, as 'the pioneer of psychedelic experience for the West'.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Plotinus represented a rational extreme, by the standard of age, trying to achieve his ends 'by purely cerebral, intellectual discipline - not by schizophrenia and not by drugs and not by religion.'

More characteristic was the mode of life of the early Christian monks as described by Gibbon. Like many modern hippies, who have rejected private property and the consumer society, 'the candidate who aspired to the virtue of evangelical poverty, abjured at his first entrance into a regular community the idea, and even the name, of all separate or exclusive possession. Gibbon remarks:

The aspect of a genuine anchoret was horrid and disgusting: every sensation that is offensive to man was thought acceptable to God; and the angelic rule of Tabenne condemned the salutary custom of bathing the limbs in water, and of anointing them with oil. The austere monks slept on the ground, on a hard mat, or a rough blanket; and the same bundles of palm-leaves served them as a seat in the day; and a pillow in the night. ... Thirty or forty brethren composed a family of separate discipline and diet; and the great monasteries of Egypt consisted of thirty or forty families.

It could almost be a description of a hippy commune. One cannot resist quoting Gibbon's remark about the more 'savage saints' of both sexes who 'contemptuously cast away all superfluous encumbrance of dress' and 'whose naked bodies were covered only by their long hair' (Decline and Fall, Chapter 37).Just as Gibbon's description was unfair as a description of many of the monasteries, which 'transmitted by their indefatigable pens' the monuments of Greek and Roman literature' through the Dark Ages, and many of whom suffered a natural descent from 'powerful and dangerous virtue' to 'the common vices of humanity', it would be equally unfair as a description of many of those who affect a hippy-type style. But as far as the extremes of both ideal and practice are concerned, the analogy is convincing. Alternative London presents us with a rich variety of communes, many far from the metropolis. One of the more notable contains about 20 people - the men young, the women old. Orders are given daily to one member and imposed by her husband, the founder. Nature spirits help them produce their own food, despite the RAE base next door, and everywhere are cards saying 'Expect a miracle'.

Of course there are differences as well as similarities compared with the phenomena about which Gibbon was writing. Above all, the early Christians were ascetics who took a masochistic delight in mortifying the flesh, while their modern descendants make a cult of sex and promiscuity. We must, however, remember that the early Christians were only one of many rival cults which 'withdrew from the world' in the later Roman Empire. There were others who did emphasise promiscuity in the modern style. Moreover when one passes from a mere lifting of conventions and inhibitions into a cult of promiscuity, irrespective of the great variety of human inclinations and nuances of feeling, we are very near to a new sort of asceticism, or puritanism in reverse.

The external environment in which these practices grow up has uncanny resemblances to that of several Western countries in recent years. There was a very heavy level of military expenditure to guard against the external threat, resulting in hitherto unprecedented levels of government expenditure and taxation; the collection of the necessary funds prompted, according to Professor Grant, a tendency towards a levelling-down egalitarianism; and there were attempts to solve the problems by expanding the monetary circulation with periods of runaway inflation and currency collapse.

The late Roman Emperors were also pioneers in prices and incomes policy and state regulation of trade. Guilds and corporations established closed shops for most trades and crafts. The emperor became the greatest landowner and industrialist and this large public sector was run by an important Ministry in Rome. By the time of Diocletian and Constantine most workers were under permanent and inherited obligation to remain at their job'.¹⁹ The saving grace of the system was the inefficiency of its law-enforcement. Nevertheless, the controls, taxes and economic policy of the late Roman Empire eventually paved the way not to metaphorical, but to literal serfdom in the strict feudal meaning of the term.

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17. N. Saunders, Alternative London (published privately but available from W. H. Smith & Co. Ltd, 2nd edition, 1971).{back to text}

18. M. Grant, The Climax of Rome (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 150.{back to text}

19.Ibid.{back to text}