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The many faces of liberalism Samuel Brittan The Financial Times 23/01/10 The Neo-liberal State By Raymond Plant OUP £50, 312 pages British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour Edited by Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson Palgrave Macmillan £60 256 pages The Science of Liberty By Timothy Ferris HarperCollins $26.99 384 pages Anyone searching for the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficulty: the key terms of political theory now have a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings. Take the word "liberal". In the US a liberal is usually someone with an overriding belief in state intervention as a cure for social problems and market inefficiencies. Indeed, President Bush Sr used the "l" word as a slur on his Democratic opponents. But in the European tradition a liberal is committed, above all, to personal freedom, including a belief in free competitive markets as a means to this end. To confuse matters, the US meaning is creeping into European usage too. The word "neoliberalism" came into widespread circulation two or three decades ago, in particular in French political circles, as a term of abuse to denote the Anglo-American espousals of free markets, especially under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It is still used in this way today: three new books attempt to analyse the basic issues surrounding the term. Raymond Plant tackles the concept directly in The Neo-liberal State. In British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour, a collection of essays, it crops up not by name but as something from which both New Labour and the Cameron Conservatives have been trying to get away. In The Science of Liberty, on the other hand, Timothy Ferris vigorously defends the European notion of liberalism, not shirking the pro-capitalist implications but dispensing with "neo". Plant's book is a discussion of the fundamental political philosophy behind the Thatcher-Reagan espousal of free markets. A defect of his otherwise very thorough treatment is that he plunges into the subject without either a definition of neoliberalism or an account of the origin of the term. Although the term has been only recently adopted into common political parlance, it was originally coined by the German economist Alexander Rüstow as far back as 1938. He invented it to define the political and economic philosophy of the Ordo political economists - a group who managed to continue working during the Nazi period and who inspired Ludwig Erhard, the free-market German minister popularly known as the father of the German postwar "economic miracle". The Ordo economists embraced a variety of views. They wished to distance themselves from the disreputable activities of German business between the wars; some were even keen on a carefully designed welfare state. After the second world war, however, the term neoliberal was replaced by the term "social market". And today social market has at least as broad a range of meanings as liberal. Nearly all continental European political parties say they favour it, as did David Owen's sadly short-lived Social Democrats in Britain. For Plant, who is a Labour peer as well as a political philosopher, the term neo-liberalism today essentially means the doctrines of the Austrian-born Friedrich Hayek, the 20th-century economist turned political philosopher. Plant refers in particular to the doctrines in Hayek's magnum opus The Constitution of Liberty. This is the book that Margaret Thatcher famously banged down on the table at a meeting with her staff, saying, "This is what we believe" - a story retold in British Party Politics. It was a funny way of promoting a book with liberty in the title. Nevertheless, Hayek's book is still probably the most comprehensive statement of the underlying ideas of the moderate free market philosophy espoused by neoliberals. Plant's study was originally intended to be a joint effort with Gordon Brown and his then economic adviser Ed Balls. It is as well that this project fell by the wayside, as the Brown team almost define their beliefs in opposition to neoliberalism and the result would have had an element of partisan polemic. Although Plant comes out in the end against Hayek's doctrines, he gives The Constitution of Liberty a more thorough and fair-minded analysis than it has received even from its professed adherents. In his discussion of the principles of neoliberalism, Plant begins by taking seriously Hayek's concept of the "rule of law". This is the centrepiece of The Constitution of Liberty but one that I fear many free-market enthusiasts skip over quickly in their rush to get to the economics. They are wrong to do so, as it is central to their own case and thus to neoliberalism. Plant finds the best statement of the rule of law by the late Michael Oakeshott, the English philosopher, in a series of essays published in the 1960s and 1970s. Oakeshott outlined the idea of the state as an "enterprise association" with projects of its own, whether to make peace in the Middle East, boost the rate of economic growth or whatever else. He contrasts this with the alternative ideal of a "civil association", which simply provides a framework under which individuals can follow their own projects. Oakeshott obviously preferred the civil association, which closely resembles the neoliberal ideal of the rule of law. But he strongly held the view that it was not the political philosopher's job to recommend civil association or anything else, but just to analyse. To clarify the meaning of the rule of law, Plant also finds it necessary to discuss various American writers more rigorous than Hayek on the subject, some of whom would describe themselves as "libertarians" rather than neoliberals. Among them, Robert Nozick. In his 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick espoused a strictly minimal state, confined to protecting citizens against fraud and enforcing civil rights. Nozick later distanced himself from what he called "a young man's book" and never properly returned to the subject. Hayek argues that his preferred kind of state, which might nowadays be called neo-liberal, would minimise the use of coercion in society. Plant finds the Hayekian concept of coercion too ill-defined. But I find this rather pedantic. If I am not allowed to fly to Australia, either because of a direct prohibition or because of a stringent official travel allowance, that is one kind of evil and certainly coercion. If I cannot afford to go, this is another kind of misfortune and there is nothing to be gained by confusing the two. Plant does, however, score by pointing out that Hayek's acceptance of a social security minimum rather destroys the idea of a deep philosophical divide between himself and modern social democrats who no longer wish to abolish capitalism, but envisage a more extensive welfare state. The differences then become ones of degree. My main quarrel with Plant, when it comes to political conclusions, is his insistence on the term "social justice", on which the Conservative thinker David Willetts, in an exchange reported in British Party Politics, supports him wholeheartedly. Normally I detest arguing about the true meaning of words. But social justice is based on a false analogy with justice per se. The latter is a legal concept. There is a considerable agreement, at least in the west, on what it involves, and we have courts of appeal to adjudicate on borderline cases. There is no such agreement on the redistribution of income and wealth or the extent and nature of the social services. Though not on the same intellectual level as The Neo-liberal State, British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour is far from an easy read. It is a worthy attempt in a fragmented series of essays to link the conventional empirical study of partisan politics with deeper issues of political theory. It does not quite come off, however. It reminds me of broadcasters on highbrow subjects who are so afraid of confusing people that they pack in so many voices that people become more confused. In the first half of the book, contributors split hairs on the definition of New Labour, making one sympathise with Anthony Giddens' remark that he stopped using the term several years ago. We then have a cri de coeur on behalf of England against Gordon Brown's talk of "Britishness", which may become relevant if we have a series of governments overriding an English majority, due to the casting vote of the Celtic fringes, but is not so yet. There is an inconclusive discussion of David Cameron's Conservatism, which finds that its nature is unlikely to emerge until he is forced to define it by the nature of the choices he makes, if and when, in office. This is usually the case with new political leaders, Margaret Thatcher being very much the exception. There is also a useful, if dry, summary of the progress of the Lib Dems' attempts at constitutional reform. The best part is the concluding essay by Plant himself on social justice, which can be regarded as a crib to his full length study of neoliberalism. After all this heavy material, it is a relief to come to The Science of Liberty by well-known American science writer Timothy Ferris, which is both an easy read and unfashionably optimistic. He has no need for the word neoliberalism, as he is happy to use just plain liberalism in the traditional European sense of a passion for personal freedom, preferring the term "progressivism" for what Bush attacked. It would be sad if the clarity of style were to cause anyone to underrate the book. Its professed purpose is to show how political liberty and scientific advance have reinforced each other, reminding us how many of the Enlightenment thinkers and political leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in the US, were not only influenced by science but were to some extent scientists themselves. But The Science of Liberty is far more than that. It is both a history of liberalism and an exposition of it. Ferris provides irrefutable evidence that, despite the tragedies of war and terrorism, there has been astounding progress in both the living standards and the degree of personal freedom enjoyed by the majority of the human race. He even has a good word for economics, which he calls the "science of wealth", and brings out the underlying similarities between apparently opposed schools of thought. He retells the true story of how John Maynard Keynes and Hayek, bitter opponents in the 1930s, became friends as they joined in fire-watching at King's College Cambridge during the second world war. I can only hope that there was a professional fire brigade nearby. None of these books is the last word on liberalism or any of its varieties. Given the nature of the subject, there cannot be a last word. But taken together they remind us that there is far more to the subject than banks and financial markets. They also remind us how difficult it is for it to get a foothold in the British political debate.
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