The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain
The seventy years since the end of the Second World War have seen dramatic changes in Britain’s cultural, intellectual and political climate. Old class allegiances have been challenged by new loyalties to gender, ethnicity, religion or lifestyle and a new sensibility of self-fulfilment – sometimes hedonistic, sometimes altruistic – has been born.There have been equally seismic shifts in political ideology and public policy in this period. The Labour government of 1945 came to power with an ambitious collectivist programme, involving a planned economy and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. By 1979 the welfare state was widely attacked as a nanny state and economic planning had been discredited. The ascendant New Right sought instead to return to the economic liberalism of the last century while the Left seemed divided and in comprehensive retreat. The 1990s have seen yet another shift – away from the unbridled individualism of the Thatcher years towards a new emphasis on community, civic duty and mutual obligation.In 'The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain', writers of the stature of James Bulpitt, Peter Clarke, José Harris, Albert Hirschman, David Marquand, Geoff Mulgan, Chris Pierson, Raymond Plant, Anthony Seldon, Robert Skidelsky and Robert Taylor give novel interpretations of this paradoxical evolution. They show how ideas once thought beyond the pale – privatisation, marketization, anti-trade union legislation – came to be seen as the norm in the 1980s, only to be challenged in turn in the 1990s, and relate these changes in the climate of ideas to transformations in the social sphere – the end of ‘jobs for life’, new sexual and cultural identities, the crises in relations between the leaders and the led. Fresh, unique and brilliantly well written, 'The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain' is an indispensable companion for anyone seeking to understand the course Britain has plotted in the second half of the twentieth century.
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COPYRIGHT
William Collins
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A William Collins Original 1996
Copyright © David Marquand and Anthony Seldon 1996
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Source ISBN: 9780006384496
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008191931
Version: 2016-09-27
CONTENTS
| Cover | ||
| Title Page | ||
| Copyright | ||
| Introduction: Ideas and Policy | David Marquand and Anthony Seldon | |
| 1 | Moralists and Hedonists | David Marquand |
| 2 | Politics | Albert Hirschman |
| 3 | The Fall of Keynesianism | Robert Skidelsky |
| 4 | The Keynesian Consensus | Peter Clarke |
| 5 | Industrial Relations | Robert Taylor |
| 6 | ‘Contract’ and ‘Citizenship’ | Jose Harris |
| 7 | Social Policy | Chris Pierson |
| 8 | Social Democracy | Raymond Plant |
| 9 | Culture | Geoff Mulgan |
| 10 | The European Question | Jim Bulpitt |
| 11 | Ideas are not Enough | Anthony Seldon |
| 12 | The Stakeholder Society | Will Hutton |
| Contributors | ||
| Notes | ||
| Index | ||
| About the Author | ||
| About the Publisher |
INTRODUCTION
Ideas and Policy
MORE YEARS have passed since 1945 than from the beginning of the century to that date. The major issues and questions in British history from 1900–45 are now fairly well established and there have been authoritative responses in many areas. In contrast, the historiography of the last fifty years is still in flux. A mass of scholarly literature has been written on particular policy areas, institutions and individuals. But the pattern and contours of post-war British history have been strangely hard to define. This is particularly true of the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the world of action. Some of the published literature refers in passing to the role of ideas, but for most authors it is very much a secondary concern.
Yet it is clear that the fifty years since the end of the Second World War have seen dramatic changes in the intellectual and cultural framework within which policy is made and implemented. The details of policy change, as well as the fluctuating fortunes of the political parties, reflect these broad changes in the subconscious of the nation and cannot be understood in isolation from them. The object of this book is to tease out the relationships between these dimensions of change. It explores the impact of transformations in the intellectual and cultural climate on the thinking and assumptions of policy makers, seeks to explain why ideas (such as privatisation or monetarism) which seemed beyond the pale in one period became the orthodoxy of another, and analyses the relationship between changing policy approaches and changes in the content of policy.
In doing so, The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain aspires to throw new light on the alleged shift from the collectivism of the post-war era to the individualism of the last decade and a half, and to place the Thatcher revolution and its aftermath, as well as the preceding thirty years, in a new and richer context.
Ideas, and the complex relationship between thought and action, provide the connecting theme of the book. However, our authors have approached the subject from very different angles. In the first chapter, David Marquand examines the rise and fall of Keynesian social democracy from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s, explores the New Right paradigm which dominated the following twenty years and speculates on the possible emergence of a third paradigm (which is itself the subject of the final chapter in the book). Marquand’s distinctive approach is to provide a subtler separation than that between individualism and collectivism, and to suggest that within each dominant phase were powerful cross-cutting political languages, at one time active and moralistic, at another passive and hedonistic.
Albert Hirschman, the seminal American political economist, next measures the British post-war experience against the propositions of two of his recent books, Shifting Involvements (1981) and The Rhetoric of Reaction (1992). Hirschman’s work is well known to social scientists in Britain, but historians have paid too little attention to it. His oeuvre provides the inspiration for several chapters that follow.
