Yet even these arguments were not as new as they were sometimes thought to be. They were the latest manifestations of a long line of speculation and rhetoric, going back to the earliest apologists of the capitalist market economy and of the unconditional rights of private property.22 The notion that markets are, in some mysterious sense, more ‘spontaneous’ than governments goes back to Adam Smith’s famous claim that a propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ is fundamental to human nature. The proposition that deliberate government planning cannot out-perform market spontaneity goes back to his doctrine of the invisible hand, and perhaps even to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, with its sardonic claim that ‘private vices’ unintentionally produce ‘publick benefits’. The claim that democratic party competition is bound to engender inflationary overload is a modern version of the fears that disturbed the sleep of a long line of nineteenth-century economic liberals, alarmed by the thought that a democratic suffrage would endanger the market order. On a deeper level, the assumptions behind it can be traced back to the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Court whigs who dismissed the ideal of civic activism on the grounds that, as J. G. A. Pocock puts it, men were ‘interested beings’, to be policed ‘by a strong central executive’.23
This does not prove that the arguments concerned are false, of course: old arguments may well be better than new ones. But it does raise an obvious question. Why should a set of arguments, which had seemed intellectually discredited and politically irrelevant for the first three decades after the Second World War, suddenly experience a miraculous rebirth in the fourth and fifth? Granted that the history of social thought provides plenty of examples of recycled ideas masquerading as new ones, what was it about these particular theories that made it possible to recycle them to such effect?
For many New Right sympathisers, the answer lies in a kind of inverted historicism, as deterministic as the historicism of the Keynesian social democrats and their precursors in the first part of the century. The inexorable tides of economic and social change which the Keynesian social democrats once rode, the argument runs, have changed direction. They are still there, and they are still inexorable; but they no longer run from the small to the big, from the disorganised to the organised, or from the individual to the collective. Now they run in the opposite direction. Like a de-coagulant dissolving a blood clot, the micro-electronic revolution has dissolved the great power blocks that impeded the free flow of market forces. Large organisations have broken up and social classes have merged. As a result, the state has been disempowered. For in the fluid, dynamic, rapidly-changing economy created by modern technology, the techniques of Keynesian social-democratic regulation have no purchase. Planning, corporatism, even demand management have become unnecessary, and in any case impossible. As David Howell put it during the high noon of the New Right,
The unplanners have defeated the planners completely. There has to be less government because more government is becoming unnecessary and unworkable. The corporatists, who rested their thinking on big unionism, big government, big finance and big industry, are seeing their edifice collapse not because they have lost some temporary political power struggle (or because some other clique has won it) but because this degree of centralism has simply become outdated. The computer and micro-electronic communications disperse power and knowledge, and therefore traditional political formations, just as they disperse and alter industrial and commercial activity. So a new business landscape has emerged, and therefore a new political landscape as well.24
Unfortunately, there are at least two weaknesses in this answer. In the first place, its claims are too universal. The information revolution and its accompanying economic fluidity have affected the entire globe. The moral and intellectual victory of the British New Right was peculiar to Britain, or at most to the English-speaking world. If the demise of Keynesian social democracy and the rise of the New Right were the products of some inexorable technological imperative, continental Europe and Japan would have seen something similar. But although the forms of economic regulation and the rhetoric of political and intellectual leaders have changed in both, neither has experienced anything remotely comparable to the New Right ascendancy in Britain. Technological imperatives that manage to produce Margaret Thatcher in Britain, but François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany, cannot be as imperious as all that.
Much the same applies to the suggestion that inexorable tides of change have disempowered the state. No one can dispute that the British state is less effective, less respected and, in important ways, less powerful today than it was in 1945. This is scarcely surprising. In 1945, it had just emerged triumphant from the most terrible test in its entire history. It had nowhere to go but down. The same is true, in varying degrees, of the other victor states of the Second World War. The Soviet Union has disappeared altogether, while the United States has suffered a decline almost as marked as that of the British state. But it is not true of the defeated states of the Second World War or, for that matter, of the other major states of western Europe. As Alan Milward has argued, the post-war history of western Europe is a history of the revival and reconstruction of the nation-state, not of its decline.25 The German, French, Spanish and even Italian states are, by any reasonable definition, more powerful, more efficacious and more respected in the 1990s than they were in the 1940s. Indeed, most modern states have far more power over their citizens than Napoleon, Louis XIV or, for that matter, Bismarck or Nicholas II could have dreamed of. Of course, there is much that they cannot do. In capitalist market economies, they cannot force up the long-term rate of growth by expanding demand, successfully defy the world’s currency markets or make much difference to pre-tax income differentials. But they never could.
That leads on to the second weakness inherent in the New-Right world view. It purports to explain the second phase in the post-war struggle for hegemony, but it ignores the third. If it were true, there would be no cracks in the New Right’s ascendancy, and no intimations of a new policy paradigm or a new ideological divide. The 1990s would be a continuation of the 1980s; the social and economic imperatives that gave the New Right hegemony in the 1970s could be relied upon to perpetuate its position into the next millennium. But, as we have seen, there are striking differences between the ideological climate of the late 1990s and that of ten years ago; that is, between Act Two of the drama and Act Three. And the transition from Act Two to Act Three is as important to the play as that from Act One to Act Two.
The key to these transitions, I shall argue, lies in a dimension which the political language of the last one hundred years does not capture. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been customary to distinguish between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ and to think in terms of transitions from one to the other. The Victorian jurist, A. V. Dicey, famously thought that the age in which he lived was dominated by a swing to collectivism, and away from the individualism of the early part of the century. More recently, W. H. Greenleaf has found the key to the British political tradition in a continuing dialectic between ‘collectivism’ and what he calls ‘libertarianism’ – essentially another word for individualism. More recently still, Robert Skidelsky has written the history of the twentieth century as a history of the rise and fall of collectivism on the one hand, and of the fall and rise of individualism on the other. Albert Hirschman’s now-classic suggestion that ‘involvement’ swings back and forth from the public to the private sphere belongs to the same genre.26
However, despite its distinguished lineage, the distinction between individualism and collectivism is too crude to catch the full meaning of the story I have been discussing. Individualism, but for what kind of individuals? Collectivism, but for which collective goals? The abstinent, energetic, self-improving, God-fearing puritans whom Max Weber pictured as the ancestors of modern capitalism were individualists. So were (and are) the rationally-calculating utility-maximisers of Jeremy Bentham, of neo-classical economics and of the public-choice theorists of the Virginia School. But the moral and emotional meanings of these two kinds of individualism are far apart: so far, in fact, that it hinders understanding to use the same term for both. The same is true of ‘collectivism’. Joseph Stalin and R. H. Tawney both held ‘collectivist’ values, but their conceptions of the purposes and modalities of collective action were diametrically opposed.
Plainly, no simple classification