In the Shadow of Justice by Katrina Forrester

Author:Katrina Forrester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

7

New Right and Left

BY THE END of the 1970s, the New Right had arrived.1 Under the Reagan administration, state-sponsored financial deregulation and the turn to global capital markets alleviated and postponed the state’s crisis.2 At the same time, “the market” was enshrined as the solution to the problems caused by the end of the age of affluence.3 Markets were introduced into new areas of public and private life, and weaponized as the alternative to the state in attacks on its welfare and democratic functions.4 Amid the fracturing of the Keynesian consensus, and under the influence of monetarists like Milton Friedman, various forms of neoliberalism gained ground in liberal and conservative intellectual circles: antibureaucratic public choice theory, Austrian-inspired libertarianism, rational expectations theory, and supply-side economics.5

The neoclassical framework was projected from economics to politics. Economists, lawyers, and political scientists attacked aggregate concepts; conceived behavior in highly individualizing terms; condemned “unaccountable,” “rent-seeking” governments, bureaucratic “inefficiency,” and “non-market decision-making”; and argued for the privatization of public enterprises.6 For some, the government was no longer a unique authority, as Keynesians assumed, but one among several maximizing units.7 Others downgraded the state to an information- and knowledge-collecting entity and framed welfare provision as a drain on the economy. The argument that democracy causes inflation gained traction, as inflation was constructed as an “all-encompassing social crisis,” the prevention of which justified massive transformations in economic governance.8 American conservatism’s long-standing commitment to laissez-faire within labor markets and hostility to unions had free rein.9 Decisions were taken out of democratic politics and removed from public view. Both the public and the private were privatized.10 Yet the state was shored up for anti-statist ends as government policies and mechanisms forced change and realignment, strengthening capital rights and incentivizing doctrines of choice, responsibility, and competition in education, health, incarceration, and social services.11 This was a radicalization of and departure from the midcentury rhetoric of anti-statism that had penetrated liberal philosophy. It had been a mark of Rawls’s youthful barebones liberalism that one of the few responsibilities he ascribed to the state was to run lighthouses. By the 1970s, libertarian economists no longer argued that lighthouses were public goods made necessary by market failure. Even they could be privatized.12 Social justice, Hayek declared, was a “mirage.”13

Liberal philosophers underestimated how high the New Right would rise. Many did not see or did not object to the process of marketization taking place, whereby social relationships were subordinated to market logic and new aspects of life were commodified. In part this was because they were preoccupied not with the rising right, but the left. For political philosophers, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initially provided an opportunity to consider the nature of the social democratic left’s egalitarianism. The collapse of affluence during the previous decade, particularly in Britain, had looked at first like it might benefit the socialist left. “In the 1950s many of us thought that inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous,” wrote the Labour Party grandee and later founder of the Social Democratic Party Roy Jenkins in 1972.

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