Nearly 30 years ago now I dropped out of a PhD exploring the communitarian critique of liberalism. My interest in liberalism continued through articles, chapters, book reviews and especially blog posts, but I never wrote anything major, original or influential. From the early 2010s my express ‘liberal’ output dropped further as higher education policy took over my life.
All of this is background to my surprise at being included in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party: Intellectuals and the Liberal Party of Australia, a study of six politically engaged liberal/Liberal intellectuals – Peter Coleman, David Kemp, Greg Melleuish, Margaret Fitzherbert, Louise Asher and myself. Along with Melleuish, I was never an MP, but I had several advisory stints with Liberal governments. I was on the winning side in some internal discussions but ultimately failed to achieve my policy objectives.
Geoffrey Robinson, author of The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party, is an academic at Deakin University. His book is old-school academic work – and I mean that in a positive way, that an academic’s first priority should be to understand their subject matter, not to denounce or to advocate. For someone whose previous book was called Being Left-wing in Australia he shows restraint.
In the break-up of Australia’s anti-communist political alliance, in the early 1990s after the end of European communism, Robert Manne and I took different political paths. But I still followed his work, with on one occasion significant benefits for my own career. When his ‘political memoir’ was published it went immediately onto my must- read list.
Early life
For me, the first quarter of Manne’s book – on his early life and education – was the most interesting part. His parents were Jewish refugees from Nazism just prior to WW2; his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. Robert was born in Melbourne in 1947. As Manne says, his family history made him ‘naturally sympathetic’ to refugees.
When Milton Friedman died in 2006 I wrote a blog post crediting him as an ‘enormous influence on my life’. I said back then that although few people call themselves ‘Friedmanites’, for many – including me – his writings guided us to a broader set of arguments and influences. Despite the subtitle Jennifer Burns gives her biography of Friedman -‘the last conservative’ – these were mostly ideas in the classical liberal tradition.
Classifying Friedman
Burns acknowledges that Friedman described himself as a classical liberal. But in the United States ‘liberals’ are the rough equivalent of social democrats or progressives in other countries. Tribally, Friedman was not one of them. His US partisan leanings were Republican, he was sceptical of ‘big government’, and he sometimes associated with people progressives hate.
If Friedman is a ‘conservative’, the word ‘last’ is doing a lot of work. It refers back to the post-WW2 synthesis of relative conservatism in social matters, private enterprise/free market economics and anti-communism adopted by ‘conservative’ political parties. Friedman more than anyone else turned the private enterprise part of this synthesis into a free market perspective. This combination of views still exists, but has faded as a political force. In the 2010s and 2020s populist figures like Donald Trump captured American ‘conservatism’.
For a non-American audience it is simpler to keep Friedman’s ideological classification as ‘classical liberal’.
The full set takes us from the pre-liberalism of the late 18th century, when ‘liberal’ ideas and institutions were yet to be linked into the ideology of liberalism; through liberalism’s highpoint in the 19th century (volumes one and two); the twentieth century’s dismal first half when racism, protectionism, war, economic depression and utopian socialism broke liberalism but not democracy (volumes three and four); to the defeat of socialism after World War II covered in the later parts of volume four; to the story of volume five, which covers the revival of the liberal project in the 20th century’s final decades followed by stall and setback in the early 21st century.
The 40 years after Sir Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, having been in office since 1949, saw a liberalisation in which liberals were one influence among many. Kemp’s idea of ‘liberal project’, a policy agenda, is useful in understanding how Australia became a more liberal society despite ideological liberals not being numerous or always highly influential. Many people had reasons for overturning the ‘Australian settlement’ of the 1900s: white Australia, high tariffs, and a highly-regulated labour market.
In Australia’s division of political labour for the most part the people outside government calling for more liberal social policies and more liberal economic policies were different.
Liberal social policies were often promoted by single issue movements, at their core people trying to improve their own lives and not advance general philosophical ideals, although sometimes attracting support by appealing to broader principles (see Jon Piccini’s book on human rights in Australia).
Liberal economic policies were promoted by a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, economists, business interests and think-tanks. In the think-tanks especially classical liberal philosophy was explicit, but in the other groups support for market mechanisms owed more to utilitarianism than freedom. The aim was greater and more efficient economic growth.
As in the immediate post-World War II period the Liberal and Labor parties provided the alternative governments. But ideologically party competition changed in the 1960s. Declining support for socialism within Labor and its increasingly university-educated and socially-liberal MPs and voters meant that attitudes to ‘liberalism’ were less of a divide between the two main parties. The Liberal Party often struggled to find a clear direction. Labor governments took the lead in ‘liberal’ reforms.
Brendan Duong points me to another Google innovation, a new way of tracking mentions of words and terms in books, using the huge archive of scanned books in Google Books. It can be used to track ideological fashion and interest over time.
In the easy to use version (there is a complicated-looking raw data download option) some care has to be taken with interpreting the results. For single words it is calculated as a % of all ‘unigrams’ or single words, for two-word phrases it is a % of all ‘bigrams’ or two-words. So percentages will always be lower for bigrams than unigrams, and I won’t directly compare them.
And because we are looking at percentages of all words in the category, a term could be rising in absolute mentions but still declining relatively.
Over the 150 years to 2000, we can see the changing fortunes of the three main Western ideological forces: socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. The interest of intellectuals in socialism is very evident here. Despite socialism entering a long decline in the 1980s, in 2008 it was still more mentioned slightly more often than liberalism. And despite the apparent ideological revival of conservatism, it trended slightly down from the 1960s.
[19/12: graphs and text updated to take account of later data]
But re-reading that article after all this time makes me think that if anything ‘left’ and ‘right’ have gained in utility since the early 1990s. The test of labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ is not whether they can fully describe someone’s political position. Rather, it is whether the label will reasonably reliably locate someone in significant political contests of the day.
In 2007 I used results from the 2004 Australian Election Survey to suggest that this was the case with the questions I examined – especially on party preference, perhaps the most important indicator because of the way it bundles reactions to many different issues.
In my 1993 article I suggested that Labor support for market reform was complicating the old left-right divide. Now there is little support for further market reform in Labor or anywhere else on the left, and near universal left support for a serious reform rollback on industrial relations. Continue reading “‘Left’ and ‘right’ not so useless after all”→
Tim Dunlop kindly exempts me from his argument that the right’s commentators generally gave the Howard government a soft time, while the left’s commentators have turned on Rudd.
Some theories:
* Right-wingers typically have low expectations of what politics can achieve, and so were not so disappointed with the Howard government. Left-wingers have high expectations – higher than is realistic – so are inevitably disappointed. There was a huge expectations and popularity bubble around Rudd that in my view was always absurdly out of line with the fundamentals. It had to burst and it has.
* Labor governments try to do more than Liberal governments, and given the inherent limitations of state action are therefore more likely to stuff things up. The national broadband network looks like the next big Rudd fiasco, if he survives the 2010 election. Blunders put both left and right commentators on the attack.
Martin Krygier’sresponse to Waleed Aly’s Quarterly Essay makes an interesting distinction between ‘methodological’ and ‘normative’ conservatism. Methodological conservatism offers what he calls ‘well-nigh universal’ lessons: that the world is complex, that radical change will always have unintended effects, that long-lasting things are likely to have something going for them or at least be ‘sticky’.
‘Normative conservatism’ expresses an ‘attachment to familiar features of the society in which the conservative lives’. The problem with it is that these ‘familiar features’ can be ‘lousy’; other ideologies provide some grounds for discriminating between those that are worth keeping and those which are not. We can accept methodological conservatism, but still recognise that ‘sometimes the disease actually is worse than the cure’.
John Howard said that he supported ‘modern conservatism in social policy’. I argued several years ago that this seemed to amount to more emphasis on facilitating the social institutions conservatives did like – such as supporting families through generous handouts – and less emphasis on prohibiting or penalising things conservatives did not like.
During the Howard years, however, there were anomalies in this approach, which Tony Abbott seems to be moving towards removing.
Earlier in the month, Abbott announced a paid parental leave scheme. While this didn’t go down very well in his party room, I argued that it fits with a ‘modern conservatism’ that recognises that married women work, and that this is a factor in both deciding to have children and in the care of their children. The social science case for giving women six months off to care for and bond with a newborn child is far stronger than the case for longer term income redistribution in favour of families.
To think of an ideology in absolute terms is to take a principle or idea its adherents support and make that its foundational principle or idea, from which all else must derive or be deemed philosophically inconsistent.
To think of an ideology in relative term, by contrast, considers these principles and ideas relative to the status quo and other political ideologies.
So relative to the status quo and social democracy, ‘neoliberalism’ could be considered the ideology of markets. ‘Absolute’ opposition to any other organising institution than markets is a non-existent political force in Australia. But compared to where we are, the ‘neoliberals’ are those most in favour of using markets more. Continue reading “Absolute vs relative understandings of ideology”→
Andrew Norton 