Reinventing Civil Society

Book: Reinventing Civil Society. David Green. 1993

Citations

Markets generate more prosperity, but `more goods' do not make a good society.

The challenge we face today is to identify a sense of community or solidarity that is compatible with freedom. Competitive markets coordinate the efforts of people who may be self-interested, even selfish, but they do not create solidarity.

Contrary to the view attributed to Mrs Thatcher, that there is `no such thing as society', there is indeed such a thing. But it is not synonymous with the state. It is the realm of `activity in common', which is at once voluntary and guided by a sense of duty to other people and to the social system on which liberty rests.

Introduction

The author's motivation:

"This book began as an attempt to consider the lessons the former communist countries of Eastern Europe might be able to learn from Western experience of voluntary welfare provision. But, as the study proceeded, it quickly became obvious that we in the West have done almost as much harm to our own voluntary associations as the communist countries, not as part of a deliberate effort to create a mass society of individuals ruled by an elite, but as a result of the inadvertent displacement effect of the welfare state. By narrowing opportunities for personal idealism in the service of others, the welfare state has eroded the sense of personal responsibility and mutual obligation on which a resilient civil society rests.

As I began to think about how best we could re-invigorate our once rich and varied voluntary, communal life it also became obvious that the economic philosophy which had come to dominance in the 1980s did not provide intellectual tools adequate to the task. This inadequacy was particulary reflected in the social policies of the Thatcher years, which were dominated by a hard-boiled economic rationalism which failed to do justice to human character and potential.

We only have to look at our own language to discover the rich variety of virtues that make a free society work and which describe the obligations we all owe to one another. Good character, honesty, duty, self-sacrifice, honour, service, self-discipline, toleration, respect, justice, self-improvement, trust, civility, fortitude, courage, integrity, diligence, patriotism, consideration for others, thrift and reverence are just a few. Yet many of these words cannot readily be used today in ordinary talk. To the modern ear, they have a ring of either antique charm or total obsolescence.

The leading voices of Thatcherite philosophy invariably saw the Thatcher revolution in moral terms. They hoped to restore what Shirley Letwin, in her excellent book The Anatomy of Thatcherism, called the `vigorous virtues' of self-sufficiency, energy, independent mindedness, adventurousness, loyalty to friends and hardiness in the face of enemies. The Thatcherite emphasis on the vigorous virtues was of central importance in halting the pace of Britain's genteel economic decline. And today, the superiority of robust market competition compared with socialist planning is accepted across the political spectrum. But, Thatcherism suffered from a missing ingredient. It is the thesis of this book that the missing dimension was its inadequate emphasis on the `civic virtues', such as self-sacrifice, duty, solidarity and service of others.

Over twenty years ago in 1971 the IEA's Editorial Director, Arthur Seldon, commissioned The Morals of Markets2 by the philosopher H.B. Acton to examine the moral questions raised by competition. In the heat of the subsequent battle to improve public understanding of economic problems, the issues raised in that book were put to one side but now, in recognition of its continuing relevance, the Liberty Fund has republished The Morals of Markets. Reinventing Civil Society is an attempt to refine and develop further our thinking about the moral dimension of a free society."

Excerpts

The tradition of Communal Liberalism

"Liberty rests on people taking personal responsibility for the maintenance of the institutions, morals and habits fundamental to freedom.

This tradition of `communal liberalism' is not a utopian ideal of the imagination, it was the lived reality of liberty for many long years until well into the twentieth century. Most of this book is an attempt to describe the day-to-day character of this tradition by re-assessing the voluntary social institutions that had emerged under its influence by the end of the last century, when their incomplete evolution was prematurely halted by the march of socialism."

The historic role of Friendly Societies

"For liberty was not only an intellectual ideal, it was the guiding philosophy of the common people who acted out its values in their everyday lives. This reality is nowhere better exemplified than in the work of the friendly societies, those organisations for mutual aid which flourished in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and which were joined by the vast majority of working men, far exceeding the membership of the other characteristic organisations of the working classes, the trade unions and the co-operative societies. (In 1910 there were 6.6m registered members of friendly societies; 2.5m members of registered trade unions; and 2.5m members of co-operative societies.)

The friendly societies are of additional interest for two other reasons. First, the record of the friendly societies contradicts the wide perception today that, although a market society is undoubtedly the best way to generate prosperity, it provides inadequately for the health and welfare of its citizens. As Chapters 3-10 relate, the historical reality turns out to have been the opposite of the legend of welfare before the welfare state widely believed today.

And second, the experience of the friendly societies shows that we have under-estimated the displacement effect of the welfare state. Thatcher Governments thought it an adequate response to defects in the health service, for example, to introduce competitive tendering within the state system. But this was to misunderstand the true character of a free society. Competitive markets are a necessary but not sufficient condition of freedom. The welfare state did not only suppress the incentive system of the competitive market, it also suppressed those institutions which served as proving grounds for men and women of good character and which provided outlets for idealism, service and achievement. We must therefore find new ways to re-energise `civil society'."

The role of Civil Associations

"If Oakeshott is correct in identifying the absence of overwhelming concentrations of power as the essence of liberty, how can we account for the peculiar character of the state in Britain? According to Oakeshott, modern European states can best be understood as torn between two contradictory methods of association which are the legacy of the medieval age. The first mode of association he calls `civil association' and the second `enterprise' or `purposive association'.

An `enterprise association' is composed of persons related in the pursuit of a common interest or objective. In the pure form of such an association there are not several purposes, but one sovereign purpose. The task of leaders is to manage the pursuit of this goal and to direct individuals as appropriate. A nation might comprise many such enterprise associations, including business corporations, but here I am concerned with nation-states which take on this character. In a nation of civil associates people are related to one another, not because they share a concrete goal, or are engaged together in a substantive task, but in that they acknowledge the authority of the jurisdiction under which they live. Respect for the authority of the law does not imply that every person supports every law. The law is a changing phenomenon, and so what commands respect in a civil association is both the law as it stands and the law-reforming process. The laws specify the conditions to which every person subscribes as each pursues his or her self-chosen life style. This type of association is therefore a system of law and its jurisdiction. People are associated, not because they share the same substantive wants, but because they accept the same conditions in seeking to pursue their own goals as they believe best.5 Each is under an obligation to act justly towards others, and each person enjoys equal status under the jurisdiction. The character of the laws is central. In both an enterprise association and a civil association people are subject to rules of conduct, but in an enterprise association the rules are instrumental to the pursuit of the common aim. In the pure form of civil association, the laws are moral stipulations, not instrumental commands.

Under a system of civil association the sense of solidarity of the people as well as the legitimacy of the government derives from the shared sense that the social system gives everyone their chance to do the best they can in their self-chosen sphere of life and also from popular awareness that the continuance of liberty depends on everyone doing their bit. The sense of solidarity in an enterprise association, however, derives from the belief that each person is part of a single grand scheme, in practice either to modernise or develop the nation's resources or to mould human character in a new direction. Thus, in a nation organised as an enterprise association, individuals are instruments of the government; whereas in a civil association the government is an instrument of the people, charged with keeping in good order the institutions which allow people to pursue their self-chosen ideals. Historically, Oakeshott characterises the two types of association as outcomes of medieval thought and practice. The enterprise association approximates to `lordship' and the civil association to `rulership'. In medieval times kings were lords of their domain or estate, and therefore managers of their people. Kingship in the age of lordship was, therefore, estate management. The King was lord of the manor."

Civic Capitalism

"This seventeenth-century antipathy to over-mighty government developed in two directions, not always clearly distinguished. The first, which I will call civic capitalism in the hope of avoiding confusion with other related ideas, can be understood as an effort to prevent the king from reverting to `lordship', in Oakeshott's language. The civic capitalist ideal was a nation united as civil associates, not as instruments of the king's will. This antipathy to the king was based on a sense, entrenched since at least the thirteenth century, that English subjects were governed by a ruler not by a lord, and that the law was a moral and prudential code for living which no person, and certainly no king, ought to defy. The Stuart kings were seen as usurpers meddling with the centuries-old rights of subjects. Classical liberalism, or civic capitalism, was therefore respectful of history. It saw England's civilisation as worth preserving.

The other leading liberal tradition is commonly called rationalism. It did not see the struggle against the Stuart monarchs as a restoration of historic rights, but rather saw all tradition as suffocating, and barely distinguished between custom and superstition. This tradition originated with Descartes and, in its search for `clear and distinct' truth, over-estimated the capacity of governments to re-arrange human affairs.

How did the civic capitalists see the human condition?

Essentially, they saw it as a struggle against human imperfection. Two particular shortcomings concerned them, sinfulness and ignorance, and consequently the practical task of the civic-capitalist thinker and activist was to develop human civilisation by discovering or improving those institutions which encouraged the opposites of sin and ignorance, namely goodness and learning. The moral ideal underlying civic capitalism is that human relations should, as far as possible, be based on free mutual consent rather than force or command. Classical liberals favoured this ideal because they believed it was more consistent with human nature than rule by the `lord of the manor'. But it was also an ideal in the sense that it challenged human character by setting a standard to be aimed for. It presented people with an ideal way to live. The particular combination of institutions that came to be supported had taken reasonably mature shape by the time that liberals like David Hume, Adam Smith, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley were writing in the eighteenth century. The character of civic capitalism was elaborated further during the American constitutional debates of the 1780s, not least by the authors of the Federalist Papers, by Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany, by Montesquieu in France and during the nineteenth century by Tocqueville, J.S. Mill and Acton. During this century the tradition has been developed still further by Friedrich Hayek and Michael Novak. It is important to avoid one major source of modern confusion.

Liberty under law is not a doctrine which sees liberty as the absence of all restraint, or freedom from all obstacles to our desires. The classical liberals did not want `power', they wanted `liberty', that is they did not seek the `power' to achieve their particular ambitions, they sought a social order—a civilisation—which allowed every person the liberty under law to contribute to their own good and the good of others as each believed best. To repeat Acton's words: they treasured the liberties of others as their own.

The ideal was liberty under law, not liberty to do as anyone pleased. It was liberty guided by conscience rather than naked wants. Nor was it relativistic. Liberty was valued, not because civic capitalists thought that any individual's views or values were as good as anyone else's, but because it is not possible for any authority to identify in advance who will turn out to do the most good, or benefit humankind to the greatest extent, or to judge which values, habits or institutions will ultimately prove most conducive to human co-operation. Consequently, they thought that every one should be free to contribute as each thought proper, in the belief that we will recognise real progress when we see it.

The view of thinkers such as Acton and Tocqueville must also be sharply distinguished from another attitude often associated with liberalism. It is the view, which derives from Rousseau, that people are essentially good and that they are made bad by institutions, such as bad laws or bad governments.

The law is intended, not only to punish wrong conduct, but also to smooth the path of voluntary co-operation. Roughly speaking, criminal law punishes moral wrongs, and civil law is the body of rules that makes it easier to work with other people, as buyers or sellers, employers or employees, and consequently to create wealth more readily.

Thus, civic capitalism was a political philosophy based on a belief in the possibility (but not the inevitability) of progress and how it could best be achieved. In essence, civic capitalists have taken the view that progress is the result of trial and error. As the distinguished turn-ofthe- century economist Alfred Marshall argued, collectivism might seem in the short run to deliver benefits, but this was only because it lived off the fruits of earlier private initiative. In Marshall's view, if the springs of progress were not to dry up, there was no substitute for the bearing of risks at one's own expense.

The civic capitalists were first and foremost concerned to discover those common institutions, both private and public, which, on the one hand, encouraged individuals to become better citizens and which, on the other, reduced the harm that would result when human behaviour fell short of the ideal. Individuals are capable of great self sacrifice and many have laid down their own life for the good of others, but they are also capable of great wickedness. The civic capitalists were idealists whose vision was tempered by their awareness of human fallibility. As Professor Alfred Marshall wrote, `progress mainly depends on the extent to which the strongest, and not merely the highest, forces of human nature can be utilised for the increase of social good'.2 Unlike some conservative thinkers who have celebrated established authority per se, civic capitalists did not forget that authority is a means and not an end."

Summary:

I.

"The founders of civic capitalism saw the state as the protector of the people from crime and oppression as well as the facilitator of human ingenuity. They saw individuals as each struggling to understand the world around them and to make the most of their own lives in mutual concert with others. No less important, they saw people as united, not in pursuit of a uniform goal, since all were free to pursue their own objectives, but by the particular sense of solidarity that results from a shared awareness of belonging to a civilisation that gives everyone their chance. Solidarity is a term generally associated with egalitarianism, or with the creation of cohesion through compulsory transfers of cash—as exemplified by the European Community's `cohesion fund'—but the solidarity associated with liberty is the sense of unity that flows from being part of a culture that respects persons as fully entitled to make the most of the opportunities available to them and which expects each individual to uphold the values on which freedom rests. To feel love for their country has been typical of free citizens, as demonstrated by the high morale of the allied soldiers of World War

II.

Also central to the thinking of civic capitalists has been a commitment to personal responsibility, partly for prudential and partly for moral reasons. They thought it prudent for people to be free to pursue their own lawful ends as their judgement dictated and at their own risk, because better results in the interests of all were more likely. This view was taken partly because, when decision makers spend other people's money, they do not exercise the same care as when they personally bear the cost of failure or reap the reward of success. In addition, classical liberals believed that the personal bearing of risk gave individuals a powerful reason to improve their knowledge, skills and character. Morally, their view was based on the argument that freedom will not work unless we all accept an obligation to treat others with the respect due to fellow moral agents."

The role of the medical establishment in destroying mutual aid

David Green:

"The freedom to experiment during the period before the 1911 National Insurance Act allowed consumers to protect themselves from the demands of organised medicine and to encourage higher standards of care. First, liberty enabled medical consumers to organise themselves against the efforts of the medical profession to force up pay and free doctors from accountability to patients for the standard of care. Second, the absence of a public sector monopoly before 1911 enabled different methods of paying for medical care to be attempted and threw up valuable lessons from which others could learn and on which future progress could be based. The 1911 Act led to the dismantling of these arrangements by the state at the behest of the doctors, as Chapter 9 describes."