The intellectual origin of the New Right in Britain has become a focus for scholarly attention in recent years by political scientists, historians, and, most recently, historians of economic thought.Footnote 1 Hitherto, much had been assumed about the genesis of the New Right and of its subsequent influence on the Thatcher governments and beyond, and especially about the role of public intellectuals and think-tanks. It is only recently, however, that detailed study has been made of the individuals, networks, and institutions that comprise the New Right in Britain and, more generally, neo-liberalism elsewhere. For Britain, think-tanks have now received much attention, as have key academics (notably Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) and leading politicians, not least Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph.Footnote 2 The role of journalists has been far less studied, though they have been attributed a central role in Britain, as in America, in creating the climate in which political and policy agents could translate New Rights ideas into practice.Footnote 3 Part of the interest in journalists is the fascination with turncoats, and certainly these feature prominently in Cowling's prosopography of the New Right.Footnote 4 Nonetheless, elite journalists deserve attention for other reasons. For some, this would be for the continuity not the discontinuity of their views, while more generally there remains a real risk that the difficulties associated with the concept and category of ‘public intellectual’ in Britain means that key journalists in particular have been under-researched in relation to the think-tanks.
The names of Peter Jay and, above all Samuel Brittan, occur frequently in the roll call of those who were instrumental in ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and thereby overturning the Keynesian consensus on big government.Footnote 5 That Brittan entitled one of his most widely cited pamphlets Second thoughts on full employment (1975), and that it was written no less than as the first publication of Joseph's Centre for Policy Studies, made it inevitable that both the timing and nature of his second thoughts would be closely monitored by contemporaries. For Arthur Seldon, with Ralph Harris the driving force of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA),Footnote 6 Brittan was ‘the doyen of the editor-scholars’.Footnote 7 Another friend, indeed former colleague at The Financial Times, Nigel Lawson, was in no doubt that upon joining The Financial Times Brittan ‘soon became (and remains) the leading British commentator on the passing economic scene, and the issues which lie behind it, contributing more to our understanding than at least 90 per cent of academic economists and acquiring in the process a unique international reputation’.Footnote 8 For Cockett, unofficial historian of the IEA, ‘Most Conservative and Labour MPs learnt more about economic liberalism from the journalism of Samuel Brittan and Peter Jay than they did from their own Party “research” organizations or from the universities.’Footnote 9 That two of Brittan's pamphlets were on Joseph's famous reading list alongside such canons of political economy as Adam Smith's The wealth of nations and The theory of moral sentiments is about as good evidence as the historian can expect of his subject being at least read by those right at the very heart of Thatcherism.Footnote 10
Unsurprisingly, Brittan's significance as a key economic commentator and opinion former is emphasized as much by those who at the time and since opposed the neo-liberal agenda.Footnote 11 Yet, Brittan is often misrepresented and frequently misunderstood. Some have Brittan as a New Right theorist;Footnote 12 Prasad's global study of the rise of neo-liberalism has Brittan as ‘right wing’,Footnote 13 while in a recent study of the free market ‘project’, Peck described Brittan as a ‘renowned conservative economist’ and ‘former student’ of Friedman.Footnote 14 The last of these points is overdone, for Brittan only had supervisions whilst a second-year undergraduate when Friedman was a visitor at Cambridge, while his characterization as a conservative is hugely wide of the mark.Footnote 15 There is nothing conservative about Samuel Brittan, or indeed Conservative save being the elder brother of Leon Brittan, who served in Thatcher's cabinet between 1981 and 1986, and plying a trade that required networking with political and other elites. As Marquand put it pithily, Brittan was ‘no tory and still less a nationalist’.Footnote 16
The misrepresentation of Brittan is symptomatic of weak scholarship on British political economy in the 1970s and 1980s in which too often an imprecision in delimiting the New Right results in a failure to capture the complexity of individual and group positions. Recent scholarship has confronted some of the worst excesses. Thus, in a recent paper in this journal, Jackson demonstrates that the ‘long march’ narrative of neo-liberalism (Harvey's phrase)Footnote 17 from the wilderness of Hayek's Road to serfdom Footnote 18 to eventual ‘success’ in the late 1970s entails teleology and anachronism.Footnote 19 Jackson has also issued an important corrective to the IEA's carefully crafted public persona as outsiders, marginalized by the British establishment; instead, the IEA had a robust base of support within business, the media and politicians, with only the universities (and particularly academic economists) aloof from its embrace.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, Rollings has shown that the supposedly revolutionary ideas underpinning Thatcherism had an earlier foundation of support among the business elite and were thus closer to the mainstream than previously understood.Footnote 21
This review presents a close study of Brittan's writing on mid-1970s Britain, and more particularly of one key work, his most cited (in the sense of academic citations), ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’ (1975, hereafter ECD).Footnote 22 This sort of micro intellectual history is particularly appropriate as an entry point to the intellectual journey of one of the most influential political economists of the last half century in Britain. ECD also has enormous hermeneutic potential. It proceeds on the basis that tracking the fortunes of a particular paper allows us to disaggregate more precisely matters that have been previously wrapped up in arguments about the emergence of the New Right. Before turning to that close study, two interrelated themes are highlighted in Brittan's writings: the first long-running and the second more contextual to what, for Brittan, was the state of the social market economy, this beginning with an IEA pamphlet published in summer 1971.Footnote 23 On the former, Brittan was (and remains) greatly perplexed by the ‘intellectual paradox that the non-Muscovite left favours freedom in everything but economics, while the right is sympathetic to freedom only in the economic sphere’.Footnote 24 On the latter, Brittan became ever more concerned that the ‘treatment of free market ideas [had become ] … playthings of partisan debate’ with the result that ‘the valuable insights and true weaknesses of thinkers such as Hayek and Friedman … have been lost to sight in the public slanging matches about “Monetarism”, “Wets and Dries”, “Thatcherism” and other similar slogans’.Footnote 25
The first section of this review offers a brief outline of ECD and its publishing history; the second examines why Brittan was so influential by the early 1970s and whether it is possible to provide a quantitative dimension to the impact of the ECD paper, proceeding on the assumption that contemporary history and bibliometrics need not be strange bedfellows; the third situates the ECD paper within the contemporary declinist literature, especially that which sought to marry anxieties about the health of British politics with that of the market economy; the fourth locates ECD within a cluster of contributions (principally Anthony King's overload paper and a contemporaneous paper by Tom Wilson) of the developing ‘ungovernability’ discourse;Footnote 26 the fifth then discusses the ECD paper as part of the corpus of Brittan's work in political economy since his first significant publication on the Treasury, including why he was very far from being a member of the New Right;Footnote 27 and the last section draws some conclusions about the enduring themes identified by ECD.
I
Brittan's ECD paper is a staple of the declinist literature of the 1970s, but it is much more than eloquent, scholarly declinism. In a later paper (hereafter ECDR),Footnote 28 which revisited his ECD essay, Brittan made clear both the occasion of its composition and his principal objective. He had written it just after the Yom Kippur War (and during the implosion of the Heath government) and aimed to confront the then dominant view of Britain's economic problem: that Britain was beset by an oil-price induced supply-side shock (what we now call OPEC I) and that this had distracted attention from longer-term forces (‘certain strains in liberal democracy’) which ‘could do great damage unless countervailing forces appeared or policies or attitudes were changed’ (ECDR, p. 191). Indeed, such were his concerns that he conjectured that, without remedial action, liberal democracy ‘is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult’ (ECD, p. 129).
Brittan identified two endemic threats to liberal democracy: ‘the generation of excessive expectations’ and ‘the disruptive effects of the pursuit of group self-interest in the market place’ (ECD, p. 129). Importantly, most of his essay ‘was devoted not to crying woe but to explaining the checks, balances and limitations which had kept the competitive outbidding at bay and thus enabled limited, constitutional democracy to survive’ (ECDR, p. 195). Whilst he offered no headline solutions (‘Liberal democracy will not be saved by detailed policy programmes which will soon be overtaken by events’, ECD, p. 159), merely hints for alleviating the strains on liberal democracy, the ECD paper reveals a political economist at the height of his powers warning political elites and the listening public of disaster unless they looked beyond the contemporary political market place to reflect upon certain fundamentals of political and economic structure and behaviour.
The publishing history of ECD and the stage it represented in Brittan's career is important. The paper was written whilst Brittan was a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford during 1973–4, his sabbatical year from The Financial Times commencing just after he had published in tandem Capitalism and the permissive society (1973) and Is there an economic consensus? (1973). These works were the final, substantive products of the period 1968–72 which he classifies as his ‘most productive’.Footnote 29 The later, a report on a questionnaire designed to reveal the unifying and divisive factors amongst British economists, provide an empirical groundwork for the former, which was a full-scale investigation into the relation between a free market and free society designed ‘to persuade the open-minded reader that the right kind of market economy can be an instrument of human freedom and a way of satisfying human wants rather than a hollow dogma to quiet businessmen's consciences’.Footnote 30Capitalism and the permissive society marked a turning point in Brittan's career, from economic journalist to what Peter Jay called a ‘fully fledged protagonist in the continuing intellectual debate about the political and economic organization of societies, who happens also to write regularly in The Financial Times’.Footnote 31
ECD began life as a Nuffield seminar paper in early 1974; was then developed for the September 1974 British Association for the Advancement of Science section F (Economics) annual meeting;Footnote 32 and was then further revised for the version used here, which was published in the April 1975 issue of the British Journal of Political Science (BJPolS), with King (the BJPolS editor) singled out for especial thanks in the revision process (ECD, p. 129n).Footnote 33 Concurrently, King described his overload paper as ‘complementary in many ways’ to Brittan's ECD paper.Footnote 34 ECD thus first came to prominence through the annual set piece of the British Association, and again it was Jay in The Times who, on the front page, paraded Brittan's grim warning of the risk that liberal democracy's internal contradictions would bring about its demise.Footnote 35 ECD also received a further mention five days later in The Times diary, then preoccupied with ‘doom watchers’.Footnote 36 Short of having a spot on Jay's ‘Weekend World’, his London Weekend Television Sunday news analysis programme that did much to prepare the ground for the assault on the Keynesian consensus, it would be difficult to imagine how a work that began life as a seminar paper could have entered the market place for ideas any more effectively than it did.
II
The ECD paper has novel qualities, not least that here was an economic journalist placing his work in a journal which was in the forefront of the professionalization path from British ‘political studies’ to British ‘political science’.Footnote 37 ECD is a rich, deeply textured source. Academic papers that combine deep engagement with the writings of key political economists – including Bagehot, Dicey, Schumpeter, Hayek, Downs, Nozick and Rawls – with close analysis of the minutiae of contemporary events are rare indeed. Such a combination from outside academe is rarer still, although Andrew Shonfield (1917–81), a former Financial Times journalist and the author of one of the key canons of the first wave of Britain’s post-war declinism,Footnote 38 comes to mind as someone with similar ambitions and capabilities. Additionally, Brittan was unique among the leading financial journalists of the time in his propensity to be normative about what Western societies could and should attempt to achieve.Footnote 39
ECD by its very nature might be thought an unpromising case study for those searching to define the effect of ideas on the course of events. However, in practice ECD is much more promising as a case study than it initially appears, for reasons of timing and circumstances, but above all for the characteristics of the author. We have noted Brittan's prominence as an economic journalist, one recognized in 1971 with the accolade of financial journalist of the year.Footnote 40 What distinguished him and made him especially effective as a ‘self-appointed educator of the influential classes’ was that the market for economic ideas was more highly contested than normal.Footnote 41 Jay explained that academic economists had entered a phase of ‘offer[ing] diminishing returns to policy-makers’, enabling accomplished journalists to exploit their position as the true inheritors of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy tradition, which ‘is essentially a literary tradition orientated to the illumination and solution of real problems’.Footnote 42
Brittan bridged the divide between the different types of economic knowledge favoured by the policy community, academic-theoretical but above all practical (here embracing two of Peden's categories in his taxonomy of useful economic knowledge).Footnote 43 Few of his contemporaries could match his felicity of expression, his adroitness in translating technical economic issues for the lay reader, his eye for the main story, and his intellectual appetite, both for new ideas and for recovering those, especially from continental European (principally Austrian) economics, which had a new relevance for current times. Few contemporaries could match his prodigious output: to the staple of Financial Times reportage and commentary there was also a stream of contributions to the widely read bank reviews, the important role of which is still underappreciated;Footnote 44 to think-tanks, not least the IEA;Footnote 45 to international periodicals (Fortune; Encounter); to economic journals, not least the Economic Journal, then very much the organ of British academic economics;Footnote 46 and to literary journalism. Nor should one underestimate the growing appeal of the maverick; in this case, typically in the vanguard, often very uncomfortably so, particularly during the final years of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange regime when Brittan was well ahead of academic economists, let alone the British policy community, in thinking the unthinkable about the virtues of flexible exchange rates.Footnote 47 Undoubtedly, declinism helped also as the currency of comfortable nostrums was devalued in face of a perceived economic and political crisis.
These were considerable attributes, but Brittan's special advantages derived from a personal network forged during his first period on The Financial Times and then developed at The Observer, when he researched what became The Treasury under the Tories, 1951–1964 (1964). This, his first book, consolidated his reputation as a premier economic journalist, not least for the innovative use of official and somewhat unofficial interviews with civil servants and politicians. The publication of this book coincided with his post as a temporary civil servant in George Brown's ill-fated Department of Economic Affairs, a period Brittan considered ‘important mainly for the contacts I made and the subsequent beliefs of people that I was writing about Whitehall from experience’ but which, in the longer run, contributed to his growing scepticism about big government and Keynesian-style demand management as practised in Britain since the 1950s.Footnote 48 Thus, upon his return to The Financial Times in early 1966, Brittan possessed a rare network of contacts in academe, finance, and politics (all three main parties and none). The importance of these contacts within the ‘village’ of British government and bureaucracy, which Heclo and Wildavsky revealed to be one of intimates huddled against strangers, ensured that those outside Whitehall–Westminster had to be attentive to Brittan's writings.Footnote 49 There is a further dimension to this, here offered speculatively, namely the potential to apply to neo-liberalism and the New Right in Britain tools developed within the history and philosophy of science on friendship dynamics and creative work (the sub-title of an important work by Farrell).Footnote 50 Intellectual communities in economics are now a staple of the history of economic thought and there is an obvious extension to this episode in British political economy.Footnote 51 Certainly, Brittan admits to competition with Jay, and vice versa, with each seeking to differentiate their product and so having to be a little bolder or at least louder in the crowded market for ideas, though characteristically both were generous to each other in print and in person.Footnote 52
Brittan's own assessment (ECDR, p. 190) was that the ‘paper attracted almost no attention among economists, but was frequently cited by academic students of politics and was reprinted in various forms’. A search of the ISI Web of Science (WoS) Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) databases confirms the distribution of citations between the two disciplines, but he is altogether too modest about their quantity.Footnote 53 ECD is Brittan's most cited publication (N=70).Footnote 54 If the comparator group be economic journalists, then Jay, often cited with Brittan as a key player in the reaction against the Keynesian conventional wisdom that brought forth the revival of economic liberalism in the 1980s, received not a single citation in either database, though he was much more prominent in The Economist than Brittan, as one might have expected since Jay was from the early 1970s onwards building a parallel career as a broadcaster as well as author and commentator.Footnote 55 Citation exercises of this sort have well-known limitations even when the source is a paper in the natural sciences (where the journal rules supreme as the dominant publishing outlet), but for ECD we would expect its footfall in the literature to be as much, if not more, in books and current affairs magazines, neither category of which is enumerated by WoS along with its having a restricted range of journals enumerated.Footnote 56 Nonetheless, citation analyses have become a commonplace of the sociology of science, one tool amongst many in exploring the basis of professional reputation, and ought not to be dismissed out of hand by contemporary historians. Historians of economic thought have been in the forefront of applying this methodology and are especially sensitive to the difficulties that bibliometrics present in terms of capturing reputation and influence.Footnote 57 By contrast, there have not been many efforts to gauge the reputation of political scientists in this way.
Examination of the data available on the seventy citations of the ECD paper reveals the spatial breadth of citations (albeit within the English-speaking world); that ECD captured attention amongst academics based in elite institutions and journals; that the citation footfall extended beyond political science into all of the other social sciences (penetration from one discipline into another is where bibliometrics can be particularly helpful); and that even ten years after its publication the paper was still being cited frequently, especially when we normalize the modal citation per paper in the social sciences (including political science) as zero.Footnote 58 As Giles and Garand concluded after an extensive quantitative exercise: ‘Publications in most academic journals in political science are stones that fall into the pool of disciplinary discourse without causing a ripple. They are lines on a resumé without resonance.’Footnote 59 Judged against this reference group, ECD is a significant paper for political science; its author even more so. King, admittedly a friend and collaborator, was nonetheless not devoid of objectivity when he observed in 1989 that, even after a decade or more of the professionalization of British political studies into political science, ‘most of Britain's best political scientists (Peter Jenkins, Sam Brittan, Peter Riddell) are, for some reason, journalists’.Footnote 60 The reference group ought also to be extended to economists, for whilst ECD does not feature in EconLit, Brittan as an economist certainly does writ large and more than as an economic journalist, being for example in the first edition of Who's who in economics (subsequent editions used citation analysis as the sole currency of esteem).Footnote 61
Traditional bibliometric sources have been supplemented recently by new tools that exploit the internet and its plethora of resources. First, and foremost, there is Google Scholar which, no doubt, is used informally by all but has potential for more systematic exploitation.Footnote 62 Some very casual empiricism yields 304 citations for ECD (with 101 ‘related items’),Footnote 63 i.e. over four times the number of WoS citations, with the greater part of the difference being, of course, that Google Scholar captures books and all journals with an internet footprint. Again, taking Jay as a comparator, Brittan's footfall for ECD is over ten times greater than for Jay's most cited publication, and nearly seventeen times greater than for his most cited contribution to the declinist literature.Footnote 64 Second, even newer citations tools, for example Publish or Perish,Footnote 65 reveal Brittan's standing in relation to other contemporary authors. A full bibliometric analysis is reported elsewhere, but here we limit ourselves to reporting Brittan's h-index.Footnote 66 This index is now routine, if highly contentious, in science,Footnote 67 being designed not to measure total citations but a scholar's research productivity, defined as the largest number h such that the researcher has published h articles each cited at least h times.Footnote 68 With an h-index of 21 (Jay, 7), Brittan stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, including almost all of those with full-time academic posts. These quantitative measures of influence are, of course, wholly inadequate for this task in anything other than a supporting role, but were worth a detour to signal that, in certain cases, for authors and public figures the contemporary historian is not limited to his or her traditional craft of making sense of a subject's footfall in the primary and secondary sources without assistance from modern technologies of quantification. This is offered as a modest contribution towards the sub-field of contemporary history which is widely acknowledged to be methodologically underdeveloped.Footnote 69
III
In another much cited paper, Brittan referred to the ‘orgy of pessimism and self-doubt’ which beset British political elites and the commentariat during the decade.Footnote 70 Tomlinson provides the following account of ECD's context and significance:Footnote 71
It was the alleged political implications of economic development that underpinned much of the extreme scaremongering. This linkage is very evident in the writings of that characteristic figure of the period, the economic journalist turned political pundit. Peter Jay is one obvious example of this … [while] a similar trajectory may be seen in the work of Samuel Brittan, the Financial Times journalist, with his publications on ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’ and ‘The British sickness’. Both these authors were also part of the groups involved with the right-wing think-tanks, at this time the most important being the Institute of Economic Affairs … , but it was as journalists that they probably had the most impact, with the think-tanks being relatively minor players, despite retrospective claims to their significance.
But it was not just the academics manqués who contributed to this climate. Respected political scientists speculated in the same vein about whether the British polity could survive the pressures of ‘decline’, arriving at strikingly pessimistic conclusions. Books about British politics routinely used decline in their titles, even if the meaning of the term was a vague amalgam of long-term growth failings and high inflation and unemployment.
Tomlinson's depiction of Jay and Britain as academics manqués would not be shared by all who have analysed the declinism of the 1970s, even if – as I do – they concur broadly with his assessment of the significance of declinism. In any case, so far as Brittan is concerned, our citation analysis has shown that he had more of an academic impact than most academic political scientists. Indeed, Brittan's ECD paper has more citations in WoS and Google Scholar (respectively 70 and 304) than the contemporaneous and, according to its author, complementary paper by King on overload (respectively 45, 266), another staple of the declinist literature and also his most cited paper (although his h-index is higher at 26). Moreover, from what is known of political scientists’ publication rates at this time, Brittan's output was exceptional also in terms of quantity.Footnote 72
Examining the historiography more closely, Brittan's work is taken seriously as academic declinism by most who have written on the 1970s and 1980s,Footnote 73 including importantly English and Kenny's interview with Brittan as part of their ‘rethinking of British decline’ which ‘features some of the intellectual figures whose ideas and theories in relation to decline have played a critical role in the development of debates in this field’.Footnote 74 For English and Kenny, Brittan became one of the ‘public intellectuals’ who ‘have all “borne witness” to the division and destruction wrought upon the nation by mistaken and self-interested policies and institutional configurations’.Footnote 75 Public intellectual is a highly contestable concept in Britain,Footnote 76 but English and Kenny are right in trying to be more systematic both about declinism (with the shift of attention to perceptions of decline) and the contribution of leading commentators such as Brittan.Footnote 77
Johnson has observed that most of the declinist literature was ‘part of the problem, not part of the solution’.Footnote 78 This forms a potential benchmark for Brittan's ECD and other papers contributing to the declinism of the 1970s and the 1980s, although for obvious reasons the ECD paper cannot be judged alone but must be seen as part of his broader corpus. The following is not exhaustive, but forms a starting point in that such an evaluation must include Brittan's role in educating political elites and public opinion to be more discriminating in distinguishing between longer-term relative economic decline and the shorter-term problem of stagflation and to understand that a presumption had taken root in policy-making circles and much of the commentariat that market failure exceeded government failure.Footnote 79 In all of this, Brittan was one voice amongst many, but an especially effective voice. However, he was also highly critical of certain foundations of what became the declinist canon. For example, since the mid-1960s he had not been one of those who fretted about the balance of payments as symbolic of economic decline, let alone as the justification for the ensuing Stop–Go policies on whose destabilizing effects he was such an effective commentator. Later, of course, he has also been a vocal critic of the idea of competitiveness which became important in the 1990s as declinism evolved into a new stage of anxiety associated with globalization.Footnote 80
Brittan was (and remains), however, highly typical of much of the ‘right’ of the declinist literature in his strictures about the role of organized labour in longer-term economic underperformance and shorter-term political crises. In ECD, organized labour is the central ‘group self-interest through coercive means in the market place’ that is identified for its disruptive effects (ECD, p. 142). More broadly, labour market reform does become a central part of his vision for an economically liberal Britain, and in his retrospectives on the Thatcher–Major years he has been more positive about this (and privatization) than any other aspects of economic policy reform.Footnote 81 Of course, the ECD paper does not give equal attention to market power in product markets and does not engage with any of the then contemporary critiques of multinational companies and other big businesses’ pricing policies and their contribution to inflation and threat to government autonomy.Footnote 82 More importantly, given that issues of distributive justice featured strongly in ECD, Brittan was vulnerable to Duncan's criticism that he had:
Isolate[ed] the unions … as a quasi-political threat. If we agree that group self-interest in the market place, along with the democratic process of political competition, does push expectations and demands systematically upwards, it remains hard to separate out particular groups as primarily responsible. In a political culture which is materialistic and individualistic, and with an economy which is struggling, it is not at all surprising that the question of what they get, and what others get, is crucial to most people. Obviously the treadmill effect can be devastating. But one result is that the issue of distribution is not ignored and cannot be outlawed.Footnote 83
Brittan would soon also be taken to task by Blank, amongst others, including thoughtful American observers, for his contention that organized labour in Britain exercised undue economic and political power relative to comparator economies or that Britain was more strike prone in the 1970s than its comparators.Footnote 84
IV
We can now examine the ECD paper in a more disciplinary context, paying attention to the distinctive features of Brittan's methodology and message and to ECD's status as part of a developing political science of Britain's economic problems. Political scientists played a key role in the development of declinist literature, although at this transitional time not all British academics who were students of politics would define themselves as political scientists – Minogue refers to the pre-RAE period as one of ‘pragmatic slumber’ for the discipline.Footnote 85 The British political science journals at mid-decade carried a number of papers which might be defined as declinist, but they were in the minority relative to more routine concerns of public administration, politics, and philosophy.Footnote 86 The greater part of the declinist literature was journalism and, less so, books. Central to this output were contributions which, directly or indirectly, related to the overload thesis and, a variant thereof, the adversary politics thesis.Footnote 87 Both represent the academic wing of the ungovernability discourse which had been developing for some time and which blossomed between 1977 and 1980 in such diverse staples of the declinist literature as the much cited collections by Tyrrell (which included a version of the ECD paper), Kramnick and Gwyn.Footnote 88
Brittan's ECD paper together with King on overload and Wilson on adversary politics constituted a trilogy of early British ‘ungovernability’ papers. Ungovernability and the concept of overload make an academic appearance simultaneously in Britain and the United States and would soon become something of a Lakatosian research programme.Footnote 89 This makes the topic a large one, and it is necessary to limit ourselves to what was distinctive about ECD but also to how Brittan's thinking was paralleled by some other writers (not least Jay and King) at this time. Brittan's ECD and Jay's two contributions of 1976–7 were grounded in the generality of an incipient crisis of liberal democracy which had reached a more extreme form in Britain, where it had become a problem of social democracy.Footnote 90 In ECD (p. 130), Brittan proposed a formula which linked excessive expectations and the pursuit of group self-interest in terms of the ‘excessive burden … placed on the “sharing out” function of government’. In a latter commentary, Beetham called these the ‘mediating factors’: ‘the use of the state to redistribute wealth, and to maintain full employment’.Footnote 91 On the latter of these, Brittan had already undergone his ‘second thoughts’ as he had incorporated Friedman's natural rate analysis of how the pursuit of full employment beyond the natural rate of unemployment had generated inflation.Footnote 92 On the former, Brittan had, for some time, been preoccupied with how British political elites and the intellectual classes had since the Second World War subscribed to a vision of Britain as an unequal society and to remedies that had done ‘immense harm to my country’.Footnote 93 Importantly, such issues of equity and ethics preoccupied him for the next thirty years and more.Footnote 94
In King's construction of overload, full employment features as part of the intractable demands on government, but equity issues are not much evident. Where King is remarkably prescient, however, is in developing the ungovernability thesis beyond excessive demands and inadequate resources to highlight problems of complexity: the ‘sheer number of dependency relationships’.Footnote 95 There are shades of this also in Wilson's discussion of the frequency and failures of economic policy experimentation. However, all are potentially vulnerable to Blank's refrain that the overloadists identify at best sub-optimal, and at worst declining, government performance in Britain relative to comparators, yet provide no objective evidence for it.Footnote 96
For King, big government was both cause and consequence of overload, a finding which was especially timely as Britain's economic problems were beginning to be understood in terms of what soon became the Bacon–Eltis thesis.Footnote 97 This provided academic respectability for a revival of the judgement of the classical economists that, in general, government (the non-market sector) was a drain on the wealth-producing market sector. This developing analysis then acquired a particular salience as Friedman revived the idea of a tipping-point in terms of the size of the public sector: there were shades of Hayek in his claim that, ‘once the communal … sector exceeds a certain fraction of the total the effects of its actions dominate the whole system’.Footnote 98 For Brittan, the positivist critique was somewhat irrelevant: there was a widespread perception of under-performance – here we are at the heart of declinism – and, subscribing as he did to contemporary psephology that voting was more performance-related than issue-related (ECD pp. 134–5), what mattered was responses to those perceptions.
Retrospectively, what strikes one upon re-reading ECD and associated work is not so much the argument, but the manner of its construction and here there is an interesting King–Brittan contrast. King, the political scientist, largely uses historical sources and narrative political studies, whereas Brittan, the economic commentator turned political economist, applies the comparatively new literature of the economics of politics in a closely argued, highly conceptual, paper. Indeed, the ECD paper is of additional interest for what it reveals of Brittan as a propagator of the more technical, largely but not exclusively American, political science literatures which were to be so successful in undermining the foundations of the ideal of benign government. The public choice literature first made a serious entrance in Brittan's ‘A restatement of economic liberalism’, the opening and most important part of his Capitalism and the permissive society (1973), although in ECD Hayek and Schumpeter feature more than Buchanan and Tulloch or Downs.Footnote 99 Thompson, in his survey of the contribution of public choice literature to the undermining of Keynesian social democracy in Britain, has Brittan with Arthur Seldon as principal proselytizers.Footnote 100 As is well known, the IEA (and the Adam Smith Institute) played a key role in alerting the political classes and commentariat to public choice, but on re-reading ECD one is struck by how little of the IEA literature is cited by Brittan.Footnote 101 Surprisingly, given the emphasis on performance-based voting and the centrality of political business cycles (PBCs) in the work of public choice authors, not to mention Brittan's earlier study of Stop–Go policies, there is no mention in ECD of the empirical studies launched by Goodhart and Bhansali's pioneering research on British PBCs.Footnote 102 This is surprising as Goodhart and Brittan were long-time friends; indeed, it was Goodhart who drew Brittan's attention to Friedman's natural rate analysis.Footnote 103
PBCs are an exemplar of the application of economic analysis to political phenomena, with Goodhart and Bhansali's being the first widely noted empirical analysis to calculate the economic vote for Britain. In selecting the unemployment and inflation rates as independent variables (the economic voting literature has since progressed substantially), they acknowledged the prior work of ‘Certain of the best financial journalists now writing, Lawson in the Spectator and Brittan in the Financial Times, [who] have already pointed out the links between movements in unemployment and political popularity.’ Given the role that political competition, and resultant expectations, plays in the ECD paper, the absence of a PBC element is thus all the more surprising. Their finding, that ‘the response of the electorate to economic developments … has been both more marked and more volatile since 1959 than in previous years’, was consistent with the ECD analysis, as was their exploration of how economics and politics combined to explain the simultaneous rise of unemployment and inflation with each successive business cycle peak.Footnote 104 Indeed, as one academic commentator quickly noted, ‘What makes particularly striking the similarity between Brittan's conclusion and Goodhart and Bhansali's is that Brittan adopted a significantly different analysis.’Footnote 105
Part of the pessimism of Brittan's ECD conjecture derived from his analysis that there were insufficient incentives in a competitive political market place for political elites to behave responsibly to maximize societal long-term interests and that this was also the case for the group self-interests he had identified as the second of the tensions of liberal democracy (ECD, p. 145):
The basic difficulty is that the benefits from restraint in the use of group market power are ‘public goods’. They consist of things such as price stability, fuller employment or faster economic growth which are thinly diffused among the whole population, while the costs are incurred by the group which exercises restraint.
This part of the argument was couched in terms of the trade unions but, of course, is capable of generalization and, here we are mindful of Parsons's description of the problem of the ‘promise-ridden politics of affluence’.Footnote 106 This might seem a curious conception amidst the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s, but it was a crisis in that it represented an interruption to the post-war ‘golden age of affluence’ – to personal economic security and material advancement. Importantly, if we view overload and ECD in the light of affluence, we have an immediate bridge to a now dominant historiographical strand in the writings of contemporary historians and, in the shape of Avner Offer's paradoxes of affluence, room to develop a novel strand of affluence and voting when there was no constitutional mechanism to prevent politicians raising expectations beyond what was feasible.Footnote 107 Reminding ourselves of the pivotal role of Schumpeter's conception of democracy in Brittan's ECD, which Beetham pithily states as the liberal fear that ‘too much politics is bad for society, and too many people demanding things is bad for politics’, we are left also with a further reference group for evaluating the significance of that paper: Brittan did not display the pessimism about the human condition that motivated neo-conservatives, as he has shown in his subsequent explorations of economics and ethics in a post-industrial landscape.Footnote 108
Finally, from a longer-term perspective the ‘overload’ research programme was extremely productive as political science: one can trace a clear lineage from concerns of ungovernability in the 1970s through the hollowing-out literature of the late 1980s and 1990s and onward to the ESRC Whitehall project and beyond.Footnote 109 ECD's particular contribution cannot be fathomed as such, but what can confidently be said is that whilst in the short term it may well have added to the noise of crisis, in the longer term it was helpful for those seeking to distinguish between the demand-side and the supply-side of overload: between the problems of excess demand on resources (and how these might be contained) and the supply-side of government and its institutions being incentivized to supply less. Within such territory lay possible remedies.
V
We turn thus to an evaluation of ECD within Brittan's corpus, mindful that in assembling a composite of qualitative and quantitative evidence on impact and influence it is inevitable that the professional reference group for Brittan should be a hybrid. It must capture Brittan as both the ‘doyen of British economic journalists’ and as having an academic output which, in quantity and quality (as measured by citations), exceeded the median British political scientist by a very considerable margin.Footnote 110
One can begin by situating Brittan amongst the five ‘overlapping movements’ of academics, journalists, and others of Cowling's prosopography of the New Right.Footnote 111 The identification of Brittan as a New Right theorist, or at least as a fellow traveller, is widespread. He was publishing with the IEA from 1971; he was one of the lecturers to the Selsdon Group (established in 1973);Footnote 112 he was known to be assisting Joseph with speeches, including the notorious September 1974 Preston speech, which was a milestone in rethinking Conservative macroeconomic policy on its journey towards monetarism;Footnote 113 and, with the election of Thatcher as party leader, Brittan became part of an informal group of economists and financiers who met with her and shadow cabinet members in the four years of preparation for government.Footnote 114 Brittan was in the vanguard of economic journalists whose second thoughts on Keynesianism led eventually to the monetarist experiment of the first Thatcher government.Footnote 115 However, the conflation of monetarism with the New Right is one of the most egregious errors in the current neo-liberal historiography of Britain, while it is essential to remind the non-economist reader that Brittan was no orthodox monetarist: he took from Friedman the natural rate analysis but not the Friedmanite monetary transmission mechanism, a vital difference.Footnote 116
More fundamentally, neo-liberal triumphalism needs to distinguish between participation and partisanship. It is one thing to argue that Brittan made an indirect contribution to the economic policy programme of the Conservatives before the 1979 general election, and quite another to claim that he was part of ‘Thatcher's entourage’.Footnote 117 Moreover, and again invoking economic criteria, Brittan would fail many tests of true ‘Thatcherism’, not least in viewing the 1981 budget as ‘badly judged’.Footnote 118 This watershed in post-war economic policy was the subject of collective derision by 364 economists, but for many ‘true disciples’ it was Thatcher's Stalingrad.Footnote 119 In short, Brittan was a resource for the New Right, not a member of it. To argue otherwise does neither he nor the New Right justice. Brittan was (and remains) no (either large or small c) conservative, but an economic and social liberal; one to whom it was ‘saddening … that the sound idea of shifting the responsibility for decisions from the state to the individual should be discredited by the glib and superficial nature in which it has been applied’.Footnote 120 Indeed, the New Right, more broadly neo-liberalism in practice, posed a problem for Brittan, as what developed in Britain was an unintended synthesis of liberalism and authoritarianism.Footnote 121 Brittan's views about personal freedom were of long-standing, as was his antipathy to much of orthodox social conservatism. Abhorring nationalism, ‘by family origin and personal leaning … a European’, Brittan was independent of any political party.Footnote 122 He has perhaps best been described as an ‘iconoclastic libertarian, as concerned with moral and ethical questions as with formal economic arguments’.Footnote 123 Elsewhere in that interview he observed: ‘I have never been a Tory. I have never liked the Conservatives very much. So I was not dancing in the street at the prospect of a Thatcher government. There was something paradoxical about using authoritarian means to bring in a liberal order.’Footnote 124 Finally, there were also limits to his participation as well as his partisanship: Brittan was not for instance a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society; he never attended any of the meetings, not even the British branch meetings.
Accepting this hybrid status and unusual significance, it is tempting to ask whether there might be anything in Brittan's intellectual journey emblematic of the broader currents of British intellectual life during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Born in 1933, Brittan's is an interesting cohort: schooled during the late 1930s and 1940s and then at university in the early 1950s, when the dominant anxiety was of mass unemployment, their professional lives exactly matches the consolidation of peacetime Keynesianism and then the ‘Stop–Go’ years that ended in its eclipse and the free market experiment that in Britain we call Thatcherism. What for Britain were ‘second thoughts’ about Keynesian demand management and developing anxieties about liberal democracy were, by comparison with other leading members of that cohort who changed sides, a study in moderation. Countless others made bigger journeys towards the New Right (among journalists, consider Paul Johnson; among academics, John Vaizey), whilst in any case Brittan had never been an orthodox, unquestioning Keynesian. Brittan's own personal journey might be characterized as beginning with the disappointed dirigisme of The Treasury under the Tories (1964), an assessment reinforced by his unhappy time as an ‘irregular’ in the Department of Economic Affairs as the planning experiment came to nought in face of a government machine which could not translate policy reform into practice.Footnote 125
From an early point in his career, Brittan was therefore reflecting on defects in the British political process, not just for their dysfunctional implications for economic policy. A landmark here, a book which ought to be better known, is his Left or right (1968).Footnote 126 Although only cited once and in passing in his ECD paper (ECD, p. 156), there is a clear intellectual lineage (progressing through Brittan's Capitalism and the permissive society) here as well as a statement of Brittan's own partisan dilemma which helps to explain why the ECD paper took the form it did and remains of enduring significance:Footnote 127
The dilemma of the [classical] liberal is that while Conservatives now use the language of individual freedom, they apply this only – if at all – to domestic economic questions. They are the less libertarian of the two parties – despite individual exceptions – on all matters of personal and social conduct, and are much the more hawk-like in their attitude to ‘foreign affairs’. Labour, on the other hand, has liberal instincts on foreign affairs and personal conduct, but is perversely blind to the claims of economic liberty, which is distrusted as a capitalist rationalisation.
Brittan is often highlighted as one of the public intellectuals who changed allegiance from the Keynesian social democratic consensus to side with what became Thatcherism. In fact, his intellectual journey was more interesting. The ECD paper is an important part of that journey, as well as a key contribution to the analytical declinist literature of the mid-1970s. Our account of Brittan's journey emphasizes continuity more than change. Circumstances were changing rapidly in the early 1970s and this required a deeper analysis of the underlying condition of British democracy, one which had preoccupied him for the better part of a decade. Thus this was not just a response to immediate circumstances; and that ECD and associated publications were attacks, implicitly if not always explicitly, on the Heath and Wilson governments ‘does not ipso facto make them wrong’. What needs to be remembered about the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s is the ideological breadth of the challenge to governments and the endemic pessimism as Britain ‘enjoy[ed], if that is the word, the ripest variety of prognoses of doom’.Footnote 128 Brittan and the conjectures in his ECD paper about the contradictions of democracy expressed important anxieties about the maintenance of freedom. Freedom features right at the beginning of the ECD paper (p. 129) and its evocation of ‘an open society, where a large weight is put on both freedom of speech and freedom to choose one's own way of life’.
It then appears no less than eighteen times. This is the same conception of freedom that motivates Brittan and the bogus dilemma:Footnote 129 it combines a conception of ‘negative freedom’, that of the state minimizing coercion (which derives from Isaiah Berlin), with the ‘want-regarding’ principle of classical liberalism, propagated by Brian Barry, which has the attraction that it operates with the citizenry as they are rather than as they ought to be in some ideal. It is also the conception of freedom that prefaces Brittan's ‘A restatement of economic liberalism’, itself the opening essay of Capitalism and the permissive society. The ‘orgy of pessimism and self-doubt’ of the 1970s was thus for Brittan much more about fundamentals than the immediate crisis.
VI
Brittan's ECD predictions for British liberal democracy proved unduly pessimistic. As he acknowledged in ECDR ‘Democracy has survived better than I feared’, but this was because it had abandoned the full employment commitment which was ‘hardly a satisfactory, desirable or even sustainable basis of survival’. Even more fundamentally, the problem of unconstrained majority rule (‘elective dictatorship’, a theme about to be pursued by Hailsham)Footnote 130 was if anything magnified by the time he came to write ECDR as, with the then apparent Tory hegemony, the right was now not interested in constitutional (including electoral) reform to improve British government and politics (ECDR, pp. 199, 202–3).
A little later Beetham made the following judgement on Brittan, which is worth quoting in full:Footnote 131
If we have heard less of these terminal contradictions of democracy in the 1980s, it is perhaps because Brittan's warnings have been heeded, and … the social democratic dragon has been successfully fought and vanquished – at the theoretical level, by the distributive theories of Nozick and Hayek, and the monetarist theories of Friedman; at the practical level, by the re-marketisation of the economy and the discipline of mass unemployment.
At least that is what Brittan's own analysis would lead us to suppose. If we can abstract from its local context, there is no denying that it raises issues that are basic to the political economy of social democracy, such as how to secure a workable compromise between competing versions of distributive justice, and the institutional arrangements by which such a compromise can be made to stick; or how to ensure that distributive policies work to promote rather than to hinder an effective industrial strategy. However, from the standpoint of most West European countries, where these issues have been solved more effectively than in Britain, the elevation of them into a major threat to democracy must seem like a more pathological manifestation of Britain's defective political economy. And from the standpoint of a decade of Thatcherite economics, with a second economic slump still in progress, a different analysis of events in the 1970s seems more plausible than Brittan's. That is that our problem lies neither in democracy nor yet in social democracy, but rather in the capitalist market itself, and the unique institutional framework in which it is set. It is this that has been responsible for the underlying relative decline which gave the distributional conflicts of the 1970s such intensity in Britain. It is this that has perpetuated the decline in the 1980s, a decade in which distributional conflicts were simply suppressed by unemployment on one side, and massaged by raiding future investment for present consumption on the other. According to such an analysis, the theorem that the free market constitutes the chief threat to democracy would be every bit as plausible as the reverse contention of Brittan.
This is most helpful, even if the conclusion is not accepted: it brings us back to declinism; it returns us also to that hardy perennial of ‘British exceptionalism’. Was there something unique about Britain's situation in the 1970s? A decade after ECDR, Brittan remained ‘agnostic about my own conjecture’ for his real aim had been to ‘exploit the prevailing mood to propagate some observations in Schumpeter's Capitalism, socialism and democracy (1943)’ about the fundamental conditions under which democracy can function.Footnote 132 ECDR reaffirms the central Schumpeterian message of ECD that politicians should not run economies.Footnote 133 That said, precision is required about Brittan's position on the cardinal choice of government versus the market: he has never held to an instinctive, let alone ideological, opposition to government intervention; he is much more in the tradition of British pragmatism: of a case-by-case evaluation of whether the practical dangers of government failure are likely to exceed the perceived market failure as filtered through the political market place.
That Brittan defies routine ideological mapping assists us with the first and most important conclusion of this review: with serious historical attention now being given to neo-liberalism, there must be a premium on precision if we are to escape from the broad-brush caricatures of the New Right to secure a genuine intellectual history of neo-liberalism which captures what was general as well as what was specific to time and place. Until very recent contributions to the British historiography, too much of our understanding of the New Right emanated either from contemporary literature motivated by adversarial opposition or from what was essentially raw material for the ‘long march’ narrative. Secondly, elite journalists deserve much more attention, including attention to television as well as the press in educating and shifting opinion.
Thirdly, there is a danger of anachronism and of surface readings of key texts: ECD was not written consciously to be ‘declinist’ and its central warning about the fate of liberal democracy needs to be understood in terms of its ultimate goal: to draw attention to a problem(s) requiring resolution. Group self-interest, more particularly union monopoly power, was the ultimate target for two reasons: one explicit and one somewhat less so in ECD. On the former, ECD explored the dangers that organized labour posed for political and economic markets. On the latter, which Brittan explored more fully in contemporaneous publications,Footnote 134 the focus was on unemployment but within the context of the ‘second thoughts’ whereby the principal supply-side determinant of the natural rate of unemployment was organized labour and wage bargaining. ECD thus united technical economics with a core political economy anxiety; it also provides continuity to Brittan's thinking about the importance of full employment and how it might be secured.
Brittan's antipathy to trade unions is of very long standing, though perhaps less well understood. Between ECD and ECDR, trade union density fell from nearly 50 per cent of the workforce to some 35 per cent and was under 30 per cent by the turn of the millennium.Footnote 135 Given that the 1980s saw a most pronounced increase in income (and other categories of) inequality, and that this is often connected with the sustained industrial relations reform undertaken by the Conservative governments, it is pertinent to ask whether, when given an opportunity to reflect in ECDR, Brittan felt the need to comment on the coincidence. Distributional issues were discussed in ECDR, but in the abstract (pp. 196–7) and not empirically, despite growing income equality being then very much in the news.Footnote 136 Brittan's position was complex: as seen, he was very far from being a classical liberal on distributive justice, though he could be considered more conventional in his adverse reaction to the elements of compulsion, conflict, and subordination of individual rights associated with organized labour.Footnote 137 Nor was he simply a pragmatic economist for whom the better strategy was to raise living standards through the fruits of higher productivity, and for whom unemployment was the real problem. In the 1970s, he was very concerned about the costs for absolute productivity levels of trade union restrictive practices and wage bargaining, and in the 1980s he hardened his analysis on unions and job destruction through excess real wage pressure after incorporating the analysis of Layard.Footnote 138 In late career, he devised ‘redistributive market liberalism’ as the best label for his position, by which he meant a market system allowed ‘to function freely and competitively against a background of law and monetary stability’ with cash redistribution ‘of some of the rewards to those who would otherwise do less well in the lottery of life’.Footnote 139 His special target was the rhetoric of redistribution,Footnote 140 and at the time of ECDR his analysis was clear that the greater danger was unemployment and that data from the Institute of Fiscal Studies showed that whilst ‘income concentration (a less value-laden word than inequality)’ had increased, ‘absolute poverty had … fallen under the Thatcher Government’.Footnote 141 For Brittan, as for Peter Lilley, with whom he had co-authored an influential attack on incomes policiesFootnote 142 and who served in Thatcher and Major's cabinets, he ‘would rather everybody got a bit better off, even if we have to suffer some people getting a lot better off’.Footnote 143
Since Brittan's ECD paper, successive British governments have responded to overload by moderating their economic policy goals, including trying to depoliticize monetary policy by granting operational independence to the central bank on interest-rate setting. One suspects that few of the political elite, perhaps rather more of the policy-makers, knew they were dancing to a Schumpeterian tune in so doing. To an immeasurable extent, Brittan's ECD paper helped shaped opinion that more constitutional safeguards were necessary for good or at least better government. Certainly, some thirty-five years after its publication, Brittan judges the methodological advances of ECD as more important than the headline prediction about the fate of liberal democracy.Footnote 144 With his enduring interest in the role of government, Brittan belongs in the pantheon of neo-liberal public intellectuals, but his disdain for partisanship and his insistence that ‘government [i]s a device rather than a totem’ means that he was never more than a resource for the New Right.Footnote 145 Brittan's ECD was not a prescriptive paper, and it is axiomatic that by the standards of constitutional political economics there remains enormous scope in Britain as elsewhere to adjust incentives and penalties for politicians to improve further economic policy. The potential of the Hayekian agenda thus remains largely untapped, whilst debates over the health of British politics remain a hardy perennial, with voter disengagement a particular worry. The erosion of legitimacy is the leading edge of many other problems of contemporary politics – the quantitative indicator of distrust of politicians, scepticism about democratic institutions and disillusionment with the democratic process. As Rose noted in his major overload study, ‘indifference cripples political authority without causing it to collapse’.Footnote 146 In modern polities, and particularly in Britain, where the media have produced corrosive cynicism amongst consumerist citizens,Footnote 147 voter disengagement is very dangerous in terms of the response that political elites will naturally make in an intensely competitive political market place. In ECD, Brittan fretted about ultra-competitive politicians generating unrealizable expectations of voters who, lacking budget constraints, subscribed to a mirage of social justice. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
