Three Roads to the Welfare State: Liberalism, Social Democracy and Christian Democracy 9781447360346

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THREE ROADS TO THE WELFARE STATE Liberalism, Social Democracy and Christian Democracy Bryan Fanning

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2021 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4473-6032-2 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-6033-9 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-6034-6 ePdf The right of Bryan Fanning to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press and Policy Press work to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Robin Hawes Front cover image: iStock/​2windspa Bristol University Press and Policy Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents About the author Preface

iv v

1

Three roads

1

2

The invention of laissez faire

11

3

Utopian socialism

33

4

Reform liberalism and technocracy

55

5

Catholic social thought versus modernity

77

6

The case for social democracy

99

7

Social engineering versus democracy

135

8

The rise of neoliberalism

161

9

European Christian democracy

183

10 Legacies

203

Notes Select bibliography Index

215 245 251

iii

About the author Bryan Fanning is Professor of Migration and Social Policy at University College Dublin. His previous books include Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation (2011, with Denis Dillon), Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2012, 2nd edition), Histories of the Irish Future (2014) and Migration and the Making of Ireland (2018). He is a former head of the School of Social Policy and Social Work at University College Dublin (UCD).

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Preface The book grew out of two decades of teaching social policy at University College Dublin and out of my interest in intellectual history. It is dedicated to the memory of two deceased colleagues who were also good friends. I began this book following many years of discussion about comparative social policy with my friend Dr Michael Rush who had been my doctoral student and was a brilliant social policy lecturer. He died while the book was at an early stage and I miss our conversations very much. Professor Gabriel Kiely was Head of the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at UCD when I began teaching at the university. My background was in European studies and I had just completed my doctorate in the Department of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Gabriel commissioned my first ever social policy publication, a chapter on the mixed economy of welfare for a book he was editing, which set me on the path that led to this book.

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Three roads The focus of this book is on the development of Europe’s three big ideas which have shaped approaches to social problems and social policy since the industrial revolution –​liberalism, social democracy and Christian democracy rooted in Catholic conservativism. The book examines how laissez faire liberalism emerged to undermine the hierarchies and social contracts of the earlier ancien regime, how socialist thought about the inequalities sanctioned by early liberals gained influence and how conservative responses to both liberal and socialist ideals came to constitute a third distinctive response to modernity. Initial chapters examine the birth of laissez faire liberalism, the emergence of utopian socialism and Catholic responses to the social dislocations that followed in the wake of the industrial revolution at a time when a minority of citizens had the right to vote. Subsequent chapters examine the competing ideals and aspirations of reform liberals, neoliberals, social democrats and Christian democrats through a focus on the writings of the most influential intellectual champions of these respective recipes for the good society. As influentially mapped by Gosta Esping-​Andersen in his seminal Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), these ideological traditions vied with one another with different results in different countries depending, he argued, upon the relative appeal of each approach to electorates.1 The idea of worlds of welfare capitalism suggests not just different ways of thinking but also cultural and institutional histories. The ideological trinity examined in this book was borne out of epic conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism since the Reformation and between socialism and capitalism since the industrial revolution. At various times I describe these as vantage points (perspectives on social and economic change) or as roads (along which such changes might be navigated). Each came to be reconciled, sometimes begrudgingly, with democracy. The great intellectual champions of nineteenth-​century liberalism mostly opposed giving the vote to the masses. Europe’s Christian democratic parties were built upon the foundation of Catholic thought that flirted, and more, with fascism. Social democracy

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

emerged in conflict with anti-​democratic forms of socialism and was forever conflated with this by liberal opponents of collectivism. Three Roads to the Welfare State examines the development of enduringly influential ways of thinking about social problems. It examines visions of a better world and less grandiose proposals for a less-​worse one put forward by intellectuals, politicians and technocrats. One premise of utopianism is that if something can be envisaged it might be conjured into existence with the application of sufficient will to power. Early socialists and other utopians viewed human nature as something that was malleable. Some of these imagined that that human societies could be cured of imperfection with a little bit or a lot of social engineering. This generally meant a greater role for the state or ceding power to expert elites. Beliefs that better societies could be brought into existence through top-​down social engineering vied with arguments that better societies could be created through incremental progressive democratic reform. This book charts the development of three influential ideological approaches to social policy with a particular focus on how these engaged with democratic politics. Each of the three, liberalism, Christian democracy and social democracy were preceded by, or existed in competition with, forms of liberalism, conservativism and socialism, which were ambivalent towards democracy. The laissez faire liberals examined in Chapter 2 and many of the reform liberals examined in Chapter 4 opposed or were ambivalent towards extending the right to vote to the working classes. The early socialists examined in Chapter 3 tended towards paternalism. Later socialists were doctrinally committed to advancing their cause though a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Catholic social thought examined in Chapter 5, which influenced several European countries until the Second World War, advocated corporatist alternatives to democracy aimed at avoiding class conflict and the rise of state socialism. Subsequent chapters examine the rise of social democracy (Chapter 6), neoliberalism (Chapter 8), Christian democracy (Chapter 9), each opposed in theory to authoritarianism. However, as Chapter 7 emphasises, the power of experts and technocrats –​those who saw themselves as best qualified to govern –​continued to vie with a commitment to government by democratic means. Grand utopian schemes tended not to be compatible with democracy. Utopian ideas variously derived from Enlightenment beliefs in progress and from religious beliefs clashed with faith in the power of individualised freedom to bring about the optimum or least-​ worst society. By the 1930s, all-​too-​real examples of left and right

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Three roads

totalitarianism were claimed as warnings that the well-​intentioned efforts of progressives would set democracies on, as Friedrich Hayek later put it, the road to serfdom. However, liberals, as well as conservatives and social democrats, came over time to favour greater levels of state intervention to address social and economic problems in what had become increasingly complex societies. Within the academic literature, two main theories have been posited to explain the emergence and expansion of welfare states. One is the premise that the relative influence of ideologies depends considerably on electoral support for these as translated into the composition of governments that enact legislation. The other is a modernisation or convergence thesis, which argues that the main driver of social policy has been functional rather than ideological. The argument is that broadly similar institutions emerge in different societies as these become more economically developed and urbanised. This makes intuitive sense. Hospitals, schools, universities and other forms of social infrastructure are broadly similar in many countries at similar levels of economic development. Convergence theorists argued that all societies that use the same technologies tend to develop similar social structures and require similar social policies in response to analogous functional needs.2 Technologies influence how societies tend to become organised. Unlike culture, science and technology works the same in different places. As put by Francis Fukuyama, a given technology provides ‘a uniform horizon of production possibilities.’ That said, a variety of paths to modernity can be conceived. Late developers may do things differently but the broad outlines of the process –​urbanisation, rational authority, bureaucratisation and an increasingly complex division of labour –​may be more or less the same.3 The second major theory of comparative social policy advances a class mobilisation thesis. This posits that in the era of the extended franchise –​since the late nineteenth century when the right to vote was extended to working-​class men in several countries –​the extent of social citizenship, that is, rights to sickness, unemployment and retirement-​age benefits, was influenced by the degree to which left-​ wing political parties controlled or influenced governments over time. Simply put ‘Where the left was strong, the welfare state became generous and encompassing; where the left was weak, the welfare state remained residual.’4 What Esping-​Andersen described as the three worlds of welfare capitalism, might be understood as three ideological vantage points. Individual voters might be wedded to just one of these. One particular perspective might even dominate how social issues and problems are

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

considered in a particular society. Or, it may be the case that different worldviews compete more evenly with one another for the support of voters. In democratic societies, these perspectives might be represented as a Venn diagram where the concerns of liberals, conservatives and socialists could be seen to overlap a bit but where there is, nevertheless, much to argue about. All three as ideal types favour different balances-​of-​responsibility between the state, market and community or voluntary sector activity. Simplifying greatly, each might be reduced to a single core maxim which has guided prescriptions for addressing social problems: • Conservatives believed that the state and the market should not undermine the family and its capacity to reproduce religious and communal values. • Liberals argued that the good society depended upon individual rights and free markets and neither traditional social institutions nor the state should be allowed to impede individual autonomy. • Socialists presumed that it was necessary to intervene in families and with markets to ensure the greater good. Each of these three ideologies of welfare, according to Esping-​Andersen endorsed particular institutional approaches to social policy. In Scandinavian countries where social democratic political parties were influential, a large role for the state met with support. In countries that were particularly influenced by liberalism, markets have played a more prominent role in the provision of welfare goods and services. Conservatives resisted encroachment on families by the state and favoured services provided by the religious voluntary sector. Esping-​Andersen’s comparative analysis sought to measure the respective influence of the three typologies or worlds of welfare capitalism in 18 countries using data from 1980. He compared levels of social citizenship by measuring levels of ‘decommodification’ from the labour market due to the extent and duration of entitlements to sickness, unemployment and retirement benefits. The conceptualisation and measurements used by Esping-​Andersen focused considerably on the extent to which men engaged in paid employment came to achieve social security. Decommodification occurred ‘when a service was rendered as a matter of right’ and when a person could ‘maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market.’5 Decommodification scores as calculated in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism measured the levels of social citizenship achieved by male breadwinners in various countries at a time when women were, to a considerable extent, marginalised

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Three roads

within the labour market, and experienced a lesser degree of social citizenship because rights to benefits were often linked to time spent in paid employment, and unpaid work, mostly undertaken by women, was not taken into account.6 Feminist social policy theorists have argued for a focus on gender roles when making comparisons between welfare typologies and have maintained that debates about taxonomy ignore important gender equality issues.7 Esping-​Andersen’s focus on measuring and comparing relationships between paid employment and welfare entitlements was criticised for ignoring divisions of labour on the basis of gender. As put by Jane Lewis: One of the main feminist criticisms of the work on the growth of welfare states was that it focused on the relationship between the state and the labour market, and that the position of women was considered only when they entered paid work. Little has changed in this respect. Changes in family structure, which have been as or more rapid and dramatic in the last quarter of the twentieth century as labour market change, are now recognized as a driver of welfare state restructuring, but gender is about more than families, or women’s employment, or indeed ‘reconciling’ family and (paid) work. In particular, the gendered division of care work, more often unpaid than paid, is crucial to understanding the gendered nature of welfare state change.8 None of this invalidates Esping-​Andersen’s taxonomy. The three worlds model can also be used to compare levels of ‘defamilisation,’ the extent to which welfare states’ social policies facilitate women’s economic independence through, for example, childcare subsidies.9 Analyses from this perspective observe that childcare has been collectivised to a considerable extent in Scandinavian countries while being considerably privatised or left to (women in) families in countries where social policy has been predominantly influenced by liberalism or conservatism.10 All three ideological approaches developed in response to the industrial revolution and the societal dislocations that followed in its wake. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) anticipated how the industrial revolution would change day-​to-​day life through the ever-​ increasing division of labour. What had been the work of one man ‘in a rude state of society’ came to be divided with economies of scale

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

between many in more technologically advanced ones. Specialisation and the invention of a great number of machines enabled one man to do the work of many.11 Smith argued that impetus for the division of labour was due to the propensity in human nature to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.12 He viewed free trade, individual rights and progress as intertwined. More than a century later Émile Durkheim in De la division du travail social (1893), published in English as The Division of Labour in Society, emphasised how specialisation, individualism and urbanisation also produced social dislocations and the unravelling of older forms of social cohesion.13 Anxieties about secularisation, urbanisation and the rise of individualism found political expression within conservative ideologies and political movements. The map upon which all these debates played out was one that identified a continuum between the left and right but also one that distinguished between conservatives and those who were keener on social change (Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1: Ideological and cultural cleavages

Modernity: complex societies

Right: liberalism, individualism, the market

Left: collectivism, redistribution, the state

Tradition: social cohesion based on similarity of beliefs and lives

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Three roads

What was meant by liberalism, by socialism and even by conservativism has changed over time. There have been varieties of liberalism, conflicts between conservatives and disputes among socialists. Furthermore, none of these broad schools of thought were hermetically sealed off from the others. For example, the story of social democracy is one that includes Christian socialists and liberal reformers. The liberal tradition has been a broad church that has included the early architects of welfare states as well as those utterly committed to the replacement of all collectivism by markets. Conservatives at various times have absorbed socialist ideas and come to champion forms of free market capitalism that were indifferent to tradition. Approaches to social policy differ on the basis of ideology, and tracking the influence of different ideologies over time can explain, to some extent, the shape of the welfare economy –​the particular combination of state, market and voluntary sector responsibility –​ that pertains in any particular country. It is also the case that the development of specific domains of social policy, such as a particular education system or the ways in which health care is delivered and paid for, result from the accretion of decisions made over a long period of time. The mixed economies of welfare of modern societies consist of complex thickets of law and regulation and ways of thinking and working. Their present institutional contours owe much to the idealism and utopian thinking of previous generations. Social policy has developed over several generations in reaction to processes of modernisation and social change that show no sign of halting. The three roads depicted in this book were responses to social and economic changes that occurred in the wake of the industrial revolution. These included the division of labour and its effects on family life and gender roles and on where people lived. The focus of the book is on the emergence and development of influential approaches to such changes. The extent to which these approaches continue to be relevant in the twenty-​first century is examined in the final chapter. An avalanche of pessimistic writing has warned about the destruction of the welfare state by neoliberalism and of the democratic one by authoritarian populists.14 Fukuyama’s point in the early 1990s was that there was no big competing idea to liberal democracy on the horizon to serve as a roadmap to the good society. This remains the case even though many Western democracies have come to be beleaguered by far-​r ight political populism and authoritarianism. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the majority of adult men had the right to vote in many European countries while women were generally excluded from electorates until after

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

the First World War. The precursors of all three ideologies seen to influence twentieth-​century welfare capitalism were ambivalent to democracy. For example, nineteenth-​century social policy was, to a considerable extent, shaped by technocrats drawn from the same social class as the small property-​owning electorate. These favoured laissez faire liberalism while promoting some reforms designed, in part, to stave off agitation by the working classes seeking a greater degree of social transformation. Much innovation within social policy over the last few centuries has been paternalistic. Several chapters of this book address the antipathy of many technocrats and social reformers to the masses. Some nineteenth-​century liberals and some twentieth-​century social democrats did not regard the relatively uneducated working classes as fit to vote on complex issues. These anxieties found expression in early efforts by some feminists to promote contraception and in subsequent enthusiasm for eugenics among some social democrats. Yet strong commitments to democracy underpinned the main ideological approaches to social policy that flourished during the second half of the twentieth century. Christian democracy stood on the shoulders of Europe’s pre-​Second World War Catholic parties and emerged as an alternative to forms to anti-​democratic corporatism that had championed by the church. Social democracy developed from the early twentieth century as an alternative to forms of socialism that were unwilling to trust democratic politics. Beyond these ideologies, nationalism has played a crucial role in the development of different kinds of welfare states. The nation state has been the pitch on which different ideals of what constitutes the good society have competed. Chapter 6 examines how nationalism was mobilised in support of social democracy in Sweden before the Second World War, and in support of the British welfare state in its aftermath. Understanding of what is meant by social citizenship came to be grafted onto national citizenship. Or to put this another way, the rights of citizens came to include entitlements to welfare goods and services as well as rights to vote and other freedoms. While the march of such rights and freedoms was often driven by political struggle (the class mobilisation thesis), social policy also developed somewhat similarly in different places in response to changes in technology and to economic changes resulting from the ongoing division of labour (the convergence thesis). In this context, military and economic competition between nations, according to Richard Titmuss (see Chapter 7), resulted in the social policy equivalent of an arms race. The peacetime equivalent included forms of economic nation building and modernisation that sought to raise gross national

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Three roads

product (GNP) through investment in education, health care and other welfare services.15 Yet, the argument of this book is that distinct alternatives can still be identified under the umbrella of democracy. There exists a reservoir of coherent traditions of thinking about social problems, each with some advantages and some shortcomings. It may not be easy, as the saying goes, to think outside the box, but having three boxes to think inside is better than one. When it comes to social policy my own ideological preference is for a blend of social democrat, liberal and Christian democrat approaches, perhaps in this order though sometimes not. Mostly I think of these as complementary vantage points that, taken together, offer a broad palate for thinking about how to address social problems in complex societies. I do not claim that the particular admixture that has won out in any particular country has come closest to getting the balance right. However, I do think that pluralistic dialogue between such vantage points occurs in what astronomers call the Goldilocks Zone, the range of distances from a star where it is neither too hot nor too cold to make life viable. Intellectual history is, among other things, an attempt to impose order on the gloriously messy flow of ideas within and between societies. Georg Hegel influentially depicted history as a ‘dialectical’ unfolding or progression of these. Karl Marx, drawing on Hegel, came up with the concept of dialectical materialism. Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto that the history of all societies was one of class struggle. Socialists were therefore progressives, to use a term that is widely used at the time of writing. The notion of three ideological worlds developing over time and vying with one another for influence fits with Hegel’s schema. And because these three worldviews are each children of the Enlightenment, they have a lot in common. As such, there have been cross-​pollinations of ideas and perspectives back and forth over time. In Hegel’s jargon, this is a dialectical process, but his claim that ongoing processes of synthesis are progressive cannot be accepted at face value. The stage of history for Hegel, who was fond of using the metaphor of theatre, and for Marx was one dominated by ‘Great Nations and their Great Leaders, or perhaps Great Classes and Great ideas.’16 Hegel’s presumption and Marx’s also was that a particular grand synthesis would mark the culmination of (upper case) History. However, the experience of actual history is that understandings and perspectives can shift in zigzag steps without ever moving conclusively towards some definite end. Progress, however this is understood, can be undone and the ground gained in one generation may be lost to

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

the next.17 As put by Isaiah Berlin, history is not an autobahn.18 It does not flow in one direction or even, as the title of this chapter suggests, along just three channels. It is certainly not claimed that the three influential traditions examined in this book are winding their way towards progress as part of some grand design for all that each has demonstrable achievements. Part of the focus of this book is upon the perceived shortcomings associated with each.

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The invention of laissez faire The eighteenth century witnessed in England and Scotland the birth of an intellectual case for what Karl Polanyi has described as a new utopian social and economic project. The proposed experiment was that economic liberalism should become the basic organising principle in society and that the organisation of human society should, for the first time in history, be subordinated to the principle of laissez faire, a term taken from a phrase in French ‘laissez Faire et Laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme,’ which translates as ‘let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself.’ Achieving this required that impediments to market forces such as laws and customs of providing welfare for the poor, which had operated for centuries, should be swept aside and that massive changes be made to how society was organised. By the time of the industrial revolution, various social entitlements that had been rooted in membership of village communities, towns or guilds had become considerably undermined by economic change, until nothing remained but a poor law system of parish relief that had been introduced following the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries by Henry XVIII during the Reformation.1 The 1597 and 1601 poor laws replaced an earlier charitable system run by Catholic religious organisations with a new national one administered through the parishes of the established Protestant Church.2 The relief system that developed had a number of components and it expanded over time. Church alms and charity were replaced with a right to support within one’s parish. Parish relief funded by local taxes called rates assisted ‘the impotent,’ who were unable to work because of illness or old age. Sturdy beggars, who were fit to work, were to be punished for their indolence. Magistrates regulated wage levels in their areas. The old Poor Law was administered and paid for in the parish, and responses to poverty were influenced by local traditions.3 Outdoor relief was controversially extended during late eighteenth century to include the ‘industrious poor’ in the south east of England who faced seasonal unemployment. Throughout the eighteenth century, parishes in many parts of England at times supplemented the wages of able-​bodied persons from the poor rates, particularly those of labourers with large families. The May 1795 decision of justices taken

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

at Speenhamland in Berkshire to introduce a uniform countywide scale of relief was not unique. Some other counties, also facing high food prices and agrarian unrest, adopted similar if less elaborate programmes.4 Under what was called the Speenhamland System, wages came to be subsidised with levels of support that were geared to the price of corn and the number of children in the family. This was part of a political trade-​off that allowed the retention of the Corn Laws –​protectionist measures that ensured high prices to agricultural producers –​while preventing their labourers from starving as the price of food rose. The doctrine of laissez faire that made its first appearance in the eighteenth century had a distinctly religious flavour. It included beliefs about how Providence –​God’s will –​had ordered the natural world: Providence, such thinking went, had assigned different climates and resources to different peoples, in order that they should be mutually dependent on each other for subsistence, and thus, through the medium of commerce, should join in the universal brotherhood of man.5 Laissez faire, as championed by political economists and others, had two aspects and focused on two domains. Adam Smith influentially advocated for the dismantlement of trade and tariff barriers which inhibited the international division of labour and the efficiency of industry. The Reverend Joseph Townsend, a once influential but now forgotten figure, and the Reverend Robert Thomas Malthus, influentially argued for the removal of Poor Law protections using a range of interlocking arguments derived from Protestantism and what would come, after their time, to be called social Darwinism. These arguments played well in a climate where the industrial revolution was unravelling older communal solidarities. However, the thinking which perhaps most influentially shaped social policy was a prevalent public morality rooted in religiosity which emphasised humankind’s sinful nature and viewed poverty as a consequence of improvidence and individual moral failure. Advocates of laissez faire from the late eighteenth century sought the abolition of this extended parish relief system. These argued that the system offered perverse incentives to early marriage, excessive population growth and increased poverty.6 Because of England’s initial prominence in the industrial revolution, their beliefs gained a wider currency.7

Reformation roads The sociologist Max Weber set out what came to be an influential account of the emergence of capitalism in a two-​part essay published

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The invention of laissez faire

in 1904–​5. This was later published in English as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In essence, Weber attributed the distinctive features of modern capitalism to the emergence during the Reformation of a spiritual individualism, among Calvinists in particular, which contributed in turn to the rise of liberal individualism. In effect, Weber argued that capitalism was the product of a specifically new mind set and that ideological support for this as an economic system could be traced to shifts in religious beliefs and practices. Weber explained the ascendance of capitalism in terms of culture; the spirit of capitalism was a distinct attitude towards the accumulation of wealth held by the first capitalist merchants and industrialists. As put by R.H. Tawney in his introduction to the 1930 English-​ language translation of The Protestant Ethic, ‘The pioneers of the modern economic order were parvenus who had elbowed their way to success in the teeth of the established aristocracy of land and commerce. The tonic that braced them for the conflict was a new conception of religion, which taught them to regard the pursuit of wealth as, not merely an advantage, but a duty.’8 What was significant was not the strength of the motive of economic self-​interest, which was commonplace of all ages, and demands no explanation, but a change of moral standards which were canonised as the virtuous habits that had previously been denounced as vices. Weber argued that the Puritan rules of Calvinism, as these were enforced during the sixteenth century in Geneva, at the turn of the seventeenth century in Scotland and in large parts of the Netherlands and in New England during the seventeenth century and for a time in England, placed strict controls on individual behaviour that fostered the emergence of a distinctly new economic order.9 Puritanism gained ground among the rising bourgeois classes in countries which were, at the time, the most economically advanced. Unlike previous kinds of Christian ascetics who sought to withdraw from the material world, whether into monasteries or into inner lives of prayer and contemplation, Puritans regarded work as a spiritual calling; they embraced self-​denial without withdrawing from the material world. While the pursuit of wealth was hardly unique to this new class, there were, Weber argued, some crucial differences between how this was regarded by some Protestants and among Catholics, who cleaved to the pre-​Reformation social order.10 Theological differences emerged between forms of Protestantism, which cherished the notion of an unmediated relationship between the individual and their creator and individual, and with Catholicism where faith was organised within a hierarchical church. Weber was clear that the Protestant ethic was

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but one of a number of factors which led to the development of early capitalism during the centuries before the nineteenth century, and that capitalism also flourished early in places such as the Catholic city of Antwerp. The Protestant ethic, expressed through norms, customs and laws, justified a public morality that discouraged provision for the poor. John Calvin borrowed copiously from doctrines on free will, grace and predestination articulated by St Augustine more than a thousand years earlier.11 Augustine found favour with Calvin because, as an early Christian interpreter of scripture, he predated the doctrinal accretion of what Calvin saw as ‘vain speculations’ of the pre-​Reformation Church of Rome.12 Calvin’s refined doctrine of predestination emphasised much more the central place of God’s will in foreordaining salvation or damnation. Calvin defined predestination as; ‘God’s eternal decree, by which he determined with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition, rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death.’13 Individuals could do nothing to change their fate but were encouraged to seek signs that could be used to indicate that they might be among the elect. These signs of salvation could be uncovered through an ascetic life of hard work, frugality and material success. R.H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) located the development of Calvinist social ethics and development of capitalism against the broader backdrop of conflicts within Christianity before and after the Reformation. In particular, he focused on the intersections between religious and business ethics with respect to practices and prescriptions relating to usury.14 The Calvinist sought the glorification of God through active labour. Good works alone were not enough, but they were indispensable signs of salvation. The elect were spurred into an active life of individual agency. The evidence for spiritual salvation was to be found in material success. Calvinist teaching, according to Tawney, was ‘admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to wield the rising bourgeoisie’ into a disciplined force.15 The sundering of the living under Calvinism into the categories of the future saved and the future damned, turned the matter of individual salvation into a social issue. Those who seemed to epitomise the norms and behaviour of the elect achieved status. Those who were deemed to fall short of such standards might be shunned. As such, religious asceticism and religious belief served to regulate social behaviour.16

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The invention of laissez faire

Distinctions between the worthy and the unworthy in church and in commerce came to be mirrored by distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving in the disbursement of charity and welfare. Calvinism opposed indiscriminate almsgiving to those perceived as lacking moral worth. Calvin vehemently urged ecclesiastical authorities to repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues of industry and thrift. He quoted with approval the words of St Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians; ‘If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.’17

Divisions of labour Weber’s explanation of capitalism in terms of ideology, beliefs and values seemed to contrast with an essentially functionalist explanation first put forward by Adam Smith in The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s father, who died before his son was born, was a customs official in Edinburgh, responsible for the collection of extensive tariffs on international trade in a Scotland, where smuggling was rampant. In 1750, when Smith was 27 he was elected as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Glasgow. Instead of understanding capitalism as a system of beliefs and values, Smith focused on the division of labour that occurred as new manufacturing techniques massively increased productivity but also resulted in considerable changes to the lives of workers. These changes split tasks previously performed by one craftsman into components that were each undertaken by a different person, greatly increasing the volume of work that the same number of people were capable of performing. Smith gave an example he observed whereby a blacksmith might be able, by working on his own, to produce a few hundred iron nails in a day’s work. He would have to work a bellows, tend to the fire that heated the metal and switch between several different tools for each and every nail he made. However, Smith had witnessed several boys produce more than 2,000 nails a day each by splitting various tasks between them. While a blacksmith might find himself making nails now and again, the team of boys did nothing else all day every day. The result was that productivity was greatly increased, and nails became cheaper to purchase.18 Something similar had happened across a wide range of manufacturing processes.19 The tools used by workmen, their looms and the shears used by shepherds to harvest the wool used in factories, all had come to be manufactured using complex and efficient divisions of labour involving many people. Only agriculture seemed not to admit so many subdivisions of labour. The spinner was almost always a distinct person

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

from the weaver; but the ploughman, the harrower, the sower of the seed, and the reaper of the corn, were generally one and the same. The country weaver, who also cultivated a small farm and undertook many different kinds of tasks, would lose out to competition from factories within which woollen and linen manufacture had become far more efficient due to the division of labour. Everything used by these workers had also come to be manufactured using similarly complex processes.20 Smith argued that the imperative to ensure and secure free trade –​to bring about what came to be called laissez faire, though this was not a term he used –​had intensified as commerce became increasingly complex. His analysis of the division of labour was clear that there would be losers, including farm workers, whose ways of life would no longer be economically viable, as well as overall economic benefits. In his early writings, Smith argued that the administration of the great system of the universe and the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings was in God’s hands. As put in a 1755 lecture, which could be read as an early endorsement of laissez faire: Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.21 This proposition, which would be central to Smith’s later writings, did not originate with him. Its first influential intellectual champion was Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch doctor who settled in London. His sole influential publication, The Fable of Bees: Or Private Vices, Publik Benefits (1714), argued that allowing individuals to pursue their own selfish interests, wants or vices, worked to bring about the best overall result for society. The Fable consisted of a long satirical poem, ‘The Grumbling Hive’ that had first appeared in 1705, which was republished alongside much-​longer text in which Mandeville spelt out its meaning. His poem described a successful society comprised of, ‘Millions endeavouring to supply/​Each other’s Lust and Vanity.’ While every part of this hive was ‘full of Vice,’ ‘the whole Mass’ was ‘a Paradise.’22 Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) marvelled that human society, ‘when we contemplate it in a certain abstract

16

The invention of laissez faire

philosophical light’ appeared like ‘a great, immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produced a thousand aggregable affects.’23 It discussed The Fable of the Bees at some length and observed that Mandeville defined ‘vices’ very broadly to include any self-​ indulgence such as a clean shirt.24 Smith posited that the harmony and beneficence observable in the matter-​of-​fact processes of nature were the results of the design and intervention of a benevolent God. A Theory of Moral Sentiments proposed the existence of an inherent harmony in the natural order, whereby humans, in following their own interests, without intending so, also serve the general interests of humanity.25 A guiding Providence, a beneficent Nature and an ‘invisible hand’ so operated the machinery behind the scenes that even inequality in the distribution of human happiness was more apparent than real. Smith only ever used the term ‘invisible hand’ a small handful of times. It appeared just once in Moral Sentiments in an argument that while most wealth was controlled by a small wealthy and selfish minority, these consumed just a small portion of this, while society benefited from their avarice though employment, industry, inventions in the science and arts, and other works upon which this wealth was spent.26 What Smith meant by the ‘invisible hand’ here was hardly the scientific law that some of those influenced by him have claimed this to be in the centuries since his death.27 The benevolent deity who served as the author and guide of nature who featured prominently in A Theory of Moral Sentiments was relegated to the margins of The Wealth of Nations.28 There are some much-​cited passages in the Wealth of Nations, most notably the following, in which Smith claimed the existence of a more or less complete harmony between the general interests of society and the pursuit by individuals of their own interests: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-​love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.29

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

Smith’s economic theory, as this came to be widely understood, held that individuals acted selfishly in the pursuit of their interests and in doing so contributed to the greater good.

Hunger games The case for the abolition of the parish relief drew as much, if not more, on the theology of Paul, Augustine and Calvin than upon what counted at the time as economic and social theory. Beliefs about humankind’s sinful nature provided an impetus to develop punitive social policies that would punish indolence. The case for curbing humankind’s improvident biological drives were most influentially set out by Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers (1798).30 The principle of population that Malthus invoked in the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population was the potential for generation-​on-​generation doubling, every generation ‘in the ratio of –​1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 etc.’ which would outstrip the world’s food supply. Cruel correctives in the form of mass hunger and starvation would be inevitable unless the improvident poor could be compelled, through harsh measures for their own good, to engage in kinds of provident behaviour that was a general norm among other social classes, namely to refrain from marriages and from having children that they could not afford to feed.31 Malthus was a Church of England minister. His book was a riposte to what he considered to be the blithely optimistic Enlightenment philosophies of Jean Jacques Rousseau and followers of Rousseau such as Godwin and his own father. Many of the ideas set out by Malthus, which became very influential during the early nineteenth century, were first forcefully articulated by the Reverend Joseph Townsend in an anonymous pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-​Wisher to Mankind (1786).32 Townsend was a cleric and medical doctor who had embraced Calvinism when he was a medical student in Edinburgh; he later became a Methodist. In his Dissertation, he insisted that Christian charity should not be indiscriminate and blind; it should favour those who were the worthiest; it was never meant to discourage diligence. Like Calvin, he quoted St Paul’s epistle against charity for those who were unwilling to work. For a time, Townsend travelled around England as a Methodist missionary. His most successful book was a three volume English-​ language book on the history, geology and customs of Spain. 33

18

The invention of laissez faire

He became a close friend of Jeremy Bentham, who, in the first documented use of the term, described Townsend in a 1791 letter as a utilitarian.34 Townsend’s arguments concerning over-​population and the Poor Laws anticipate Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which was first published anonymously in 1798. Karl Marx, who had no love for Malthus, accused him of plagiarising some of Townsend’s Dissertation. In his chapter in Das Kapital (1868), on the general law of capital accumulation, Marx traced the influence of Townsend on Malthus. Marx also catalogued a genealogy of earlier attacks on parish relief, which also invoked the laws of the natural world.35 In the same footnote, he also attacked Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees.36 Marx quoted Mandeville as stating that ‘Temperate living and constant employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational happiness’ (by which he most probably means long working-​days and little means of subsistence),’ and to riches and strength for the state. Marx accused Mandeville of arguing, like Townsend, that hunger, or at least the fear of it, was needed to ensure that the poor laboured constantly for the benefit of the richer classes.37 It would easier for the rich, Mandeville noted in The Fable of the Bees, with an irony that Marx chose to ignore, ‘where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work? … As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving.’38 Marx admonished Smith for giving intellectual credibility to laissez faire and Townsend for championing the coercion of the poor ‘in a thoroughly brutal way.’39 Townsend claimed that giving financial aid to the poor violated the natural workings of competition and that the existing Poor Laws gave the poor no encouragement to be frugal or industrious. He advocated, according to Marx and with no exaggeration, making hunger permanent among the working class.’40 As stated in Townsend’s Dissertation: The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks into action –​pride, honour and ambition. In general, it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour; yet our own laws have said, they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said that they shall be compelled to work. But then legal constraint is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise; creates ill will, and can never be productive of good and acceptable service: whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but as the most

19

Three Roads to the Welfare State

natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the bounty of another, lays a lasting and sure foundation for good will and gratitude.41 There must always be, Townsend insisted, ‘a degree of pressure.’ When hunger was either feared or felt, the desire to obtain bread would sweeten the severest labours. The peasant with a sickle in his hand, Townsend assured his readers, was happier than the prince upon his throne. But when the poor were assured of the constant provision of food, as they were in their parishes, this increased their improvidence; it tended to destroy ‘the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and nature have established in the world.’42 The poorer classes should, Townsend insisted, be given no hope except ‘from their own sobriety, diligence, fidelity,’ and from the well-​earned friendship of their employers who, should they not forfeit this through misconduct, ‘would be their principal resource in times of sickness and distress.’43 A wise legislator, Townsend advised, would endeavour to conform to the natural bonds of society. Good laws ought to strengthen the natural obligations of the servant to his master, the first duty required of a servant being ‘prompt, cheerful and hearty obedience.’ He argued that the then-​existing Poor Laws tended to destroy this natural subordination. Laws designed to confine the labouring poor to parishes in which they were born had impeded industry. It was difficult for those in need of work to get permission to live in areas where work was available and the labouring poor in any given parish enjoyed a monopoly of labour. It was also difficult for manufacturers to locate in areas where the costs of labour were lowest. Townsend described the Poor Laws as unjust and oppressive to employers.44 Townsend’s depiction of the natural order of things, as explained through a scientific parable about the animal kingdom, the case of an island in the South Seas, became a foundational expression of social Darwinist thinking. It professed to demonstrate, according to Townsend, the workings of a natural law that applied to all creatures on the planet.45 It claimed to show that it was natural for provident behaviour and diligence to win out over sloth and improvidence: In the South Seas there is an island, which from the first discoverer is called Juan Fernandez. In this sequestered spot, Juan Fernandez placed a colony of goats, consisting of one male, attended by his female. This happy couple

20

The invention of laissez faire

finding pasture in abundance, could readily obey the first commandment, to increase and multiply, till in the process of time they had replenished their little island. In advancing to this period they were strangers to misery and want, and seemed to glory in their numbers; yet continued for a time to increase their numbers: but from this unhappy moment they began to suffer hunger; yet continued for a time to increase their numbers, had they been endured with reason, they must have apprehended the extremity of famine. In this situation the weakest first gave way, and plenty was again restored. Unable to voluntarily control their numbers, the goats endured a cycle of population growth and of famine. Remove the risk of hunger from the poor, Townsend warned, and they would be as unthinkingly improvident as Fernandez’s goats: When the Spaniards found that the English privateers resorted to this island for provisions, they resolved on the total extirpation of the goats, and for this purpose they put on shore a greyhound dog and bitch. These in their turn increased and multiplied, in proportion to the quantity of food they met with; but in consequence, as the Spaniards had foreseen, the breed of goats diminished. Had they been totally destroyed; the dogs likewise must have perished. But as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circumspection in the vallies [sic], few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the most watchful, strong and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food. Thus, a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and most vigorous preserved their lives. It is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species.46 The proper order of things, according to Townsend, was that the lazy be left to suffer the natural consequence of their indolence. Artificially interfere with this, he warned, and the poor would feel free to marry and increase their numbers, but at some stage, their population would rise to such a level as to result in famine and mass starvation.47 Mass

21

Three Roads to the Welfare State

starvation, Townsend warned, more than a decade before Malthus did likewise, would be the fate of the descendants of the poor who were not discouraged from bringing children into the world that they could not provide for without the assistance of Poor Laws. Townsend proposed measures that would shame and stigmatise paupers (‘compel the pauper and his family to wear the Roman P in scarlet cloth upon their shoulders’) but came down in favour of his core idea –​use hunger as a lash to keep paupers in line –​and he urged the gradual removal of parish relief altogether.48 He also supported some measures to assist the industrious poor. He favoured placing sufficiently high taxes on alehouses to drive most of these out of business. He proposed the establishment of parish workshops to train their children in useful skills and mutual aid societies funded by taxes on the poorer classes as a kind of unemployment insurance. Access to assistance would depend on having been a paid-​up member of such societies with all disbursement of funds placed entirely under the control of church ministers and wardens. As such, sobriety, industry and economy would be encouraged, while drunkenness and idleness would not be rewarded. There was still a place for charity, benevolence and for bestowing ‘unexpected favours’ on the deserving grateful poor. Townsend ended his pamphlet with an assurance that scenes of charity would frequently occur when the poor were obliged to cultivate the friendship of the rich.49 Townsend’s influence on Malthus was superficial in many respects. The tone of Malthus’s extensive writings about his fears about the existential crisis that he believed that the poor faced was generally sympathetic to these. After the publication of the first edition of his Essay on the Population Crisis in 1798, Malthus gained immediate fame and huge influence though mostly for a simplified ‘high concept’ version of his original argument, which he subsequently modified, and which even in 1798 was nuanced. He acknowledged that most European countries, with the exception of Ireland, had in recent centuries witnessed at most only a slow growth of population. He attributed this slow growth in considerable part to prudential social mores that inhibited marriage in circumstances where having children would result in descending the rungs of the class system.50 He argued in his Essay on Population that a preventive check to population already operated, albeit with varied force, among all of England’s social classes. He observed that men of his own social standing who lacked sufficient fortune to support a family would ordinarily defer marriage rather than adopt the way of life of a lower class. They thought and behaved like characters in a Jane Austen novel.

22

The invention of laissez faire

The opening sentence of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) declared: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ A man without sufficient income to ensure that his children would not slip down the social class hierarchy had no business seeking to get married. Several of her plotlines could have been pitched using the following quote from The Essay on Population: A man of liberal education, but with an income only just sufficient to enable him to associate in the rank of gentlemen, must feel absolutely certain that if he marries and has a family he shall be obliged, if he mixes at all in society, to rank himself with moderate farmers and the lower class of tradesmen. The woman that a man of education would naturally make the object of his choice would be one brought up in the same tastes and sentiments with himself and used to the familiar intercourse of a society totally different from that to which she must be reduced by marriage. Can a man consent to place the object of his affection in a situation so discordant, probably, to her tastes and inclinations?51 Malthus similarly exhorted the sons of tradesmen and farmers not to marry until they became settled in some business or farm that enabled them to support a family. He noted that some deferred marriage until very late in life, perhaps until they purchased or inherited a farm. Others who were unsuccessful in business did not see themselves as in a position to marry.52 The calculus facing the poorer classes was much the same, but the stakes were higher: The labourer who earns eighteen pence a day and lives with some degree of comfort as a single man, will hesitate a little before he divides that pittance among four or five, which seems to be but just sufficient for one. Harder fare and harder labour he would submit to for the sake of living with the woman that he loves, but he must feel conscious, if he thinks at all, that should he have a large family, and any ill luck whatever, no degree of frugality, no possible exertion of his manual strength could preserve him from the heart-​rending sensation of seeing his children starve, or of forfeiting his independence, and being obliged to the parish for their support.53

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

Social restraints on marriage inevitably caused considerable unhappiness, but the wise course of action was to resist the temptation of improvident sexual gratification. The institution of marriage, ‘or at least, of some express or implied obligation on every man to support his own children,’ had a functional purpose or, as Malthus put it, was a natural response of any community confronted with the relationship between unchecked sexual impulses and poverty. So too was the ‘superior disgrace’ or stigma placed upon unmarried or deserted mothers. When a woman became connected with a man who took no responsibility to maintain her children and then deserted her, her children became either a burden on society or they would starve.54 He argued that rules of sexual conduct and social sanctions had developed as a check on population. These sanctions were especially directed towards women because the offence was ‘more obvious and conspicuous in the woman;’ she was always identifiable, whereas the father of her children was not: ‘Where the evidence of the offence was most complete, and the inconvenience to the society at the same time the greatest, there it was agreed that the large share of blame should fall,’ however harsh, cruel and unfair this might appear.55 In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus, like Townsend, made the case for gradual but ‘the total abolition of all present parish laws,’ even if his tone and argument expressed a compassion for the poor that was absent from Parson Townsend’s rhetoric.56 Malthus attacked the Speenhamland system and then-​current proposals for a weekly allowance of a shilling for each additional child for poor families with more than three children.57 The poor, so defined, were the families of men who were fully employed but still unable to keep their children from hunger. He described the prevalence of child mortality and widespread malnourishment among the peasantry. Of the former ‘much too great a proportion belongs to those who may be supposed unable to give their offspring proper food and attention, exposed as they are occasionally to severe distress and confined, perhaps, to unwholesome habitations and hard labour.’ Large families on low incomes inevitably faced distress: The sons and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as they are described to be in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen are, upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must

24

The invention of laissez faire

certainly be a healthy exercise, are very rarely seen with any appearance of calves to their legs: a circumstance which can only be attributed to a want either of proper or of sufficient nourishment.58 Malthus argued that artificially raising the incomes of the poorer classes would not necessarily address their poverty. Suppose that instead of 18 pence a day, a tax on the rich increased the rate of pay for labourers to five shillings. It might be imagined that now they could have meat every day for their dinners. But this would be a very false conclusion. Such a rise in wages would not increase the quantity of meat in the country but would push up its price. Under conditions of scarcity, what mattered was who could pay the most. Malthus believed that increased incomes would stimulate the production of additional food to only a limited extent because agricultural land was finite in supply. In 1798, Malthus thought that the limits of agricultural production had nearly been reached.59 While efforts to improve the conditions of the poor clearly ameliorated some cases of severe distress, Malthus believed that these had unintended consequences. They made it apparently feasible for a poor man to marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence.60 The Poor Laws, he argued, had ‘powerfully contributed to generate that carelessness and want of frugality observable among the poor, so contrary to the disposition frequently to be remarked among petty tradesmen and small farmers.’ If the labouring poor could not be educated out of their improvidence, they could be encouraged to feel stigma and shame: Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful. Such a stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great mass of mankind, and every general attempt to weaken this stimulus, however benevolent its apparent intention, will always defeat its own purpose. If men are induced to marry from a prospect of parish provision, with little or no chance of maintaining their families in independence, they are not only unjustly tempted to bring unhappiness and dependence upon themselves and children, but they are tempted, without knowing it, to injure all in the same class with themselves. A labourer who marries without being able to support a family may in some respects be considered as an enemy to all his fellow-​labourers.61

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

Malthus repeatedly emphasised the harsh, precarious and unfair conditions under which the poorest lived. The very laws necessary for a society to function –​that protected the security of property and the institution of marriage –​also imposed conditions of great inequality. Those who were born into poor families were unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.62 Malthus opposed any measures that fostered an increase in the population without increasing the food supply. So while he opposed subsidies on the incomes of the poorest (these would only make food more expensive), he supported reforms and freedoms that would enable the poor to grow more food or travel to find work. Existing legislation, aimed at preventing newcomers settling in parishes where they might become a burden on the poor rates, hampered labour mobility. Like Smith, he argued that the poor should be allowed to settle without interruption anywhere there was better prospect of employment or a higher price for labour.63 For all that Malthus railed against Poor Laws, presenting these as a trap for the poor, he nevertheless allowed that, for cases of extreme distress, county workhouses with harsh regimes might be established, supported by rates upon the whole kingdom, and ‘free for persons of all counties, and indeed of all nations,’ where also the able-​bodied poor ‘whether native or foreigner, might do a day’s work at all times and receive the market price for it.’64

The shadow of laissez faire The beliefs and arguments which justified laissez faire became institutionalised within the new science of political economy. Laissez faire became the theology of the industrial revolution. It came to be justified not just by the Protestant ethic but also by a new social science based on ‘immutable facts of nature.’65 Political economists, some of whom were clerics to begin with, became a new priestly class whose sermons about the improvident poor were directed primarily at the relatively small elites who had political representation. The ‘scientism’ of the political economists was a methodological and rhetorical device of political persuasion to prove that any interference in the market mechanism was not only futile but also harmful.66 Although Adam Smith has since been heralded as the great theorist of laissez faire, the economic doctrine which claimed his endorsement ignored the humanism evident in his writings. Smith saw people and dogs as fundamentally different from one another. In The Wealth of Nations, he discussed the differences between humans and their four legged friends to show how, among the former, cooperation and

26

The invention of laissez faire

interdependence was integral. Smith argued that these divisions of labour, and the wealth these produced, depended upon opportunities to engage in free trade. But people had always engaged in forms of trade and barter that were more sophisticated than anything that could be managed by other living creatures. As put by Smith: ‘Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.’67 Smith insisted that differences between the abilities and potential of people were superficial; philosophers had much more in common with street porters than did different breeds of dogs with one another.68 The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and convenience of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents.69 Smith observed that some people were simply born lucky while others were not. He suggested that through nurture and education anyone could improve their lot in life. Malthus, like most liberal political economists, believed that education could foster a sense of responsibility among the poor –​in the language of the day ‘improve the poor’ –​but

27

Three Roads to the Welfare State

that it was highly improbable that the lower classes of people in any country should ever be sufficiently free from want and labour to obtain any high degree of intellectual improvement.70 Unlike Townsend or Malthus, Smith did not claim or infer that this was for the best. It was one thing to imagine a benevolent providence, another thing altogether to revel in using hunger as a lash to discipline the poor classes. Malthus’s views on markets and the perverse effects of poor relief were ‘repeated so frequently by political economists, the clergy and various Parliamentary commissions that it gained the quality of truth.’71 When the New Poor Law was passed in 1834, it marked not merely the end of the long-​established practice of providing public welfare benefits to the poor but the first victory of market fundamentalism as a political ideology that could claim it was based on truths unearthed by economic science.72 Academic writing on this has attributed much of the credit or blame to Malthus. As put by one historian: The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic. For half a century, social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought. It was in this form, the form given it by Malthus and modified by Ricardo, that political economy took hold in the early part of the nineteenth century. And it was under the aegis of Malthus and Ricardo that political economy freed itself from its ties to moral philosophy and emerged in the guise of a natural science –​a ‘natural economics,’ one might say, which professed to be nothing more than the application to the economy of the simple, inviolable laws of nature.73 The cumulative impact of decades of pamphlets such as Townsend’s and, in particular of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population was not the abolition of the parish laws but their replacement by a more restrictive Poor Law system from 1834 in England and from 1837 in Ireland. The dominant perspective, reflected in the Report of the Commission on the Poor Law (1834), was that the old, comparatively generous parish relief system was the cause of the problem. A morality tale, influenced by Townsend and Malthus, blamed Speenhamland for the improvidence of the poor. There emerged an almost overwhelming consensus promoted by political economists and accepted by policy makers that the old parish relief system had ‘demoralized the working class, promoted population growth, lowered wages, reduced rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on ratepayers;’ and that the more the system sought to relieve poverty, the more it

28

The invention of laissez faire

made matters worse.74 Other analyses of Speenhamland drew different conclusions. Marx and Engels argued that under the Speenhamland system farmers had shifted cost onto the parish in order to reduce their wage bills and that this had driven down wages.75 Ideological attacks on the Speenhamland system made little or no reference to the seasonal nature of rural unemployment and to how a rudimentary form of seasonal unemployment insurance served the needs of landowners as well as farm workers who might have to move way if these were unable to access relief.76 Malthus’s influence on the 1834 Report could be seen in particular in the sections of the 1834 Report on Bastardry.77 Malthus wrote in 1798 that the stigma imposed by society on illegitimate birth was unfair but necessary in order to prevent improvident population growth, and that in order to achieve such an aim it was more feasible to stigmatise the mothers of illegitimate children rather than their fathers. Nassau Senior Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and the co-​author of the 1834 Report, who wrote the sections on Bastardry, had in an 1831 memorandum expressed concern that the then-​current laws were an inducement to improvident marriages and population growth.78 As similarly argued by Malthus: That a woman should at present be driven from society for an offence which men commit nearly with impunity, seems to be undoubtedly a breach of natural justice. But the origin of the custom, as the most obvious and effectual method of preventing the frequent recurrence of a serious inconvenience to a community, appears to be natural, though not perhaps perfectly justifiable.79 To be clear, Malthus in 1798 proposed that illegitimate children should have their long-​accepted rights to parish relief withdrawn altogether. The old system he sought to abolish was one that had long acknowledged the responsibilities of both parents. His proposals were far more restrictive than what Nassau Senior recommended –​that under the new Poor Law unmarried mothers were to be entitled to relief in the workhouse.80 The end result was that the entire burden of responsibility of illegitimacy was shifted onto the mother. However, his later writings acknowledged that huge agricultural improvements had occurred in England.81 As such, his analysis of the population question and of the extent to which the crisis facing the poorer classes in England was an existential one, shifted considerably over time. By the time of the new Poor Law Act, the population

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

question, except in Ireland, was at most a sideshow. There was, he argued in the 1836 edition of his Principles of Political Economy, ‘no state in Europe, or in the world,’ which could not support ten times as many inhabitants as were supported at present.’82 But what about Ireland where around one million people died from hunger and disease during the post-​1847 famine? Marx, in an 1853 article on famine-​era land clearances blamed landowners who had well digested their Malthus.83 Writing about the Irish Famine influenced by Marx has sometimes suggested that Malthus, because he advocated population checks and laissez faire, was one of its architects. It is certainly the case that some mid-​nineteenth-​century political economists advocated sticking with laissez faire during the famine. For example, in 1847 William Hancock, who was the first Chair of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin, gave a series of talks published as Three Lectures on the Question: Should the Principles of Political Economy be Disregarded at the Present Crisis?84 In one of these, Hancock advocated sticking to laissez faire principles.85 Malthus died 13 years before the start of the Famine, but he had given some thought to Ireland’s future in two essays published in the Edinburgh Review in 1808 and 1809. In these, he argued that the condition of the rural Catholic poor could never be improved while penal laws against Catholics were in force. Their poverty was not simply a moral problem of individual failure or improvidence. Malthus argued that discrimination and exploitation, including prohibitions for entering certain occupations and the prospect of rent increases when they made any improvements to their rented smallholdings effectively made it impossible for the Catholic poor to improve themselves and the lands that they farmed. His belief was that Irish character was unlikely to change while penal laws, in effect, punished providence.86 Laissez faire, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, was but one component of a liberal philosophy which saw the need for individual rights. As put in his Principles of Political Economy: Of all the causes which tend to generate prudential habits among the lower classes of society, the most essential is unquestionably civil liberty. No people can be much accustomed to form plans for the future, who do not feel assured that their industrious exertions, while fair and honourable, will be allowed to have free scope; and that the property which they either possess, or may acquire, will be secured to them by a known code of just laws impartially

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The invention of laissez faire

administered. But it has been found by experience that civil liberty cannot be permanently secured without political liberty. Consequently, political liberty becomes almost equally essential; and in addition to its being necessary in this point of view, its obvious tendency to teach the lower classes of society to respect themselves by obliging the higher classes to respect them, must contribute greatly to aid all the good efforts of civil liberty.87 In 1808 Malthus had estimated, fairly-​accurately, that Ireland’s population would exceed eight million by 1837 and thought that if left unchecked it could reach 20 million by the end of the nineteenth century.88 He hoped that the kinds of prudential behaviour which had slowed population growth elsewhere might come to be established in Ireland. He neither anticipated nor called for the famine that killed more than a million in the years after 1847 or for the mass emigration that played a part in reducing the population decade-​on-​decade for the century that followed.89 The intellectual influence of Malthus ran far deeper than his case for stigmatising improvident sexual relationships. The onset of the industrial revolution had turned England upside-​down. There was a huge demand for workers in the industrial cities but people were still tied to their parishes. The case for laissez faire to oil the wheels of the new economy won out. The removal of the old parish system of itself generated upheavals and dislocations. The new divisions of labour created wealth but undermined the incomes of de-​skilled workers. Pieceworkers in rural areas lost out to factories but factory workers often lived lives of poverty unimaginable to previous generations of labourers with steady employment or ties to land. From the early days of the industrial revolution, attempts to introduce the utopia of laissez faire came to be identified with massive collateral damage to society and with human misery. As put by Karl Polanyi of the decades prior to the 1870s: For some seventy years, scholars and Royal Commissions alike had denounced the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, and a galaxy of poets, thinkers, and writers … had branded its cruelties. It was deemed an established fact that the masses were being sweated and starved by the callous exploiters of their helplessness; that enclosures had deprived the country folk of their homes and plots, and thrown them on the labor market created by the Poor Law

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Reform and that the authenticated tragedies of the small children who were sometimes worked to death in mines and factories offered ghastly proof of the destitution of the masses.90 The next two chapters examine the emergence of socialist and conservative critiques of laissez faire liberalism and some efforts to ameliorate and to develop alternatives to this. Amelioration took the form of laws and public services aimed at curbing the worst excesses of the industrial revolution. The alternatives included rival utopian visions. It is no coincidence that the decline of the influence of laissez faire in England and elsewhere coincided with the widening of the franchise to give votes to the kinds of people who were affected by the application of theories of social Darwinism. It was supplanted in England and elsewhere by a more pragmatic reform liberalism which retained a taste for minimalist welfare rights and entitlements alongside an enthusiasm for punitive measures aimed a coercing the improvement of the poor classes while nevertheless recognising the benefits of expanding education and social infrastructure on utilitarian grounds. Laissez faire persisted as an ideology with some devotees and became hugely influential as neoliberalism from the second half of the twentieth century.

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3

Utopian socialism The term socialist first appeared in print in English in 1827 in an article in The London Co-​operative Magazine. It was originally taken to mean somebody who acted unselfishly for the common good. As an adjective, it denoted the body of knowledge which outlined, described, and ‘proved’ the rightness of such action.1 It was a definition that recast Jeremey Bentham’s utilitarian goal of the greater good of the greater number of individual interests in terms of the greater collective interest. The earliest written use of the term has been traced to a letter five years earlier from Edward Cowper, an inventor and engineer, to Robert Owen, which described a mutual friend as a socialist. Early British socialists came to be called Owenites. Owen was a successful industrialist who became renowned for reforms he introduced at the factory he ran at New Lanark in Scotland, as a campaigner for Factory Acts, which would improve the conditions of workers, and as the advocate of planned communities modelled on New Lanark, which would serve as sanctuary islands of socialism in an ocean of capitalism. Owen’s proposals were rooted in a very different understanding of human nature than those of liberal political economists like Malthus. Owen accepted John Locke’s account of the human mind as a blank slate that was shaped by what was empirically perceived through the five senses, as set out in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).2 Like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, he was influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau to believe that human relations could and should be remade in accordance with enlightened reason. Rousseau’s dream, of a new form of society, secured by a social contract that delivered freedom and equality for citizens who governed themselves in accordance with a ‘general will’ –​working with identical minds for the common good, without dissensions, tumult or conflicts –​proved hugely influential.3 Owen never felt the need to justify his faith in reason or to discuss the writings that influenced him. Although he was, from an early age, a voracious reader, he tended not, in his own works, to cite other writers and thinkers. Some of what he argued resembled the writings of the hugely influential-​at-​the-​time Godwin, whose Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) included a chapter titled ‘The Characters of Men Originate in their External Circumstances.’

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Godwin argued that the ‘the actions and dispositions of men are not the off-​spring of any original bias that they bring into the world in favour of one sentiment or character rather than another, but flow entirely from the operation of circumstances and events acting upon a faculty of receiving sensible impressions.’4 Children, Godwin wrote, were ‘a sort of raw material put into our hands, a ductile and yielding substance, which, if we do not ultimately mould in conformity to our wishes, it is because we throw away the power committed to us.’5 Similar claims about the power of education and environment to shape character and thereby positively reshape society were set out in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).6 Owen, in a paper he gave to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in his early 20s, soon after the publication of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s books, declared that the universe appeared to him to be one great laboratory.7 He professed to believe utterly that character was shaped by environment. Like Rousseau, he argued that individuals were innately good but were corrupted by societal influences beyond their control.8 He maintained that the belief, inculcated from infancy, that ‘man was bad by nature,’ was a moral evil responsible for much that was wrong in the world. Owen declared that the key to establishing a new moral world was to abandon beliefs both in original sin and in people having a free will to act contrary to their supposedly sinful natures. The fundamental principles that would serve as the basis for a new moral world were ‘that man was good by nature, and good because he is always inclined to think, feel and act in accordance with his nature.’ Yet he also argued that the people’s beliefs were shaped by environment and external factors, that ‘man could not avoid feeling as nature and eternal circumstances compel him to feel.’ People were inherently good and should be directed towards good ends. They were also malleable. Rather than place children in competition with one another, and ‘thus perpetuate vicious competition, contests and division throughout society,’ he proposed that they should be educated from birth to think in terms of the collective interests of the human race and to use all their ‘physical, intellectual and moral faculties and powers for the general betterment of society.’9 Owen’s proposals for social engineering inspired some social experiments and a wider sense that an alternative future to laissez faire capitalism was possible. His writings influenced nineteenth-​century socialist and radical movements, which included early feminists. But some of those he stirred put their energies into developing smaller

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Utopian socialism

scale, bottom-​up, cooperative ventures aimed at improving the lives of workers in tangible ways and into securing piecemeal reform.

Robert Owen and New Lanark Owen (1771–​1858) was that paragon of liberal virtue, a self-​made man and a great industrial innovator. Yet he was also the founder of socialism in Britain and, before that, an early prominent critic of industrial capitalism. As put in his 1857 autobiography: The rapid accumulation of wealth, from the rapid increase of mechanical and chemical power, created capitalists who were among the most ignorant and injurious of the population. The wealth created by the industry of the people, now made abject slaves to these new artificial powers, accumulated in the hands of what are called the monied class, who created none of it, and who mis-​used all they had acquired.10 He became much concerned by the deterioration of conditions of workers within the cotton mills; he observed rapid annual improvements in manufacturing techniques and a parallel deterioration in working and living conditions. He became ‘vividly alive to the deteriorating condition of the young children and others who were made the slaves of these new mechanical powers.’11 His communitarian socialist vision was based on the model factory he established at New Lanark, which was invented alongside industrial processes aimed at ensuring profits for his shareholders. He acquired, as he put it in his autobiography, great practical experience, not just in directing great commercial and manufacturing operations successfully but in governing for 40 years a model community of 2,500 souls in ‘all its details,’ including the education of the young, ‘creating a better and happier working population than could be found at that time in any nation or among any people.’12 Owen’s father was a tradesman, a saddler and ironmonger who was also the village postmaster in Newtown, Montgomeryshire. Robert received some schooling until he was nine, after which he worked in a shop until he was apprenticed to a draper in Lincolnshire. He subsequently acquired a wholesale and retail business in Manchester and became an expert in fabrics. From the age of 18, with some borrowed money, he worked in partnership with a mechanic to manufacture

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

machines for spinning cotton. He subsequently set up a factory which produced and sold cotton thread. He sold his start-​up and was hired as a manager of a spinning mill that employed some 500 men, women and children. Here, he became, because of innovations he oversaw, in his version of events at least, ‘the first fine cotton spinner in the world,’ or in Manchester at least, which amounted to the same thing at this early stage of the industrial revolution.13 Owen became a partner in a successful firm, the Chorlton Twist Company, which purchased cotton mills in New Lanark in 1800, when Owen was 29 years old.14 In his autobiography, no different in some respects from present-​day ones by business gurus that sell well in airports, he describes the steps and stages of a brilliant industrial career built on initiative and the ability to understand and manage what were then cutting-​edge manufacturing processes. But very few such autobiographies pivot to become attacks on the system that made their authors rich. A ‘wicked’ economic system compelled him ‘to learn the trade of buying cheap and selling dear.’ The apparent choice was to be ‘tyrant or slave,’ but there was, he believed, another way.15 The New Lanark water mills on the banks of the Clyde were originally built in 1785 by David Dale, who became Owen’s father in law. Dale built accommodation for the pauper children and migrants from the Scottish Highlands and a school next to the mill in the same multi-​story architectural style. The live-​in industrial complex was an attempt deal with labour mobility and worker retention problems and to ensure strict discipline.16 The mill at New Lanark had been built before Owen arrived on the scene. Accommodation was provided for migrants displaced from the Scottish Highlands. Those recruited before Owen arrived included passengers from a ship carrying emigrants to North America from the Isle of Skye that had run aground. The population of New Lanark, when Owen took over consisted of about 2,000 people. This included between 400 and 500 orphaned children, leased from parish poorhouses, who were said to be aged between seven and twelve, but who appeared to be from five to ten years old. These children received food, lodgings and access to some schooling at the end of a long day working in the mill. Unsurprisingly, they slept in class. Owen found that none of them understood anything they attempted to read. One schoolmaster did his best but was unable to manage several hundred children under such circumstances.17 At New Lanark, Owen strove to change the ‘old notions and habits’ of his managers and employees. He believed that bad conditions at the factory had detrimentally affected the character and conduct of the workforce. The intemperate and immoral behaviour that he sought

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Utopian socialism

to check included drunken ‘sprees’ and rampant theft of employer’s property. The workforce, in his account, were the dregs of society or at least people with no better options; ‘it was then most difficult to induce any sober well-​doing family to leave their home to go into cotton mills as then conducted.’ He introduced behavioural management techniques which closely monitored but did not physically punish his employees as an alternative to, as he put this in his autobiography, the usual range of punishments of the time –​to have thieves arrested, imprisoned and transported, ‘and at that period to have others condemned to death.’ He viewed such offences as the product of ‘evil conditions’ and argued that the focus should be on changing the workplace environment rather than on punishing workers.18 Owen became expert at controlling the routines of his employees. He devised information systems which made workplace theft very difficult. He closely monitored and evaluated the work of all his workers. He placed a ‘silent monitor,’ a block of wood painted on different sides in different colours, beside each workstation. Black denoted sloth, blue denoted indifferent quality work and white denoted excellence. The colour pointing forward recorded the conduct of the worker during the previous day. No verbal admonishments were needed during his factory floor inspections. Each day’s colour was recorded in a ‘book of character.’ He or his recording angel foremen would gaze at the outward-​facing colour of the monitor, then look the worker in the eye, before walking on.19 He improved and built new houses for his workers, organised street cleaning and refuse services, established a model school for children who worked in his factory –​The Institution for the Formation of Character –​which eschewed the corporal punishment that was prevalent at the time. He provided free medical care, a rudimentary form of health insurance to cover loss of earnings through illness and a savings bank. From 1806, he replaced the village shops, which sold goods, including alcohol, at a high mark-​up and on credit, with the direct purchase and distribution of food, clothing and other essentials at cost price. The same year, when then cotton trade with the United States was disrupted and production at New Lanark came to a halt for four months he continued to give his workers their full pay, which was unusual at that time. In 1816, almost two decades after he arrived in New Lanark, he reduced the working day to ten and a half hours.20 He practised a form of paternalism that could be and was, in the abstract at least, admired by Tories and bishops of the established church, but he mostly failed to convince other industrialists to become benevolent model employers.

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

He lobbied for legislation covering conditions in factories which would reduce the hours worked by children and raise the working age to 12. As described in his autobiography: ‘Children at this time were admitted into the cotton, wool, flax and silk mills, at six, and sometimes even at five years of age. The time of working, winter and summer, was unlimited by law, but usually it was fourteen hours per day, and in many cases the mills were artificially heated to temperatures most unfavourable to health.’21 He argued against the liberal presumption that society fared best when individuals were allowed to pursue their own interests in competition with one another. He declared that free trade capitalism, the system in which he thrived, was a ‘miserly selfish system’ built on ‘the petty tyranny of masters, and slavery of their workmen, especially among the large manufacturers.’22 Owen took issue with Adam Smith’s by-​then much-​cited argument in favour of free trade and laissez faire that man can provide better for himself, and more advantageously for the public, when left to his own individual exertions, opposed to and in competition with his fellows, than when aided by any social arrangement, which shall unite his interests individually and generally with society. He quoted Smith’s declaration in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’23 Owen’s counter-​argument was that by living cooperatively, individuals could provide mutual support and efficiencies.

Parallelograms and blank slates From 1810, he began to move in the same social circles as the prominent political economists of his day, including Malthus and Ricardo., He held animated discussions with these but fundamentally differed with them on how to address the big social questions of the time. In his estimation, ‘They were liberal men for their time; friend to the national education of the people but opposed to national employment for the poor or the unemployed.’24 Jeremy Bentham became an investor in New Lanark, but Owen did not rate him highly either. Bentham, he wrote, had spent a long life of well-​intended industry trying to amend legislation and posit theories of law but ‘had little knowledge of the world, except through books.’25 Owen’s 1814 book, New View of Society, was a collection of four previously published pamphlets. In one of these, ‘Character Formation and Mistaken Principles’ he noted the poor and working classes of Great Britain and Ireland have been found to exceed 15 million, or

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Utopian socialism

nearly three fourths of the total population. He argued that the lack of appropriate education had left many of these without proper guidance or direction, and, in many cases, had pushed them towards extreme vice and misery. Another essay, ‘Rational Education as the Way Forward’ argued that governments in all countries should establish plans for the education and general formation of the characters of their subjects. Children needed to train in good habits from infancy, then rationally educated so that their labour could be usefully directed. In New View of Society and in subsequent publications he proposed model communities –​‘villages of mutual cooperation’ and agricultural cooperatives –​modelled on New Lanark, that he claimed would meet the moral, educational and economic needs of the masses who were otherwise destined to suffer lives of misery and deprivation in industrial societies. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, during a period of high unemployment, Owen was commissioned to write a Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor (1817).26 The Report began with an economic and sociological analysis of the problem. The beginnings of the industrial revolution had coincided with a wartime economic boom. Mechanisation of production –​the inventions of Arkwright and Watt –​had brought down the price of manufactured goods. As goods became cheaper, demands for these rose to such an extent that more human labour needed to be employed after the introduction of machinery than had been employed before. The end of the war found Great Britain in possession of a huge productive capacity which was many multiples of that of the entire population a generation before but also with a large surplus of unwanted labour. Investment in machines had become cheaper than human labour. There existed unprecedented productive capacity, yet wages were being driven down below subsistence levels. He argued that millions of people would starve because machinery was taking their place unless useful occupations could be found for those unable to find work. In effect, his Report proposed that society, or the state, needed to plan the lives of those in distress. He argued that the poor and unemployed working classes ‘cannot, must not, be abandoned to their fate.’ They should be afforded the means of procuring a secure and comfortable subsistence by their labour, under a system which would not only direct that labour and its earnings to the best advantage, but also, at the same time, place them under circumstances that were most favourable to the growth of morals and happiness. In short, instead of allowing their habits to proceed under the worst influence possible, or rather, as it were, to be left to chance, thus

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

unintentionally producing crimes that render necessary the severities of our penal code, let a system for the prevention of pauperism and of crimes be adopted, and the operation of our penal code will soon be restricted to very narrow limits. The most complete statement of Owen’s socialist programme was To the County of Lanark, of a Plan for relieving Public Distress and Removing Discontent, by giving permanent, productive Employment to the Poor and Working Classes, under Arrangements which will essentially improve their Character, and ameliorate their Condition, diminish the Expenses of Production and Consumption, and create Markets co-​extensive with Production (1820).27 Here and in his 1817 Report, he argued that most of the vices and misery of the poor arose from living in environments where they were surrounded by unnecessary temptations which they had not been trained to overcome. Owen argued that the current ignorance of the poor, their ill training and their lack of a rational education, would make it necessary to closely regulate their lives. He proposed communities that would provide for the material needs of the poor but also insulate them from unnecessary temptations and prevent their children from acquiring bad habits. In effect, they would be deliberately isolated from the wider world. He believed that biological parents, or working-​class ones at least, were not up to the task of rearing their children. In essence, these model communities would cut their adult members off from the wider world as much as was practical, and to detach children from the influence of their families to the greatest extent possible. He envisaged that these model communities, each holding in and around the population of New Lanark and surrounded by farmland, would replace villages, towns and city slums. Owen proposed a division of labour that mirrored processes of workplace sub-​specialisation. In his 1817 and 1820 reports, Owen produced blueprints of the planned communities he envisaged. His preferred design, the shape of things to come, to borrow a phrase later coined by H.G. Wells, was a parallelogram. He drew up plans for a massive four-​sided several-​storey tall building, which in the diagrams he produced looked a bit like the present-​day Pentagon, but with a larger central open space, or like a giant military barracks with an enclosed parade ground bounded by tall buildings on all four sides. Within such machines, men and their wives would share a room with their children under three years of age. In his 1817 and 1820 reports, he envisaged that children over three years of age would sleep away from their families in dormitories attached to the school.

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Utopian socialism

He argued that every means possible should be taken to prevent children from acquiring bad habits from their parents. Ideally, their education would focus on such habits and dispositions as may be most conducive to their happiness throughout life, as well as render them useful and valuable members of the community to which they belonged. Owen claimed that a rational and peaceful utopian society could eventually be brought about by taking control of the nurture of children. He believed that it would become scientifically possible for men to acquire the same kind of control over the faculties of infants, as they possessed over the breeding of domestic animals. Despite using language that came to be associated with eugenics, Owen was entirely preoccupied with nurture. His aim of improving humankind, however, was similar to goals subsequently professed by eugenicists. Owen was preoccupied with reducing labour associated with the running of family households as well upon reducing the influence of family routines on the formation of children. Apartments in Owen’s proposed parallelograms would have no kitchens. All eating would be communal. Rooms would be centrally heated using the then-​latest technology. This appears to be why, in part, Owen favoured huge industrial-​scale buildings. Factories, after all, were what he knew best. Women would be employed in the care of their infants, and in keeping their dwellings in the best order, in cultivating gardens to raise vegetables for the supply of the public kitchen and would work part-​time in various manufactories. They would work occasionally, on rotation, in the public kitchen, mess rooms and dormitories, and, when properly instructed, in superintending some parts of the education of the children in the schools. Women would also be responsible for the manufacture of women’s clothing for ‘the inmates of the establishment,’ as the 1817 Report put it. Owen had strong opinions on clothing. He envisaged in his 1820 Submission that, once they could be educated in reason, women in his model communities would show no interest in fashion. He declared that the time, expense, thought and labour employed to create a variety of dress, the effects of which were to render the female figure an object of pity and commiseration, served no useful or rational purpose. This echoed some arguments outlined with far greater nuance by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. He argued that men and women could be educated to prefer clothing that was practical, functional and cheap to manufacture. In his autobiography he recalled experiencing an epiphany during his first visit to Glasgow. On an early morning walk he came upon

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Three Roads to the Welfare State

some women washing clothes in tubs out of doors. He was shocked to see the naked legs of these women in a public place; their clothes were hitched up much higher than decency required or appeared to him to be at all necessary. The women took no notice of him as he passed. They were no doubt accustomed to tramping in their outdoor tubs since childhood. This was not the English custom. The women were entirely unconscious of what in England would be understood as an impropriety. It was ‘another proof, among thousands, that, commencing early in life, we may be taught to think that any custom might be right or wrong.’28

Precarious islands of socialism Owen sailed to America in November 1824 intending to establish a model community there. He was feted by academics, businessmen and politicians. Some of his strongest disciples in the United States were among the thousands who had visited New Lanark, and his ideas had already crossed the Atlantic. A New York Society for Promoting Communities (which advocated a ‘Scientific Commonwealth’) had been established in 1820.29 Owen in turn had been inspired by American communitarian experiments. Long before he visited the United States Owen considered Harmony in Indiana and the somewhat similar religious Shaker communities to be living proof of the viability of cooperative living. He had written a pamphlet on the Shakers in 1817.30 During the early 1820s, George Rapp, the leader of Harmony, decided to uproot his community (he declared he had a divine revelation instructing him to do so) and move to Pennsylvania.31 In January 1825, Owen purchased Harmony. He agreed to pay $150,000 for a village of around 200 buildings capable of housing 1,000 people together with around 20,000 acres of surrounding farmland, farm equipment and two churches.32 As with New Lanark, he took over a going concern. Owen then set about populating New Harmony. Those who flocked to his experimental community were most unlike the employees of New Lanark; some were intellectuals drawn by Owen’s idealism. Others included frontier Methodist families and labourers hoping to find employment. Not enough were artisans or people with farming skills who would be able to make an initial success of the community. The constitution of New Harmony gave every community member over 21 years, including women, a vote. Committees to run agriculture, manufacturing, education and other functions were set up. Owen’s

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Utopian socialism

management style was far more hands-​off than at New Lanark. Very quickly some small breakaway communities were set up, comprising some of those who fell out with their brethren in New Harmony. For example, in 1826, around 100 Methodists, no doubt upset with Owen’s persistent criticisms of all organised churches and sects, set up their own community two miles from the main village. New Harmony endured seven official reorganisations within a few years.33 At a speech in Washington –​he only lived in New Harmony part of the time –​ Owen unveiled a large model of the enormous parallelogram –​‘a new machine for performing, in a superior manner, all the purposes of human life’ –​that he planned to construct on a hill close to Harmony. The quadrangle would be several stories tall and would be designed to accommodate 20,000 people on the first two floors. It would contain schools and state-​of-​the-​art-​factories.34 But the parallelogram was never built. Running New Harmony ate up much of Owen’s wealth. Some of the most practically skilled members began to leave as conflicts escalated. In May 1827 Owen abandoned his New Harmony experiment but many inhabitants including Owen’s sons remained. New Harmony reverted to an ordinary American town with privately-​owned property, schools and a library. A visiting Owenite wrote in 1842 that its population had been ‘wearied and disappointed’ by socialism and ‘had been filled full of theories until they were nauseated.’35 Owen returned to England for the final and perhaps most influential phase of his career. He conducted no further utopian experiments, but his theories, set out in pamphlets and periodicals he funded out of his vast profits from New Lanark, continued to inspire socialists looking for alternatives to rapacious industrial capitalism. Some of his followers tried to establish their own experimental communities. The most ambitious, at Orbiston near New Lanark, complete with plans for a parallelogram that was never built, lasted for three years. Owen purchased some shares in the scheme when investors were sought in 1825 by Abram Combe, an Edinburgh businessman who, inspired by Owen, had attempted unsuccessfully to introduce a cooperative worker scheme and then a profit-​sharing system for his workers. The Orbiston scheme floundered for some of the same reasons that New Harmony failed, due to the incompatibility of the self-​selected community members. This community was referred to by some local people as ‘New Babylon.’ Some of those who joined were unhappy with some of the rules of the commune. Communal dining facilities were rejected by the majority of members and particularly by women. Insufficient share capital was raised and by mid-​1827, the

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financial situation was desperate. Combe died in August 1827. Soon after, Orbiston was declared bankrupt.36 In his 1817 Report, Owen had argued that it would be possible for individuals (like himself), parishes or the nation at large to fund the purchase of land and the construction of parallelograms. He hoped that the success of initial pilot schemes would convince government that this was a better and more cost-​effective way of managing the poor and unemployed working classes than through the then system of charities and poor rates levied on parishes. He envisaged a role for the state in planning the location of such communities. Communities for the poor and unemployed would need to be run by ‘competent persons,’ employed for the purpose, until others could be trained-​up from within to take over the running of these. In his 1820 Report, he envisaged that those founded by landowners and capitalists, public companies, parishes or counties, would be placed under the direction of the individuals whom these powers may appoint to superintend them, and would of course be subject to the rules and regulations laid down by their founders. However, the utopian communities that Owen envisaged as machines for re-​engineering the lives of the poorer classes would depend upon the patronage of benevolent elites. The parallelograms for the poor he envisaged were designed to isolate their populations from the wider world and to facilitate the indoctrination of their inmates. These had more than a little in common with Bentham’s Panopticon, the model prison designed so that from one point in the building those in charge could see all that was going on in every part of it. By contrast, Owen argued that co-​operative communities formed by the middle and working classes could be self-​governing from the outset. He imagined, fancifully, that these would, without any difficulty, become organised upon principles of rationality that would prevent divisions, opposition of interests, jealousies or any of the common and vulgar passions that power conflicts might generate. In New Harmony, Owen was unable to manage his diverse population of socialist dreamers, scientists and artisans in the way he had managed the employees under his authority at New Lanark. The planned communities he imagined on paper were meant to be the product of reason and to become institutional machines capable of producing rational people. But the leaders who would bring these communities about, by necessity, had to be people like Owen. An interim autocracy of benevolent paternalists like him would be required –​a rational dictatorship of the proletariat, who could not be proletarians.

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Utopian socialism

The problem was that there was only one Robert Owen and there had only been one New Lanark. His proposed parallelograms did not appeal much to those who might be expected to live in them. London workers voted against his initial proposal at two public meetings in 1817 ‘on the grounds that it was too paternalistic and too likely to restrict individual action.’37 Communities like Orbiston, inspired by Owen, did not have a profitable factory to subsidise their experiments nor –​had they wanted this –​a manager capable of exercising the level of control Owen had over the lives and day-​to-​day routines of the children, families and workers at New Lanark. What was missing from New Harmony were the coercive elements of the New Lanark experiment. In New Harmony he was unwilling or unable to play the role of industrial commissar.

New moral worlds According to Barbara Taylor in Eve and the New Jerusalem, a seminal analysis of early nineteenth-​century feminism, the intellectual contribution of Owen, to this movement, was his argument that the apparent inferiority of women to men arose from the unnatural position of both in society. Owen’s writings struck a chord with early nineteenth-​century feminists. He made the case for communities where family life and housework would be abolished. He wrote about the gendered division of labour and how this might be changed within socialist communities. Owen’s emphasis on the power of environmental factors to shape character were forerunners of prevalent ideas in our time that gender identities are social constructions. Owenite feminists challenged beliefs that there was a uniquely female sensibility, which conveniently equipped women to do what their husbands would really rather not: attend church, care for children, visit the poor, and so on.38 These, of course, were middle-​class feminists railing against the social conventions which circumscribed their lives and those of their daughters in ways that were very different from working-​class women and their daughters who toiled long hours in factories.39 Feminists were also attracted by the notion that education might counteract environmental factors which impeded the emergence of rational society. From the 1820s to the 1840s, a plethora of newspaper articles and tracts were published by Owenites on the position of women. Most notably, the Appeal of One-​Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretentions of the other Half, to retain them in political and thence in civil and domestic Slavery: in Reply to a paragraph of Mr Mills celebrated ‘Article

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on Government’ (1825) co-​written by William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, exhorted female readers to demand with ‘confidence and dignity’ their ‘portion of the common rights of all.’40 James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill in his Article on Government (1824) had argued against votes for women because their interests were ‘indisputably included’ in those of other individuals, namely their fathers and husbands and, as such, like children, they could be denied political representation ‘without inconvenience.’41 The notion that female inferiority was simply the result of nurture, and that this could be redressed through education, was first advanced by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication Of the Rights Of Woman more than 40 years earlier.42 Wollstonecraft argued that women had yet to be given the opportunities to see whether they could be the equals of men or not. She argued that they should be prepared by education to become the equals of men in reason, knowledge and virtue. The opening sentence of Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) declared that ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in Chains.’43 But, as far as Wollstonecraft was concerned, he had little that was enlightening to say about women in chains. She was scathing of ‘ridiculous stories’ like Émile written by Rousseau, which attributed differences between the sexes to nature, without backing up such claims with evidence: I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than J.J. Rousseau. I can recollect my own feelings, and I have looked steadily around me; yet so far from coinciding with him in opinion respecting the first dawn of the female character, I will venture to affirm, that a girl, whose spirits have not been dampened by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative.44 She argued that girls with a strong inclination to read and write were discouraged from doing so, while their brothers, even if they showed no interest, received education and were given opportunities to develop their minds. Genteel women –​for these were the women whose rights Wollstonecraft sought to vindicate –​ were encouraged to be ‘slaves to their bodies, and glory in their subjugation,’ to be ‘proud of her delicacy and sensibility.’45 They were taught from their infancy ‘that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body. A bird, roaming round its gilt cage,

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only seeks to adore its prison.’46 She argued that genteel women lived stunted lives. They were encouraged to focus on their looks, to use their sex appeal, while they possessed this, to influence men. But there was more to it than this. Children did not observe reason in their parents but were forced to accommodate arbitrary authority. The ‘irregular exercise of parental power’ injured the minds of girls more than those of boys. The will of those who never allow their authority to be disputed, unless they happen to be in a good humour, was almost always unreasonable. To elude this arbitrary authority girls learnt lessons very early, which they subsequently practised on their husbands.47 The predicaments she described and some of her ideas and arguments found their way into Jane Austen’s novels.48 Wollstonecraft argued that children, including girls, needed to be educated outside their homes and that girls needed to be removed from the influence of their mothers. She argued that women of sensibility were unfit as educators because they would infallibly ‘be carried away by their feelings’ and spoil a child’s temper: ‘The management of the temper, the first and most important branch of education requires the sober steady eye of reason.’49 Wollstonecraft declared that: ‘It is time to effort a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.’50 She advocated a system of well-​regulated elementary schools for children between five and nine years of age that were open to all classes. At the age of nine, girls and boys intended for domestic employments or mechanical trades should be removed to other schools. Children of both sexes should be taught in the same classrooms in the mornings, with girls and boys taught different skills in the afternoons. Boards of education should be set up to employ suitable teachers.51 Proposals that women be given the vote in Owenite utopian communities (which were put into practice in New Harmony) went beyond the more modest proposals for female emancipation in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Thompson and Wheeler argued in The Appeal that, all women, ‘and particularly women living with men in marriage’ had been reduced to a state of helplessness and slavery.52 They argued that fettered women could not be other than mental and moral cripples. So degraded were these that they did not understand themselves to be enslaved. Their self-​contempt and servility reduced them ‘to such impotence, that they either voluntarily

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spring forward to meet the yoke and vow themselves slaves or submit in sullen apathy to their fate.’53 Various presumptions expressed by Wollstonecraft and Owen went on to acquire specific social scientific terminologies and bodies of theory during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wollstonecraft proposed something akin to what sociologists call socialisation, the process whereby individuals acquire and internalise the attitudes, habits and values of a given society. Owen anticipated the emergence of a behavioural science of the kind that grew out of the early twentieth century work of J.B. Watson.54 He anticipated the use on humans of techniques of positive reinforcement proposed by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.55 B.F. Skinner, perhaps the most influential twentieth-​century behavioural psychologist, published a utopian novel, Walden Two (1948), which envisaged a community organised along very similar lines as those proposed by Owen in his 1817 and 1820 reports, when it came to education of children, the subordination of family life to communal life. Skinner was an environmental determinist. His experimental work was hugely influenced by Pavlov’s argument: control the environment and you will see order in behaviour.56 Some of his experiments focused on methods for conditioning the behaviour of rats and pigeons, with the aim of learning how to condition human behaviour. His ‘Skinner Box’ was a device used to condition rats and pigeons to respond to stimuli and train these to move through mazes along particular routes. Such mechanisms for testing positive reinforcement operated on similar principles to Owen’s colour-​coded silent monitors at New Lanark. Like Owen, Skinner argued that there was no such thing as free will and that all behaviour was the result of environmental factors. Like Rousseau and like Owen, Skinner believed that human behaviour could be influenced by positive reinforcement; he rejected rote learning or punishment. Like Owen and like Wollstonecraft, Skinner was strongly influenced by Rousseau’s understandings of human nature and claims about the degree to which children could be influenced by their teachers.57 Skinner’s narrator in Walden Two recalls, in passing, a resemblance between the utopian community set up by Frazier, one of his former students, and early nineteenth-​century American utopian ones, but makes no mention of Robert Owen. Yet, the extent to which Skinner’s utopia mirrors the proposals set out by Owen in 1817 and 1820 is striking. Buildings and living quarters in Walden Two, like the parallelograms imagined by Owen, were designed to regulate social interactions between parents and their children. Frazier (who

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stands in for Skinner and is a mouthpiece for his theories) claims that because the environment in which young children live is carefully controlled, they never experience unhappiness and that jealousy is unknown. Children are raised communally; they do not live with their parents but meet them in the public dining hall at mealtimes. He described the community’s approach to child rearing as behavioural engineering. Frazier describes how the young are gradually weaned of all adult supervision by being conditioned to emulate the behaviour of slightly older peers. Teachers need not re-​educate children because no distinction exists between home and school: the ordinary teacher spends a good share of her time changing the cultural and intellectual habits which the child acquires from its family and surrounding culture.’58 In Walden Two traditional family bonds are deliberately weakened. Frazier argues that few parents are equipped to raise children in a beneficial scientific manner and that the home is a chaotic environment in which to attempt to do so. Walden Two, he explains, replaces the family ‘not only as an economic unit, but to some extent as a social and psychological unit as well.’59 Walden Two, like the parallelograms for the poor envisaged by Owen in 1817 and 1820 but unlike actual utopian communities attempted by Owen and others, was to be managed by experts. Frazier insisted that refusal to control people for own their good and for the good of society would simply leave them in the hands of less-​scrupulous controllers. He argues that democracy cannot be the best form of government ‘because it’s based on a scientifically invalid conception of man. It fails to acknowledge that men are made good or bad and wise or foolish by the environment in which they grow up; it fails to take account of the fact that in the long run man is determined by the state.’60 Yet, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), a summary of his ideas and work, Skinner reflected on the implausibility of any utopian scheme, including his own as set out in Walden Two. The basic problem was that, to have a chance of working, these needed to be isolated from the contaminating influences of wider society: A utopian community is usually composed of a relatively small number of people living together in one place and in stable contact with one another. … They can learn from each other rather than from specialists called teachers. They can be kept from behaving badly towards each other through censure rather than the specialised punishments of a legal system. They can produce and exchange goods without specifying values in terms of money. …

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Troublesome contacts with other cultures are avoided through geographical isolation (utopias tend to be located on islands or surrounded by high mountains), and the transition to a new culture is facilitated by some formalized break with the past, such as a ritual of rebirth (utopias are often set in the distant future so that the necessary evolution of the culture seems plausible). A utopia is a total social environment, and all its parts work together. The home does not conflict with the school or the street, religion does not conflict with government and so on.61 Skinner acknowledged that the kind of pocket utopia he proposed could never be feasibly applied to the world at large, because without the necessary levels of isolation from external influences, the community could never be sufficiently controlled. It was not surprising, he reflected, that as far as the real world was concerned, ‘the word utopian means unworkable.’62

Little Jerusalems Despite the failure of New Harmony, Owen remained a hugely popular public figure. New Lanark had become one of the wonders of the world and one of the most-​visited tourist destinations in Europe.63 By the early 1830s, he was the de-​facto leader of socialism in Britain. He pumped thousands of pounds into publicising his ideas and those of other early socialists. In the early nineteenth-​century marketplace for socialist ideas his main competitors were William Thompson, a benevolent county Cork landowner, who wrote influential books and pamphlets, before attempting unsuccessfully to establish his own model socialist community on his lands, and Claude-​Henri de Saint-​ Simon, who inspired a Christian socialist movement that influenced some British socialists and drew praise from conservatives opposed to industrial progress, like Thomas Carlyle.64 Thompson was the first great popular theorist of socialism in the English-​speaking world. He first met Owen, who was on a tour of Ireland, in 1822. Owen’s ideas appeared to him, at the time, merely ‘an improved system of pauper management,’ useful for that purpose but for no other.65 He came to view Owen as a reformer who aimed much of his propaganda at the better-​off classes. In An inquiry into the principles of the distribution of wealth not conducive to human happiness (1824), Thompson argued that ‘no high-​sounding maxims influence or can influence the rich as a body.’66 He argued that different classes

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have different interests, and that class conflict would be inevitable, as the ruling classes, however benevolent some of their members might be, turned on the poorer classes. Yet, like many other early socialists inspired by Owen, Thompson became a champion of the cooperative movement. In his Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the Principles of Mutual Co-​operation, United in Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of the Means of Enjoyment (1830), Thompson, like Owen, argued for the establishment of cooperatives that would shield people from capitalism. His proposals were somewhat similar but were less grandiose. For example, one was for a cooperative scheme that would initially consist of ten families who would pool their resources. Another envisaged that 200 families would contribute to a saving scheme and then build a farming cooperative with manufacturing workshops that might eventually be enlarged step-​by-​step to include 2,000 people over time. Thompson insisted that cooperative schemes should be owned and controlled by participant workers. He opposed the kinds of top-​down paternalistic management approaches that featured in many of Owen’s proposals. Yet the sole scheme he established for his tenants on his estate in Cork was an exercise in benevolent paternalism.67 Thompson, in his An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth (1824) proposed an early version of the theory of surplus value and exploitation under capitalism that became a central tenet of Marxism.68 His last published work, Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the Principles of Mutual Co-​operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of the Means of Enjoyment (1830) both refined Owen’s plans for model communities and challenged some of his thinking. The focus was more on practical plans for establishing smaller scale communities, than those envisaged by Owen, or tried during the failed experiment at New Harmony. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto dismissed Owen and other early utopian socialists as ‘quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances.’69 Owen was part of what Karl Polyani has called ‘the messianic dawn of socialism,’ when the belief was prevalent that all it would take to achieve a better society was to win people over was knowledge of its desirability. Owen, for all his antipathy to organised religion, was part of a kind of spiritual revolution in which religious reformers and movements predominated.70 Religious and conservative responses to the industrial revolution, and the influence of these on thinking about how the predicaments of the modern world might be addressed, are the focus of the next chapter. Typically,

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conservatives, including Catholic anti-​modernists, looked to the pre-​ industrial past when modelling their preferred future ideal society. What particularly distinguishes Owen from some of these was the extent to which he embraced the industrial revolution. There was not a whiff of democracy, nor of worker participation in decision-​making at New Lanark. Owen appears to have been disinterested in extending the franchise to the working classes, although this became a priority for subsequent generations of trade unionists and socialist reformers. His goal was not the emancipation of the working class as many other socialists understood this but to create planned communities in which they would be better off.71 Unlike some later socialists, Owen did not countenance class conflict. Partly, this was because he did not believe that revolutionaries had the skills or abilities to realise a viable social order. In his 1857 autobiography, he dismissed Europe’s ‘Red Socialists’ as well-​intentioned people with little knowledge of human nature: ‘As they would first destroy before they built up or knew how to build up, it is evident that they could only, if their desires were not gratified, lead nationalities headlong into confusion and universal disorder, to the sacrifice of life and property.’72 For all his fondness for grandiose schemes, Owen’s abiding influence was on a cooperative movement that was willing to start small. Owenism tapped into deep and widespread anxieties about the unravelling of social cohesion and decline of working conditions that accompanied the industrial revolution. It became a huge social movement that attracted ‘hundreds of thousands of craftsmen and artisans, laborers and working people.’ It was not a political movement like Chartism, but it articulated concerns about the need to protect people from capitalism and the market that gave rise to trade unions and socialist political parties.73 John Stuart Mill observed in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) that associations of individuals voluntarily combining their small contributions had come to ‘perform works, both of an industrial and of many other characters, which no one person or small number of persons are rich enough to accomplish.’74 One of the most influential early projects was a co-​op founded in 1844 by 28 flannel weavers in Rochdale to set up and run a grocery shop. The cooperative principles that governed the workings of the Rochdale Pioneers were adopted by many subsequent community-​led organisations. These established equal voting for members who were shareholders. By 1894, the Rochdale Society had 12,000 members. By 1936, its membership had risen to around 40,000.75 In England and across Europe, cooperatives were established by Catholic and Protestant faith communities as well as by socialists and

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trade unionists. In France cooperatives were promoted by the followers of Saint-​Simon.76 Cooperative savings banks and life-​insurance co-​ops were established in Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, and many other countries as well as in England.77 Cooperatives were promoted in Germany by a workers’ industrial association movement from the mid-​nineteenth century; in 1876 workers’ mutual assistance societies and rural mutualism were regulated by an imperial law. In several European countries cooperative movements and trade unions became intertwined. For example, the Asociación de Tejedores or Weavers’ Association, the first trade union in Spain, was founded in 1840, at the same time as the Asociación Mutua de Tejedores mutual provident society, which in 1842 combined to form Compañía Fabril de Tejedores. Workers’ associations were established in France from the 1830s. A notable early example, the Association Chrétienne des Bijoutiers en Doré, founded in Paris in 1834, was run along very similar lines as the Rochdale Pioneers. Mutual assistance and mutual provident societies expanded very quickly in France in the decade that followed. By 1847 there existed some 2,500 mutual assistance societies with 400,000 members. In Italy, a system of mutual assistance societies also expanded from the 1830s. One of these, the Società operaia di Torino, set up the first Italian consumers’ cooperative, the magazzino di previdenza di Torino in 1853. Its aim, like the Rochdale co-​op, was to ensure that members could maximise the purchasing power of their wages. The necessity of ameliorating the effects of laissez faire capitalism through cooperatives and other communal ventures, as well as through legislative reform, came to be accepted across the political spectrum. In England, a Christian socialist movement became prominent from 1848 after the collapse of Chartism.78 That same year, in the first edition of his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill described workers’ cooperatives as the ‘progressive movement of the age.’79 In essence, Mill favoured a kind of reform socialism, one that would leave competition and capitalism in place within a mixed economy where cooperatives operated according to competitive market rules. Owen’s abiding influence was upon the trajectory of this kind of gradualist reform socialism.

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4

Reform liberalism and technocracy Laissez faire constituted just one aspect of the bundle of liberal ideologies that became influential during the industrial revolution. It coexisted uneasily with utilitarianism, the idea of ‘the greater good of the greater number as the right and proper action’ as influentially defined by Jeremy Bentham (1738–​1932), even though Bentham also subscribed to the logic of liberal political economy in the running of prisons and workhouses. Laissez faire was enabled by the resistance of nineteenth-​century liberal politicians and thinkers like John Stuart Mill towards extending the vote to the industrial working and poor classes. Yet it came to clash with the technocratic social policy advocated by Edwin Chadwick (1800–​90) and other Benthamite reformers. Within liberalism, faith in progress abided, but there were differences between those who believed that all that was needed to ensure this was to enable free trade and individual autonomy, and those who believed that the invisible hand needed the guiding hand of laws and regulation. Both laissez faire and the belief that experts were best placed to make utilitarian calculations about the public interest sat comfortably with prevalent understandings of liberalism as a political philosophy.1 Bentham’s ‘utilitarianism’ proposed a calculus for determining what the aims of public policy and legislation should be without recourse to politics and the opinions of the uninformed masses. Utilitarian liberalism as an engine of reform relied on administrative rationality and expertise rather than electoral politics. Followers of Bentham, like Mill, called themselves philosophical radicals. They maintained that institutions or practices should be swept away if these failed to pass the test of utility.2 Bentham himself proposed utopian for-​profit institutions to replace inefficient societal responses to crime and poverty. Whether liberals championed free markets or saw themselves as institutional reformists, they generally resisted giving the right to vote, and therefore extending political influence, to the working and poorer classes. Initially, laissez faire flourished because it chimed with eighteenth-​ century understandings of the limited capacity of government. Thomas Robert Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), influentially posited that, unless checked, the population would come to exceed the amount of food that could be produced.3 In a context

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where human societies still had scant control over natural phenomena the belief that poverty was an existential problem that could only be ameliorated through individual effort seemed to be a rational viewpoint.4 Yet Malthus became less anxious about population increases during the early nineteenth century. His later writings acknowledged that huge agricultural improvements had occurred in England.5 There was, he declared in the 1836 edition of his Political Economy, ‘no state in Europe, or in the world’ which could not support ten times as many inhabitants as were supported at present.’6 Improved agricultural techniques and huge increases in industrial output vastly increased overall levels of wealth during in the nineteenth century, if not its distribution. By the 1830s, a considerable part of urban working classes seemed to have had it worse than previous generations. This was not simply due to working conditions. The Benthamite doctor James Kay Shuttleworth’s pioneering The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832) observed very poor urban housing conditions and no provision for the removal of sewage.7 As put in one subsequent analysis: ‘Twelve insanitary houses on a hillside may be a picturesque village, but twelve hundred are a grave nuisance, and twelve thousand a pest and a horror.’8 Liberals came to accept the necessity of a growing number over time of palliative interventions that might ameliorate such conditions but, by and large, demands for reform were driven by opponents of laissez faire. Radicals like Friedrich Engels, Tories like Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Disraeli and Benthamites like Chadwick found themselves in broad agreement on the inability of laissez faire to address the needs of an urban industrial society. Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) written in German when he was 24 years old and newly arrived in Manchester, combined a synthesis of British writing about urban conditions and his own observations. It borrowed heavily from Carlyle’s polemic Past and Present, which had been published the previous year in its accounts of ‘the shirtless workers who toiled in mills making millions of shirts’ and ‘the working millions at liberty to die by want of food. Engels’ own observations in Manchester focused on a hollow surrounded by factories known as ‘little Ireland’ with a population of around 4,000. Engels described an environment poisoned by the effluvia of refuse, offal and sickening filth, and by the smoke from a dozen factory chimneys.9 Drawing on public health reports, he described conditions of chronic overcrowding (‘pens containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar prone to flooding

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where, on average twenty people lived,’ ‘120 persons having to share a single privy’) where often whole families crowded into one bed.10 Carlyle’s Past and Present recounted the case of a widow who had been refused help from the charitable establishments of Edinburgh. She died from typhus along with 17 others on the lane where she lived, who she had most likely infected. Would it not have been economical, protested a doctor that Carlyle had cited, to help the widow? She was treated as if she had no place in the wider community. Yet by fatally infecting 17 others, she had proved that social bonds were all too real. Chadwick, one of the main authors of the report which led to the 1834 Poor Law, also authored the seminal 1842 Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which justified new kinds of interventionist social policies. The title of Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) refers to a speech in the book by a radical journalist who tells an investigator examining the conditions of the lower classes, that England has become divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were the inhabitants of different planets.11 The principle of laissez faire found expression in arguments proposing the removal of tariffs on imports and for the abolition of subsidies on agriculture introduced after the Napoleonic War, known as the Corn Laws. But moves to regulate factories and to pass laws to ensure that fast-​ expanding cities had sufficient infrastructure, emerged concurrently. As a result of new manufacturing and new farming techniques, it was now apparently possible for smaller numbers of workers to produce ever-​ increasing amounts of goods and food. The high rates of investment required for industrial expansion, together with the economics of large-​scale and full capacity production, created incentives to attain and maintain high levels of output. Capitalism became orientated towards increasing demand and increasing consumption in order to maximise returns on investment.12 Economists became preoccupied with problems arising from gluts in production or inadequate demand for manufactured goods or foodstuffs and came to advocate greater state involvement in regulation of the economy.13 This chapter examines the shift away from laissez faire liberalism in nineteenth-​century Britain towards a reform liberalism which recognised the need for significant government intervention in social policy and economic regulation. In Britain and in several other industrialising countries, liberals became politically influential at a time when most of the population did not have the right to vote. In Britain, liberals and Benthamites dominated the royal commissions and

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parliamentary committees which developed the 1834 Poor Law, various Factory Acts and public health legislation. The nineteenth-​century dance by which such reforms progressed also involved conservative and radical reformers. At a time when liberals had unprecedented influence –​influence they feared losing once the right to vote was widely extended –​the debates that played out among the intelligentsia mattered considerably.14

Liberalism versus democracy European liberalisms as political philosophies emerged in the shadow of the 1789 French Revolution, against absolutist monarchy. The 1791 French Constitution gave the vote to men over 25 years of age who paid taxes on their incomes. However, a relatively peaceful initial phase of political transition gave way to a violent period during which the Terror against the enemies of the people resulted in the execution of thousands by guillotine, including the royal family. The Catholic Church was supressed, and thousands of priests were killed, imprisoned or exiled. The Terror ended in 1794. Five years later Napoleon Bonaparte led a successful coup d’état and in 1804 he declared himself Emperor of France and reinstated the Catholic Church. Following Napoleon’s defeat and final imprisonment in 1815, the monarchy was reinstated. Edmund Burke’s influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) seemed prescient. He contrasted the costs of revolution (‘plots, massacres and assassinations’) with the benefits of orderly gradual parliamentary and legal reform, exemplified by the British Constitution.15 As he put this to his imagined French audience: You would have had a free constitution; a potent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction that inspires false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it can never remove, and which the order of civil life establishes

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as much for the benefit of those it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.16 Burke is now claimed as a Conservative philosopher, but he was a member of the Whigs and his approach to reform sat close to prevalent understandings of what was meant by liberalism during the decades that followed the French revolution.17 The term came into fairly widespread use during the second decade of the nineteenth century. The Spanish Liberales (Liberal Party), founded in 1813 (in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808), advocated constitutional representative government but also the retention of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. After Napoleon was deposed, the new French King Louis XVIII promised what he called ‘a liberal constitution.’ This established a system of representative government and endorsed key liberal principles such as equality before the law, freedom of the press and religion, although it declared Catholicism to be the national religion. Voting rights were considerably more restricted than in the 1791 Constitution.18 French liberals favoured a restricted franchise. The Terror and subsequent popular support for Napoleon’s dictatorship into power confirmed their view that most Frenchmen were utterly prepared for democratic rights. As put by Helena Rosenblatt in her history of liberalism: As we know, early liberals were not democrats. Endorsing popular sovereignty did not mean endorsing universal suffrage. Their reticence on this issue owed much to their experience with the Terror and the Napoleonic regime. Universal suffrage was introduced in France in 1792 for the election of the National Convention, the same convention that launched the Reign of Terror. Napoleon’s dictatorship was approved by a plebiscite. Universal suffrage was associated on one hand with mob rule, violence and disorder and on the other with gullibility, poor judgement and submissiveness.19 The 1830s witnessed, in Britain and in some other countries, political changes which gave more power to the middle classes who ran industry and commerce. In 1830 there were revolutions in several European countries including France, Belgium and Italy. These were primarily middle-​class and liberal protests against the rigidities of conservative regimes and policies that had been introduced after the Napoleonic

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war.20 The term liberalism began to be widely used in Britain around 1816 when a Tory author denigrated the Whigs as British Liberales.21 Post-​1830 reforms in France increased the number entitled to vote by lowering the (male only) voting age from 30 to 25 years of age and the property qualification from 300 to 200 francs. The result was still a small electorate compared to that created by the 1784 revolution that proclaimed a Republic to replace an absolutist monarchy but had then given way in turn to the Napoleonic regime and a restoration of monarchy. The chamber (parliament) elected in 1836 included a significant proportion of industrialists, merchants and bankers as well as landowners.22 The French liberal writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–​59) coined the term ‘individualism’ and was preoccupied with what he described as ‘the tyranny of the majority.’ This, as examined in his classic Democracy in America, meant something more sociologically nuanced than the extreme case of French Terror. Tocqueville’s concern was not so much with the extended franchise but that the modern state, in which sovereignty was invested, would become increasingly complex and overpower its increasingly atomised citizens.23 Democracy, as he understood this, had been the achievement of liberal aristocrats like himself and the educated middle classes and it was most likely to flourish where there was also a vigorous civil society. In Democracy in America he argued that this was best exemplified by the town councils of New England where local inhabitants elected their officials.24 The British equivalent of the 1830 French revolution was the Great Reform Act passed in 1832. This rebalanced the districts from which 658 members of parliament (MPs) were elected giving greater representation to urban areas, and hence to the industrial middle classes, while reducing some of the power of aristocratic landowners to control seats in parliament. Under the previous system, there had been scores of small boroughs which returned MPs, while there were some large new industrial cities that were not represented in parliament at all. The Reform Act protected both landed and industrial interests against the dangers of democracy. The right to vote still depended on property-​ owing qualifications that excluded the entirety of the working class. In 1832 the number of voters in England and Wales rose from about a half a million to three quarters of a million, but the total population at the time was somewhere between ten and 15 million.25 In France in 1830, the number of voters who met property ownership criteria rose from 140,000 to just over 241,000 when the total population was around 25 million.26

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Utilitarianism and the limits of liberty Liberalism was not without its internal tensions. Antipathy to universal franchise worked to damp down pressures for social reforms, but laissez faire was also challenged by utilitarianism and other ideas and concepts developed by Jeremy Bentham and his followers. Bentham wrote extensively on the need for social and administrative reform but was primarily a legal theorist. Like Burke, he was concerned about the apparent dangers of political absolutism associated with the spread of beliefs that people had natural rights. Specifically, he rejected theories of natural rights developed by John Locke and elaborated on by Tomas Paine.27 Bentham viewed talk of natural rights as ‘terrorist language’ ‘mischievous’ and ‘dangerous nonsense.’28 His concern, first and foremost, was to preserve the legitimacy of government and the rule of law in an age of revolutions. Natural and imprescriptible rights and social contract theories, he argued, were ‘rhetorical nonsense, –​nonsense upon stilts.’29 Benthamite jurisprudence emphasised the empirical interpretation of the meaning of sentences aimed at translating (vague, imprecise, fictitious, nonsense) propositions about right and duty into (empirically sensible) propositions about laws, sanctions and sovereigns. Legislation as understood by Bentham offered a precise means of regulating social and economic relations and reforming public administration.30 A law was not rooted in something sacred or inviolable; it was merely a command of the sovereign power, backed up by sanctions and maintained by the habit of obedience. Bentham coined and popularised terms including ‘minimise,’ ‘maximise,’ ‘rational’ and ‘codify.’31 His doctrine of utilitarianism –​the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number was first set out in his Fragment on Government (1776) where ‘utility’ was presented as a basis for determining whether a law served its intended purpose or not.32 In essence, the greater good, as understood in utilitarian terms, was Bentham’s conceptualisation of the public interest. Various schemes he put forward for model prisons and houses of industry for paupers focused not just on the design of building but administrative systems that would use rewards and punishments to regulate human behaviour.33 Bentham defined happiness in terms of the balance between pleasure and pain. He emphasised that people sought pleasure and to avoid pain within three domains which were binding on human conduct –​ the law, religion and public opinion. He described the reward and penalties of the law as political sanctions. He proposed a new way of

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thinking about law that broke with the legacy of feudal inheritances, quirky customs and a series of contrivances that benefited lawyers. His practical achievement was a codification of existing laws which set these out in writing as a systematically arranged code. Religious beliefs also influenced public morality. Popular or moral sanctions operated through the pleasures and pains arising from the favour or disfavour of other people.34 He devoted considerable energy to designing and promoting his idea for a model prison built from iron and glass, the Panopticon, which would enable convicts to be constantly observed by inspectors and know that they would be punished for any infractions. They would presumably seek, in accordance with utilitarian principles, to avoid additional suffering by adhering to the rules. The first complete version of his plan was published in 1791.35 It appeared at a time when large numbers of criminal offences still carried the death penalty or resulted in the expensive transportation of convicts to Australia. New systems of punishment and a much larger prison system were needed if the death penalty was to be replaced by secondary punishments.36 Bentham proposed a humane alternative to the violence that was inflicted on criminals at every turn.37 He declared that his design offered an unprecedented degree of organisational efficiency and ‘economy’ and many other advantages to the state.38 He argued that the principles on which his model prison was organised could also be applied to the design and running of workhouses, hospitals, schools and factories.39 The preface of his proposal opened with an advertisement of the benefits he claimed his system would provide: ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burdens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor Laws are not cut but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture.’ The use of violence in Bentham’s model prison was to be replaced by a system of intense surveillance and regulation that could be readily extended to many other kinds of institutions including hospitals and factories.40 His Outline of a Work entitled Pauper Management Improvement (1798) was a companion piece to the Panopticon, which proposed a system of industry houses for paupers organised on similar principles.41 He published further editions of this industry house scheme in 1802 and 1812 and a further edition of the Outline was being prepared when he died in 1832.42 In essence, Bentham proposed the construction of 250 industry houses of a similar design to his model prison to accommodate 500,000 inmates. This was at a time when he estimated that the entire

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population of England and Wales was nine million. An inspector’s lodge in the middle of each building would offer visibility of every pauper’s quarters. This, Bentham argued, would allow all acts of delinquency to be instantly recorded. Like the Panopticon, the proposed industry houses would be run on a commercial basis. Bentham proposed that a joint stock company modelled on the East India Company should be established to run the system. In an unpublished manuscript he acknowledged that the English mind could hardly conceive of four hundred individuals under one management let alone half a million. Yet, the East India Company controlled a territory several times the size of Britain and a population of 20 to 30 million. Running the National Charity Company –​the name he gave to his proposed system of industry houses –​would be but child’s play to a director of the East India Company.43 Under Bentham’s scheme, the administrators of an industry house would have a financial interest in the wellbeing of the men, women and children in their charge. They would, for example, have to forfeit a specified sum for the death of a woman in childbirth.44 Bentham proposed that his system replace all existing parish relief, wage supplements of the kind given under the Speenhamland system and medical assistance for the poor. To ensure that this total abolition of outdoor support would work he argued that the management company should be granted the power to apprehend any person, who was able-​bodied or otherwise, who did not have visible means of support. Bentham’s use of the term ‘pauper’ included a wide category of people who could be forcibly incarcerated. It included all beggars and all ‘habitual depredators,’ a term that covered every person deemed not to have visible means of support. By this means, smugglers, thieves and others who were likely to be engaged in criminal activity could be incarcerated without trial alongside vagrants and beggars.45 Bentham argued that his industry house proposals would not violate the principle of liberty, because habitual depredators and the burdensome poor would not be accused of any crime, and their admission to an industry house would not be classed as a punishment. However, their internment would deny such people the liberty of doing mischief to society.46 Inmates, Bentham explained, would be taken into care for their own benefit and the benefit of the wider community. Industry houses would run on the principle of wardship akin to the kind that placed children in the care and custody of their parents. Admission would no more be punishment than the committal of the insane to the custody of those with sounder minds. In summary, those deemed to lack the

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moral sanity necessary to be trusted with the uncontrolled management of their conduct and affairs should be committed. Bentham proposed that beggars and depredators should not be released unless they were found employment. Those who became unemployed again would be committed once again to a house of industry.47 Bentham set out detailed proposals on the (minimum) amount of food, clothes and bedding that inmates should be given. His main concern was keeping costs low because industry houses were envisaged as private enterprises and were meant to be able to make a profit. So there was no meat (Hindus did fine without it), clogs not shoes; soldiers wore uniforms so why not paupers? And everybody, including all children, women and people with disabilities should be put to work in commercial enterprises run by the industry houses. Even a blind person could be taught to knit or spin.48 Bentham argued that paupers and their children above four years of age should be put to productive labour. He did not envisage that industry houses would provide formal education even though he referred to minors as apprentices.49 Unlike Malthus, Bentham did not appear to be concerned about population growth. Notwithstanding the authoritarianism he displayed in imagining how the lives of inmates could be micromanaged, he supported early marriages among the poor (because these were conducive to happiness) and enthusiastically advocated the ongoing expansion of this proposed industry house system to accommodate these. At the same time, Bentham considered paupers to be moral children and no more entitled to freedom than actual children. Every child, he argued, was like a slave insofar as it fell absolutely under the authority of its father until it became an adult.50 In the final euphoric chapter of his Outline, he referred to this as his utopia.51 Bentham argued that the pauper inmates of his well-​regulated industry houses would enjoy ‘extraordinary security in respect to health’ greater than could be found within a private family, security against want of any kind, cleanliness and tidiness and employment favourable to health.52 In essence, the poor would have no worries. They would be stripped of the burden of having to survive independently. They would know that their children had a secure place to live. They would not be troubled by education that they did not need and which, Bentham argued, could only give them unsatisfied longings that would make them unhappy with their lot.53 Apprentices under Bentham’s rule would be free to marry young, perhaps at 14, knowing that their children would be similarly cared for. Bentham, in this final chapter, expressed the view that early sexual relations were probably not harmful because these were so obviously a source of pleasure. Bentham also

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seems to have envisaged his industry houses as laboratories (‘crucibles for men’) where social experiments aimed at promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be attempted. He quoted a Latin phrase (‘Fiat experimentatum’) which translates as ‘let experimentation be done.’54 Bentham wrote extensively about sexual non-​conformity. Most of these writings were omitted by a prurient editor from his posthumous multi-​volume Works (1838–​43). Between 1814 and 1816 he wrote a treatise entitled Sex, which was appended to a collection of unpublished writings on religion entitled Not Paul but Jesus. Between 1824 and 1828 he wrote an Appendix on Sexual Eccentricities which argued that there were no grounds consistent with the principle of utility for legal punishment of consensual homosexual relations. These were obviously a source of pleasure for those who practised such relations, and unlike adultery or rape, had no detrimental consequences for other persons or for society.55 It was illogical that homosexuality was punished more severely than some offences that were actually harmful to society: Of all the offences of which a man in the maritime service can be guilty, burning a fleet, betraying it to the enemy and so forth, this is the only one which it was thought proper to exclude from mercy. The safety of the fleet and of the Empire were in the eyes of the legislator objects of inferior account in comparison with the preservation of a sailor’s chastity.56 Bentham did not seem to believe that men could be exclusively homosexual and so argued that ‘pederasty’ was not prejudicial to marriage. As he put it in a fragment of his Appendix on Sexual Eccentricities that was short enough to be posted on Twitter: Let us be unjust to no man: not even to a pederast. In all antiquity there was not a single instance of an author nor scare an explicit account of any other man who was addicted to this taste. Even in modern times the real womenhaters are to be found not so much amongst pederasts, as among monks and catholic priests.57 Unlike Malthus who wrote his Essay on Population during this period, he was not concerned about the dangers of overpopulation. Although he became aware of Malthus’s writings (around 1802), he did not change his view on the utility of sex as a great pleasure. Bentham, the

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pioneering advocate of sexual liberalism, also opposed punishments for abortion, which he understood as a means of controlling fertility that was consistent with individual liberty.58 As put by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her seminal analysis of Bentham’s utopian scheme for managing the lives of paupers (which I have drawn on here), it was typical of him to have imagined that the only objection that could be raised to his plan was that it was too good. Bentham claimed that it represented the ‘pitch of perfection.’ But then, a more conventional mind ‘might have baulked at describing any poorhouse, however excellent, as a Utopia.’59 Bentham claimed that his industry houses would be able to provide for children so much better than the families of the self-​maintaining poor and that, having weighed up the advantages, such families would seek to enrol their children in houses of industry.60 Bentham was clearly at odds with the political debate about the Poor Law that was beginning to unfold even though his plan would have removed all forms of parish and outdoor relief. His elaborate scheme to ensure that habitual and suspected depredators would be automatically committed to institutions ran contrary to then-​recent legislation which had become more lenient towards vagrants and no longer required them to wear uniforms. For example, legislation requiring paupers to wear badges (with the letter ‘p’), passed in 1697, was repealed in 1810. The influence of anti-​utopians like Burke and Malthus loomed large and any proposal that paupers might be encouraged to be fruitful and multiply would not have played well. In particular, Bentham’s plan was at odds with a prevailing antipathy towards large centrally managed schemes and a preference for minimalist local administration. There was little appetite for the grandiosity of what he proposed.61 Utilitarianism mandated interventions by legislators that ran contrary to the principles of laissez faire. Among the liberals, supporters of utilitarianism like Bentham’s protégé John Stuart Mill styled themselves as radicals because they challenged the absurdities of the then legal system or championed administrative reform.62 Mill in his Autobiography describes how the Benthamite type of radicalism, which he promoted in The Westminster Review¸ a journal he edited, gained ‘out of all proportion to the number of its adherents’ within the rapidly-​r ising Liberal movement.63 Its rivals in the intellectual politics of the 1830s included The Edinburgh Review, which published writings by laissez faire-​supporting political economists and was described by Mill as the chief literary organ of the Whig Party.64 Tory viewpoints found expression in Frazier’s Magazine.

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Mill’s own passion for Benthamite utilitarianism began with a period of intense commitment during the 1820s (‘the most sectarian period of my Benthamism’), during which he admitted the description often given to a Benthamite ‘as a mere reasoning machine’ for two or three years was not untrue in his case.65 He came to observe that the opinions to which Benthamites attached the most importance were attacked by others as unfeeling, and to agree with such observations: ‘Utility was denounced as cold calculation; political economy as hardhearted; anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word “sentimentality,” which, along with “declamation” and “vague generalities” served us as common terms of opprobrium.’66 In his 1838 essay on Bentham, Mill describes his then-​deceased mentor as somebody who had little knowledge of or interest in the thoughts and feelings of others, whose writings contained few traces of accurate knowledge of any schools of thinking but his own, who was convinced, in any case that others could not teach him anything worth knowing. Bentham, according to Mill, was determined to create a philosophy wholly out of the materials furnished by his own mind, and by minds like his own; he lacked the imagination to understand those who thought differently than he did. In essence, Mill argued that Bentham’s utilitarian theory took account of too narrow a range of human motivations.67 He claimed that it was uninformed by insights into other people, human nature in general or by knowledge of other societies. None of this was fair to Bentham, who bequeathed some 20 million words of writing to posterity and has since been described as one the most imaginative people who ever lived.68 But, none of this was unfair to Benthamism, as this had come to be widely understood as a narrow kind of cost-​benefit analysis. Mill argued in his 1838 essay that people did not respond to stimuli as simply as Bentham imagined. For example, they might act on the basis of what they believed to be right and wrong. Another related objection to Bentham’s supposed rigidity was that it did not allow sufficiently for the individual pursuit of happiness and for individual understandings of what might constitute this. To Bentham’s short definition of utility, Mill added in his own essay Utilitarianism (1863), the caveat that human happiness was varied and complex. Each of us had to pursue it in our own way, and in the search for such happiness, both education and experience were necessary.69 Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859) echoed concerns articulated by Tocqueville about the pressures upon individual liberty imposed by the juggernaut of mass society. He proposed the notion that individuals

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should be free to do whatever they wanted as long as it did not demonstrably impose harm on others. Mill’s formula sided with the ideal of individual freedom against any conception of the greater good, however worthy, imposed from above.70 Yet, unlike the champions of laissez faire he rejected the validity of individual actions that had negative consequences for others. He bemoaned the prevalence of free trade political economy, which had become a habit of mind. He welcomed the socialistic experiments of the cooperative societies which, whether these succeeded or failed, could not but provide useful education for those who participated in these.71 Like Bentham, he believed in the necessity of regulations and laws which would determine the balance of interests. Social change, by which he meant changes in beliefs and thinking, would have to precede institutional change. For democracy and socialism to work, ‘the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses would need generations of exposure to education and experimentation.’ In 1859, when debates about extending the franchise were once again raging, Mill published a pamphlet advocating that voting rights be linked to having an education rather than to ownership of property.72 In essence, he agreed with Bentham that the uneducated poor were moral children, but, unlike Bentham, he argued that as the population became more educated a greater proportion could be regarded as citizens.

A helping hand to the invisible hand Bentham died in 1832, the year of the Great Reform Bill that adjusted the balance of power in favour of the liberal urban middle classes but still excluded the masses. In the absence of working-​class political influence, efforts to ameliorate their conditions were driven by a new class of technocratic professionals. The key figure among these was Edwin Chadwick, a barrister and member of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarian Society, who had worked as Bentham’s literary secretary. After Bentham’s death Chadwick played a leading role in the commission established in 1832 to draw up what became the 1834 Poor Law. Initially, he was employed as its secretary by Nassau Senior but became a full member and an author of much of its report and of the legislation that followed.73 Bentham’s intellectual contribution to the new Poor Law was the principle of ‘less eligibility,’ which inverted the utilitarian principle to minimising pleasure and maximising the pain of those obtaining poor relief. The aim was to ensure that nobody would be incentivised to

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apply for poor relief who was fit to undertake available employment. Chadwick argued that it was necessary to ensure that Poor Law relief was always a worse option than undertaking the lowest-​paid available employment. Relief could be made less attractive by limiting the rations provided to paupers as well as by requiring that they enter a workhouse.74 Whereas Bentham claimed that his houses of industry would not be instruments of punishment, the new Poor Law envisaged workhouses as having a punitive role. Chadwick was also a member of the Commission which prepared the 1833 Factory Act. The first Factory Act had been passed by Robert Peel’s Whig government in 1819. It was meant to reduce the working day of children under 16 to 12 hours and to stop altogether the employment of children under nine years, but it proved ineffective. The Act only applied to cotton factories and there was no adequate system of factory inspections. Additional restrictions on child labour introduced for the cotton industry in 1825 and 1831 also proved to be ineffective.75 The 1833 Factory Act and subsequent ones passed in 1844 and 1847 were policed by government appointed factory inspectors and the courts.76 The 1833 Act regulated child labour but the Factory Act Commission, which included Bentham, resisted the regulation of adult workers in factories. Nassau Senior who was a member of the Commission that drew up the 1933 Act, which rejected the regulation of the working conditions of adults, argued that an overall reduction in working hours would be disastrous to British industry because it was in the last hour’s work of the day that the profits of the manufacturers were made. If this was an argument for laissez faire, it was also one that manufacturers were entitled to make a profit. Nassau Senior also opposed the regulation of child labour on the grounds that this constituted interference with contracts between employees and their employers, which ran contrary to the sound laissez faire principles.77 However, even opponents of factory legislation conceded the argument that children could not be considered to be free to enter into contracts of employment. Many of the leading champions of factory legislation and reform were Tory members of parliament: Michael Sadler (the Duke of Newcastle) led the parliamentary committee which investigated factory conditions, and he also opposed the removal of the old system of parish relief. Lord Antony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftsbury) and Richard Oastler became lifelong campaigners for improved working conditions and shorter working hours. Ashley Cooper was the main architect of the Ten Hours Act (1847) and subsequent laws that

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regulated conditions in factories, mines and housing for the poor. Anthony Froude the historian who edited Frazier’s Magazine also campaigned to improve the conditions in factories. An 1833 article by Froude and John Tulloch, a Church of Scotland theologian, ‘The Commission for Perpetuating Factory Infanticide,’ published in Frazier’s Magazine, was bluntly critical of the ideological blindness of liberals such as Chadwick and Nassau Senior to the comprehensively documented suffering of children: Practical men, of various classes, amongst those inhabiting the manufacturing districts, described with frightful accuracy, the dehabilitating effects of prolonged labour on the infant frame and constitution. … Clergymen came forward in crowds, to testify that children employed in factories were so overworked as to place their moral faculties and perceptions in complete abeyance. … Many, who had examined Sunday-​schools in those districts declared, that the effects of their employment stamped a character of sickly feebleness on factory-​children which it was not possible to mistake; that it was to be detected in their meagre aspects, and in their inferior weight and stature, compared with the scholars engaged in other employments.78 Such evidence, and petitions from children working in Manchester factories was ‘violently and without reason put aside’ by the commission’s ‘deluded’ utilitarians who ‘believed themselves in search of the public good’ in accordance with ‘the greatest happiness principle’ but had ‘no idea of a people save and except as tax-​producing and money-​gathering animals.’ They left ‘the dignity of human nature wholly out of their reckoning under the influence of utilitarianism and liberal political economy.’79 Chadwick’s abiding legacy was in the field of public health. His motivation to pursue reform was utilitarian. A cholera epidemic in 1831 and 1832 drew attention to the exceeding poor sanitation of England’s rapidly expanding cities. It was obvious that cholera was concentrated in the poorest districts and that there was a relationship between disease, death and destitution. 80 Disease needed to be tackled because of the costs it imposed upon society. It needed to be addressed differently than the so-​called moral causes of poverty, as these were understood by the political economists of his time.

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Chadwick’s report to the Poor Law Commission on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) tracked cases of fever and cholera in badly-​cleaned areas, collated statistics on death rates from epidemics and other causes in residential areas exposed to sewage. It undertook comparative analyses of ‘chances of life’ among the gentry, tradespeople and working people. Part of his argument was that unsanitary conditions in towns and cities were unhealthy for all classes, though especially for the poorer classes. It compared morality rates and illness rates in areas with different circumstances. It examined the costs associated with illness to make the case for preventive expenditure on clean water supplies and sewage disposal. He concluded that dire urban conditions created some 43,000 new widows and some 112,000 orphans per annum. Chadwick argued that effective preventive measures would require the skills of civil engineers more so than doctors.81 He made the case for improved drainage and the provision of sewers and clean drinking water.82 He was the main architect of the 1848 Public Health Act, which required local government to adopt proactive public health measures, provide paved streets, clean water, and sewage disposal and meet defined standards. Chadwick’s achievement was to bring together different stands of insight and evidence to make the case for a comprehensive public policy response to poor sanitation. He came to be regarded as a great pioneer of public health systems that quickly saved large numbers of lives. He was the leading member of a generation of practical Benthamites that developed new administrative methods, including systems of monitoring and inspection, without which legislative reforms would have been ineffective. Similar techniques also emerged in other countries. Persuasive arguments for interventionist government, municipal public health services and state regulation of trade came to the fore around the same time, for similar reasons, in Victorian England, the Prussia of Bismarck, the French Third Republic and in the Empire of the Hapsburgs. In each case, somewhat similar legislation was introduced and public utilities funded by local taxes were expanded.83 Chadwick emphasised the value of empirical data and comparative analysis in weighing up the costs and benefits of regulation aimed at tackling documented social problems. For example, in 1859 he published an article comparing the manufacture and distribution of bread in London and Paris. This argued that the low quality of bread available in London was due to the widespread use by bakers of poor and adulterated ingredients and to unhygienic working conditions in mostly small and poorly equipped bakeries. Chadwick found that

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in Paris the total proportion of bakers to the overall population was restricted to one third that found in London. As a result, Parisian bakeries were typically bigger and better equipped, more hygienic and able to source raw materials more cheaply than the smaller businesses in England. Chadwick was able to demonstrate that the more highly regulated market in Paris benefited producers as well as their customers. His article demonstrated step by step how legislation and regulation functioned in practice in both cities.84 He published several other articles in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society that covered Competitive Examinations for employment in the Civil Service, contrasted public health legislation and regulation in various European countries with the British case, set out comparative analyses of the costs and regulation of hackney carriage and other transport services, and similarly examined the brewing of beer. None of his conclusions accorded with laissez faire doctrine.

The masses and the classes In Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, liberal parties were mostly in government during the two decades after 1848.85 However, in Britain the Conservative Party led by Benjamin Disraeli won the 1867 election and passed the country’s second so-​called Great Reform Bill. This considerably widened the franchise but still avoided extending the vote to the working classes. By then, the Liberals and their leader William Gladstone had come to support a further extension of the franchise even if many were ‘squeamish’ about doing so.86 Among intellectual liberals, John Stuart Mill had long argued against extending the right to vote to the masses, but he came to realise that their enfranchisement was inevitable. In an anonymous 1833 essay written in the aftermath of the previous year’s Great Reform Bill, he declared that ‘The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.’87 He argued in his Political Economy (1848) that in an era of mass education paternal liberalism would cease to be politically viable and that one way or another, liberals would have to engage with the working classes as citizens: Of working men, at least in the more advanced countries of Europe, it may be pronounced certain, that the patriarchal or paternal system of government is one to which they will not again be subject. That question was decided when they were taught to read and allowed access to newspapers and political tracts; when dissenting preachers were suffered to

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go amongst them, and appeal to their faculties and feelings in opposition to the creeds professed and countenanced by their superiors; when they were bought together in numbers, to work socially under the same roof; when railways enabled them to shift from place to place, and change their patrons and employers as easily as their coats; when they were encouraged to seek a share in government by means of the electoral franchise.88 In an 1859 essay Mill argued that, not everyone should have an equal voice in public affairs because some (the less educated) were less worthy of the vote than others were.89 However, Disraeli’s 1867 Act was a tipping point beyond which further ongoing electoral reform could hardly have been avoided.90 It extended the right to vote to a million new voters in place of the 400,000 that would have benefited from the legislation that Gladstone had failed to pass the previous year. The differences between both came down to how the right to vote was to be calculated. Under the Act passed by the Conservative government, male adult occupiers of properties with a rateable value above £10 received the vote.91 Those who benefited from 1867 Act included petty bourgeois shopkeepers, craftsmen and peasant proprietors who as property-​owners met the criteria. Further Acts in 1884, 1918 and 1928 created a genuine universal suffrage that extended to women as well as to men. In several European countries, but most extensively in Britain in the years after 1867, laws were modified to recognise the rights of workers to be represented by trade unions and engage the free market in the free collective bargaining on wages and conditions of employment.92 In France in 1874 a National Assembly dominated by royalists and clerical conservatives passed a factory act that regulated the hours worked by children to a greater extent than previous legislation. Disraeli’s social policy as Prime Minister from 1874 to 1880 was similarly motivated by what he described as ‘one-​nation’ conservatism.93 In Britain and elsewhere, reformism crossed political party lines. Reformist liberals competed with reformist conservatives and socialists for the working-​class vote. By the time Chadwick died in 1890, a new generation of influential Benthamites had come to the fore. Many of these were members of the socialist Fabian Society. Its leading members worked assiduously to influence the policies of both the Liberal Party and Conservative Party before becoming closely associated with the Labour Party (see Chapter 6). The Fabian vantage point, according to Eric Hobsbawm, was that of the new salaried

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professional, administrative, technological and intellectual cadres of post-​laissez faire capitalism. These were: ‘Largely indispensable in the modern versions of the capitalist economy, often recruited from the established middle classes or assimilated socially (and in the case of industrial managers, financially) to the wealthy class, neither private enterprise nor the profit motive was essential to their functioning.’94 Early twentieth century liberal reformers acknowledged the need to increase the role of the state within social policy but were, at the same time, concerned that this should not undermine the primacy of the market. The Liberal government elected in 1906 passed legislation providing free school meals for children who were under-​nourished.95 It introduced old-​age pensions in 1908 and a system of compulsory sickness and unemployment insurance in 1911. Much of this legislation was overseen by Winston Churchill who was then a member of the Liberal Party government. The main intellectual architect of these reforms was William Beveridge (1879–​1963). He distinguished ‘unemployment’ –​the idea that worklessness resulted from the unavailability of paid employment –​ from pauperism, understood by champions of the Poor Law as the result of moral failure of individuals to seek work. In his 1909 book Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Beveridge argued that the state had a legitimate role in seeking to arrest such economic downturns and in setting up labour exchanges to match workers to available employment and to provide social security for them during periods of involuntary unemployment.96 He argued that the state should set the policy goal of achieving full employment, a notion that anticipated The Beveridge Plan (1944), his later blueprint for the welfare state.97 Churchill absorbed Beveridge’s language and concepts. In a 1909 memorandum to one of his senior officials entitled ‘Notes on Malingering,’ Churchill insisted that entitlements to social insurance should not depend on assessments of individual morality: I do not feel convinced that we are entitled to refuse benefit to a qualified man who loses his employment through drunkenness. He has paid his contributions; he has insured himself against the fact of unemployment, and I think it arguable that his foresight should be rewarded irrespective of the cause of his dismissal, whether he lost his situation through his own habits of intemperance or through his employer’s habits of intemperance. I do not like mixing up moralities and mathematics.98

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Churchill argued in parliament that social insurance for workers would foster political stability. Insured industrial workers with a ‘stake in the country’ would be less likely to heed to the vague promises of revolutionary socialism.99 However, the reforms he championed did not bind them to the Liberal Party, which went into decline following the rise of the Labour Party. Twentieth-​century liberal reformers like Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes were preoccupied with, as Keynes put it, directing economic forces in the interests of social stability. In a 1925 essay Am I a Liberal? Keynes wrote that the Labour Party would always draw passion from its ‘catastrophists’ –​its ‘Die-​Hard wing’ of Jacobins, Communists and Bolsheviks –​but it was dominated by ‘the best type’ of educated, humane, socialistic reformers, who lent it moral and intellectual respectability. He also observed that the Conservative Party also consisted of two wings: a Right of Die-​Hards and what he called the best type of educated humane Conservative Free Traders. After the principle of laissez faire had been abandoned by the Liberal Party, it still found sanctuary in the Conservative Party. Keynes reflected that some of the British leaders of the capitalist cause –​those who continued to champion laissez faire –​were third-​generation men living off wealth created by their grandfathers. Their natural political home was in the Conservative Party.100

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5

Catholic social thought versus modernity During the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church became increasingly exercised by the influence of the Enlightenment, as this found expression in politics and social policy through both liberalism and socialism. By the end of the century, the Church had managed to put forward a hugely influential third way alternative to these which influenced the development of both authoritarian corporatism and Christian democracy. The 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (trans. ‘Of New Things’ but sometimes given the title ‘On the Condition of the Working Classes’) was no less than the totemic Catholic equivalent of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. Intellectually, this drew on Thomism –​Aristotelian natural law philosophy as Christianised by Thomas Aquinas –​for its rebuttals of liberalism and socialism. Neo-​Thomism provided the basis for specific political and social prescriptions that were at once an expression of interest group politics and presented an ideological alternative to secular modernity. Rerum Novarum acknowledged a spirit of revolutionary change in politics and economics and recognised the ‘misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the working classes.’1 Yet it harked back to a time before the Enlightenment when liberalism and individualism did not exist. It idealised the pre-​capitalist Middle Ages as the golden age of Christianity in Europe.2 The focus of this chapter is on efforts to promote European Catholic third way alternatives to liberalism and socialism in the aftermath of Rerum Novarum and on the political contexts in which Catholic thought proposed utopian responses to secular modernity, which drew on both the Romantic Right, with its belief in ‘natural’ communities that needed to be protected from modernity, and a sense of Christian universalism –​of being part of a Christian community.3 Whether what was proposed was a specific institutional system, such as the corporatist state, or whether opposition to secular modernity found expression as an idealisation of medievalism, the goal was one of religious restoration. Some of the focus of this chapter is on authoritarian expressions of utopian Catholic conservativism. Yet, the underlying critiques of

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capitalism and modernity that fuelled these had a wider cultural and political impact. At times these overlapped with those of liberal and socialist reformers. Anti-​modernism was by no means unique to Catholic conservatives. Nor were concerns about the how industrialisation, urbanisation and what Adam Smith called the division of labour appeared to undermine older forms of social cohesion upon which their status and authority depended. The earliest recorded use in English in print of the word ‘medieval’ was in an 1827 magazine article.4 In mostly-​Protestant Britain and elsewhere, the idealisation of medievalism, –​‘the middle ages by moonlight’ as G.K. Chesterton put it –​became an enduring phenomena. The nineteenth century saw unfavourable contrasts being drawn by some artists, architects and writers between industrial society and the medieval social order. In his hugely popular Past and Present (1843), which included searing criticisms of conditions experienced by factory workers and the urban poor, Thomas Carlyle declared that the piety of the Middle Ages had been abandoned and nothing had taken its place but a Godless utilitarianism: man had lost his soul and vainly sought ‘antiseptic salt in killing Kings, in Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, in Manchester Insurrections.,’ Carlyle contrasted the precarious and impoverished lives of millions of supposedly free factory workers with what he claimed were the superior conditions enjoyed by the lower classes under the stable hierarchies of feudalism.5 In his novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), Benjamin Disraeli, who would become a Conservative Party prime minister in 1868, contrasted the sense of duty of the medieval church to the ‘social welfare of the people,’ to an industrial Britain that had become two polarised nations of rich and poor.6 Mid-​nineteenth-​century art critics, including John Ruskin, championed a revival of gothic spirit as an aesthetic rejection of the ugliness, as he saw it, of industrial buildings and of bourgeois philistinism.7 Past and Present was hugely admired by Friedrich Engels and read avidly by later generations of socialists who could not but agree with his trenchant denunciation of laissez faire capitalism.8 Ruskin, like Carlyle, made a strong impression on twentieth-​century socialists like Clement Attlee.9 British debates about medievalism echoed the Catholic critique of modernity and this in turn intellectually mirrored Émile Durkheim’s De la division du travail social (1893), published in English as The Division of Labour in Society. Durkheim’s book emerged a few years after the publication of Rerum Novarum. It argued that the division of labour was far more pervasive than observed by Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

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Durkheim described the unravelling of traditional ‘mechanistic’ forms of social solidarity and their replacement by more complex ‘organic’ interdependencies. Mechanistic solidarity was grounded in the similarities between people’s day-​to-​day lives. Individual members of society, perhaps living in a village like their ancestors before them, held the same values as one another and held the same things sacred. Society was coherent because they led very similar lives. Members of such communities had little individual autonomy and were expected not to deviate from communal norms and religious practices. Durkheim’s German contemporary Ferdinand Toinnes referred to this as gemeinschaft. Durkheim expected conflicts between those who championed progress, efficiency, modernisation and an increased division of labour, and those who were anxious about the pace of change and the disruption of older bases of social cohesion.10 He highlighted the negative potential consequences of such disruption, including a sense of dislocation that could be tracked through increased suicide rates. He employed the concept of anomie to depict the ruptures in social cohesion that came with the decline of established religious moral authority.11 This was understood by many European Catholic thinkers as an existential crisis. For Durkheim, it was by no means solely a problem for the Church. The shift away from traditional mechanistic interdependencies or gemeinschaft to new, yet to be fully realised forms of social solidarity, was for Durkheim a sociological puzzle. It was unclear what would replace traditional forms of communal authority tied to religion. In the last paragraph of The Division of Labour, he argued that the moral order of the modern secular society was only in the process of taking shape.12 The appeal of Catholic social thought to conservatives was its concern with such questions. Durkheim’s preoccupation with the unravelling of shared moral codes echoed natural law understandings of social order. In a 1906 essay entitled ‘The Determination of Moral Facts,’ Durkheim argued that morality begins with membership of a group, however small that group may be. Even the notion of individualism was in fact a product of society.13 Durkheim agreed with the Aristotelian principle that humans must realise their nature, but unlike Aquinas or the authors of Rerum Novarum, he did not see this as unchangeable. As he put it: ‘at different moments in history this nature does not remain constant; it is modified in societies.’14 Neo-​Thomism shared Durkheim’s emphasis on the functional necessity of and agreed basis for social solidarity.15 Rerum Novarum

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emphasised the need for the ongoing innovation of social and political arrangements capable of meeting unchanging human needs in changing circumstances. In other words, social disruptions had to be addressed, but human nature and human spiritual needs remained constant. There was one fundamental problem that made the sociology of Durkheim anathema to the Church. He depicted religion to be a ‘social fact’ –​ something to be taken seriously by sociologists because people took it seriously, not because it was true.

Anti-​modernism and the Kulturkampf The idealisation of the pre-​Reformation Middle Ages appealed to many conservatives and anti-​modernists who never gave much thought to sociology. Following the Reformation, Europe became a patchwork quilt with some countries like France and some regions dominated by Catholicism and others, including parts of Germany where these were a minority. Catholics tended to behave differently in countries where these constituted majorities than in ones where these were minorities. In countries where they constituted minorities or faced religious discrimination, such as in Great Britain and Ireland, they benefitted from, and made alliances with, political liberals and became advocates of religious toleration. In some places where Catholics were a religious minority there was some pragmatic adjustment to the great revolutions of Western culture. But in predominantly Catholic areas –​Italy, France, Austria, Spain and Portugal –​the Church continued to side with the ancien regime. Somewhat similarly, in Protestant-​dominated societies, German Lutheranism, Dutch Calvinism and the Church of England also identified with conservatism.16 The Church of England was described in a 1917 speech by Agnes Maude Roydon, a suffragist, as the Conservative Party at prayer.17 It originated with Henry VIII’s break with Rome and became, in effect an ecclesiastical arm of government following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the passing of legislation (the Penal Laws) which excluded Catholics and Protestant dissenters from political and public life. These laws were not completely repealed until the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) by an alliance of the Liberal Party with the support of Irish Catholic members of parliament. Because of this history, British conservativism differed considerably from the Catholic conservative tradition that gave rise to Christian democracy. In Catholic France, the First Republic had been politically anti-​ clerical and had disestablished the Church. Pope Pius VI had been

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arrested by French troops in Rome in 1798 and was deported to France where he died the following year. The papacy signed the Concordat of 1801 with Bonaparte that aligned Rome with conservative forces. In this context, Catholic liberals received very little encouragement from Rome. For example, during the 1830s, the French liberal Catholic movement, under the leadership of Filicite de Lamennais, who was a priest, called for universal suffrage, complete religious liberty, the rejection of competitive capitalism and for the working classes to demand their God-​given rights. L’Avenir (trans. ‘The Future’; its motto was ‘God and Liberty’), the periodical of de Lamennais’s movement advocated a democratic Christian republic with a free press, free speech and freedom of worship that could only be accomplished by the separation of the Church from political power.18 This pioneering articulation of Christian democracy with its proposal to separate church and state horrified the papacy.19 Such liberal efforts to reconcile the aspirations of the French revolution with Catholicism were condemned by Rome.20 In the German states, where unlike France, Catholics were in some places a religious minority, and in Catholic Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom, matters played out differently. Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association was Europe’s first mass member political party. It had hundreds of thousands of members organised on a parish-​by-​parish basis. Catholic priests served as party branch organisers. O’Connell entered into pacts with the Liberal Party and, although he was a European-​educated Catholic, when it came to debates about social policy and the Poor Law he was a supporter of laissez faire liberalism and utilitarianism. To achieve Catholic emancipation, O’Connell presided over an alliance between the Irish Catholic Church and Irish liberals. His enemies were Ireland’s Protestant aristocracy, which controlled the courts and local government, who were allied, in turn, with the Conservative Party.21 German Catholics led by Baron Emmanuel Von Ketteler, who became the Catholic Bishop of Mainz in 1948, supported a similar liberal democratic programme to that of Lamennais and L’Avenir. Unlike Lamennais, Von Ketteler avoided papal censure and went on to wield considerable influence in Catholic debates about how to respond to social change resulting from industrialisation.22 The position put forward by Von Ketteler in Germany that was censured in France might be summed up by his slogan: ‘Religion has nothing to fear from freedom.’ German Catholic liberals did not suffer the fate of French Catholic liberals because the Church in Protestant-​dominated Germany was best served by a separation of church and state.23

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That situation unravelled in the aftermath of Europe’s 1848 revolutions during which the Vatican was attacked and Pope Pius IX had to be smuggled out of Rome in disguise. Under Pius IX’s long reactionary papacy (from 1856 to 1878), the Church became increasingly anti-​modernist and came into conflict with the secular governments of Germany and Italy.24 In 1864, Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned many influential Enlightenment ideas including philosophies of naturalism, which removed the idea of God from understandings of the world. In 1869, he convened the First Vatican Council, which approved (by a majority vote of cardinals) a new doctrine of papal infallibility, which alarmed governments with significant Catholic electorates. Why it did so might be illustrated by the following quotation from an anti-​modernist pamphlet entitled De la devotion au Pape: It is as impossible to be a good Christian without devotion to the Pope as without devotion to the Eucharist. If therefore we truly love the Pope, nothing will be dearer to us than the Pope’s will; and even when obedience to the Pope means sacrifices, we shall never hesitate to follow any direction whatsoever emanating from Rome. Every objection will be silenced, every reasoning will go for nothing, every hesitation will yield before this unanswerable argument: ‘God wills and commands it because the Pope wills and commands it.’25 Some Catholics had been prominent in liberal politics during the 1850s and early 1860s. However, the liberals’ advocacy of German unification at the expense of Catholic Austria and their resentments of the dogma of papal infallibility soon created a nearly insurmountable gulf between liberalism and most Catholics. Conflicts between the Church and modernism came politically to the fore in Catholic parts of Europe that most strongly experienced the industrial revolution and its attendant social problems: Belgium, France, the German-​speaking countries and parts of Italy towards the end of the nineteenth century.26 From 1871 large numbers of Catholics from Bavaria, Baden and Alsace-​Lorraine, the Rhineland, Westphalia, Posen and West Prussia became citizens of a unified Germany in which all adults had the right to vote. The new state had a population of around 15 million Catholics and 25.5 million Protestants. As in other countries, the extension of the franchise to include the industrial working classes and peasants

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undermined the political influence of liberals. Newly-​enfranchised Catholics supported Zentrum (trans. ‘the Centre’) a confessional party that was perceived by German liberals and Protestant conservatives to be more loyal to Rome than to the German state. Bismarck, who was Lutheran, feared the influence of Pius IX armed with his newly-​ minted doctrine of papal infallibility. There were disputes over the secularisation of control of education. There had between wider diplomatic conflicts with Rome which sided with the forces defeated by Bismarck in the 1866 and 1870 war between Austria and France with Germany.27 The ‘War over Culture’ or Kulturkampf which played out between around 1872 and 1886 in Germany, with similar conflicts in Italy, was one between an anti-​modernist papacy seeking to assert its influence and the liberal secular state, which the Church attacked in its Syllabus of Errors. Not for the last time in history, liberals used heavy-​handed illiberal methods against their ideological enemies. German liberals viewed the conflict between the state and the Catholic Church as a struggle for modern culture against medieval superstition and intellectual obscurantism. Kulturkampf legislation, which introduced civil marriages and secular control of education, was similar to the anti-​clerical legislation found in other countries.28 However, there was also some severe repression of Catholicism. The Prussian parliament passed laws banning religious orders which declared support for papal infallibility. Catholic bishops called on German Catholics to resist such legislation. Clerics were fined and imprisoned for refusing to pay fines. However, the political influence of Germany’s Catholic bishops increased throughout this period. And, as put by A.J.P. Taylor, insofar as the Kulturkampf was an effort to strangle Zentrum in the cradle, it backfired.29 Zentrum began as a confessional conservative party but it also became a somewhat anti-​authoritarian one. Its membership included Catholic lawyers, businesspeople, editors and academics. Its preoccupation with repealing repressive anti-​Catholic legislation in Prussia and in other states gave liberal centrists within the party a strong degree of influence.30 Part of Zentrum’s response to discrimination against Catholics, articulated by the party’s leader Ludwig Windthorst, was to argue that rights for Catholics could not be separated from those of other groups, including socialists and Jews. Windthorst became Germany’s most influential Catholic following the death of Bishop Von Ketteler in 1877.31 As put to Bismarck by Windthorst in a prominent speech that same year: ‘ “Conservative” means to conserve the given, legitimate institutions in state and church. It does not mean to arm

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a government with omnipotence, with which it can modify those institutions at will.’32 Following the truce between Bismarck and Rome, Zentrum remained a powerful block in the Reichstag. In 1887 it controlled more than a quarter of the seats. Bismarck came to depend politically on its support and that of Protestant conservatives to pass his budgets and legislation.33 From 1878, under Leo XIII, the Church’s antipathy towards Catholics who supported political liberalism softened, as long as Church interests were protected.’34 None of this meant that antipathy towards political Catholics vanished or that Catholic anti-​modernism faded away. Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism having lived and taught in Freiberg and Heidelberg in predominantly Catholic southern Germany, at a time when Catholic politicians and organisations had become confident.35 Weber’s arguments might be reasonably interpreted as offering a somewhat triumphalist account of the development of capitalism, one within which an individualism rooted intellectually in aesthetic Protestantism swept other supposedly less-​ fit-​for-​modernity ways of thinking aside. However, it is likely he felt somewhat beleaguered in a southern Germany where Catholic political influence was on the rise and where that of liberalism was in the decline. In countries with substantial Catholic minorities such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany it became possible, from the 1880s, for Catholic voters to elect Catholic politicians who were part of Catholic political parties, read Catholic newspapers, send their children to Catholic schools and universities and to participate in sports and other social activities with other Catholics.36 Clearly, there was space in the marketplace of ideas for Catholic thinking about social problems. Documents like Rerum Novarum could draw upon examples of Catholic organisations and social movements to propose measures such as Catholic trade unions and forms of social insurance that might compete with socialist answers to pressing social questions. For example, from the 1870s, Léon Harmel (1829–​1915), a Catholic paternalist equivalent of Robert Owen, influentially advocated the participation of workmen’s councils in the management of factories, a syndicat mixte of both management and labour based on the model he introduced in his own factory, as an alternative to trade unions led by workers. Harmel called for the introduction of such syndicats across the country aligned to a Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens. His cotton mill at Val-​des-​Bois near Reims in northern France was surrounded by model workers’ cottages, schools, a church and a

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convent. A visitor described Harmel’s model factory as ‘beautifully clean, airy and hygienic.’ Men and women worked apart in separate workshops. Girls and women wore a uniform comprised of a simple cotton frock onto which was pinned a medal of the enfant de Marie. Those under 17 years of age attended school as part of their working day. Like Owen’s New Lanark, Val-​des-​Bois received thousands of admiring visitors. Unlike Owen, the goal of Harmel’s paternalism was to guide the spiritual welfare of his employees and, beyond that, to return the working classes to Christ.37

Aquinas versus modernity The new Catholic social doctrine that came to be articulated in the papal encyclicals of Leo XIII owed its main intellectual debt to Thomas Aquinas (1225–​74) who had Christianised the thought of Aristotle on human nature, natural law and on the role of the state.38 The writings of Aristotle found their way to Europe after these were translated from Arabic during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, having been mostly unknown within Christendom before then. This rediscovery galvanised the wave of medieval Christian philosophy led by Aquinas. Aristotelean natural law emphasised the power of human reason to make sense of the world. Aquinas grafted this emphasis onto Christian theology but insisted upon the subordination of reason to faith.39 Faith became the lens through which reason was exercised. Reason, so understood, provided the Church with a synthetic mechanism for engaging with social change and a theological way forward in its engagements with secular knowledge. Aquinas depicted human nature as a set of dispositional properties or inclinations that might be understood as the basic requirements or essence of human life. These included dispositions to stay alive, seek nutrition or care for offspring that were shared with other living creatures. He took from Aristotle an emphasis on the social nature of humankind and on the necessity of mutual cooperation so that a good and sufficient life could be realised for everyone. Humans were uniquely disposed towards reason, rational curiosity and to live together in social communities.40 They used their reason to devise social and political institutions and the societies these constituted were also in accordance with natural law. The authority of these institutions was underwritten by the will of God.41 The prescriptions set out within Rerum Novarum, which were justified in terms of natural law, echoed debates and writings that had intensified from the 1830s among Catholic economists, academics and

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politicians about how best to address the unravelling of pre-​industrial systems of communal solidarity. What these Catholic alternatives to liberalism and socialism had in common was some degree of focus on intermediate institutions and associations that could ameliorate the effects of laissez faire on workers.42 The revival of Thomism was pioneered during the 1850s in Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit periodical in which a series of articles by the Jesuit Thomist philosopher Matteo Liberatore had appeared. Liberatore was commissioned to write the first draft of Rerum Norvarum.43 Catholic intellectuals blamed the French revolution and liberalism for eradicating earlier institutions that offered protection from pauperism. Various proposals fell into two groups. Voluntary vocational associations which might be regulated or supported, but not overtly interfered with by the state, were endorsed in Rerum Novarum. These included trade unions, workers cooperatives, mutual aid societies which provided sickness or unemployment insurance and associations of employers and employees aimed at securing mediation and avoiding industrial conflict. Corporatist systems of representation and economic management, as an alternative to representative democracy and capitalism, also had their champions. Léon Harmel, who organised several working men’s pilgrimages to Rome between 1885 and 1891 when Rerum Novarum was published, may have had some influence on the encyclical.44 Anticipating Rerum Novarum he argued that the interests of capital and labour, rightly understood, were one and the same.45 Germany’s Bishop Von Ketteler wrote a number of pamphlets which addressed Church responses to liberalism and socialism, including Liberty, Authority and the Church (1862) and The Labour Question and Christianity (1864).46 Before the publication of Rerum Novarum, Von Ketteler was the Church’s most influential advocate for social Catholicism.47 Leo XIII echoed the language of Marxism in his attempt to appeal to a Catholic working class attracted to socialist ideals. Rerum Novarum opened with a striking acknowledgement of inequalities perpetrated by capitalism and a frank acknowledgement of the appeal of socialism while retaining a focus on the perennial anxieties of conservatives about moral decline: The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the

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masses; the increased self-​reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy.48 It urged that a remedy quickly be found for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class. It blamed this injustice on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few ‘so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself ’ and on the abolition of ancient workingman’s guilds, without these being replaced by other protective organisations.49 Rerum Novarum declared that the poor had a duty and a natural right to seek decent working conditions and to obtain wages that were sufficient in order to live.50 However, it was the duty of workers to faithfully undertake work which had been freely and equitably agreed upon and ‘to have nothing to do with men of evil principles,’ socialists that is, ‘who work upon the people with artful promises of great results, and excite foolish hopes which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss.’ Wealthy owners and employers had a duty ‘not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen’ nor ‘misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain.’ Rulers had a duty to ensure distribute justice between the different social classes.51 The rights of ‘the poor and badly off’ warranted especial consideration. These needed to be protected from the rich: The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-​earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government.52 Rerum Novarum disapproved of industrial conflict and it proposed, as an alternative, a paternalist system which would impose fair decisions. It stated that legislation was needed to ‘save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-​making.’ It was ‘neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor.’ Work conditions and the length of the working day should be regulated, with shorter working hours for more physically arduous jobs such as coal mining. Children should not be placed in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds

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were sufficiently developed. The encyclical addressed ways in which workers could protect their natural rights. The ‘most important’ of these was through the establishment of workingman’s unions modelled on the medieval guild system: History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers’ guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age –​an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually in existence not a few associations of this nature, consisting either of workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together, but it were greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous and more efficient.53 The stated preference was for corporatist organisations comprised of both workers and employers in particular industries. A Catholic trade union movement grew rapidly from the end of the nineteenth century and spread rapidly through France, Germany Italy, Belgium, Holland, Germany and other countries. In Germany, by 1903 one Catholic social movement founded by Windthorst, the Volksverein, had 300,000 members including some 10,000 who were elected local government officials. That year it circulated over 13 million copies of its publications and sponsored some 1,400 public meetings.54 In 1919 the Confederation lnternationales des Syndicats Chrétiens was formed with headquarters at Utrecht. In the aftermath of the 1914–​18 war, some two million Catholic workers were affiliated with Christian trade unions.55 Rerum Novarum argued against attempts by socialists to do away with private property, and to contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies. Doing so would deprive the individual worker of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life. It would run contrary to natural law insofar as the instinct of self-​preservation was natural in human beings as it was in the animal kingdom while humans, unlike other animals, were endowed with reason. This was not an argument for the status quo. Property needed

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to become more equally divided in order to bridge the chasm between the richer and poorer classes.56 The encyclical articulated an understanding of human nature and of poverty that differed fundamentally from laissez faire perspectives that had coalesced around the Speenhamland system at the beginning of the nineteenth century in southern England. There was no emphasis on the improvidence of the poor in Rerum Novarum, and no advocacy of the proposition, integral to the arguments made by Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in support of laissez faire, that the private self-​interested acts of individuals –​rooted in vice, as Mandeville put it –​spontaneously worked to bring about the greater good. Instead, there was strong emphasis upon reciprocal duties of ‘proletarians’ and ‘wealthy owners.’57 Where Mandeville might consider the miseries of the poor to have been ordained by Providence, social Catholicism viewed these as due to a breach of the natural law. Liberal Poor Law reformers –​those mostly and utterly hostile to any kind of poor relief –​argued that the greater good would be served by forcing the rural poor to move from their districts. Rerum Novarum, against this, emphasised the need to protect rural social cohesion. For instance, it declared that men always work harder and more readily when they work on land that belongs to them and that no one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own afforded him the means of living a decent and happy life.58 Rerum Novarum did not condone the pursuit of individual profit to the detriment of the community. Rather than claim, as did Adam Smith, that God, the author of nature or an invisible hand worked, if left unencumbered by the state, to achieve the greatest good, social Catholicism argued that it was the responsibility of government to coordinate the economy and ensure an adequate level of distributive justice. The concept of distributive justice –​providing for members of society according to their needs –​as understood by social Catholicism, translated into a proposition that would have appalled Thomas Malthus. A man’s wage should be a family wage that is sufficient to support him and all his dependents. Aquinas had been more optimistic than Augustine or Calvin about humanity’s capacity for reason to achieve a semblance of divinely intended order in the material world.59 Aquinas viewed the state as natural, necessary and good. Its purpose was to direct people to the common good and their own good. Central to his Aristotelian conception of natural law was optimism about the capacity of human reason to inform moral choices.60 This suggested a very different perspective than that offered by Augustine and Calvin who endorsed the need for a coercive state to hold sinful humans in check.

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Yet there was huge emphasis on keeping the faithful from temptation by removing occasions of sin bought about by the breakdown of social cohesion, pressures on family or challenges to the authority of the Church.61 Rather than emphasise the role of individual conscience, autonomy and responsibility in such matters, Rerum Novarum proposed systems of government that mirrored the Church’s own paternalistic and authoritarian watch over its flock.

Catholic utopias In his 1911 novel The Dawn of All, Robert Hugh Benson, an English priest who converted to Catholicism (his father had been the Archbishop of Canterbury), imagined a future where ‘Catholicism had floated to final victory in the history of mankind.’62 The novel was set in 1973 when the political system advocated by early twentieth-​ century Catholic corporatists had become established around the world. The Dawn of All recounts the tale of a priest who during his life had witnessed the collapse of religion. However, he regains consciousness in a London hospital in an alternative 1973 England that is devoutly Catholic. He gets to tour by airship a futuristic Europe where the lay population is organised along vocational lines, where the Catholic Church has become the established religion in most countries and where democratic liberalism has been abandoned for a return to monarchies that accept the spiritual authority of the Church and its control over education. In these societies, members of the butcher’s guild proudly wear blue uniforms to distinguish themselves from other occupations who wear different colour clothing. Senior members of each guild wear differently-​cut uniforms. Their wives, as a rule, wear the colour of the head of their family. In Benson’s Catholic corporatist utopia unrepentant socialists are exiled to the United States. London police officers salute priests on the street and curfew laws maintain an ‘extraordinary vigilance over morals.’ The protagonist meets a scientist priest who is to be executed for the heresy of arguing that some events declared by Church doctrine to be supernatural miracles have scientific explanation. He accepts his fate on the grounds that every society has the right to suppress opinions which are directly subversive to the foundations on which it stands. Not every aspect of this future could have been extrapolated from Rerum Novarum. The encyclical contained some strong endorsements of such corporatism but did not flesh these out. Specifically, it referred approvingly to efforts to create ‘a special system of syndicates and corporations representing various vocational calling.’63 It advocated

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turning such vocational syndicates into legal entities with monopoly privileges; each vocation would be represented by its own vertically integrated organisation, which would represent the manufacturers and workers within particular areas of industry. Strikes and lockouts were to be forbidden; within such syndicates the different social classes would work together and ‘socialist organisations and their activities’ would be ‘repressed.’64 However, the encyclical unleashed a flood of writing by clergy and Catholic intellectuals which examined how the alterative Rerum Novarum envisaged to liberalism and socialism might be realised. This includes Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912), a book whose influence went beyond that of the system of distributive justice it proposed.65 Like Friedrich Hayek’s later The Road to Serfdom (1944), its title found its way into a multitude of attacks on socialism by writers who may not have read the book. Belloc argued that under the modern state the majority of families and individuals existed in a slave-​like condition of servitude. They had been forced to become un-​propertied wage earners while the powers of the state were used to protect a capitalist property-​owning elite. As an antidote, Belloc proposed a system modelled on an idealisation of the Middle Ages, which bound men from the same families, village and guild to one another and where cooperatives and a landowning peasantry combined to prevent the growth of an exploited proletariat on one hand and capitalist monopolies on the other. Belloc’s distributive state would put the means of production into the hands of as large a proportion of the population as possible. He proposed this as an alternative to socialism, which would put this into the hands of none but vest control in the state.66 Distributivism made very little practical headway, but in Britain, mostly, it sparked considerable debate among Catholic intellectuals and became a mainstay of social Catholic ideology during the 1920s and 1930s.67 And like the writings of Robert Owen, it inspired some unsuccessful efforts to establish utopian model communities.68 Rerum Novarum begat a sequel Quadragesimo Anno (trans. ‘Forty Years After’), which fleshed out some of its themes in more explicit and prescriptive terms. The 1931 encyclical, which appeared as democracy was disappearing from much of continental Europe, strongly advocated corporate political structures in which professions and trades would be vertically integrated as an alternative to representative democracy. By then Mussolini’s fascist state had been established for almost a decade. Mussolini and the Church reached an accord in 1929 even though some Catholic politicians had been murdered by fascist death squads. Under the terms of the Lateran treaty, Mussolini recognised

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the independence of the Vatican State and established Catholicism as the state religion, and gave the Church control over education. In return, the Church legitimised Mussolini who reciprocated with special status for the Church. Fascism, ‘searching for philosophical depth,’ incorporated Catholic social teachings and put into actual practice some ideas outlined in Rerum Novarum. Mussolini acceded to Church demands that Catholic teaching, rather than fascist ideas be used to guide corporatist institutions. Mussolini reinvented himself from fierce anti-​Catholic into an apparently loyal ‘son of the Church.’69 Quadragesimo Anno gave Mussolini’s corporatist state a ringing endorsement. The Italian state, it declared, had inaugurated a ‘special system of syndicates and corporations of the various callings’ that offered a model for Christian government. The encyclical advocated a system of associations, or corporations, composed of employer and employee delegates from the same industry or profession.70 The role of the state was to coordinate these in matters of common interest. The encyclical emphasised the ‘obvious advantages’ of Italian fascism: the various classes worked together peacefully; socialist organisations and their activities were repressed; strikes and lock-​outs were forbidden and if the parties could not settle their disputes, the state would intervene.71 However, Quadragesimo Anno also worried that the Italian state had gone too far in interfering with private property ownership and Catholic community organisations.72 The encyclical was published in 1931 in the midst of a crackdown on Azione Cattolica (trans. ‘Catholic Action’), the mass movement established by the papacy to advance social Catholicism.73 Behind the scenes, there was an ongoing power struggle between the Church and the fascist state and between Catholicism and secular fascist ideology; the latter was mostly interested in the legitimacy it might gain from the former and less interested in the spiritual and pastoral welfare of the Italian people. An authoritarian Catholic corporatist system emerged in Portugal following a military coup in May 1926. This regime was led by António de Olivera Salazar, a religiously devout economics professor who was appointed minister of finance from 1928. In this role he became the most powerful government minister and in 1932 he became premier. He ruled Portugal until 1968. Salazar’s early successes in stabilising the Portuguese economy during the great depression and following an earlier period of chaotic democratic government made him seem indispensable.74 Portugal’s democratic First Republic (1910–​26) had been spectacularly unstable, with 45 different governments during the 16 years it lasted.75 Salazar was, in essence, the civilian chief executive

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of a military dictatorship in which the army was willing to be the silent partner.76 However, he was a devout and austere Catholic who had spent eight years in a seminary and remained close to senior clergy throughout his life. The Portuguese equivalent of Italy’s Azione Cattolica, the Centro Católico was a mostly rural movement which was preoccupied by the ‘the destruction of local community life.’ It was inspired intellectually by claims that Portugal had been devastated by ‘imported nineteenth-​ century liberalism.’ Salazar’s political career began as a leader of this movement.77 The influence of church hierarchy and of the Centro Católico stymied the development of a specifically Portuguese fascist ideology. Around 1932, when Salazar came to power, the Church publicly condemned fascism as ‘pagan and agnostic nationalism.’ However, it ‘supported the consolidation of authoritarian rule, and was content to see the regime adopt Catholic principles in its activities, ideology and symbolism.’ Salazar supported the systematic Catholicisation of education and state organisations.’78 In a book published in English as Doctrine and Action (1939), he described as one of the greatest fallacies of the nineteenth century the belief that British parliamentarianism and democracy could be adapted to every European country.79 Salazar insisted on the establishment of an authoritarian state but condemned totalitarianism as a doctrine of ‘pagan Caesarism.’80 Within the Estado Novo (trans. ‘new state’) established by Salazar, industrialists accepted extensive state regulation in return for restricted competition and retaining private ownership. Portugal’s 1933 constitution granted executive power to the prime minister, who was in effect a dictator. There were no mixed associations of workers’ unions and employers in the Corporate Chamber until 1956. Notwithstanding the prevailing corporatist ideology, the Corporate Chamber, or upper house, comprised of representatives of the various professions, only had advisory powers. Members of the Chamber were mostly appointed by the government. Salazar wielded dictatorial power through a council of government ministers all appointed by him.81 For all that, the corporatist aspects of Salazar’s regime reflected the prescriptions of Rerum Novarum and other encyclicals Portugal was, according to one analysis, ‘an archetypical Catholic right-​wing dictatorship with certain affinities with fascism.’ In theory, Portugal was a corporate state but the advisory ‘corporate chamber of puppets’ was powerless. In practice, Salazar presided over ‘an authoritarian version of capitalism.’82

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The limits of corporatism Corporatism was not the only approach to social policy commended by Rerum Novarum. The encyclical also advocated what came to be called the principle of subsidiarity, which came to the fore as the guiding principle of social Catholicism once support for corporatism withered in Europe outside of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal. This held that the state should not usurp the relationship between Catholic institutions and the family. These included Catholic schools, hospitals and welfare services. The collectivisation of such services by the state was to be opposed not least because such institutions provided a means of transferring the faith from one generation to the next. They were also infrastructures that were owned and controlled by the Church. The essence of the principle of subsidiarity was that a community of a higher order (meaning the state) should not interfere unnecessarily in the internal workings of a lower order community (such as the family or the religious voluntary sector). As put in Rerum Novarum, the contention, that the civil government should ‘intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household’ was ‘a great and pernicious error.’ If, somehow, the family found itself in great distress, ‘without any prospect of extricating itself ’, it was right that this extreme need be met by public aid. Higher-​level institutions should only step in if lower level ones could not manage. If the family could not manage, there was a role for the voluntary sector. If the voluntary sector could not manage, there was a role for the state.83 Rerum Novarum emphasised the autonomy of the family and civil society from the state in accordance with natural law: A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and it’s just liberty.84 Rerum Novarum promoted the idea of family rights, with the father at the head of the family, as distinct from individual rights: Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. The child belongs to the father, and is, as it were,

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the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.” The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.85 Social Catholicism, as such, rejected the approach to education favoured by followers of Rousseau such as Robert Owen, who viewed human nature as malleable and the child as a blank slate to be moulded to fit the prevailing social order. Subsidiarity had considerable influence in societies where corporatism gained little traction. It was the basis upon which the Church defended Catholic-​minority societies or ones dominated by liberalism or socialism. One of the sources for this chapter was The Framework of the Christian State (1932), a lengthy history of and case for social Catholicism by Edward Cahill, an Irish Jesuit who had direct input into the writing of Ireland’s 1937 constitution. This was invited by Eamon de Valera, the leader of Fianna Fáil (trans. ‘Soldiers of Destiny’), the party which won the 1932 election.86 Although Cahill’s book appeared immediately after the publication of Quadragesimo Anno, its 701 pages made just a few passing mentions of corporatism.87 Likewise, there was very little emphasis on corporatism in Ireland’s 1937 constitution even if it was strongly influenced by other aspects of Catholic thought. Article 44.2 stated that the state recognised the special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens. Article 42 enshrined the subsidiarity rights of the family; it guaranteed the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, for the education of their children, Article 44.4 protected the subsidiarity of Catholic and other religious schools. Article 45, which set out general principles governing social policy closely echoed the text of Rerum Novarum when it came to understandings of the rights of citizens to an adequate livelihood and in declaring that economic competition and the private ownership of property should not be allowed to develop to the detriment of the common good.88 Ireland featured in Benson’s novel. By 1973 it had become a gigantic monastic resort where Catholics from around the world travelled by airship for religious retreats. The closest the real Ireland came to

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introducing the kind of authoritarian corporatist system favoured by Benson was in 1933 when a fascist-​style movement, led by General Eoin Duffy, appeared as a new force in Irish politics.89 Within a few years this movement had collapsed. Duffy was charismatic but politically inept. The Blueshirts borrowed some rhetoric from Italian fascism and copied the uniforms of Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Duffy advocated replacing Irish democracy with a corporatist system, but his championing of this was at best superficial.90 The Blueshirts were Catholic conservatives but so was deValera’s Fianna Fáil. In 1932 deValera had presided over a Eucharistic Congress in Dublin that drew more than one million Irish worshippers. At the time, the population of the Irish Free State was less than three million. The Church needed no help from authoritarian corporatists because it had long since achieved considerable influence in Irish society including ownership and control of the school system and hospital system. Ireland was, in a sense, Pius IX’s greatest victory. His protégé Cardinal Paul Cullen arrived to take command of the Church in Ireland in 1850, almost two decades after Catholic emancipation. Cullen imposed a strict orthodoxy to Rome, which replaced religious folkways and attachments to nationalist politics that had flourished when Catholicism had been repressed.91 The Irish state was the only one in Europe that gained independence after the First World War to remain fully democratic. Catholicism mostly coexisted without conflict with economic liberalism within social policy. The state inherited a pre-​independence Poor Law system and a social insurance from the United Kingdom. The church had no problem with the minimalist social security provided by the state. Church and state mostly kept to their own domains within Ireland’s mixed economy of welfare. In essence, the Church in Ireland had achieved the kind of dominance that worried liberals in nineteenth-​century Germany and elsewhere, and remained anathema for twentieth-​century liberals. In American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) Paul Blanshard claimed that Catholic doctrine was incompatible with American democracy using arguments that found expression during the Kulturkampf.92 Blanshard’s The Irish and Catholic Power (1954) applied this analysis to an Ireland still led by de Valera.93 He concluded that while political democracy in Ireland was genuine an unofficial church-​state alliance permitted ecclesiastical dictatorship and political democracy to live side by side without any sense of incongruity. The Church’s ideal polity, he had argued in his book on Catholic power in America, was no longer a corporatist state. It was for something like the Republic of Ireland, a Catholic society

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in which the Church had considerable influence upon the state and where the state established through constitution and laws a public morality that accorded with Catholic teaching. In Studies in Political Morality (1962) Jeremiah Newman –​then a Professor of Sociology at Maynooth, later the Bishop of Limerick –​ essentially agreed with Blanchard’s analysis, though he took issue with Blanshard’s disparaging tone.94 So effective, Newman argued, was anti-​ Catholic propaganda in the United States that Senator John F. Kennedy gave assurances that, in the event of his becoming President of the United States, there was no question that he would, as a Catholic, undermine the system of separation between church and state or that he would obey the pope’s instructions in political life. But even in states where Catholics were in the minority, the Church, Newman argued, should never surrender this ideal in theoretical discussions on church-​state relations. Where Catholics were in the majority, special recognition of the Church was legitimate in order to secure their interests. And in the Irish case, where the Church enjoyed a special position, there had, Newman insisted, to be limits to religious tolerance. The rulers in a state comprised almost entirely of Catholics had a duty to influence legislation in accordance with Catholic teaching. Blanshard described the status of Catholicism in the Republic of Ireland as ‘triumphantly unique.’ Ireland was the only Roman Catholic country in the English-​speaking world. In practice it was the world’s most devoutly Catholic country, so confident in its exalted mission in modern society that it sent out to non-​Catholic countries, including Great Britain and the United States, more than three fourths of all its young priests. Ireland’s particular church-​state relations constituted a paradox: Although the nation’s schools, libraries, newspapers and publishing firms are almost completely dominated by the Catholic outlook, and although that outlook is imposed by a hierarchy chosen in Rome, the majority of Irish people do not resent this domination. They accept it as an organic and established part of Irish life. They permit ecclesiastical dictatorship and political democracy to live side by side without any sense of incongruity. Although they cherish their official political freedom with fierce jealousy, they are more loyal to Rome than the people of any other nation, far more devoted and obedient than the natives of the Vatican’s home country.95

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A corporatist regime was hardly necessary in a still-​predominantly rural society without a large urban working class, where the Church was directly and indirectly the state’s largest employer. Blanshard reckoned that almost one third of professional people in Ireland were in the direct service of the Church insofar as they worked for the 20,000 or so priests, nuns and brothers that ran the schools, universities, hospitals and some other institutions. However, during the second half of the twentieth century the Church’s influence began to slowly unravel for the very reasons feared by generations of Catholic anti-​modernists. Irish society became more urban and less religious as the old gemeinschaft was replaced by more individualistic ways of life. The ability of the Church, and its apparent stranglehold over public morality, combined with censorship, isolationist nationalism and economic protectionism, to ‘prevent the future,’ as a prominent political scientist put it, declined over time.96

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The case for social democracy Social democrat political parties emerged during the late nineteenth century in a number of European countries including Germany, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries as well as in the Low Countries. Except in Germany, these broke with Marxism or had developed with very little meaningful Marxist influence to begin with. Some could trace their institutional and ideological roots to earlier utopian movements, cooperatives and trade unions. Some such parties were broad churches that contained Christian socialists as well as Marxist fringes. Some emphasised a nationalist case for social democracy as a means of promoting social cohesion. Their defining characteristic, a commitment to securing ongoing socialist reform through democratic means, mirrored that of Christian Democrats who differed from some earlier confessional parties by also being committed to parliamentary democracy. Political parties that called themselves social democrats often differed considerably beyond a shared rejection of an insurrectionary route to power.1 However, as remains often the case within democratic Left parties, different understandings of socialism and approaches to achieving change competed with one another. In a 1925 lecture, Ernst Wigforss (1881–​1977), a prominent member of Sweden’s Social Democratic Worker Party, described his party’s aspirations for socialism as working to achieve ‘a provisional utopia.’ He argued that socialists should not operate with fixed blueprints and that one’s personal life and politics unfolded as a continuing series of experiments. A sensible person or political movement approached life not with dogmas but with working hypotheses. He argued that socialism must be empirical; it must be experimental; it must evaluate the success of its reforms against the tests of experience; it must allow for miscalculation and failure in its efforts to achieve reform. The impossibility of seeing all the consequences of new measures required a willingness to address unexpected consequences. A provisional utopia, as such, was a tentative sketch of a desirable future society that offered a guide to political action but would need to be revised in accordance with future experience.2 According to Wigforss, the value of setting out a provisional vision of the socialist future was threefold: it guided

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the work of social reconstruction by translating abstract values into concrete institutional recommendations; it facilitated rational political debate about how to make this work; and it served to inspire the work of social transformation by enlisting the moral energy of citizens.3 And these three points might serve as an adroit summary, from the perspective of Wigforss’s future self, of what came to pass. Notwithstanding such claims, the development of social democracy in Sweden owed much to the expression of utopian ideas about re-​ engineering Swedish society. After 1932, when the Social Democrats began an unbroken period of 44 years in power, its programme came to be influenced by radical modernist social engineers (see Chapter 7) including Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Social democrat utopianism came wrapped in the reassuring rhetoric of Folkhemmet, which translates loosely into English as ‘the People’s Home.’ Sweden’s socialist utopia was not presented as a radical futuristic upending of the status quo but as in keeping with traditional communalism. In Sweden the Social Democratic Party won election after election in part because it successfully integrated national identity into its programme. In essence, social democracy was successfully presented as a ‘one nation’ unifying political philosophy. The term Folkhemmet was popularised by Per Albin Hansson who became leader of the Social Democratic Party in 1928 and went on be Prime Minister from 1932 to 1946. From its inception, the Party spoke the language of nationalism. The first social democratic newspaper was called Folkviljan (the ‘people’s will’) and the party’s first paper was titled the ‘people’s paper’ (Folkbladet).4 The concept of Folkhemmet was a form of national socialism before that term became associated with Nazism. It was a translation of the German term Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘the people’s community.’ Per Albin appropriated it and turned into a left-​wing slogan.5 In doing so, he performed the same rhetorical slight-​of-​hand as many successful twentieth-​century nationalist leaders who evoked tradition in order to weave a modern sense of national mass identity. These, as Ernest Gellner explained, mobilised the language of Gemeinschaft in the pursuit of Gesellschaft. Nationalist movements championed folk culture, but what they in fact created was a codified version of this expressed through literacy and mediated through mass education.6 In effect, both cultural and economic forms of nation building as expressions of modernity were often intertwined.7 Even where mass cultures evoked the ideals of traditional society, these did so in distinctly modern ways.8 Leaders like Hansson were forever evoking ideals of community and tradition while engaging in decidedly modern forms of identity formation.

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From the 1920s to the 1950s, Wigforss restated his concept of a provisional utopia a number of times. He argued repeatedly that socialists should not operate with fixed blueprints. His case against rigid socialist idealism resembled considerably that of Karl Popper set out in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and elsewhere. In particular, Wigforss appeared to accept the premise of Popper’s concept of negative utilitarianism, that rather than design a utopia that would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the aim should be to minimise human suffering.9 Popper argued that the greatest happiness principle of the utilitarians, as reworked by the British Fabians and other socialists, could easily be used to justify despotism. The socialist version, which justified constraints on individual liberty for the sake of the greatest good, was, according to Popper, open to abuse. Yet Wigforss argued that his approach had differed fundamentally from the kinds of idealist utopianism criticised by Popper because it depended on many democratic decisions taken over an extended period.10 In Om provisoriska utopier (1958), Wigforss discussed and cited a passage from Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism (1957), which observed that democratic decisions to achieve piecemeal reform could lead to significant change in the composition and class structure of a society.11 Provisional utopianism, as a political methodology aimed at achieving socialism in incremental steps, involved both a degree of social engineering and mobilising future-​orientated popular support for further stages of step-​by-​step socialism. In Sweden this played out pretty much as Wigforss had envisaged in 1925 or perhaps earlier when the Gothenburg Programme was put together. Wigforss argued that step-​ by-​step reform depended upon ongoing popular support and implied that support for incremental change depended on the ability of socialist leaders and technocratic elites to embed socialist communitarian values and beliefs within Swedish society: The new socialist society will require a new moral basis. One-​sided reliance on self-​interest will have to yield to a more rounded conception of human nature, one that allows the pursuit of longer-​term objectives, that recognizes the validity of others’ claims, that accepts democratic decisions even when they run counter to one’s immediate personal interests, and that lends itself to cooperation.12 Wigforss and the other architects of Swedish social democracy were in a unique position compared to socialist politicians and intellectuals in

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other democratic countries. From 1932, the Social Democrats enjoyed more than four uninterrupted decades in government. Wigforss was a senior government minister for most of this period and had also been a member of three earlier coalition governments led by the Social Democratic Party. A somewhat similar gradualist socialist project envisaged in somewhat similar terms by Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee in Britain played out differently. At the beginning of the twentieth century, British politics was dominated by the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. Democratic socialism encountered far greater ongoing ideological competition than in Sweden. Simply put, any socialist utopianism had to compete with other deeply embedded ideas about what constituted the good society. Support for gradual step-​by-​step socialist reform could not be counted on. It took the Second World War to give the British welfare state its democratic mandate. However, the Conservative Party held power for much of the subsequent post-​war era and democratic socialism lost its forward momentum.

Democratic roads to socialism The split from Marxism played out most prominently in the development of the German Social Democratic Party under the intellectual influence of Ernst Bernstein (1850–​1932). The Social Democrats won close to half a million votes in the 1877 Reichstag elections but the party was suppressed by Bismarck. Bernstein fled from Germany to Zurich and relocated to London in 1887. In 1890, following an election, the still-​ suppressed Social Democrats, which still supported Marxist orthodoxy as defined by Friedrich Engels, obtained almost a million and a half votes. Bernstein remained in London until 1901 when the arrest warrant against him was lifted. After Engels died in 1895 another German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, took on his mantle as the leading voice of Marxist historical materialist orthodoxy with its insistence that capitalism would collapse under its own inherent contradictions and that there would be a transition from capitalism to socialism in a single stroke.13 In 1899 in Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialimus und die Aufgaben de Sozialdemokratie (‘The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy’) Bernstein made the case for evolutionary socialism to fellow Marxists.14 Prior to the publication of this seminal case for democratic and non-​revolutionary socialism, he set out similar arguments in a speech to the Fabian Society in January 1897.15 Bernstein’s Fabian speech began with and then challenged the observation that to the average Englishman Karl Marx was understood

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to be ‘an ultra-​revolutionary state-​socialist, the advocate of violent overthrow of all constituted order in government.’ This ignored the volume and complexity of Marx’s writings and the shifts that took place over time in response to changing social circumstances.16 The core of Marx’s social theory, Bernstein explained, was that the ultimate forces or causes which determined the shape of society and the evolution of social values were of an economic nature: they are to be found in the changes of the modes of production of the necessaries of life. To a given mode of production and exchange of the necessaries of life, correspond certain forms of social institutions and moral conceptions, and they will prevail as long as the former continues to exist, though not always in their purity or in absolute sway, as they have to contend with remainders of former institutions and the germs of a slowly evolving new mode of life, factors which call forth a certain variety such as everywhere we observe in nature. Society evolved, as Marx would have it, in accordance with objective principles, but the nature of social evolution was complex and could not be altered by oversimplified understandings of the complexities influencing social change. Bernstein argued, drawing on Marx’s understanding of historical materialism, that capitalism could not be defeated by a political revolution in isolation if the economic and social prerequisites for this form of socialism had not become established. For this reason, ‘progressive movements, upheld by the most energetic men’ had failed in 1848 and subsequently ‘for no other reason than because they anticipated a state of social evolution which had not yet set in.’ The other factor, which according to Bernstein rendered revolutions unnecessary, was that significant reforms had ameliorated the worst features of laissez faire liberalism and that democratisation offered future opportunities for ongoing concrete social reform. English socialists, he argued, had been indifferent to the extension of voting rights, dismissing this as ‘mere radicalism.’ However, the right to vote gave the working classes a new and effective weapon. Their votes, or just the threat that these would be withdrawn, compelled middleclass legislators to champion their concerns: To-​day the member of Parliament plays for an audience, the majority of which in most cases are workers, and he plays accordingly. There are very few of them who

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have not taken up at least one question of real or fancied interest to the workers as their speciality, from the legal eight hour day to ‘England for the English.’ Any question which a large section of the workers have at heart is sure to find a great number of advocates in the ranks of the middle-​class legislators. All this gives the class-​struggle another form. It works to-​day more as a potential than as an active force, more by the knowledge of what it might be than by actual manifestation.17 The class struggle, Bernstein declared, was ‘no less a reality because it has taken the shape of continuous barter and compromise.’ Marx, he argued, might correctly be described as a revolutionary evolutionist. But, unlike many of his supporters, he was not a revolutionary romantic. To back up this assertion, Bernstein quoted Marx from a September 1850 speech to fellow Communists, which warned against revolution for its own sake: Whilst we tell the workers, you must run through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and struggles, not only for changing the conditions, but for altering yourselves and for rendering yourselves capable of political supremacy, you, on the contrary declare: ‘We must at once capture power, or we may go and lay down to sleep.’ Whilst we explain, especially to the German workmen, how undeveloped the proletariat is in Germany, you flatter in the coarsest way the national sentiment and the sectional prejudice of the German handicraftsmen –​a process which, true, is more popular. Just as the Democrats have made the word people, so you have made the word proletariat a fetish. Just like the Democrats, you substitute the revolutionary phrase for the revolutionary evolution.18 Bernstein proposed social democracy as a viable road to socialism. This, as understood by Bernstein and later by its most successful champions in Sweden, could not be achieved solely by class struggle, meaning solely with the support of the industrial working classes. It required a wider buy-​in that could only be accomplished through alliances with other movements seeking social reform. It could not be achieved without politics, meaning democratic politics that sought to appeal to volk and nation.

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Bernstein argued that society was too complex to change by implementing socialist theory and that a more pragmatic and necessarily piecemeal approach was needed: To study the given economic conditions of society, to closely follow their march, to ascertain what to do –​not from an imaginary perfect Socialist world, but from the very imperfect world we live in and its actual requirements –​is therefore the task of the disciples of Marx. People may repeat in eloquent terms the general doctrines of the class war, and speak again and again of the social revolution and the socialisation of all the means of production, exchange, and distribution –​they will still be poor Marxists if they refuse to acknowledge changes in the economical evolution which contradict former assumptions, and decline to act accordingly.19 From Marx’s writings and speeches Bernstein selected examples of support for various elements of a social democratic programme. He argued that Marx had shared the general preference of nearly all early socialists for cooperative production, as distinct from mere redistribution of wealth, that Marx had strongly supported the development of trade unions and that Marx had been emphatic that the role of the nature of the state was something that changed over time. In the early writings of Marx, he identified a champion of gradualism who was sceptical ‘of the realisation of a socialist society from one great cataclysm.’ Bernstein concluded his explanation of social democracy to the Fabian Society with an argument that this could make common cause with other reformist movements to achieve its goals: We are all social reformers to-​day: some in order to fortify present society, others in order to prepare the way for an easy and organic growth of a new cooperative society, based on common ownership of land and the means of production. And even amongst reformers in the latter sense some will prefer a more cautious policy, others a more impulsive action. But intentions alone do not decide the course of development, and in a given moment the impulsive reformer may have to choose between destroying the chance of a real step in advance, and thereby delaying the whole movement, or, by supporting people whose

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ways generally are not his, help the carrying out of such progressive measures. However strong Marx’s sympathies were with the impulsive reformer, where an important step in the direction of lifting the social position of the workers was in question he would certainly not have hesitated to part ways with him if he refused to lend a hand.20 The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, was named after Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman general who defeated the Carthaginians. Fabius’s preferred tactic was to harass his enemies and to avoid pitched battles. Like Bernstein, the Fabians were socialists who advocated piecemeal and pragmatic reform. The Society was also an intellectual movement aimed at changing the climate of opinion within the wider society. Members were required to sign up to the goal of reorganising society by vesting ownership of land and industrial capital in the community for the general benefit. The initial group of 40 or so members was led by Sidney Webb and included George Bernard Shaw. The first Fabian pamphlet Why Are the Many Poor? (1884) sold around 100,000 copies.21 This appeared as part of a wave of influential literature by Anglican Protestants, Quaker Christians and liberal reformers, as well as socialists. These books included A Night in the Workhouse (1866) by James Greenwood who was a pioneering investigative journalist, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) by William Booth who was the founder of the Salvation Army, George Sims’s How the Poor Live (1883) and Denis Hird’s Jesus the Socialist (1908). Sims and Hird were members of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s earliest socialist political party. It was inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels but was not sanctioned by either. Its membership included Marx’s daughter Elanor and the hugely influential artist William Morris who wrote News from Nowhere (1890), a bestselling novel which imagined a future socialist utopian England in which the cities and slums had been demolished and everybody lived in bucolic pastoral harmony. The most prominent studies of poverty included Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889), a pioneering social scientific study of power which estimated that almost a third of the population were living in poverty., It was written with the assistance of Beatrix Potter who subsequently married Sidney Webb and became a prominent Fabian.22 Another notable contribution to such social research was Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), by Seebohm Rowntree, a member of a Quaker chocolate manufacturing family.23 This literature offered a devastating critique of Victorian moral certainties and laissez faire and it documented

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problems that appeared to be insoluble through individual prudence and Christian charity. At that time, philanthropy and local government, and especially the latter, played a more prominent role in addressing social problems than did central government. The social services and infrastructure of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, which the Fabians sought to expand, had developed out of a patchwork of Poor Law provision, municipal provision and philanthropy. Sewerage and sanitation, street lighting, police forces, hospitals and schools were administered and funded through local government. Poverty was still addressed through the Poor Law; the workhouse remained, as it had been envisaged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a place to be feared. The early efforts of the Fabians therefore, were not focused on creating a collectivised welfare state but in expanding the patchwork of services run by Poor Law Unions, local education authorities and municipal and county councils. These institutions were controlled or governed by local notables and elected councillors usually drawn from the middle classes. They were not central government bureaucrats or expert technocrats. The Fabian Society also sought to influence Liberal and Conservative Party reformers, ‘to take up socialist ideas without recognising their socialist implications.’ For example, Sidney Webb worked with Conservative Party members to pursue education reform during the 1890s.24 The connection with the Labour Party came later.25 After the 1906 election, Keir Hardie was the leader of 29 Labour MPs. His own manifesto for practical social reform, From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), set out his views on socialism, British history, religion, women’s rights and local and national government.26 Hardie rooted his case for socialism in Christianity and in an interpretation of British history. Marx got scant mention except for one quotation: ‘Workers of the word unite; you have a world to win, and nothing to lose but your chains.’27 However, Hardie argued that capitalism could not be reformed, short of placing ownership of all land, property and the means of production under the control of the state. He argued that wealthy owners of property, and capitalists who invested their wealth, served no function that could not be replaced by the state.28 He insisted that bringing all industry under the ownership and control of the state was practical and merely an extension of what was already happening: If the State can build battleships and make swords, why not also trading ships and ploughshares? Since the State conveys letters and parcels and telegrams, why not coal and wool and grain? And if the State insists upon owning telegraph

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lines, why not also railway lines? And if the railways, why not the coal mines …? And if the coal mines, why not the ironworks and engineering shops in which the raw materials for the rails and the engines and the trucks are produced and fashioned into shape?29 Hardie gave over a chapter of his book to emphasise the appeal of socialism to Christians. He argued that the socialist who denounces rent and interest as robbery, who seeks the abolition of the system which legalises such, is in the true line of apostolic succession with the pre-​Christian era prophets, with the Divine Founder of Christianity, and with those who for the first seven hundred years of the Christian faith maintained even to the death the unsullied right of their religious faith to be regarded as the Gospel of the poor. He argued that the forerunners of British socialists included Wat Tyler, the Anabaptists, the Levellers and other sects ‘who had sought to make Communism and Christianity synonymous terms.’30 Hardie argued that the trade unions, cooperative societies, socialist organisations and the Labour Party were ‘each and all’ developing feelings of solidarity that would make the inauguration of Communism a comparatively easy task as the natural next step to state socialism.31 Someday, he claimed, and without too much conflict, all land and machinery would be socially owned ‘with the parasites wiped out.’32 This end would be achieved, he believed, ‘when the modern industrial movement reaches fruition, land capital, and the State itself shall all be owned and controlled by the useful classes. There shall be no longer an exploiting class left to reduce the workers again to penury.’33 But how exactly this communist utopia might work could not be known. As Ernst Wigfross would argue in Sweden eighteen years later: ‘To dogmatise about the form which the Socialist State shall take is to play the fool. That is a matter with which we have nothing whatsoever to do. It belongs to the future, and it is a matter which posterity alone can decide.’34 The most that Hardie felt could be done was to pave the way for this socialist future ‘in the full assurance that it will shape itself alright when it does come.’35 Like Bernstein, Hardie argued that the extension of the franchise meant that revolution was not a necessary precondition of socialism –​ the ballot had already proved more effective than the barricade –​and that the expansion of public ownership had already begun, especially

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through the municipal local government.36 The task of socialists was to build support for such collectivism. He emphasised the attraction of socialism to middle-​class idealists who were not just interested in a more equal society but in creating one that addressed their own dissatisfaction with modern life: In Great Britain two sets of influences are at work bringing the more intellectually minded middle classes over to socialism. There is an increasing tension required in the conduct of business which so saps a man’s energies as to leave him little of either time or inclination for the cultivation of any other than business faculty. A tendency to revolt against this is a well-​marked feature of the social life of our time. Of what use is it, asks these slaves of the ledger, to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring a competency only to find after it has been acquired that its acquisition has taken all the savour and enjoyment out of life? It is surprising the charm which Socialism has for men and women of this type. Others come to Socialism through intellectual convictions and humanitarian prompting. The terrible lot of the people, from which there is no way of escape, harries their feelings and overrides all consideration of their own material interests.37 Hardie believed that the future of socialism very much depended on its appeal to the middle classes. He argued that socialism was something the middle-​class people could get behind and that it was not necessary, as some socialists would have it, that the poor would have to be taken to the limits of poverty by capitalism before they became radicalised. A starved and miserable people, Hardie stated, are more likely ‘to sink into a nation of spiritless serfs than rise in revolt against their lot.’38 Much of Hardie’s argument and analysis was shared by Clement Attlee (1883–​1967), who became leader of the post-​WW2 Labour government that introduced the welfare state. Attlee, who read Hardie’s book soon after it was published, exemplified the kind of middle-​ class convert to socialism that Hardie had in mind. Attlee had been a member of the Conservative Party in 1900 when the Labour Party was formed. He had trained as a barrister and became involved in social work in the east end of London, which was ground zero for those studies of the poor which described these as the people of the abyss, through the settlement movement. Settlement houses were founded by clergy, but were run by lay middle-​class volunteers who sought to

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provide education, social services and to promote Christian values to children in deprived areas. Attlee worked as a lawyer in London and volunteered at the Haileybury House, a settlement house set up by his former school. He was also an officer in the Territorial Army. At the Haileybury Club, a settlement house established by his former school, Attlee provided drill and physical education training to boys from London’s east end slums, who were expected to join the army.39 He later served as the secretary of Toynbee Hall, which was the flagship of the British settlement movement. From 1907 Attlee worked full time as socialist organiser and stood unsuccessfully for election as an Independent Labour Party candidate in the 1909 local government elections. During this period, he assisted Beatrice Webb in the promotion of a ‘minority report,’ published in 1909 by the Royal Commission, on the Poor Law. The report argued that responsibility for the poor should be a function of central government rather than left to local government.40 The subsequent reform legislation by the Liberal Party government elected in 1906, which set up systems of unemployment insurance, sickness benefits and contributory old-​age pensions in 1911, was the foundation on which the post-​WW2 welfare state was built. From 1912 until the beginning of the Great War Attlee lectured on social work at the London School of Economics (LSE), and took up this post again after he was demobilised –​he rose to the rank of Major in the infantry. He quit the LSE in 1922 when he was elected as a member of parliament for Limehouse in East London.41 Attlee’s 1920 book The Social Worker set out a genealogy of influences on British socialism that did not include Marx, but it discussed at length the development of Christian socialism and its influence on the Labour Party. He also credited the influential attacks of the anti-​modernist conservative Thomas Carlyle ‘on the crude doctrines of the Manchester School’ with creating a climate in which socialism came to be accepted. He stressed the influence of John Ruskin’s ‘powerful attacks on the political economy of the day’ and Ruskin’s ‘denunciations of the ugliness of industrial life.’42 Attlee also emphasised the influence of William Morris and the Arts and Craft movement. Morris, unlike Ruskin who otherwise influenced him greatly, became a socialist and was a prominent member of the Social Democratic Federation. In 1884 the Social Democratic Federation split, losing members who opposed relying on democratic reform to The Socialist League, which was funded by Morris. Such socialist groups were part of an institutional genealogy that preceded Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party.

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Attlee, writing about the development of British socialism and his own ideological journey, emphasised the influence of Morris’s aesthetics. As he put it in The Social Worker, Morris and his companions: ‘were led by their love of art to the conviction that the whole of the present civilisation was on a false basis, and that nothing but a return to a society based on fraternity instead of competitive selfishness could provide an environment in which art could again come to its own.’43 Like Hardie, Attlee argued that socialism was compatible with Christianity. Whereas Hardie made the case for a socialist interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, Attlee examined in detail the rise to influence of such perspectives among Anglican clergy and Protestant nonconformists. They interpreted Christianity very differently from the clergy who had given spiritual cover to laissez faire and the Poor Laws.44 Attlee emphasised, in particular, the importance of Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801–​85), an evangelical Anglican Tory reformer who was a member of parliament from 1826 and became Lord Shaftesbury following the death of his father in 1855. Cooper proposed legislation in 1828 to improve the conditions of paupers in lunatic asylums. He introduced the Ten Hours Act (1833), which restricted the working hours of children and removed children under nine years from the factories. In 1842 he instigated a commission of inquiry into the working conditions of children in mines. He introduced the Miners and Collieries Act (1845), which made it illegal to employ women and children in underground mining and similar legislation aimed at preventing the employment of children as chimney sweeps. In 1845 he founded the Ragged Schools Union, which set up schools run by volunteers for poor children. Cooper may have been a Conservative MP, but he was also an agitator and a pioneer of practical social work: That a peer, a conservative and a churchman, should lead the attack on the abuses of the factory system, not from an abstract economic principle of State control, but from the effect of a knowledge of actual conditions, and should be prepared to work with radicals and atheists to attain his end, showed people that it was not only the have-​nots who clamoured for reform, but that the Church had its duty to perform in endeavouring to obtain social justice. Religion in him, instead of leading to contentment with conditions in this world in the hope of recompense in another, led him to judge conditions as he saw them in the light of Christian teaching, and to condemn them as not in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel.45

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Attlee also emphasised the influence of Christian socialists, many of whom were lay Church of England members (known as ‘the Broad Church movement’), as distinct from those clergy were willing at times to work alongside socialists, express radical views about housing, support workers’ rights and advocate for social reform.46 Attlee praised the ‘practical reforming spirit of the settlement movement’ and church missions such as the Christian Social Union, which undertook similar kinds of work on behalf of the poor. Attlee was clear that his own journey to socialism had been influenced by these movements.47 He saw these Christian influences as integral to the labour movement and the Labour Party. He attempted to explain why the typical conflicts that played out between Christianity and secular socialism in many European countries did not prevail in the Labour Party: In continental nations the union of political and industrial democracy with anticlericalism is one of the marked features of social life. It is true that there are Christian socialist movements on the Continent, but these, if not actually concealing under a specious title some other object such as anti-​Semitism, are forms of counter attack against social democracy. That in this country organised labour is not hostile to Christianity, and that it has not entirely lost all faith in the churches as instruments of social justice, is due in the main to the Christian socialists. At one time it looked as if the aggressive secularists had captured the leadership of the advanced movement among the workers, but the fact that prominent leaders of religious thought were not only not hostile but favourable to the claims of the workers for a wider life, has prevented such a division between Christianity and organised labour as may be seen on the continent.48 Attlee described the intersections of Christianity and socialism as ‘one example out of many in English life of the permeation of opinion from one camp to another.’ Britain had its conservatives, its liberals and its socialists. It had Christians who were socialists as well as ones who were conservatives or liberals.49 In his 1937 book, The Labour Party in Perspective, written after he had become its leader, Attlee reiterated his argument that in no other socialist movement did Marxism have so little influence and did Christian thought so much. Not only did the Labour Party stand on the shoulders of Protestant reformists, it had not found itself locked into the kinds of conflict with Catholicism

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which had occurred on the continent where socialists tended to be anti-​clerical and the Church was anti-​socialist: The Labour Party necessarily differs from those Continental countries where Socialists found themselves faced by a Church either closely bound up with the State or with property or class interests, an inimical to liberty of thought. Where, as in many countries, the works in the formative years of the Socialist movement were attached to a dogmatic faith which controlled every phase of their lives, it was natural that the movement of revolt should be anti-​clerical.50 In this context, it was possible, Attlee wrote, for millions of faithful Catholics descended from Irish immigrants, who bought over from their own country a hatred of oppression, to support the Labour Party. Until 1945, the big advances in social policy which significantly improved working conditions and addressed poverty were achievements of Liberal governments. One of the main architects of the post-​1945 welfare state William Beveridge was a Liberal. Ramsey McDonald who succeeded Hardie as leader of the Labour Party was briefly Prime Minister in 1924 (for nine months) and again from 1929 to 1931. During both terms, his governments published some reformist legislations but nothing as game changing as the 1911 Acts which hugely extended support for the sick, the unemployed and the aged beyond the Poor Law system. His second term and his third, as leader of the 1931–​5 Conservative-​majority national government, both coincided with the post-​1929 Great Depression. After 1918, when the number entitled to vote rose from seven to 20 million, the Liberal Party went into decline. Many liberal progressives joined the Labour Party. In a 1922 Socialist Review article, Attlee argued that Labour should in future compete rather than cooperate with the Liberals. The aim was to replace the Liberal Party in the eyes of voters as the alternative to the Conservative Party government.51 In a 1923 essay he emphasised intellectual and ideological distinctions between liberalism and socialism. He argued that liberalism’s great idea, the value of the individual in all his or her variety, was ultimately incompatible with liberal economics and that socialism differed from liberalism by rejecting economic liberalism. He also wrote that Marxists who claimed that economic forces were the main agent of historical change were wrong: ‘There are people,’ he wrote, ‘who try to reduce all human activity to one plane, who rule out all other motives save those of material gain.’52

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The Labour Party’s practical achievements were mostly to be found in municipal local government from where Attlee and some other leading members of his post-​1945 government first rose to prominence. Local government, Attlee explained in a 1920 Fabian Society pamphlet, was responsible in Britain for the local courts, public health, asylums for those with mental deficiency, housing and town planning, highways, parks and public recreation grounds, allotments and small holdings, libraries and public utilities including gas, water and electricity. Furthermore, borough councils owned considerable amounts of land and other assets and could take out 60-​year loans for capital expenditure that could be repaid through rates on businesses and property.53 Attlee in his 1937 book The Labour Party in Perspective set out his personal aspirations for a future socialist Britain while noting that probably every member of the Labour Party would find something about this with which he disagreed.54 He argued that British socialists had always recognised conflict between the classes but had not generally ‘adopted the class war as a theory of society.’ While there were vital conflicts of interests between those who lived by mere ownership of wealth and those who lived by their labour, it was also the case that some workers owned some property and some capitalists served a useful social function.55 He argued that Socialism (he always put the word in uppercase) would lead to greater individual freedom and autonomy. He defined freedom in practical day-​to-​day terms. The poor man was restricted in his diet, clothing, in the time available to him for education or leisure and in the kinds of work available to him. Attlee’s vision of socialism went beyond tackling the Five Giants subsequently identified in the Beveridge Report (Want, Squalor, Idleness, Ignorance and Disease). Influenced perhaps by Ruskin and Morris, he emphasised repeatedly the importance of beauty and of entitlement to leisure. He argued, following Ruskin, that capitalism had been responsible for much of the ugliness of industrial society. Under capitalism, which kept most people poor, the aesthetic horizons of ordinary men and women were narrow. It was the job of a socialist government to address this deficit.56 Again and again, Attlee emphasised the importance of avoiding the imposition of uniformity: British Socialists have never made an idol of the State, demanding that individuals should be sacrificed to it. They have never accepted the beehive or the ants’ nest as an ideal. They leave that to advocates of the Corporate State. They have never desired that men and women should be drilled

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and regimented physically and mentally so that they should all be of one pattern. On the contrary they appreciate that the wealth of a society is its variety, not its uniformity. Progress is not towards, but away from the herd. Attlee’s vision of socialism emphasised security (from unemployment, want and squalor), equality, democracy and common ownership. Socialism would make society more equal by extending educational and other kinds of opportunities to everyone. In summing up what he meant by this he wrote that ‘we mean to give every man, woman and child in the country an opportunity to live the fullest life that the resources of our island will allow.’57 Under socialism people would still spend much at their lives at work, but working conditions would be improved. Land and the major industries would be owned by the state. Individuals would not own property but would have security of tenure. Attlee argued that control of collectivised resources should be subject to a wide regional decentralisation.

Social democracy and Swedish modernity Sweden came to be regarded as the social democratic exemplar. And there was a tendency within Sweden itself to portray the achievements of social democracy as ‘a utopia of the rational’ where the great conflicts of capitalism between efficiency and equality, between markets and society, somehow found their optimum solution.58 This begs questions about how and why social democracy developed with so little opposition. Much of the writing in English, about its rise to dominance in Sweden, has focused on political leaders and key intellectual figures. For several decades Ernst Wigforss was both, while Gunnar and Alva Myrdal played important intellectual and political roles during the 1930s in defining the Swedish social democratic vision and explaining this to the wider world. Their stories are integral to any account of the rise to dominance of social democracy in Sweden but again, these don’t explain why this occurred. In 1870 almost three quarters of the Swedish population was engaged in farming and related occupations. By 1930 this proportion had shrunk to just under 40 per cent. The Social Democratic Workers Party first emerged during the 1880s at a time when the kinds of industrial and urban issues which led to the growth of similar parties in other countries had yet to become part of Sweden’s political agenda.59 Rural taxpayers had significant influence within the political system and in the parliament. It was not politically feasible to introduce state-​financed

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benefits to industrial workers or the urban working class without also including rural communities within the remit of such programmes.’60 Sweden modernised slowly before 1890 and rapidly thereafter. The embryonic Social Democratic Party did not have the support of a large industrial working class or well-​organised trade unions because neither had yet come into existence. The period from the 1890s to the 1920s witnessed the expansion of all these alongside simultaneous belated emergence of political liberalism –​the first nationally-​organised Liberal Party was founded in 1902 –​and an expanded electorate. Sweden changed during this 30-​year period from being a predominantly rural society into an industrial democracy. The Liberal Party stood for the kinds of reformism that had been championed in Britain by John Stuart Mill and later by the New Liberals who were open to the ideas of the Fabians. Sweden’s Liberal Party had no history of endorsing laissez faire. It drew support from the lower middle classes, religious nonconformists and some urban intellectuals. The Social Democrats appealed to the emerging industrial working class but was led by middle-​class intellectuals. Both parties cooperated to secure social reform and both cooperated to extend the franchise. Sweden was not the only country to witness cooperation between liberals and social democrats during this period. Somewhat similar alliances were to be found in Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and, as already mentioned, in Britain.61 Between 1890 and 1930 those working in industry, mining and crafts rose from 96,000 to 400,000. This growth was mirrored by a similar expansion of an urban middle class working in industry, trade and commerce. In Europe, only Britain by the 1930s had a proportionately larger industrial working class.62 The rise of the Social Democrats coincided with this industrial modernisation. Unlike many other countries, the Left came to represent a great many farmers and farmworkers whose equivalents in some other European countries supported conservative and confessional political parties. There were no competing Christian or conservative parties mainly because for centuries prior to the 1890s the Lutheran Church had been an established Church, its clergy had been co-​opted by the pre-​democratic state which paid them wages and Lutheran leaders had been represented in parliament. Before 1865, the Swedish parliament had comprised of four chambers designed to incorporate different elements of a medieval social order: the clergy, town burghers, the nobility and the peasantry. Modern political parties only began to emerge when the Rikstag was reformed in 1866.63

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In Britain during the early nineteenth century, the dislocations of an early industrial revolution and the ideological influence of laissez faire liberalism undermined a longstanding parish-​based welfare system. The Swedish equivalent of this system was one in which Lutheran clergy of the established Church administered poor relief, hospitals and education. This system remained intact and was expanded during Sweden’s later industrial revolution. The Lutheran Church supported the 1847 Poor Law and the 1862 Local Government Act that expanded the older system of parish relief. The Swedish welfare state was built upon Lutheran foundations. Church doctrine on poverty was somewhat similar to that expressed by British clerical advocates of laissez faire; it expressed the view, for instance, that poverty was the will of God and should be accepted as such. As a result of the 1847 law the state’s role in providing poor relief strengthened, but its punitive character was retained.64 Ernst Wigforss, the main intellectual and political architect of Swedish social democracy, viewed socialism as the logical extension of liberalism rather than its antithesis. He argued that social democracy was rooted in ‘the same intellectual soil that nourished the old liberal ideas of freedom,’ but that, unlike liberalism, it did not believe that freedom could be achieved through competition between individuals without a role for society in regulating free markets.65 Swedish politics never had to contend with laissez faire liberalism. As in the early twentieth century British case where socialist reformers like the Fabian Society could do business with new liberal reformers it was both possible and strategically advantageous for social democrats to cooperate with liberals and others. Social democracy found itself on fertile soil in Sweden with no strong ideological enemies and a temperate climate in which it could flourish. In 1908 in Materialistisk historieuppfattning (trans: The Materialist Conception of History), Wigforss put forward an argument in favour of evolutionary socialism that was similar to Bernstein’s. He concluded that Swedish capitalism was not evolving in a way likely to generate proletarian revolution. The working class was not growing steadily poorer; on the contrary, its standard of living was rising rapidly as the trade unions combated the most brutal tendencies of capitalism.66 Wigforss was first elected to parliament in 1919 and remained a member of the Riksdag until 1953. Between 1928 and 1952 he was a member of the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party. He steered a social democratic strategy of permanent step-​by-​step reform of social welfare policy, taxation and economic planning and

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he championed industrial democracy. He argued for a system of state capitalism in which large enterprises would either be state-​owned or state-​controlled. He also proposed models of worker participation and consumer involvement in the management of these.67 He was the main author of the Social Democratic Party’s Gothenburg Programme (1919) which proposed legislating for an eight-​hour working day, paid vacation leave, a maternity leave scheme, the introduction of a minimum legal wage, a guaranteed right to a job, the expansion of social insurance, a programme of public housing and reforms to the education system. Additionally, it proposed bringing natural resources, large-​scale industry and the economy under state control, to increase taxes on incomes and inheritances and to nationalise transportation, some agricultural land, large banks and the private insurance industry. Although the Social Democrat Party did not endorse the Gothenburg Programme, it became the basis of subsequent reform efforts.68 It sought to address inequalities of wealth, income and education by taking control of the means of production and state-​led redistribution. It placed a strong emphasis on the inviolability of civil and political rights, parliamentary democracy (Sweden introduced the universal franchise in 1920) and advocated workplace democracy. It proposed an extensive system of social security. It advocated controlling the capitalist economy through a mixture of state ownership, state-​led planning and market regulation. It also championed principles of mutuality, solidarity and social cooperation as ways of embedding collectivism in a modern Swedish society. This was to be a collective of responsible, disciplined and industrious workers.69 Crucially the Gothenburg Programme emphasised a role for consumer cooperatives and worker participatory democracy in the management of public services and state-​owned enterprises. In the early 1920s, Wigforss, inspired by English guild socialism and by syndicalism, began pushing his fellow social democrats to commit to the introduction of such industrial democracy. In 1921 he assumed the chairmanship of the governmental commission established to study industrial democracy and wrote the central sections of its report.70 After the introduction of universal suffrage in 1920, the Social Democrats became the largest party and established the first of three short-​lived coalition governments led by Karl Hajalmar Branting (1920, 1921–​3 and 1924–​5). Between 1920 and 1930 Sweden had nine different governments in all. The Social Democratic Party did not obtain a sufficient mandate for its programme until 1932 when it won 104 of the 230 seats in the Second Chamber of the Riksdag.

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The long-​term success of the Social Democratic Party owed much to Wigforss’s considerable ability as Minister of Finance. In parallel with John Maynard Keynes, Wigforss and a group of younger economists, including Gunnar Myrdal, who came to be known as the Stockholm School, championed a new approach to economic management that challenged the then-​widely prevailing orthodoxy that governments should avoid budget deficits and should cut expenditure during economic recessions.71 Wigforss had long been sympathetic to expenditure on public works as a way of reducing unemployment. His Gothenburg Programme proposed that whenever private enterprise failed to provide employment the government should step in to do so instead.72 His 1928 pamphlet Spararen, slösaren och den arbetslöse (trans. The Saver, the Spendthrift and the Unemployed) argued that during recessions –​when money was being hoarded and private enterprise was unwilling to hire and produce –​it was necessary that the state step in and take control of underused resources.73 Wigforss was not alone in thinking along such lines. By the end of the 1920s the Stockholm School economists had become influential through their involvement in a government appointed Committee on Unemployment.74 This committee suggested, contrary to the then dominant orthodoxy, that governments should fund deficit-​financed public works during recessions.75 Wigforss in his 1931 book Den ekonomiska krisen (trans, The Economic Crisis) set out arguments that mirrored to some extent those of Keynes’ General Theory. In essence, Wigforss argued that during recessions reductions in demand were followed by reductions in prices and production, which, if left unchecked, resulted in a further downward spiral. Cuts in public spending would be self-​defeating, as deflation rendered debt repayments relatively more burdensome. A fall in the price of factors of production was no cure, only a sign of the crisis: The price fall during the crisis removes or reduces the profits of enterprise, whose willingness to produce is therefore dissipated or diminished. However, a reduction in production and entrepreneurship not only implies a reduced demand for all that firms usually need. It also implies unemployment, reduced income for the workers, and thus a reduced demand for many consumer goods; and therefore a further decline in prices and willingness to keep production going.76

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He argued that counter-​cyclical government expenditure was necessary to arrest such decline and that it was feasible of governments to set deficit budgets in order to do so. Rather than strike a balanced budget in a given year (in accordance with the prevailing liberal economic orthodoxy) it was prudent for governments instead to seek to balance their income and expenditure across an economic cycle that might be several years long. When he returned to government in 1932 as Minister of Finance, he was in a position to implement the approach he advocated. During the early 1930s, what would now be called Keynesian methods of fighting the depression were tried out in Sweden but not in Britain.77 Attlee, in his 1937 book The Labour Party in Perspective, found much to admire in the achievements of Swedish Social Democrats: Sweden has afforded perhaps the most remarkable example of the successful development of Socialism through constitutional means in Europe. While it is still far from being a Socialist country, there has been wide development of State control and ownership of finance and industry. The State owns the central bank, the airlines, and the overwhelming proportion of the railway system. It is the owner of some ten million acres of forests, which it exploits with considerable success. It has established a network of power stations and is the chief distributor of electric power in the country. It owns the mining rights to the largest iron ore deposits in the country and exploits them in conjunction with a private company. It has a monopoly on the importation of all unprocessed tobacco and the manufacture and distribution of cigars and cigarettes. Side by side with these semi-​state industries there is one of the biggest cooperative movements in the world, which carries on some 20 percent of all the wholesale and retail trade of the country and has, in addition, a large number of factories.78 Attlee argued that a combination of cooperation and state ownership made Swedish workers relatively prosperous and the wealth it produced made possible some of the best housing schemes to be found anywhere. Because of state investment during the Great Depression, unemployment never reached the levels that occurred in other countries, including Britain.79

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Wigforss was Minister of Finance from 1925 to 1926 and again in the Social Democratic Party dominated governments from 1932 to 1949. He introduced public expenditure policies which anticipated Keynesian economics which were credited with Sweden’s recovery from the Great Depression. Wigforss consciously instituted an effective counter-​cyclical programme four years before the publication of Keynes’s General Theory, thus making Sweden the first country to adopt modern stabilisation policies. He was also the architect of the post-​Second World War expansion of the Swedish welfare state. Wigforss was largely responsible for the main documents that outlined policy for the post-​war period. These proposed to transform capitalist society through economic planning and social welfare policy rather than by nationalising industry. Economic planning included an emphasis on promoting full employment, industrial efficiency and higher productivity in order to produce the wealth needed to underwrite social welfare provision.80

Folkhemmet and the welfare state In 1937 there was little apparent hope that Hardie and Attlee’s socialist vision could be realised in Britain. Hardie may have hoped or believed that the middle classes would see the light, but so far, they had not done so in sufficiently large numbers. As put by George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941): After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment, the entire English Socialist movement was unable to produce a version of Socialism which the mass of the people could even find desirable. The Labour Party stood for a timid reformism, the Marxists were looking at the modern world through nineteenth-​century spectacles. Both ignored agriculture and imperial problems, and both antagonized the middle classes. The suffocating stupidity of left-​wing propaganda had frightened away whole classes of necessary people, factory managers, airmen, naval officers, farmers, white-​collar workers, shopkeepers, policemen. All of these people had been taught to think of Socialism as something which menaced their livelihood, or as something seditious, alien, ‘anti-​British’ as they would have called it. Only the intellectuals, the least useful section of the middle class, gravitated towards the movement.81

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Yet Orwell argued that the social solidarities and shared sacrifices brought about by the war would create the necessary moral climate to legitimise socialism in Britain. The differences in outlook and habits between the social classes were rapidly diminishing and the war would diminish these further. The war had created a climate that made socialism necessary and, he hoped, desirable to the majority: We know very well that with its present social structure England cannot survive, and we have got to make other people see that fact and act upon it. We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war. At such a time it is possible, as it was not in the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and realistic. A Socialist movement which can swing the mass of the people behind it, drive the pro-​Fascists out of positions of control, wipe out the grosser injustices and let the working class see that they have something to fight for, win over the middle classes instead of antagonizing them, produce a workable imperial policy instead of a mixture of humbug and Utopianism, bring patriotism and intelligence into partnership –​for the first time, a movement of such a kind becomes possible. The socialist programme he sketched out in The Lion and the Unicorn was broadly similar to Attlee’s: nationalise the land, mines, railways, banks and major industries; limit incomes on such a scale that the highest tax-​free income did not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one, and reform the education system along democratic lines. And also in agreement with Attlee, The Lion and the Unicorn emphasised Orwell’s belief that political extremism and regimentation were not in keeping with the English character. Orwell claimed that the introduction of socialism would leave the essence of Englishness untouched. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor,

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the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. In The Lion and the Unicorn it was always England and English identity he invoked. Not Britain or Britishness. Much of Orwell’s essay was given over to claims about English character that would make any sociologist wince and mutter under her breath that this is nothing more than sentimental essentialism: Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians; painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-​ view.’ Nor is this because they are ‘practical,’ as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town-​planning and water-​supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. Orwell argued that socialism needed to speak the language of ordinary English people. His view was that the English did not like officialdom, did not like top-​down impositions, had a private way of going about their lives and had little regard for the pronouncements of intellectuals. Orwell’s implication was that what might be accepted in Sweden would not, for cultural reasons, play well in England. In terms of electoral success, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party fared considerably better than did the Labour Party in Britain. This success owed much to its ability to tap into Swedish nationalism and to portray socialism as the realisation of Folkhemmet. Per Albin Hansson convinced Swedish voters that no political party was more patriotic than the Social Democratic Party. In a much-​cited 1928 speech he

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presented Folkhemmet as a yet-​to-​be-​attained common-​sense utopia modelled on the ideal family home: The foundations of the home are community and the sense of belonging together. The good home knows no privileged and disadvantaged, no favourites and no stepchildren. None there looks down on any other, none tries to gain an advantage at the expense of others, the strong does not oppress and plunder the weak. In the good home, equality, consideration, cooperation, helpfulness prevails. Applied to the great home of the people and citizenry, this would signify the breaking down of all social and economic barriers which now divide citizens into privileged and disadvantaged, rulers and dependants, rich and poor, propertied and impoverished, exploiters and exploited.82 Folkhemmet evoked home, family and the idea of nation as family, concepts usually mobilised explicitly by conservatives and the Right. The word came from a German term –​Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘the people’s community’ –​a term associated with Nazi national socialism. As it was used in Sweden it had both cosy communal and authoritarian connotations. Families could be profoundly illiberal institutions yet their members were bound to one another.83 Folkhammet was the promise of a new sense of national identity, one founded on the capacity of industrialism for generating material wealth, but under a completely new social system –​rational, planned, harmonious and egalitarian. As put by Mauricio Rojas: Here we have the idea of the classless society, the dream of a harmonious native country free from divisive conflicts and injustices, but here too we have a fundamental bid to abolish the harrowing conflict between modernity and tradition which was such a central theme of European thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The tensions characterising the cataclysmic economic, social and mental transformation constituting the very substance of the modernisation process are dissolved in the dream of building up a modern society based on the ties of a traditional community.84 At a time when Sweden was modernising rapidly, the concept of Folkhemmet portrayed social change ‘as a bridge rather than a break in Swedish history.’ According to Rojas: ‘It offered continuity during a

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time of rapid change brought on by modernisation. Its main power lay in its ability to intertwine the past with the future, in its promise to preserve Sweden’s distinctive traditions while exploiting the material prosperity of the industrial era.’85 The Swedish Social Democrats came to stand simultaneously for both modernity and tradition. Since its inception, the Lutheran Church of Sweden has enjoyed the full protection of the state. Until 1951 Swedish citizens were automatically registered as members of the Church at birth. The environment that Tage Erlander (1901–​85) the Social Democrat politician who became Prime Minister in 1965 grew up in what was described by his biographer as a ‘classic one for a Swedish politician’: a rural upbringing, no stranger to physical work, ambitious and lower middle-​class, the son of a teacher, educated in a boarding school that had been set up by members of the clergy, a member of the temperance movement.86 The clergy of the established Church were in effect civil servants; they received salaries from the state and were part of its bureaucracy.87 Before he became Prime Minister, Erlander had been Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, a brief that included responsibility for education. Social democracy was built on a welfare system that had been delivered by the Church in rudimentary form for centuries on behalf of the state. The new role of the municipality in the organisation of welfare services was modelled upon the historic one of parishes as administrative units. Parish ministers suppressed beggary, collected alms for distribution, allocated paupers to farmers’ houses on a rotation basis, and educated the young.88 The clergy were formally represented in one of the four chambers of the Rikstag as part of a corporatist model of government dating to the fifteenth century. The other three chambers represented respectively, the nobility, town burghers and the peasantry.89 This system was, in certain respects, the mirror opposite to the kind of corporatism advocated by Catholic thinkers from the late nineteenth century insofar as the Church came under state control and where the opposite to subsidiarity pertained. The ideology of Folkhemmet found expression in how history and Swedish national identity was taught in schools. A 1943 sociological study of ‘Medelby,’ an anonymised ‘ordinary Swedish railway town,’ described how children were being educated to understand their society in the following terms: The history period and the geography lesson provide abundant opportunities for comparisons between the present and the past, the native and the foreign … in

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which the present appears as the culmination of a long and arduous development and where Sweden, compared with other countries, can be recognised by its high educational standard, its advanced economy and its good communications. … And when, in the history lesson, we read about the Stone Age, we think how fortunate we are today, also compared with the old agrarian society! And about how backward many countries are where ‘the state has not done anything for the elevation of popular enlightenment.’ The schoolbooks explain that Sweden is really just one enormous Medelby, ‘a sunny and contented society –​the modern technical idyll.’ Folkhemmet’s first generation, sitting here at their school desks, saw foreign countries ‘glimpsed like exotic patches of colour.’ These children were told that Swedish identity was solidly founded in a modern, sensible and rational society. Higher popular education, better communications, improved hygiene, greater longevity, more social cohesion. Other countries in the world should follow its example. At the same time as they were taught that they were living in the best of all worlds, they could take pride in being Swedish.90 The English equivalent to Folkhammet was forged in the existential crisis of the war. It was not as closely associated with the left as in Sweden. The idea that the welfare state might provide security ‘from the cradle to the grave’ was first articulated using this memorable phrase by Winston Churchill in a March 1943 radio broadcast.91 In a July 1943 newspaper article Attlee could reflect on the new unprecedented popularity of the socialist programme set out by Keir Hardie at the beginning of the century.92 But he was also as mindful of the suspicions of many ordinary Englishmen of big government. Attlee did not believe that these were now all socialists. In a 1945 memorandum in his private papers, he observed that the British working and middle classes had small but significant investments in private insurance schemes, savings and property that they were eager to protect. They were not, he wrote, a proletariat who had nothing to lose but their chains.93 Yet the appetite for a welfare state was tangible by 1945. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the Beveridge Plan were published. A copy was even found in Hitler’s bunker.94 The Labour Party manifesto which championed a welfare state, Let’s Face the Future, sold a million and a half copies.95

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The upper limits of the welfare state 1952 saw the publication, some 63 years after the launch of the original Fabian Essays (1889) edited by George Bernard Shaw, and one year after Attlee’s brief second government lost power, of a collection of New Fabian Essays edited by Richard Crossman. In his foreword, Attlee revisited some old themes. There was a difference, he wrote, between the socialist gradualism he stood for and utopian socialism and the ‘catastrophic’ system which replaced capitalism in the Soviet Union. The British Labour and Socialist movements, he argued had been strongly influenced and went on to apply many of the doctrines outlined in the original Fabian Essays. That book had sold ‘hundreds of thousands.’ Much of the programme set out by its contributors, according to Attlee, had come to pass with the establishment of the post-​war welfare state. Fabian blueprints for social welfare, redistributive taxation and nationalisation were now part of the law of the land.96 The new essays edited by Crossman had been planned while the post-​war Labour government was still in power, but in 1951 Attlee, with only a small majority in the House of Commons and finding it difficult to govern because of conflicts within the Labour Party, had called another election, only then to lose power. Labour would remain out of government for the next 13 years. The theme of Crossman’s contribution to the volume, ‘Towards a New Philosophy of Socialism’, was the Labour Party’s loss of momentum. The post-​war Labour government had achieved the nationalisation of half a dozen industries, the construction of a universal social security system, a free at the point of use national health service and had tentatively begun to plan the national economy. Following these achievements, the Party, according to Crossman, was unsure where it was going. Immediate policy questions included whether to hang on to wartime food subsidies and price controls (thinking of these as part of the socialist structure of the state) or whether to return to the price system. Should wages be determined by collective bargaining or set by the state? Should services and public utilities be run by central government or should there be municipal or cooperative ownership? Should public transport be provided free to use in the same way as the National Health Service (NHS)?97 Although he was leader of the Labour Party’s ‘Look Left’ faction, and was not a political ally of Attlee, Crossman had a similar understanding that the only kind of socialism that had ever worked in Britain was the non-​doctrinaire gradualist kind promoted by the Fabians:

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Most of the early Fabians –​the one outstanding exception was George Bernard Shaw –​repudiated socialist theory as dangerous Teutonic verbiage. They assumed that everyone knew the difference between justice and injustice, happiness and unhappiness, and that it was the job of the Fabian Society to show the British trade unionist and any politician who cared to listen –​the way to make Britain an efficient example of socially planned happiness. The Benthamite approach to socialism, in contrast with the Marxist theories had considerable advantages. It suited the anti-​intellectual bias of the Labour Movement, and it faithfully reflected the conscientious objection to dogma, whether theological or political, on which our British conception of personal freedom rests. Moreover, by repudiating classical Marxism, it enabled the Labour Party, in its formative years, to welcome into its ranks all men of goodwill –​the Christian Socialist, for instance, and the middle-​class liberal in search of a new vehicle of social reform –​and not only the class-​conscious worker. It was largely because the Party accepted this unphilosophical Fabian approach that it was able to become a national party and to assume the national responsibilities of government more easily than any Socialist Party in Europe.98 However, Crossman argued that ‘this absence of a theoretical basis for practical programmes of action’ was also the main reason why the post-​war Labour government represented the culmination of a century of social reform and the end of an era, rather than, as its socialist supporters hoped, the dawn of a new one. What was achieved by the 1945 Labour government had been the climax of a long process. The Labour Party was now in danger of becoming not the party of change ‘but the defender of the post-​war status quo.’99 Anthony Crosland, who would, like Crossman become a government minister in post-​1964 Labour governments, wrote in The Future of Socialism (1956) that any government that tampered with the welfare state would suffer electorally. This explained why the conservatives had fought and won two elections largely on policies that 20 years earlier had been associated with the Left and repudiated by the Right. When Crossland’s book was published, the Conservative Party was five years into a 14-​year period in government.100 It did not seek to dismantle the welfare state partly because of the influence of ‘One Nation’ Conservatism on the party during this period. This articulated

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a concept of social cohesion rooted in tradition that was to some extent closer to the Swedish notion of Folkhammet than the kinds of socialism articulated by Attlee and Crossland. The term ‘One Nation’ was first associated with politics of Benjamin Disraeli, author of Sybil, or The Two Nations. Disraeli’s novel examined the gulf between Britain’s rich and poor. Disraeli, the Conservative Party Prime Minister, emphasised the need to address poverty in order to achieve social cohesion between these two separated nations. The post-​Second World War ‘One Nation’ Tories could hardly be described as socialists, but these influenced the rhetoric of the 1951–​64 Conservative governments that became stewards of the welfare state. The One Nation Conservative Rab Butler, who served as Minister of Education during the war, might even be described as an architect of the welfare state for his role in championing the Education Act (1944). During the late-​1950s there were policy differences between One Nation Conservatives and the Labour Party concerning levels of taxation and national insurance contributions to pay for pensions and other welfare state entitlements.101 However, the overriding post-​ war consensus on economics and social policy shared by Labour and the Conservatives might be illustrated by the term ‘Buskellism,’ an amalgam of the surnames of Butler, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1951 and his Labour predecessor in this role, Hugh Gaitskell.102 The welfare state was a child of Conservative as well as Labour parents, given that both parties were members of the wartime national government. All members of Attlee’s 1945 Labour government had been born during the nineteenth century.103 They were shaped by pre-​Second World War ideas and debates that they had incubated for decades before being eventually in a position to enact these in government. Where, Crossman worried, would the next generation of democratic socialists find their inspiration? From where might the intellectual energy to extend democratic socialism in Britain come? Rather than defend the welfare state status quo there was, he argued, an urgent need to address its shortcomings. Otherwise, it would lose support. ‘We must assume,’ he wrote, that increased concentration of power, ‘whether in the form of technological development or social organisation, will always produce exploitation, injustice and inequality in a society, unless the community possesses a social conscious strong enough to civilise them.’104 Every political system, he argued, ‘whether capitalist or socialist,’ degenerates into a system of privilege and exploitation unless its leaders are faced by an opposition within the ranks. Every Church becomes a vested interest without its heretics, and every political

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system, including democracy, ossifies into an oligarchy.’ The threat to freedom he emphasised in particular was the managerial society and the coercive control that went with it.105 Crossman’s first book Plato Today (1937) anticipated the arguments against utopianism that are most prominently associated with Karl Popper. Crossman’s new Platonists included well-​educated professionals and members of the intelligentsia drawn to authoritarian politics of the left or right who viewed themselves as the most suitable people to be in charge. These may have felt sympathy for the poorer classes but had never mixed with them on an equal basis.106 In his New Fabian Essays chapter ‘Towards a New Philosophy of Socialism,’ Crossman argued that the main enemy of human freedom had now become the managerial society and the central coercive power that went with it. Just as capitalism needed to be civilised by the welfare state, the managerial society that was part and parcel of the welfare state needed to be civilised by democratic socialism. In a world organised in ever larger and more inhuman units, the task of socialism is to prevent managerialism from becoming synonymous with privilege. Crossman argued that unless socialism could be further democratised, support for it would unravel.107 Such a direction of travel was in keeping, he argued, with the longstanding goals of democratic socialism in Britain. The object of the Labour movement, and their intellectual Fabian leaders, had never been a dramatic capture of power but to convert the nation to socialist values. However, post-​war welfare capitalism fell short of socialism. Although national income was now distributed more fairly than before, concentration of capital and economic privilege remained unchanged, wages and salaries were still determined by market principles and collective industries remain under control of a small managerial and civil service elite. Crossman argued that there was an urgent need to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of the bureaucratic state.108 There had been in the immediate post-​war period under Labour ‘no effort to encourage popular participation in the new Welfare State.’ A system of collective bargaining, such as had existed before the establishment of the welfare state, had persisted. However, workers, trade unions and the cooperative movement had no input into how the welfare state was run. Nationalised industries were run by the same managers as before. In the absence of workplace democracy, the welfare state had become a managerialist one. Ironically, Crossman observed that the transition to what should have been the ‘the first stage of socialism’ had been executed primarily by anti-​socialist managers and neutral civil servants.109 It remained under the control of the kind of

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privileged elites he had associated with authoritarian paternalism in Plato Today. Crossman’s thesis was that democratic socialism in Britain had stalled and that the welfare state in its current form was danger of losing its legitimacy. This did not appear to be the case in Sweden where workplace democracy was repeatedly referred to as a cherished principle even if concrete measures to introduce this were not introduced until the last days of the Social Democratic Party’s unbroken run in power. Gunnar Myrdal argued in Beyond the Welfare State (1960) that Swedes had become acculturated to the welfare state and that they accepted its social contract. In a section of his chapter on the individual and the state (under the heading ‘They like it’) he claimed that they did not feel that its rules and regulations were pressed upon them from above because these had been arrived at through democratic consensus. Of course, there were new constraints on individual behaviour. The welfare state fixed prices and earnings. It set standards for all sorts of economic and social relations. For example, it laid down rules determining which school a family could send their children to.110 But such controls had replaced limitations on individual freedom that had resulted from social inequalities. The new rules Swedish society imposed on its members were less arbitrary and more rational. A young person’s educational and work opportunities no longer depended on the economic and social status of their parents. He also claimed that satisfaction with the regulative activity of the welfare state had become stronger as democratic participation in its organisation became more intense. Sweden, he suggested, had become an advanced welfare state in which ‘an increasingly large portion of the adult population’ participated in its government through elected membership of various municipal boards and councils responsible for the implementation of laws and for public expenditure.111 Yet elsewhere in Beyond the Welfare State he acknowledged that working examples of this next phase of the development of the welfare state were sporadic.112 It was not until the early 1970s that widespread political support for workplace democracy emerged and it did so, in part, within non-​socialist opposition political parties rather than mainly within the still-​dominant Social Democratic Party. In 1976 Sweden adopted Co-​Determination in the Workplace legislation, described by the Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme as the ‘reform of the century’ and as the most important widening of democracy since the introduction of the universal franchise. What this legislation did was involve trade unions in management decision-​making and extend share ownership to workers in some industries. The involvement

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of the trade unions in management decision-​making was hardly a fundamental change because the party and the labour movement had been intertwined for decades.113 However, soon after, the Social Democratic Party was voted out of office for the first time since 1932. The technocratic elite and social engineers who drove Swedish social policy after 1932 included utopian modernists like the Myrdals who believed they were well qualified to direct a top-​down reorganisation of Swedish society and family life.114 Yet the grandiose plans of this elite for a modern, egalitarian, welfare utopia fell on very fertile soil. As put by Rojas: ‘The social planners’ and popular educators’ obvious intention of educating, disciplining and refashioning the people coincided with the intention of the people to allow itself to be educated, disciplined and refashioned in the spirit of modernity, equality and the new national community.’ Accounts by various Swedish social scientists describe how technocratic planning mentality was accepted on a scale, which even its keenest advocates in the 1930s could hardly have imagined.115 During the period covered by the chapter, social democracy in Sweden encountered no major ideological challenge, while in Britain the welfare state had yet to face politically significant opposition. That would come in the 1970s when neoliberalism, dedicated to the privatisation of collectivised industries and utilities and the winding down of the welfare state. Neoliberalism arguably had considerably more initial impact in Britain, where liberalism had long been socially and politically embedded. The main challenges, as perceived by some left intellectuals, were how to ensure forward momentum in the absence of sufficient commitment to democratise public services and industry. The kinds of legitimacy challenges barely hinted at by Wigforss and Myrdal, who professed a degree of optimism for social democracy in their country, which Crossman couldn’t match for his, played out with an intensity that perhaps none could have envisaged. These challenged the legitimacy of technocratic welfare statism in more complex ways than they could have imagined. From the late 1960s, and in many countries, there was widespread disillusionment with the social engineers, planners and experts who shaped the welfare state. These had promoted large-​scale, technologically rational, functionally efficient designs which eroded a sense of place. The tower blocks and huge tracts of social housing designed as homes for the people too often declined into bleak relatively impoverished sink estates. In many European cities these became concentrations of relatively poor people with relatively poor life chances. From the 1960s in Britain, there was a ‘rediscovery of poverty’ which found that the subsidised housing and free education

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offered by the welfare state had not managed to quash intergenerational inequality.116 In Britain, Sweden and elsewhere, social problems and class inequalities turned out to be more sociologically complex than had been envisaged. Many of the new social problems –​patterns of urban disadvantage, educational and health inequality and even crime –​came to be perceived as legacies of welfare state policy failure. Intellectuals on the left dedicated considerable energy to addressing the crisis of the welfare state which came to be understood as a crisis of legitimacy arising from a lack of meaningful accountability of top-​ down bureaucratic and paternalistic elite-​driven top-​down statism. Much of the left critique of the crisis of welfare state came to focus on what Jürgen Habermas and others called the crisis of modernity, which found expression in the subordination of people to forms of administrative rationality that these found alienating.117 For example, a 1977 report The Crisis of Planning recorded a public disillusionment with planning in Britain ‘so widespread that one does not feel obliged to document it.’118 Even from the left the welfare state came to be viewed as paternalistic and authoritarian.119 The Keynesian post-​war settlement which was predicated on economic growth and secure employment unravelled during the 1970s when a combination of high inflation and economic stagnation, ‘stagflation,’ became widespread. The defensive political coalitions that made social democracy possible –​alliances between left political parties and trade unions –​were fractured in some countries by the decline of traditional industries and high unemployment and the decline of middle-​class support. In Sweden social democracy survived. Elsewhere it faltered. Everywhere it encountered a new ideological enemy in neoliberalism.

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7

Social engineering versus democracy In a 1925 speech, John Maynard Keynes reflected that by the late nineteenth century economists no longer felt it necessary to address the population question as identified by Malthus. Promiscuity, as he put it, had ceased to be regarded as an economic problem and came to be addressed scientifically by coldly statistical and amoral population studies. Instead, concerns about overpopulation were highlighted by advocates of women’s rights, sex education and contraception, such as Annie Besant (1847–​1933). Keynes’s 1925 address to the by-​then moribund Liberal Party declared that ‘sex questions’ were about to enter the political arena: The very crude beginnings represented by the Suffrage Movement were only symptoms of deeper and more important issues below the surface. Birth Control and the use of Contraceptives, Marriage Laws, the treatment of sexual offences and abnormalities, the economic position of women, the economic position of the family, –​in all these matters the existing state of the Law and of orthodoxy is still medieval –​altogether out of touch with civilised opinion and civilised practice and with what individuals, educated and uneducated alike, say to one another in private.1 Keynes’ checklist referenced the emancipatory possibilities of birth control for women but also alluded to a by-​then well-​established eugenic social engineering agenda that had long impressed the reformist intellectual circles in which he moved.2 Feminist advocacy of birth control and contraception emerged during the late nineteenth century alongside campaigns for the rights to vote for women.3 By then, the influence of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spenser had superseded that of Malthus. Preoccupations with reducing the birth rate were joined by obsessions with eugenics among some influential social reformers in Britain, in several European countries and in the United States. The term eugenics was coined by the British biologist Francis Galton in 1883 to refer to the ‘science,’ based on his cousin Darwin’s theories of natural or sexual selection,

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of manipulating hereditary factors through breeding, contraception or sterilisation in order to eliminate the reproduction of those deemed to be inferior.4 The underlying presumption was that there were significant inheritable differences between individuals and that if undesirables could be prevented from having children then social problems associated with these could be ameliorated. Elitist supporters of eugenics variously championed measures aimed at preventing the ‘unfit’ from reproducing (negative eugenics) while at times supporting policies designed to encourage suitable people to have healthy offspring (positive eugenics).5 To some extent, enthusiasm for eugenics among social reformers was superimposed on earlier campaigns against alcoholism and sexually transmitted diseases, and efforts to promote public health education.6 Champions of eugenic social engineering variously advocated contraception, restrictions on the rights of the unfit to marry and the sterilisation of the unfit, while calls for the legalisation of euthanasia remained beyond the bounds of political acceptability in democratic countries. Some saw themselves as engaged in a kind of class war against the lower orders and advocated population controls to prevent the responsible classes from becoming outnumbered by the unfit. Some on the left viewed the unfit as the enemies of socialism.7 Unlike Britain, where the influence of eugenics beliefs upon legislation stalled before the First World War, Nazi Germany experienced the state-​run medicalised mass murder of tens of thousands of ‘malformed infants’ and people with disabilities.8 What came to be called the Holocaust began with the mass gassing of some 70,000 mental patients by doctors and nurses in asylums.9 Advocacy of negative eugenics measures and commissions to study how these might be implemented preceded the post-​1933 Nazi era.10 What made mass murder possible was not just the acceptance of eugenic thinking but also the emergence of a ‘Massnahmenstaat’ –​a political system that operated by administrative fiat rather than by law.11 The novelist H.G. Wells, the Fabian Society reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, William Beveridge who was director of the London School of Economics and later architect of Britain’s welfare state, the Swedish social democrat intellectuals Alva and Gunnar Myrdal and earlier pioneers of women’s reproductive rights like Besant and Marie Stopes, variously exemplified a ‘progressive’ enthusiasm for eugenic social engineering as a means of eradicating social problems. They shared a sense that radical reform was needed to avert social crisis coupled with some degree of belief that science and technocracy could re-​engineer society for the better although most (the exceptions being

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Wells and Stopes) did not have scientific backgrounds.12 In this context eugenics –​the study of the (alleged) inheritance of physical, intellectual and social characteristics in human populations –​expressed an almost religious sense of possibility at the heart of modernity; it held out the promise of improving the actual material of humanity itself.13 In Britain, the Fabian Society exemplified this interest in pursuing the ideal of a state-​regulated social order directed by professional experts.14 Social policy would in future no longer seek to address pauperism, crime, alcoholism, mental illness or illegitimacy through the system of workhouses, prisons and asylums that had expanded during the nineteenth century. Instead, social problems would be solved through the application of expert knowledge held by doctors, psychiatrists, academics, social workers, criminologists and other specialists.15 Eugenic population controls also held out an answer to the dilemma articulated by an earlier generation of utilitarian reformers who did not trust the reform of society to the poorer classes, and who had unsuccessfully opposed extending the right to vote to these. Eugenics debates emerged in Britain around the time that the franchise was extended to male members of the poorer classes. Eugenic prescriptions allowed for the repackaging of claims that some of the poorer classes were unfit to vote. Yet, at the same time, the extension of the franchise made it difficult to implement policies aimed at curbing the numbers of undesirables. In Britain, eugenics had little political influence. As explained by Bertrand Russell: The ideas of eugenics are based on the assumption that men are unequal, while democracy is based on the assumption that they are equal. It is, therefore, politically very difficult to carry out eugenic ideas in a democratic community when those ideas take the form, not of suggesting that there is a minority of inferior people such as imbeciles, but of admitting that there is a minority of superior people.16 However, in democratic Sweden the case for eugenic population controls won out. As in Britain, some social democrats, though keen to improve the lives of the lower classes, believed that these were not intellectually equipped to make political decisions. Gunnar Myrdal, Sweden’s great technocratic public intellectual, exemplified the kind of progressive elitism that promoted the betterment of the working classes while doubting their fitness to rule. As a young man, he proposed the formation of a ‘party of the intelligent,’ a meritocracy of high-​minded and brilliant men who would manipulate the masses

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and provide rational leadership to a Sweden that had now acquired universal suffrage. The ‘crude masses,’ he argued, had historically been bound by tradition and conservative in their political opinions, but with the expansion of literacy and the decline of religion ‘they had become increasingly “suggestible” and open to manipulation by demagogues.’17 ‘Democratic politics are stupid,’ Myrdal declared, and voters lacked a sense of responsibility. The masses were ‘impervious to rational argument’ and could only be influenced by politicians who made ‘intuitive appeals to emotion.’ The problem would get worse, he warned, with the enactment of women’s suffrage, a development he opposed at the time.18 Men of intelligence would have to learn to speak the language of the masses, ‘to translate the reasonable to the emotional, thought to slogan.’ Myrdal did not abandon his youthful elitism but instead went on to make the case that eugenic social policies were necessary to preserve democracy. Such arguments turned on the proposition that if unfit people were likely to fail democracy, it was time to engineer a new kind of people.19

Reshape the things to come The case for rights to birth control, information about and access to contraception and later to abortion, rested on the belief that such rights were emancipatory. Yet several leading feminists also advocated coercive eugenics policies aimed at preventing unfit women from the lower classes from having children. Birth control was deemed by Annie Besant to be intrinsically eugenic. It would allow ‘fit’ mothers to have fewer but better babies, and it would decrease the numbers of ‘degenerate’ children produced by ‘poor’ mothers. Many pamphlets and books written by the early champions of birth control were aimed at the well-​to-​do classes. However, these also made the case for extreme preventive measures to prevent unfit members of the poorer classes from having children.20 Besants’s The Law of Population (1887) observed that men, women and children who in earlier times would be doomed to death, had their lives prolonged by civilisation. The sickly were now carefully tended in hospitals and were saved by medical skill. The feeble, who once would have been left to starve, were tenderly shielded from hardship. Life’s road had been made smoother for the lame. People lived longer because of efforts to address the causes of preventable disease. Better drainage, better homes, better food and better clothing had reduced many natural checks to population among the comfortable classes.21 The problem, she declared was that the feeble, the deformed and the

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helpless in human society now passed on their disabilities to their offspring. She made the case for using science to reinstate the natural balance observable in the animal kingdom: Scientific checks to population would just do for man what the struggle for existence does for brutes; they enable man to control the production of new human beings; those who suffer from hereditary diseases, who have consumption or insanity in the family, might marry, if they so wished, but would preserve the race from the deterioration which results from propagating disease. The whole of the British race would gain in vigour, in health, in longevity, in beauty, if only healthy parents gave birth to children; at present there is many a sickly family, because sickly persons marry; they revolt against forbiddance of marriage, celibacy being unnatural, and they are taught that ‘the natural consequences’ of marriage must follow.22 The idea that the natural order should be enforced by law and regulations resembled, to some extent, arguments that laissez faire should be imposed by state action to remove traditional institutions which provided social protection within communities. Besant argued that the kinds of moral restraint measures proposed by Malthus to limit population growth –​sexual abstinence and late marriage –​were not feasible. Celibacy, she insisted was ‘not natural to men or to women; all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction.’ Nature had ‘marked celibacy with disapproval’; the average life of the unmarried was shorter than that of the married. Unmarried people, she added, tended to be emotionally disordered, more peevish and more fanciful. It was also the case that blocks on marriage would perpetrate prostitution.23 She argued that the welfare of individuals and society was best served by early marriages and smaller families. Besant argued that contraception was no more unnatural than cooking raw meat or living in houses rather than caves: Raw meant nakedness, living in caves, these are irrational natural habits; cooked food, clothes, houses, these are the rational natural customs. Production of offspring recklessly, carelessly, lustfully, this is irrational nature, and every brute can here outdo us; production of offspring with forethought, earnestness, providence, this is rational nature, where man stands alone.24

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She argued that prudishness and ignorance about sex harmed women. Contraception could lighten the burden of poverty. It was better to ‘rejoice over two healthy, robust, well-​fed children, instead of mourning over seven frail, sickly half-​starved ones.’25 The Law of Population included information on how (then known) contraceptive techniques (condoms and pessaries) worked. It also included a one-​ page advertisement for a pharmacy that sold ‘Malthusian specialities’ in boxes of one dozen, ‘The Wife’s Friend’ soluble pessary, and other products by post. Eugenic ideas, exemplified by Besant’s pamphlet, percolated among social reformers during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. These only came to be institutionalised at the beginning of the twentieth century. Besant was a founding member of the Fabian Society in 1887. Some 15 years later its leading members Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw turned to H.G. Wells, the then most famous popular promoter of eugenics, to boost the profile of the Society. In Anticipations (1901), Wells outlined his vision for a future utopian society which might be achieved through social engineering and eugenics policies that would prevent the procreation of or, in some cases, bring about the death of those unfit to be part of his envisaged New Republic.26 Wells’s polemic is significant because its popularity highlighted the acceptability of eugenics ideas even before the establishment of the British Eugenics Society in 1907 and of similar bodies in other countries. Anticipations made an extreme case for measures that were enthusiastically debated, if only partially implemented in democratic countries. Eugenic societies were established in Germany (from 1905), New Zealand (1911), the United States (1911), the Netherlands (1912), Sweden (1910) and Australia (1913). International eugenics congresses were first held in Dresden (1911), London (1912) and New York (1921). The first professorship in eugenics was established at the University of London in 1911.27 Attempts to institutionalise negative eugenics generally coincided with the emergence of welfare states with ministries of health or equivalent infrastructure that allowed for the monitoring of the so-​called feebleminded in schools, hospitals and prisons.28 In the United States, human sterilisation was first used as a form of punishment for crimes such as prostitution. The first eugenic sterilisation bill in the United States was introduced in 1897 in the State of Michigan. This was not passed into law. However, by the end of the nineteenth century the practice of (illegally) sterilising ‘feeble minded and idiot’ inmates had been documented in Kansas and Indiana. Sterilisation laws first were passed in Indiana in 1907 (for the

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prevention of the procreation of ‘confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’) and in several other states (California, Washington and Connecticut) by 1909. In all, a total of 27 states passed such laws.29 Wells, writing in a context where famine was no longer feared, seemed to relish the extinction of the unfit. He professed little doubt that in the future the euthanasia of ‘the weak and the sensual’ could be achieved. Wells declared that the belief in human equality which was implicit in all the liberalising movements of the world had been ‘destroyed, quietly but entirely’ by acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection: It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is a thing of the past, it is no longer a doctrine, but a faction. There must follow some new-​born thing.30 Wells declared that in his new republic the death of the unfit would be viewed as ‘the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.’31 A review of Anticipations in the scientific journal Nature considered that even those readers who might be offended by what Wells had written could not but be impressed by his ‘unsparing analysis’ and by book’s ‘spirit of hope and belief in future development.’32 The leader of the Fabian Society Sidney Webb declared Anticipations to be his favourite book of the year. Beatrice Webb described it as the most remarkable one, and as the work of ‘a powerful imagination furnished with the data and methods of physical science working on social problems.’33 The Webbs and George Bernard Shaw were anxious to recruit the hugely popular novelist and their campaign to do so took several months to succeed.

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Shaw’s play Man and Superman (1903) was published with a pamphlet, attributed to a character in the play, which argued that it was futile to breed men for special qualities like greyhounds for speed because it was impossible to foresee what the qualities of the supermen of the future would be. He argued that, except in the unlikely event that socialism could impose equality upon society, any policy of sexual selection (determining who should be allowed to breed or not) would most likely fail to improve the human race. Unlike Wells, Shaw was sceptical of negative eugenics. He considered that many of the claims put forward by Wells in support of sterilisation and euthanasia were based upon unconvincing science as well as dubious morality. However, Shaw maintained that such improvement was a goal worth striving for. He advocated establishing a government department of evolution to study ways of creating the ‘Superman.’ He recommended that women who managed to produce healthy citizens by careful selection of the fathers of their children be rewarded by the state. He also suggested that the War Office could employ women to marry suitable soldiers or that a local government by-​law might direct that women might have a year’s maternity leave under certain circumstances.34 The progressive idea here, the use of allowances paid by the state to prevent child poverty, was also put forward by Wells and was integral to subsequent positive eugenic proposals in Britain, Sweden and elsewhere. The argument that the unfit should not benefit from such measures or that instead they should be sterilised so as not to produce burdensome children was also widely advocated. Wells became a member of the Fabian Society in 1903 but was too much of an intellectual gadfly to influence the movement. With an imagination that fired on all cylinders, he never managed the political consistency of its ideologues. However, he shared its passion for elite-​driven social reform. In a 1899 interview he declared that democracy had reached its limits (as long as the general public remained uneducated) and that, henceforth, power would flow towards skilled managers and engineers.35 In novels and short stories that imagined the shape of things to come, he depicted the marvels that technocratic elites might produce, as well as dystopias that might result from their hubris. This was his saving grace and explains why several of his science fiction novels, if not his political writings, are still admired. In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells backtracked some of the way from his advocacy of euthanasia: ‘There would be no killing, no lethal chambers. No doubt Utopia will kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births.’ The way of nature was ‘to kill the weaker and the sillier, to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them,

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using the stronger and more cunning as her weapon.’ But humans were unnatural animals who would stand no longer for ‘the failures’ of the human race to suffer. His utopia would not, however, permit the reproduction of inferior types.36 It would impose competition to determine who was to prevail and multiply and those incompetent low-​grade men who would be, as he put it, pushed to the edge: its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, people who were too stupid to be of use to the community.37 The unfit and the incorrigible would be exiled to remote islands that were segregated by gender where, ‘most of them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of the world of prigs’ they could do anything they liked except have children.38 A New Utopia was not without its flashes of humour but Wells was adamant that his ideal society could not be run along democratic lines. His ‘sound and happy World State’ was to be ruled by an aesthetic caste of benevolent administrators, the Samurai. It was partly from these that Aldous Huxley derived the technocratic caste of Alphas who administered the world government depicted in his novel Brave New World (1932). In Wells’s utopia every citizen who made the grade would be properly housed and well nourished. The state would act as the reserve employer and maintain a minimum wage which would cover the cost of a decent life. A Modern Utopia took readers on a tour of a borderless world where people moved around a lot and stayed in hostels that resembled, more than a little, the parallelograms proposed a century earlier by Robert Owen. Wells described these as five-​story quadrangles where people would take their meals in common and where the autonomy of the family had been reduced far below what was common in the real world.39 It reiterated proposals from Anticipations for birth control and responsible family planning and proposed that young children be raised in kindergartens rather than at home by their parents. In Wells’s utopia, the state would be ‘the reserve guardian of all children.’ If they were undernourished, if their education was being neglected, the state would step in, take over the responsibility of their management, and require parents to pay the cost of this care.40 He put forward similar proposals in subsequent publications. In Socialism and the Family (1907), Wells envisaged a ‘sane and organised state,’ organised along middle-​ class principles in which bad parents would be punished but where responsible ones who reared healthy children on behalf of the state would receive financial support.41 In a 1910 essay, published in the Eugenics Review, Sidney Webb claimed that the nation was breeding from its inferior stock because the existing Poor Laws subsidised ‘the reproduction of mental moral

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and physical defectives’ and it discouraged ‘the thrifty from undertaking the responsibilities of parentage.’42 He complained that the existing Poor Laws did not even try to check the continued procreation of uncertified mentally defective persons and that the system offered free maternity care to feeble-​minded women or women who were morally and mentally degenerate.43 He further argued that the Poor Law system failed in such cases because such persons were incapable of feeling the sense of stigma that workhouses were designed to produce. Webb, like Wells, argued for a more generous approach to the welfare of healthy mothers and babies to prevent these from being dissuaded from having children while, at the same time, taking ‘steps to prevent the continued procreation of the feeble-​minded at the public expense.’ He proposed handing the care of the whole of this class over to a separate government department for the mentally defective and advocated that this be given the power to segregate the unfit from the rest of the population.44 Webb enthusiastically advocated making negative eugenics integral to social engineering. In short, the ‘survival of the fittest’ in an environment unfavourable to progress may –​as every biologist knows –​mean the survival of the lowest parasite. It is accordingly our business, as eugenicists, deliberately to manipulate the environment so that the survivors may be the type we regard as the highest. Our judgement may conceivably be wrong, but if we are to do anything we can only follow it … No consistent eugenicist can be a ‘Laisser Faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!45 Michael Burleigh’s description of the early British eugenics movement as a coalition of ‘people with an uninhibited loathing of the poor’ and ‘those who regarded themselves as the vanguard of progressive opinion’ hardly appears to be an exaggeration.46 Yet, like racism and anti-​immigrant sentiment then and since, antipathy towards eugenic undesirables could be presented as reasonable concern. The lurid writings of Wells and some of his contemporaries, no less that their equivalents in our present time, coexisted with the expression of similar ideas using more moderate language. By the early twentieth century, birth control gained support largely as a tool of selective population control aimed at improving the quality of the race –​a term then used interchangeably with nation –​rather than as a women’s rights issue, even if many of the leading champions

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of contraception were women. For example, claims that the well-​ to-​do and the well-​behaved tended to have fewer children than the disreputable classes gave rise to anxiety about what Marie Stopes, the hugely influential champion of birth control, called ‘racial disease’ and others thought of as ‘national decay.’47 By the beginning of the twentieth century, eugenics theories had become integral to feminist thought in Britain and Germany as well as implicit within social policy debates in these and other countries.48 This could be seen from the writings of the two most influential advocates of birth control, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes. Sanger was an American midwife whose pamphlet Family Limitation (1914) argued for ‘sound and sane’ birth control education to both conserve the lives of mothers and to prevent the birth of diseased and defective children.49 She fled the United States to England to avoid prosecution for promoting contraception, where she met Stopes, who organised a campaign in her support that included H.G. Wells and other prominent British progressives. Stopes was a scientist and university lecturer whose academic research focused on paleobiology before she became best known as an advocate for birth control. In 1912 she became a member of the Eugenic Education Society in London.50 She became internationally prominent following the publication of her international bestseller Married Love (1918), which included a chapter on contraception. In the aftermath of the First World War Stopes and Sanger led similar campaigns for eugenic birth control in Britain and the United States, which were emulated by likeminded reformers in Australia.51 In 1916 Sanger cofounded the first birth control clinic in the United States, which evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation. In Woman and the New Race (1920) she called upon the female ‘creators of over-​population’ to remake the world by taking charge of birth control. Sanger argued that women were oppressed by their ignorance of their own reproductive systems and by their unwillingness to use birth control to attain their basic freedom.52 Women, she argued, had always sought to limit their fertility in order to prevent their lives and those of their families from becoming unbearable. Where women had no recourse to contraception, they either sought abortions or children that could not be cared for were abandoned. In the least developed (she used the term ‘savage’) societies where neither abortion nor contraception was accessible, infanticide had long been practised by the most desperate. Even though abortion was illegal, she argued that millions of procedures were performed annually for want of effective contraception.53

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Sanger argued that a majority of American families subsisted on incomes so low that these lived on ‘the ragged edge of hunger from week to week and month to month’, unable to afford to keep their children in education or feed them adequately.54 She also claimed that a large proportion of the feebleminded were ‘notoriously prolific in reproduction.’55 She attributed feeblemindness to being born into large impoverished families in slum conditions. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and institution for the feebleminded cried out ‘against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage workers.’56 In a chapter titled ‘The Wickedness of Creating Large Families’ Sanger argued that ‘there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders.’57 More generally, she emphasised the burdens of poverty when poor families became too large: ‘the broken lives of overworked fathers,’ ‘the ceaseless, increasing pain of overburdened mothers’ and ‘the agony of childhood fighting its way against the handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, inadequate training and stifling toil.’58 She argued that most women in the middle and upper classes in America had knowledge about and access to contraceptives as a means of birth control even if this knowledge was imparted illegally and illicitly. However, most women belonged to the working classes, and without access to contraception, many were forced to have children against their will or ‘find refuge in abortion.’59 In Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who Are Creating the Future (1920) Stopes protested that ‘Society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feebleminded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped and inferior infants.’ These were ‘doomed from their very physical inheritance to be at the best but partly self-​supporting, and thus to drain the resources of those classes above them which have a sense of responsibility.’60 Stopes advocated the introduction of laws to ‘ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.’61 Stopes argued that government policies should encourage parenthood for those who would produce ‘healthy, well-​endowed future citizens,’ while discouraging all those who would ‘make probable the introduction of weakened, diseased or debased future citizens.’ Women who took responsible control of their fertility would be ‘eugenic mothers.’ Once they knew their own power there would be ‘only fine and beautiful young people’ produced by ‘conscious, powerful, voluntary mothers’ and the evolution of humanity would ‘take a leap forward.’62

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While Stopes’ books were written for the middle classes, her emphasis on negative eugenics was directed against the poorer classes. In Wise Parenthood she claimed that: ‘’The thriftless who breed so rapidly tend by that very fact to bring forth children who are weakened and handicapped by physical as well as mental warping and weakness.’63 Her zeal for sterilisation extended to those who would engage in inter-​racial marriages. In a 1934 interview she stated that she believed that ‘half-​castes’ should be sterilised at birth.64 Stopes received and responded to thousands of letters from parents seeking advice about sex or childrearing. In 1924 a deaf and dumb father of four deaf children wrote asking for help in getting his son admitted to a special school. Her response criticised the man and his wife for failing in their duty to the community in having children. On the same day she wrote a letter of complaint to the chaplain of the Royal Association of the Deaf and Dumb complaining that ‘two defectives, both brought up at public expense’ were permitted to produce four ‘defectives’ also at public expense. The chaplain, who had recommended places in the school for these children replied: ‘Ought I, then, to have recommended the lethal chamber?’65 Stopes’ support for sterilisation was not sufficiently shared in Britain to become the subject of legislation even though such laws were passed in a number of other countries. Enthusiasm for eugenics lent itself to comedy and satire, most notably in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Rose Macauley’s comic novel What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1919), a template for Huxley’s book. What Not, written shortly before Gunnar Myrdal called for a party of the intelligent, was set in a near future where the British government’s Ministry of Brains was responsible for eugenics policies and propaganda. Sixteen years earlier in Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw had proposed a similar department of evolution, and in 1910, Sidney Webb called for the establishment of a department to take responsibility for the mentally defective. In Macauley’s novel Nicholas Chester, the earnest Minister of Brains falls in love with Kitty Grammont a civil servant who works on propaganda campaigns. She is transferred to a new branch of the Ministry which deals with abandoned uncertified babies. When asked what happens to these babies by a friend who is a new mother, Kitty responds that she couldn’t possibly say but that her friend wouldn’t like to know the answer to her question. The inference was that unfit children were euthanised. At the end of a church service the congregation sing a hymn composed by the Brains Ministry and take up a collection for the education of imbeciles. Citizens are exhorted by

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state propaganda to become more efficient and to improve their minds and they are only permitted to marry, as proposed in Wells’s A Modern Utopia, if they are certified as mentally fit to do so. The efforts of the Ministry come unstuck following a scandal in which Nicholas, who married Kitty in secret, is revealed to be uncertified for matrimony because his sister has a mental disability. The media then turn against government eugenics policies and thousands of angry citizens march in protest. Careers and ideals lie in ruins and the Ministry of Brains is no more.66 For all that Britain was the initial hotbed of eugenic thought, and for all that this came to be reflected within social policy debates and institutions, the legal application of such ideas stalled before the First World War. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act did not approve the sterilisation of so-​called mental defectives and it did not pave the way for further negative eugenic law making in Britain, even if the case for such laws remained intellectually credible there.67 However, it did allow for the segregation of mental defectives. Subsequent efforts to widen the definition of these to include habitual criminals and other social undesirables and to permit their sterilisation were rejected by parliament.68

The crowbar of social reform In Population: A Problem for Democracy (1940) Gunnar Myrdal described the population question as ‘the crowbar of social reform’ because it became, during the 1930s, a lever for winning support from conservatives for social democratic policies. These, he claimed, came to be convinced that their concerns about the decline of the family and social cohesion could only be addressed by means of state interventions.69 Arguments that pronatalist social policies could prevent the need for large-​scale immigration from non-​Scandinavian countries also proved effective in winning support for these. As put in a speech by Minister of Social Affairs Gustav Möller, the Minister of Social Affairs responsible for the drafting of eugenic legislation: ‘I do not hesitate to scare as many right-​wing men, as many Agrarians, and as many People’s Party supporters as I can with the threat of our people’s imminent disappearance, if that is what makes them vote in favour of the social policies I propose.’70 Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, in their writings about the population question, similarly warned that the People’s Home would become the home of immigrant people unless it could arrest the decline of its native population. They argued that large numbers of working-​class immigrants from outside Scandinavia

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would be difficult to assimilate. Swedish workers, they predicted, would oppose immigration as an attempt by Swedish employers to decrease wages.71 It has been suggested that some feminists used eugenic arguments for tactical reasons, in order to lend scientific legitimacy to their political demands. But the fact that these were (or seemed) politically useful does not mean that they did not also express sincere conviction.72 Similarly, some leading Swedish social democrats like Alva and Gunnar Myrdal championed eugenics as the solution to social problems with a degree of certainty that is difficult retrospectively to understand. Both were convinced of the benefits of eugenics to social democracy. But how could they have been so certain, their daughter Sissel Bok wondered in her 1992 biography of her mother, of the claims they put forward during the 1930s to justify negative eugenics? She recalled her father as an intellectual elitist who was certain of his scientific objectivity.73 Nowhere, perhaps, did modernist optimism remain such a driving force of social policy for so long as in Sweden. Many Swedish intellectuals and pundits came to view their country as the most advanced and as having the world’s most progressive social policies.74 The Myrdals were, as another biographer put it, ‘prototypical rationalist social engineers, who were certain about how things ought to be and about how a life should be lived.’75 Yet both spent their young adulthood during the 1920s stumbling towards the feminist values they would insist were integral to social democracy. In 1922 Gunnar declared that he did not believe that most women should be permitted to graduate from university or to work alongside men after they were married.76 A decade later they both argued for social reforms that would give women the choice to do otherwise and compensate them economically if they decided to have children. The driving influence here most likely came from Alva Myrdal who was a sociologist, child psychologist and became winner of the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize for subsequent work with the United Nations.77 Gunnar Myrdal shared his 1974 Nobel Prize for Economics with Friedrich von Hayek but his self-​declared vocation during the 1930s was for social engineering. Eugenics alongside economic policy were part of his toolkit for furthering social democracy in Sweden.78 Swedish historians have focused considerably on the development of the welfare state as the key factor which bound the nation together, and accounts of its development have emphasised a history of consensus, compromise and national unity.79 In such accounts the publication of Alva and Gunner Myrdal’s Kris I befolkingsfragan (1934), which translates as Crisis in the Population Question came to be regarded as a seminal event

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in the establishment of the Swedish welfare state.80 Their joint manifesto emphasised the centrality of family social policy to the Swedish welfare state and championed both positive and negative eugenics. The Crisis in the Population Question was mostly concerned with arresting population decline. Before the First World War, some 130,000 children had been born each year in Sweden. By 1926 this had fallen to just over 100,000 and by 1933 had declined to 85,000.81 The book presented a social democratic programme to reverse Sweden’s declining birth rate. In essence, it linked the case for social democracy to the survival of the nation by offering supports to families (pronatalism) which would encourage them to have more children. Laws against contraception were still on the books but evidently many Swedes across the social spectrum practised contraception, and abortions were also widespread.82 The Myrdals argued that the low birth rate was a rational response to economic insecurity and that if people could anticipate more employment, income and housing security, they would have more children. The emphasis on pronatalism articulated by the Myrdals chimed with the Swedish folkhemmet ideology. The Myrdals advocated social policies aimed at encouraging women to have more high-​quality children. These included better public housing, state-​provision of childcare to enable women who had become mothers to remain in paid employment, while also arguing that the unfit should be discouraged from giving birth. They argued that the handicapped were less likely to find niches in which they could contribute to the community in a modern industrial society than in the old peasant society.83 They concluded that the nuclear family that had come to replace the older extended rural kind was in many respects unviable. The industrial revolution had ‘burst apart the old unity of the village, kin and family’ and ‘had made individuals more lonely’ while also ‘driven them to a heightened individualism in their social and moral attitudes.’84 Much of the sociological argument in their joint book was Alva’s. Her own 1941 book Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (1941) attributed the crisis of the Swedish family to the industrial revolution.85 In rural society, she claimed, the mother of small children was not isolated. Peasant society, she argued, had not been as inhospitable to children or their mothers as the one that replaced it. Modern society was fundamentally inhospitable to children and her own experience was that being a mother was a lonely business.86 The reasons for deferring having children, she argued, included ‘psychological insecurity, discomfort and economy.’ What she meant by psychological insecurity, she emphasised, was the

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product of modernity: ‘The very fact that the individual is considered more directly responsible for success and failure in an individualistic, competitive and non-​religious society than formally makes him more inclined to seek the security he can guarantee himself.’87 Both argued that the situation of small modern families where a woman stayed at home to devote herself to the care of one or two children was ‘almost pathological’ and ‘utterly absurd.’ It led to overprotected children and unhappy marriages. Parents needed to put their children into day care centres where they would be able to interact with other children. A new kind of family based on equality between the sexes and a greater sense of social responsibility could be integrated into a democratic socialist society.88 The Myrdals argued that a decreasing birth rate had to be actively fought with what Gunnar called ‘prophylactic’ welfare measures. The prophylactic solution was a preventive social policy, based on large-​ scale structural changes in the areas of housing, health care, childcare, family planning and education. Ultimately, radical changes in the area of social policy would help to raise productivity as the quality of the population increased and the costs to society of poverty, unemployment and criminality decreased.89 The Myrdal’s in Crisis in the Population Question wrote that modern industrial society demanded a higher quality of ‘human material’ than life on the farm had required. It was necessary to think about how it might be possible to ‘root out all types of physical and mental inferiority within the population, both the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, the genetically defective and persons of bad character.’90 They advocated that feeble-​minded persons who were unable to care properly for their children be subject to voluntary sterilisation. And if it turned out that if pressure was needed to get them to do so then ‘a sharpening of the law ought to be considered, giving the authorities of the society the right to sterilise even against their will persons with legal competence.’91 They argued that the state had a right to impose forced sterilisation and that sterilisation should be mandatory for persons incapable of making a rational decision. They discussed whether various medical conditions rendered people affected by these as valueless or not. For example, they acknowledged that too little was known about the causes of schizophrenia to warrant compulsory sterilisation and that manic depression did not make those affected ‘unequivocally valueless.’ However, they insisted that there were thousands of people with environmentally-​caused mental illnesses and social problems who would not make good parents. Such persons should be strongly advised by doctors and social workers to undergo

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voluntary sterilisation. They proposed that the state should provide free contraception and abortion to such ‘undesirable parents.’92 In the aftermath of their 1934 book both Myrdals (but especially Gunnar) wrote much about how The Crisis of the Population Question had exerted a seminal influence on Swedish social policy. They and others credited their 1934 book with shifting political attitudes. The Social Democrat government used the public debate that occurred in the wake of their bestseller to promote its programme of public housings, social welfare and eugenics.93 Sweden’s history of eugenics laws preceded the championing of such measures by the Myrdals. But due to their influence, Alva Myrdal claimed in in her 1941 book Nation and Family, ‘the need for sterilisation on social grounds gained momentum.’94 Legislation passed in 1915 had prohibited those suffering from a mental illness or epilepsy from lawfully marrying.95 A Sterilisation Act, passed in 1934, had coincided with the publication of The Crisis of the Population Question. This Act permitted eugenic sterilisation on social, humanitarian or criminal grounds in some circumstances. Social grounds were defined as those who where psychologically, physically or morally inferior individuals not suited to care for children. In 1941 this Act was extended to give doctors, teachers and other officials greater powers to authorise ‘voluntary’ sterilisations. It added further legal grounds for sterilisation including alcoholism.96 Officials were empowered to determine that somebody had consented voluntarily to sterilisation. Anything above a 10 per cent risk of inheritable mental defect or above 1.5 per cent risk of some kinds of physical disability was deemed as grounds for sterilisation. Epileptics were prohibited from marrying unless they submitted to sterilisation. Both the 1934 and 1941 Acts required that sterilisations be voluntary, but in practice, voluntarism was defined by the consent of officials who acted as legal guardians. Coercive or involuntary sterilisation occurred in many cases where those who were sterilised did not have an intellectual impairment. Powers to enforce sterilisation laws were given to doctors, judges and school headmistresses. The vast majority of those who were sterilised were female.97 Coercive or involuntary sterilisation often involved deception (performing the procedure during the course of another medical operation), under pressure (offering sterilisation was a condition of parole or release from an institution), threats (of the withdrawal of social benefits) lying about the procedure (telling the victim that it was reversible or pressing it upon somebody who had not sought it). Women were the main victims in all this. Alleged promiscuous

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sexual behaviour, negligent childcare or even untidiness or sloppiness were deemed to be grounds for sterilisation. The rationale for these sterilisations was not based on eugenic factors. Rather, the aim was to eliminate asocial behaviour thought to be socially hereditary.98 Between 1935 and 1975 some 62,888 sterilisations were performed. Many, if not most, of these were coercive. The 1934 and 1941 legislation gave wide-​ranging powers to medical and social welfare officials to pass judgement on patients and clients over which they had authority.99 For example, in 1943 a teenage girl, Maria Nordin, had her ovaries removed on the instructions of the headmistress and consulting physician at a reform school for girls on the grounds that ‘she was said to suffer from genetic inferiority that, in the interests of the Swedish welfare state, was best not passed on to offspring.’ As a child she had fallen behind at school and was assumed incorrectly to have sub-​normal intelligence. In fact, she was near-​sighted; the school doctor who classified her as feebleminded had not checked her eyes.100 Very little of what the Myrdals advocated was original to them. For all that, their 1934 book struck a resounding chord with the Swedish zeitgeist and great claims were made by the Myrdals themselves about the extent of their influence. The Crisis in the Population Question articulated ideas that had been written about for decades in Britain and elsewhere, that had become something of an orthodoxy among social reformers in several countries. For example, in a 1934 article ‘What Is Happening to Our Population?’ Aldous Huxley called for positive measures to encourage the professional classes to have larger families while advocating negative eugenic measures, including sterilisation, to discourage the procreation of the unfit. Without such measures, Huxley claimed, a quarter of the population would in the future come to consist of halfwits. There was a simple way, Huxley declared, ‘of limiting the multiplication of sub-​normal stocks’: ‘certified defectives can be sterilized.’101 In his 1934 article he declared that it would be impossible for democratic institutions to survive where an increasing percentage of the population was mentally defective. Halfwits voted for dictators. If the average intelligence of the population could be increased then democratic government would have a future.102 Huxley’s celebrated novel Brave New World depicts what has come to be called a dystopia or what its author called a bad utopia. It imagined a future in which the kind of world state advocated by H.G. Wells was run by a caste of genetically-​bred brainy technocrats.103 Huxley’s own family history suggested that preoccupations with eugenics could be inheritable. His grandfather, T.H. Huxley, a biologist who once

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described himself as Darwin’s bulldog, taught elementary biology and zoology to H.G. Wells in 1884.104 The novelist’s brother Julian was a prominent evolutionary biologist and a member of the British Eugenics Society. Between 1925 and 1929 Wells collaborated with Julian Huxley on a multi-​volume textbook The Science of Life, which covered theories of evolution and what was then known about genetics.105 Wells, according to Huxley, had by then forgotten most of what he had learnt about biology during the 1880s.106 Julian Huxley was an early prominent critic of the racial pseudoscience taught in German universities and schools after Hitler’s rise to power.107 He distinguished what he saw as a socially progressive and humane approach to eugenics from the policies of the Nazis. Yet in 1934, he too argued that there was an overwhelming case for legalising sterilisation in the United Kingdom.108

Two dogs, different tales While the Eugenics Society remained an influential social science forum for several decades after its foundation in 1907, its political influence perhaps peaked with the passing of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Aims to widen the remit of this legislation met political pushback led by the Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood, who later became a member of the Labour Party. The horrible ‘Eugenics Society,’ Wedgewood proclaimed, was attempting ‘to breed up the working class as though they were cattle.’ He opposed the proposed incarceration of people who had committed no crime on the authority of medical specialists who might be proven wrong in their theories a few years later.109 As he put this, a letter published in The Nation, a prominent liberal periodical which opposed the proposed legislation: ‘At this stage of knowledge, one may not be unreasonable in thinking that there is less danger to society, present and future, in the marriage of the feeble-​ minded than in the tyranny of those experts who would force them to unwilling chastity for the sake of a scientific creed, which in ten years may be discredited.’110 The debate surrounding the 1913 Act revealed a profound distrust of eugenics within British politics, which did not change subsequently.111 In Britain and in other democratic countries eugenics came to be intellectually challenged by arguments that social problems could be better explained in terms of environmental factors rather than by biological ones. In Britain, if not in Sweden, eugenics orthodoxies were ripe for challenge. Biological explanations of social behaviour had come to be ‘tainted with the brush of German National Socialism,’ but

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it was also the case that mass unemployment during the 1930s could hardly be credibly explained in such terms. In a 1936 speech the then-​ president of the Eugenics Society, Lord Horder, described the conflict as one between ‘environmentalist desires to make fit homes for heroes to live in’ and ‘eugenicist desires to make the heroes.’112 Richard Titmuss, Britain’s closest equivalent to Gunnar Myrdal and a member of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1973, influentially emphasised the need to focus on environmental and social conditions.113 In a 1944 paper delivered to the Society he argued that the Victorian age during which eugenics theories had emerged had been an age of uncompromising judgements when discoveries in the field of human biology were converted into immutable laws. When Galton undertook his pioneering work on heredity during the 1880s and 1890s much of Britain’s population lived in appalling environmental conditions. These, Titmuss emphasised, were not considered when early eugenicists made their pronouncements about the biologically-​ unfit lower classes. Presumptions made about the unfit had swept up others whose behaviour and circumstances owed more to prevailing social conditions: We know that mental defectives, whether their condition is genetical or the result of an acquired disease, cannot be desirable parents; and we believe that they, as well as persons suffering from a few serious and fortunately rare hereditary diseases, should be relieved of the burden of their fertility. But what can we know in the vastly unequal opportunities offered by a highly stratified society, of the biological endowment and potentialities of the great masses of our fellow men?114 If the aim was to reap a richer human harvest, it was not sufficient to weed out the demonstrably unfit; it was necessary to look equally to the improvement of the social environment. Titmuss initially came to prominence as a statistician who studied fertility rates. He worked his way into academia from the insurance industry through joining the Eugenics Society. He had left school at 14 and had never attended university. Many of the great and the good of the London School Economics, where Titmuss obtained a professorship in 1950, were also members of the Eugenics Society. He became editor of the Eugenics Review in 1942 and understood his role as being the rehabilitation of eugenics from the taint of Nazi pseudoscience or, as he put it, to restate eugenic principles in contemporary terms (‘which

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would mean emphasising far more than we did in the past the eugenic significance of nutritional and other environmental factors’).115 Or as put by his daughter, the sociologist Ann Oakley, he ‘helped dig the British eugenics movement out of the nasty hole of its association with German national socialism.’116 The Eugenics Society part-​funded the publication of Poverty and Population (1938) in which Titmuss concluded that child mortality rates were more influenced by environmental factors than hereditary ones. He argued, using data from the north of England and Wales, that some 55,000 preventable child deaths had occurred during the previous decade as a result of poor housing conditions and poor nutrition resulting from poverty.117 In effect, he argued that environmental factors beyond the control of individuals experiencing poverty outweighed any possible eugenic explanations of their circumstances. The book and many subsequent writings were aimed at an audience of academics and policy makers who had come to accept deterministic eugenics explanations for the persistence of chronic poverty.118 Science as well as political expediency contributed to the more hostile environment eugenics had to contend with. For example, J.B.S. Haldane, a pioneer of genetics and Eugenics Society member, argued that much eugenics theory was unscientific in its claim to be able to disentangle nature from nurture in explaining social phenomena. In Heredity and Politics (1938) Haldane gave the example of two dogs born with short legs, one because of a vitamin deficient diet and the other because its father was a dachshund.119 Like the Myrdals, Titmuss and his wife Kathleen co-​authored a book on the population question. In Parents Revolt (1942) they argued that ‘an undue proportion of children’ were being ‘raised in homes least equipped to produce healthy, alert, informed and courageous citizens.’120 However, they disagreed with the determinism of Victorian eugenicists like Galton who still intellectually dominated the British movement. They argued that the extent to which eugenics theory was true could not be known until environmental conditions affecting health were equalised.121 Negative eugenics came to be judged as unfit within British social policy debates. Titmuss’s writings on the history of social policy came to emphasise the role of common sense understandings that the fitness of the general population had much to do with adequate housing, diet and education. The terminology of eugenics had never been needed to communicate these ideas. He argued that modern European nation states, locked into industrial and military competition, became increasingly concerned about the biological

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quality of potential military recruits. And as twentieth-​century wars came potentially to involve entire populations, attention shifted from the physical and psychological health of enlisted personnel to the wider population. The issue wasn’t just whether soldiers were strong enough to fight but whether they were physically and psychologically fit for service in militaries and navies increasingly subject to a division of labour. Medical innovations that began within military settings were subsequently expanded to the wider population. For example, Florence Nightingale introduced trained medics during the mid-​ nineteenth century Crimea War. To give another example, psychiatry expanded in the United States in part because of the role psychiatrists came to play in war efforts. By the beginning of the twentieth century, concern about the standards of fitness of men of military age came to be extended to the wider population, especially to children –​the next generation of recruits.122 In Anticipations (1901), Wells had declared that future wars and competition between nations would be won by those with the best-​ educated and most eugenically fit population: The nation that produces in the near future the largest proportional development of educated and the intelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters, professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts; the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss.123 What occurred instead was the extension of health care and other services with the aim of making the unfit healthier and fitter. During the First World War, according to Titmuss, the establishment of free health services offered universally to soldiers and civilians who had contracted venereal disease became a building block of Britain’s subsequent National Health Service. The phrase ‘C3 nation’ crept into British journalism after a 1919 Report of the Ministry of National Service stated that only one man in three of nearly two-​and-​a-​half million examined was completely fit for military service. Most of these men, according to a 1954 report (by which time these men would have been in their 60s), were forced to retire from work today on grounds of ill health.124 In essence, Titmuss argued that the development of social policy owed much to how far the cooperation of the masses was essential to the successful prosecution of war. If this cooperation is thought to be essential, then inequalities had to be reduced and the pyramid of social stratification had to be flattened.125

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In Sweden it was not until the 1970s that coercive sterilisation policies were quietly abandoned. By the 1990s there had been a revisionist backlash against the sanctification of the Myrdals and of the valorisation of the social democratic project more generally. The role of forced sterilisation within Swedish social engineering came under retrospective scrutiny.126 Elsewhere and long before then, the language of eugenics had fallen out of favour, but its underlying assumptions found ongoing expression in debates about intelligence testing. During the early 1900s eugenicists had sought to develop statistical methods which would enable them to substantiate their claims and they settled on a system of standardised intelligence testing, devised by Alfred Binet, colloquially known as IQ. Binet’s test was devised with the sole aim of identifying French children with intellectual disabilities so that they could obtain extra help in school. It was adapted in the United States by Henry Goddard, a professor of clinical psychology, into a system for classifying the so-​c alled feebleminded. Goddard was preoccupied with preventing morons (a term he used to denote adults with mental ages of between eight and 12) from reproducing because of the ease with which they could pass for normal.127 The main premise of Goddard and his successors was that measured intelligence (IQ) was largely inherited and that socioeconomic success or failure were largely genetically caused. Such claims turned on assertions that high IQ scores correlated with high educational attainment and incomes while low scores correlated with criminality and social failure.128 IQ and psychometric testing became widely used in the United States and it was viewed by American corporations as a tool for promoting meritocracy.129 Claims that IQ tests accurately distinguished between the intellectually fit and unfit and that society was being undermined by social policies that enabled the unfit, or the underclass as these came to be called, have remained prominent in the United States. Notably, in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray contended that there were racial and ethnic differences in average IQs and that such differences partly explained why African Americans fared worse economically than white Americans.130 Their justifications for such claims appear to have been bound up with an unwillingness to consider other explanations for high levels of inequality. While eugenics debates were harnessed by social democrats and others who advocated state-​led social reform, IQ debates have been used in the United States by libertarians and laissez faire liberals to justify the socioeconomic status quo. Murray and others on the

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right used IQ differences to make the case for punitive social policies aimed at discouraging intergenerational welfare dependency by the so-​called underclass. The notion that IQ tests offer a sound basis for understanding social inequalities was discredited by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mis-​Measure of Man (1981), a critique of statistical methods and cultural presumptions underlying biological determinism, in this specific case the belief that overall intelligence levels within racial and ethnic groups are inheritable. Gould argued that there is no such thing as a direct test of general mental ability.131 IQ tests measure particular cognitive skills: size of vocabulary, degree of reading comprehension, facility with analogies, and so on. IQ scores clearly tell us something of genuine importance about mental ability because they measure cognitive skills rather than provide a proxy of underlying ability. But it makes less sense to think of intelligence as a single entity –​to imagine that complex human beings can each be reduced to a single numerical score –​that can be measured in all its aspects and ranked on a gradually ascending scale. Gould has argued that The Bell Curve contained no new arguments and presents no compelling data. It merely reworked earlier arguments for biological determinism, which Gould described as: ‘the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups are innately inferior and deserve their status.’132 Sociologists who study racism and inequalities experienced on the basis of social class, find that these are reproduced from generation to generation even in education systems that are supposed to be meritocratic. Instead of language derived from eugenics, some use concepts like cultural capital to mean not just cognitive abilities or skills but meaningful access to resources or rights that enable people to make the best use of these.133 In European countries, unlike the United States, IQ is rarely invoked to explain educational failure or unemployment. Rather the focus has been on environmental factors which could be ameliorated through social policies and economic redistribution. Gunnar Myrdal reached a similar conclusion when confronted with the extreme environmental differences experienced by Black and White Americans due to racism and discrimination. While he believed that eugenics policies might conceivably benefit black Americans, he also maintained that these could not be applied until environmental conditions were more equalised. In An American Dilemma: The Negro

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Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) he argued that the majority of White Americans desired that there be as few Black people as possible in America, a claim that uncomfortably echoed the genocidal perversion of eugenic ideas in Nazi Germany. Only in the absence of racism and discrimination could a scientific case for negative eugenics be made.134

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8

The rise of neoliberalism The original intellectual champions of neoliberalism subscribed to an implicit utopian vision where the best of all possible worlds would be one without borders to trade or barriers to the ongoing division of labour and where global peace and prosperity would be spontaneously fostered by economic interdependencies. Neoliberalism emerged in opposition to left and right forms of totalitarianism and isolationism from the 1930s. It was also borne out of claims that the road to a collectivist hell in democratic countries was being paved with the good intentions of liberal reformers and social democrats. For left critics, neoliberalism came to be seen as a licence for the exploitation of the working classes, for the hollowing out of the middle classes and for the wanton destruction of social cohesion. Thatcherism and Reganomics became watchwords for cuts in public services, deliberately-​fostered inequalities and rapacious capitalism. If Friedrich Hayek had not called his 1944 neoliberal polemic The Road to Serfdom, it would have made a good title for a treatise that considered anxieties about free market capitalism from any other perspective. The focus of this chapter is on the emergence of the intellectual case for neoliberalism both before and after the Second World War. Neoliberalism became prominent as an ideological project in Anglophone countries where totalitarianism had not been experienced at first hand. The main reason for this perhaps was that in such places neoliberalism spoke to a particular intellectual and political tradition that had been given its language and mode of reasoning by Adam Smith. Laissez faire ideology emerged alongside the British industrial revolution and this came to be influentially challenged by later generations of British liberals in what might be likened to a theological adjustment rather than an abandonment of faith. During the nineteenth century, factories came to be regulated. The industrial working classes became electorally significant. Utilitarian liberals made functionalist arguments for public health measures, for the expansion of education and for the introduction of social insurance. During the economic crises that followed the First World War, protectionist tariff barriers, supported by industrialists as well as by trade unions, replaced international free trade. From the 1870s,

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according to Walter Lippmann writing in the 1930s, the emergence of large-​scale private corporations and governments subject to popular sovereignty combined to make meaningless nineteenth-​century liberal ideals of freedom: To enhance their prospects businessmen looked to tariffs, to concentrated corporate control, to the suppression of competition, to large-​scale business administration. To relieve the poor and lift up the downtrodden, reformers looked to an organized working class, to electoral majorities, to the capture of the sovereign power and its exploitation in their behalf. Though great corporate capitalists continued to invoke the shibboleths of liberalism when confronted by the collective demands of the workers or the hostile power of popular majorities, yet they were thoroughly imbued with the collectivist spirit through their attachment to protection and to the concentration of control.1 Lippmann, who had joined the Fabian Society while a student at Harvard, had been, for a while, a huge admirer of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. He shared their prodigious energy and zeal for shaping public opinion though not, ultimately, their faith in the potential of state socialism.2 ‘If it can be shown,’ Lippmann wrote in 1910, ‘that public enterprise, when tried under democratic conditions, fails to produce a beneficent effect on the health, happiness and general culture of a community, or that private enterprise is more beneficent, then the socialist case collapses. And good riddance to it.’3 A few years later he came to identify in centralised government ‘the germs of that great bureaucratic tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State.’4 The term ‘neoliberal’ was coined at a 1938 conference in France on Lippmann’s book The Good Society (1937). Participants in the Walter Lippman Colloquium included the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and his protégé Friedrich Hayek who became the most prominent intellectual architects of the new doctrine. 5 These established a network, the Comité Internationale d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme (CIERL), which reconvened after the war as the Mont Perelin Society which, in turn, birthed neoliberal think tanks modelled on the Fabian Society with similarly ambitious but opposing aims. Laissez faire, Lippmann emphasised in The Good Society, had been a revolutionary political idea. It emerged when men found it necessary

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to destroy the entrenched resistance of the vested interests that opposed the industrial revolution. It sponsored the destruction of laws, institutions and customs in order to clear the way for a new mode of production. But once it had served its revolutionary purpose, it proved incapable of guiding public policy. Once the old restrictions of law and custom had been removed –​a process which was substantially accomplished in western Europe and North America by 1832 –​laissez faire proved incapable of governing the new economy.6 Its political economists imagined that the economy unlike society did not need to be governed by legislation. The notion that there were two fields of social activity –​one to be ruled by anarchy and one by law –​was a ‘grotesque error’ that imagined that economy and society could be somehow disconnected from one another. But in a community there could be no such thing: all freedom, all rights and all property were sustained by some kind of law. Economic anarchy was not permitted to prevail in the new societies where the kinds of division of labour Adam Smith wrote about had intensified. A system of capitalist law crystallised in the nineteenth century. In the English-​speaking countries this was the common law modified by judicial decision and legislation.7 According to Lippmann, the political economists who advocated laissez faire made assumptions about human behaviour that were ‘never in touch with reality as this was experienced by people whose choices were constrained.’ Their writings ‘constructed a hypothetical economy’ in which all labour and all capital were perfectly mobile. They assumed that each labourer and capitalist knew infallibly where to move. That he knew when to move. That he was willing to move. That he had the facilities for moving. That he was not held down to a particular job or to a particular place by family ties, by social connections or by the ownership of a home which could not be disposed of without sacrifice. They presumed that everyone was born free and equal and had equal opportunities. They assumed that there were no legal privileges, no natural monopolies, no conspiracies in restraint of trade, but only perfect and fair competition among equally intelligent, equally informed, equally placed and universally adaptable men.8 They did not, according to Lippmann, address the legal, psychological and social circumstances which obstructed and perverted supposedly-​free markets. David Ricardo and his successors chose to believe that the real world conformed approximately to simplistic theoretical models. They were properly rebuked by Thomas Carlyle, ‘who had his eyes on the real world’ and who described this kind of economics as the ‘dismal science.’9

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Lippmann in The Good Society insisted that real and effective economic freedom could not be achieved except through governmental regulation. He was emphatically not calling for a return to laissez faire. The challenge, as he put this, was to develop an alternative to collectivism which, he argued, was incapable of efficiently managing or replacing the transnational ever-​increasing complexities of the division of labour. The influence of Smith loomed large in Lippmann’s 1930s description of these complexities: The thinker, as he sits in his study drawing his plans for the direction of society, will do no thinking if his breakfast has not been produced for him by a social process which is beyond his detailed comprehension. He knows that his breakfast depends upon workers on the coffee plantations of Brazil, the citrus groves of Florida, the sugar fields of Cuba, the wheat farms of the Dakotas, the dairies of New York; that it has been assembled by ships, railroads, and trucks, has been cooked with coal from Pennsylvania in utensils made of aluminium, china, steel, and glass. But the intricacy of one breakfast, if every process that brought it to the table had deliberately to be planned, would be beyond the understanding of any mind. Only because he can count upon an infinitely complex system of working routines can a man eat his breakfast and then think about a new social order.10 Lippmann described the transition from the relative self-​sufficiency of individuals in local communities to their interdependence in a worldwide economy as the most revolutionary experience in recorded history. Self-​sufficient households and communities, for the most part, no longer existed. Some nations depended less on foreign trade than others, but none could even begin to maintain its current living standards if it became isolated from the rest of the world.11 Yet from the 1870s, to some degree, the worldwide division of labour had been countered by tariffs, immigration laws and other barriers to the movement of capital and labour.12 Protectionism constituted a rebellion against the market economy. Its impetus had been the conviction that worldwide free trade caused intolerably rapid and violent dislocation of the established interests of both capital and labour. Lippmann emphasised how protectionists used collectivist methods to maintain industrial monopolies just as trade unions used the closed shop to protect their members from competition.13

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A true programme of economic freedom, he insisted, would involve a great multitude of reforms and departures from laissez faire that would seek to break up, prevent and minimise monopolies and collectivisms of all kinds. It would seek to maximise the number, and the freedom and intelligence, of all those individual choices of occupation, employment, expenditure and investment, which, taken together, would constitute the sort of ideal free economy which Adam Smith had in mind. Smith, Lippmann argued, would not have regarded the corporate capitalism of the nineteenth century as the ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ for he had been careful to say that it was the duty of the sovereign to protect as far as possible ‘every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it.’ It was plain from the whole tenor of The Wealth of Nations, Lippmann argued, that Smith ‘meant something more substantial than the equal right of the rich and the poor to drive hard bargains.’14 Lippmann’s 1937 book sparked the first international debates about what Friedrich Hayek referred to as the new liberalism.15 In Anglophone countries where liberals had embraced New Deals, welfare states and Keynesian economics this new liberalism did not become a political juggernaut until the 1970s. Neoliberalism developed in its initially influential form as a loosely demarcated set of political beliefs that commonly included the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state was to safeguard individual, especially commercial, liberty as well as strong rights to private property that translated into a belief that the state ought to be minimal or least drastically reduced in strength and size. As summarised by David Harvey in his Brief History of Neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-​being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution)

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then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-​ guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.16 Neoliberalism came to be understood as a political philosophy that prioritised individual freedom and the right to private property. The term has come to encompass a range of perspectives. It has been used to describe libertarian and anarcho-​liberal positions arguing, unlike Lippmann, for a complete laissez faire and the abolishment of all government as well as neoclassical liberalism which emphasises a clear, if limited role for the state.

The God that failed and other stories Friedrich Hayek (1899–​1992) was born in Vienna into an academic family that had been for generations part of old imperial Vienna’s elite. During the last year of the First World War, he served on the Italian front in an Austrian artillery regiment where he was wounded. After the war Hayek studied law and economics at the University of Vienna.17 As a student at the University of Vienna he came under the influence of the well-​established, liberal free market ‘Austrian School’ that dominated the teaching of economics and, at the beginning of his career, benefited from the patronage of the influential libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–​1973).18 Von Mises in Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (1922), published in English as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, declared that all economic action was rational, that all rational action was economic, that all human action, insofar as this was rational, involved the exchange of one condition for the other. For example, personal time was exchanged for economic goods on the basis of evaluations and judgement arrived at by individuals. Industrial production processes and investment decision-​making scaled up such judgements. Economies consisted of a myriad of such evaluations and as such could not be effectively replaced by central planning.19 Much of von Mises’s writing in defence of such theories focused on how pricing worked as an expression of myriad individual decisions

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and a system of information. The essence of this approach originated with Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Von Mises argued in a 1920 essay that in the absence of the pricing system that came with free markets it was not possible for socialist centrally planned economies to use resources effectively. When it came, in an example von Mises gave, to building a house, the controller of the socialist economy had no means of weighing up the costs of different approaches to building or of using different potential materials. Socialism, he argued, was the abolition of the rational economy.20 Socialists had criticised the economic structure of capitalist societies yet, according to von Mises, they had consistently failed to demonstrate how the economies of socialist states might operate effectively. Hayek taught economics at the University of Vienna from 1929 to 1931. He was recruited by the London School of Economics after giving a series of lectures there on monetary theory.21 The LSE had been founded by Sidney Webb and was closely associated with the Fabian Society. From the 1930s the LSE, led by William Beveridge built up its economics department. Hayek was recruited to the LSE in 1931 by Lionel Robbins, a protégé of Beveridge and professor of economics, who had spent time in Vienna during the early 1920s and had become enamoured by the work of von Mises and the Austrian School.22 During the interwar period the number of full time academics at the LSE rose from just 17 to 79. This expansion included a cluster of anti-​collectivist economists. When it came to economics, the LSE acquired something of an international reputation as ‘ein Vorort von Wien,’ a suburb of Vienna.23 Hayek viewed this relationship as working the other way around. Britain was where the ideals he cherished had originated and had found expression in their purist form. Hayek was intellectually drawn to Britain by a liberal tradition that appeared to be on the wane.24 Von Mises in his introduction to the 1932 edition of Socialism declared that the belief that socialism was ethically and economically superior to private ownership of the means of production had come to dominate the modern spirit.25 Socialism, he argued, had very few opponents. Even in England, the home of liberalism, the liberals had become more or less moderate socialists.26 In 1935 Hayek edited Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (1935), a collection of previously published essays that included the aforementioned 1920 one by von Mises. Hayek, in his concluding chapter, reiterated von Mises’s argument that nobody was intellectually equipped to manage a centrally planned economy.27

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Much of the case against collectivism associated with Hayek originated with his mentor. The 1938 Walther Lippmann Colloquium in Paris brought together some 26 participants including Lippmann, Hayek, von Mises, Robbins and Raymond Aron.28 Its focal point, Lippmann’s The Good Society, was a response to Roosevelt’s New Deal and a warning about the dangers, as Lippman understood these, of collectivism in all its forms: social democratic, communist and fascist. Lippmann warned about the insidious advance of collectivist ideologies and claimed that gradual collectivism would lead to a tyranny of planners and technocrats.29 To achieve their goals, planners were required to become despots who tolerated no effective challenge to their authority. Lippmann was thinking perhaps of the samurai, ‘the aristocracy of the mind’ in H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, which he described as painting an entrancing vision of what a benevolent despotism of engineers, experts, leaders, saviours and heroes could achieve.30 The premise in such fictions was that the despots who climb to power would somehow be benevolent.31 Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was written in the shadow of British wartime collectivism. The blueprint for Britain’s post-​war welfare state, The Beveridge Report (1942), was hugely popular and went on to sell about half a million copies. Hayek presented his polemic as a kind of sequel to The Servile State (1911) by Hillaire Belloc, which had emerged as a critical response to the introduction of unemployment and sickness benefits and old-​age pensions by the liberals in 1911.32 A 1944 review of The Road to Serfdom by George Orwell provided a succinct summary of its argument against the consensus in favour of a welfare state: Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-​wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security.

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The Road to Serfdom appeared in 1944 as part of a wave of academic books that included von Mises’s Bureaucracy (1944) and Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945).33 Both Hayek and Popper grew up in Vienna, but they first met at the LSE in London in 1935. Hayek found a publisher for The Open Society and Its Enemies, and secured an academic post for Popper at the LSE.34 Popper sent his draft book to Hayek in February 1943, who wrote back that it seemed ‘extraordinarily close’ to what he was writing. Popper, for his part, was conscious when finalising his book that some conclusions he had reached were very close to those of Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.35 In particular, their respective chapters on utopianism gave very similar warnings about the dangers of collectivist planning and ‘social engineering.’36 Many of the arguments that became integral to the neoliberal critique of state planning were amplified in widely-​read novels. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) was an exposé of the Soviet show trials. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1944) was a didactic satire on the emergence of Soviet totalitarianism following the Russian revolution. Orwell’s 1984 depicted a dystopian future composed from a synthesis of arguments against totalitarianism from many of his earlier essays combined with a science fiction premise that borrowed elements from several earlier anti-​utopian novels. In a 1944 essay on Koestler, Orwell described him as a writer who had seen totalitarianism from the inside. From his European perspective, he could see things such as purges for what they were; he was not like English socialists such as George Bernard Shaw, ‘looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope.’37 In 1949 Richard Crossman, a left-​wing Labour Party member of parliament, edited a book of essays in which six intellectuals described what drew them to communism and why they subsequently abandoned, what the title of the book called, The God that Failed.38 According to Crossman, all six became communists because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice bourgeois liberties in order to defeat Fascism.39 The intellectual attraction of Marxism was that it exploded ‘liberal fallacies – which really were fallacies.’ It taught the bitter truth that progress is not automatic, that boom and slump were inherent in capitalism and that social injustice and racial discrimination were not cured merely by the passage of time. In the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution and during ‘that dreary armistice between the wars’ the political choice seemed to lie between an extreme Right, determined to use power in order to

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crush human freedom, and a Left which seemed eager to use it in order to free humanity.40 Koestler’s essay in The God that Failed described how and why in 1931 he joined the Communist Party in Germany while working as a journalist there at the time.41 His decision to do so was the climax of a long process that reached back into his childhood in Vienna. He grew up in a milieu where once-​comfortable middle-​class families like his own had become destitute. He recalled a former travelling salesman who had worked for his father, reduced to cadging occasional meals from his parents. He wrote that a considerable proportion of the middle classes in central Europe, like the Koestler family, came to be financially ruined. The pauperised bourgeois became rebels of the Right or Left; Some joined the Nazis and ‘found comfort in blaming their fate on Versailles and the Jews.’ Others turned left.42 Koestler worked as a journalist in Germany while the Nazis were on the rise. Yet he was instructed by the Communist Party that the greatest enemies of socialism were the social democrats or the ‘social fascists’ as he was instructed to refer to these.43 In 1932 Koestler was invited by the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers to write a book to be called The Soviet Land Through Bourgeois Eyes. The idea was to describe how Mr K., a bourgeois reporter with strong anti-​ Soviet prejudices, came to be gradually converted by seeing the results of socialist reconstruction during the first Five Year Plan. Koestler spent a year in the Soviet Union –​six months travelling followed by six months in Kharkov and Moscow, writing the book – which was published in German.44 Koestler witnessed first-​hand the ravages of the famine of 1932–​ 33 in the Ukraine, which, according to an estimate he cited, killed some six million people. He was told that the victims were Kulaks who had resisted the collectivisation of the land and he accepted the official explanation; ‘they were enemies of the people who preferred begging to work.’45 Alongside accounts of catastrophes attributable to totalitarianism, Koestler focused on the individually experienced tyrannies that resulted from failures of the Soviet command economy. He described how a maid in the Hotel Regina in Kharkov fainted from hunger while cleaning his room. The manager explained that she was fresh from the countryside and through a technical hitch had not yet been issued her ration cards. Koestler accepted these explanations at the time. However, he was struck by the apathy of the crowds in the streets, tramways and railway stations, by housing conditions which made all industrial towns appear one vast slum (two or three couples sharing one room divided by sheets hanging from washing lines),

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by the starvation rations handed out by the cooperatives; or the fact that the price of one kilogram of butter on the free market equalled the average worker’s monthly wage, the price of a pair of shoes two months’ wages.46 All this appeared to vindicate the claims of von Mises, Lippmann and Hayek that collectivism was doomed to fail and that central planning inevitably led to totalitarianism. Margaret Thatcher, who gave her name to neoliberalism as a political programme (Thatcherism), described her intellectual development as having been influenced by Koestler and Karl Popper, as well as by Hayek. As a young woman (in 1944), she read Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and would later quote a passage from this in her autobiography.47 She also included the following summary of The Open Society and its Enemies: Popper, whose analyses in many ways complemented Hayek, approached Marxism from the point of view of the philosopher of the natural sciences. This meant that he was ideally equipped to expose the fraudulent claims of Marxists to have discovered immutable laws of history, social development or ‘progress’ –​laws which were compatible with natural science.48 None of this would have been disputed by Crossman, a left-​wing member of the Labour Party who distinguished between democratic socialism and the Marxist kind, and who argued that unless the welfare state was democratised, it would lose legitimacy among the people it was meant to serve. While champions of neoliberalism were never slow to trot out examples of Soviet or Nazi totalitarianism, their crude argument that any level of state planning in democratic societies would bring about a totalitarian hell came to be modified. In his introduction to the 1956 edition of The Road to Serfdom and in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) Hayek argued that the appeal of communism in democratic societies had peaked and was in decline. 1848 marked the beginning of an enthusiasm for socialism that had probably (he thought) come to an end by 1948. Although ‘hot socialism’ was ‘probably a thing of the past’ some of its conceptions had deeply penetrated too far into the current structure of Western thought to justify complacency. In 1956 Hayek acknowledged that the six years of socialist government in the United Kingdom had not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. Totalitarian socialism could only be produced by methods that socialists in democratic societies clearly did not support. However, he

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argued that the extensive government control would, perhaps over a couple of generations, produce a psychological change in the character of the people that would, in time, undermine liberty.49 In some branches of Christian theology hell has ceased to be literally described as an actual place of fire and brimstone. Somewhat similarly, nobody wore jackboots in the visions of collectivist hell painted by post-​ war neoliberal theorists. Hayek’s job in The Constitution of Liberty was to explain how the welfare state and its planners undermined individual freedom and autonomy in more nuanced but still-​unacceptable ways. Hayek claimed that ‘none too pessimistic’ possible futures could be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Both these novels imagined how behavioural science might undermine the individual’s capacity for liberty. Hayek argued that technological advances had created new potential threats to individual freedom. Writing in 1960 he argued that ‘we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first an innocuous or beneficial power over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of the government.’50 A huge academic literature has emerged since the 1960s, much of this from the left, on a crisis of planning resulting from forms of technocracy that were not meaningfully accountable to disempowered communities that had to live with their flawed prescriptions. In the Constitution of Liberty Hayek referred to this as administrative despotism.51 Britain during the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a prevailing sense of urban crisis relating to bad urban design, tower blocks that were unfit machines for living in and huge urban estates that concentrated large numbers of the relatively poor. Similar problems in many other countries also challenged the legitimacy of the planners who created such environments and were, so to speak, the architects of urban decay. As depicted by sociologists and in some of the more theoretical literature on planning, the crisis was rooted in a failure of accountability by planners to the communities meant to benefit from their activities. Such depictions were fuelled by wider sociological critiques of professional and bureaucratic rationality as a crisis of modernity.52 The response from the left was to emphasise the need for greater responsiveness to communities via community development programmes and participation in decision-​making. The ideal here was broadly in keeping with the arguments by Crossman in the United Kingdom and Ernst Wigforss in Sweden that the future legitimacy of the welfare state and social democracy would

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depend on the ability of these to become more democratic. This has proved much easier said than done. In this context, neoliberalism came to be positioned as an alternative emancipatory project. Neoliberals claimed that government had crowded out the space for individual responsibility and prescribed a minimal state ideal in the belief that the relationship between decision makers and recipients of decisions had been disturbed by the growth of pressure groups, special lobbies and large-​scale bureaucratic institutions.53

The visible hand It has been argued that Hayek’s entire career was driven by his belief that ‘socialism was bogus and there had to be some way to make a halfway decent intellectual case that this was true.’54 The nature of his unremitting war against collectivism shifted over time. His early phase built upon von Mises’s ‘socialist calculation’ arguments against the economic viability of central planning. From 1933 Hayek developed the concept of a ‘Spontaneous Order’ to refer to the institutions that cropped up in society as conduits for the myriad of decisions made by individuals in free markets.55 Rather than Smith’s invisible hand guiding markets –​a metaphor which suggested the hand of God –​ free markets, according to Hayek, expressed a kind of decentralised intelligence whereby each individual economic decision became part of a huge pool of evolving knowledge that could never be comprehended by a central planner. In essence, he argued that the price system functioned as a kind of mind. The economy was not, as collectivists presumed, an organisation that would be managed from the centre. It was an organism that contained dispersed knowledge. In The Road to Serfdom he argued that ‘the spontaneous and uncontrolled efforts of individuals were capable of producing a complex order of economic activities.’56 Earlier, in The Good Society, Lippmann had similarly insisted that planners and technocrats could not hope to direct a complex economy as if it was an organisation. Advocates of collectivism failed to understand the sheer complexity of economic interrelationships: The modern economy is perhaps the least systematic of any that has ever existed. It is world-​wide, formless, vast, complicated, and, owing to technological progress, in constant change. For that reason, it is incapable of being conceived as a system, or of being replaced by another system, or of being managed as an administrative unit.57

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Hayek’s theory of a spontaneous order challenged the presumption that lay at the heart of theories of rational economic decision-​making, that individual actions could be predicted. Instead, he argued that humans were purposeful but imperfect beings with limited knowledge; they made mistakes. Whatever knowledge existed was dispersed, fragmented and often difficult to communicate.58 A division of knowledge accompanied the division of labour and as societies became more complex this also became increasingly so. Just as individuals in modern society depended on a complex division of labour, they also benefited from a dispersed division of knowledge. For all that Hayek has been regarded as an influential economist, he came to distance himself from standard economic reasoning.59 He wrote that markets conveyed information through the price system but entrepreneurial decisions also made use of tacit knowledge. Markets, as information processors were more complex than generally imagined in models put forward by economists. Like the complex neurological workings of a human mind, these were impossible to fully map, and therefore manipulate. If the mind could never exhaustively describe and know itself, no ruler or collective was capable of successfully directing economic processes that could only be understood by knowing the minds of all actors in the economy.60 Efforts to claim otherwise in support of social engineering were in no way scientific. Influenced by Karl Popper he viewed ‘social engineering’ as an expression of ‘scientism’: ‘a tendency to ape, in the field of social science, what are supposed to be the methods of the natural sciences.’61 Hayek’s neoliberal utopia was a society in which state planning and collectivism had been abolished and in which a spontaneous order had been conjured into existence.62 His later writings, including the three volume Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979), refined the intellectual case for free market alternatives to the welfare state. What this might look like or how precisely it might work he left to others. The original or proto-​neoliberalism was trenchantly opposed to cartels and monopolies, which were likened to state bureaucracies. Yet with the notable exception of von Mises, many participants at the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium were not opposed in principle to some state intervention.63 Hayek, in the Road to Serfdom, declared that there was no reason why in modern, relatively-​wealthy societies that social security should not be guaranteed in a manner that does not undermine freedom. Some minimum of food, shelter and clothing –​sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work –​should be available to everybody. In the

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foreword to the 1956 edition of this book he acknowledged that some goals of the welfare state were practicable and laudable.64 None of this detracted from his ongoing emphasis on developing market-​based alternatives to such statism. By the 1970s schemes to privatise public services and to create internal markets within these had been developed in detail by others. Hayek described as ‘ingenious’ proposals by Milton Friedman set out in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) for the financing of the education through vouchers to be given to the parents of children, to enable them to pick and choose between schools, as if the public school system was a market.65 Friedman became the intellectual leader of the United States’ equivalent of the Austrian School of Economics at the University of Chicago, which had published The Road to Freedom and given Hayek a professorship after the war.66 The Chicago economists were more favourably disposed towards large corporations that Lippmann, Hayek and post-​war European Christian Democrats (see Chapter 9) who considered collaboration by large cartels and industrial monopolies as a key feature of Nazi totalitarianism. Friedman, as such, differed from those early neoliberals who were convinced that economic freedom required laws and regulations that would prevent the emergence of monopolies. Friedman argued that big business was more efficient than the state while a libertarian wing of neoliberalism argued against regulation in any shape or form.67

Politics and propaganda Having come up with a theory of spontaneous order it is ironic perhaps that Hayek dedicated considerable energy to building organisations that would incubate and promote this as a political project.68 He came to be convinced that the death of planning would have to be planned.69 He first travelled to the United States for a lecture tour in April 1945. By then his book had become a bestseller for the University of Chicago Press that went on to sell more than 350,000 copies.70 Isaiah Berlin, an British embassy attaché in the United States, when The Road to Selfdom was first published there, acerbically noted that it had been immediately taken up by Wall Street republicans.71 An abridged 20-​page Readers Digest version of the book, also published in 1945, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.72 Hayek’s message was further distilled down into 18 pages of cartoons, each accompanied by a short paragraph, which was published that same year by Look Magazine.73 Hayek wrote to Popper in July 1944 that the immediate success of the book in Britain was much greater than he had hoped but that the

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audience it found was almost exclusively among the Conservatives.74 In the run up to the 1945 election Churchill made a speech, which Clement Atlee described as ‘a second hand version’ of The Road to Serfdom, that likened the would-​be architects of the welfare state to the Gestapo: There can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state. … No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.75 Margaret Thatcher, then a 20-​year old member of the Conservative Party, thought that Churchill had gone too far.76 Churchill was, after all, the outgoing leader of the government that had overseen the design of the welfare state. His speech closely matched the tone of The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons.77 In the run up to the 1945 election, the Conservative Party donated one and a half tonnes of its rationed paper supply to print 12,000 copies of the abridged version of Hayek’s book.78 Although the Conservatives used The Road to Serfdom as stick with which to beat the left, it would take almost three decades of behind-​the-​scenes activism to translate its ideas into a political programme. Hayek organised a spring 1947 conference in Mont Pelerin in Switzerland, attended by more than 30 prominent liberal scholars from the United States, Britain, France and Germany to pick up the intellectual conversation from where it had left off following the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium.79 There was a relatively small number of these in a many other countries and the task, as he saw it, was to grow the influence of the ‘philosophy of freedom.’ He wrote to potential participants in December 1947 about his concerns and aims: I have found a strong desire for closer contacts between all those who have become gravely concerned about the chances of preserving a free civilization, and those who feel that not only the whole relation between governmental coercion and individual freedom requires re-​examination, but also that current views of recent history will have to be revised if dominant beliefs and misconceptions are not to drive us ever further in a totalitarian direction.80

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The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was an ‘invisible college’ comprised of carefully vetted members. It was a private members-​only debating society. Many, but not all, members held academic posts in departments where neoliberalism became influential including the LSE, the University of Chicago, St Andrews in Scotland and Freiburg in Germany. The international web of think tanks it inspired included the Institute for Economic Affairs in Britain, the American Enterprise Initiative and the Swiss Institute of International Studies, designed to promote neoliberal ideas to sympathetic politicians and media. A complex international system with several organisational layers was devised to promote neoliberalism. As put in one analysis, there was nothing spontaneous about the spontaneous orders so beloved by these well-​organised associations of individualists, and about Hayek’s efforts to mobilise these. Hayek: realized one had to nurture his own battalion of dealers, as well as some of the ideas they would retail. Hayek thus conjured a Groupthink congenial to what he considered to be the Truth, since it would not conjour itself. The Group then conjured a State that fostered a Market, since it would not conjour itself. Hayek realized that one had to embrace and revel in the contradiction of an ‘organized’ spontaneous order, and create an entire set of institutions to generate and promote the sort of social science (and even natural science) he felt would stand as a bulwark against creeping totalitarianism. No conventional ‘intellectual history’ can begin to do justice to the extent to which his vision has been successful at the dawn of the twenty-​first century.81 Following a landslide election victory in 1945, the Labour government introduced a programme that drew on half a century of Fabian thought. Notwithstanding Churchill’s rhetoric, the post-​war Conservative Party broadly supported the welfare state. However, in response to the Beveridge Report some 44 economic liberal members of parliament had formed the Tory Reform Group in 1944. A cleavage became evident within the Conservative Party between paternalists and economic liberals.82 In Britain there had clearly been an audience on the right for arguments that promoted free market capitalism prior to the publication of The Road to Serfdom. Ernest Benn’s The Confessions of a Capitalist (1925) had sold around a quarter of a million copies by 1948.83 In its opening pages Benn introduced himself to his readers as the archetypical

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enemy of the working classes as this was portrayed by socialists. He was a businessman who enjoyed making money and who employed about 2,000 ‘wage slaves.’84 Benn founded the Individualist Bookshop in 1926 and led a campaign to cut public expenditure during the depression. In response to the Beveridge Report, he published the Manifesto of British Liberty. This declared that the notion of individual rights had come to be regarded as ‘hopelessly reactionary’ and that the wartime government had made ‘innumerable efforts’ to persuade people that social salvation is only to be found in millennial plans which involve vast expansion of the functions of the State.’ This spirit needed to be fought to prevent the country from ‘lapsing into one or other of the forms of totalitarian Government.’85 Benn argued that socialism in Britain was driven by middle-​ class resentment of his class and by a species of snobbery that was unsympathetic to commerce. The Confessions of a Capitalist was packed with the kinds of anecdotes and stories about the workings of businesses and explanations of the need for private enterprise, free trade and competition that resembled the values proclaimed by Thatcher, before she had studied the ideas of Hayek. In her autobiography she recalled a 1949 political speech given by her father in which he declared that it was the conservatives who had come to stand for the old liberalism.86 Hayek’s ideas infiltrated the Conservative Party via the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the think tanks that emerged in the aftermath of the Mont Pelerin conference. Yet Antony Fisher, the founder of the IEA in 1957, first encountered Hayek’s ideas in the Readers’ Digest version. Fisher consulted Hayek on the design of his organisation. Hayek’s advice was that Fisher and others who were likeminded should form a scholarly research organisation to supply intellectuals in universities, schools, journalism and broadcasting with authoritative studies of free market economic theory and its application to practical affairs.87 It was run according to Hayek’s guiding principle: to fight and win the intellectual battle as the Fabians had done earlier, over a long period. The IEA wasn’t so much a think tank in the traditional sense –​a body which sought to research what policies it might be best to follow –​as an evangelical body. As put by Fisher, the IEA ‘knew the truth.’88 During its initial 20 years of existence, it followed a strategy, as explained in a paper to the Mont Pelerin Society 1959, aimed at establishing and maintaining a free society. Firstly, it was necessary to promote through education the philosophy of the market economy: teach the virtues of the free economy and demonstrate that these do not conflict with accepted ethical and political codes. This

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should be achieved by seeking to appeal intellectually to those on the left such as Fabians or trade union leaders who might be sympathetic to some IEA ideas because of their basic love of freedom. There should be a battle to win over hearts and minds rather than engaging in head-​on ideological conflict. Secondly, according to the 1959 paper, it was necessary to figure out how to make the transfer from a controlled economy to one regulated by a spontaneous order. Thirdly, policies had to be designed to make futile all pleas for protection from the consequences of change that democratic politicians would have difficulty in resisting. There was a need to outflank political supporters of the status quo.89 In his essay ‘Why I am not a Conservative,’ a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek wrote that conservatives were inclined to use the powers of government to prevent or limit change. Conservatives lacked ‘the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about.’90 Neoliberalism required a leap of faith that the Conservative Party was clearly unwilling to take during the 1960s. Thatcher first met Hayek in 1974, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics jointly with Gunnar Myrdal. By then, she had been introduced to his case for ‘a limited government under rule of law’ ‘the kind of state Conservatives find congenial’ –​by her intellectual mentor Keith Joseph.91 In 1974 Joseph and Thatcher, after the collapse of Ted Heath’s Conservative government, co-​founded the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) with a remit to develop a new kind of free market conservatism. Initially, this examined the potential to learn from the social market economy devised by Germany’s Christian Democrats. The social market economy (see Chapter 9) model sought to combine an economic regulatory framework aimed at supporting free markets with a strong emphasis on social cohesion. A CPS pamphlet, Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy (1975) was published but, according to Thatcher in her biography, quietly forgotten. It was only subsequently, under Thatcher’s post-​1975 leadership, that Hayekian neoliberalism came to influence Conservative Party policy.92 Neoliberalism took meaningful shape from the 1970s as a distinctive political philosophy dedicated to the extension of market (and market-​ like) forms of governance rule into all parts of state and society. It translated in Britain into a politically pragmatic programme of gradual privatisation of public-​owned utilities and the imposition of ‘internal markets’ within the National Health Service. In the decades since the 1970s, claims that every aspect of economic and social life

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have succumbed to, or are threatened by, neoliberalism seem to have become ubiquitous. While the influence of neoliberalism has indeed spread widely, nowhere has it come to exist in such a ‘pure form’ that might meet the threshold of Hayek’s theoretical spontaneous order. According to one 2007 analysis that is highly critical of neoliberalism: Neoliberal impulses and imperatives have become increasingly widespread and, in many contexts, normalized. But everywhere they are enmeshed, blended, and imbricated with other forms of governance; nowhere does neoliberalism exist in ‘pure’ form. … The neoliberal conceit is that state withdrawal is a necessary and sufficient precursor to the (re)animation of market, which are seen to be a spontaneous and naturally occurring phenomena. In reality, deregulation and privatization led to many and varied outcomes, equilibrating markets being perhaps the rarest; state sanctioned monopoly or various forms of regulated competition were more typical. No matter what it says on the bottle, neoliberalization rarely involves unilateral acts of state withdrawal.93 The European systems that are the focus of this book have remained mixed economies of welfare with various balances of state, market and voluntary sectors and with increasingly complicated intermeshing between these. The term neoliberalism has come to be equated with borderless global financial capitalism as well a distinct ideology which favours such as system. Neoliberal ideology has come to coexist in various countries with other traditions of welfare capitalism. For example, it has been a significant component of the German Christian Democratic system examined in the next chapters. There are also ongoing battles between varieties of liberalism. For example, Isaiah Berlin in Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) distinguished between negative liberty, the conditions mostly emphasised by Hayek that were necessary to ensure human freedom and autonomy –​the ‘freedom of the individual from external coercion’ –​and positive liberty understood to include that which might be required to ensure that individuals could achieve self-​realisation. Berlin, an émigré from Riga who was no less trenchantly opposed to totalitarianism than Hayek or Popper, maintained that an over-​emphasis on negative freedoms had contributed to great and lasting social evils such as poverty. If a man was too poor to afford something on which there was no legal ban, be it a loaf of bread or recourse to the law courts he was ‘as little free

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to have it as he would be if it were forbidden to him by law.’94 Berlin in a scathing letter wrote that ‘wicked Hayek’ was ‘quite wrong in assuming that political liberty is insolubly tied to economic private enterprise.’95 In another he argued that Hayek’s conception of freedom was ‘too dogmatic and too conceited and removed from the actual lives of the people they are prescribing for: and blind, complacent, and scholastic.’96 To a greater or lesser extent, even those countries which appear to have been most influenced by neoliberalism continue to operate on the presumption that some degree of positive liberty is necessary for the common good.

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9

European Christian democracy Very late in life in 1943 H.G. Wells wrote an anti-​Catholic pamphlet that called, among other things, for the bombing of Rome. ‘Even in comparison with Fascism and the Nazi adventure,’ he wrote,’ Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.’1 This was pretty much the Catholic view of the triumphant modernity professed by Wells in his novels and polemics. Gabriel Almond, an American political scientist wrote, in a 1948 assessment of the post-​war European political landscape, that ‘to the Church-​backed Christian democratic movements there flocked practically all that part of Western Europe which was neither Marxist, nor ‘liberal’ in the classic meaning of the term.’2 This Christian democratic wave was essentially the product of a period of catharsis and reconstruction which followed the Second World War. Christian Democracy very quickly became a prominent political force in several European countries, though not in Scandinavia or Great Britain. It became influential in European countries with large Catholic populations, other than Spain and Portugal where totalitarian regimes remained in control. By 1948, Christian democrat political parties had become dominant or politically prominent in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and in the Federal Republic of Germany following its establishment in 1949. Ideas and approaches associated with Christian democracy subsequently spread to Latin America and to former Eastern Bloc countries including Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Lithuania after these became democracies.3 In western Europe, it filled a political vacuum left by the defeat of totalitarianism. In the immediate post-​Second World War era Christian democrats in Germany and elsewhere could present themselves as harbingers of a new democratic era and, with the onset of the Cold War, as enemies of communism. The post-​war Christian democratic project was one that supported religious pluralism and Western democratic values. It looked West in opposition to the Soviet-​controlled Eastern Bloc. This chapter examines the convergence of religious, political and economic responses to pre-​1945 totalitarianism that came to constitute a distinct world of welfare capitalism. The influence of religious ideas

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is examined through a focus on the intellectual journey of Jacques Maritain (1882–​1973), the most prominent Catholic theologian and political philosopher prior to the Second World War and during its aftermath. He exerted considerable influence on the UN Convention on Human Rights (1948) and on the Basic Law (Constitution) of the West German republic. Maritain gave Christian democracy a malleable language that worked within secular political debates. Human rights, according to Maritain were God-​g iven, but his natural law arguments for these found common ground with those of the Enlightenment. In the soul searching that followed the Nazi occupation of Europe and the Holocaust, Maritain and others who made the case for Christian humanism found wide audiences.4 The chapter also explores how political champions of Christian democracy and of what would become the European Union, like Konrad Adenauer (1876–​1967), combined Catholic ideas with liberal economics to create a distinct Christian democratic antidote to what were perceived as the causes of totalitarianism. In the immediate aftermath of the war Christian democratic parties cooperated across borders. By 1950 these formed either national governments or were the largest party in coalition governments in the six countries that became founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) established in 1951–​2, and of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957–​8.5 Adenauer, who served as the West German Chancellor from 1949 to 1963, was born in Cologne in the Rhineland where he became a member of Zentrumspartie in 1906 and mayor of the city from 1917 to 1933. He came into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy when he advocated extending membership of Zentrum to Protestants, thereby diminishing its role as a Catholic confessional party. Adenauer lived in seclusion for much of the Nazi period, although he was imprisoned briefly in 1934 and was sent to a labour camp for some months in 1944, following the assassination attempt on Hitler. After the war, he was reinstated by the Allied occupation forces as Mayor of Cologne and in 1946 he became a founding member of the Christlich-​Demokratische Union (Christian Democrat Union).6 The CDU in alliance with the smaller more conservative Christlich-​Soziale Union (Christian Social Union) dominated the West German Federal Republic from its establishment in 1949 to 1963.7 It was built on the foundations of Zentrumspartie and several pre-​Nazi era conservative and moderate parties supported by Protestants as well as Catholics.8 What bought these disparate elements together and what defined the CDU for its members was its self-​image as a Christian party.9 Its main post-​war

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rival was the reconstituted Social Democratic Party (SPD), which did not win power until 1969. In France, a Christian democratic party, the Mouvement Républican Populaire (MRP), was founded in November 1944 under the chairmanship of Robert Schuman (1886–​1963). He was born a German citizen and was educated in Germany because he grew up in Alsace-​Lorraine, which had been annexed by Germany after the Franco-​Prussian War. After the First World War, the coal-​r ich Alsace-​ Lorraine region became part of France. Schuman’s political career was influenced by his troubled geography as well as by a deep Catholic faith. After the war he became the prime minister of France and minister of foreign affairs in the post-​war government led by Charles de Gaulle.10 The MRP participated in the provisional government led by de Gaulle in October 1945. In the elections to the second Constituent Assembly in June 1946 it became the biggest party in France, with 28.2 per cent of the votes.11 In Italy Alcide De Gasperi, the leader of Democrazia Cristiana, became prime minister in June 1945. Democrazia Cristiana dominated Italian coalition governments between 1945 and 1993 and until 1981 every prime minister was a member of the party. The Rhineland, Alsace-​ Lorraine and Trentino where De Gasperi was born, when this was part of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, were each places with somewhat unsettled relationships with the nation states they had become part of and with the nationalisms that defined these.12 The other three signatories of the treaty, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands had either internal linguistic or religious differences, or both. To each of these a project of cultural as well as economic cooperation made sense. As put by Tony Judt: And hailing from the fringes of their own countries, where identities had long been multiple and boundaries fungible, all six members of the new ECSC had only recently seen their sovereignty ignored and trampled on, in war and in occupation: they had little enough sovereignty left to lose. And their common Christian Democratic concern for social cohesion and collective responsibility disposed all of them to feel comfortable with the notion of a trans-​ national ‘High Authority’ exercising executive powers for the common good.13 While in many respects Christian democrats were anti-​utopians, a distinct Christian democratic visionary project emerged that was

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focused on the unification of Europe. This proposed economic union –​ a common market –​as a prelude to political unity. In short, it rebooted the old idea of Christendom into a union that would be held together by free market capitalism rather than God’s glue. In West Germany, where Christian democracy was strongest, Catholic ideas influenced social policy while economic policies were shaped to a considerable extent by a kind of neoliberalism which advocated the use of legislative regulation to foster competitive markets. Post-​war German ‘ordoliberalism’ had much in common with the kinds of neoclassical liberalism promoted by F.A. Hayek, which became hugely influential a few decades later. It influenced the development of the European Economic Community (EEC), the common market that subsequently became the European Union, which permitted the free movement of people as well as free trade and provided reciprocal rights to social protection and health care to member-​state citizens.

Christianity and democracy After the First World War Maritain authored a number of textbooks on philosophy, logic, psychology and metaphysics for use in Catholic colleges and seminaries. He greatly influenced how Thomism, the Catholic natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas derived from Aristotle, was taught to seminarians and understood by lay intellectuals. Yet in several books, including The Things that are not Caesar’s (1931), Antisemitism (1939) and Christianisme et démocratie (1943), he developed a political philosophy that that defended democracy and human rights.14 During the 1930s he became a prominent critic of totalitarianism in Catholic majority countries such as Spain and Italy and was intellectually influential among Catholics who opposed the Nazis in Germany. Maritain became a champion of democracy at a time when there were few Catholic majority democracies in the world.15 He portrayed the modern secular democratic state as ultimately more faithful to the principles of Christianity and natural law than the hierarchical corporatism espoused in Quadragesimo Anno (see Chapter 5). Subsequently, he had considerable influence in promoting the acceptance of religious pluralism and human rights by European Catholics and by the papacy. Maritain was the son of a French non-​practising Catholic father and a liberal Protestant mother. In 1901 at the Sorbonne, he met and married Raissa Oumanscoff who was the daughter of a Jewish Russian émigré. Both dedicated themselves to becoming intellectual defenders of the faith against what Raissa later referred to as ‘the illusions of

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positivism.’16 In her memoir Raissa Maritain recalled that she first met her husband when he organised a protest among French writers and university people in the Sorbonne against the ill-​treatment of socialist students in Russia.17 Both were science students, although her future husband had by then completed a master’s degree in philosophy. At one stage, in a state of existential despair, both contemplated suicide for reasons that fitted the thesis of Le Suicide; étude de sociologie (1897) by Émile Durkheim who taught them at the Sorbonne during their time there as students.18 Their shared sense of dislocation was described by Raissa Maritain as a ‘metaphysical anguish’ that she attributed to a prevailing utilitarianism and scientism. ‘I believe that during these last dark years,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘in Austria, in Germany, in Italy, in France thousands of suicides have been due to this despair.’19 Durkheim viewed his research on suicide as a means of understanding the ‘causes of the general malaise currently being undergone by European societies.’20 His theory of anomie related the phenomenon of melancholic suicide to the dissolution of traditional society and to the loss of an ontological sense of security and identity rooted in shared religious beliefs. Maritain and his wife came under the intellectual influence of Henri Bergson, a Sorbonne-​based philosopher who pioneered what has come to be known as critical realism and developed a philosophy of personalism that challenged what Bergson argued was the narrowly defined individualism of Enlightenment rationalism. Maritain’s writings on personalism sought to refute secular understandings of human nature. These also made the case for Catholic support for democracy and human rights.21 Maritain’s initial influence among Catholics owed much to his reputation as an intellectual defender of church orthodoxy. Three Reformers (1928), a critique of the Reformation and the Enlightenment which focused on the influence and errors (as Maritain understood these) of Martin Luther, Rene Descartes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, was translated from French to Italian by Giovanni Battista Montini, who in 1963 became Pope Paul VI. Like other Catholic neoscholastics Maritain rejected Protestant and secular conceptions of individualism. As depicted in Three Reformers, the Lutheran Reformation was the great German sin and the Cartesian distinction between body and soul was the great French one.22 What Protestantism represented as a one to one relationship between an individual person and God was, Maritain argued, a hollowed out interior life that detaches the egotistical individual from his true nature: ‘he withdraws from himself all support but his self, he sets up a doctrine that places man rather

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than God at the centre of his religious life.’23 Descartes put forward a conception of intelligence that turned the human mind in on itself, imposing a gulf between cognition –​what the mind was understood to be capable of perceiving –​and Being, a conception of a mind and human reasoning that possessed a sublime or supernatural dimension.24 Post-​Cartesian philosophy, Maritain insisted could not be reconciled with what the Catholic Church considered ‘true humanism.’ And as for Rousseau, his dogma of natural goodness was a corruption of Christian feeling that located divinity in individual selves.25 Against all this, Maritain maintained that the human personality possessed a supernatural dimension that had come to be rejected by Protestant-​ derived individualism and rational science.26 The arguments of Three Reformers echoed Durkheim’s sociology of modernity. Modern individuals, Durkheim wrote in The Division of Labour (1893), live in a society that presupposes that individuals are different from one another in which each has ‘a sphere of action which is specific to him, and in consequence an individual personality.’ Individuals depend on other parts of society but are not entirely governed by this.27 What Durkheim called the conscience collective had become an increasingly secular social bond within modern societies. Social bonds, he wrote, in language that could have been used by Maritain, had lost ‘the transcendent character which placed it as if in a sphere superior to human interests.’28 As shared beliefs become less religious in character the individual had become the object of a sort of religion; but this cult of individual dignity, of the individual work ethic or of individual rights nevertheless derived its force from society.29 Except for how Durkheim depicted religion as a ‘social fact’ –​ something created by people that then impacted upon society –​his understanding of the consequences of secularisation was very similar to that put forward by Catholic anti-​modernists.30 Maritain began his intellectual career in a milieu that was ambivalent towards liberal democracy. In 1914 he became a professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He served as the philosophy editor of Action Française, the newspaper of the similarly named anti-​modern political movement founded in 1899 which had protested against the disestablishment of the Catholic Church by the French state in 1905. Action Française sought both the reinstatement of the monarchy and the re-​establishment of the Church. It was strongly nationalistic and anti-​Semitic and, as such, was quite representative of mainstream French Catholic opinion. Beginning with a 1921 essay, Maritain emerged as a strong critic of anti-​Semitism and other forms of racism.31 In 1926 Maritain broke with

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Action Française. In a huge volume of subsequent writing he articulated a Christian democratic alternative to the mainstream of anti-​modernist political Catholicism that Action Française endorsed. In April 1934 Maritain led a group of five Catholic intellectuals to publish Pour le bien commun (trans. ‘For the Common Good’), an anti-​fascist manifesto.32 He came to stand for a ‘militant humanism that excluded all forms of totalitarianism and refuted all justifications of antisemitism.’33 Maritain argued that human beings were enabled (by God) to achieve their natural and supernatural needs as persons and that the capacity to exercise his personal freedom was an exigency of man’s elevated human nature. These freedoms could only be exercised within a social context, and this context was one that changed over time. He argued that secular liberalism was flawed because it did not take enough account of human interdependence. Totalitarianism was contrary to natural law because it did not permit the kinds of personal autonomy human beings required in order to flourish. He argued that authoritarian forms of government which were tolerable before Western man had achieved his present state of personal and cultural development were no longer acceptable.34 Maritain emphasised that the contemporary believer could no longer respond to his world and to God in a medieval way because his religious experience was no longer a medieval experience and that this was in accordance with natural law. Medieval man had lived in the unitary culture of Christendom. Even though he lived in St Thomas’s church and shared St Thomas’s faith, the modern Catholic knew that his Western culture had been accompanied since the Renaissance by changing ways of thinking about individual freedom and consciousness.35 Human nature did not change but human perceptions and understandings could and did evolve.36 What changed included understandings of the rights and entitlements required by people in order to flourish in the modern world. An interview published in February 1939 in the United States variously addressed Maritain’s criticisms of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, the horrors of totalitarianism, of fascism and anti-​Semitism. To give some examples: I have no faith in the holy war which is ruining Spain with the help of fascism of Senor Mussolini or the racism of Herr Hitler… In several of my books, I have very radically criticized Marxism and atheistic communism, but I think that fascism is the other horn of the same devil…

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In Nationalist Spain there is at present being manufactured a curious political and war-​like ‘Catholicism’ against the spirit of the Gospels, which offers an equally grave danger to genuine Catholicism… What I mean is that fascism, or more precisely, totalitarianism in all its forms is, first of all, a state of mind. It is the decay of democracy when it is breaking up and when, by virtue of a blind biological instinct, it illusively flies into dictatorship. Totalitarianism is created by the ignorance of the masses, fear and impatience, and the presence of a demagogue in whom the multitude seeks refuge in a sort of psycho-​pathological communion.37 In Christianisme et démocratie (1943) –​which was dropped by Allied aircraft over Nazi-​occupied Europe 38 –​ Maritain criticised the nativity of Enlightenment utopians and rationalists who had separated Europe from its Christian roots. The rationalism of Descartes and the Encyclopaedists and the pseudo-​Christian naturalism of Rousseau had promised a kingdom of God on earth procured by ‘the State’ or by ‘the Revolution’ which Hegel’s pantheism taught to deify its own historical movement. He also excoriated the destructive power of the capitalist profit system and the unbridled absolutism of nation states.39 Much of this invective might well have adorned the writings of any typical Catholic anti-​modernist intellectual. However, Maritain emphasised that modernity contained the seeds of great potential as well as such great evils. The Enlightenment, it must be accepted, had produced social and political progress which could be built upon: Science and the scientific conquest of nature, industry and technology, have known wondrous successes –​while taking, to our misfortune, the place of wisdom. … Ever since the French Revolution and the effusion of secularized Christian idealism which it provoked in history, the sense of freedom and the sense of social justice have convulsed and vitalized our civilization; and one would need to have the soul of a slave to wish for the destruction of this very sense of freedom and justice on account of the suffering and disorder it may have occasioned.40 Maritain repeatedly argued during and after the Second World War that human rights needed to be grounded in a pluralistic range of religious and ideological value systems, including those of Protestantism and the

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Enlightenment. He argued that the best of these were compatible with Catholicism and should constitute the basis of a Christian democracy: It was not given to believers faithful to Catholic dogma but to rationalists to proclaim in France the rights of man and of the citizen, to Puritans to strike the last blow against slavery in America, to atheistic communists to abolish in Russia the absolutism of private profit, although this last process could have been less vitiated by the force of error if it had been performed by Christians. Yet the effort to deliver labour and man from the domination of money is an outgrowth of the currents released in the world by the preaching of the Gospel, such as the effort to abolish servitude and the effort to bring about the recognition of the human person.41 Maritain emphasised how democracy and human rights were compatible with Christian humanism. He argued that one did not have to be a follower of Rousseau to recognise individual rights, or of Marx to recognise economic and social rights.42 It was not necessary to integrate the differing underlying theological, metaphysical and naturalistic premises from which different groups justified their common democratic beliefs and practices. It would be a foolish intolerance to allow only one justification of these.43 Although Maritain was a Thomist, he did not consider any kind of utopian recreation of pre-​Enlightenment Christendom to be viable. Catholic thinkers generally rejected secular humanism as a perversion of the ‘true’ Christian kind. Maritain had done so himself in Three Reformers. However, his case for democracy came to be grounded in a conception of integral humanism that did not require the rejection of secular humanism.44 He emphasised that political rights were an aspect of the dignity of the ‘human person’ and, as such, were compatible with the transcendent destiny of all persons.45 This amounted to a formulation of Christian humanism that was opposed to communism, totalitarianism and racism because these sacrificed the dignity of the person.46 He defined this as an ‘integral humanism,’ an account of the human being, that unlike the truncated humanism of the Enlightenment took account of humankind’s proper relationship with God.47 Maritain played a key role in drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.48 In particular, he influenced the wording of the preamble to the Declaration and of Article 1, which referred to the

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dignity of the person, and of Article 23, which referred to the right to ‘an existence worthy of human dignity.’ The Declaration defined dignity with reference to an image of the human person as somebody ‘endowed with reason and conscience.’ It emphasised the rights of the individual but portrayed individuals as situated in families, communities, workplaces, associations, societies, cultures, nations and an emerging international order. Article 28 declared that it was in community ‘alone’ that the ‘free and full development of an individual’s personality was possible.’49 The language used by Maritain to denote the rights of the person also found its way into the wording of the post-​war constitutions of France, Italy and Germany.50 The parliamentary council responsible for drafting the 1949 German Grundgesetz (trans. Basic Law) was chaired by Adenauer.51 Catholic conceptions of personalism located individual rights with a societal context. These differed from Protestant and liberal conceptions of the sovereign individual and from theories of democracy in the tradition of Hobbes and Rousseau, which legitimised the authority of the state as the will of the people. Article 1 of the Basic Law stated that ‘The dignity of man shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.’ Article 2 declared a right to ‘self-​fulfilment’ and to the ‘free development [one’s personality].52 In the immediate post-​war period natural law came to influence court decisions. For example, a 1945 ruling determined that the laws which declared that the property of the Jews had become forfeit to the state were incompatible with natural law and were therefore void.53 Between 1947 and 1949 Maritain participated in international conferences of the Christian democratic parties that played a key role in establishing European economic and political cooperation: The Nouvelles Équipes Internationales: Union internationale des democrats-​ chrétiens (NEI).54 Charles de Gaulle appointed him French ambassador to the Vatican from 1945 to 1948.55 Maritain was subsequently appointed by Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini, the translator of Three Reformers) to speak for Catholic lay intellectuals at the closing session of the Second Vatican Council.56 In his encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967) Paul VI referred explicitly to Maritain’s writings on integral humanism and borrowed several passages from these.57

The social market economy The CDU was founded by members of Zentrum and of Christian trade unions that had clandestinely maintained their political networks during the Nazi period. By the early 1950s almost 20 per cent of CDU

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members were Protestant. The latter were underrepresented insofar as the population of West Germany was roughly half Catholic and half Protestant. The CDU was most prominent in the historic strongholds of political Catholicism (the Rhineland and Westphalia).58 However, Ludwig Erhard (1897–​1977), the second most influential figure within the CDU was a Protestant, as were many of his economic advisers.59 Erhard dominated economic policy in the governments led by Adenauer and served as the Federal Republic’s second Chancellor between 1963 and 1969. He had completed a doctorate in economics in 1925 and worked in an institute for economic research until he was dismissed in 1942 because he refused to join the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. In 1947 he became a professor at the University of Munich and subsequently the director of economic affairs for the British and American-​run zones during the post-​war occupation. In 1949 he was appointed by Adenauer as Minister of Economic Affairs and he became the political architect of the Soziale Marktwirtschaft (trans., ‘social market economy’), which in turn was credited with bringing about Germany’s post-​war ‘economic miracle.’60 In the aftermath of the Third Reich, religious Protestants and Catholics came to blame many of the same ‘evils’ for the rise of Nazism. Both conservative Protestants and Catholics in the CDU were similarly convinced that Nazism’s roots lay in secularism and materialism. Conservative Protestants, such as the Pietists, had come to regard Catholics as natural allies in the ongoing battle against secularism and some had defended Catholic religious rights during the Kulturkampf.61 Notwithstanding all such rhetoric, the CDU, like Zentrum beforehand, pragmatically supported economic modernisation. Rhetoric about re-​establishing Germany and Europe on Christian foundations found limited practical application, although anti-​ materialist virtue signalling was part of Adenauer’s political repertoire. He declared that he considered the accumulation of too much wealth to be pathological. The 1946 Christian Democrat programme stated that moderate property ownership was the essential guarantor of the democratic state and that this must be facilitated for workers.62 Adenauer and the CDU attempted to straddle two very different competing ideas. The Christianisation of post-​war West German politics was a symbolic reaction to Nazi totalitarianism in a context where Adenauer and the CDU adopted, for pragmatic reasons, a limited approach to the removal of former Nazis from administrative positions.63 The resurgence of economic liberalism which coexisted with Catholic ideas as part of the social market economy was also portrayed as an antidote to totalitarian government. A degree of

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conflict between Catholic and Protestant ideas, between corporatism and subsidiarity on one hand, and economic liberalism on the other, played out as the social market economy came into being.64 The social market economy championed by Adenauer and its political architect Ludwig Erhard could hardly be described as anti-​materialistic or anti-​ capitalist. It emphasised the need for well-​functioning markets within which competition was seen as a prerequisite for economic efficiency.65 As described by Adenauer in 1965 in his memoirs: It is a conception linked to the social, an economy in which the outcomes of the work of free and capable men are harmonized into an order bringing maximum economic profit and social justice to all. This system is radically opposed to that of the planned economy we reject, whether its directives derive from centralized or decentralized, official or private bodies. It is likewise opposed to the so-​ called ‘free economy,’ and it is in order to prevent a return to it that independent control of monopolies is necessary so as to ensure healthy competition.66 The term ‘social market’ was coined by Alfred Müller-​Armack, who became one of Erhard’s chief officials. During the early 1930s Müller-​ Armack and some other members of the Freiburg School had been supporters of the strong state as proposed by Hitler in Mein Kampf and as put into practice by Benito Mussolini in Italy.67 They were less enamoured with the Nazi totalitarianism and during the war developed proposals for a post-​war economic order.68 The term, Ordnungstheorie (ordoliberalism) was originated by Walter Eucken, another member of the Freiburg School, to denote a system within which the state ordered the rules of the economy but did not seek to directly manage economic processes.’69 Ordoliberals like Eucken insisted that the economy should be regulated through strong competition laws to prevent economic vested interests from undermining competition. The stated aim was to prevent the re-​emergence of the kinds of economic cartels and monopolies that became prevalent in Germany during the late nineteenth century that, it was argued, had facilitated the rise of totalitarianism. Ordoliberals, in essence, opposed the concentration of economic power in private hands or under the control of the state.70 Ordoliberalism advocated a constitutional approach to economic regulation. The concept of Wirtschaftsverfassung (trans. ‘economic constitution’) was used by German economists to describe the legal

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principles and relations which set established economic rules. The ordoliberal economic constitution was one that permitted freedom of contract but regulated competition by ensuring that group interests did not override individual economic interests. Under the ordoliberal economic constitution, economic rights and freedoms had the same status as traditional political rights and freedoms. Once these were constitutionally established it would not be necessary or possible for the government to micromanage the operations of markets.71 The role of government, ordoliberals argued, was to ensure economic competition through regulation but not to own or directly control industries or even public services.72 Ordoliberalism had much in common with the neoliberalism championed by Hayek. Eucken was the only economist living in Germany to be invited by Hayek to the inaugural meeting of the MPS in April 1947. He was appointed vice-​president of the MPS and worked closely with Hayek in building its membership.73 Hayek arranged for the translation of Eucken’s Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie (1940) which was published as The Foundations of Economics by Chicago University Press. Here Eucken argued that the dirigisme of the totalitarian state could not be simply replaced by laissez faire and that a new kind of competitive economic order must be deliberately established.74 Correspondence in 1946 between both, following the publication of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, highlighted some differences between ordoliberalism and Hayek’s neoclassical liberalism. Eucken’s case for an ordoliberal market economy as set out in his 12 March 1946 letter to Hayek prioritised the need for social order, whereas Hayek foregrounded the importance of individual freedom within a spontaneous order to be brought about by state regulation. Simply put, Hayek maintained that free markets depended on individual autonomy and that the role of the state was to create a spontaneous order and then stand back so that countless individual economic decisions could play out without interference to the maximum benefit of the economy. Eucken inverted this proposition, arguing that economic freedom depended on a state-​imposed system of order and that the needs of society required interventions to address perverse aspects of the market which worked to impair free market competition. Freedom, Eucken argued, was secondary to the system of order which protected the needs of society.75 As put by Euchen in his 1940 manifesto: The problem will not solve itself simply by letting the economic system develop spontaneously. The history of

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the last century demonstrates this fully. The economic system must be constructed deliberately. The exact problems of economic policy, whether they concern agriculture, trade, credit, monopolies, taxation, corporate law, or bankruptcy law, are all parts of one large problem, which consists in finding out how the economy as a whole must be constructed, along with its rules, both nationally and internationally.76 Eucken was concerned with the perverse influence of monopolies upon markets. Ordoliberalism argued that the big cartels that had built up since the nineteenth century and had flourished under national socialism needed to be broken up. Eucken argued, with the German case in mind, that the big economic players were large conglomerations of factories, trusts and cartels, which tended to become monopolies or oligopolies that closed off competition. The tools for regulating these included corporate law, patent law, trade policy and taxation policy. Simply put, it took a lot of regulation to create modern economies in which competition would flourish.77 Eucken and Hayek differed in their understanding of the relationship between democracy and liberalism. Both believed that socialism was incompatible with democracy. However, Eucken, in a letter to Hayek reflecting on the rise of totalitarianism in Germany, emphasised that democracy did not guarantee freedom.78 For Hayek the biggest threat to the open society was the growth of the state. Ordoliberals were preoccupied with the dangers to social cohesion posed by powerful economic cartels.79 The model of neoliberalism proposed by Hayek was simply not viable in post-​war West Germany where social needs that could not be addressed by market forces were all too apparent even to champions of economic liberalism: Early post-​war economists and politicians were acutely aware of those millions of war widows, orphans, mutilated veterans and displaced families as well as some 11 million refugees and expellees from the East. They could not possibly be left to struggle on their own in the harsh competitive winds of a market economy. The Freiburgers accepted not only the Bismarckian and Weimar traditions as part of the country’s history, but also that a welfare infrastructure was indispensable to deal with the post-​ 1945 emergency. These were burdens that both the ‘state’

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(taxpayer) and private industry had to bear. To leave the destitute and those in poor health without support was not only inhuman but also a threat to the still precarious political stability of West Germany as a parliamentary-​democratic system which guaranteed basic rights.80 Ordoliberalism combined with Catholic thinking about social cohesion within the social market. Christian democracy required that economic rules worked to protect the rights of workers and families and in particular, the entitlement of male breadwinners to wages capable of supporting their families. In its stewardship of the economy, the state was to be a good shepherd rather than the metaphorical night watchman beloved of neoliberals.81 The consensus in support of a social welfare safety net extended beyond the political parties. A 1954 analysis of industrial relations in Germany noted that the major trade union federation –​the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) –​had some six million members of around 40 per cent of the workforce.82 The trade union movement reached some similar conclusions to the Freiburg school about the need to break up the power of the economic cartels that dominated the German economy during both world wars, the Great Depression and the Nazi period. Large employers which were closely connected to the Nazi state were discredited. Alfried Krupp and other leading industrialists remained in prison until 1951.83 In many cases, factories were put back into operation by the workers themselves. The unions had considerable political influence during the reconstruction period when the institutions of the social market were put in place.84 These managed to reintroduce works councils that had been abolished by Hitler. Factory committees in Germany dated back to the First World War period and became part of the German economic system by law in 1920. The post-​war system of works councils negotiated work conditions, wages and social insurance. The DGB became a powerful player within the social market economy.85 In Germany the CDU sought to preserve what had come to be viewed as the traditional family –​a division of labour produced by the industrial revolution, which segregated the paid work of males from the unpaid care work in the home of women –​by ensuring that wages paid to industrial workers were sufficient to support a family. This became an explicit goal of economic and social policy. Social insurance was related to male paid employment and ‘traditional families’ were institutionally promoted through the taxation system. Social protection of female homemakers, such as widows’ pensions for old-​age security, derived

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primarily from their status as wives or daughters of socially insured males. Employment of women, especially that of mothers of young children, was discouraged by an absence of childcare.86 Ideological resistance to measures aimed at enabling women to engage in paid employment remained strong within the CDU into the twenty-​first century long after contraception and technology ended much of the need for a gendered division of labour in Western societies.

Certain ideas of Europe In the closing pages of The Division of Labour in Society (1893), in the midst of an argument that individual autonomy would flourish best in societies with complex divisions of labour, Émile Durkheim emphasised how the forms of interdependence that brought about organic solidarity could also cross borders. On one hand, there was an ideal: ‘a state of affairs where war would no longer govern international relations, where relationships between societies would be regulated peacefully as are already those between individuals’; on the other, there was the aspiration for an intellectual and moral convergence between broadly similar societies that would unite these. Shared ideals, he argued, would never be enough to bring about such unity. However, an ongoing division of labour which would foster deeper functional interdependence across Europe, by means of the kinds of laws that regulated complex interdependences within nations, might make such unity possible.87 The mostly-​C hristian democratic political and technocratic architects of what would become the European Union perhaps shared what has been called L’Esprit Européen.88 This had a number of elements. In the immediate aftermath of the war, religious sensibility played a part in the case put forward for democracy, transnational cooperation and human rights.89 However, the main impetus was the need to recover from the war and to prevent the re-​emergence of subsequent conflicts. The Christian democratic architects of European integration variously blamed the war on modern nationalism, the rise of authoritarian fascism and the decline of Christian values. As put by Rosario Forlenza: In the narrative of Christian Democracy, the order of European history and civilisation had been destroyed by modern nationalism and then by its association with the authoritarian political theologies of fascism and Nazism. Furthermore, political Catholicism had long experienced

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the nation state as a homogenising force threatening communities, from the churches to families. Taming nationalisms and nations, healing the European civil war and overcoming the past through close cooperation beyond the borders of nation states were explicit goals of the Europeanism of Christian Democracy.90 The CDU approach to European integration owed much to German Catholic ideas about the ‘Christian West’ (Das Christliche Abendland).91 The CDU invoked Abendland as the home of anti-​materialistic ‘Christian’ ideals and depicted Europe as the battleground where the survival of these would be determined.92 During the immediate post-​ war period, Abendland evoked a European cultural mission to rebuild a shattered world. As explained by Ronald Granieri: Contemporary critics might joke that ‘even the Catholics’ did not really believe in that Abendland nonsense (abendlanderei), but for many Germans, especially Catholics in the Union, this vision of a special European cultural identity and mission corresponded with their conception of the Union as a barrier to materialism. The ideology of the Abendland provided a powerful rallying point for Union enthusiasts for European integration.93 By the early twenty-​first century the ideals of Abendland seemed part of a distant past, notwithstanding pronouncements by the German-​ born Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) that emphasised Europe’s Christian heritage. As a boy, Ratzinger had been conscripted into the Hitler Youth. He was ordained in 1951 and rose to Cardinal as part of the German hierarchy. As Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (from 1981 until he became Pope in 2005), he was in charge of enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy with the Church. Like Maritain, Ratzinger viewed Europe as a product of both Christianity and the Enlightenment and he wrote that that European identity had developed as a synthesis of faith and reason.94 Unlike Maritain, Ratzinger had never been able to muster enthusiasm for the notion of dialogue with modernity.95 Like earlier generations of Catholic anti-​modernists, he viewed the problem of European identity in zero-​ sum terms as a conflict between Christianity and the Enlightenment. Viewed in such terms, Christianity had become ‘a minority identity’ and Europe had become more or less post-​Christian.96 In Europe Today and Tomorrow (2004) Ratzinger reflected that the European Union had

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based its identity on faith and culture but had become ‘hollowed out’ by secularism.97 Cooperation between the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was influenced by anxieties about the Cold War. These translated, for Adenauer and the CDU, into the need for Westbindung (to look West). Adenauer’s greatest political achievement, he declared, when asked about this in 1960, was to ally West Germany firmly with the free West. Westbindung, for Adanauer, was both a political and a moral imperative without which Germany would not be able to overcome its Nazi past and become a respected member of the international community. Adenauer argued that European security, political stability and what came to be called the European project benefited from Atlanticism: close alliance with the United States.98 The establishment of the ECSC in 1951 was driven by political and technocratic elites whose mandate came from national governments.99 However, even before the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, the CDU, other Christian democratic parties and Catholic intellectuals like Jacques Maritain had debated the future of Europe under the umbrella of the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (NEI). The NEI was reconstituted as the European Union of Christian Democrats (EUCD) in 1965 and as the European People’s Party (EPP) in 1976.100 The political impetus for the Schuman Plan that proposed the ECSC approach of economic transnationalism came from France (encouraged by the United States). It was designed by Jean Monnet, a French economist who had coordinated the expansion of the Allies’ armaments industries during the war. Monnet was preoccupied with removing future risks of conflict between Germany and France over control of the Ruhr and Lorraine regions that provided the coal and steel needed to forge instruments of war.101 He argued that peace between both countries could be best secured if each yielded sovereignty and pooled control of these industries across frontiers, which ‘would reduce their malign prestige and turn them instead into a guarantee of peace.’102 The expectation of the technocrats was that deeper economic interdependencies and interconnections would translate into deeper communal bonds. However, the European Union never quite managed to foster the kind of intensive imagined sense of shared identity that continues to be found within member nation states. The European Union became ‘a messy contradiction made out of compromises, concessions, accommodations, fudging of issues’ and also of ‘whole periods of stagnation, back-​pedalling and outward opposition’ to the aspirations of its strongest champions. For example,

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many German Christian democrats supported European integration, but others like Erhard were concerned that this might block eventual German reunification.103 In several of his 1979 lectures at the College De France Michel Foucault examined the nature and influence of German ordoliberalism. Its defining goal, he argued, was not to prevent state inference in the economy but to place the state under the supervision of the market.104 In essence, state autonomy was to become subordinated to an economic constitution which applied to governments as well as to economic actors. However, in Germany the influence of ordoliberalism was tempered by other elements of the social market economy model. European integration proceeded by means of treaties which created and then extended a transnational economic constitution. The Treaty of Rome (1957) established the EEC that was often referred to as the Common Market. From an ordoliberal perspective the Treaty of Rome was close to the ideal of an economic constitution because in setting up the Common Market it appeared to concern exclusively economic rights. Under Article 2 of the Treaty of Rome, the European integration was to be furthered by the establishment of an internal market and the subordination of member state economic policies to EEC rules as interpreted by the European Court of Justice.105 In keeping with the ordoliberal approach European Union member states have ceded considerable autonomy with respect to economic policy.106 The Treaty of Maastricht (1992) –​the blueprint for European Monetary Union –​stipulated that member states had to implement policy ‘in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with free competition.’ Various rulings of the European Court of Justice have blocked economic protectionism by member states even if, to the dismay ordoliberal purists, European Union economic policy continues to be considerably shaped by political horse-​trading.107 The EU has been described as a highly competitive social market economy, one within which an economic constitution coexists with a social policy emphasis on social cohesion, where regulation is managed by supposedly impartial technocrats on the basis of economic rationality, while politically sensitive decisions requiring broad social consensus are still left to member states to thrash out.108

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Legacies Previous chapters have examined how influential thinking about social policy developed along three winding roads since the beginning of the industrial revolution in several European countries. In various places conservatives have sought to resist liberalism and socialism, socialists have rejected liberalism and conservatism while liberals have sought to overcome conservativism and resist the influence of socialism. However, it is not simply the case that each of these worldviews has always operated as an intellectual silo. There have been crosspollinations of ideas and ongoing pragmatic accommodations that have been made by political parties in order to maximise electoral support. Many European countries have long been run by coalition governments which represent more than one ideological perspective and where political power has oscillated between rival political parties who are, to some extent, in ideological opposition to one another. This is not to claim that ideological conflicts have not often been fierce. The kinds of intellectual silos and echo chambers that are now all too apparent on social media are by no means recent phenomena. Yet, the rationale for much social policy has been functional, notwithstanding some differences from country to country when it came to who did what –​the state, markets or the voluntary sector –​ within mixed economies of welfare. Countries affected by broadly similar processes of social change over time have required similar services and institutions: schools, universities, hospitals, utilities and so on. How these are organised continues to be worth arguing over. For example, the absence of pre-​school education as the legacy of conservativism can inhibit the ability of women with children to engage in paid employment. Whether access to health care depends upon individual levels of wealth or is made free at the point of use can literally be a matter of life or death. The period covered in earlier chapters stretches from the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 to the publication of Gosta Esping-​ Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990. The starting place for this final chapter is a once influential take on how the future might play out, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which was published a few years later in 1992. The End of History was

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a bestseller in the English-​speaking countries it placed at the centre of the universe. It had one of those snappy titles that promised big clear answers to what were inevitably complex questions. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was another such title, and in some respects, The End of History was its sequel. The End of History appeared at a time when the neoliberalism that Hayek and others had nurtured for several decades had apparently become the dominant ideology of the age. In his original 1989 essay, ‘The End of History?,’ Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy in the absence of viable systematic alternatives. By the end of history, he meant ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ This was not to argue that liberalism had or would triumph everywhere but that with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union it faced no grand competing viable ideal.1 Fukuyama argued that in the West the ideals of political liberalism had vanquished Christian theocracy as well as communism and in the wider world only Islam proposed a political alternative to both liberalism and communism.2 Fukuyama equated the end of history with the death of utopianism, with the end of the belief that radicalism could produce a better world or that the future could transcend the present.3 Writing with more than a little hubris, in 1989 he predicted a future in which a willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal would everywhere ‘be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer concerns.’4 Whatever problems the future would bring, Fukuyama seemed to infer, these would not be brought about by efforts to impose utopian grand plans on humanity as a way of fixing social problems. As an alternative to such utopias, neoliberalism proposed an alternative grand plan: an epically monolithic global system ruled by economic rationality. Utopias are fundamentally undemocratic. A recurring theme in earlier chapters has been the ambivalence of ardent social reformers to the extended franchise. The Samurai of H.G. Wells’s imagination were social engineers who scorned democratic accountability because they knew best. Their real life equivalents included those utilitarian liberals who were the successors of Jeremy Bentham, as well as early socialists like Robert Owens. The fantasies Wells spun appealed to the elitism of the Fabian Society. Somewhat similarly, Gunnar Myrdal favoured an aristocratic approach to social democracy. The job of the social engineer, as he saw it, was to design the future and use propaganda to obtain the support of the masses.

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Neoliberalism has also proved ambivalent to democracy insofar as it has argued that social policy should be governed by the market rather than by the state and that the economy should not be subordinated to democratic politics. In short, it has sought to engineer a world dominated by markets rather than by social engineering. Fukuyama did not anticipate the extent to which some democratic countries would come to be influenced by authoritarian populists who declared that, in an era of economic globalisation, high immigration and economic turmoil, the social contracts championed by mainstream political parties and technocrats had failed. A dearth of optimism for a better future has come to characterise the current zeitgeist. As put by W.B. Yeats in his 1919 poem The Second Coming:5 Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-​dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Yeats’s fatalism a century ago was part of the mood that precipitated European fascism. The democratic era of welfare capitalism that followed Europe’s fascist era was hardly perfect and its flaws and failures to some extent fuel present-​day discontents. This book is something of a love letter to the centre that must somehow hold. It is by no means clear where the three roads along which previous chapters have travelled will lead in the future, but that is not the point here. Both institutional contexts of and ideological approaches to social policy are accretions of past ideas, beliefs and ways of doing things. These are the places from where future journeys begin.

Endgames Fukuyama’s conception of history was explicitly Hegelian. When it came to the progression of big ideas –​through what Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–​1831) depicted as an ongoing process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis –​liberal democracy represented the end of the road. Hegel posited the unfolding of ‘world history’ through the back and forth interplay and conflict between ideas. Dominant ideas expressed the spirit of the age or Zeitgeist.6 For Hegel, according to Fukuyama, ‘the Universal History of mankind was nothing other than man’s progressive rise to full rationality, and to a self-​conscious awareness of

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how that rationality expresses itself in liberal self-​government.’7 This did not mean that Fukuyama expected democracy and capitalism to win out everywhere –​or even that he presumed there could not be one without the other –​but that no competing ideologies which promised to deliver the good society would be taken as seriously as liberal democracy. What Fukuyama grandiosely called ‘The End of History’ amounted to the universal approval in the West of perspectives that had long been widely accepted in any case. For example, during the 1920s, Ernst Wigforss influentially defined social democracy as democratic progress towards a provisional utopia that could not be prescribed in advance. Leaders of the British Labour Party, including Kier Hardie and Clement Atlee and their successors, unambivalently opposed Marxist socialism. In 1959 the West German Social Democrat Party, at a conference at Bad Godesberg, abandoned the party programme written in 1891 by Karl Kautsky under the supervision of Friedrich Engels.8 Across Western Europe Catholic confessional parties were supplanted by Christian democratic ones. During the 1940s the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain argued that democratic conceptions of liberty had won out because these were seen to meet best what was needed to enable people to flourish in the modern world.9 What Fukuyama called the End of History had been percolating for decades. Liberal democracy was defined in broad terms by Fukuyama. It apparently encompassed both social democracy and Christian democracy; these received just one mention each in The End of History. This occurs in a sentence which depicts these as strands of liberalism: The major arguments concern not the principles of liberal society, but the precise point at which the proper trade-​off between liberty and equality should come. Every society will balance liberty and equality differently, from the individualism of Reagan’s America or Thatcher’s Britain, to the Christian Democracy of the European continent and the social democracy of Scandinavia. These countries will be very different from one another in their social practices and their quality of life, but the specific trade-​offs they choose can all be made under the broad tent of liberal democracy, without injury to underlying principles.10 Fukuyama inferred that the End of History constituted a victory for all three. However, it also coincided with the rising influence of neoliberalism. These worlds of welfare capitalism were often conflated

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within debates that played out in Anglophone countries that had strong traditions of liberalism. Fukuyama rarely distinguished within liberalism between the different democratic worlds of welfare capitalism examined here. The End of History was received as a kind of sequel to Fredrick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Fukuyama argued that Hayek and Ludwig von Mises had been ultimately proved right in their claim that centrally planned socialism was incapable of competing with capitalism.11 Like these, he claimed that communism unravelled because central planning failed to manage what were unmanageable levels of economic complexity and because socialists gravely underestimated the importance of economic incentives in motivating people to produce and innovate. None of this could have been known, according to Fukuyama-​the-​ Hegelian, had there not been socialist experiments that had failed.12 Marxist critiques of the flaws of capitalism had influenced intellectuals and Western socialists generation after generation. For these, communism was the God that faltered. Even if the Soviet Union was deeply flawed, its existence counted as proof that another world was possible. The fall of the Soviet Union precipitated a crisis of confidence among idealists who had until then kept their faith in socialism. The historian Tony Judt argued that Marxism proved attractive to generations of young people in democratic Western societies because it offered a way of distancing oneself from the status quo. It was more attractive as a vantage point for considering the shortcomings of capitalism rather than a playbook of specific prescriptions for reorganising society.13 The death of collectivism in the Soviet Union –​the God that failed –​ undermined faith in utopian socialism among those who had clung to this in the West. From the perspective of Marxists in despair, as summarised in an 1992 essay in The New Left Review, Fukuyama’s book posited a liberal version of historical materialism that explained: ‘the triumph of a superior system of economic organization by its capacity to bring reason to bear on the problems of meeting human desires.’14 It imagined no further stage of economic and social development beyond that of the present.15 Even the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm accepted that socialism was an ideology in crisis.16 For two decades, he lamented, the intellectual and political Left had been fighting an ‘agonized rear-​ guard action’ as it retreated before the advance of capitalist liberalism. Socialists of all varieties had ceased to believe in the possibility of an entirely non-​market economy and in the desirability and feasibility of a centrally planned state economy.17 The final issue of Marxism Today, the magazine of the British Communist Party, appeared in December 1991. In its pages, in 1979,

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Stuart Hall first coined the term ‘Thatcherism.’18 In his contribution to the final issue he argued that Thatcherite neoliberalism had become utterly intellectually dominant within policies and that the Labour Party was left with no ideological room to manoeuvre except to seek to graft a few humane considerations onto this new status quo. The ‘plain fact,’ he wrote, ‘was that the Left has nothing remotely like a social philosophy which it could state in anything remotely resembling the pithy, memorable and succinct form of Thatcher’s.’ It wasn’t just that the old styles of state ownership and management of the public sector were politically out of favour for the time being. According to Hall, the British welfare state had failed the people it was meant to serve: They have failed to provide either the scale and range of services, the models of control and accountability, the flexibility and sensitivity to consumer needs in a diversifying society, or the innovations which would allow them to keep up with modern developments. Nor is it simply because they were bureaucratic and inefficient as well as unwieldly, defensive and undemocratic to their clients. It is also that, with the collapse of the communist experiment, the deep flaws of the state managed economy and society are profound and extensive, and any Left alternative cannot now avoid confronting that historic failure.19 The point of Hall’s 1991 article (and several others in a similar vein) was that unless the Left acknowledged such failures it could have no viable future. What such a future might look like was sketched out in a collection of essays New Times (1989), coedited by Hall, several of which first appeared in the magazine. These declared that there was a need to move beyond the traditional class politics that followed the emergence of an industrial working class in order to also challenge gender and racial inequalities. Thatcherism, the New Times manifesto declared, ‘rose to power on the back of the exhaustion of the post-​ war social democratic project.’ Rather than make the fight with neoliberalism about defending ‘the rusting infrastructure of the post-​ war settlement’ and ‘a discredited past’ there was a need to develop a positive vision of the future.20 The actual leftist political project that emerged, led by Tony Blair, had much of its genesis in various ‘New Times’ think pieces. Blair, in one of the last issues of Marxism Today wrote that the challenge for socialists was to ensure the provision of public services without insisting on state ownership of these.21 Blair dusted off the word ‘modern,’ a term that

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had come to be blighted by perceptions of crises of modernity by critics of utopian socialism and the grand visions of planners and technocrats, and applied this to his promises of renewal. First, he ‘modernised’ the Labour Party into ‘New Labour’ and Blairism was proclaimed as a new ‘Third Way’ between free market capitalism and socialism.22 Blair’s New Labour programme, which abandoned a commitment to collectivisation, recalled the 1959 German Social Democrat slogan: So viel Markt wie moglich; so viel Staat wie notig (trans: ‘as much market as possible, as much state as necessary’). New Labour’s assessment of the amount of market needed hardly differed from what Thatcherism had achieved. Markets were to be the primary instrument for achieving the public good.23 The 1990s were good times for market friendly centrists in Europe.24 A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, left-​leaning political parties were in power in 12 European countries including the four largest: Germany, Britain, France and Italy.25 That might have been a good place for History to stop but, of course, it didn’t stop there.

The inevitability of social policy The neoliberal project has sought to liberate economic systems from the interference of governments and of electorates. The original neoliberal thinkers advocated the use of legislation that would regulate economic competition by preventing the emergence of monopolies that undermined free markets as well as state interference. Neoliberalism promoted the separation of economic decision-​making from politics in order to protect the economy from democracy. The argument was that democratic actors –​the voters, interest groups and political parties –​would always be tempted to make ‘irrational’ economic decisions including giving support to the ongoing expansion of public expenditure.26 It was clear that by the time neoliberalism had become a powerful political ideology, the welfare state in the democratic West had nowhere precipitated the kinds of tyranny that Hayek had warned against in The Road to Serfdom. Europe’s welfare capitalist countries, as Steven Pinker put it, turned out not to be dystopias but rather pleasant places to live and these trounced the United States, which came closest to Hayek’s ideal, in every measure of human flourishing including life expectancy, infant mortality, education levels and happiness.27 It is probably the case that there are now more novels and movies portraying neoliberal-​style dystopias than ones about collectivism. In these, corporations have been depicted as ruthless entities whose prioritisation of profits led to cover-​ups of pollution and denials that

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their products caused illness or even death. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s novel The Space Merchants (1953), which was published before The Road to Serfdom, anticipated a future world in the midst of an environmental crisis in which the protagonist, an advertising executive whose vocation it is to manipulate the tastes of ordinary citizens or ‘consumers,’ loses his job and sinks into the abyss.28 If the extent to which consumers might be manipulated seemed exaggerated when the book was first published, it hardly seems so now when algorithms are used to precisely target niche markets and influence voters. In the world as portrayed in The Space Merchants, the spontaneous order imagined by Hayek was entirely open to manipulation. Neoliberalism has been proclaimed most loudly as a political ideal in the Anglosphere, in countries where the English of Adam Smith was spoken and where liberals, rather than social democrats or Christian democrats, had shaped processes of social and economic modernisation. Anglophone neoliberals, much more so than Europe’s ordoliberals, have championed the deregulation of markets. The notion that markets had a role to play in everything gained ground. Citizens became customers. Britain’s National Health Service became a system of internal markets. More generally, and in other countries neoliberalism became institutionalised within bureaucratic rationality even though different worlds of welfare capitalism have persisted. Neoliberalism has often been described, especially by its critics, as all-​powerful. However, the case for collective responses to social problems and infrastructural needs has persisted even in those societies most influenced by neoliberal ideology. Karl Polanyi argued that nineteenth-​century laissez faire was a temporary artificial imposition that sought to sweep away the kinds of laws and customs that had tended to exist to promote social cohesion. Societies have always organised some forms of collective welfare and modern societies with complex divisions of labour need a lot of infrastructure. Whether we are talking about collectivised services or markets or about some combination of both, complex societies cannot manage without education, healthcare, social insurance and other forms of infrastructure on a scale that requires some degree of planning. The nature and extent of this might be influenced by ideology, but in complex societies, some degree of social policy is functionally necessary. Polanyi argued that social policy was inevitable. Something like laissez faire, according to Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1934), could not have ever come into existence without having been deliberately imposed by legislation in a political system that was insulated from a broad electorate. Neoliberalism has been

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described as a second great transformation that also needed to be invented and imposed.29 However, even countries with strong liberal traditions proved unwilling to completely dismantle their welfare states. The re-​imposition of the levels of laissez faire that were imposed in Britain before the advent of mass democracy during the nineteenth century has not proved to be politically feasible. Yet even where neoliberal political rhetoric is unpopular, social policy has come to be influenced by the neoliberal rationality of transnational financial markets and regulatory systems. Governments in democratic societies do not just listen to voters. These also must consider the impact of their decisions on market confidence, knowing that if they lose this their countries will be punished. Different ideological approaches to social policy still compete to appeal to citizen voters. However, the power of markets in a globalised world constitutes a second politically influential constituency of interests. These two constituencies are referred to by Wolfgang Streek as the Staatvolk, the citizens who vote in elections and whose opinions are polled, and the Marktvolk, which includes international investors and creditors.30 Many countries responded to the post-​2008 global economic crisis by imposing austerity measures without proclaiming an accompanying ideological project of undermining the welfare state.31 Austerity measures were imposed at the behest of the Marktvolk with, at best, the very-​begrudging consent of the Staatvolk. To some extent these prescriptions were channelled through the European Union, which has required that economically distressed member states increase taxation while cutting public expenditure and privatising some public services.32 The EU has functioned as a free trade zone, but it has also fostered commitments to social policies aimed at promoting social cohesion within member states. The Treaty of Rome (1957) created the EEC, also known as the Common Market. However, the EEC also became a vehicle for the expansion of social policy in member states. For example, the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) supported the modernisation of farming, which also cushions social cohesion by providing income supports in regions with large rural populations. This is the opposite to what happened when British liberals ended the Speenhamland System during the early nineteenth century. Other measures to promote social cohesion include a Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers (1989) that was ratified by all member states at the time, except for the United Kingdom. The Maastricht Treaty (1992), which established the European Community included some specific social policy objectives including (in Article 1 of the Agreement on Social Policy) ‘the promotion of employment,

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improved living and working conditions, proper social protection.’ These were ratified by all member states at the time except, again, by the United Kingdom.33 What became the European Union was the invention of Christian Democrats. Yet social democratic ideas and concepts have come to influence the social policy of many member states. For example, the influence of Swedish measures aimed at supporting women in paid employment through social insurance, and policies aimed at encouraging men to become more involved in childcare through paid parental leave for fathers, is reflected in EU Parental Leave Directives since 1996.34 Social democratic thinking about the gendered division of labour, exemplified by the writings of Alva Myrdal, has become influential even in European countries whose social policies were once strongly influenced by Catholic conservatism.35 The new worlds of welfare capitalism of the twenty-​first century are still influenced by a range of ideologies as well as by the evolving functional needs of societies. Nation states still make political choices about their welfare futures but not often under circumstances of their choosing.36 To some extent, what is meant by social citizenship has continued to deepen. Rights and access to welfare goods and services have improved for women, people with disabilities and other groups that have faced discrimination in the past even if the nature and extent of many services continues to be constrained by the logic of markets. Even countries that do not elect neoliberal politicians find it hard to escape the pervasive influence of neoliberal rationalities in a globalised world. In this context, political populists who promise to make their countries great again have struck a chord. Neoliberalism is a utopian, internationalist and cosmopolitan doctrine. The new political populists tend to be nationalists and isolationists. These wage war on the political mainstreams that appear to have presided over the flight of manufacturing and jobs to countries that can produce goods more cheaply. The current political crisis is, in part, a legacy of past efforts by politicians and technocrats to depoliticise social policy by ceding control to economic processes placed deliberately outside of the control of politics. Michael Sandel has argued that present-​day populist politics are very much the offspring of both neoliberalism and technocracy. Both have worked to hollow out politics. Technocrats embraced the logic of markets as an alternative to securing political consent for their programmes. Politicians embraced forms of regulation that insulated them from contentious decisions and difficult choices. Behaving

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as if moral judgement can be outsourced to markets, according to Sandel, has created a political vacuum that is being filled by narrow, intolerant, authoritarian alternatives –​whether in the form of religious fundamentalism or strident nationalism.37 The focus of this book has been upon Europe and on some of the mixed economies of welfare that have emerged there. These have been examined as specific traditions. This European story cannot explain the wider world. The academic study of comparative social policy once regarded Esping-​Andersen’s analysis of Western countries as the last word. In the decades since the publication of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the discipline has come to focus on approaches to social policy in other parts of the world. In my university, where comparative social policy is taught, it is not unusual for students to study countries like Japan, South Korea and those with Muslim majorities. However, in all these, Polanyi’s observation about the inevitability of social policy holds true. Earlier chapters have emphasised how social policy developed in the absence of democracy under liberal, conservative and fascist capitalist systems. What is called the class mobilisation thesis arguably accounts not just for the end of laissez faire but also for Catholic social thought that was championed by conservatives who sought to compete with socialists for the hearts and minds of the working classes once these obtained the right to vote. It will not be possible to restore the welfare settlements of the twentieth century. Nor is it desirable to do so because social policy needs to respond to social change. Europe’s three worlds of welfare capitalism took their impetus from the industrial revolution, its accompanying division of labour and technologies, and from the emergence of mass democracy. The twenty-​first century presents a vista of ongoing technological and social change as well as new risks that somehow need to be addressed by states, markets and communities. In particular, the environmental crises may come to exert a game-​changing influence on how social policy comes to be organised and how the transnational capitalist systems in which it is embedded come to be regulated. Just as twentieth-​century totalitarianism and the Second World War provided the impetus for liberal, Christian democratic and social democratic welfare states, so might the threat of environmental collapse or events such as the 2020 global pandemic inspire a new generation of welfare systems. Any such future dispensations will, to some extent, draw on past ideological legacies because the various theories and beliefs about human nature that in the past have influenced liberals, conservatives and socialists will continue to be salient.

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Notes Chapter 1 

Gosta Esping-​A ndersen (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. 2 Harold Wilensky (1975), The Welfare State and Equality: Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditure, Berkeley: University of California Press. 3 Francis Fukuyama (1995), ‘Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later,’ History and Theory, 34.2, 27–​43, pp 29–​30. 4 Philip Mannow (2009), ‘Electoral Rules, Class Coalitions and Welfare State Regimes, or How to Explain Esping-​Andersen with Stein Rokkan,’ Socio-​Economic Review, 7, 101–​121, p 103. 5 Esping-​Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, pp 21–​22. 6 Esping-​Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, pp 26–​28. 7 Jane Lewis (2002), ‘Gender and Welfare State Change,’ European Societies, 4.4, 331–​357, p 331. 8 Lewis, Gender and Welfare, p 332. 9 Clare Bambra (2004), ‘The Worlds of Welfare: Illusory and Gender Blind?’ Social Policy and Society, 3.3, 201–​212, p 203. 10 Mary Daly and Jane Lewis (2000), ‘The Concept of Care and the Analysis of Contemporary Welfare States,’ British Journal of Sociology, 51.2, 281–​298. 11 Adam Smith (1776), The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, pp 9–​13. 12 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, p 18. 13 Émile Durkhiem (1893/​1984), The Division of Labour, London: Macmillan. 14 Timothy Snyder (2018), The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, London: The Bodley Head, pp 8–​15. 15 Peter Flora (ed.) (1986), ‘Introduction’ Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States Since World War II: Vol. 1, New York: Walter de Gruyter, p xvi. 16 Karl Popper (1945/​2002), The Open Society and its Enemies: Vol. 1, London: Routledge, p 7. 17 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p 463. 18 Ramin Jahanbegloo (1991), Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, London: Phoenix Press, p 34. 1

Chapter 2 

T.H. Marshall (1980), Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 13. 2 Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, p 21. 3 D.A. Baugh (1975), ‘The Cost of Poor Relief in South-​East England, 1790–​1834,’ The Economic History Review, 28.1, 50–​68, p 53. 4 M.D. Neuman (1969), ‘A Suggestion Regarding the Origins of the Speenhamland Plan,’ The English Historical Review, 84.331, 317–​322, p 318. 5 Jacob Viner (1960), ‘The Intellectual History of Laissez Faire,’ Journal of Law and Economics, 45.3, 45–​69, p 48. 6 Fred Block and Margaret Somers (2003), ‘In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law,’ Politics and Society, 31.2, 283–​323, p 293. 7 Karl Polanyi (1944/​1957), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press: Boston, p 148. 1

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Three Roads to the Welfare State R.H. Tawney (1930),‘Foreword’ to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Unwin, p 2. 9 Weber, Protestant Ethic, p 37. 10 Weber, Protestant Ethic, p 40. 11 See Francois Wendel (1987), Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, North Carolina: Labyrinth Press, p 124. 12 John Calvin, Institutes of Religion cited by H. Jackson Forstman (1962), Word and Spirit: Calvin’s Doctrine of Biblical Authority, California: Stanford University Press, p 25. 13 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III. xxi. p 5. 14 R.H. Tawney (1926), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London: Pelican, p 109. 15 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p 111. 16 Max Weber, ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,’ in (eds) H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1969), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, p 305. 17 St Paul, 2nd Epistle to the Thessalonians cited in Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp 111–​113. 18 Adam Smith (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 1. 19 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 1. 20 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 1. 21 Adam Smith (1755), lecture cited by Jacob Viner (1927), ‘Adam Smith and Laissez Faire,’ Journal of Political Economy, 35.2, 198–​232, p 230. 22 Bernard Mandeville (1714/​1924), The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publik Benefits, with a commentary by F.B. Kaye. 23 Adam Smith (1790/​2 009), The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition, London: Penguin, p 371. 24 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition, pp 366–​367. 25 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p 75 26 Jesse Norman (2018), Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters, London: Allan Lane, p 155. 27 Norman, Adam Smith, p 325. 28 Viner, ‘Smith and Laissez Faire’, p 207. 29 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Book 1, Chap. 2. 30 T.R. Malthus (1798), An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers, London: J Johnson. 31 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 5. 32 Rev. Joseph Townsend (1786/​2nd edition 1817), A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-​Wisher to Mankind, London: Ridgeway. 33 Rev. Joseph Townsend, A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787. 34 Philipp H. Lepenies (2014), ‘Of Goats and Dogs: Joseph Townsend and the Idealisation of Markets –​A Decisive Episode in the History of economics,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38, 447–​457, p 448. 35 Karl Marx (1887), Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, Chap. 25. 36 Bernard de Mandeville (1728), The Fable of the Bees, 5th edition, London, p 54. 37 Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chap. 25. 38 Cited by Marx in Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chap. 25, Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, p 147. 39 Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chap. 25. 40 Marx, Das Kaptial, Vol.1, Chap. 5. 8

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Notes Townsend, Dissertation, pp 14–​15. Townsend, Dissertation, pp 40–​41. 43 Townsend Dissertation, p 20. 44 Townsend, Dissertation, pp 26–​27. 45 Lepinies, Of Goats and Dogs, p 450. 46 Townsend, Dissertation, pp 42–​43. 47 Townsend, Dissertation, p 46. 48 Townsend, Dissertation, p 77. 49 Townsend, Dissertation, pp 99–​108. 50 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 20. 51 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 20. 52 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 21. 53 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 22. 54 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 66. 55 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 66. 56 Malthus, Principle of Population, pp 95–​96. 57 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 134. 58 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 24. 59 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 24. 60 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 26. 61 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 16. 62 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 67. 63 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 31. 64 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 30. 65 Gertrude Himmelfarb (1984), The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Ages, London: Faber, p 101. 66 Lepenies, Of Goats and Dogs, p 456. 67 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 2. 68 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 2. 69 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chap. 2. 70 Malthus, Principle of Population, p 67. 71 Block and Somers, In the Shadow of Speenhamland, p 313. 72 Lepenies, Of Goats and Dogs, p 456. 73 Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, p 101. 74 Mark Blaug (1963), ‘The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,’ The Journal of Economic History, 23.2, 151–​184, p 151. 75 Block and Somers, In the Shadow of Speenhamland, p 292. 76 Block and Somers, In the Shadow of Speenhamland, p 297. 77 ‘Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws,’ p 482 cited in Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 335. 78 Nassau Senior cited in Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 335. 79 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, p 142. 80 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 356. 81 T.R. Malthus (1836/​1 968), Principles of Political Economy: Second Edition, New York: Augustus M. Kelly, p 161. 82 Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, p 311. 83 Karl Marx, ‘The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery,’ The People’s Paper, No. 45, March 12 1853. 84 W.N. Hancock (1847), Three Lectures on the Question: Should the Principles of Political Economy Be Disregarded at the Present Crisis? Dublin: Hodges and Smith. 41 42

217

Three Roads to the Welfare State W.N. Hancock (1847), ‘On the Use of the Doctrine of Laissez-F ​ aire in Investigating the Economic Resources of Ireland,’ Transactions of the Dublin Statistical Society, Vol. 1, p 9. 86 T.R. Malthus (1809/​1963), ‘Newenham and the State of Ireland: Part Two,’ in Bernard Semmel (ed.) Occasional Papers of T.R. Malthus on Ireland, Population and Political Economy, New York: Burt Franklin. 87 Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, p 227. 88 T.R. Malthus (1808/​1963), ‘Newenham and Others on the State of Ireland: Part One,’ in Bernard Semmel (ed.) Occasional Papers of T.R. Malthus on Ireland, Population and Political Economy, New York: Burt Franklin. 89 Bryan Fanning (2014), Histories of the Irish Future, London: Bloomsbury, p 72. 90 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 164. 85

Chapter 3 

The London Co-​operative Magazine, 2.11 (1827), cited in Gregory Claeys (1986), ‘ “Individualism,” “Socialism” and “Social Science”: Further Notes on a Process of Conceptual Formation, 1800–​1850,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 47.1, 81–​89, p 83. 2 John Locke (1689/​1975), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3 James MacGregor (2013), Burns, Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World, New York: St Martins Press, p 101. 4 William Godwin (1793) [2nd Edition 1797]), ‘An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, And Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness,’ Chapter 4, London: Robinson and Robinson. 5 Godwin, Political Justice, Chap 4. 6 Mary Wollstonecraft (1792/​1 992), A Vindication of the Rights of Women, London: Penguin. 7 Robert Owen (1857/​1967), The Life of Robert Owen: Written by Himself, London: Frank Cass, p 38. 8 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, pp 130–​131. 9 Robert Owen (1934), The New Moral World 1834–​35: A London Weekly Publication, Developing the Principles of the Rational System of Society Conducted by Robert Owen and his Disciples, No. 1, November, Vol. 1, p 6. 10 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 128. 11 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 112. 12 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p vii. 13 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 35. 14 T.L. Jarman (1972), Socialism in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day, London: Victor Gollancz, pp 37–​41. 15 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 26. 16 John F.C. Harrison (1967), ‘The Steam Engine of the New Moral World: Owenism and Education, 1817–​1829,’ Journal of British Studies, 6.1, 76–​98, p 85. 17 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 60. 18 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 58. 19 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 80. 20 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, pp 63–​64. 21 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 116. 22 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p xxiii. 23 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book 5, Chap. 2, cited in Robert Owen (1820), To the County of Lanark, of a Plan for relieving Public Distress and Removing 1

218

Notes Discontent, by giving permanent, productive Employment to the Poor and Working Classes, under Arrangements which will essentially improve their Character, and ameliorate their Condition, diminish the Expenses of Production and Consumption, and create Markets co-​extensive with Production. 24 Owen, Life of Owen, p 113. 25 Owen, Life of Owen, p 95. 26 Robert Owen (1817/​1858), Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor. A supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of the Life of Robert Owen, London: Effingham Wilson. 27 Robert Owen, To the County of Lanark. 28 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p 45. 29 W.H.G. Armytage (1971), ‘Owen and America,’ in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor, London: MacMillan, pp 216–​217. 30 Robert Owen (1817), A Brief Sketch of the Religious Society of People Called Shakers, reprinted as an appendix to Owen, Life of Owen, pp 145–​154. 31 Chris Jennings (2016), Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, New York: Random House, p 104. 32 Jennings, Paradise Now, p 105. 33 Jennings, Paradise Now, pp 134–​145. 34 Jennings, Paradise Now, p 112. 35 Jennings, Paradise Now, p 146. 36 Ian Donnachie (1971), ‘Orbiston: A Scottish Owenite Community 1825–​28,’ in John Butt (ed.), Robert Owen, Prince of Cotton Spinners, Devon: David and Charles, pp 135–​149. 37 Harry W. Laider (1949), Socio-​Economic-​Movements, London: Routledge, p 93. 38 Barbara Taylor (1983), Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, London: Virago, pp 25–​26. 39 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p 26. 40 William Thompson and Anna Wheeler (1825/​1994), Appeal of One-​Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretentions of the other Half, to retain them in political and thence in civil and domestic Slavery: in Reply to a paragraph of Mr Mills celebrated ‘Article on Government,’ London: Thoemmes Continuum. 41 James Mill (1824), ‘Article on Government,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol. 1. 42 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p 26. 43 Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762), Du contrat social; ou principes du droit politique, Amsterdam: Chez Marc Michel Rey. 44 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p 130. 45 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p 289. 46 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp 131–​132. 47 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p 277. 48 Cy Frost (1991), ‘Autocracy and the Matrix of Power: Issues of Propriety and Economics in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Harriet Martineau,’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 10. 2, 253–​271, pp 261–​262. 49 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p 165. 50 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p 132. 51 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp 284–​293 52 Thompson and Wheeler, Appeal, p 107. 53 Thompson and Wheeler, Appeal, p 110. 54 J.B. Watson (1913), ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It,’ Psychological Review, 20.1, 158–​171.

219

Three Roads to the Welfare State L.P. Pavlov (1927), Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 56 A. Charles Catinia and Victor G. Laties (1999), ‘Two Lives in Science: Pavlov and Skinner,’ Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 3.11, 455–​461. 57 B.F. Skinner (1971), Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York: Jonathan Cape, pp 44–​45. 58 B.F. Skinner (1948/​1976), Walden Two, New York: Macmillan, p 109. 59 Skinner, Walden Two, p 128. 60 Skinner, Walden Two, pp 268–​263. 61 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp 151–​152. 62 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p 153. 63 Chris Jennings (2016), Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, New York: Random House, p 95. 64 Saint-​Simon (1825/​1952), ‘New Christianity: Dialogue,’ Selected Writings. Edited and translated by F.M.H. Markham, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 81–​116. 65 Richard Pankhurst (1991), William Thompson (1775–​1833): Pioneer Socialist, London: Pluto Press, p 15. 66 Robert Owen, ‘An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness,’ p 214. 67 Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp 100–​108. 68 Thompson, An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth (1824), see Pankhurst, William Thompson, p 34 69 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848/​1 996), The Communist Manifesto, London: Orion. 70 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 178. 71 Chushichi Tsuzuki, ‘Robert Owen and Revolutionary Politics,’ in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds) (1971), Robert Owen; Prophet of the Poor, London: Macmillan, pp 31–​34. 72 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, p xxiii. 73 Polyani, The Great Transformation, p 176. 74 John Stuart Mill (1848), Principles of Political Economy and Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy: Vol. 1, London: John W. Parker, Book 4, Chap. 2. 75 Harry M. Laider, Socio-​Economic Movements, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, p 680. 76 Rafael Chaves Ávila and José Luis Monzón Campos (2005), The Social Economy in the European Union, Brussels: Centre International de Recherches et d’Information sur l’Économie Publique, Sociale et Cooperative, pp 7–​13. 77 Laider, Socio-​Economic Movements, p 688. 78 Thomas L. Jarman, Socialism in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day, London: Gollancz, p 57. 79 Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy and Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy: Vol. 1, Book 4, Chap. 7. 55

Chapter 4 

Edward Fawsett (2014), Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p 67. 2 Robert Skidelsky (1983), John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–​1920, London: Macmillan, p 28. 3 T.R. Malthus (1798), An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers, London: J. Johnson. 1

220

Notes Calvin Woodward (1962), ‘Reality and Social Reform: The Transition from Laissez-​Faire to the Welfare State,’ The Yale Law Journal, 72.2, 286–​328, p 298. 5 T.R. Malthus (1836/​1 968), Principles of Political Economy: Second Edition, New York: Augustus M. Kelly, p 161. 6 Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, p 311. 7 James Kay Shuttleworth (1832), The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, London: James Ridgeway. 8 G.D.H. Cole and R. Postgate (1956), The Common People, London: Methuen, p 306. 9 Friedrich Engels (1845/​1892), The Condition of the Working Class in England, London, p 91. 10 Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p 95. 11 Benjamin Disraeli (1845), Sybil, Or the Two Nations, p 66. 12 Woodward, Reality and Social Reform, p 298. 13 John Maynard Keynes (1933/​2012), Essays in Biography, London: Palgrave, p 120. 14 J. Bartlet Brebner (1948), ‘Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain,’ The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 8, Supplement: The Tasks of Economic History, 59–​73, p 64. 15 Edmund Burke (1790/​1968), Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: Penguin, p 156. 16 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 124. 17 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 119. 18 Helena Rosenblatt (2018), The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twentieth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp 62–​63. 19 Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, pp 84–​85. 20 David Thomson (1973), Europe Since Napoleon, London: Pelican, p 165. 21 Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, p 71. 22 Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, p. 185. 23 Fawsett, Liberalism, p 58. 24 Alexis de Tocqueville (1835/​2003), Democracy in America: Vol. 1, London: Penguin, Chap. 15. 25 Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, pp 172–​174. 26 Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism, p 90. 27 Thomas Paine, ‘The Rights of Man,’ in M.C. Conway (ed.), (1967), The Writings of Thomas Paine: Vol. II 1779–​1792, New York: AMS Press, p 306. 28 J. Waldron (ed.) (1987), Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke Marx and the Rights of Man, London: Methuen, pp 39–​40. 29 Jeremy Bentham (1816), ‘Anarchical Fallacies; being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution,’ in Waldron (ed.) Nonsense Upon Stilts, p 53. 30 Waldron, Nonsense on Stilts, pp 34–​36. 31 Lawrence L. Martin (1997), ‘Jeremy Bentham: Utilitarianism, Public Policy and the Administrative State,’ Journal of Management History, 3.3, 272–​282, p 272. 32 Jeremy Bentham (1776), A Fragment on Government: Being An Examination of What is Delivered, On the Subject of Government in General In the Introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries: With a Preface, In Which is Given A Critique on the Work at Large cited in Mary Warnock (1962), ‘Introduction’ to John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, London: Fontana Press, pp 9–​13. 33 Martin, Utilitarianism, Public Policy and the Administrative State, p 274f. 34 John Stuart Mill, Bentham. 4

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Jeremy Bentham (1791/​1838–​43), Panopticon or The Inspection House Containing the Idea of A New Principle of Construction Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, In Which Persons of Any Description Are to be Kept Under Inspection; citations here from The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Vol. 4 edited by John Bowring. 36 Marco E.L. Guidi (2001), ‘ “My Own Utopia”, The Economics of Bentham’s Panopticon,’ History of Economic Thought, 1.3, 405–​431, p 408. 37 Bart Schultz (2017), The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p 83. 38 Bentham, ‘Panopticon,’ Works, Vol. 4, p 39. 39 Bentham, ‘Panopticon,’ Works, Vol. 4, p 40. 40 Michel Foucault (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random House, p 207. 41 Bentham, ‘Panopticon,’ Works, Vol. 4, pp 39–​172. 42 Gertrude Himmelfarb (1970), ‘Bentham’s Utopia: The National Charity Company,’ Journal of British Studies, 10.1, 80–​125, p 82. 43 Bentham, manuscript cited by Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 84. 44 Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 85 45 Bentham, ‘Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8, p 401. 46 Bentham, ‘Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8, p 404. 47 Bentham, manuscript cited in Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 99. 48 Bentham, manuscript cited in Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, pp 95–​96. 49 Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 106. 50 Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 107. 51 Bentham, ‘Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8, 437. 52 Bentham, ‘Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8. p 42. 53 Bentham, ‘Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8, p 439. 54 Bentham, ‘Pauper Management Improvement,’ Works, Vol. 8, p 437. 55 Bentham (1983), Unpublished manuscript: Chapter on Pederasty in ‘Appendix on Sexual Eccentricities,’ cited in Lea Campos Boralevi, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Writings on Sexual Non-​Conformity: Utilitarianism and Sexual Liberty,’ Topoi, 2.1, 123–​148, pp 123–​125. 56 Bentham, Chapter on Pederasty, p 106. 57 Bentham, Chapter on Pederasty, p 403. 58 Campos Boralevi, Bentham’s Writings on Sexual Non-​Conformity, p 128. 59 Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 114. 60 Bentham, Pauper Management Improvement, p 422. 61 Himmelfarb, Bentham’s Utopia, p 118. 62 John Stuart Mill (1874), Autobiography, New York: Henry Hold and Company, p 89. 63 Mill, Autobiography, p 98. 64 Mill, Autobiography, p 94. 65 Mill, Autobiography, p 109. 66 Mill, Autobiography, p 111. 67 John Dinwiddy (1989), Bentham, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 19. 68 Bart, The Happiness Philosophers, pp 56–​66. 69 Fawsett, Liberalism, p 90. 70 Mill, Autobiography, pp 167–​170. 71 Mill, Autobiography, p 234. 72 Mill, Autobiography, p 257. 35

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Notes Edwin Chadwick and Nassau Senior (1834), Poor Law Commissioner’s Report of 1834, London: HM Stationery Office. 74 S.E. Finer (1952), The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, London: Methuen, pp 74–​75. 75 Mark Blaug (1958), ‘The Classical Economists and the Factory Acts-​A Re-​ Examination,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 72.2, 211–​226, pp 212–​214. 76 A.E. Peacock (1984), ‘The Successful Prosecution of the Factory Acts, 1833–​55,’ The Economic History Review, 37.2, 97–​210, p 197. 77 Nassau W. Senior (1837), ‘What Has Been the Effect of the Factory Regulation Act; 3 Proceedings of the Political Economy Club,’ vol. 46, cited by Kenneth O. Walker, ‘The Classical Economists and the Factory Acts,’ Journal of Economic History, 1.2, 68–​177, p 171. 78 James Anthony Froude and John Tulloch (1833), ‘The Commission for Perpetuating Factory Infanticide,’ Frazier’s Magazine, Vol. vii, 707–​715. p 707. 79 Froude and Tulloch, Commission for Perpetuating Factory Infanticide, p 707. 80 Elizabeth Free and Theodore Brown (2011), The Public Health Act of 1848, Bulletin of World Health Organization, 83.1, 866–​867, p 867. 81 Edwin Chadwick (1842), Report on the Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, London: Poor Law Commission, p 368. 82 Chadwick, Report on the Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, p 269. 83 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 153. 84 Edwin Chadwck (1859), ‘On the Conditions in the respect of the Manufacture and Distribution of Bread in London and Paris; Co-​operation for the Distribution of Flour,’ Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, pp 409–​414. 85 Eric Hobsbawm (1962), The Age of Capital, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp 103–​104. 86 Kirstin Zimmerman (2003), ‘Liberal Speech, Palmerstonian Delay, and the Passage of the Second Reform Act,’ The English Historical Review, 118.479, 1176–​1207, p 1180 87 John Stuart Mill (1833), cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis, p 120. 88 John Stuart Mill (1848), Principles of Political Economy and Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy: Vol. 1, Book 4, Chap. 7. London: John W. Parker. 89 John Stuart Mill (1962), ‘Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform,’ Essays on Politics and Culture, in Gertrude Himmelfarb (ed.), New York, pp 344–​345. 90 Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, p 353. 91 Philip Magnus (1964), Gladstone, New York: Dutton, p 187. 92 Eric Hobsbawm (1975), The Age of Revolution, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, p 13. 93 Asa Briggs (1961), ‘The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,’ European Journal of Sociology, 2.2, 221–​258, p 250. 94 Eric Hobsbawm (1964), Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, London: Orion, p 288. 95 Briggs, The Welfare State in Historical Perspective, p 225. 96 William Beveridge, (1909/​1 930), Unemployment: A Problem of Industry, London: Longmans, Green and Co., p 229. 97 Atsushi Komine (2004), ‘The Making of Beveridge’s Unemployment (1909): three concepts blended,’ The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 11.2, 255–​280, pp 271–​273. 73

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Winston Churchill ‘Memorandum: Notes on Malingering’ (1909), cited in George Boyer (2019), The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p 201. 99 Gertude Himmelfatb (2014), ‘Winston vs the Webbs,’ Weekly Standard. 100 John Maynard Keynes (1925), Am I a Liberal? 98

Chapter 5 

Leo XIII (1891), Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labour, available online at: http://​ www.vatican.va, para. 3 (accessed 5 March 2021). 2 Edward Cahill S.J. (1932), A Framework of the Christian State, Dublin: Gill and Sons, p 3. 3 Fergal Lenehan (2009), ‘Catholic Utopian Spaces: The Essays of Christopher Dawson and Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State,’ Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 7, 54–​75, p 54. 4 The Gentleman’s Magazine (1827), cited in Michael Alexander (2007), Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England, New Haven: Yale University Press, p xxv. 5 Thomas Carlyle (1843), Past and Present, London: Chapman and Hall, p 274. 6 Benjamin Disraeli (1845), Sybil, Or the Two Nations, Oxford University Press, p 273. 7 Alexander, Medievalism, p 90. 8 Friedrich Engels (1844), ‘A Review of Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, London 1943,’ Deutsch-​Franzosische Jahrbucher. 9 John Bew (2017), Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, London: Quercus, p 60. 10 Durkheim, Division of Labour, p 43. 11 Émile Durkheim (1897/​1951), Suicide: A Study in Sociology, New York: Free Press. 12 Durkheim, Division of Labour, p 340. 13 Émile Durkheim (1906/​1965), ‘The Determination of Moral Facts’ in Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, London: Cohen and West, pp 52–​59. 14 Durkheim, Division of Labour, p 335. 15 Durkhiem, Division of Labour, p 405. 16 Gabriel Almond (1948), ‘The Political Ideas of Christian Democracy,’ The Journal of Politics, 10.4, 734–​786, p 736. 17 Fred R. Shapiro (ed.) (2006), The Yale Book of Quotations, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p 654. 18 Gabriel Almond, The Political Ideas of Christian Democracy,’ pp 736–​737. 19 Lester R. Kurtz (1986), The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism, Berkeley: University of California Press, p 29. 20 Kurtz, The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism, pp 27–​29. 21 Sean O’Faoilain (1980), King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Liberator, in a Study of the Rise of Modern Irish Democracy, Dublin: Poolbeg. 22 Cahill, Framework of A Christian State, p 257. 23 Almond, Political Ideas of Christian Democracy, p 740. 24 Richard P. O’Brien (1997), Lives of the Popes, New York: Harper Collins, pp 343–​347. 25 Cited by M.D. Petre (1912), Autobiography and Life of George Tyrell, London: Edward Arnold, p 189. 26 Paul Miser (1992), ‘Social Catholicism in Nineteenth-​Century Europe: A Review of Recent Historiography,’ The Catholic Social Review, 8.4, 581–​600, p 581. 27 A.J.P. Taylor (1955), Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman, New York: Random House, p 148. 1

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Notes Gordon, R. Mork (1951), ‘Bismarck and the “Capitulation” of German Liberalism,’ Journal of Modern History, 59–​75, p 69. 29 Taylor, Bismarck, p 151. 30 John K. Zeender (1976), ‘The German Center Party, 1890–​1906,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 66.1, 1–​125, p 4. 31 Cahill, The Framework of A Christian State, p 256. 32 Ludwig Windthorst cited by Jonathan Steinberg (2011), Bismarck: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 375. 33 Steinberg (2011), Bismarck: A Life, Oxford University Press, p 382. 34 Almond, Political Ideas of Christian Democracy, p 740. 35 Norman Stone (1984), ‘The Religious Background to Max Weber,’ in W.J. Shiels (ed.), Persecution and Toleration: Studies in Church History Vol. 21, London: Basil Blackwell, p 402. 36 Hugh McLeod (1986), ‘Building the ‘Catholic Ghetto,’ in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion: Studies in Church History Vol. 23, London: Basil Blackwell, pp 412–​413. 37 Virginia M. Crawford (1929), ‘The Centenary of Léon Harmel,’ Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 18.63, 131–​136, pp 132–​136. 38 G.K. Chesterton (1933), St Thomas Aquinas, London: Hodder and Stoughton, p 61. 39 F.C. Copelston (1955), Aquinas, London: Pelican, p 247. 40 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, q 94 a 2. 41 Ewart Lewis (1954), Medieval Political Ideas: Vol. 1, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p 150. 42 Stefano Solari (2010), ‘The Corporative Third Way in Social Catholicism (1830 to 1918),’ European Journal of Economic Thought, 17.1, 87–​113, p 90. 43 Paul Misner (1991), ‘The Predecessors of Rerum Novarum within Catholicism,’ Review of Social Economy 49.4, 444–​464, p 459. 44 Joan L. Coffey (2003), Léon Harmel: Entreprenneur as Catholic Social Reformer, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. 45 Crawford, Léon Harmel, p 133. 46 Cahill, Framework of a Christian State, p 256. 47 Martin Calkins S.J. (2000), ‘Recovering Religion’s Prophetic Voice for Business Ethics,’ Journal of Business Ethics, 23.4, 339–​352, p 346. 48 Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, para 1. 49 Rerum Novarum, para 3. 50 Rerum Novarum, para 44. 51 Rerum Novarum, para 33. 52 Rerum Novarum, para 33. 53 Rerum Novarum, para 42. 54 Michael Fogarty (1957), Christian Democracy in Western Europe: 1820–​1953, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p 427. 55 Almond, p 742. 56 Rerum Novarum, para 47. 57 A.M.C. Waterman (2016), ‘Rerum Novarum and Economic Thought,’ Faith and Economics, p 20. 58 Rerum Novarum, para 47. 59 Paul Sigmund (1988), St Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, New York: Norton, p 102. 60 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, 96, 4. 28

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Rerum Novarum, para. 36. Robert Hugh Benson (1911), The Dawn of All, London: Hutchinson and Co., p 306. 63 Rerum Novarum, para 25. 64 Rerum Novarum, paras 92–​96. 65 Hillaire Belloc (1912), The Servile State, London: T.N. Foulis, pp 49–​50. 66 Belloc, Servile State, pp 99–​100. 67 Lenehan, Catholic Utopian Spaces, p 67. 68 Robert G. Hoyt (1989), The Catholic Counterculture in America 1933–​1962, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 69 Randall K. Morek and Bernard Yeung (2010), ‘Corporatism and the Ghost of the Third Way,’ Capitalism and Society, 5.3, 1–​43, p. 1–​59. 70 Quadragesimo Anno, para 92. 71 Quadragesimo Anno, para 93. 72 Quadragesimo Anno, para 95. 73 Paul Misner (2004), ‘Catholic Labour and Catholic Action: The Italian Context of Quadragesimo Anno,’ The Catholic Historical Review, 90.4, 650–​674. 74 Ernst Nolte (1966), Three Faces of Fascism, New York: Rinehart and Winston, p 14. 75 Eric N. Baklanoff (1922), ‘The Political Economy of Portugal’s Later “Estado Novo”: A Critique of the Stagnation Thesis,’ Luso-​Brazilian Review, 29.1 pp 1–​17. 76 Paul H. Lewis (1978), ‘Salazar’s Ministerial Elite, 1932–​1968,’ The Journal of Politics, 40.3, pp 622–​647. 77 António Costa Pinto and Maria Inácia Rezola (2007), ‘Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State in Portugal,’ Politics, Religion and Ideology, 8.2, 353–​368, pp 354–​356. 78 Costa Pinto and Rezola, Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State, p 360. 79 António de Olivera Salazar (1939), Doctrine and Action, London: Faber and Faber, p 29. 80 Costa Pinto and Rezola, Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State, p 360. 81 Baklanoff, The Political Economy of Portugal’s Later ‘Estado Novo,’ p 4. 82 Nicolau Andresen (2007), ‘The Salazar Regime and European integration, 1947–​ 1972,’ European Review of History/​Revue européenne d’histoire, 14.2, 195–​214, pp 196–​187. 83 Rerum Novarum, para 35. 84 Rerum Novarum, para 13. 85 Nerum Novarum, para 14. 86 Dermot Keogh (2012), ‘The Jesuits and the 1937 Constitution,’ in Bryan Fanning (ed.) An Irish Century: Studies 1912–​2012, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, pp 120–​126. 87 Cahill, Framework of a Christian State. 88 Patrick Murray (2000), Oracles of God: The Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, 1922–​37, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, p 292. 89 Mike Cronin (2007), ‘Catholicising Fascism, Fascistising Catholicism? The Blueshirts and the Jesuits in 1930s Ireland,’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8.2, 401–​411, p 401. 90 Ferghal McGarry (2005), Eoin O’Duffy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 91 Dáire Keogh and Albert McDonnell (eds.) (2011), Cardinal Cullen and His World, Dublin: Four Court Press. 61 62

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Notes Paul Blanshard (1959), American Freedom and Catholic Power, Boston: Beacon Press. Paul Blanshard (1954), The Irish and Catholic Power, Boston: Beacon Press. 94 Jeremiah Newman (1962), Studies in Political Morality, Dublin: Sceptre. 95 Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power, p 27. 96 Tom Garvin (2005), Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor For So Long?, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, pp 49–​55. 92 93

Chapter 6 

Sheri Berman and Dieter Dettke (2005), Understanding Social Democracy, Washington DC: Friedrich Egbert Stiffling, pp 8–​9. 2 Cited in Timothy A. Tilton (1984), ‘Utopia, Incrementalism and Ernst Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia,’ Scandinavian Studies, 56.1, 36–​54, p 46. 3 Ernst Wigforss (1980), Skrifter iurval, Stockholm: Tidens förlag, p 274 cited and translated in Tilton, Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia, p 47. 4 Katrine Kielos (2012), ‘One Nation Labour and Sweden’s People’s Home,’ Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 20.4, available online at www.renewal.org. uk (accessed 5 March 2021). 5 Andrew Brown (2017), ‘Swedes Can’t Go Home Again,’ Foreign Policy, 6 September. 6 Ernest Gellner (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 57. 7 Ernest Gellner (1996), ‘The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class,’ in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.) Mapping the Nation, London: Verso, p 107. 8 Gellner, The Coming of Nationalism, p 128. 9 Tilton, Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia, p 47. 10 Tilton, Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia, p 49. 11 Karl Popper (1957/​2002), The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge, p 68. See Ernst Wigforss, Om provisoriska utopier (1958), cited by Tilton, Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia, p 49. 12 Ernst Wigforss cited by Tilton, Wigforss’ Conception of a Provisional Utopia, p 52. 13 Karl Kautsky (1902), The Social Revolution, Chicago: Charles Kerr and Co., p 35. 14 Eduard Bernstein (1899/​1993), The Preconditions of Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15 Eduard Bernstein (1897), Speech to the Fabian Society 29 January. 16 Eduard Bernstein (1897), ‘Karl Marx and Social Reform,’ Progressive Review, No. 7, April, Marxist.org. 17 Bernstein, Speech to the Fabian Society. 18 Karl Marx (1850), Minutes of Central Committee Meeting, 15 September 1850, in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, London: Penguin, p 351. 19 Bernstein, Speech to the Fabian Society. 20 Bernstein, Speech to the Fabian Society. 21 W.L. Phillips (1884), Why Are the Many Poor?, London: Fabian Society. 22 Charles Booth (1889/​1 969), Life and Labour of the People in London, London: Hutchinson. 23 Seebohm Rowntree (1901), Poverty: A Study of Town Life, London: Macmillan and Co. 24 John Stevenson (1984), ‘From Philanthropy to Fabianism,’ in Ben Pimlott (ed.) Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, London: Heinemann, p 24. 25 Stevenson, From Philanthropy to Fabianism, pp 24–​26. 26 Keir Hardie (1907), From Serfdom to Socialism, London: George Allen. 1

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Marx cited in Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 86. Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 11. 29 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 15. 30 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 48. 31 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 97. 32 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 101. 33 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 60. 34 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 96. 35 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 96. 36 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 28. 37 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 29. 38 Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, p 73. 39 John Bew (2016), Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, London: Hachette, pp 50–​54. 40 Bew, Citizen Clem, p 65. 41 Bew, Citizen Clem, p 208. 42 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 190. 43 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 190. 44 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 163. 45 Attlee, The Social Worker, pp 163–​164. 46 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 165. 47 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 167. 48 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 167. 49 Attlee, The Social Worker, p 187. 50 C.R. Attlee (1937), The Labour Party in Perspective, London: Victor Gollancz, p 29. 51 C.R. Attlee (1922), ‘Liberal and Labour Cooperation,’ Socialist Review, cited in Bew, Citizen Clem, p 128. 52 C.R. Attlee (1923), ‘History: Socialist and Liberal,’ New Leader, cited in Bew, Citizen Clem, p 130. 53 C.R. Attlee (1920), Borough Councils: Their Constitution, Powers and Duties, Fabian Tract no. 191, London: Fabian Society. 54 Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, p 12. 55 Attlee, The Labour in Perspective, p 115. 56 Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, pp 156–​157. 57 Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, pp 164–​165. 58 Jenny Anderson (2009), ‘Nordic Nostalgia and Nordic Light: The Swedish model as Utopia 1930–​2007,’ Scandinavian Journal of History, 34.3, 229–​245, p 233. 59 Herbert Tingsten (1973), The Swedish Social Democrats, New Jersey: Bedminster Press, p xi. 60 Urban Lundberg and Klas Åmark (2001), ‘Social Rights and Social Security: The Swedish Welfare State, 1900–​2000,’ Scandinavian Journal of History, 26:3, 157–​176, p 157. 61 Tingsten, Swedish Social Democrats, pp x–​xi. 62 Tingsten, Swedish Social Democrats, p 9. 63 Karen Anderson (2009), ‘The Church as Nation? The Role of Religion in the Development of the Swedish Welfare State,’ in Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow (eds), Religion, Class Coalitions and Welfare States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 216–​217. 64 Anderson, The Church as Nation? p 211. 65 Ernst Wigforss (1941), Fran Klasskamp till Samverkan, Stockholm: Tidens Forlag, p 293 cited in Timothy A. Tilton (1979), ‘A Swedish Road to Socialism: Ernst 27 28

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Notes Wigforss and the Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy,’ The American Political Science Review, 73.2, pp 505–​520, p 511. 66 Ernst Wigforss (1908), Materialistisk historieuppfattning (The Materialist Conception of History), cited in Tilton (1979), A Swedish Road to Socialism, p 506. 67 Tilton, Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy, p 517. 68 Tilton, Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy, pp 506–​511. 69 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2013), Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Duke University Press, 2013, pp 26–​27. 70 Tillton, Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy, p 508. 71 Martin Kragh (2012), ‘The Stockholm School, Ernst Wigforss and the Great Depression in Sweden: An Outline,’ in Michalis Psalidopoulos (ed.), The Great Depression in Europe: Economic Thought and Policy in a National Context, Athens: Alpha Bank, Historical Archives, pp 73–​74. 72 Kragh, The Stockholm School, Ernst Wigforss and the Great Depression, p 75. 73 E. Wigforss (1928), ‘Spararen, slösaren och den arbetslöse,’ (The Saver, the Spendthrift and the Unemployed) (1928), cited in Kragh, The Stockholm School, Ernst Wigforss and the Great Depression, p 75. 74 Kragh, The Stockholm School, Ernst Wigforss and the Great Depression, pp 73–​74. 75 Kragh, The Stockholm School, Ernst Wigforss and the Great Depression, p 75. 76 E. Wigforss (1931), Den ekonomiska krisen (The Economic Crisis), Stockholm: Tidens Förlag, p 49. 77 Robert Skidelsky (1992), John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior: 1920–​1937, London: Macmillan, p 488. 78 Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, p 18. 79 Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, p 19. 80 Tilton, Wigforss and the Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy, pp 506–​511. 81 George Orwell (1941), The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, London: Searchlight, Part 1. 82 Per Albin Hansson (1928), ‘Folkhemmet, medborgarhemmet,’ in Från Fram till folkhemmet, Solna: Metodica Press, 227, cited in Mauricio Rojas (2005), Sweden after the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State, Stockholm: Timbro, p 23. 83 Andrew Brown (2017), ‘Swedes Can’t Go Home Again,’ Foreign Policy, 6 September. 84 Mauricio Rojas (2005), Sweden after the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State, Stockholm: Timbro, p 25. 85 Rojas, Sweden after the Swedish Model, pp 4–​12. 86 Olaf Ruin (1990), Tage Erlander: Serving the Welfare State, 1946–​1 969, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, p 22. 87 Laurence Iannaccone, Roger Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark (1997), ‘Deregulating Religion: The Economics of Church and State,’ Economic Inquiry, 35:2, pp 350–​364. 88 Ka Lin (2005), ‘Cultural Traditions and the Scandinavian Social Policy Model,’ Social Policy and Administration, 39.7, 723–​739, p 727. 89 Ka Lin, ‘Cultural Traditions and the Scandinavian Social Policy Model,’ pp 728–​729. 90 Yvonne Hirdman (1995), Att lägga livet till rätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik, Stockholm: Carlssons, p 122, cited in Rojas, Sweden After the Swedish Model, p 31. 91 Nicholas Timmons (2017), The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State: Third Edition, London: Harper Collins, p 47. 92 C.R. Attlee (1943), Daily Herald, 12 July. 93 Attlee cited in Bew, Citizen Clem, p 355.

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Bew, Citizen Clem, p 339. Bew, Citizen Clem, p 336. 96 C.R. Attlee (1952), Preface to Richard Crosland (ed.), New Fabian Essays, London: Turnstile Press, pp vii-​xi. 97 Crossman, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Socialism,’ in Crossman (ed.) New Fabian Essays, p 4. 98 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 4. 99 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 6. 100 Anthony Crosland (1946), The Future of Socialism, London: Jonathan Cape, p 61. 101 Paul Bridgen (2000), ‘The One Nation Idea and State Welfare: The Conservatives and Pensions in the 1950s,’ Contemporary British History, 14.3, 83–​104, p 92. 102 Hugh Bochel (2010), ‘One Nation Conservativism and Social Policy, 1951–​64,’ Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 18.2, pp 123–​134. 103 Bew, Citizen Clem, p 356. 104 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 10. 105 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 11. 106 Richard Crossman (1937/​1963), Plato Today, London: Allen and Unwin. 107 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, pp 12–​13. 108 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 27. 109 Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism, p 28. 110 Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State, p 178. 111 Gunnar Myrdal (1960), Beyond the Welfare State, New Haven: Yale University Press, p 85. 112 Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State, p 93. 113 Astrid Hedin, (2015), ‘The Origins and Myths of the Swedish Model of Workplace Democracy,’ Contemporary European History, 24.1, 59–​82, pp 64–​69. 114 Myrdal and Myrdal (1934), Kris i befolkningsfrågan (The Population Crisis), p 203. 115 Rojas, Sweden After the Swedish Model, p 29. 116 Peter Townsend (1979), Poverty in the United Kingdom, London: Penguin. 117 Jurgen Habermas (1994), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. 118 Tim Brindley, Yvonne Rydin and Gerry Stoker (1989), Remaking Planning: The Politics of Planning in the Thatcher Years, London: Allen and Unwin, p 4. 119 J. Keane, (1984), ‘Introduction’ in Claus Offe, The Crisis of the Welfare State Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 94 95

Chapter 7 

John Maynard Keynes (1925), Am I a Liberal? An Address to the Liberal Summer School at Cambridge. 2 John Macnicol (1992), ‘The Voluntary Sterilization Campaign in Britain,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2.3, 422–​438, p 422. 3 Nancy Fix Anderson (1944), ‘Bridging Cross-​cultural Feminisms: Annie Besant and women’s rights in England and India, 1874–​1933,’ Women’s History Review, 3.4, 563–​578, p 564. 4 Francis Galton (1883), Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, London, pp 24–​25. 5 Donald MacKenzie (1976), ‘Eugenics in Britain,’ Social Studies in Science, 6.3/​4, 499–​532, p 500. 6 Michael Burleigh (2000), ‘Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present,’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1.1, 56–​77, p 58. 7 Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias, p 65.

1













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Notes Michael Burleigh (2000), The Third Reich: A New History, London: Macmillan,, pp 232–​385. 9 Burleigh, The Third Reich, p 402. 10 Edward Ross Dickinson (2001), ‘Bio-​politics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”,’ Central European History, 37.1, 1–​48, p 12. 11 Dickinson, Bio-​politics, Fascism, Democracy, pp 12–​18. 12 Michael Freeden (1979), ‘Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity,’ The Historical Journal, 22.3, pp. 645–​671, p 658. 13 Ross Dickinson, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy, p 3. 14 L.J. Ray (1983), ‘Eugenics, Mental Deficiency and Fabian Socialism between the Wars,’ Oxford Review of Education, 9.3, 213–​222, p 213. 15 L.A. Farrell (1970), ‘The Origin and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865–​1925,’ PhD Thesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p 225. 16 Bertrand Russell (1929), Marriage and Morals, London: Allen and Unwin, p 262. 17 Walter A. Jackson (1990), Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism 1938–​1987, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, p 46. 18 Myrdal ‘Massan och intelligensen’ (1919), cited by Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, p 46–​48. 19 Yvonne Hirdman (2008), Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p 29. 20 Jane Carey (2012), ‘The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years,’ Women’s History Review, 21.5, 733–​752, p 746. 21 Annie Besant (1887), The Law Of Population, Its Consequences and Its Bearings on Human Conduct and Morals, London: Freethought Publishing Company, p 13. 22 Besant, The Law of Population, p 43. 23 Besant, The Law of Population, p 43. 24 Besant, The Law of Population, p 38. 25 Besant, The Law of Population, p 43. 26 H.G. Wells (1901), Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, London: Chapman and Hall. 27 Paul Weindling (1999), ‘International Eugenics: Swedish Sterilization in Context,’ Scandinavian Journal of History, 24.2, 179–​197, pp 182–​185. 28 Weindling, International Eugenics, p 188. 29 Stephanie Hyatt (1998), ‘A Shared History of Shame: Sweden’s Four-​Decade Policy of Forced Sterilization and the Eugenics Movement in the United States,’ Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, 8.2, 475–​503, pp 498–​490. 30 Wells, Anticipations, p 290. 31 Wells, Anticipations, p 299. 32 Cited in Michael Coren (1993), The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells, London: Bloomsbury, p 67. 33 Cited in Coren, The Invisible Man, pp 66–​67. 34 George Bernard Shaw (1903), ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,’ and appendix to Man and Superman. 35 H.G. Wells interview in the Puritan cited by Michael Sherborne (2010), H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, London: Peter Owen, p 137. 36 H.G. Wells (1905), A Modern Utopia, New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, p 96. 37 Wells, A Modern Utopia, pp 95–​96. 38 Wells, A Modern Utopia, pp 100–​101. 8

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Wells, A Modern Utopia, pp 146–​150. Wells, Anticipations, p 124. 41 H.G. Wells (1907), Socialism and the Family, London: A.C. Fifield, pp 56–​57. 42 Sidney Webb (1910), ‘Eugenics and the Poor Law: The Minority Report,’ Eugenics Review, 11, p 240. 43 Webb, Eugenics and the Poor Law, p 233. 44 Webb, Eugenics and the Poor Law, p 328. 45 Webb, Eugenics and the Poor Law, p 237. 46 Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias, p 65. 47 Richard Titmuss (1944), ‘The Social Environment and Eugenics,’ Eugenics Review, 53–​58, p 54. 48 Jane Carey, ‘The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years,’ Women’s History Review, 21:5, 733–​752, p 733. 49 Margaret Sanger (1914), Family Limitation, New York: Review Publishing Company, p 15. 50 Ruth Hall (1977), Marie Stopes, London: Andre Deutsch, p 112–​113. 51 Carey, The Racial Imperatives of Sex, p 733. 52 Margaret Sanger (1920), Woman and the New Race, New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, p 8. 53 Sanger, Women and the New Race, pp 11–​29. 54 Sanger, Women and the New Race, p 39. 55 Sanger, Women and the New Race, p 41. 56 Sanger, Women and the New Race, p 64. 57 Sanger, Women and the New Race, p 87. 58 Sanger, Women and the New Race, pp 43–​44. 59 Sanger, Women and the New Race, p 119. 60 Marie Stopes (1920), Radiant Motherhood, London: Putnam. 61 Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, p 231. 62 Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, pp 171–​173 and pp 212, 225. 63 Marie Stopes (1918), Wise Parenthood: A Treatise on Birth Control or Contraception, London: Fifield, p 6. 64 Interview with Marie Stopes, Australian Women’s Weekly, 19 April 1934 cited in Hall, Marie Stopes, p 182. 65 Correspondence cited Hall, Marie Stopes, p 182. 66 Rose Macauley (1919), What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, London: Constable and Company. 67 Edward J. Larson (1991), ‘The Rhetoric of Eugenics: Expert Authority and the Mental Deficiency Bill,’ The British Journal for the History of Science, 24.1, 45–​60, p 59. 68 Freeden, Eugenics and Progressive Thought, pp 658–​659. 69 Gunnar Myrdal (1940), Population: A Problem for Democracy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p 96. 70 Cited in Alberto Spektorowski and Elisabet Mizrachi (2004), ‘Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden: The Politics of Social Margins and the Idea of a Productive Society,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 39.3, 333–​352, p 345. 71 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, pp 105–​111. 72 Ann Taylor (2000), ‘Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–​1940: A Comparative Perspective,’ German Studies Review, 23.3, 477–​505, p 479. 73 Sissela Bok (1992), Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir, Reading, MA: Addison-​ Wesley, p 151. 39 40

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Notes Hedvig Ekerwald (2000), ‘Alva Myrdal: Making the Private Public,’ Acts Sociologia, 43.4, 343–​352, p 43. 75 Yvonne Hirdman (2008), Alva Myrdal: A Passionate Mind, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p 3. 76 Hirdman, Alva Myrdal, pp 96–​97. 77 Beatrice Cherrier (2009), ‘Gunnar Myrdal and the Scientific Way to Social Democracy, 1914–​1968,’ 31.1, 33–​55, pp 33–​34. 78 Cherrier, Gunnar Myrdal, p 40. 79 Jenny Anderson (2009), ‘Nordic Nostalgia and Nordic Light: The Swedish model as Utopia 1930–​2007,’ Scandinavian Journal of History, 34.3, 229–​245, pp 299–​231. 80 Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal (1934/​1997), The Crisis in the Population Question [Kris i befolkningsfrågan], Stockholm: Tidens Forlag, pp 200–​204. 81 Hedvig Ekerwald (2001), ‘The Modernist Manifesto of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: Modernization of Sweden and the Question of Sterilization,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 14.1, 539–​561, p 547. 82 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, p 14. 83 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, p 247. 84 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in Population Question, p 321. 85 Alva Myrdal (1941), Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy, New York: Harper, p 56. 86 Myrdal, Nation and Family, pp 57–​58. 87 Myrdal, Nation and Family, p 55. 88 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, p 310. 89 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, pp 200–​204. 90 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, p 218. 91 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, p 260. 92 Myrdal and Myrdal, Crisis in the Population Question, pp 220–​201. 93 Alberto Spektorowski and Elisabet Mizrachi (2004), ‘Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden: The Politics of Social Margins and the Idea of a Productive Society,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 39.3, pp 333–​352. 94 Alva Myrdal (1951/​1968), Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy, New York: Harper, p 215. 95 Hyatt, A Shared History of Shame, p 482. 96 Spektorowski and Mizarchi, Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden, pp 347–​348. 97 Hyatt, A Shared History of Shame, pp 483–​485. 98 Spektorowski and Mizrachi, Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden, p 349. 99 Spektorowski and Mizrachi, Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden, p 333. 100 Hyatt, A Shared History of Shame, p 477. 101 Aldous Huxley (1934), ‘What Is Happening to Our Population?,’ Hash’s Pall Mall Magazine, April 1934 republished in Aldous Huxley, The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920–​1926, London: Faber and Faber, pp 147–​158. 102 Huxley, ‘What Is Happening to Our Population?,’ p 154. 103 Joanne Woiak (2007), ‘Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics and Fiction,’ The Public Historian, 29.3, 105–​129, p 118. 104 Michael Sherborne (2010), H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, London: Peter Owen, p 127. 105 H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells (1934), The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge about Life and Its Possibilities, Vols 1–​3, New York: The Literary Guild. 106 Julian Huxley (1970), Memories, New York: Harper and Row, pp 166–​170. 74

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Three Roads to the Welfare State R.S. Deece (2010), ‘Twilight of Utopias: Julian and Aldous Huxley in the Twentieth Century,’ Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 5.2, 210–​ 240, p 215. 108 Julian Huxley, article in News Chronicle, 24 November 1934 cited in Deece, Twilight of Utopias, p 215. 109 Josiah Wedgewood (1912), cited in Edward J. Larson (1991), ‘The Rhetoric of Eugenics: Expert Authority and the Mental Deficiency Bill,’ The British Journal for the History of Science, 24.1, 45–​60, p 53. 110 Josiah Wedgewood (1912), ‘Letter to the Editor: The Dangers of the Mental Deficiency Bill,’ The Nation, 12, p 215. 111 Edward Larson (1991), ‘The Rhetoric of Eugenics: Expert Authority and the Mental Deficiency Bill,’ British Journal for the History of Science, 24.1, 45–​60, p 59. 112 Cited in Ann Oakley (1991), ‘Eugenics, Social Medicine and the career of Richard Titmuss in Britain, 1935–​50,’ British Journal of Sociology, 42.2, 165–​194, p 176. 113 Ann Oakley, ‘Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss in Britain 1935–​50,’ British Journal of Sociology, 42.2, 165–​194, p 169. 114 Titmuss, The Social Environment and Eugenics, p 57. 115 Ann Oakley (1996), Man and Wife: Richard and Kay Titmuss: My Parents’ Early Years, London: Harper Collins, p 184. 116 Ann Oakley, Father and Daughter, Bristol: Policy Press, p 113. 117 Richard Titmuss (1938), Poverty and Population, London: Macmillan and Co. p 43. 118 Oakley, Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss, p 174. 119 J.B.S. Haldane (1938), Heredity and Politics, London: Allen and Unwin, p 29. 120 Oakley, Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Career of Richard Titmuss, p 181. 121 Richard Titmuss and Kathleen Titmuss (1942), Parents Revolt, London: Secker and Warburg, p 86. 122 Titmuss (1958), Essays on the Welfare State, London: Unwin, pp 77–​80. 123 Wells, Anticipations, p 212. 124 Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, p 81. 125 Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, p 86. 126 Jenny Anderson, Nordic Nostalgia, p 230. 127 Aitha Reddy (2008), ‘The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing: Implication for Post-​ Atkins Litigation,’ De Paul Law Review, 57, 667–​678, pp 668–​670. 128 Bernie Devlin (1995), ‘Galton Redux: Eugenics, Intelligence, Race and Society: A Review of the Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by R.J. Hernstein and C. Murray,’ Journal of the American Statistical Association, 90.432, pp 1483–​1488. 129 Lyndsay A Farrell (1979), ‘The History of Eugenics: A Bibliographical Review,’ Annals of Science, 36, 111–​123, p 121. 130 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994), The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, New York: The Free Press. 131 Stephen Jay Gould (1981/​1996), The Mis-​measure of Man, New York: Norton and Co. 132 Gould, Mis-​measure of Man, p 30. 133 Amartya Sen (1993), ‘Capability and Well-​Being,’ in Marta Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp 30–​53. 134 Gunnar Myrdal (1944), An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper, pp 168–​169. 107

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Walter Lippmann (1937), The Good Society, London: George Allen and Unwin, p 47. 2 Donald Steel (1980), Walter Lippmann and the American Century, New York: Vintage, p 23. 3 Lippmann (1910), cited in Steel, Walther Lippmann, p 28. 4 Lippmann (1914), cited in Steel, Walter Lippmann, p 49. 5 Helena Rosenblatt (2012), French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 214–​218. 6 Lippmann, The Good Society, pp 185–​186. 7 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 187. 8 Lippmann, The Good Society, pp 198–​199. 9 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 200. 10 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 30. 11 Lippmann, The Good Society, pp 161–​164. 12 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 163. 13 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 173. 14 Lippmann, The Good Society, pp xii–​xiii. 15 Ben Jackson (2012), ‘Freedom, the Common Good, and the Rule of Law: Lippman and Hayek on Economic Planning,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 73.1, 47–​68, p 49. 16 David Harvey (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 2. 17 Hayek cited in Alan Ebenstein (2001), Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, London: Palgrave, pp 22–​23. 18 Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek, pp 23–​37. 19 Ludwig von Mises (1932/​1936), Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, London: Jonathan Cape, p 97. 20 Ludwig von Mises (1935), ‘Economic Calculation in the Economic Commonwealth,’ in F.A. Hayek (ed.), Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism, Abingdon: Routledge. 21 Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek, p 52. 22 Lionel Robbins (1971), Autobiography of an Economist, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p 91. 23 A.W. Coats (1982), ‘The Distinctive LSE Ethos in the Inter-​War Years,’ Atlantic Economic Journal, 10.1, 18–​30, pp 20–​25. 24 F.A. Hayek (1944/​2001), The Road to Serfdom, Abingdon: Routledge, p 221. 25 Ludwig von Mises (1931/​1951), Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, New Haven: Yale, p 25. 26 Mises, Socialism, p 27. 27 Hayek, ‘Present State of the Debate’ in Hayek (ed.), Collectivist Planning, pp 241–​243. 28 Richard Cockett (1995), Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-​thanks and the Economic Counter-​Revolution, 1931–​83, London: Harper Collins, p 12. 29 Lippmann, The Good Society, pp 105–​106. 30 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, p 215. 31 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 104. 32 Hilaire Belloc (1927), The Servile State, 3rd edition, p. xiv, cited in Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p 13. 1

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Ludwig von Mises (1944), Bureaucracy, Chicago: Chicago University Press; Karl Popper (1945), The Open Society and Its Enemies, Abingdon: Routledge. 34 Karl Popper (1974/​2002), Unended Quest, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 137–​138. 35 Ebsenstein, Friedrich Hayek, p 157. 36 F.A. von Hayek (1939), Freedom and the Economic System, Chicago: Public Policy Pamphlets. 37 George Orwell (1944), Arthur Koestler, 11 September, first published in Orwell (1946), Critical Essays, London: Seeker and Walburg. 38 R.H.L. Crossman (1949) (ed.), The God that Failed, New York: Harper. 39 Crossman, The God that Failed, p 5. 40 Crossman, The God that Failed, p 5. 41 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 17. 42 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 30. 43 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 30. 44 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 60. 45 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 56. 46 Koestler, in Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, p 60. 47 Margaret Thatcher (1995), The Path to Power, London: Harper Collins, p 57. 48 Thatcher, The Path to Power, pp 58–​59. 49 Hayek, foreword to 1956 edition of The Road to Serfdom. 50 F.A. Hayek (1960/​1999), The Constitution of Liberty, Abingdon: Routledge, p 216. 51 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p 353. 52 Denis Dillon and Bryan Fanning (2011), Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation, London: Ashgate, p 14. 53 Desmond King (1987), The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenships, London: Croom Helm, p 167. 54 Philip Mirowski (2007), ‘Naturalizing the Market on the Road to Revisionism,’ Journal of Institutional Economics, 3.3, 351–​372, p 370. 55 F.A. Hayek (1933/​1991), ‘The Trend in Economic Thinking,’ in W.W. Bartley and Stephen Kresge (eds), The Trend in Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p 25. 56 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p 15. 57 Lippmann, The Good Society, p 362. 58 Bruce Caldwell (1997), ‘Hayek and Socialism,’ Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXV, 1856–​1980, p 884. 59 Caldwell, Hayek and Socialism, p 1874. 60 Steven Horwitz (2001), ‘From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-​Rationalist Liberalism,’ Review of Austrian Economics, 13, 23–​40, p 31. 61 Karl Popper (1945/​2002), The Open Society and Its Enemies: Vol. 2, London: Routledge, pp 693–​694. 62 Bruce Caldwell (1997), ‘Hayek and Socialism,’ Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXV, 1856–​1890, p 1856. 63 Arnaud Brennetot (2015), ‘The Geographical and Ethical Or igins of Neoliberalism: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the Foundations of a New Geopolitical Order,’ Political Geography, 19.1, 30–​39, p 35. 64 Hayek, foreword to 1956 edition of The Road to Serfdom. 65 Milton Friedman (1962), Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, cited in F.A. Hayek (1979), Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Political Order of a Free People, London: Routledge, p 46. 33

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Notes Brennetot, The Geographical and Ethical Origins of Neoliberalism, pp 37–​38. Brennetot, The Geographical and Ethical Origins of Neoliberalism, p 37. 68 Mirowski, Naturalizing the Market, p 357. 69 Peck and Tickell, Conceptualizing Neoliberalism, Thinking Thatcherism, p 37. 70 Bruce Caldwell (2007), ‘ “Introduction”, to F.A. Hayek,’ The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents –​The Definitive Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp 1–​22. 71 Michael Ignatieff (1998), Isaiah Berlin: A Life, London: Chatto and Windus, p 128. 72 Bruce Caldwell, ‘Introduction’ to F.A. Hayek, pp 1–​22. 73 F.A. Hayek (1945/​1999), Readers Digest Condensed Version of The Road to Serfdom, London: Institute of Economic Affairs. 74 Letter from Hayek to Karl Popper 8 July 1944, cited in Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 96. 75 Winston Churchill, 4 June 1945. On Atlee’s response, see John Bew (2017), Citizen Clem: A Biography of Atlee, London: Quercus, p 333. 76 Margaret Thatcher (1995), The Path to Power, London: Harper Collins, p 47. 77 F.A. Hayek (1945), The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons, originally published in Look Magazine. 78 Richard Cockett (1995), Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-​Tanks and the Economic Counter-​Revolution, 1931–​83, London: Harper Collins, p 92. 79 Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, pp 101–​102. 80 Letter 28 December 1946 cited in Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 103. 81 Mirowski, Naturalizing the Market, p 369. 82 Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 67. 83 Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 67. 84 Ernest Benn (1925), Confessions of a Capitalist, London: Hutchinson, p 12. 85 Cited in Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 70. 86 Thatcher, The Path to Power, p 65. 87 Antony Fisher (1974), Must History Repeat Itself? London: Churchill Press, p 103. 88 Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 139. 89 Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon (1959), ‘The Tactics and Strategy of the Advance of a Free Society,’ Mount Pellier Society cited in Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, p 140. 90 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p 400. 91 Thatcher, The Path to Power, p 50. 92 Thatcher, The Path to Power, p 253. 93 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2007), ‘Conceptualizing Neoliberalism, Thinking Thatcherism,’ in Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard (eds), Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, London: The Guilford Press, p 31. 94 Isaiah Berlin (1958/​2002), ‘Two Concepts of Liberty in Isaiah Berlin,’ Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 167–​217, p 170. 95 Isaiah Berlin, letter to Herbert Elliston, 30 December 1952, cited in Anthanassios Pitsoulis and Steffen W. Grob (2015), ‘The Other Side of the Argument: Isaiah Berlin versus F.A. Hayek on Liberty, Public Policies and the Market,’ Constitutional Political Economy, 26, 475–​494, p 479. 96 Berlin, letter to Jean Floud, 7 July 1968, cited in Pitsoulis and Grob, The Other Side of the Argument, p 479. 66 67

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H.G. Wells (1943), Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church, London: Penguin, p 79. 2 Gabriel Almond (1948), ‘The Political Ideas of Christian Democracy,’ Journal of Politics, 10.4, 734–​763, p 749. 3 William Hale (2005), ‘Christian Democracy and the AKP: Parallels and Contrasts,’ Turkish Studies, 6:2, 293–​310, p 294. 4 Edward M. Andries (1999), ‘On the German Constitution’s Fifthieth Anniversary: Jacques Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz),’ 13 Emory International Review 1, 1–​77, p 10. 5 Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser (2001), ‘Transnationalism and Early European Integration: The Nouvelles Equipes Internationales and the Geneva Circle 1947–​ 1957,’ The Historical Journal, 44.3, 773–​798, p 774. 6 Ronald J. Granieri (2003), The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/​ CSU, and the West,’ New York: Berghahn, p 19. 7 Hale, Christian Democracy and the AKP, p 295. 8 Granieri, Ambivalent Alliance, p 14. 9 Granieri, Ambivalent Alliance, p 14. 10 Margriet Krijtenburg (2012), Schuman’s Europe: His Frame of Reference, Leiden: Leiden University Press, p 17. 11 Hale, Christian Democracy and the AKP, p 295. 12 Tony Judt (2005), Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, London: Vintage, pp 157–​158. 13 Judt, Postwar, pp 157–​158. 14 Jacques Maritain (1931), The Things That Are Not Caesar’s, New York: Scribner; Jacques Maritain (1939), Antisemitism, London: G. Bles; Jacques Maritain (1943/​ 1944), Christianisme et démocratie (New York: Éditions de Maison Francaise, (Christianity and Democracy), New York: Charles Scribner. 15 Paolo Pombeni (2000), ‘The ideology of Christian Democracy,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 5.3, 289–​300, p 295. 16 Raissa Maritain (1943), We Have Been Friends Together, New York: Longmans, p 51. 17 Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, p 40. 18 Émile Durkheim (1897), Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie, Paris: Alcan. 19 Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, p 74. 20 Émile Durkheim (1897/​1951), Suicide: A Study in Sociology, New York: Free Press, pp 37–​39. 21 Gerald A. McCool (1978), ‘Jacques Maritain: A Neo-​Thomist Classic,’ The Journal of Religion, 58.4, 380–​404, p 388. 22 Jacques Maritain (1928), Three Reformers, London: Sheed and Ward, p 8. 23 Maritain, Three Reformers, p 11. 24 Maritain, Three Reformers, p 78. 25 Maritain, Three Reformers, p 147. 26 McCool, Jacques Maritain, p 398. 27 Émile Durkheim (1893/​1984), The Division of Labour in Society, London: McMillan, pp 129–​131. 28 Durkheim, Division of Labour, p 374. 29 Durkheim, Division of Labour, pp 403–​404. 1

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Notes Lewis A. Coser (1960), ‘Durkheim’s conservatism and its implications for his sociological theory,’ in Kurt H. Wolff, Émile Durkheim; Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp 211–​216. 31 Jacques Maritain (1921), ‘A propos de la question juive,’ La vie spirituelle, July 1921, cited in Richard Francis Crane (2008), ‘Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain’s Jewish Question,’ Patterns of Prejudice, 42:4–​5, 385–​411, p 387. 32 Jacques Maritain, Etienne Borne, Olivier Lacombe, Yves R. Simon and Maurice de Gandhillac (1934), Pour le bien commun: les responsabilites du chretien et le moment present, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, cited in Crane, Surviving Maurras, p 404. 33 Richard Francis Crane (2007), ‘Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain’s Jewish Question,’ Patterns of Prejudice, 42.4–​5, 385–​411, p 387. 34 McCool, Jacques Maritain, p 402. 35 McCool, Jacques Maritain, p 399. 36 Maritain, Man and the State, p 93. 37 The editors (1939), ‘An Interview with Jacques Maritain,’ Commenweal, 3 Feb. 38 Rosario Forlenza (2017), ‘The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War,’ Contemporary European History, 26.2, 261–​286, p 274. 39 Jacques Maritain (1943), Christianity and Democracy, Edinburgh: J. and J. Gray, pp 14–​15. 40 Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, p 19. 41 Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, p 25. 42 Maritain, Man and the State, p 105. 43 Jacques Maritain (1956), The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, London: Geoffrey Bles, p 139. 44 Alan Jacobs (2018), The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 42. 45 Jacques Maritain, (1944), The Rights of Man and Natural Law, London: Centenary Press, pp 5–​10. 46 Maritain, The Rights of Man, p 26. 47 Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, p 91. 48 Mary Ann Glendon (1998), ‘Knowing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ Notre Dame Law Review, 73, pp 1153–​1190, p 1156. 49 Glendon, Universal Declaration, p 1197. 50 Forlenza, Politics of the Abendland, p 278. 51 Edward M. Andr ies (1999), ‘On the Ger man Constitution’s Fiftieth Anniversary: Jacques Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz),’ 13 Emory International Law Review 1, 1–​77, p 40. 52 Andries, Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law, p 45. 53 Andries, Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law, p 38. 54 Andries, Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law, pp 29–​30. 55 Forlenza, The Politics of the Abendland, p 274. 56 McCool, Jacques Maritain, p 381. 57 Forlenza, The Politics of the Abendland, p 277. 58 Maria Mitchell (1996), ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945–​1949,’ The Journal of Modern History, 67, 278–​308, p 282. 59 Josef Hien (2013), ‘The Ordoliberalism That Never Was,’ Contemporary Political Theory, 12.4, 349–​358, p 352. 30

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Three Roads to the Welfare State Ludwig Erhard cited in Nils Goldschmidt (2004), Alfred Muller-​Armack and Ludwig Erhard: Social Market Liberalism,’ Frieburg Discussion Papers on Constitutional Economics 04/​12, Frieburg: Walter Eucken Institute, p 11. 61 Mitchell, Materialism and Secularism, p 300. 62 Interview with Adenauer translated in Serge Audier (2013/​2014), ‘A German Approach to Liberalism? Ordoliberalism, Sociological Liberalism, and the Social Market Economy,’ L’Économie Politique, 60, 48–​76, p 60. 63 Frederick Taylor (2011), Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany, London: Bloomsbury, pp 356–​357. 64 Hien, The Ordoliberalism That Never Was, p 352. 65 Nils Goldschmidt, Alfred Muller-​Armack and Ludwig Erhard (2012), ‘Social Market Liberalism,’ Freiburger Diskussionspapiere zur Ordnunsokonomik, No 4, pp 1–​3. 66 Konrad Adenauer (1965), Mémoires, Vol. 1, 1945–​1953, Paris: Hachette, p 211. 67 Hien, The Ordoliberalism that Never Was, p 352. 68 Hien, The Ordoliberalism that Never Was, p 351. 69 Preface to The Ordo Yearbook of Economic and Social Order (1948), p xi, translated by Goldschmidt, Social Market Liberalism, p 15. 70 Serge Audier (2013), ‘A German Approach to Liberalism? Ordoliberalism, Sociological Liberalism, and the Social Market Economy,’ L’Économie Politique, 60.4, 48–​76, pp 48–​76. 71 Wolf Sauter (1997), The Economic Constitution of the European Union, Groningen: Center for European Law and Politics, pp 47–​48. 72 Audier, A German Approach to Liberalism?, pp 48–​76. 73 Stefan Kolev, Nils Goldschmidt and Jan-​O tmar Hesse (2019), ‘Debating liberalism: Walter Eucken, F.A. Hayek and the Early History of the Mont Pèlerin Society,’ The Review of Austrian Economics, pp 1–​6. 74 Walter Euchen (1950/​1992), The Foundations of Economics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p 314. 75 Kolev, Goldschmidt and Hesse, Walter Eucken, F.A. Hayek and the Early History of the Mont Pèlerin Society, p 6. 76 Euchen, The Foundations of Economics, p 314. 77 Kolev, Goldschmidt and Hesse, Walter Eucken, F.A. Hayek and the Early History of the Mont Pèlerin Society, p 13. 78 Kolev, Goldschmidt and Hesse, Debating Liberalism, p 13. 79 N.T. Tuncer (2013), ‘F.A. Hayek and Ordoliberalism: A comparative Study,’ Sosyoekonomi, 2, 147–​160, p 158. 80 Volker Berghahn and Brigitte Young (2013), ‘Reflections on Werner Bonefeld’s “Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism” and the Continuing Importance of the Ideas of Ordoliberalism to Understand Germany’s (Contested) Role in Resolving the Eurozone Crisis,’ New Political Economy, 18.5, 768–​778, p 722. 81 Hein, The Ordoliberalism That Never Was, p 352. 82 Clark Kerr (1954), ‘The Trade Union Movement and the Redistribution of Power in Postwar,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 68.4, 535–​564, p 535. 83 Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, p 355. 84 Andries, Maritain and the 1949 Basic Law, p 30. 85 Kerr, The Trade Union Movement, pp. 437–​546. 60

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Notes Timo Fleckenstein (2011), ‘The Politics of Ideas in Welf are State Transformation: Christian Democracy and the Reform of Family Policy in Germany,’ Social Politics, 18.4, 543–​571, p 548. 87 Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, pp 336–​337. 88 Josep R. Liobera (2003), ‘The Concept of Europe as an Idée-​Force,’ Critique of Anthropology, 23.2, 155–​174, p 157. 89 Stathis N. Kalyvas and Kees van Kersbergen (2010), ‘Christian Democracy,’ Annual Review of Political Science, 13, 183–​209, p 188. 90 Rosario Forlenza (2017), ‘The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War,’ Contemporary European History, 26.2, 261–​286, p 274. 91 Forlenza, The Politics of the Abendland, p 262. 92 Mitchell, Materialism and Secularism, p 298. 93 Ronald J. Granieri (2003), The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Anenauer, the CDU/​ CSU, and the West, New York: Berghahn, p 16. 94 James Corkery S.J. (2019), Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Ideas: Wise Cautions and Legitimate Hopes, Dublin: Dominican Publications, pp 117–​119. 95 Lieven Boeve (2007), ‘Europe in Crisis: A Question of Belief or Unbelief? Perspectives from the Vatican,’ Modern Theology, 23:2, 205–​227, p 206. 96 Boeve, Europe in Crisis, p 222. 97 Joseph Ratzinger (2004/​2007), Europe Today and Tomorrow, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p 11. 98 Granieri, Ambivalent Alliance, p 2. 99 Forlenza, The Politics of the Abendland, p 274. 100 Wolfram Kaiser and Brigitte Leucht (2008), ‘Informal Politics of Integration: Christian Democratic and Transatlantic Networks in the Creation of ECSC core Europe,’ Journal of European Integration History, 14.1, 35–​49, p 39. 101 Sherrill Brown Wells (2011), Jean Monnet: Unconventional Statesman, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, p 85. 102 Cited in Brown Wells, Jean Monnet, p 129. 103 Liobera, The Concept of Europe, p 157. 104 Michel Foucault (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–​79, London: Palgrave, p 116. 105 Sauter, The Economic Constitution of the European Union, p 50. 106 Sauter, The Economic Constitution of the European Union, p 68. 107 Andy Storey (2017), ‘The Myth of Ordoliberalism,’ New Europe, 5 December. 108 Václav Šmejkal, Stanislav Šaroch (2014), ‘EU as a Highly Competitive Social Market Economy: Goals, Options and Reality,’ Review of Economic Perspectives, 14:4, 393–​410, pp 393–​394. 86

Chapter 10 

Francis Fukuyama (1989), ‘The End of History?,’ The National Interest, 16, 3–​19, p 4. 2 Fukuyama, The End of History?, p 14. 3 Russell Jacoby (1999), The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, New York: Basic Books, p xii. 4 Fukuyama, The End of History?, p 18.

1





241

Three Roads to the Welfare State Reproduced from the W.B. Yeats Collection Full-​Text Database. Copyright © 1998 Chadwyck-​Healey Ltd. © Copyright material reproduced under licence from Michael and Anne Yeats. 6 Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1839/​1971), Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Clarendon, p 178. 7 Francis Fukuyama (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, London: Hamish Hamilton, p 60. 8 Daniel Bell (1960), The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, p 417. 9 Jacques Maritain (1951), Man and the State, Chicago: Chicago University Press, p 93. 10 Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man, pp 293–​294. 11 Francis Fukuyama (1992), ‘Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link,’ Journal of Democracy, 3.3, 100–​110, pp 100–​101. 12 Francis Fukuyama (1995), ‘Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later,’ History and Theory, 34.2, 27–​43, p 29. 13 Tony Judt (2010), Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, London: Penguin. 14 Michael Rustin (1992), ‘No Exit from Capitalism?,’ New Left Review, 193, 96–​107, p 97. 15 Paul Auerbach (1991), ‘On Socialist Optimism,’ New Left Review, 192, 5–​36, p 23. 16 Eric Hobsbawm (1991), ‘The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies,’ New Left Review, 192, 55–​64, pp 58–​59. 17 Hobsbawm, The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies, p 61. 18 Stuart Hall (1979), ‘The Great Moving Right Show,’ Marxism Today, January, pp 14–​20. 19 Stuart Hall (1991), ‘And Not a Shot Fired,’ Marxism Today, December, 10–​15, pp 14–​15. 20 Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds) (1989), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p 28–​31. 21 Tony Blair (1991), ‘Forging a New Agenda,’ Marxism Today, October, pp 31–​34. 22 Anthony Giddens (1998), The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge: Polity. 23 Michael J. Sandel (2018), ‘Populism, liberalism and democracy,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism, 44.4, 353–​359, p 354. 24 Colin Crouch (2011), The Strange Non-​Death of Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Polity, p 27. 25 Donald Sassoon (1999), ‘European Social Democracy and New Labour: Unity in Diversity? In Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (eds), The New Social Democracy, London: Fabian Society/​Blackwell, pp 19–​20. 26 Armin Schafer and Wolfgang Streek (2013), ‘Introduction: Politics in the Age of Austerity,’ in Armin Schafer and Wolfgang Streek (eds), Politics in the Age of Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, pp 8–​9. 27 Steven Pinker (2018), Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Humanism and Progress, London: Allen Lane, p 345. 28 Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (1953), The Space Merchants, New York: Ballentine. 29 Ronaldo Munck (2002), Globalization and Labour: The New ‘Great Transformation,’ London: Zed Books. 30 Wolfgang Streek (2015), The Rise of the European Consolidation State: MPifG Discussion Paper 15/​1, Cologne: Max-​Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, p 12. 5

242

Notes Paul Pierson (2011), ‘The Welfare State Over the Very Long Run,’ ZeS-​Arbeitspapier, No. 2  Zentrum fur Sozialpolitik, Bremen: University of Bremen, 1–​30, pp 22. 32 Jacques Mistral (2014), ‘Building a Stronger Union: Social Policies in Europe and the Management of the Debt Crisis,’ in Kemal Dervis and Jacques Mistral (eds), Europe’s Crisis, Europe’s Future, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, p 159. 33 Linda Hantrais (2000), Social Policy in the European Union: 2nd edition, London: St Martin’s Press, pp 11–​20. 34 Michael Rush (2015), Between Two Worlds of Father Politics: USA OR Sweden?, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 88–​89. 35 D. Erler (2009), ‘Germany: Taking a Nordic Turn?,’ in Sheila Kamerman and Peter Moss (eds), The Politics of Parental Leave Policies: Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market, Bristol: Policy Press, 119–​215, p 131. 36 Manuel B. Aalbers (2013), ‘Neoliberalism is DEAD … Long Live Neoliberalism!,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37.3, 1083–​1090, p 1083. 37 Michael J. Sandel, Populism, Liberalism and Democracy, p 354. 31

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250

Index A

C

Abendland  199 Action Française  188–​9 Adenauer, Konrad  184, 192, 193, 194, 200 administrative despotism  172 Almond, Gabriel  183 anomie  79, 187 anti-​modernism  77–​8, 80–​5, 110, 188, 190, 199 Anticipations  140, 141, 143, 157 Aquinas, Thomas  77, 85, 89, 95, 186 Aristotle  85, 186 Attlee, Clement  109–​15, 120, 126, 127, 176 Augustine, Saint  14, 89 Austen, Jane  22–​3, 47 austerity measures  211 Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action)  92

Cahill, Edward  95 Calvin, John  14, 15, 89 Calvinism  13, 14–​15, 18 capitalism  57, 74, 103, 107, 177–​8, 180 corporate  162, 165 division of labour  15–​18 emergence of  12–​15 Marxist critiques of  184, 207 Owen’s critique of  35, 38 Rerum Novarum and critique of  86–​8 Swedish  117, 118, 121 three worlds of welfare  1, 3–​8 Weber on development of  84 Carlyle, Thomas  56, 57, 78, 110, 163 cartels, economic  174, 175, 194, 196, 197 Cartesianism  187, 188 Catholic Association  81 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829)  80 Catholic social thought  77–​98 anti-​modernism  77–​8, 80–​5, 188, 190, 199 Catholic utopias  90–​3 idealisation of medievalism  78–​9, 91 limits of corporatism  94–​8 principle of subsidiarity  94–​5 versus secular modernity  77, 85–​90 Centre for Policy Studies (CPS)  179 Centro Católico  93 Chadwick, Edwin  55, 56, 57, 68, 69, 70–​2 child labour  36, 64, 70 regulation  38, 69, 73, 87–​8, 111 child mortality rates  156 child poverty  24–​5 child rearing  Alva Mydral on  151 Godwin on  34 Owen on  40–​1 Skinner on  48–​9 in Well’s utopia  143 childcare  5, 150, 198, 212 cholera  70–​1 Christian democracy, European  183–​201 Christianity and democracy  186–​92 pioneering articulation of  81 post-​war constitutions  192 project for a unified Europe  185–​6, 198–​201 social market economy  192–​8

B Belloc, Hillaire  91, 162, 168 Benedict XVI, Pope (Joseph Ratzinger)  199–​200 Benn, Ernest  177–​8 Benson, Hugh  90, 95–​6 Bentham, Jeremy  19, 55, 61–​6, 69 industry houses  62–​5, 66 Mill’s critique of  66–​8 model prisons  44, 62 Owen on  38 sexual non-​conformity  65–​6 Bergson, Henri  187 Berlin, Isaiah  10, 175, 180–​1 Bernstein, Ernst  102–​6 Besant, Annie  135, 136, 138–​40 Beveridge Report  114, 126, 168, 177 Beveridge, William  74, 113, 167 Binet, Alfred  158 birth control  135, 138–​41, 144–​8 see also sterilisation Bismarck, Otto von  83, 84, 102 Blair, Tony  208–​9 Blanshard, Paul  96–​8 Blueshirts  96 Booth, Charles  106 Brave New World  143, 147, 153, 172 bread  71–​2 British Eugenics Society  140, 154, 155, 156 Burke, Edmund  58–​9 Butler, Rab  129

251

Three Roads to the Welfare State Christian Democratic Union (CDU)  184–​5, 192–​3, 197–​8, 199 Christian humanism  188, 191, 192 Christianity  compatibility with socialism  108, 110, 111–​13 and democracy  186–​92 Church of England  80, 112 Churchill, Winston  74–​5, 126, 176 class mobilisation theory  3, 8, 103–​4, 213 clothing  41–​2 collectivism  164, 165, 209 failure of  207, 208 neoliberal theorists and case against  166–​73, 173–​4 Combe, Abram  43–​4 communism  108, 169–​71, 204, 207 The Communist Manifesto  9, 51, 77 The Confessions of a Capitalist  177–​8 conscience collective  188 conservatism  1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 203 Catholic  see Catholic social thought Church of England and British  80 Conservative Party  4, 7 champions of factory legislation 69–​70, 111 and Church of England  80 and electoral reform  72, 73 Fabian Society seeks to influence  107 Hayek on  179 Keynes on  75 neoliberal think tanks  178–​9 ‘One Nation’ Conservatism  128–​9 popularity of The Road to Serfdom  175–​6 Thatcherism  161, 208, 209 Tory Reform Group and cleavage in  177 The Constitution of Liberty  171, 172, 179 constitutions, post-​war  192 contraception  135, 136, 138, 145, 146, 150, 152 Besant’s argument in support of  139–​40 convergence theory  3, 8 Cooper, Anthony Ashley (Lord Shaftsbury)  69, 111 cooperative movement  51, 52–​3, 68 Corn Laws  12, 57 corporations  162, 175, 209–​10 corporatism  86, 88, 90–​3 limits of  94–​8 Crisis in the Population Question  149–​50, 151, 152, 153 crisis of modernity  133, 172, 209

Crosland, Anthony  128 Crossman, Richard  127–​8, 129–​31, 169–​70, 171 Cullen, Cardinal Paul  96

D Darwin, Charles  135, 141 The Dawn of All  90, 95–​6 De Gasperi, Alcide  185 De la division du travail social (The Division of Labour in Society)  6, 78–​9, 188, 198 de Valera, Eamon  95, 96 ‘decommodification’ from labour market  4 democracy  ambivalence towards  1–​2, 8, 205 Catholic doctrine and compatibility with American  96–​7 and Christianity  186–​92 Fukuyama’s view of liberal  7, 204, 205–​6 liberalism versus  58–​60, 196 Skinner on  49 social engineering and intellectual challenges from  148–​54 social engineering in Sweden versus  148–​53 social engineering versus  137–​8 socialism and compatibility with  196 utopian schemes and incompatibility with  2–​3, 204 workplace  118, 131 Democrazia Cristiana  185 Descartes, René  188, 190 ‘The Determination of Moral Facts’  79 Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB)  197 Disraeli, Benjamin  57, 72, 73, 78, 129 A Dissertation on the Poor Laws by a Well-​ Wisher to Mankind  18, 19–​20 distributive justice  89, 91 division of labour  5–​6, 7, 15–​18, 31, 78–​9, 157, 164, 174, 188, 198 gendered  5, 45, 197, 212 The Division of Labour in Society (De la division du travail social)  6, 78–​9, 188, 198 Duffy, Eoin  96 Durkheim, Émile  6, 78–​80, 187, 188, 198 dystopias  153, 169, 209–​10

E The Edinburgh Review  30, 66 education  27, 64, 68, 95 neoliberal financing of  175

252

Index Owen on  39, 41 of women and girls  45, 46, 47 electoral reform  in Britain  60, 68, 72–​3, 103–​4, 113 and concern for ‘fitness’ of masses to vote  137, 138 extending vote to working class  2, 3, 8, 52, 72–​3, 82–​3, 137–​8 in France  58, 59, 60 in Germany  82–​3 in Sweden  118, 138 vote for women  46, 47–​8 The End of History and the Last Man  203–​4, 205–​7 Engels, Friedrich  9, 29, 51, 56–​7, 77, 78, 102, 206 Enlightenment  77, 82, 187, 190–​1, 199 environmental crisis  213 Erhard, Ludwig  193, 194, 201 Erlander, Tage  125 Esping-​Andersen, Gosta  1, 4, 5, 213 Essay on the Principle of Population  18, 19, 22–​6, 28, 55–​6 Eucken, Walter  194, 195–​6 eugenic societies  140 British Eugenics Society  140, 154, 155, 156 eugenics  41, 135–​8 birth control and  135, 138–​41, 144–​8 British movement  136–​7, 140, 141–​5, 146–​8, 153–​4 challenging of arguments for  154–​7 negative  136–​7, 140–​1, 142, 143–​4, 146–​7, 148, 149, 150, 151–​3 positive  142, 153 support in Sweden for  137–​8, 148–​53 tainted by German National Socialism  154, 155–​6 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)  184, 185, 200 European Economic Community (EEC)  184, 186, 201, 211 European identity  199–​200 European Union  198, 199–​200, 201, 211–​12 euthanasia  136, 141, 142

Rerum Novarum on regulation of  87–​8 legislation  in Britain  69, 111 in France  73 Factory Act (1819)  69 Factory Act (1833)  69, 111 Factory Act (1847)  69 family  crisis of Swedish  150–​1 rights  94–​5 support for ‘traditional’ German  197–​8 fascism  198, 205 Italian  91–​2 Maritain on  189–​90 Nazism  136, 154, 155–​6, 168, 170, 175, 193, 194 Portuguese  93 feminists  5, 45–​7 advocacy of birth control  135, 138, 145 Fianna Fáil  95, 96 financial crisis 2008  211 Fisher, Antony  178 Folkhemmet  100, 123–​6 food  prices  12, 26 supply  18, 20–​1, 25, 26, 55–​6, 57 Forlenza, Rosario  198–​9 Foucault, Michel  201 France  Burke’s reflection on revolution  58–​9 Catholic Church  80–​1 Christian democracy  185 comparing Parisian and London bakeries  71–​2 factory legislation  73 mutual assistance societies  53 suffrage  58, 59, 60 Terror  58, 59, 60 Val-​des-​Bois  84–​5 Frazier’s Magazine  66, 70 Freiburg School  194 Friedman, Milton  175 Froude, Anthony  70 Fukuyama, Francis  3, 7, 203–​4, 205–​7

F

G

Fabian Essays  127 Fabian Society  73–​4, 106, 107, 167 Bernstein’s speech to  102–​6 interest in eugenics  137, 140, 141–​4 type of socialism promoted by  127–​8 factory  conditions  36–​7, 38, 70, 111

Gaulle, Charles de  185, 192 gemeinschaft  79, 100 Germany  Catholic Church  81–​4 Catholic trade unions  88 Communist Party  170 economic cartels  174, 175, 194, 196, 197

253

Three Roads to the Welfare State extension of franchise  82–​3 kulturkampf  83, 96, 193 Nazis  136, 154, 155–​6, 168, 170, 175, 193 negative eugenics  136 Social Democratic Party  102 Zentrum  83–​4, 184 see also West Germany Gladstone, William  72, 73 The God that Failed  169–​70 Goddard, Henry  158 Godwin, William  33–​4 The Good Society  162–​5, 168, 173 Gothenburg Programme  101, 118, 119 Gould, Stephen Jay  159 Granieri, Ronald  199 Great Britain  electoral reform  60, 68, 72–​3, 103–​4, 113 eugenics movement  136–​7, 140, 141–​5, 146–​8, 153–​4 intellectual challenges to  154–​7 local government  71, 107, 109, 110, 114 rise of neoliberalism  175–​6, 177–​80 social democracy  102–​15, 121–​3 urban planning  133, 168, 172 see also laissez faire liberalism; reform liberalism; utopian socialism; welfare state, British Great Reform Act (1832)  60, 68, 72 Great Reform Act (1867)  72, 73 Grundgesetz (Basic Law)  192

H Haldane, J.B.S.  156 Hall, Stuart  208 Hancock, William  30 Hansson, Per Albin  100, 123–​4 Hardie, Kier  107–​9, 121, 126, 206 Harmel, Léon  84–​5, 86 Harvey, David  165 Hayek, Friedrich  162, 166, 167–​8, 171–​2, 173–​6, 179, 207, 209 Berlin’s critique of  180–​1 on conservatives  179 correspondence with Eucken  195, 196 friendship with Popper  169 Mount Pelerin conference  176–​7 Orwell’s review of The Road to Serfdom  168 Spontaneous Order  173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 195 health and fitness of potential military recruits  156–​7 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm  9, 205–​6 Himmelfarb, Gertrude  66

Hird, Denis  106 Hitler, Adolf  126, 184, 189, 194, 197 Hobsbawm, Eric  73–​4, 207 homosexuality  65 Horder, Lord  155 housing  poor design  132, 172 slum  56, 71 human nature  33–​4, 85, 101 human rights  190–​2 humanism, Christian  188, 191, 192 hunger  disciplining poor through  18–​22 Irish potato famine  30 Huxley, Aldous  143, 147, 153–​4, 172 Huxley, Julian  154

I illegitimate children  29 individualism  6, 13, 79, 84, 187, 188, 192 industrial revolution  5–​7, 31–​2, 39 industry houses  62–​5, 66 Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)  178–​9 intelligence testing (IQ tests)  158–​60 Ireland  analysis of church-​state relations  96–​8 Catholic Association  81 corporatism and  95–​6 potato famine  30–​1 subsidiarity enshrined in 1937 Constitution  95 waning influence of Catholic Church  98 Italy  Catholic Church  80, 82 Christian democracy  185 Mussolini  91–​2 mutual assistance societies  53

J Joseph, Keith  179 Judt, Tony  185, 207

K Kautsky, Karl  102, 206 Kennedy, John F.  97 Ketteler, Emmanuel von  81, 86 Keynes, John Maynard  75, 119, 135 Koestler, Arthur  169, 170–​1 Kornbluth, C.M.  210 kulturkampf  83, 96, 193

L Labour Party  75, 108, 110–​14, 169, 206, 208 under Blair  209

254

Index Crossman’s views on  127–​8 in government  109, 113, 127, 128, 129, 130, 177 Let’s Face the Future manifesto  126 laissez faire liberalism  11–​32 Conservatives continued championing of  75 divisions of labour and  15–​18 Lippmann on need for an alternative to  162–​5 Owen’s critique of  38 Polanyi on  210 political economy and shadow of  26–​32 provision for the poor  18–​26 Reformation and emergence of capitalism  12–​15 shift away from  55–​8 Lamennais, Filicite de  81 L’Avenir  81 Leo XIII, Pope  84, 85, 86 Lewis, Jane  5 Liberal Party (Great Britain)  75, 80, 81, 113, 125 in government  74, 110, 113 support for extension of right to vote  72 Liberal Party (Sweden)  116 liberalism  4, 7 Attlee on distinction between socialism and  113 Catholic Church’s antipathy to  82, 84, 86 versus democracy  58–​60, 196 Fukuyama on  204, 206–​7 Swedish social democracy an extension of  117 see also laissez faire liberalism; reform liberalism Liberatore, Matteo  86 liberty  balancing equality and  206 individual  68, 114, 165, 166, 172, 174, 176, 179, 180, 181, 195 positive and negative  180 utilitarianism and limits of  61–​8 The Lion and the Unicorn  121–​3 Lippmann, Walter  162–​5, 168, 173 local government in Britain  71, 107, 109, 110, 114 Locke, John  33 London School of Economics (LSE)  110, 167, 169 Lutheran Church  116, 117, 125

M Macauley, Rose  147–​8 Malthus, Rev. Thomas Robert  12

principle of population  18, 19, 22–​6, 28, 55–​6 on rural Catholic poor in Ireland  30–​1 on treatment of unmarried mothers and their children  24, 29 Man and Superman  142, 147 managerialism  130 Mandeville, Bernard  16, 17, 19, 89 Manifesto of British Liberty  178 Maritain, Jacques  184, 186–​92, 200, 206 Maritain, Raissa  186–​7 Marktvolk  211 marriage  21–​5, 29, 64, 139, 147 Marx, Karl  9, 19, 29, 30, 51, 102–​3, 104, 105, 106, 107 Marxism  attraction of  169–​70, 171, 207 critiques of  113, 121 in despair  207–​8 Labour Party repudiating of classical  128, 206 social democracy and  99, 102 Marxism Today  207, 208 McDonald, Ramsey  113 medievalism, idealisation of  78–​9, 91 Mental Deficiency Act (1913)  148, 154 middle class  59, 74, 116, 161, 170 attraction of socialism for  109, 121 electoral reform and power of  60, 68 military recruits, fitness of  156–​7 Mill, James  46 Mill, John Stuart  52, 53, 55, 66–​8, 72–​3 Miners and Collieries Act (1845)  111 Mises, Ludwig von  162, 166–​7, 168, 169, 174, 207 model communities  35, 36–​8, 40–​1, 42–​5, 52 New Harmony  42–​3, 44, 45, 47 New Lanark  33, 35–​8, 39, 50, 52 Orbiston  43–​4, 45 Val-​des-​Bois  84–​5 A Modern Utopia  142–​3, 168 modernity  anti-​  77–​8, 80–​5, 110, 188, 190, 199 Catholic social thought versus  77, 85–​90 crisis of  133, 172, 209 Durkheim’s sociology of  188 Maritain’s perspective on  190 social democracy and Swedish  115–​21 Möller, Gustav  148 Monnet, Jean  200 Morris, William  106, 110, 111 mothers  138, 144, 146

255

Three Roads to the Welfare State employment of  150, 198 ‘eugenic’  146 unmarried  24, 29 Mount Pelerin Society (MPS)  162, 176–​7, 178–​9, 195 Movement Républican Populaire (MRP)  185 Müller-​Armack, Alfred  194 Mussolini, Benito  91–​2 mutual assistance societies  53 Myrdal, Alva  148–​51, 152, 212 Myrdal, Gunnar  131, 137–​8, 148–​50, 152, 159–​60, 179

N Napoleon Bonaparte  58, 59 Nation and Family  150, 152 National Charity Company  63 National Health Service  157, 179, 210 National Socialism (Nazism)  136, 154, 155–​6, 168, 170, 175, 193, 194 nationalism  8, 100, 198–​9, 212 natural law  77, 79, 85, 89, 94, 184, 186, 189, 192 natural rights  61 natural selection, theory of  135, 141 Neo-​Thomism  77, 79 neoliberalism  161–​81, 204, 207 ambivalence to democracy  205 challenge to welfare state  132, 174–​5, 211 coining of term ‘neoliberal’  162 dominance of Thatcherite  208 and inevitability of social policy  209–​11 Lippmann on need for alternative to laissez-​faire  162–​5 ordoliberalism and comparisons with  195–​6 politics and propaganda  175–​81 rise of  166–​75 taking shape as a political philosophy  179–​80 think tanks  178–​9 unviable in post-​war West Germany  196–​7 view on role of state  165–​6, 195 New Fabian Essays  127, 130 New Harmony  42–​3, 44, 45, 47 New Labour  209 New Lanark  33, 35–​8, 39, 50, 52 New Times (1989)  208 New View of Society  38–​9 Newman, Jeremiah  97 Nordin, Maria  153 Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (NEI)  200

O Oakley, Ann  156 O’Connell, Daniel  81 ‘One Nation’ Conservatism  128–​9 Orbiston  43–​4, 45 ordoliberalism  186, 194–​5, 196, 197, 201 Orwell, George  121–​3, 168, 169 Owen, Robert  33, 34, 35–​45, 48, 51–​2 influence on cooperative movement  52–​3 model communities  35, 36–​8, 40–​1, 42–​5, 52 New Harmony  42–​3, 44, 45, 47 New Lanark  33, 35–​8, 39, 50, 52 parallelograms  40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 153 on position of women  41, 45 Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor (1817)  39–​40, 41, 44 ‘silent monitor’  37 views on clothing  41–​2

P Panopticon  44, 62, 63 papal infallibility, doctrine of  82, 83 parallelograms  40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 143 parish relief  11–​12 Bentham’s proposed industry houses to replace  62–​5 ideological attacks on  12, 19, 28–​9 laissez faire and case for abolition of  12, 18–​26 Protestant ethic and discouragement of  14–​15 in Sweden  117, 125 tying workers to parish  26, 31 Past and Present  56, 57, 78 Paul VI, Pope  187, 192 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich  48 personalism  187, 192 Pinker, Steven  209 Pius IX, Pope  82, 83 planning, urban  132, 133, 168, 172 Pohl, Frederik  210 Polanyi, Karl  31–​2, 51, 210 poor  assistance for industrious  22 Bentham’s scheme for managing lives of  63–​5, 66 child mortality among  156 church movements working on behalf of  109–​10, 112 environmental conditions and links with being  155, 156

256

Index negative eugenics directed at  137, 143–​4, 146, 147 negative freedoms and impact on  180–​1 Owen’s report on improving lives of  39–​40, 41, 44 patchwork of services for  107 radicalisation of  109 Rerum Novarum and duty and rights of  87–​8 using hunger to exercise control over  18–​22 welfare state policy failures  132–​3 see also working class Poor Law 1834  28–​9, 58, 68–​9, 107 1909 Royal Commission report on  110 Webb’s critique of system  143–​4 see also parish relief Poor Law Commission  71 Popper, Karl  101, 169, 171 population  addressing problem of decline in Swedish  148–​52 eugenic controls on  135, 138–​41, 144–​8 hunger and  19–​22 Malthus’ principle of  18, 19, 22–​6, 28, 55–​6 populism  205, 212–​13 Portugal  92–​3 predestination, doctrine of  14 pricing system  166–​7, 173, 174 principle of subsidiarity  94–​5 prisons, model  44, 62, 63 privatisation of public services  175, 179–​80 pronatalism  148, 150 property, private  Rerum Novarum on  88–​9 state protection of right to  165–​6 protectionism  161–​2, 164 Protestant  concept of individualism  13, 84, 187, 188, 192 conservatism  80 ethic  13–​15, 26 nonconformists  111 Reformation  11, 13, 14, 187–​8 public health  70–​1 Public Health Act (1848)  71 Puritanism  13

Q Quadragesimo Anno (Forty Years After)  91, 92, 186

R racism  159–​60 Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI)  199–​200 reform liberalism  32, 55–​75 crossing political party lines  73–​4 versus democracy  58–​60 engagement with working class voters  72–​3 shift away from laissez faire to  55–​8 social policy reforms  72–​5 technocracy and  68–​72 utilitarianism  55, 61–​8 Report on Bastardry 1834  29 Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor (1817)  39–​40, 41, 44 Rerum Novarum (Of New Things)  77, 79–​80, 84, 85–​9 corporatism  90–​1 family rights  94–​5 on property  88–​9 understanding of poverty  89 The Road to Serfdom  91, 168–​9, 171, 173, 174–​5, 175–​6, 195, 204, 207, 209 Robbins, Lionel  167, 168 Rochdale Pioneers  52 Rojas, Mauricio  124–​5, 132 Rosenblatt, Helena  59 Rousseau, Jean Jacques  18, 33, 46, 48, 188, 190 Rowntree, Seebohm  106 Ruskin, John  78, 110, 114 Russell, Bertrand  137

S Sadler, Michael  69 Salazar, António de Olivera  92–​3 Sandel, Michael  212–​13 Sanger, Margaret  145–​6 Schuman Plan  200 Schuman, Robert  185 The Second Coming  205 secularisation anxieties  6, 188, 193, 200 Senior, Nassau  29, 68, 69, 70 The Servile State  91, 168 settlement houses  109–​10, 112 sexual non-​conformity  65–​6 Shaftsbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper)  69, 111 Shaw, George Bernard  106, 127, 128, 140, 142, 147, 162, 169 Shuttleworth, James Kay  56 ‘silent monitor’  37

257

Three Roads to the Welfare State Sims, George  106 Skinner, B.F.  48–​9, 50, 172 Smith, Adam  5–​6, 12, 15–​18, 26–​8, 38, 77, 78, 165, 167 social citizenship  4–​5, 8, 212 social cohesion  89, 185, 197, 210 EU and promotion of  211–​12 unravelling of  6–​7, 78–​9, 85–​6, 150 social Darwinism  12, 20–​1, 32 social democracy  99–​133 Bernstein’s speech to Fabian Society  102–​6 in Britain  102–​15, 121–​3 welfare state  126–​33 emergence of political parties  99 in Germany  102 in Sweden  99–​102, 115–​21, 123–​6 case for social engineering  148–​53 Folkhemmet  100, 123–​6 Social Democratic Federation  106, 110 Social Democratic Party, Germany  102 Social Democratic Party, Sweden  99, 100, 102, 116, 118, 119, 120, 123–​4, 125, 131, 132 Social Democratic Workers Party  115–​16 social engineering  2, 135–​60 birth control  135, 138–​41, 144–​8 British eugenics movement  136–​7, 141–​5, 146–​8, 153–​4 dystopian texts  153–​4 Fabians’ interest in  141–​4 Hayek’s view of  174 intellectual challenges to  154–​8 intelligence testing  158–​60 in Sweden  137–​8, 148–​53 social housing  132, 172 social insurance  74–​5 social market economy  179, 192–​8, 201 socialism  4, 5 arguments for evolutionary  102–​6, 108–​9, 117 Attlee’s vision of  114–​15 attraction for middle classes  109, 121 Benn’s view of  178 Christianity and compatibility with  108, 110, 111–​13 Churchill on  176 democracy and compatibility with  196 Fabians’ approach to  127–​8 failure of  207–​8 Hayek’s criticism of  167–​8, 173 terminology  33 see also social democracy; utopian socialism

Soviet Union  170–​1, 204, 207 The Space Merchants  210 Spain  53, 59, 189, 190 Speenhamland System  12, 24, 28–​9 Spontaneous Order  173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 195 Staatvolk  211 state  Aquinas’ view of  89 arguments for regulation of  57, 71–​2, 74 Kier Hardie on role of  107–​8 neoliberal view on role of  165–​6, 195 ordoliberal view on role of  195 planning, neoliberal critique of  169, 171–​2, 175, 207 principle of subsidiarity and role of  94–​5 sterilisation  British rejection of laws on  147, 148, 154 laws in US  140–​1 Stopes’ support for  147 in Sweden  151–​3, 158 Stockholm School  119–​20 Stopes, Marie  145, 146–​7 subsidiarity, principle of  94–​5 suicide  187 Sweden  crisis of family  150–​1 establishment of welfare state  117, 121, 131, 149–​50 eugenics  137–​8, 148–​53 backlash against  157 Folkhemmet  100, 123–​6 Gothenburg Programme  101, 118, 119 influencing EU social policy  212 Liberal Party  116 parish relief system  117, 125 problem of population decline 148–​9, 150–​2 social democracy  99–​102, 115–​21, 123–​6 sterilisation  151–​3, 158 Stockholm School economists  119–​20 technocratic planning  132 universal suffrage  118, 138 workplace democracy  118, 131 Sybil, or the Two Nations  57, 78, 129 Syllabus of Errors  82 syndicats  84

T Tawney, R.H.  13, 14 technocracy  8, 55, 132, 142, 172, 212 European Union and  200, 201

258

Index of planners  168, 172 reform liberalism and  68–​72 see also social engineering technology  3, 172 Thatcher, Margaret  171, 176, 178, 179 Thatcherism  161, 208, 209 think tanks  178–​9 Thomism  77, 86, 186 Thompson, William  46, 47, 50–​1 Three Reformers  187, 188, 191, 192 Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism  1, 4, 213 Titmuss, Kathleen  156 Titmuss, Richard  155–​6, 156–​7 Tocqueville, Alexis de  60 totalitarianism  93, 171–​2, 176, 177, 189 Christian democracy a symbolic reaction to  183, 184, 193–​4 Maritain’s criticism of  189–​90 Nazism  136, 154, 155–​6, 168, 170, 175, 193, 194 Townsend, Rev. Joseph  12, 18–​19, 19–​22 trade unions  52, 53, 73, 131–​2 Catholic  84, 88 in West Germany  197 Treaty of Maastricht (1992)  201, 211 Treaty of Rome (1957)  201, 211 Tulloch, John  70

U unemployment  Beveridge on  74 insurance  74, 86, 110 Owen’s report on  39–​40, 44 relief for seasonal  11, 29 Swedish public works to reduce  119, 120 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights  191–​2 United States  birth control  145–​6 Catholic doctrine and democracy  96–​7 intelligence testing  158–​9 New Harmony  42–​3, 44, 45, 47 racism  159–​60 sterilisation laws  140–​1 urban planning  132, 133, 168, 172 utilitarianism  55, 61–​8 utopia  Bentham’s  64, 66 Catholic  90–​3 death of visions of  204 H.G. Wells’ vision of  140, 142–​3 incompatibility with democracy 2–​3, 204

neoliberal  161, 174 of the ‘rational’  115, 124 Wigforss’ ‘provisional’  99–​100, 101 utopian socialism  2, 33–​53 cooperative movement  51, 52–​3 New Harmony  42–​3, 44, 45, 47 New Lanark  33, 35–​8, 39, 50, 52 new moral worlds  45–​50 Orbiston  43–​4, 45 Owen’s programme for  38–​42, 51–​2 parallelograms  40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 143 Skinner’s proposals for  48–​50 Thompson inspired by Owen  50–​1

V Val-​des-​Bois  84–​5 Volksgemeinschaft  100, 124 Volksverein  88 vote  see electoral reform

W Walden Two  48–​9, 172 Walter Lippmann Colloquium, 1938  162, 168, 174, 176 The Wealth of Nations  5–​6, 15, 17, 26–​7, 38, 77, 78, 165, 167 Webb, Beatrice  110, 141 Webb, Sidney  106, 107, 140, 141, 143–​4, 147, 167 Weber, Max  12–​13, 84 Wedgewood, Josiah  154 welfare capitalism, typologies of  1, 3–​8 welfare state, British  102, 126–​33 Beveridge Report  114, 126, 168, 177 Churchill on would-​be architects of  176 Conservative Party support for 128–​9, 177 Crossman’s concerns over future legitimacy of  129–​31, 171, 172–​3 disillusionment with  132–​3 foundations of  110, 113 Hall on failure of  208 welfare states  austerity measures and undermining of  211 disillusionment with  132–​3 emergence and growth of  3–​5 Hayek’s critique of  168, 172, 174–​5, 209 negative eugenics coinciding with emergence of  140 Swedish  117, 121, 131, 149–​50 Wells, H.G.  140, 141, 142–​3, 148, 154, 157, 162, 168, 183 West Germany  Abendland  199

259

Three Roads to the Welfare State Catholic thinking on social policy  186, 197, 199 Christian democracy a reaction to Nazism  183, 184, 193–​4 Christian Democratic Union  184–​5, 192–​3, 197–​8, 199 Grundgesetz (Basic Law)  192 ordoliberalism  186, 194–​5, 196, 197, 201 social insurance  197–​8 social market economy  192–​8 support for European integration  200–​1 support for ‘traditional’ family  197–​8 trade unions  197 Westbindung  200 Wirtschaftsverfassung  194–​5 works councils  197 Westbindung  200 The Westminster Review  66 What Not: A Prophetic Comedy  147–​8 Wheeler, Anna  46, 47 Wigforss, Ernst  99–​100, 101, 102, 108, 117–​18, 119–​20, 121 Windthorst, Ludwig  83–​4, 88 Wirtschaftsverfassung  194–​5 Wollstonecraft, Mary  34, 41, 46–​7, 48 women  45–​8 clothing  41–​2 education of  45, 46, 47 gendered division of labour  5, 45, 197, 212 within labour market  4–​5

Myrdal’s on social reforms and position of  149, 150–​1 in Owen’s proposed model communities  41, 45 stigmatising unmarried mothers and deserted  29 suffrage  46, 47–​8 in ‘traditional family’  197–​8 unmarried mothers and deserted  24 Wollstonecraft on position of  46–​7 working class  class struggle  103–​4 competition for vote of  73–​4, 103–​4, 213 extending vote to  2, 3, 8, 52, 72–​3, 82–​3, 137–​8 insanitary housing  56, 57 Owen’s paternalistic regulation of lives of  36–​7, 39–​40, 44–​5, 52 Rerum Novarum and appeal to working class  86–​8 size of British and Irish  38–​9 Sweden’s emerging industrial  116 see also poor workplace democracy  118, 131 works councils  84, 197

Y Yeats, W.B.  205

Z Zentrum  83–​4, 184, 193

260

“An impressive intellectual history of the welfare state, well written and highly readable. It offers a fresh perspective while remaining an accessible and stylish survey of ideas.” Fred Powell, University College Cork “Bryan Fanning offers a fresh and erudite history of the welfare state. This is a book well worth reading, especially for those interested in the underlying concepts and philosophies.” Mary Daly, University of Oxford The development of social policy in Europe is explored in this accessible intellectual history and analysis of the welfare state. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, the book identifies three important concepts behind efforts to address social concerns in Europe: social democracy, Christian democracy and liberalism. With guides to the political and ideological protagonists and the beliefs and values that lie behind reforms, it traces the progress and legacies of each of the three traditions. For academics and students across social policy and the political economy, this is an illuminating new perspective on the welfare state through the last two centuries. Bryan Fanning is Professor of Migration and Social Policy at University College Dublin.

ISBN 978-1-4473-6032-2

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