The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left by Stuart Hall

Author:Stuart Hall [Hall, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839761362
Google: IeU2EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-05-18T23:26:15.519110+00:00

9

Authoritarian Populism:

A Reply to Jessop et al.

Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling contributed a long and important article ‘Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism’, to New Left Review 147. This article took issue with ‘authoritarian populism’ (hereinafter, alas, AP) and the use of that concept in my work on Thatcherism; and proposed some wide-ranging alternative theses. I should like to take issue with some aspects of their argument, not so much to defend my work as, through mutual discussion and debate, to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of Thatcherism.

My view, briefly, is that in their genuine desire to produce a general and definitive account of Thatcherism as a global phenomenon, Jessop et al. have been led to mistake my own, more delimited project for their own, more ambitious one. In so doing, they obscure or misread many of my arguments. They produce, in the end, a rather confused tangle of important arguments and spurious debating points. Let me say categorically that ‘authoritarian populism’ (AP) has never been intended to, could not possibly have been intended and – I would claim – has never been used in my work, to produce a general explanation of Thatcherism. It addresses, directly, the question of the forms of hegemonic politics. In doing so, it deliberately and self-consciously foregrounds the political–ideological dimension. Thatcherism, however, is a multifaceted historical phenomenon, which it would be ludicrous to assume could be ‘explained’ along one dimension of analysis only. In that basic sense, I believe the Jessop et al. critique to have been fundamentally misdirected. The misunderstanding begins, so far as I can see, with their partial and inadequate account of the genealogy of the concept.

AP first emerged, as they acknowledged, from the analysis of the political conjuncture, mid-1960s to mid-1970s, advanced by myself and others in Policing The Crisis.1 That analysis accurately forecasted the rise of Thatcherism, though it was researched in the mid-1970s and published in 1978. It pointed, inter alia, to a shift taking place in the ‘balance of social and political forces’ (or what Gramsci calls the ‘relations of force’), pinpointed in the disintegration of the social-democratic consensus under Callaghan and the rise of the radical right under Thatcherite auspices. It argued that the corporatist consensus – the form of politics in which Labour had attempted to stabilize the crisis – was breaking up under internal and external pressures. However, the balance in the relations of force was moving – in that ‘unstable equilibrium’ between coercion and consent which characterizes all democratic class politics – decisively towards the ‘authoritarian’ pole. We were approaching, it argued, a moment of ‘closure’ in which the state played an increasingly central ‘educative’ role. We noted, however, the degree to which this shift ‘from above’ was pioneered by, harnessed to, and to some extent legitimated by a populist groundswell below. The form of this populist enlistment – we suggested – in the 1960s and 1970s often took the shape of a sequence of ‘moral panics’, around such apparently non-political issues as race, law-and-order, permissiveness and social anarchy.

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