Abstract
In their respective analyses of twentieth-century Britain, David Marquand and Robert Skidelsky give their readers useful tools for evaluation. In Marquand’s case, these tools are the ‘public realm’ and the concept of a ‘moral economy’. The concepts of power and welfare loom large in Skidlesky’s response to his subject. While employing different evaluative criteria, Marquand and Skidlesky each dwell gloomily on British decline. However, the two books share a further feature that relieves the gloom. This is scrutiny of the efforts made by politicians during the twentieth century to secure the benefits of the market economy while fashioning institutions that expressed a commitment to social justice.
Marquand traces developments along a timeline that runs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. On his analysis, the ‘public realm’ gained a place of prominence in mid-twentieth-century Britain. By the ‘public realm’, Marquand means those institutions that promote the public good and that engage in public reasoning when seeking to justify their operations. Moreover, Marquand associates the public realm with a practical outlook that is disinterested. This becomes apparent when, for example, he notes that Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government expected those running the newly nationalised industries to be ‘high custodians of the public interest’ (p. 38).
Marquand uses the idea of a moral economy to trace the decline of the public realm in Britain. By moral economy he means ‘the complex nexus of values, teachings, implicit assumptions and tacit understandings that tells economic agents how they ought to behave’ (p. 2). On Marquand’s account, this nexus embraces a range of reasons for action running from the other-regarding to the self-interested. He identifies Britain during and following the Second World War as a society in which other-regarding reasons for action were a prominent feature. This meant that there was a strong commitment to the public realm and a readiness to act in ways that would sustain it. As a result, the commitment to social justice that had been gaining currency since Victorian times began to blossom – finding expression in the welfare state, Keynesian economic policy and governmental commitment to full employment. Marquand identifies Margaret Thatcher and her government as having acted in ways that undermined the public realm and the moral economy that supported it, for they sought to foster an environment in which self-interested individuals would flourish. The upshot is, according to Marquand, ‘a tense, febrile society in which the past is not just a foreign country, but an inconceivably distant one’ (p. 65).
Skidelsky states that ‘Britain started the century as Rome and ended it as Italy’ (p. 3). He supports this view by reference to, among other things, Britain’s retreat from empire and the fact that it ceased to take the lead in the process of globalisation after the Great War. Here, we see him using the criterion of power to trace a process of relentless geopolitical decline. However, he sets alongside this analysis welfare-related considerations that tell a story of progress. For example, Skidelsky notes that the British became ‘much more prosperous’ (p. 2), but against this, he sets the fact that ‘[o]n most measures, the UK still fared poorly compared to other rich countries’ (p. 397). Skidelsky’s exposition intersects with that of Marquand when he describes post-war Britain as standing in a position of ‘political equipoise’ (ch. 9).
Skidlesky and Marquand identify Britain in the decades after the Second World War as wedded to the market while being committed to the pursuit of social justice. However, the two authors offer different accounts of the way in which the commitment to equipoise weakened. Skidelsky argues that this process began when the state overreached itself: its commitment to ‘interventionism damaged the delicate balance between capitalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism’ (p. 284). Marquand identifies the Thatcher government as the cause of the retreat from equipoise. While disagreeing on the causes of the post-war settlement’s collapse, Marquand and Skidlesky each reflect mournfully on a social context in which individualism has become a corrosive social force.
In dwelling on the retreat from political equipoise, Marquand and Skidlesky have each done useful work. For over a century, this subject has been a recurrent theme in the minds of British politicians and commentators. For example, when Winston Churchill left the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904, he declared that his new party’s policies would advance ‘the cause of the left out millions’ (cited in WH Greenleaf (1983) The British Political Tradition. Volume II: The Ideological Heritage, pp. 142–143). Churchill had in mind a society in which individuals might enjoy wide freedom in a socially just context. Something similar was in George Orwell’s mind in 1940 when he contemplated the possibility of a social order in which ‘socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism’ (George Orwell (1957) Inside the Whale and Other Essays, p. 48). Orwell’s statement and that of Churchill support the view that Skidelsky and Marquand have traced the unravelling not simply of the post-war settlement but of a long-lived and morally attractive tradition.