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Bald Economics and Mere History
| Article
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12793 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
4,120 Words |
| Author
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Dennis J. O'Keeffe
Dennis J. O'Keeffe is director of the Truancy Research Project
at the Polytechnic of North London, and serves on many
academic and political committees. His latest book is Wayward
Elite: A Critique of British Teacher Education (London: The
Adam Smith Institute, 1990). |
It is apparent that since World War II, and especially since the late 1970s, socialism in its various intellectual guises and in its various administrative forms, has become increasingly unattractive to scholars in advanced societies. It might be slyly added that the general citizenry, and not for the first time, are at least in line with the intellectuals in this disenchantment, and even perhaps a little sharper on the mark. At any rate, socialism is under attack in the Western world, both in its Marxist, globalizing form and in its creeping state interventionist form. There is a considerable consensus, one might say, about what it is that we must defend ourselves against. There is, however, a distressing degree of doubt as to what precisely it is what we are defending. This essay seeks no more than to clarify this in terms of the two clearest historical alternatives to collectivism.
Should the development of language - since it happens anyway - always be given free reign? Alternatively, is the kind of monitoring favored by the Academie Francaise a salutary influence and one that American and British scholars should press for in the case of English? Certainly the vocabulary of conventional politics and political theory alike has been rearranged radically in the Anglo-Saxon world during the last century, and a case can be made for the view that the crucial labels, in the United States and in Great Britain, have been reversed without any obvious theoretical advantage. Consider, for example, the fate of conservatives and liberals.
A Shift In Denotation
The "conservative," after all, once celebrated the tried and trusted institutions and practices that, by surviving, had been historically endorsed. The "liberal," more modern in perspective, stressed individualism, the free markets, and contractual arrangements that maximized the citizen's well-being and minimized governement. The case is altered today and probably to no advantage.
In America the nineteenth-century style liberalism of the theorist Milton Friedman and of the man-of-the-people politician, Ronald Reagan, has become conservative. In Great Britain too, a real woman of the people, like Margaret Thatcher, a dynamic parvenu having nothing much in common with the sluggish patricians who have presided over recent British decline, is rarely credited with the radical liberalism she stands for. She is, as it were, smothered by a label - conservative - despite her manifest desire to change things, to halt her country's absurd demotion to the tail end of the advanced
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