IT IS A COMMONPLACE THAT BRITISH POLITICS ARE AT PRESENT less consensual, and more polarized ideologically, than they have been for a generation. It is also a commonplace that the ideological polarization of the 1980s has its roots in the economic and political failures of the 1960s and 1970s.

I ONCE PERSUADED MYSELF THAT I COULD DISTINGUISH AT least seven different meanings of the term ‘individualism’ but I shall mention here only two. The fust is individualism in contradistinction to spiritual and emotional identification with a group. The second is individualism in contradistinction to dependence on some individual other, or others, who are in some sense deemed superior. One of my themes today is the interaction between the two: between self-assertion vis-à-vis the group, and self-assertion vis-à-vis established authority, and what this tells us about the way industrial concerns can be or ought to be organized in modern societies.

PARTIES ARE THE LINK BETWEEN EXISTING POLITICAL STRUCtures and the rocesses which lead to new political institutions. No wonder, therefore, that parties play an important role at the centre of many revolutionary theories. Nevertheless the theory of parties is not as decisive to Marx's social and political theory as one might imagine. Some introductions to Marx's thought do not even mention the catchwords ‘party’ or ‘parties’ though they concentrate on the sphere of his political ideas. In most books hints at a theory of parties are hidden away in remarks of marginal importance under the topics ‘praxis’ or ‘revolution’. Only those comprehensive studies which emphasize the continuity between Marxism and Leninism, because they defend the Marxist position, deal explicitly with the theory of parties. The same is true for those authors who overemphasize the continuity of Marxist thought, to a degree which almost identifies the theoretical positions of Marx, Engels and Lenin, for the purposes of anti-Marxist polemi.

IN SWEDEN, AS ELSEWHERE, ECONOMIC TRAUMA HAS BROUGHT the future of the welfare state onto the political agenda. The conjuncture at the end of the 1970s of a faltering economic performance together with an acute fiscal crisis has called into question the viability of welfare commitments. A widespread body of opinion sees the welfare state as a volume of expenditure which needs to be trimmed to accord with more limited economic means. Some argue more fundamentally that the welfare state, both as a fiscal burden and a set of values, contributed to the malaise of the economy and is an obstacle to its recovery. A feature of Swedish politics in the early 1980s has been the growth of electoral support for the Conservative Party which has introduced into public debate the ideas and idiom of neo-liberal political economy. The Conservatives have exploited a vein of unease extending across the political spectrum which has become concerned not only about the economic inefficiency of the welfare state, and the tax burden needed to maintain it, but also about the possibility that its institutions have limited rather than enhanced individual choices and freedoms.

I DECIDED TO ENTITLE THIS ESSAY ‘TERRA INCOGNITA Australis’ — a rubric appropriate for more than one reason, as will become apparent later — since, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that what we profess to know concerning the determinants of public policy outcomes has much the same epistemological status as the shapes that appeared in the Southern Hemisphere of sixteenth-century cartographers. The objective of the essay is to substantiate this charge in respect of the prevailing explanatory parad’ ms which inform as to the best way to proceed to give some more definition to the map in future. The charge is a serious one insofar as comparative public policy analysis is currently a boom area in political science. I could be accused of attempting to create a ghost town before the shafts are driven deep enough to hit ‘pay dirt’, but I can only claim that this is not my intention. I have been working in the area which is currently described as comparative public policy for more than a decade now and the explanatory paradigms I criticize are ones to which I have variously subscribed over the years. Since I believe that there is valuable ore to be found, and found in roughly the area in which we are looking for it, I would argue that criticism and redefinition of paradigms are useful tasks, since they improve our eventual chances of hitting a lode-bearing seam.

‘MORALITY’, LENIN TOLD THE 529 APPRENTICE APPARATCHIKI gathered at the Third Congress of the Communist Youth League in October 1920, ‘is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, a communist society… We do not believe in an eternal moralit and we expose the falseness of all fables about morality.’ Lenin's rapt young listeners learned the lesson well: for some it paved the way to high office in Stalin's party, state and police machines, across the corpses of Lenin's own comrades ‘objectively’ become ‘enemies of the people’; many were to perish as they lived by it. The goal was sublime: the ‘true‘ freedom and unity natural to Man, but thwarted till now by class division and exploitation. For such a goal all expedient instruments and methods were fitting. To spurn vile means where these advanced ‘communism’ was the true immorality.

THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE SURRENDER OF LEGAL positivism to the prevalence of injustice under the nazi regime and the concern to create a real federation led the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany to create the most powerful Constitutional Court in the world for the control of the formal and material constitutionality of laws.

This Court, a supreme constitutional organ like the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, is organized in two chambers, called Senates. The First Senate has jurisdiction over basic rights, the Second Senate decides all questions of political disputes. Though the Court only acts on request, it does nevertheless play an active role in shaping politics and policy output. The jurisdiction of this Court is the ‘authentic interpretation of the Constitution’ and it cannot be qualified as normal jurisdiction, because many provisions of the Basic Law are open to different interpretations and call for a reference to sources and premises beyond the document itself.

MY INTENTION IN THIS ARTICLE IS TO PRESENT A BIRD'S-EYE view of various planning approaches to the welfare state crisis that are currently being initiated or at least discussed in a number of Western democracies. They fall into three broad categories which, I believe, bear some relation to the kind of diagnosis made about the 'crisis' to be dealt with.First of all, those who believe that the welfare state's main weakness comes from the disappearance of sustained, fast growth of the GNP, put their hopes in economic recovery in Beyond this strictly quantitative solution there are interpretations of the welfare state's predicament in terms of dee - order to return as soon as possible to ‘welfare state as usual’. seated, ‘structural’ imbalances which allegedly require fairly radical transformation in order to provide this ailing system with the more effective command and control mechanisms needed to make it viable again, Finally some people argue that the welfare state has exhausted its growth potential alto ether, so that its crisis can only be overcome through a quaftative change toward a different system (hence the phrase ‘metasystemic’ solution).

HOW DO PEOPLE'S IDEAS ABOUT REDISTRIBUTION AND STATE welfare affect their political judgments? The issue is of interest for practical and theoretical reasons. A party which presents egalitarian redistribution as a central social-policy objective has been replaced in government by one which does not. Various writers suggest that a lack of popular support for redistribution contributed to this change, whether because the experience of economic decline undermines altruism; because there is an anti-welfare backlash at the level of ideology; or because the least redistributive welfare services benefit the better-off groups who are also more influential .Thus free sixth-form and university education, mortgage interest relief and occupational pension subsidy are favoured, whereas rent subsidy, low wage supplementation and unemployment benefit are not. Underlying these arguments is the suggestion that welfare programmes, to the extent that they are seen to contradict popular desires, will contribute to a generalized decline in support for government.

THE ANTITHESIS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM which dominates political discussion of the welfare state and many other political issues confuses more than it illuminates. First, the individual of market liberal theory is a curious entity, existin solely as a disembodied unit in market transactions. Secondly, the ‘choice’ which is the means by which units in the liberal system express their freedom is highly constrained: they choose solely between items offered in the market. Such a choice confers power on the choosing individual, but it also limits that power: choices may be made only within the framework that the market provides. Liberal theory is explicit about this; it is this limitation on the behaviour of individuals that protects mankind from tyranny. But by no means all the constraints it imposes are of this kind. If consumers are ill-equiped to choose they are made dependent on the providers ofthe service, who may, if competition is imperfect, acquire something of a dictatorial position themselves.