New Right Ideology, Welfare State Form, and Citizenship: A Comment on ConservativeCapitalism

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

New Right Ideology, Welfare State Form, and Citizenship: A Comment on ConservativeCapitalismAuthor(s): Desmond S. KingSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 792-799Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178936 .

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New Right Ideology, Welfare State Form, and Citizenship: A Comment on Conservative Capitalism DESMOND S. KING

London School of Economics and Political Science

The similarities between the Reagan and Thatcher administrations have stimu- lated considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Scholars have sought to clarify the ideology of these administrations, the content and significance of their public policy, and their relationship to preceding social and economic conditions in the United States and in Britain.1 Kenneth Hoover's recent interesting and insightful article contributes also to the analysis of these important issues.2 Hoover distinguishes the traditional and libertarian strands jointly constitutive of "conservative capitalism," the ideology common to both the Reagan and the Thatcher administrations. He then applies this distinction to aspects of government policy under these two regimes, notably to New Federalism in the United States. Both tasks are undertaken effectively and provide useful insights about these administrations, their policies, and ideological lineage. However, I think two aspects of Hoover's account can be reconsidered or extended: the ideology he attributes to these two administrations, and their impact upon welfare state policies. In discussing ideology it is important to delineate between liberalism and conservatism, rather than to push these into the single category "conservative capitalism," and to explain the relationship between them. To analyse the impact of these administrations' policies on welfare it is necessary first to outline differences between the welfare state in each polity according to a more general model of welfare state forms.3 In this comment I shall concentrate primarily on the first issue,

1 See, for example, William Keegan, Mrs Thatcher's Economic Experiment (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984); Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Government (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983); and John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill, ects., The Reagan Record (Cambridge MA: Ballinger Co., 1984).

2 Kenneth R. Hoover, "The Rise of Conservative Capitalism: Ideological Tensions within the Reagan and Thatcher Governments," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29:2 (1987), 245-68.

3 These themes are developed in Desmond S. King, The New Right. Politics, Markets and Citizenship (Homewood IL: Dorsey Press and London: Macmillan, 1987), and King, "The State and the Social Structures of Welfare in Advanced Industrial Democracies," Theory and Society, 16:6, (1987), 841-68.

0010-4175/88/8201-0402 $5.00 ? 1988 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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both for reasons of space and because establishing the ideological contours of New Right thought is a necessary preliminary to effective analysis of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.

DECONSTRUCTING NEW RIGHT IDEOLOGY: LIBERALISM AND

CONSERVATISM

The post-1973 decade was one of substantial economic difficulty for most advanced industrial countries including Britain and the United States-a marked contrast with the preceding decades of economic growth and relative prosperity. These new conditions provoked a rightward electoral (or policy) shift in the majority of Western democracies. This rightward shift was most pronounced in Britain and the United States, however, and associated with a grouping of ideas and movements collectively termed the "New Right." Specifying this term is not easy, because it has been applied variously to government public policy and to administrations as well as to particular ideas, theorists, and politicians. In common with many analysts, Hoover recognises that there is not one simple and coherent set of principles but rather several, not necessarily linked together.4 Hoover's response is to distinguish between libertarian and traditional conservative capitalists. The former "believe in individual initiative; the use of governmental power to improve individual's competitive position is immoral. . . . Equality before the law is thought to be a sufficient guarantee of equal opportunity. . . . Libertarians see a role for

government only in protecting the freedom of individual choice from en- croachment by others."5 By contrast, traditionalists see "government's role as the guarantor of appropriate forms of in-equality. The use of governmental power to counter the natural inequality of people is impractical and un- wise. . . . Government must act to restrict individual behavior that threatens the maintenance of the institutional structure of the society."6

Accordingly, amongst those supporting capitalism Hoover sees a distinction between traditionalist conservatives and libertarian conservatives. This is quite a useful categorisation, and the content or principles Hoover ascribes to each category are coherent ones. To some extent, this grouping overcomes the important difficulty of classifying coherently the diverse strands and ideas contained in New Right thought. However, I think Hoover's terms are not the most appropriate; what he terms libertarianism is better classed as liberalism, and his category of traditionalism can be represented as conservatism. New Right ideology is thus an amalgam of liberal and conservative ideas, but

4 See Ruth Levitas, ed., The Ideology of the New Right (Oxford: Polity, 1985); Andrew Gamble, 'The Free Economy and the Strong State," The Socialist Register, 5 (1979), 1-25; and Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds., The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983).

5 Hoover, "Rise of Conservative Capitalism," 248. 6 Ibid.



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liberalism is paramount. Liberal economic and political theories have under- pinned (however nebulously or uncertainly) the policies pursued by the Rea- gan and Thatcher administrations. Both administrations formulated economic solutions in terms of liberal economic arguments (popularised in the doctrines of supply-side economics and monetarism for the Reagan and Thatcher administrations respectively). Such arguments were pivotal to their initial electoral platforms and appeal. However, as Hoover argues, there is a second element to the ideological composition of these regimes. Both employ conservative arguments, which, I will contend, arise as a consequence of the pursuit of liberal economic policy objectives. Liberal economic strategies produce social and political outcomes that can be justified or rationalised through the use of social and moral conservative principles. On their own, these latter would have little electoral appeal; they must be viewed as residual claims addressing the political and social consequences of liberal economic doctrines when pursued in national policy.

Liberalism

Liberal economic and political tenets are at the core of New Right arguments, as Hoover recognises. Three main sets of ideas within liberalism have exer- cised an influence upon these politicians. First, liberals defend what we might call the "traditional liberal values" centred on the superiority of the market in

producing economic prosperity and political freedom. These "traditional liberal values" may be reduced to an emphasis upon the individual (understood as a healthy, employed, educated, white adult male), a limited role for the state, and support for market processes.7 These principles-a belief in competitive individualism, a minimal state role, and a maximum market role- have their lineage in classical liberal economic and political thought based on rationalism and individualism. The second strand of liberal thought is "public choice analysis," that is, the application of economic techniques and assumptions to political and social behaviour. For public choice analysts the absence of market mechanisms and constraints explains the growth of government. Bureaucrats, voters, and politicians maximise their utility, which results in

large government and unprofitable public sectors.8 Therefore, constitutions should be redesigned to control public spending, and market practices should be introduced into the public sector. Public choice theory is fundamentally individualist in assumptions and analysis and thus closely connected to liber-

7 See Nigel Ashford, "The Bankruptcy of Collectivism," in The "New Right" Enlighten- ment, Arthur Seldon, ed. (London: Economic and Literary Books, 1985); Nick Bosanquet, After the New Right (London: Heinemann, 1983); and Geoff Hodgson, The Democratic Economy (Har- mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984).

8 See Gordon Tullock, The Vote Motive (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976); James Buchanan et al., The Economics of Politics (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978); and William Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago IL: Aldine-Atherton, 1971).



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alism. Third, liberalism embrances the ideas of "libertarians," who promote a more trenchant version of liberal economic and political principles but who remain a distinct subgroup of liberalism. Like liberals, libertarians are committed to individual property-based rights, but they desire a much smaller state.9 For example, Nozick allows only a minimum night-watchman state, and anarcho-capitalists deny even the public provision of collective goods. I think Hoover is incorrect to use the term libertarianism to refer to all these sets of ideas. It is more helpful to group them as liberal principles, recognising libertarianism as a powerful subcategory. We do not disagree on the broad content of this category,10 but to use the term libertarianism rather than liberalism is misleading.

Conservatism

Liberal values are not the only ones commonly associated with New Right positions, however; there is a set of moral and social conservative arguments too. These are secondary to the liberal arguments, because they make their appearance principally to address the outcomes of liberal economic policies. These conservative arguments fall into two groups. First, social and moral conservatives seek the abrogation of the social rights of citizenship associated with welfare state policies and institutions, constructed in the postwar decades in Britain and the United States."1 The welfare state is criticised as an economic burden requiring taxes and crowding out private investment; it is also claimed to erode market incentives by providing people with a guaranteed source of income during adverse economic circumstances, thereby reducing their search for-potentially unattractive-jobs. However, these economic criticisms are extended to moral ones by some New Right theorists who argue that the welfare state has encouraged the disintegration of the family unit. 12 In the United States these moral claims are reflected in the religious right too, personified by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.13 In Britain, the regular

9 See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Collier Books, 1978); Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957); and Stephen Newman, Liberalism at Wits' End (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

10 Nevertheless, there are important differences between liberals and libertarians. For example, according to libertarians, freedom is the supreme value and must take priority over order in all cases; such a strong view is unlikely to be held by many liberals.

1 For the concept of the social rights of citizenship, see T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Doubleday 1964); King, New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship, ch. 9; and Desmond S. King and Jeremy Waldron, "Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision," British Journal of Political Science, 18:4 (1988), 489- 517.

12 Charles A. Murray, "The Two Wars against Poverty: Economic Growth and the Great Society," The Public Interest, no. 69 (1982), 3-16. See also George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981) for a more radical statement.

13 See Gillian Peele, Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), ch. 3.



796 DESMOND S. KING

citation of "Victorian values" by the Thatcher administration suggests the dislike of New Right politicians for the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s.'4 The implementation of liberal economic policies concerning state spending-primarily the reduction of welfare services-has produced enor- mous hardship for many people, as Hoover rightly notes.15 To meet protests against these outcomes it is convenient for New Right liberals to cite arguments about family disintegration, self-help, and moral values, but these are not at the forefront of their policies. Thus, for example, abortion has not been outlawed in either country. Social and moral conservatism shapes government rhetoric more than policy, because many economic liberals are not necessarily social conservatives. But that rhetorical role is important to dealing with the consequences of liberal economics, which have increased unemployment and retrenched welfare policies. Hoover overstates the role of this strand in the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher administration; the morally conservative agenda has received little more than lip-service from them.

The conservative strand of New Right thought is most directly in contradiction with liberalism: the desire of social authoritarians for a strong state to maintain public authority regardless of the consequences for freedom. Order is a more important value than freedom for social conservatives.16 For these theorists the state must have absolute authority, and this authority should be mirrored by paternal dominance in the home. State authority must be used to reassert discipline in schools and to discard the egalitarian benefits of the

postwar social citizenship rights, according to this strand of New Right ide- ologists. Hoover characterises this group as traditional conservatives.17

Liberalism and Conservatism Considered

Hoover traces the conflicts between his libertarian and traditional conservatives in the formulation of Reagan's New Federalism policy, particularly regarding welfare policy.18 Hoover's analysis of the development of policy is useful but fails to acknowledge how the contradictions between liberalism and conservatism have achieved a sort of unity in New Right thought; though, as his analysis shows, this contradiction has not been displaced from policy making. That they contradict is illustrated most starkly in their preferred roles for the state and their notions of progress: where liberals value individuality and social progress as a source of rational emancipation, conservatives value "tradition, essentially medieval tradition. From conservatism's defense of

14 See David Edgar, "The Free or the Good," in The Ideology of the New Right, R. Levitas, ed.

15 Hoover, "Rise of Conservative Capitalism," 254-57. 16 See essays in Maurice Cowling, Conservative Essays (London: Cassell, 1978); and Roger

Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980). 17 Hoover, "Rise of Conservative Capitalism," 248. 18 Ibid., 251.



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social tradition sprang its emphasis on the values of community, kinship, hierarchy, authority, and religion, and also its premonitions of social chaos surmounted by absolute power once individuals had become wrenched from the contexts of these values by the forces of liberalism and radicalism."19 Conservatives are precapitalist, whereas liberals consider capitalism and in- dustrialisation to hold the possibility of greater happiness and freedom. Thus liberals' esteem for freedom and progress shares little with the conservative obsession for order, an organic notion of the state and fear of economic change. What is the link between these two doctrines? In the context of the New Right ideology influencing the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, each strand gains from association with the other. Liberal economic and political theories are the source of New Right policy aims; conservative principles represent secondary arguments available to justify the unpleasant social and political consequences of liberal economic policy. The liberal goal of retrenching social welfare implies a traditional conception of the role of women and the family; conservative arguments about social order and traditional values provide a legitimating ideology for such policy outcomes. In addition, conservatism offers a coherent theory of the state to liberals, some- thing that liberal theory lacks. Finally, conservatives and liberals are united in their attack upon the social rights of citizenship bound up in the welfare state.

New Right ideology is not only a hybrid, as Hoover rightly notes, but remains full of inconsistencies and paradoxes in its various manifestations. Hoover and I agree that these manifestations can nevertheless be categorised usefully into two main strands. But I think those strands are liberalism and conservatism-rather than libertarian and traditionalist conservatives-with the latter a source of secondary-level, though nonetheless important, arguments for liberal politicians and theorists. Such diverse strands and ideas produce the tensions, contradictions, and frequent incoherence common to both administrations. But to analyse their policies-and the source of these policies-it is necessary to delineate the range of ideological positions under- lying the two administrations and to understand how these contradictions are absorbed into policy making.

STATE POLICY AND WELFARE STATE FORMS

Hoover develops an analysis of the Reagan administration's New Federalism policy and its impact upon income-maintenance programmes. His analysis is valuable but can be strengthened through consideration of the nature of the welfare state in Britain and the United States. Both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations are committed to reductions in public spending and to halting the growth of the welfare state and hence the extension of social citizenship that these institutions represent. Neither administration has accomplished the

19 Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London: Heinemann, 1966), 11.



798 DESMOND S. KING

substantial inroads they desired, though each has shifted the priorities within total government spending away from social spending.20 This outcome de- rives from the institutional strength of the welfare state and from the public support for the social rights of citizenship they embody.

These issues can be treated systematically by incorporating Korpi's distinction between marginal and institutional welfare state forms.21 Each is an ideal type with the first implementing selective, means-tested welfare policies and the latter providing universal services based on a more progressive tax system. Institutional welfare state forms are constructed to minimise demarcations within society based upon welfare; marginal welfare state forms reinforce such demarcations by maintaining distinctions between means-tested and universal benefits. The type of welfare state form developed and implemented within each polity influences the structural position of welfare institutions within that system, producing different levels of support for them. This in turn should produce different outcomes when efforts to retench welfare policies occur. Institutional welfare state forms should be more popular than marginal ones, because their integration into society is on a universal rather than a selective basis. The American welfare state approximates the marginal model, whereas the British one is closer to the institutional ideal type. This difference seems to have been important to the policy outcomes of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations regarding reductions in social spending. In the United States those programmes not means-tested, like social insurance programmes, remain intact, whereas public assistance entitlement programmes-like food stamps, AFDC, and housing assistance-have suffered considerably. In Britain universal welfare programmes, such as health and education, have maintained their core institutions, reflecting their widespread popular support and universalistic basis.22

As Hoover notes, the suffering produced by these cuts is considerable. But in order to grasp fully the vulnerability of these programmes, it is necessary to determine the form of the welfare state in the United States and in Britain, because this indicates the level of support individual policies will hold and the status of the social rights of citizenship in each polity. And again to understand why the Reagan and Thatcher administrations are so determined to retrench social citizenship, it is important to deconstruct the New Right ideology upon which they draw. Without a clear conception of the diversity of

20 See Ray Robinson, "Restructuring the Welfare State: An Analysis of Public Expenditure, 1979/80-1984/85," Journal of Social Policy, 15:1, 1-21; and Palmer and Sawhill, eds., Reagan Record.

21 Walter Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1983). 22 See Nick Bosanquet, "Interim Report: Public Spending and the Welfare State," in British

Social Attitudes. The 1986 Report, Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon, and Lindsay Brook, eds. (Aldershot: Gower, 1986).



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their ideological sources (and their interrelationships), the apparent contradictions associated with New Right policy will remain unintelligible. Hoover's paper contributes to both tasks, and my intention has been to complement his work through clarification of the key concepts of New Right ideology and welfare state form.



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New Right Ideology, Welfare State Form, and Citizenship: A Comment on ConservativeCapitalism