Citizenship and Moral Narcissism

Published Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Originally published in The Political Quarterly


The political counter-revolution that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in England and Ronald Reagan to power in the United States can be understood as an attack on the citizenship of equal entitlement in post-war liberal democratic society. Citizenship has its active modes (running for political office, voting, political organizing) and its passive modes (entitlement to rights and welfare). The ideal of citizenship current in post-war Britain gave special emphasis to the passive mode: equal entitlement to family allowance, free health care, the dole and the old age pension. This citizenship of shared entitlement came to be understood in the conservative thought of the late 1970s as a coercive bargain between strangers which abridged the liberties of both rich and poor while infantilizing the poor.

In the irreparable ruination of the socialist tradition which did so much, alongside liberalism, to put the post-war civic contract into place, it is tempting to return to the classical discourse on citizenship in reconstructing the intellectual case for a vision of society as a political community to set against the market individualism of conservatives.

Since the Greeks, philosophers languishing under venial or despotic forms of human rule have been inspired by a rosy ideal of a public realm in which the individual debates and deliberates on the public good, transcends the limits of his private interest and becomes what Aristotle said a man truly was—a political animal. The republican myth of citizenship which traverses Western history from Cicero and the Roman republics through the early Italian city states of the 13th century, Calvin’s Geneva and the English Commonwealth became, with the emergence of market society in the 18th century, the major vernacular for the criticism of the selfishness and lack of public spiritedness in modern market man. In Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), for example, the myth of citizenship—like the myth of the primitive savage—inspired a threnody on the corruption of political virtue by market greed.[1]

It was Marx who forged the intellectual junction point between a Rousseauian doctrine of citizenship which had declined into moral jeremiad and an emergent socialist critique of capitalist modernity. In On the Jewish Question (1843) and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx used his acquaintance with the new science of political economy to subject the myth of citizenship to devastating scrutiny.[2] Modern man, he concluded, was riven by the conflict between his identities as bourgeois and as citoyen: the former expressed his real interests; the latter fabricated a merely legal equality. In the market he lived as an unequal competitor, in the polis he was only nominally a rights-bearing equal. The doctrine of communism, hammered out in the 1840s, can be seen as an attempt to envisage a form of political society in which the contradiction between bourgeois and citoyen would be reconciled. Socialist production would create the conditions of affluence and leisure which would allow communist men and women to realize the Aristotelian ideal and overcome the split between private interest and public good. Marxism, on this interpretation, was an attempt to render the ideal of citizenship applicable in modern economic conditions. It failed because the command economy is incompatible with either democracy or efficiency and because its politics never entrenched and protected private rights.

Yet if communism failed to find a way to enact the ideal of citizenship in modern conditions, Marx’s indictment of bourgeois citizenship was surely correct. The social history of citizenship in late 19th century and early 20th century Europe can be understood schematically as an attempt to reduce the contradiction Marx had discerned between real inequality in the market and the formal equality promised by the civic contract of modern democracies ruled by universal suffrage.[3] This struggle was led from below by working class and feminist organizations, assisted from above by middle class notables of liberal or socialist conscience repelled by the glaring contradiction between the formal and the real. It was in struggling against this contradiction that an essentially individualistic market society generated what A. V. Dicey called the collectivist solution.[4] 19th century market society walked backwards towards the modern interventionist state, and it did so because its citizens could not endure the moral contradiction between the promise of egalitarian citizenship and the reality of a market economy.

The 20th century history of the welfare state can be understood as a struggle to transform the liberty conferred by formal legal rights into the freedom guaranteed by shared social entitlement. Given the inertial tendency of markets to generate inequality, the state is called upon, by its own citizens, to redress the balance with entitlements designed to keep the contradiction between real inequality and formal equality from becoming intolerable. From this history of struggle has been created the modern social democratic polity: formally neutral on what constitutes the good life, yet committed to providing the collective necessities for the free pursuit of that good life, however individuals conceive of it.[5]

This is the pocket history of modern citizenship as the liberal and social democratic traditions have taught us to see it. It is a history which insists that a common structure of social entitlements is an essential precondition for the exercise of liberty in market society. Far from believing that markets and citizenship were incompatible, as Rousseau supposed, the modern fathers of the social democratic synthesis believed that the modern capitalist economy positively required the citizenship of entitlement for its efficient functioning.

The Conservative Case

The conservative counter-revolution has re-written the history of citizenship in order to drive home a very different message. Largely under the influence of Hayek and Popper, post-war European conserva­tism viewed the history of collectivism as a conspiracy against liberty foisted upon a reluctant polity by the shrill certainties and interventionist social engineering of liberals and socialists. The citizenship of entitle­ment throttled both the market and the liberty it was intended to enhance. While Hayek was forced to admit that the abolition of the inherited structure of entitlement would jeopardize social stability, because it would outrage most people’s settled expectations, he could find no justification in right or principle for their maintenance and conceded their necessity only as a matter of political expediency.[6] This style of argument about the welfare state set up an enduring antithesis in conservative thought between the market (realm of liberty, initiative, responsibility and efficiency) and the citizenship of entitlement (realm of regimentation, collectivism and bureaucratic despotism). In modern conservative thought, citizenship has a vestigial place as a form of mythic belonging, a patriotic bonding to the rituals and traditions of British life, rather than as the sharing of collective resources in order to ensure real freedom. Because conservatives view the market as an instrument of liberation, they are more likely to address the British people in the vernacular of consumption, i.e. as rate-payers or consumers, than as citizens.

Their opponents may decry the fact that conservatism has managed to secure a near monopoly on available vernaculars of British patriotism and associate their party and their leaders with the flag and the glorious British past, but they cannot deny it has been effective. They may also decry the fact that the language of consumption has so effectively displaced the language of citizenship. But the fact that conservatism has managed to do so only indicates how abjectly those on the centre left of politics have failed to rise to the intellectual challenge of their success.

Instead of confronting conservative mythology head-on, many British liberals, social democrats and former socialists have taken refuge in a lament for the vanished civilities of post-war British citizenship and in jeremiads against market values. Lament for the lost values of civic spirit may be nothing more than harmless sentimentality but becomes pernicious when it casts a rosy fog of illusion over the real failures and limitations of the post-war experiment in citizenship. When, moreover, the rhetoric of citizenship is used, not to understand market society but simply to express moral distaste for the vulgarity of market values, it becomes a form of moral narcissism, that is, a rhetoric of complacency whose result is to reassure those who cannot bear the moral complexity of a market society that they are sensitive and superior beings. What the losing sides in politics do not need is complacent conviction of the superiority of their values. Instead they need to think hard about why they lost, about why the treasured words and fastidious distaste they keep expressing have led them into a theoretical and practical cal de sac.

Evoking the idea that we should be citizens, and not just predators in the Thatcherian rat race, shares the attraction of all generous communitarian rhetoric in politics: it warms the heart while casting a veil over inconvenient questions. Most specifically: under what economic regime is citizenship, either active or passive, actually possible? Since at least Rousseau’s time, the political theory of citizenship has confronted the reality of the market economy and it has never fully met the challenge of reconciling an egalitarian community of citizens with a free market. Rousseau believed that market processes would subvert the equality and selflessness required for virtuous civic deliberation, and he could see only one way in which actually existing civic republics, at sea in the market economy, could survive: by creating a fortress economy, immured from the tides of international competition without and inequality and selfishness within. This sort of answer—eerily echoed across the centuries by the import control socialism espoused at Cambridge University in the late 1970s in Britain—escapes the reality of the market economy with a leap into political science fiction. Yet such leaps cannot conjure the difficulty away. Rousseau was right: market economies do generate substantial inequalities, indeed they require them and reward them; but a political community of citizens requires a rough equality of rights and at least a rough equality of starting conditions. Any invocation of citizenship as an ideal that is not just heart-warming words has to make its peace with the indubitable efficiency of markets and then to define and implement its redistributive goals in such a way that they do not crush the liberty that equality of opportunity exists to enhance.

The second difficulty, which has dogged the language of citizenship throughout its history, is: what is a political question and what is not? What questions should be left to the determination of the market or to private reason and what should be collectively decided? Those who begin their political reasoning from the assumption that civic identity is primary in the human make-up–that man is a citizen—run the risk of politicizing all questions, to the detriment of private liberty. It is not enough for users of the warm communitarian language of citizenship to stress that communitarian imperatives must always respect private rights. There has to be a positive acknowledgement that there are many areas of private economic life where communitarian good intentions actively endanger both liberty and efficiency. Models of human community which put the market at the centre offer a clear answer to the question of what is a political matter, and what is not. It is that all questions, especially distributional ones, can be solved by the market unless it proves itself incapable; and its test of whether the solution works is also intuitive and simple: whether the market balances supply and demand at a given price.

Central to the appeal of certain market solutions—privatization and denationalization—is that they remove distributional conflict from the political arena. When a company is privatized, its decisions about plant location, investment and levels of employment cease to be guided by political criteria and are governed instead by market criteria. If service in a newly denationalized company remains bad, as in British Telecom, the company is on the hook, not the government. If it is argued that market solutions remove whole areas of economic life from the scrutiny of democratic accountability, the advocate of markets can reply that, on the contrary, it restores to consumers the one form of accountability—over service, over products, over price—that they care about. Denationalized companies, in effect, are protected from political pressures and the political process itself is insulated from interminable distributional conflict between labour and capital. Anyone who believes that the sectors of the economy privatized under Mrs Thatcher should be returned to public ownership will have to confront the consequences: that all management–union disputes, decisions over investment and plant location will end up, ultimately, in 10 Downing Street. In the 1970s, because both sides of industry could count on the state rather than the market to adjudicate their conflicts, their clamour for adjudication reduced the political process to paralysis. The implication here is not that the state should leave distributional matters entirely to the brutal arbitrage of the international market, but that an efficient politics would content itself with ensuring that the playing field on which labour and capital compete is level, and that both sides pay their fair share of society’s social costs.

In general terms, the strength of the market case is that given the infinitely contestable nature of the argument about collective distribution of national income, it is both more efficient and more democratic to leave this argument to be worked out in each home, by each private individual determining how much income to devote to current consumption, and how much to education, saving for retirement and so on. Political allocation of these choices, free market ideologists maintain, is bound to infringe the rights of those individuals who want to spend either more or less than the democratically agreed mean. A defence of citizenship must, therefore, be able to show that for a majority of citizens, collective political distributional choices result in results superior to those reached by private allocation of income.

The third difficulty, connected to the second, concerns representation. Ever since Rousseau, defenders of the idea of society as a political community of citizens have had to reconcile themselves to the fact that the size of modern political communities and the complexity of their division of labour makes it essential to delegate public questions to elected representatives and paid officials. We are a long way from Athens: participatory democracy is dead in the modern world. Since it is dead, we must delegate, and as soon as we delegate, either to a bureaucrat or a politician, the question of whether they represent their interests or our own arises. All systems of representation present a problem of accountability and this problem has dogged social democratic politics in the post-war world. If one says, “citizens” should decide what the balance should be, for example, between public and private transport, the assertion is vulnerable to the rejoinder that citizens are more likely to make their preferences effective in a de-regulated market for transportation services than they would be if the allocative choices are left either to politicians or the Ministry of Transport.

It is no accident that the citizenship ideal of post-war liberals and social democrats stressed the passive quality of entitlements at the expense of the active equality of participation. The entitled were never empowered, because empowerment would have infringed the prerogatives of the managers of the welfare state. Housing estates were run “in the name” of the citizens, by council housing departments who had no desire to surrender any of their delegated powers. Tower blocks were run up “in the name of” working communities whose wishes, had they ever been consulted, would have been for the repair and refurbishment of their existing low-rise housing.

Public ownership was also sold to the citizenry of 1945 as a form of empowerment, yet the rhetorical myth of citizen control of the commanding heights contrasted ironically to the reality of public corporations as negligent of the citizen’s interest as any private corporation. If there is a case for public ownership, it is not one that can be easily understood as empowering ordinary citizens. Its logic is quite other: to give the state and its officials and elected politicians control over the significant investment and employment decisions in the economy. Only if their decisions result in gains in national income greater than those that could have been realized under private ownership, and only if these gains are then- applied to fund discernibly useful public expenditure, can it be said that public ownership has been in the interest of ordinary citizens.

These failures of the welfare bureaucracy and public ownership are now the clichés of the socialist crise de conscience but they would continue to dog any future politics of citizenship that fails to think clearly about the dilemmas of accountability and representation. Post-war social democrats always talked in terms of the enabling and facilitating state and never explicitly faced the empirical evidence that the interests of the state—its officials and politicians—were in opposition to those of ordinary citizens. The language of the state as servant of its citizens encouraged public sector unions to equate their interests in the collective bargaining process with the interests of the citizens their members were said to serve. The rhetorical shell-game in which trade union power spoke the language of public service might have been avoided if there had been a more robust awareness, in post-war social democratic language of citizenship, of the necessity of countervailing power, checks and balances, safeguards of the rights of citizens against their own representatives.

Post-war social democratic thinking about citizenship never pursued its rhetoric about accountability to the point of devising sanctions ordinary citizens could use to punish incompetence or unresponsiveness in the state bureaucracies. The only sanction of civic ideal envisages is to vote the rascals out, but in the Butskellite convergence of both available political parties around social democratic consensus, the sanction lost whatever force it ever had. Since, moreover, the public sector unions’ pursuit of employment security resulted in tenure arrangements in the public sector which made it difficult to sanction individuals for incompetence, ordinary citizens believed, rightly or wrongly, that no one in the public service is ever punished for a mistake. Again the plausibility of market solutions is that—under competitive conditions at least—the consumer enjoys the sanction of going elsewhere.

These clichés about the failures of social democracy need to be repeated because so many people on the losing side of politics persist in believing the heart of the conservative case is an appeal to greed alone. Enrichissez-vous is certainly a more appealing electoral gambit than: Who is my brother’s keeper? Yet what else beside selfishness was social democracy appealing to in its inflationary electoral promises of more pensions, more benefits and more public works? Bribing people with their own money, conservatives used to call it, and were it not for moral narcissism, socialists and social democrats would have called it by the same name. And were the narcissist glow of denunciations of greed not so pleasurable, socialists and social democrats would have noticed that the core of the electoral case made for the free market by the British Conservatives in 1979 was not just that it would enrich the British people, but that it would also enfranchise and empower them. Creating a market in council house properties freed the better off tenants from the dead hand of the council housing department; denationalization and share-sales offered workers a “piece of the action” in their own companies. In place of the fictive identification of worker with his enterprise offered by public ownership, Conservative legislation delivered what many workers believe to be a real identification with the prospects of the company. Any counter-attack which attempts to counterpose the noble principles of citizenship to the venality of private greed will fail because it misunderstands the fundamental appeal of these measures: they appear not merely to enrich, but also to empower, and criticism of them can only be effective politically if they can be shown to do neither.

Developing the Counterattack

If the core of the anti-Conservative, anti-Thatcherian case is that a politics of selfishness poisons the well-springs of altruism and lays waste the welfare institutions that ‘reproduce solidarity, then the counterattack will have first to confront the ambiguous impact of the post-war welfare state on social solidarity. For the impacts are markedly paradoxical. This is the fourth major difficulty embedded in the communalist vision implied in the language of citizenship: a structure of collective entitlements does not necessarily increase social solidarity. When, for example, social workers take over the caring functions formerly discharged by family members, there is both a gain and a loss: dependent individuals may be better cared for in institutional or public settings, and family members, particularly women, will be freed to enter the labour market or otherwise use their time as they wish. But it is occasionally the case that a sense of family obligation suffers, and community ties among strangers may be weakened when everyone comes to believe that “it’s the council’s job.” The welfare state did encourage the emergence of new styles of moral self-exculpation, not only among welfare dependents but among the tax-paying public. “It’s the council’s job” became everyone’s first line of defence when confronted with vandalism, the neglect of civic property, or more seriously, abuse of children or abandonment of the aged. In public housing especially, the maxim “everybody’s property is nobody’s property” goes some way towards explaining the all too frequent downward spiral of neglect.

If the idea of citizenship is in trouble these days, it is because practical experience did not always validate the post-war civic ideal that public goods would extend civic solidarity. In some cases—the health service—it did. The National Health Service still enjoys popular support despite its increasing inefficiency and squalor because it incarnates the primal equality on which political citizenship is based, equality of the body in the face of illness and death. But in other areas, like public housing and education, the delivery of the services themselves was so often either so mediocre or so undemocratic, that individuals were only behaving rationally when they opted out whenever their income allowed them to. When further, social democratic parties proved unable effectively to manage the corporatist bargain between labour, capital and the state, and the economy began to stagnate, the resultant decline in the quality of public goods simply hastened the exit of the vocal and the highly paid. For these groups, the citizenship of the 1970s seemed to be a poor bargain indeed: higher and higher levels of taxation for declining levels of public service.

Faced with the crisis of confidence in public goods, opponents of Mrs. Thatcher have unfailingly succumbed to the moral temptation of defining themselves as the altruists, the ones who care, against the supposedly selfish hedonism of the Conservatives. But to describe the welfare state in the language of caring is to misdescribe it, and to misdescribe is to deceive. The civic pact of the welfare state was not between “haves” and “have nots”, not between care-givers and care-receivers. The break with Poor Law principles was explicit and deliberate. The basis of a citizenship of entitlements was the insurance principle and universality of benefit: everyone contributed and everyone benefited.[7] [8] The effects may have been regressive—the middle class did disproportionately well out of the welfare state—but this was the inevitable result of the Beveridgian intention to ground social solidarity on equality of entitlement, rather than on rich helping/caring for the poor. To continue to describe the welfare state as a “caring” institution, and to pose as the political party that “cares”, is to think of entitlements as if they were a matter of moral generosity, when in fact, they are a matter of right. Moreover, anyone who has endured the waiting rooms of the Department of Health and Social Security will be surprised to hear that their particular combination of squalor and officiousness is an instance of “caring”. Only someone who has not actually been on the receiving end of the welfare state would dare call it an instance of civic altruism at work.

The language of citizenship is not properly about compassion at all, since compassion is a private virtue which cannot be legislated or enforced. The practice of citizenship is about ensuring everyone the entitlements necessary to the exercise of their liberty. As a political question, welfare is about rights, not caring, and the history of citizenship has been the struggle to make freedom real, not to tie us all in the leading strings of therapeutic good intentions. I do not want to live in the “caring society” beloved of Labour and SDP party political broadcasts, because it evokes for me the image of a nanny state in which the care we get depends on what the “caring professions” think it fit for us to receive. I would much prefer to live in a society which struggles to be just, which respects and enhances people’s rights and entitlements. The pell-mell retreat from the language of justice to the language of caring is perhaps the most worrying sign of the contemporary decadence of the language of citizenship among all parties to the left of Mrs. Thatcher.

Were liberals, social democrats and socialists to work themselves free of the seductive pleasures of moral superiority about the vanality of the market and false nostalgia about the vanished compassion of the old civic contract, they might be able to develop a robust alternative vision to market conservatism. As long as it is believed that such an alternative depends on mobilizing the well-springs of civic altruism, and that such well-springs are being steadily poisoned by Thatcherian greed, there can be little grounds for hope at all. But the history of citizenship sketched at the outset should show that the 20th century citizenship of entitlement was not built on altruism so much as emerging awareness of the indissoluble interdependence of private and public utilities in the modern world.

Put another way, the history of the citizenship of entitlement is a history of freedom, not primarily a history of compassion. People have struggled to extend and defend public transport, health care, unemploy­ment insurance, pensions because these provide the starting conditions that make individual freedom possible. That awareness of the structural dependence of private freedom on public provision is as strong now after a decade of Mrs. Thatcher as it ever was. Poll data consistently indicate support for high levels of public expenditure in the fields of health, education, and social welfare, although as Arthur Seldon andthe Institute of Economic Affairs have pointed out, these preferences begin to waver the higher the levels of taxation people are asked to pay.[9] Nevertheless, these stable preferences in the electorate are there waiting to be mobilized.

It is notorious that neither in Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain nor in Mr. Reagan’s America has public expenditure diminished as a percentage of GNP. In Britain the privatization of public assets has not brought down the levels of state expenditure in the economy. The income windfalls from privatization have been used to maintain expenditure on welfare, manpower training, unemployment benefit and health services while lowering levels of taxation for the better off. Rolling back the frontiers of the state has been a matter of playing at the margins.

It is here that modern conservatism reveals its incoherence: in the increasing gap between its anti-statist rhetoric and its public expenditure performance, and in its larger failure to appreciate the extent to which private satisfactions depend, in the modern world, on shared entitle­ments. The pathologies of modern living—pollution, overcrowding, despoliation of the common heritage of nature, exhaustion of natural resources, traffic congestion—repeatedly bring home to any citizen the extent to which the private satisfactions of consumption are vitiated when the environmental regulation that only the state can enforce is absent. Private affluence is a humble but important human good, but it becomes a hollow good when “enjoyed” amid public squalor. Under­standing this does not require altruism, compassion or even very much civic pride. It requires nothing more than a pair of eyes to see. A politics which appeals to these facts of life is bound to be more successful than one which seeks to make people guilty about being well-paid, or ashamed of being enterprising.

The second incoherence of modern conservatism relates to the first and is revealed in their cultural politics. An enthusiasm for the market as an economic and social instrument is accompanied by a curious distaste for the market place as a distributor of cultural goods. It is from conservatives, not from liberals, social democrats or socialists, that the alarmist jeremiads are heard about the vulgarity and violence of popular culture. Out of this tension is born a contradictory cultural policy: loosening the public service requirements of broadcasters in both the private and public sector, while browbeating broadcasters in public on the issue of violence and sex on the media. Conservatives turn out to be deeply unhappy about a cultural market place that seems to relativize and trivialize inherited values and that seems to stand for nothing more than the general permission to be free. Yet those who believe that a culture ought to stand for something more than generalized permissive­ness realize that that “something” cannot be left to the determination of the market alone. It must receive legitimation in law, in public opinion, and ultimately in the legislation that citizens decide must govern moral and cultural taste.

There is, it turns out, a deep incoherence in conservative attitudes towards their central value-freedom. Conservatives want citizens to be free, but cannot refrain from fastidious distaste towards what most citizens do with their freedom. Moreover, conservatives believe the polity exists to maximize private freedom but do not believe the polity should provide the means to enable all citizens to be free. It is this incoherence that an alternative politics has to exploit. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Thatcher’s values. Putting freedom first is what liberal society has always stood for. There is nothing wrong with enterprise, initiative, personal responsibility or even the lawful pursuit of private profit. What is incoherent is believing these goals can be achieved without a citizenship of entitlement, without the shared foundation that alone Makes freedom possible for all.


Footnotes

[1] There is extended discussion of the classical citizenship tradition, Rousseau’s place in it, and the use of citizenship as an anti-capitalist vocabulary in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds) Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: 1983); and also in my The Needs of Strangers (London: 1984), ch. 4. See also J. G. A. Pocock The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: 1975) and Quentin Skinner The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1978). On contemporary citizenship, my thinking owes a particular debt to Michael Walzer Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: 1970).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[2] Karl Marx Early Writings, edited by Lucia Colletti (London: 1975).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[3] Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation (London: 1945).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[4] A. V. Dicey Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century (London: 1905).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[5] On the philosophical basis of the modern welfare state, I am indebted to W. G. Runciman Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study in Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth Century England (London: 1966); T. H. Marshall, The Right to Welfare (London: 1981); David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: 1981); Raymond Plant et al., Political Philosophy and Social Welfare: Essays on the Normative Basis of Welfare Provision (London: 1980); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: 1972) and his “Social Unity and Primary Goods” in A. Sen and B. Williams (eds) Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: 1982). On the liberal state’s ethical neutrality on the content of the good life, see Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (London: 1985), chs. 8-11.
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[6] F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1 (London: 1973); also Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: 1945), also Anthony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (London: 1981). On the ethical implications of market distribution, see F. H. Knight, The Ethics of Competition (London: 1935); also Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: 1977); and R. H. Tawney, Equality (London: 1964).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[7] T. H. Marshall, Right to Welfare, op cit., and Plant et al., Political Philosophy and Social Welfare, op cit.
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[8] Julian LeGrand and Ray Robinson (eds), Privatization and the Welfare State (London: 1984).
Back to paragraph ↑ ]

[9] Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon in The Times, May 21, 1987.
Back to paragraph ↑ ]