A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed – or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits – loses its capacity to respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges.
However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society – and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.
The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don’t trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.
The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which – in return for political quiescence – offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’ The.
Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.
In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best – indeed the only – way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.
We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of ‘revolution’.
But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.
Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”.
A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.
True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.
What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?
War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.
However, poverty – whether measured by infant mortality, life expectancy, access to medicine and regular employment or simple inability to purchase basic necessities – has increased steadily since the 1970s.
The social question is back on the agenda.
The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line.
Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.
Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.