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    Rodney Barker – Social democracy and liberalism

    rodney barkerCapitalism has been accepted by social democrats with almost as much enthusiasm as was always granted to it amongst liberals, but it has been often accepted too uncritically. To say that you are in favour of capitalism and markets is as empty of content as saying that you like people, or enjoy music. The question is which people, what sort of music, and in what circumstances. And if capitalism is no longer cast in the role of opponent, who are the enemies whom the social democrat must confront?


    `When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
    `The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
    `The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’


    The life histories of ‘liberalism’ and ‘social democracy’ provide plenty of evidence for Humpty Dumpty’s account of the use of language as described in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’. Humpty Dumpty was fortunate to be sitting on a wall, and not in a university, otherwise we would now have dense, tight articles on the fallacies, or insights, of Humptyism or Dumptyology, and probably a fair clutch of neo-Humptyeans and post-Dumptists. But it is still worth remembering that even if words are not given new meanings in an entirely random way, and whether or not the proliferation of meanings is at the whim of the powerful, words are still put to many uses, and in order to understand what is being said, the place to look is circumstance, not universal essence.


    In the case of liberalism and social democracy, the first term has done even more different jobs than has the second. The right wing in the United States uses liberalism to mean overbearing collectivism, which is about as far from European usage as you can get. Social democracy too, has been used to refer to everything from an active and effective citizen politics, to a paternalist state run by experts in the interests of a dependent population. But since there is no ‘core’ or ‘true’ meaning, but only a range of existing and accepted ones, it is possible without being simply arbitrary, to select usages which no one can say are frivolous or esoteric. Each of the usages which I consider here starts from and stresses the political rather than the governmental descriptions embedded in the terms. They refer to both actual and desirable politics rather than to forms of government, though the values and aspirations in the account of politics have consequence for kind of government which social democrats find useful or acceptable.


    Liberalism I shall use to refer to a doctrine about politics: the belief that normative political theory starts with individual people who are entitled to decide for themselves how they will live so long as they do not infringe the equal rights of others to do just the same.


    Social democracy I shall use to refer to a sociologically and historically informed application of liberal principles, a belief that individuals can exercise control over their own lives only when excessive concentrations of power, wealth, and advantage are replaced by the widest possible equality, but an equality which makes possible, rather than prevents, diversity and unpredictability. It is the presence of such diversity and unpredictability which is one indicator that what is being achieved is equality of capacity, not uniformity of condition or character. A social democratic state comes only second, as the means of making a social democratic society possible. So social democracy, as the Fabian Socialists in Britain argued on the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, was the realisation of liberalism, the creation of circumstances where liberal aspirations could be realised in practice and grow beyond mere hopefulness. It was a socialist and a democrat, the LSE professor R. H. Tawney, who said that socialism was a state of affairs where you could tell anyone to go to Hell, and where the other person was not under the slightest obligation to do so.


    But social democracy requires a state even while it places the citizen rather than the state at the start of things. It is democracy qualified by the adjective social, not simply socialism qualified by the adjective democratic. The social democratic state is the instrument of a social dimension of a life which, while it is composed of individuals, involves social co-operation and collaboration, community and neighbourliness.


    To use the terms in this way is of course selective. But it is selective within an existing range of meanings. And selectivity is further justified by the transformed circumstances of the twenty first century and the end of the ideological and political landscape which is often termed the ‘short Twentieth century’. During that historian’s Twentieth Century, running from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the end of East European and Russian Communism and of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991, the issues were clear: democracy and totalitarianism, socialism and capitalism, east and west. A radical socialist politics could identify its principal political support, whether in revolution or democratic contest, as an industrial proletariat in a society structured principally along lines of class.


    The categories which worked in the twentieth century take us only so far in the twenty first. We now inhabit a world of which none of them can give an adequate or appropriate account. Whilst in the Twentieth Century, or at least the short twentieth century, there was both a clear road map and terrain map, and both a clear constituency and a clear opponent, all that has gone. Class no longer provides the principal contour for electoral choices, whilst age, or religion, or ethnicity all contribute to a far more complex and multidimensional political world.


    But if social democracy has lost its traditional class constituency, it has not lost its role. The fragmentation of social identity increases the possibilities of that bloody mindedness which is essential to democratic politics, and particularly to politics in an indirect democracy with a powerful state. The organic relation between democratic politics and social, political, and economic equality remains as important and central as it ever was. But the context in which it is to be pursued, the way in which it will be realised, and the methods by which it will be approached, have all been transformed.


    So the way forward for social democracy depends on a re-description of aims, methods, and constituencies. And the discovery or recognition of its constituency involves at the same time the discovery or recognition of its opponents. Capitalism has been accepted by social democrats with almost as much enthusiasm as was always granted to it amongst liberals, but it has been often accepted too uncritically. To say that you are in favour of capitalism and markets is as empty of content as saying that you like people, or enjoy music. The question is which people, what sort of music, and in what circumstances. And if capitalism is no longer cast in the role of opponent, who are the enemies whom the social democrat must confront? If social democrats are social egalitarians, then the enemies are patriarchs and all those who use monopolies or excesses of power, resources, or prestige to advantage themselves and disadvantage others, to entrench orthodoxy and defend privilege.


    If that is the scenario, what is it in the aspirations and insights clustered around the title ‘social democracy’ which is worth preserving and cultivating in the twenty first century, and which can reasonably and realistically be adopted after the end of the twentieth and its characteristic goals methods, and dramatis personae?


    They can be simply, if didactically, listed:



    1. Social resources and opportunities distributed in a way that gives the greatest opportunities for self cultivation and flourishing to the greatest number of people.
    2. Consequent on that, a form of government which is constantly open to scrutiny and critical evaluation by those citizens whose instrument it is and whose flourishing it exists to serve.
    3. 1 and 3 to be arranged in such a way that acknowledges the diversity of individual and social identities which socially democratic citizens are likely to enjoy, and which neither privileges nor penalises any of those identities.


    The setting out of such aspirations is of course the easy part. And it is true that the greatest safeguard of such system were it to be achieved, and the most likely motor for achieving it, is precisely a body of assertive, unpredictable, and troublesome citizens which the system is intended to cultivate and sustain. The cause, the means, and the consequence are one and the same. There could be a paradox here: social democracy depends on egalitarian and tough minded citizens for its realisation, but they will only emerge with the achievement of social democracy. So the conditions which create social democracy are in their turn created by it. That could mean that social democracy is unachievable. But it can also mean that the goal and the means advance in symbiosis with each other, and that in pursuing and working for social democracy the means necessary for its success, and the marks of that success, advance in organic relation with each other.


    Special issue: social democracy
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    1. Ο/Η Lewis Guy :
      March 7th, 2009 at 12:08

      Lovely piece of work this. Very clear and pure, and useful. Perhaps one might say that although Social Democracy is indeed a delicate flower, there is a hopeful pathway in that the present crisis might throw up some helpful trends. In addition to fuelling awareness of need for social democracy, as it is certainly if sometimes indirectly doing, it may also breed some new socio-economic science dedicated to optimising the dynamic range of individuals and organisations for social betterment. This in combination with law-making is what I believe will instrumentalise development of the additional muscles and their rebalancing that democracy needs to morph into social democracy.
      My compliments to the author tho’
      Great Stuff
      Cheers
      Lewis Guy


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