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Anti-Capitalism once again Samuel Brittan: Remarks on Civil Society, by Michael Edwards, Polity Press 2004 Delivered at Foreign Policy Centre 30/01/04 I have found it most difficult to react to this book. This is partly because of the lack of clear cut propositions with which I can agree, disagree or qualify. It is misleading to start with a verbal concept, such as civil society, and then look round for entities which it might to which it might apply. This is to commit the sin of what Karl Popper called essentialism - that is to assume that words have essential meanings and that progress can be made by searching for them. He preferred to try to understand what was happening in the world and try to formulate practical and concrete remedies, using whatever words came to hand. I first came across the term civil society during the period of the break up of the European communist regimes. These regimes tried to control, regiment and sometimes forbid all intermediate associations between the individual and the state. Of course there were numerous clubs, organisations and societies - ranging from so-called peace movements to sporting clubs - which the communist regimes fostered. But it was always on their own terms and subject to many conditions and guidelines. The term was continued in use after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. The suggestion was that - in contrast to de Tocqueville's United States - the absence of genuine voluntary civil associations made it very difficult for liberal democracies to emerge. Despite parliamentary elections and privatisation, habits of cronyism, bribery, cynical manipulation and even gang violence were the legacies of state systems, imposed by the Soviet Union, and which were distrusted not only by the citizens by the Eastern European rulers themselves. This seems to me what Edwards means by his first category "associational life." The author is clearly not satisfied to stop here. Running through this book and so many others of this kind is a deep distrust of market relationships based mainly on general assertions which continental sociologists comfort each other and which they do not bother to check against available data, let alone the writings of serious scholars of varying political persuasions who try to study how modern globalised functions actually function. Some ideas of Friedrich Hayek do help me at least to understand what is going on. If his name is simply a hate figure to you - as Margaret Thatcher's guru - and you want to rule out anything he might have said without reading it - that is tough luck. I have one or two minutes more. Hayek made a distinction between what he called the Great Society, a system of relations covering most of the globe in which we benefit from exchange with people of very different habits, politics and beliefs by means of contractual relationships based on market prices, and the enclosed tribal societies based often consisting of only a couple of hundred inter-related people, in which the human race has spent by far the greater part of its time on earth. In these small tribal societies it was possible to made decisions on face to face terms. Unlike anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, I will not glamorise such activities. But at least decisions on how to distribute the carcass of a newly killed animal were made by specific individuals - whether chiefs or medicine men or tribal assemblies - who could be identified, praised or blamed. It is therefore hardly surprising that many human beings have found the market relationships of the Great Society, cold, impersonal and threatening. And although they have led to a vast improvement in living standards they did not bring about anything like "equality". The search, often hypocritical, for equality has been the bane of progressive movements in the past two centuries or more. It has often been sought at the expense of liberty and fraternity. It is of course never achieved except in the graveyard and not even really there. Indeed the denunciation of inequality is often a substitute for concrete measures to ameliorate poverty and hardship. I am sure that some speakers have already come out with the blindingly original statement that man is a social animal. There is nothing in the Great Society or liberal political economy to discourage people from forming as many voluntary groups as they like. So long as they are genuinely voluntary and not coercive groups like unions maintaining their position by means of a closed shop and such like devices. Even so we can go too far in romanticising them. The line between purely voluntary and coercive groups is difficult to draw. My favourite example is from Richard Wagner's Meistersinger von Nuremburg. The Guild of Music Masters was in principle a voluntary society. But it could ensure that anyone who wanted to perform without observing their increasingly pedantic rules would life very difficult indeed. It is pretty clear that their role was also to limit the number who would compete with them not only at music festivals but in their day jobs where they relied on Guild restrictions to keep out new entrants. We have seen the demise both of hard socialism of the communist bloc and the soft socialism that has been tried in democratic countries. But people who have been brought up as collectivists are desperately looking for ways of continuing the struggle under different labels. A few years ago the slogan was communitarism. When this was found to be pretty empty as a political doctrine, the label changed to civil society. It was a fig leaf so that those who adopted new labels could still carry on with their stock in trade of denigrating capitalism and all its works. But there is a still more fundamental difference. On one side there are those who take the individual as the primary unit and there are those who put their emphasis on the group, which is what Tony Blair claimed to do when he re-wrote Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution. Those who believe in genuinely voluntary civil associations are on the individualist side; but those who want to use state power to promote them or to twist their aims are the enemies of freedom. And if this sounds like old fashioned anti-communist language then so be it. References Samuel Brittan: Essays, Moral and Economic, Edinburgh University Press, 1998. (Chapter One). Capitalism With a Human Face, Fontana Press, 1996. (Chapter Four). Johan Norberg: In Defence of Global Capitalism, Cato Institute, Washington DC 2003
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