The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain. Anthony Seldon

in the purple, noble himself, and heir to the highest rank as well as one of the greatest fortunes of the country, already very rich, surrounded by all the temptations of luxury and pleasure; and yet he devoted himself to work with the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife, and did so without any motive more selfish than that of being counted in the roll of the public servants of England. (p. 267.)

      The devotion to public service is described here, with a good deal of irony, as a quirk of the upper class – but one that is presented as being quite firmly rooted just because it is a quirk or a ‘prejudice’, as Burke had put it in his Reflections. No trace is to be found in the novel of any concern Palliser might have over a possible neglect of business matters. Interestingly, when he is driven in the course of the plot to abandon – temporarily – his highest public ambition, which is to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, he does do so for a reason related to his private life. But this is his determination to save his marriage to Lady Glencora, rather than the pursuit of any ‘base’ business venture. Moreover, in the same novel, the difficult conquest of the hesitant and mercurial Alice Vavasor by John Grey is fully accomplished only when John mentions to Alice that he too may wish to move from leading the life of a country squire to becoming a Member of Parliament (p. 795).

      The counterpart to this paramount value attached by both genders of the upper strata to public service (though rendered by men only, of course) is the remarkable ‘deference’ to the governing class on the part of the rest of the population, as famously described around the same time by Walter Bagehot (see his Introduction to the 1872 edition of The English Constitution, first published in 1867).

      In Shifting Involvements I had assembled various reasons why citizens in modern democracies often move from considerable absorption in private pursuits to throwing themselves ‘body and soul’ into public affairs and would then, after due disappointment with the public sphere, withdraw back to the private life. I have just shown that some major arguments for these moves – one for that from the private to the public domain and one for the opposite move – have actually not been much present in Great Britain. At the end of my book, I affirmed that the oscillations between private and public involvement have been overdone in Western societies, that these societies ‘appear to to be condemned to long periods of privatisation during which they live through an impoverishing “atrophy of public meanings,” followed by spasmodic outbursts of “publicness” that are hardly likely to be constructive’ (p. 132). But perhaps this lament is simply not applicable to the political history of England. From the nineteenth century well into the second half of the twentieth century, this country was indeed widely considered a model of political stability, particularly in comparison to the major countries on the Continent.

      The sudden outbreak of ‘Thatcherism’ in the not so recent past actually suggests a very different explanation: Britain may have overdone its vaunted stability. Perhaps as a result of the enormous effort furnished in the Second World War, there emerged a remarkable post-war consensus on economic and social policy based on the combined legacy and the enormous intellectual influence of Keynes and Beveridge. Eventually the consensus received a name: ‘Butskellism’ – a clever, slightly mocking term intimating that there was no real, deep difference any more that was separating the policy makers of the two principal parties, R. A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. But this convergence had a real cost which consisted in the loss of politics as ‘spectacle’ (if I may use a category whose importance has been stressed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz). Just because of the ‘deference’ factor, politics had long been of considerable value in England as a spectacle. Coming on top of the loss of Empire which was another splendid spectacle – quite apart from its profitability, so long debated by economists – these losses were perhaps too much to bear: eventually they ushered into ‘Thatcherism’, a new spectacle of highly partisan, ‘creedal (to use Samuel Huntington’s recent term), and ideology-driven politics.

      Let me now briefly turn to my other, more recent book, The Rhetoric of Reaction. This book received its initial impetus from the appearance of a new kind of ideology-driven politics on the American scene in the 1980s. My reaction to the Reagan era and to its intellectual spokesmen was an attempt to present and dissect the key, invariant, and archetypal arguments used by conservatives and ‘neoconservatives’ in their advocacies and polemics. The original intent of this procedure was of course to expose and mock the repetitious and simplistic nature of conservative positions. But a side-effect was to strip the basic arguments of the reactionaries – the arguments of perversity, futility, and jeopardy – down to so transparent a form that I became aware of their structural similarity to the principal arguments used, with the same monotony and exaggerations, by their traditional adversaries, the ‘progressives’.

      I have recently recounted how this extension of my argument to the ‘progressive’ side came to me as an unintended – and originally somewhat embarrassing – afterthought. But later on I saw that afterthought as a windfall as it gave me the chance to formulate some propositions about the desirable shape of the progressive argument in the post-Reagan-Bush and post-Cold-War era. Perhaps these propositions have also some relevance for this country in its post-Thatcherite phase. (The following paragraphs are largely taken from my article ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction – Two Years Later’, Government and Opposition, 28, 3, Summer 1993, pp 310–14.)

      The three archetypal reactionary positions I identify are:

        the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve the political, social or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what is intended;

        the futility thesis, which holds that attempts at social transformation will produce no effect whatsoever and will be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; and

        the jeopardy thesis, which holds that the cost of a proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous, hard-won accomplishments.

      The arguments which I then show to be progressive counterparts or equivalents of the ‘reactionary’ perversity, futility and jeopardy theses are essentially the following:

        We should adopt a certain reform or policy because as things are we are caught, or will shortly land in, a desperate predicament that makes immediate action imperative regardless of the consequences. This argument attempts to deflect the perversity thesis.

        We should adopt a certain reform or policy because such is the ‘law’ or ‘tide’ of history – this argument is the counterpart of the futility thesis, according to which attempts at change will come to naught because of various ‘iron laws’.

        We should adopt a certain reform or policy because it will solidify earlier accomplishments – this is the progressive’s retort to the jeopardy claim that the reform is bound to wreck some earlier progress.

      How difficult would it be for reformers to give up this kind of rhetoric, which tends to turn the debate with their opponents into a ‘dialogue of the deaf’? I believe I have just listed the arguments in decreasing order of dispensability.

      The most dispensable of the three arguments is, to my mind, the alarmist claim that disaster is upon us if we fail to take this or that progressive step. This way of arguing might be called ‘impending-disaster’ or ‘impending-revolution’ blackmail. It has been a common way for various Western progressives or reformers to present their programmes, particularly since 1917, when the threat of social revolution re-appeared on the horizon of Western societies. An important variant of this way of arguing became current after the Second World War in discussions on aid for the countries of the Third World: here the disaster to be fought off – by extending generous financial aid – was revolution and the prospect of these countries being ‘lost’ to the Soviet zone of influence.

      For some time, these ways of arguing for national or international redistribution of income have been stale from overuse. Since the events of 1989–91, they have become largely unusable as a result of the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. As Gunnar Myrdal argued long ago, progressives can and should make a convincing case for the policies they advocate on the grounds that they are right and just, rather than