It is not easy to find labels for these two conceptions. They might be termed ‘hedonist’ and ‘moralist’, or perhaps ‘passive’ and ‘active’. This yields a fourfold classification, in place of the simple dichotomy of individualism and collectivism. Individualism can be passive and hedonist, or active and moralist. So can collectivism. Individual liberty can be valued, in other words, because it allows individuals to satisfy freely-chosen desires, to live as they please so long as they do not prevent others from doing the same. Or it can be valued because it enables them to lead purposeful, self-reliant and strenuous lives, because it encourages them to take responsibility for their actions and, in doing so, to develop their moral potential to the full. By the same token, collective action and collective provision may be seen as instruments for maximising morally-neutral satisfaction, or as the underpinnings of personal and cultural growth, of engagement in the common life of the society and so of self-development and self-fulfilment. Anthony Crosland’s collectivism was essentially passive-hedonistic. So was Nigel Lawson’s individualism. Gladstone’s individualism was moralist-activist, as was R. H. Tawney’s collectivism.
From this perspective, the ebbs and flows in the struggle for moral and intellectual hegemony in post-war Britain acquire a much more complex significance. A stylised account of them might run like this. Instead of three Acts, the drama now contains five. In Act One, lasting from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the post-war generation of Keynesian social democrats exercised moral and intellectual leadership. Their collectivism was active and moralistic. For them, rights went hand-in-hand with duties, security with activity. A just society would be a moral society – not only because its resources would be distributed fairly, but because its members would be free to lead active and fulfilling lives. Collective action and resource redistribution would rescue their beneficiaries from dependence, indignity and passivity. It would also enable them – perhaps even oblige them – to repay society for the help it had given them. An enlarged public domain held no terrors: the public domain was a place of engagement, governed by an ethic of service and commitment. Beveridge was the emblematic figure and, as Jose Harris shows in her chapter in this book, Beveridge’s vision of social citizenship was quintessentially activist, drawing on a notion of civic virtue that went back to classical Greece. Social citizenship was a status, but a status that had to be earned. Its entitlements were not charitable doles granted to passive dependants, who had done nothing to help themselves. Benefits were paid out because contributions had been paid in; and Beveridge devised his system in this way because, in his own words, ‘Management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom’.27 And active citizenship was a means as well as an end. Social security had to be ‘won by a democracy; it cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy’.28 The same values ran through the participatory productivism of the wartime shop stewards’ movement, and inspired Stafford Cripps’s conception of democratic planning as a system of moral suasion, in which ‘the Government, both sides of industry and the people’ worked together to achieve a common end.29 They also underpinned Attlee’s robust defence of peacetime conscription as a legitimate quid pro quo for the welfare state.30
Eventually, however, Act One gave way to Act Two. Gradually in the 1950s, and with gathering speed in the 1960s, Keynesian social democrats abandoned the austere moral activism of Attlee, Beveridge and Cripps. Keynes himself had never really shared it; though he killed himself overworking for his country, his moral vision was always suffused with the hedonistic relativism he had absorbed in the Cambridge and Bloomsbury of his youth. Later Keynesian economists saw themselves as technicians rather than moralists, or even citizens. In their eyes, their professional task was to understand the working of the economic system and to advise policy makers how to translate their preferences into action. As private individuals they might or might not make moral judgements of their own, but the realm of moral judgement and the realm of economic science were to be kept rigidly apart. What was true of post-Keynesian economic collectivism was also true, albeit for different reasons, of post-Beveridgean welfare collectivism. The notions that rights should be balanced by duties, that activity was better than dependence and the point of collective provision was to foster self-reliance and civic activism came to be seen as patronising, or elitist, or (horror of horrors) ‘judgemental’. Meanwhile, the service ethic of the professional mandarinate – the twentieth-century equivalent of the ‘clerisy’ of the nineteenth century and, as such, the chief guardians of the moral-activist tradition – came to be seen as camouflage for illegitimate privilege.31 On a deeper level, as Geoff Mulgan’s chapter suggests, the moral and cultural presuppositions of that ethic were undermined by a loss of confidence on the part of the mandarinate itself, exacerbated by an insistent demotic relativism on the part of its critics. Among left-of-centre Keynesian social democrats, equality came to be seen as a good in itself, irrespective of the uses to which the fruits of egalitarian policies were put. Among their right-of-centre counterparts, a technocratic managerialism, in which the good life was equated with rising living standards and political leadership with the promotion of economic growth, increasingly prevailed.32
If the mentality of the first group was epitomised in Hugh Gaitskell’s ‘socialism is about equality’, that of the second was summed up in Harold Macmillan’s 1957 boast that the British people had ‘never had it so good’. If the emblematic Keynesian social democrat of the 1940s was William Beveridge, that of the 1960s and 1970s was Anthony Crosland, with his ringing plea for an ethic of private pleasure in place of the Fabian ethic of public duty:
We need not only higher exports and old age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better-designed street lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum …
… To-day we are all incipient bureaucrats and practical administrators. We have all, so to speak, been trained at the L.S.E., are familiar with Blue Books and White Papers, and know our way around Whitehall … Now the time has come for a reaction: for a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent, on culture, beauty, leisure, and even frivolity. Total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia: or, at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.33
Alas for riverside cafes. As Raymond Plant suggests in a later chapter, hedonistic collectivism contains a built-in flaw. By definition, the redistribution it demands makes some people better off and others worse off. Also by definition, it can offer no convincing moral argument for doing so. If rights are not balanced by duties, why should the rich make sacrifices for the poor? If collective provision is not a means to moral improvement, why should those who do not need it pay taxes to pay for it? If the public domain is not a place of engagement, governed by a service ethic, what is to prevent it from becoming a battleground for predatory vested interests? Hedonistic collectivists could not answer these questions. By the mid-1970s, Act Two was ending. It was clear that there was a moral and rhetorical vacuum at the heart of the Keynesian social-democratic system. The beginning of Act Three saw the New Right rushing in to fill it.
For the New Right attack on the Keynesian social-democratic system was moral as well as economic and political: in the last analysis, moral rather than economic or political. Market forces were better than