On Fraternity: Politics Beyond Liberty and Equality [Paperback]

 

 

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Ever since Burke conservatives have been arguing for the importance of the "little platoons" in society. Our lefty friends haven't taken a blind bit of notice as their socialist Big Push chewed up not just platoons but whole regiments of civil society.

Danny Kruger argues that conservatism is really the third leg of the revolutionary stool of Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! The left keeps trying to fold fraternity into liberty or equality but it won't work.

Tony Blair, he writes, wants to rebuild civil society with a new contract between citizen and state, a social justice based upon equality and emancipation.

Conservatives see social justice arising from "a system of naturally occurring and beneficial relationships... positive liberty through social membership." You cannot build civil society upon individual emancipation and egalitarian compulsion as the left believes.

All this is standard stuff, but Kruger consciously makes his argument on the left's ground, leavening appeals to Burke and Hayek with resort to Hegelian dialectic. He insists that the left can't get where it wants to go with the bare bones of liberty and equality.

You can't get genuine community with a radical individualism controlled by government statute and box-ticking bureaucracy. You need a middle ground of non-coercive authority and persuasion. Not just "I shall" or "You must" but "We should."

This is a good effort, another brick laid on the foundations put down by Edmund Burke two centuries ago. Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we will wake up and discover that our conservative bricklayers have built a home in which most people, even our progressive friends, want to live.

At the beginning of the short book, its author insists that "I do not speak for the Conservative Party". This being said, Dr Kruger is a special adviser to David Cameron and is a former leader writer for The Daily Telegraph. He also showed the manuscript of his book to David Willetts, Oliver Letwin, Daniel Hannan, and to various other people more or less closely connected with the Leader of the Conservative Party. It was, moreover, discussed before publication at one of the lunchtime seminars hosted by Civitas. I have attended several of these, and it is easy to imagine that this one was attended by just about every important academic or intellectual connected with the Conservative Party.

The disclaimer, therefore, is a matter of form. The book is--and is intended to be regarded as--an authoritative statement of Conservative Party thought. I do not see how there can be any reasonable doubt of this. But it is a point that I must ask my readers to bear continually in mind. I once sat next to Dr Kruger at a private dinner party. I do not recall that we disagreed on anything. He wrote a very nice article last year, regretting the death of Chris Tame. Some of the names given his his Acknowledgements are of friends. If I now say that this book is an intellectual fraud in its intention, and shabby in its execution, I hope he and they and you will not take my comments as personal.

So far as I can understand him, Dr Kruger is trying to analyse the current state of affairs in this country. During the second half of the twentieth century, he says, we tried two great experiments. The first was socialist equality. This began to break down in the 1960s, when trade union privilege and heavy spending on welfare led to inflation and a loss of competitiveness.

The second was a return to market liberty under Margaret Thatcher. This restored the economy, but led to a collapse of various customs and institutions that gave meaning to the lives of individuals. Before coming to power in 1997, Tony Blair did promise to sort out the resulting disorder and general loss of faith in the system. However, since then, that promise has been comprehensively broken. We therefore need a new government that will reconcile the jointly necessary but often opposed impulses of liberty and equality. Thus the title of the book.

Exactly how these impulses are to be reconciled within a new and stable order is not made clear. But Dr Kruger does excuse himself in advance with the statement:

"In this essay I try to outline the political philosophy which justifies the 'communal [but] not official'. It is necessarily abstract, a 'resort to theories', in Burke's disparaging aside. It is devoid of detailed policy, yet I hope it demonstrates that, all our common rhetoric notwithstanding, there are real differences between Right and Left, founded on very different ideas of how society works."[p.11]

This is a wise excuse, as it saves Dr Kruger from having to admit the fraudulent nature of his analysis. For there was no return to market liberty in the 1980s. If it took me until nearly the end of the decade to shake off the false assumptions I had made as a teenager, I was one of the earliest conservatives to understand the real nature of the Thatcher project. It was to reconcile the fact of an extended and meddling state apparatus, plus big business privilege, with the need to generate enough wealth to pay for it all.

There was no reduction in tax for the middle classes. There was no overall cutting of regulations. Instead, the taxes and regulations were revised so that we could, by immense hard work, reverse the long term relative decline of the British economy.

As for the working classes, their ability to slow the growth of gross domestic product was checked by the ending of various--and perhaps indefensible--protections, and by the importation of a new proletariat from elsewhere in the world that had no perceived commonality of interest with the native working classes, and that would, by its presence, drive down their living standards.

So much for economic liberty. Where other liberties were concerned, we saw a consistent rolling back of the gains made since about 1600. Procedural safeguards were shredded, so that the law was turned from a shield for the people into a sword for the state. A close surveillance was imposed over our financial affairs. Freedom of speech and association were eroded--partly by direct changes in the law, partly by creating a general environment within which disobedience to the expressed will of the authorities became unwise. At the same time, verbal and institutional associations that bound us to a more liberal past were progressively broken; and structures of democratic accountability were replaced by indirect rule from Brussels and from a more general New World Order.

The election of a New Labour Government changed very little. Government under Tony Blair became more politically correct than it would have been under the Conservatives. But this was balanced by a greater caution in matters of European harmonisation. The destruction of the Common Law and its replacement by a panopticon police state went on regardless.

There is not--and has not been during the past quarter century--any political conflict in this country between liberty and equality. We are both less equal today than we were in about 1980, and we are less free. Such debate as there is between the two main political parties is over details. The project common to both Labour and Conservative Parties is the transformation of this country into a place where the upper reaches of the ruling class can enjoy a status and relative wealth not known since early Stuart times--and in which there can be no challenge from below.

The Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher started this. It was continued by Labour under Mr Blair. It will not be reversed by the Conservatives under Mr Cameron.

Given these facts, it is not surprising that Dr Kruger has refused to discuss any detailed policies. Where nothing new is intended, nothing at all should be promised.

But this brings me to the apparent purpose of the book. Our politics may be degraded from the level even of the late 1970s. But we have yet to sink entirely to the level of America, where elections seem to be decided wholly by money and competing armies of drum majorettes. It is still expected that political debate in this country should proceed from an intellectual basis. The Conservatives have no intellectual basis that they dare honestly explain to us. They must at the same time convey the impression of one. They have, therefore, put Dr Kruger up to write a whole book about Conservative principle, but to do so in a way that will allow almost no one to understand him.

The language of his book is in all matters of importance pretentious and obscure.

Take, for example, this:

"Central to the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung or 'sublation' is the preservation of the antithetic stages passed through by the thesis. Not only is the thesis 'realised' by its sublation: the antithesis too is strengthened and perpetuated. But the thesis only preserves those elements of the antithesis it finds conducive to itself--there must be, in the key Hegelian word, an 'ethical' relationship between thesis and antithesis, by which one relates to another in a natural and organic manner."[p.18]

Or take this:

"The person abstracted from all contingent circumstances--the main in isolation--is not truly a man at all, merely (Hegel again) 'the sheer empty unit of the person'. The original Kantian individual who signs the social contract from behind the veil of ignorance, with his objective intellect and dispassionate morality, is admirable and necessary. But he is not enough."[p.49]

Or take this:

"For freedom is attained, said Hegel, not by the individual divorcing himself from society but by marrying it. True--what he called 'concrete'--freedom is not 'the freedom of the void'. It is the freedom of 'finding oneself' in society; of 'being with oneself in another'. By my marriage with society I attain my true self, which before was abstract. I am realised, socialised; I whisk aside the veil of ignorance, 'the colourful canvass of the world is before me'; I plunge into it, and find myself 'at home'."[p.51]

The meaning of this second and third can perhaps be recovered. They appear to mean that individuals function best when they are surrounded by familiar things that give meaning and security to their lives. As to the first, your guess is as good as mine.

There is page after page of this stuff. We have commonplaces dressed up to look profound. We have manifest nonsense. We have knowing references to Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes and Burke and Mill. We have untranslated words and phrases, or words that have been taken into English but never widely used. There is, of course, "Aufhebung". This is at least translated--though, until I looked it up in a dictionary, I could only understand "sublation" from its Latin roots. But there is also "noumenal"[p.13], "heteronomous"[p.38], "soixantes-huitards"[p.40], "thetic"[p.66], and much else besides. Oh--and we have the word "discombobulated"[p.58]. This is an illiterate Americanism from the 1830s, and has no fixed meaning. Such meaning as Dr Kruger gives it must be gathered from the context in which he uses it.

There are many subjects, I grant, discussion of which requires a specialised language. There is music. There is the law. There are the natural sciences. But this is so only for the most elaborate discussions. For basic presentations, plain English has always been found sufficient. And it is not so for discussing political philosophy. For this, plain English is ideally... Read more ›

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