This book represents an expanded version of the author's Boutwood Lectures given at Corpus Christi College in 2006. Plant, who is both a distinguished political philosopher and a member of the House of Lords, reflects upon a family of political theories that have exerted considerable influence upon public affairs, during the final quarter of the twentieth century (particularly in Britain and America, under Thatcher and Regan respectively) and at present. They have come to be referred to as “neo-liberalism.”
The theories that compose the neo-liberal outlook were written by a diversity of quite different authors. The issues that they raise range over questions of jurisprudence, economics and political philosophy. Plant's first task is therefore to convince us that such different writers as Hayek, Buchanan, and Ludwig von Mises can all be thought of as contributors to a more-or-less unified body of thought. To achieve this, while fully acknowledging the considerable diversity of the different theorists, Plant identifies a core theme of neo-liberalism that underlies the diversity. He finds this in a shared emphasis upon the notion of the rule of law, and in the belief that social democratic states (of the sort that came to prevail in the western world after the Second World War) are in principle incompatible with full respect for the rule of law.
Plant finds the clearest and most relevant account of the rule of law in the work of Oakeshott, a writer who (as Plant carefully acknowledges) was not a “neo-liberal”, but a conservative essentially sceptical about general prescriptive theories of politics. Oakeshott distinguished between two forms of political life that he called “telocracy” and “nomocracy”, the former implying an organisation of the state around the pursuit of certain goals, while the latter involves a form of civil association structured by commitment to a shared body of rules.
Oakeshott seems to have viewed these two forms of political life as contrasting poles towards which actual instances of political community might approximate, with the telocratic tendency presenting a permanent threat to the nomocratic framework of civil association. The modern state was viewed by Oakeshott as combining both aspects. The neo-liberal position converts this vision of underlying tension into one of fundamental incompatibility: social democracy, as a form of telocratic politics, is seen as fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law. On this account, Rechtstaat and Wohlfahrtstaat are irreconcilably different forms of political community, and social democracy must be opposed root and branch if the rule of law is to be preserved.
No matter how we choose to identify its core, the real substance of the neo-liberal outlook is revealed only as we work through the arguments of the various thinkers that Plant discusses. Those arguments are primarily aimed at demonstrating (by reference to a mixture of moral, juridical, political and economic considerations) that the Rechtstaat is fundamentally distinct from, and to be preferred to, the Wohlfahrstaat. The author's unusual background (which encompasses academic political philosophy, jurisprudence and practical politics) enables him to juxtapose, in an enlightening way, a great diversity of scholarly philosophical and economic texts alongside political interventions published by think-tanks. This breadth of coverage is significant: Plant quotes with approval Samuel Brittan's observation that behind the technical arguments of monetarism and its critics lie rival understandings of human society (p.181).
The book's analyses of the neo-liberal writers are on the whole both concise and accurate (this is not to say that one agrees with his interpretations at every point). Given that the author's own political outlook is not friendly towards neo-liberalism, the fairness and lucidity of his discussion is striking. One senses that Plant is genuinely concerned to learn even from those whose general outlook is remote from his own. In some of his earlier work, addressed primarily to fellow socialists, Plant emphasised the positive merits of markets and urged the left to embrace and endorse those merits (this in the days before “New Labour”). As a renowned scholar of Hegel, it is fitting that he should follow his master in seeking to find the truth that is contained but also concealed within seemingly opposed philosophical positions.
Even given the general fairness and accuracy of the discussion, however, the sheer diversity of the arguments addressed may cause us to wonder, as we read, whether it will be possible for Plant to offer any interestingly unified critique of the neo-liberal position, or whether his counter-arguments will prove to be disconnected and discrete. The answer is revealed by the second half of the book, which aims to develop precisely such a unified critique of neo-liberalism. Here Plant identifies and addresses three themes (the nature of freedom, of social justice and of rights) that emerge as central to the neo-liberal argument on the rule of law, and exposes the substantial intellectual difficulties that dog the neo-liberal position on these issues. Plant's conclusion is that neo-liberal views on the nature of freedom and rights, and on the illusory character of social justice, cannot in the end be sustained: there is no fundamental difference of principle separating neo-liberalism from social democracy in such a way as to justify the thesis that social democracy is incompatible with (while the neo-liberal state embodies) the rule of law.
What neo-liberalism has always lacked is a more convincing account of the nature and value of the rule of law, and of its connections with (on the one hand) liberty and (on the other) the basis of the state's legitimacy. Such an account is, in my view, by no means impossible. Those who wish to develop that possibility are sure to profit from a careful study of Lord Plant's latest book, which clearly identifies some of the hurdles that they will need to overcome.
