Here, Maurice Glasman explains how the political crises of our time can only be addressed through a common good politics in which conservatism is redeemed by traditional socialism.
In his introduction to this lecture, the great English philosopher John Gray described Lord Glasman as “one of the two or three most brilliant analysts of British politics, a very original thinker, breaking out of the traditions on the left while at the same time honouring them and reinterpreting them to fit our new circumstances that are unprecedented, at least in recent generations. A comprehensive fragmentation of the political world and a breakdown of older traditions, of left-wing thought as well as of right-wing thought, in which we all are faced with the possibly unpleasant and painful, certainly difficult, but I think rewarding, task of thinking for ourselves and talking with other people – people with different views. The traditions of the last twenty years, of a certain kind of neoliberal progressivism, if they ever had any historical or moral validity, have been exhausted. What we have now in all the major parties is the domination of a type of progressivism which has very little to do with long-term historic left-wing traditions and yet it’s the only thing that a whole generation of politicians and political activists know. This progressivism is supremely unfitted to the conditions of the world in which we live.”
We share the full text here with kind permission of Lord Glasman, a long time friend and partner of Together for the Common Good. A link to a video of the lecture, and the discussion with John Gray that followed, can be found below. The lecture was part of the 2024 Oakeshott Lecture Series held at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.
I am honoured to have been invited to speak here.
I am also grateful because the distinctive English form of conservatism is one of the glories of the world, and until it was captured and decimated by the wild weeds of Trotskyite liberal free market fanatics in the name of Thatcherism, it understood important things about how to act in the world. And about what the world was like. That the enigma of a curious silence was of greater political virtue than an angry denunciation. That there was primary matter alive in the world in terms of attachment, faith, nation, race and home and it was necessary to accommodate those to an ever more complex task of self-government. So much of what is distinctive and good about our country is a result of the strength of conservatism.
Conservatives viewed the State as a ship, and here I honour Michael Oakeshott, rather than a machine, in which the primary task was to keep order on the deck, precent mutiny, avoid getting captured and navigate the capricious uncertainty of the sea. It didn’t really matter where they were going. They were not sailing to the shores of socialism or liberty, they were just staying afloat. And that was hard enough thank you very much.
Conservatives did not even acknowledge the existence of an ideological alternative, the assumption was to conserve as much as possible for as long as possible, given the conditions. The judgement of those conditions was the art of politics.
In 1895, The Marquis of Salisbury led the Conservative Party to a landslide election victory on the public position, and I quote, ‘that as change is invariably for the worst I intend to do as little as possible’. It is sometimes hard not to yearn for better days. It is interesting to note that Clement Attlee unhesitatingly described Salisbury as the ‘greatest Prime Minister’, citing the establishment of the London County Council, the first London wide civic institution in 1899, and the building of council housing through the ‘working-class housing bill’, that built the most durable and beautiful estates that we have ever seen, balconies, brick, high windows and indoor toilets included. They now sell for millions of pounds in central London, but they were built as an inheritance for the poor. A metaphor, perhaps, for the fate of conservatism.
Salisbury was, of course, denounced by the Manchester Guardian as a ‘state socialist, pure and simple’. His response is relevant to our talk tonight, he said “Do not imagine that by merely affixing to it the reproach of Socialism you can seriously affect the progress of any great legislative movement, or destroy those high arguments which are derived from the noblest principles of philanthropy and religion”. The Bill was passed.
Restoration rather than reform was the approach. Self-governing corporate bodies were preferred to state directed departments. The ship of state preferred the navy to the army for obvious reasons. Guns were things to be used abroad, not at home. Civic peace was considered the greatest political virtue of them all. Maybe Willie Whitelaw was the last great Conservative politician, whose campaigning style was the go around the country whipping up apathy.
I am grateful to the Conservative Tradition, I am inspired by it and I study it.
And it is also a story of friendship. When I was last in this theatre I was participating in the Roger Scruton Memorial lectures and I assumed, conservatively, that this was still the case. Imagine my surprise when I checked, nervously, when the lecture was and it was the Michael Oakeshott lectures. I made a judgement that this was of no significance because Roger Scruton was a real friend of mine and in many ways this talk is a public airing of a conversation we had over several years, on Tuesday evenings in his flat in Albany. And it was Roger who taught me that nostalgia was not an accusation to be refuted but a fate to be embraced. Nostos meant a longing for home, and the very essence of a meaningful politics was to retrieve a sense of home from the dehumanising forces of market and state.
In the final sentence of his final interview, with Giles Fraser, Roger said that ‘Blue Labour is more in keeping with my line of thinking than most of what goes on in the Conservative Party’. This afternoon, I will try to explain why he would say such a thing. In our final conversation, when he was very ill I asked him why he said that and Roger replied, ‘Maurice, conservatism is not a party political thing. There used to be two conservative parties and now there is not one. You must try harder’. A few days later he was dead. I miss him terribly. He died just when a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appeared over Wuhan and the Covid apocalypse descended. My first instinct was to go and talk about it with Roger and his silence was deafening. I miss him daily and wish to say that our entire polity is the worse for his passing.
May his name and his memory be blessed and those who reviled and denounced him should be treated with contempt.
I could say more and I would like to but it is important to move along with the central argument that I am making tonight, which is that only socialism can redeem conservatism. That conservatism has been almost entirely captured by a form of revolutionary liberalism that is hostile to a stable form of life in the form of finance capitalism and has left both the Conservative Party and our country in a palsied and perilous state. That the genius of Conservatism was precisely its understanding that tradition was a condition of modernisation, that solidarity was more important than liquidity, that society requires a sense of the sacred if it is to flourish, that sacrifice was as important as choice, that the monarchy means more than the market, that meaning was more important than choice.
I guess this is the right moment to introduce the basic ideas of Blue Labour, which champions each of these commitments, before I move onto the ruins of contemporary conservatism.
Blue Labour was born during the financial crash of 2008 and the dismal twilight of New Labour and the Third Way. It was also the time of my Mother’s death. She had a terrible condition called Progressive Supra-Nuclear Palsy and I saw her become a mute witness to her own degeneration. It inoculated me to progressivism. It is indeed, the last thing you want to hear when you go to the doctor, ‘it’s progressive’. The two came together in Blue Labour as I tried to make sense of the loss of both my Mum and of Labour. The uncritical embrace of globalisation, the domination of finance capital combined with a pitiless progressive modernism left no place for workers in the movement they had created. It was a case study in alienation and dispossession.
My Mum left school at 13 to work in a factory so she could support her four younger sisters and her ill father who died a few months before I was born. My love for Labour came from her. She told me how they built the National Health Service, how Hackney Council moved her family from a damp basement to a council flat, led the fight against Hitler and shared her fanatical commitment to ‘education’. The United Synagogue, Tottenham Hotspur football Club and the Labour Party were the objects of what Edmund Burke called ‘natural sympathy’. I had no idea as a child that fidelity to this particular trinity would cause me so much pain.
As my Mum lost her capacity of speech all I could do was watch television with her. We stared together at the unfolding financial meltdown as the combined assets of many generations were lost in speculative hubris. We watched Gordon Brown saying that it was the ‘destiny of labour to save the global banking system’ and my Mum’s eyes met mine and then she shook her head and closed her eyes.
That was when Blue Labour was born and it turned out to be a river with many currents running through it. Some of them are philosophical and find their source in Aristotle and what is now called virtue ethics, taking in Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre along the way. Some are Christian, ranging from the dissenting tradition based on association, liberty and conscience, through that of Catholic Social Thought and its critique of capitalism based upon the dignity of labour, local democracy, solidarity and the stewardship of nature. These in turn were rooted within a biblical tradition which first articulated that human beings and nature were sacred and not simply resources for the accumulation of power or money. Pharoah turned out to be a contemporary reality, from Amazon to China and that mercy, kindness, righteousness and justice were necessary to resist domination. While Blue Labour expanded and the conversations intensified there was a shared recognition that all these things were embodied in the Labour Tradition itself and their recovery was essential for its renewal.
It became clear that any politics that could draw inspiration from the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Putney Debates, from Archbishop Laude and Thomas Winstanley, from Saul Alinsky and Ernest Bevin, from Edmund Burke and Karl Polanyi, was not going to find its home within a movement dominated by Whiggish assumptions. The roots of Labour lay in its covenantal bond with the British working class. The culture and experience of workers shaped the form of the Labour Movement. It was of them, by them and for them and that, clearly, was no longer the case. The steady disaffection of the working class from their party was the source of its ‘progressive palsy’. When you win less than 34% of the vote and gain 71% of the seats in Parliament it is more reminiscent of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev than the renewal of social democracy.
‘Blue’ Labour began as a recognition of the sadness and demoralisation that had fallen upon the Party movement and tradition by 2008. It was compromised, lacking in vitality and severed from the roots of its renewal, relationally and conceptually. Things don’t only get better, and the lack of understanding of loss and tragedy required a re-articulation of the fundamental tenets of the Labour Tradition and the belief that these are both relevant and true.
The first truth is that human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning. The second is that nature is not a commodity either, but a condition of life and a sacred inheritance. The Labour tradition also asserted that democracy is the best way to resist the domination of the rich and the educated and that the leadership and participation of the working-class was central to this. Further, that local democracy is vital, as well as forms of economic democracy that can hold state and market powers to account; a democracy locational and vocational.
More than that, Labour drew upon historical memory, and not only rational argument. It drew upon the Norman Yoke and the tradition of the freeborn for the solidarity required by its associations. It not only demanded a human status for labour but a move from the contractual to the covenantal. The human status of labour required the binding of capital to reciprocal obligations, the strengthening and not the abolition of the inherited institutions such as Parliament and the Common Law, and the restoration of the Ancient Constitution. Labour was rooted in class but was a national party, and its internationalism was rooted in democratic nation states, in which sovereignty was required in order to domesticate capital.
Within the Labour Tradition the liberties were held to be sacrosanct, and there were four fundamental forms. Freedom of religion, in which no-one could be coerced in their faith, and that meant freedom of religious practice, and from any violent coercion in religion. Freedom of conscience, in that no-one could be coerced in their beliefs. Freedom of expression, in that people were free to speak, create and free to reject and criticise. The fourth was freedom of association, which was the fundamental form of the Trade Union Movement which was banned for a century before it was accepted. Within Blue Labour, liberty and democracy are not opposed but mutually supportive political practices. A sacred inheritance.
Blue Labour was also born of a recognition that any vital political tradition and movement has to go beyond rational philosophy and embrace paradox, to combine seemingly contradictory elements in new forms. Labour is a paradoxical tradition, far richer than its present form of economic utilitarianism and legal progressivism. The Labour tradition is not best understood as the living embodiment of the liberal/communitarian debate, or as a variant of the European Marxist/Social Democratic tension. It is robustly national and international, conservative and egalitarian, Christian and secular, republican and monarchical, democratic and elitist, radical and traditional, and it is most transformative and effective when it defies the status quo in the name of ancient as well as modern values. The Labour Tradition has a vast and varied assortment of traditions, stories and accomplishments, great and small, and can tell a story of how things could get better out of the materials inherited from the past. And yet the technical managerialism of its dominant ideology cannot draw upon its history for its renewal. That is their weakness and our strength.
This type of political tradition is to be distinguished from matters of philosophy. Philosophical arguments, like policy proposals, aspire to be universal, coherent and reasonable. Such demands may be useful at the final stages of a policy review when specific recommendations have to be ordered, but remain unsuited to either political action or ethics. Historical continuity, democracy, the necessity of extemporised action, and the demands of leadership, render politics contingent, comparative and paradoxical in form. Ideas are not ultimate and singular in politics, but contested and related. The English nation, above all, is deeply synthetic in form, constituted by different tribes and people, that generated an unprecedented form of common law, common language and an inheritance of a commonwealth. Its political parties and movements have been stubbornly synthetic too, a matter of blending folk and academic concerns through a politics of interests. Political movements which are rooted in the lives and experiences of people bring together new constellations of existing political matter. What to philosophers is an incoherence can be a source of vitality and strength to a political tradition which contests with others for democratic power over its vision of the common good.
Two ancient political traditions came together in the Labour Movement. One could almost call them ancestors. On one side, was the Aristotelian notion of the Good Life and the Common Good. In this the importance of politics, of virtue understood as good doing rather than do gooding through a pursuit of a common life between estranged interests were carried into the political life of the nation. The founders of the Labour Movement understood the logic of capitalism as based upon the maximisation of returns on investment and the threat this posed to their lives, livelihoods and environment, but they did not embrace class war and clung stubbornly to an idea of a common life with their rulers and exploiters and the democratic renewal of their inherited institutions. The Labour idea of the person, in which the plural institutions of civic life have a vital effect on the flourishing of the individual and are inseparable from it, are explicitly Aristotelian and Conservative.
This is an important root of the conservatism in the Labour tradition, a concern with the preservation of status, limits on the market, an attachment to place, starting with the common sense of people (doxa) rather than with external values and a strong commitment to a common life. This is also a direct link to the Tudor statecraft tradition of the 16th century, self-consciously Aristotelian, which engaged with the balance of interests within the realm, pioneering endowment to promote the sciences and commerce, developing apprenticeships, and slowing enclosures. The ‘Commonwealthmen’ in the early twentieth century, of which GDH Cole and RH Tawney were active participants, are part of that tradition. Oxford University was once a rich resource of conservative socialism but now it is as quiet as a cemetery at night. A haunted graveyard.
The second ancestral tradition within which Labour was embedded, is that which followed the Norman Conquest and actively pursued the idea of the balance of power within the Ancient Constitution and the ‘rights of freeborn Englishman’. It was on the basis of the violation of customary practice that they resisted the subsequent enclosures and assertion of Royal Prerogative in the name of Parliament and the liberties threatened by the domination of one institution alone. Labour takes its place within a far longer national tradition that values a legal and a democratic order, that is both transformative and traditional, in simultaneous motion. Parliamentary Socialism, the National Commonwealth, whichever way Labour chose to describe itself in its first fifty years, acknowledged its attachment to the language and sensibility of the politics of the Commonwealth and a central role for the inherited institutions of governance that represented the interests of what used to be known as ‘the commons’, the House of Commons not being the least of those.
The early theorists of Labour economics, Therwell and Blatchford, had a commitment to natural law in which there were prescribed limits as to how a person could be treated by political authority, and by economic ones too. In England, in particular, these natural laws were assumed to have existed in this country before the Conquest, so they were not abstract, but embedded in the political history of the nation. Democracy and common law were used as ways to constrain the domination of the monarchy. Parliament was vital in this, as was the Church. This sensibility found Labour form in the work of Blatchford and Morris and the ‘guild socialism’ of Cole, Hobson and Penty.
It is far too rarely acknowledged, that alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between catholic and protestant, or between secularists and believers, but the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary achievement. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, Catholic and Protestant, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression. The churches who nurtured the Labour Movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from State power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of free born Englishmen through the protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands and they came together in the Labour Movement which was committed to religious freedom. It was, literally, a broad church.
The London Dock strike of 1889 is a classic expression of the Labour Movement in action, built on the assumption that only organised people could resist exploitation, and the forging of an alliance between Irish and local workers, brokered by the Catholic church and the Salvation Army. The local Labour Representation Committees were the new institutions within which the previously unrelated forces met and within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned. It is here that the ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers who had lost their status and small holders who had lost their land make their appearance drawing upon customary practice as a means of defying managerial prerogative. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious as the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub, and the force of the navy and army as well as the police was threatened against the strikers. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, was held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. To build a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages was a great founding achievement of Labour politics. Cardinal Manning, accompanied by William Booth and the Salvation Army Band, leading the striking dockers on their march made it very difficult for the employers to use force and depict them as an undisciplined rabble.
The sheer ferocity of the market storm within which Labour was born in the 19th century, the scale of the dispossession; of property, status and assets, generated by the creation of the first ever free market in labour and land, the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands, the criminalisation of association, the scrapping of apprenticeships, and the eviction and proletarianisation of the peasantry meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.
The burial given by the Co-operative society is another example of the retrieval of status generated by the Labour Movement, the dignity of death given by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. It was a combination of subs paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity that provided the resources out of which a human status for the person could be retrieved and retained. The reverence for life, the honour given to each member through their membership and dues, were not drawn from a secular or modernist ethic, but a radical solution was fashioned from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. They called their ideology socialism and their party Labour. I remain faithful to their memory.
The Labour tradition, alone in our country, resisted the domination of the poor by the rich, asserted the necessity of the liberties of expression, religion and association, and made strong claims for democratic authority to defy the status quo. It did this within a democratic politics of the common good that resisted violence and strengthened democracy.
The obvious conclusion is that it might be a good idea to do it again but that is my day job. What is also obvious is that we are entering a change of era, we are moving from the era of globalisation towards what I tentatively call the era of restoration.
I date the era of globalisation, which we are now emerging from, as beginning with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979.
The era of globalisation was based upon the idea of change without continuity, of a modernity without tradition. The consequences were viewed as a fate, in which alternatives were considered nostalgic, populist or doomed. As technology knew no borders, as stable employment evaporated into transferrable skills, enormous changes were embraced as necessary. Immigration was viewed as a fate outside of political negotiation, universities were expanded, house prices surged, manufacturing was replaced by the knowledge economy, real physical presence was replaced by virtual reality, the relationships and constraints of community replaced by self-defined identity. Choice was elevated as the ultimate freedom even as it was entirely constrained by technology, markets and law.
And yet it wasn’t true.
Traditions were subdued but not eviscerated, the realities of an embedded and embodied life upon the earth were lived and shared between people. Love endured through the disenchantment and democracy was not entirely subordinated to procedure. The interests of those who benefitted most from the new arrangements, the rich and the educated, articulated their interests in terms of universal values and historical inevitability. The values were those of aspiration, mobility and openness, in opposition to the nasty interests of place and work, and any resistance was characterised as reactionary and doomed. The captivation of Labour by what might be called ‘liquid modernity’ meant that it could not articulate or pursue resistance to its acceleration. The categories of labour, land and money were rendered outside of political contestation, and each was defined as a commodity. These were the assumptions that were to destroy conservatism in an even more profound way.
Underpinning this was the idea of revolution, that the era we were entering into was unprecedentedly different. This was foolish in two ways. The first is that there is always a continuity through time, that the very idea of revolution is a defiance of the persistence of matter and memory and renders itself blind to its continuities. It is not simply that revolution is wrong, it is that it is impossible, a fantasy. The second is that it renders the experiences of the past inaccessible and impermissible. Thus Tsarist imperialism could not be linked to Soviet policy, nor Napoleon to the French Kings. It is an unremarked irony that the Conservative Party was the agent of revolution. It is a matter of tragi-comedy that it is still stranded in its delusions, as this leadership election indicates.
And New Labour took a revolutionary approach to itself. The Labour movement was a curious thing, its leadership and membership taking the form of a broad-based Christian Movement, a distinctive blend of Catholic, Methodist and dissenting with a dose of High-Church Anglicanism. The Christian concepts of love, brotherhood, the dignity of labour, of community and solidarity, and even the Kingdom of God that sometimes peeked through, formed the fundamental language of the Labour Movement. While the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians were resolutely secular, this was not the case for the workers movement. The Christian inheritance of labour is a treasure of renewal, its critique of capitalism, fired by the dark satanic mills and their wicked indifference to suffering, is a constitutive aspect of its inheritance but is rendered inaccessible if a revolutionary secularism prevails. It is also deeply connected to the conservative romantic tradition. We still read Coleridge although Disraeli has not aged quite so well. It leads to the madness of thinking that global capitalism is internationalism and the fulfilment of a progressive dream. Things Can Only Get Better is perhaps the least true and the most stupid sentence that has ever been uttered in politics.
One way of understanding what went on is that in the pantheon of the Greek Gods, Apollo and Hermes represent two different types of people and peoples. Apollo was rooted in place and represented stability and honour, agriculture and war. Hermes, in contrast was swift and mobile with a delight in trickery, music and literature. They were both quick to see each other’s vices. For Apollonians, Mercurians were cunning, lacking in courage while valuing money and success over reliability and faithfulness. Likewise, the Mercurians considered the Apollonians slow, stupid and provincial. Both groups have co-existed in society since ancient times, Apollonians dominating the countryside and Mercurians flourishing in the cities.
In the development of the British polity, this tension, between the Court and the Country, the city and the countryside, London and the provinces became characteristic of its politics and both forms of life, the settled and the transient, the durable and the fleeting, the productive and the commercial, the crafts and the arts, needed each other. The tension between them constituted the distinctive character of the polity, characterised by a distinctively extreme form of tradition and modernity, conservatism and radicalism, continuity and change. The pioneer of industrialisation and the home of finance capital also preserved the Monarchy, Parliament, Common Law and the established Church. This was the mighty achievement of Conservatism. It was Conservatism that restored the Ancient Constitution, doubled down on the monarchy, church and Parliament while establishing public parks, extending grammar schools and placing limits on the market.
Politics was in large part a negotiation between these groups. The Mercurians offered ever expanding horizons and wealth on their terms, the Apollonians were wary of the offer, fearing the loss and insecurity this would bring. The relationship between progress and dispossession and the rate of change were publicly negotiated. A settlement would come unstuck if the balance of power tilted too much towards the Mercurians although the direction of travel was clear. The Tories became the dominant political formation. They kept the City of London within its walls.
What is distinctive about the past forty years, the era of liberal globalisation, is that it claims not only that all virtues are held by Hermes, that the battle is to the swift, the mobile and the qualified, but that it breaks any notion of mutual dependency with the Apollonians, and this disdain came to be reciprocated. They became, to quote the only line of poetry from Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, a ‘basket of deplorables’; the places in which they lived, reservations for the losers and the ‘left behind’, those unable to change and embrace the possibilities opened up by an increasingly Mercurial world. Tony Blair expressed this view when he described the character of the global, liberal economic order in a speech in 2005.
The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.[1]
This assumption concerning the direction and speed of change is what made the Brexit vote, and then the distant, subterranean thud of the Trump explosion so disconcerting. The ‘wrong side of history’ was exacting its revenge on Mercurian hubris. Nothing has been resolved in the past decade. This is part of the reason why conservatism needs socialism.
Perhaps the best way to understand it is that Britain is going through an interregnum. A time ‘in between times’ when the consensus that previously united Parties and underpinned policy are publicly contested. Such a period is an argument over sanity, over the limits and meaning of what it is reasonable to believe and do. The era of globalisation still persists, particularly among our elites. The increasing economic power of China and the internet platforms intensifies, and there is no constructive alternative to replace it. Hedge funds are but a post-modern form of enclosure.
Antonio Gramsci described an interregnum as a time ‘when the old is dead and the new cannot be born…when there is a fraternisation of opposites and all manner of morbid symptoms pertain’.
This is our present moment.
The new takes on a monstrous form in which we are besieged by ‘populists’ and ‘authoritarians’ who offer democracy as a form of resistance to a globalised economic order that has no place for any form of power that protects the interests and values of the working-class. In such a period the new is perceived as mad, bad and dangerous, an unreasonable spectre from the past that indicates a dystopian future. It is threatening and destabilising to the self as well as the polity. The intensification of the prescribing of opiates and other forms of legal anti-depressants and pain killers has become one of the central features of this interregnum. It is a time of betrayal, confusion, anxiety and moral panic. I subscribe to the Daily Mail to get my daily fix. It is so exhausting that sometimes I have to go straight back to bed. The market storm is accompanied by political turmoil and the questioning of the most fundamental institutions of political order. The election on July the fourth was the worst result for the Conservative Party since 1832. I see no signs of resurrection.
For four decades a political consensus supporting opening up national societies to markets and then integrating them into increasingly global markets has dominated. Globalisation promoted the corporation over the nation state and the market over democracy. The redistributive capacity of the nation state was diminished and the political realm of democratic nations weakened. Economic policy making became increasingly detached from politics. Society was treated as if it were an abstract space. In the words of Pierre Manent it was occupied by “the unlimited rights of individual particularity”. It ceased to be organised by institutions, characterised by a distinct language with its own culture, and became instead a random collection of individuals located in a particular place. What Chesterton called the ‘democracy of the dead’, a sense of continuity with the past, was besieged.
The modern political system is defined by a double commitment, to democracy on the one side and a global financial system on the other. The conflict between political self-government and global capitalism is the principle tension. The balance between them is one definition of politics within which the claims of capital to commodify human beings and nature have been resisted by democracy. The post-war settlement, for example, was brokered as a response to this tension which unleashed its demons in the 1930s. In that settlement a distinction was made between free trade in real commodities, those that were produced for sale in the market on the one side, and human beings, nature and money, which were not, on the other. This distinction was discarded in the 1980s and this was institutionalized in the form of the European Union via the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties. The abandonment of democracy and the embrace of the market felt like the breaking of a covenant, for both Labour and Conservative. All over Europe the unreasonable is becoming rational.
The distinctive feature of globalisation over the past forty years is that it sought to overturn the assumptions of the post-war settlement by subordinating democracy to Treaty Law, agreed between States but outside of the control of Parliaments to amend. Free trade is conflated with free movement and this then leads to the formation of a market society, which disintegrates, as its only bonds are self-interest and contract. This might be called the liquidation of solidarity. As people are social beings with a natural tendency to attachment and relationship, they turn to sources of solidarity that are inherited and, in that sense, arbitrary in order to associate to gain some respite from the market storm. If globalisation is a rational order then democracy and community are considered unreasonable. We will witness this now with the rise of Reform and the election of Trump which will be greeted by uncomprehending progressive hysteria.
In order to understand this it is necessary to analyse the component parts of the ideology of globalisation. Globalisation consists of the four powerful forces of a) capitalism, b) member statism, in which obligation is to elites in other countries rather than the population of your country, and c) liberalism within the framework of d) a technological determinism that renders borders irrelevant. Each are based upon the unmediated movement of people and commodities through space in which the fundamental units are the abstract individual outside of history and relationships, and a collective based upon a constitutional legal order underwritten and constrained by multi-national treaties. It eliminates the possibility of politics to challenge this order, but maintains the state structure to enforce it.
Capitalism treats human beings and nature as commodities; fungible objects to be moved about, exploited and discarded on the basis of the maximum return on investment. Its distinctive feature is that the very substance of society is turned into a market, with fluctuating prices setting the value of human beings, land and food. This is what we refer to as a market society. It is unsustainable as the organising principle of society leading to human and ecological degradation, powerlessness and inequality. This is what Salisbury understood and no Conservative politician since Thatcher has been able to articulate. The Conservatives led Brexit but had no idea what to do with it. Its possibilities remain unfulfilled.
A member-state is one in which intermediate institutions are subordinated to centralised control in the name of procedural justice. It is mistaken to assume that capitalism works alone: it is, in all cases, in partnership with a Leviathan, or state, which creates the conditions of the enforcement of a contractual society. Member-statism is a form of domination in which political sovereignty loses its democratic nature and takes on a primarily administrative form. As the State defined politics as a technocratic redistribution of resources, rather than a mutual space of negotiation for the creation of a common good, there is little reciprocity or accountability in this model. Without a democratic society to hold it in check and challenge its centralising authority it can and has become a form of domination that undermines liberty and pluralism. There is no body politic.
Liberalism in its market, identity and utilitarian forms has been the dominant ideology that has shaped both market and state in recent decades. Liberalism is a theory that views the individual as formed outside of relationships and attachment and which conceives of emancipation as breaking the mutual bonds of constraint. It tends to subordinate democracy to the economic, technical and legal realms and political conflicts are reduced to managerial, technical or economic tasks. In this, capital is allowed to treat society itself as a domain of the economy. A system of market-based practices is imposed on the public as well as the private sector. It assumes the narrow self-interest of each one of us as an autonomous chooser. While there is a constant exhortation towards society, big, networked or civil, it continues to disintegrate.
In contrast, the argument developed here is that a common life is capable of being negotiated and that is the essence of politics. For example, immigration is a political issue which was hived off into the legal and constitutional order. Free movement is not an incontestable right and legal rights are always a political achievement. They require consent from a political community. They can be lost and their maintenance requires strong democratic support. This basic truth has been lost during the period of liberal ascendency when legitimate political concerns about immigration, as well as regional or industrial policy, are often considered illegal.
In a globalised world order based upon capitalism, the administrative state, and a liberal constitution, a sense of a belonging, of place, of work, of mutuality and responsibility are undermined though a lack of power. The very basis of conservative thought is liquidated. The point of democratic politics is to shape and preserve a home in the world against the threats of domination and dispossession and to maintain the structure of society in the face of intense forces of disintegration. This is the fundamental reason why only socialism can redeem conservatism, because conservatism has proven to have no immunity to the logic of capitalism in which ‘all that is solid melts into air and everything holy is profaned’. To quote Marx.
Brexit was a symptom not a cause of the present interregnum, and through Labour’s continued inability to distinguish between internationalism and globalisation it appears as a force that maintains a bankrupt settlement. It still cannot think creatively about the democratic renewal of inherited political and civic institutions such as the City of London or City and Guilds but their abolition. Institutional diversity is subordinated to procedural uniformity. Labour cannot offer respite from the demands of an unconstrained global order and the precarious powerlessness it generates.
And here lies the heart of the matter. Neither can Conservatives. The previous Government promised a ‘new economic settlement’, ‘levelling up’ and yet nothing happened. Michael Gove was an isolated maverick, unintegrated into the direction of Government. Conservatives could not move into the space opened up by Brexit and that was because they loved capitalism more than the ancient constitution. The sight of Liz Truss giving the eulogy to her Majesty the Queen at her funeral was a symbolic expression of a far deeper malaise. The glory of Her Majesty being lauded by someone so trivial was painful to watch.
The Conservative Party was born in opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws, it invented ‘municipal socialism’, clean water and an affordable railway system. It defied the logic of the free market in human beings and nature through the elevation of covenantal institutions, such as the monarchy, the Church and the Armed forces. Conservatism successfully defeated Nazism, Republicanism and Communism and yet it has proved incapable of resisting liberalism. It has lost its sense of the sacred, of tradition, of nation.
And while I believe that only socialism can redeem conservatism, because only socialism has an understanding of the revolutionary disintegration generated by commodification, it is equally true that only conservatism can redeem socialism. That, I fear, is a different lecture entirely.
Thank you.
Maurice Glasman
Maurice Glasman is a political theorist, academic, social commentator and Labour life peer in the House of Lords. He is Director of the Common Good Foundation and author of Blue Labour: the Politics of the Common Good (Polity, 2022).
The lecture was given on the 23rd October at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, the second in the 2024 series of the Oakeshott Lectures. A video of the lecture along with a discussion afterwards with John Gray can be found below.
NOTE
[1] These sentiments were echoed by President Xi in his foundational speech on socialism with Chinese characteristics. ‘History looks kindly on those with resolve, with drive and ambition, and with plenty of guts; it won’t wait for the hesitant, the apathetic, or those shy of a challenge.’
This story is featured in the Christmas-New Year 2024-2025 edition of the T4CG Newsletter.