A question of balance

Citation

Rankin, A. (2002), "A question of balance", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.05414fab.003

A question of balance

Aidan Rankin

Keywords: Economic growth

If I had to make choice of the place of my birth, I should have preferred a society which has an extent proportionate to the limits of the human faculties; that is, to the possibility of being well governed: in which every person being equal to his occupation, no one should be obliged to commit to others the functions with which he was entrusted: a state, in which all the individuals being well known to one another, neither the secret machinations of vice, nor the modesty of virtue should be able to escape the notice and judgement of the public; and in which the pleasant custom of seeing and knowing one another should make the love of country rather a love of the citizens than of its soil (Rousseau, 1754).

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice and oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society (Smith, 1776).

These two philosophers of modern Europe were contemporaries and have been associated with opposing poles of the political debate. Rousseau, although a rebel against many a state in his time, is today generally perceived as the prophet of the interventionist state – the state described in a newspaper article by Britain's Labour Home Secretary as "a positive force, empowering and enabling people to shape their lives, a collective vehicle for progressive change" (Blunkett, 2002). Smith, by contrast, has come to be associated with the minimal state, with economic liberty and the freedom of the individual from state control, or as Isaiah Berlin called it "negative liberty'.

Yet in the above passages, Rousseau's emphasis is, for the most part, on the individual and the state as his servant, not his master. Smith's emphasis, by contrast, is on the concept of public duty. His words are a reminder to his "neo-liberal" disciples, as much as his "left-liberal" critics, that he believed in a balance between the free workings of the market and the sense of social responsibility that makes a society and its people "civilised". Indeed both thinkers are concerned with balance, whether between the individual and the state, the private and public spheres, the economic and the social.

If there is a lesson, or overall theme, to our recent history it must surely be that political and economic systems break down when the balance between those parts is lost. The totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, Fascism and Communism, both arose out of unbalanced societies, in which political institutions and economic arrangements worked against large sections of the population and had become instruments of iniquity. They were themselves unbalanced, and although they claimed to be on opposite ideological poles their imbalance was essentially the same. Both totalitarianisms, that of the "right" and that of the "left", made the mistake of elevating the collective above the individual, instead of compromising between the two. The group identities on which they depended – class for the left and race for the right – were based less on shared characteristics than on the hatred of outsiders.

Today, the same imbalance is found in many aspects of modern liberalism, especially in the movements widely identified as "politically correct"[1]. Such movements attach more importance to group identity than individual needs or wishes. As such, they often devote most of their time coercing and denouncing those they seek to "liberate" – much as the Marxists of old berated the workers for false consciousness. The influence of political correctness can bring an imbalance to the definition of civil and human rights. When human rights are defined in collective more than individual terms, they can be used to deprive individuals of liberties such as free association and, as Orwell put it, the freedom "to do what you like in your spare time". In parts of Europe and the USA, such liberties have been curbed in the interests of combating alleged prejudice. The liberal-leftist version of "human rights" is coercive, more interested in changing human nature than in bringing out what is most positive in human beings. It could be described at times as a democratic totalitarianism. Politically correct human rights are a travesty of a noble, and highly practical ideal, embodied in both the Universal and the original European declarations.

The totalitarianisms of left and right were both collectivist. Both were skewed against the individual and in favour of the state. Both therefore failed for the same reasons. Today, the left is still obsessed with the state but its emphasis has shifted from the economic to the cultural sphere. It is less interested in nationalising businesses, for instance, than in imposing "gender balance" or "diversity" on them. It is more interested in blurring the division between public and private ("the personal is political") than it is on extending public ownership in the traditional sense. The result is not a public-private balance but new and subtler forms of coercive interventionism: put simply, the model is Brave New World in place of 1984. Meanwhile, the mainstream right has clung to a form of neo-liberal economics that places the market before all other areas of human activity. Like the old left, it is mesmerised by ideas of progress and economic growth, at the expense of all that is tried and tested. Neo-liberal economics values change over continuity and quantity over quality. Its rhetoric, although adopted by conservatives, is radical and, like most radicalisms, it lacks balance and flexibility.

Just as political correctness has acquired a cultural significance well beyond the left, neo-liberalism has influenced opinion well beyond the mainstream right. Indeed it has, for the past ten years at least, been the dominant economic discourse. Yet the series of financial scandals of recent months, and the wider problems associated with globalisation, suggest that it is time to question some of the basic assumptions at the root of neo-liberal economics. This does not mean that we should abolish markets or cease to value enterprise and commerce. On the contrary, we would be best advised to restore economics to its original purpose, that of good housekeeping. The problem with neo-liberalism is that, again like Marxism, it has placed economic processes before cultural and moral considerations. As a doctrine, it is failing for the same reason as the state socialism it supplanted. Those who care about the future of business should, therefore, be concerned with reintegrating economics into a wider cultural sphere, including the public good, as Smith emphasised. Economics should be our servant, not a quasi-mystical force over which we have no control. A balanced economy is a more worthwhile and ultimately more practical goal than limitless economic growth.

Note

1. For a fuller analysis of "politically correct" movements, see Rankin (2002). Available from New European, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT at £13.95.

ReferencesBlunkett, D. (2002), "There is more to freedom than being left to fend for ourselves", Daily Telegraph, 22 July.Rankin, A. (2002), The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism, New European Publications, London.Roussean, J.-J. (1754), "The health giving air of liberty", dedication to the Discourse in the Origin and Foundation of Inequality.Smith, A. (1904), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Dent & Sons, London, (originally published in 1774).