On the Origins and Causes of the French Revolution

Although the financial crisis of the ancien regime was the immediate spark that set off the French Revolution, which broader factors within France contributed to the Revolution?

 

Prior to the evolution of the Estates-General into the National Assembly on the 17^th of June, 1789 and the taking of the Tennis Court Oath three days later, the state of France had been lumbering along in its burdensome way for generations. With French involvement in the American War of Independence pushing the intolerable and unsustainable financial administration of the country beyond breaking point, and the privileged orders anxious to maintain their status quo, it created the catalyst for the wealthy, professional and ambitious representatives of the 3^rd Estate to take up and claim political change and reform as their sacred and inviolable right.

This essay seeks to explore how other factors, in addition to the immediate bankruptcy of the monarchy, were to contribute to the causes of the French Revolution. It shall examine how factors such as the Enlightenment, although played down by many historians, provided the spirit and language of a newly politicised class, and how the manifest of this spirit in 1789 provided the recognition, justification and impetus for those feeling the more material pinch of the ancien regime to act, in the taking of the Bastille on the 14^th of July, 1789. It shall explore how the consistently blocked attempts at financial and administrative reform which could perhaps have satisfied most of the fairly moderate aims that found themselves presented in the cahiers de doleances. How these ‘cahiers’ in their turn allowed political thought to become a popular interest, but as McPhee points out, it is necessary to remember that “people were being consulted about reform proposals, not about whether they wanted a revolution.” [1]

With this in mind, it is important to look at how the ideas of the Enlightenment are both the product of their age – following industrialisation especially, but also advancements in science, and the relaxation of the influence of the church amongst thought and expression – and the expression of hope for a new age.

In his book Will and Circumstance, Norman Hampson looks at the writings of men like Marat, Robespierre and Brissot in the years preceding the Revolution and how they were influenced by the writers of the Enlightenment. He asserts that Montesquieu and Rousseau “were quoted, paraphrased and misunderstood by everyone who wrote about politics.”[2] These two men were to form the language and ideas that the men of the Revolution would take up and champion during the years of political change, reform and terror that followed the forming of the National Assembly in 1789. Ideas of the separation of judicial, legislative and executive powers and governments respecting the much confused concept of the ‘general will’ of the population became intermingled with the notion of the government playing an active role in the moral regeneration of its people.

Although these two positions seem at odds with one another, they were both drawn upon regularly to form a common and fairly moderate political ideology aimed at “the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man; …liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”[3] These ideas had been written and debated upon for decades preceding the French Revolution, and while their direct role in the events of June and July 1789 is demonstrably limited, their contribution to the emerging ideologies of the following years is almost total. As Duncan Townson argues, the philosophes were not revolutionary nor even opposed to the ancien regime itself, but that it was “only when the ancien regime had collapsed and new institutions had to be constructed did the ideas of the Enlightenment produce a revolutionary ideology.”[4]

Considering this view, the question to be asked is what constituted the collapse of the ancien regime. It could be argued that it was with the fall of the Bastille on the 14^th of July 1789 that the monarchy failed, however its role beyond this date is prominent but ineffectual, with the power of veto still legally available to Louis in late 1791, and also a remaining willingness to retain him as head of state.

Whatever the clear sign that power had changed hands, it remains that it was the calling for the meeting of the Estates-General in 1788 that began the events leading to revolution. What led to the calls for this group to meet again for the first time in over 150 years were the constant power struggles that were occurring between the King’s financial ministers like Necker, Calonne and Brienne, and the Paris Parlement and later the Assembly of Notables. These men saw that extensive changes needed to be made in order for the French economy to survive, whereas the Notables and Parlement saw the proposals as a danger to their own privileges and to the social order itself. Townson identifies the fact that Montesquieu saw the parlements, dominated by the nobility, as playing an intermediary role between King and subjects, preventing despotism of Louis and his ministers,[5] but it is precisely this role that was to block the reforms that may have prevented, or at least delayed the Revolution. As Albert Soboul saw it: “the aristocracy had undertaken the struggle against absolutism in order to recover its political dominance and preserve its outworn social privileges.”[6]

Following the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who had been Controller-General of finance and responsible for initiating many reforms such as a central treasury and the issuing of the statement of royal finances, the Compte Rendu in the late 1770s and early 1780s, one of the more prominent reforming ministers of the 1780’s was Calonne. When no longer able to secure loans to keep the French economy from collapsing after the American War of Independence, Calonne also found fiscal reform to be inevitable. In seeking to reform the tax system he came into conflict with members of the clergy and nobility. While these orders could see that reform was indeed necessary, and were willing to make concessions, they were unwilling to tolerate any changes that would affect their social position.

As Georges Lefebvre saw it, “by threatening the tax privileges, it [the reforms] aimed a blow at the social structure of the Old Regime.”[7] In an effort to bypass the opposition he expected from the Paris Parlement, and unwilling to trust in support from the King, Calonne arranged for an Assembly of Notables to consider his proposals. They met in the first half of 1787, and like the Paris Parlement who adopted a similar position, claimed that only an assembly with representatives from all three estates could decide upon questions of tax reform. Thus with the calling of the Estates-General and the cahiers de doleances was the way set out for the rising middle classes to be able to dominate the political debate that had previously been monopolised by the king’s ministers and the parlements, or in effect, the nobility.

The Estates-General convened on the 3^rd of May 1789, with changes having been made to allow for double representation for the Third Estate, so that they more or less equaled the number of deputies of the first two orders. It was assumed by the Third Estate deputies that voting would now be by head, and not as had previously been the case, by order, where each estate decided upon an issue and then cast one vote. It was thought that this would effectively negate the gesture of doubling the 3^rd Estate. What this effectively did was to put the first two orders at odds with the third, as observed by Mallet du Pan, “Public debate has assumed a different character. King, despotism and constitution have become only secondary questions. Now it is war between the Third Estate and the other two orders.”[8]

The men of the Third Estate elected to the Estates-General were the rising professional and mercantile classes. Doctors and lawyers as well as bankers and merchants. They were literate in legal matters and had experience in financial administration. They were well versed in the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu and interested in furthering their own aims and positions, which previously they had to do under the ancien regime by aspiring to noble office. Now they were presented with the opportunity to achieve the bourgeois aims that had arisen out of years of the slow move towards the industrialisation of the French economy, whilst also improving the lot of their fellow countrymen. It was this class of men who had learned the ideas for revolution, had been given the opportunity by the feuding ministers and nobles, and who possessed the financial means and independence to take part.

It could be said that the Revolution took almost everyone by surprise, although many had called for it, they had not necessarily envisaged it as it was to play out over the next five years. While many motives at work were purely for financial reform, the revolutionaries had been won over by the hyperbole of the Enlightenment writers. In this way the moral aspirations and political ideologies of writers like Rousseau and Montesquieu were to find themselves expressed in the reforms of the new governments, securing their contribution to the Revolution.

In terms of setting off the events of 1789, the financial reforms and counter-reforms over much of the 1780’s created an almost stalemate situation where stalling tactics led to the involvement of the new political breed, the representatives of the Third Estate who were to become the driving force behind the Revolution. In this way it was not just the bankruptcy of 1788 that sparked revolution, but financial mismanagement from the mid 1770s and earlier.

If it were the bourgeoisie who made the Revolution, the perspective that then follows is that the industrial revolution which made them, combined with the Enlightenment which shaped their ideas and thoughts, became the sufficient wedge to drive them between the administration of the Monarchy and the nobility at a time when both were weakened by their division from the other.

Bibliography:

Declaration of the Rights of Man

Hampson, Norman., Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

Lefebvre, Georges., The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962.

McPhee, Peter., The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Soboul, Albert ., A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.

Townson, Duncan., France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.

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[1] Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 45.

[2] Norman Hampson, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, p. viii.

[3] Declaration of the Rights of Man.

[4] Duncan Townson, France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12

[5] Ibid., p. 11.

[6] Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 14.

[7] Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, p. 22.

[8] Mallet du Pan in Townson, p. 26.

Article Review: Martin Wolf – ‘The Market Crosses Borders’

 ‘The Market Crosses Borders’ – Martin Wolf, from Why Globalization Works.

The excerpt titled ‘The Market Crosses Borders’ from Martin Wolf’s 2004 book Why Globalization Works focuses primarily upon the conflict between the ability and desire of markets to cross territorial borders; and the role states and governments play in regulating the movement of goods, services, labour and capital across these borders. Wolf discusses this conflict with reference to the following key factors of global economic integration; trade, capital and labour, before considering the further implications of geography and policy.

Wolf is a strong proponent of globalisation and economic liberalization. His intellectual origins – and the economic principle of comparative advantage which permeates this work – are heralded with an opening quote taken from Adam Smith’s …the Wealth of Nations. In this extract, Wolf expounds the thesis that ‘conflict between the natural tendency of markets to cross borders and the need for the states that define those borders to support markets is at the heart of all the challenges created by a global economy.’[1]

Revealingly, the recognition of this fundamental challenge comes in the introduction to this passage, wherein Wolf subtly assembles a disparaging view of the role of states in a global economy.

Wolf does this by explaining his own role in the global division of labour, and his own experience of markets crossing borders, largely in the form of consumer items available to him that are made elsewhere. The positive view espoused is no doubt informed by his favourable geographical situation, a determinant that Wolf returns to in more detail. He then creates a reasonable sounding implication that the operation of markets is fundamentally good, because those who engage in transactions ‘expect to be made better off’ by them.[2]

It should, however, require no debate that the reality frequently falls short of the expectation, and that these transactions are not engaged upon by equal parties. But at this point, Wolf’s preference is to discuss the inequalities of states, rather than that of other economic actors. Indeed, his emphasis on the statistics put under the heading of a country’s external transactions having little to do with the state itself serves to further sideline for the reader the role of the state in the operation of markets.

Wolf’s subsequent claim that ‘political institutions behave as if the welfare of foreigners counted for far less than those of nationals and residents’[3], when read with his analysis of inequalities in the capacities and efficacy of states domestically and internationally – which, he says, ‘makes for black holes in the world economy’[4] – completes this somewhat biased view. That is, that the opportunities and benefits of cosmopolitan markets are inhibited by states seeking to distort the operation of markets in the favour of its citizens, often at the expense of foreigners.

But although Wolf is certainly in favour of  liberalization of  markets and of controls imposed at borders, Wolf does not see liberalization as an all-or-nothing pursuit, nor even as an end in itself.[5] Rather, he is in favour of that which facilitates the freeing of movement of the elements of production between different jurisdictions. Herein, using examples of  South Korea, Taiwan, Chile and China, Wolf perceives a causal link between economic liberalization, economic growth and democratization, a contention which he cannot resist following with an unsupported reference to western leftists’ admiration for totalitarian China.[6]

This coincides with one of the more contradictory ideas explored in this article. Like Sachs et al.,[7] Wolf sees geography as being the main determinant of poverty, and muses that perhaps the ‘simplest thing we can do to alleviate mass human poverty is to allow people to move freely or their labour services to be traded freely.’[8]

Yet, in light of Wolf’s discussion of the increasing returns compounded by ‘agglomerations of skills,’[9] he does not seem to be seriously advocating an acceleration of the drain of skills from the poorer countries to the rich (which already occurs, as he rightly points out). In any case, this would not be the market crossing borders, but rather people crossing from one labour market to another; a subsumption of the poor into the wealthy societies of the rich.

It is in this area of people and labour that Wolf seems to struggle to find a standpoint as neatly anti-regulation and anti-government as he managed with his sections on trade and capital.[10] But despite his lack of surety, this freeing of labour seems to be the strongest recommendation in Wolf’s conclusion. Thus, while his convictions are well argued, it is the paramount role of people in a world economy on which Wolf finds himself confounded by the fundamental challenge he earlier identified between markets and states.

 

References:

Sachs, J., Mellinger, A., and  Gallup, J., ‘The Geography of Poverty and Wealth’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 9-13.

Wolf, M., ‘The Market Crosses Borders’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 401-9.

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[1] Martin Wolf, ‘The Market Crosses Borders’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, p. 402.

[2] Ibid., p. 402.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 403.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 404.

[7] J. Sachs, A. Mellinger, and  J. Gallup, ‘The Geography of Poverty and Wealth’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 9-13.

[8] Wade, p. 406.

[9] Ibid., p. 407.

[10] Ibid., pp. 404-6.

The Enlightenment, The French Revolution, and Edmund Burke

‘Burke was a lifelong student of the Enlightenment who saw in the French Revolution the ultimate threat to those modern, rational, libertarian, enlightened values that he sought to defend.’ Discuss.

The particular course of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution through to the Cold War which spanned almost five decades following the second world war, revived Edmund Burke from his eighteenth-century obscurity. Burke’s most famous work, his ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ offered a conservative moral and political philosophy which leant hope to those who held hopes of preservation – of religion, liberty, morality – in the most destructive century the world had yet known. This hope is able to be found in the writings of Burke because he clearly articulated the threats posed by ideology and revolution; because he was explicit in the values he supported; and staunch in their defense, from whatever threat. The following is an exploration of these three aspects of Edmund Burke.

Burke, unlike Nietzsche, did not suffer the fate of being largely ignored in the times in which he lived, before later being revived by the interest of scholars. Burke lived a public life as parliamentarian and writer, although he much abhorred the possibility of his private life being made public.[1]

On publication, his ‘Reflections’ sold extremely well with several new editions produced within a year of the first. Peter J. Stanlis, one of the most prominent Burkean scholars, believes the true success of the ‘Reflections’ is qualitatively different to that measured only by sales figures;

If we consider only Burke’s immediate practical intention, to warn against French revolutionary principles and to exalt a Christian and Natural Law conception of civil society, the Reflections was the most successful book of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and it was almost totally opposed to the prevailing spirit of the age.[2]

Burke confronted the general optimism which initially greeted the French Revolution in England with stern and dire warnings, delivered eloquently and with a modest wisdom in prose which sought not to dazzle the mind with its cleverness, but to appeal to the moral sense, heart and entrails of its reader.

Frederick Dreyer prefers to downplay this successful image of Burke. He argues, “that Burke condemned the French Revolution should cause no surprise. Eventually most Englishmen of his class would come to condemn it as well.”[3] Burke however, was Irish, which combined with false insinuations he was a catholic, created a tension within his identity as a British Parliamentarian. As for the reference to class, does Dreyer here mean the political ruling-class? If class were a determining and useful referent then perhaps Burke’s being the son of a successful lawyer, and his own experience of upward social mobility would suggest more affinity with the class of professionals that formed the vanguard of the French Revolution.

There was absolutely nothing “eventual” about Burke’s opposition to the Revolution, the quality of which was first articulated in 1756 in his satirical ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’. With “eventually” being the key word, the descent into violence of the Revolution may have been what “eventually” turned much of British opinion. But Burke had foreseen this, and in 1790 his highly successful and immediately influential ‘Reflections’ became the axis – and the dividing ground – upon which this opinion turned.

More usefully, Dreyer argues that much of the ‘Reflections’ is best understood as an attack or response to the Reverend Dr. Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’;

Without Price, Burke would not have started the ‘Reflections’ when he did; without Price the ‘Reflections’ would have turned into a different kind of book. It is not too much to say that unless we keep Price in mind it is impossible to understand fully the logic of Burke’s argument against the French Revolution.[4]

That is, many of the attacks in the ‘Reflections’ ostensibly directed at the French were a reflection of threats to English circumstances.[5]  J. G. A. Pocock concurs with Dreyer that the Reverend Dr. Price spurred on Burke to write the ‘Reflections’,[6] however the substance each attributes to this is different. Dreyer for instance, argues the passage on Marie Antoinette only makes sense when read with Price in mind.[7] On the other hand, Pocock sees at the heart of the ‘Reflections’ a question of political economy relating to the seizure of Church lands to use them as security for paper assignats (an action analogous to the spoliation of the monasteries under Henry VIII);

it is not possible to read Burke’s Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents this action – and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette – as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.[8]

This variance in possible readings of the ‘Reflections’ is indicative generally of the unsystematic nature of Burke’s writings. As with the work of Nietzsche, this has seen Burke’s writing interpreted as the needs of different readers arose. And yet it remains, despite any charge of Burke’s writings being unsystematic (spread as they were across pamphlets, books, records of parliamentary speeches, and public and private letters), that his ‘Reflections’ were comprehensive; as Seamus F. Deane notes,

Few authors, important or obscure, managed in the following two decades to raise any objection to the philosophes which had not already been expressed by Burke; he reaped the whole harvest of disagreement, insult, and invective in that one sweeping and memorable attack.[9]

Despite his opposition to the French philosophes, which will be discussed later in more detail, there is little doubt that Edmund Burke indeed was a ‘lifelong student of the Enlightenment’, or that he was consistent in his feelings toward it.[10]

Dreyer argues “Burke can be seen as an eccentric thinker only if we define the Enlightenment in perverse and narrow terms.”[11] Burke was much involved in the thinking, writing and ideas of the age, and although his work can be seen as running counter to the ‘prevailing spirit of the age’, he is still of it. If the age of the Enlightenment were to be characterised only by the primacy of rational and scientific enquiry, then it would be no stretch to think of Burke as a nostalgic eccentric. Conservatism and nostalgia, after all, are no strange bedfellows.

Despite Burke’s devout belief in the ‘great chain of being’, he seemed ill-content with his place in it, not following in his father’s footsteps to the bar, instead pursuing a career of letters and politics. This is not to suggest that this ambiguity is the result of hypocrisy or vanity on Burke’s part. Rather, as Isaac Kramnick puts forward, “the beginning of wisdom in understanding Edmund Burke is… in discerning his basic ambivalence to the two great ideological currents whose confrontation dominated his age.”[12]

While this is good advice to keep in mind, I’m not sure it does sufficient justice to the strength of Burke’s convictions. His first published work ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’ demonstrated the need Burke felt to engage with and respond to the main current of the Enlightenment;

Burke’s satire reveals that even in his early twenties he was increasingly aware that the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment encouraged men to submit to destructive analysis and criticism all the achievements of men throughout history.[13]

The writing of ‘Vindications’ and its being misunderstood as a serious work by Bolingbroke, whom Burke was satirizing, highlighted to Burke the danger of moral and social theories and speculation. At the heart of Burke’s study and feelings on the Enlightenment is the perilous nature of ideas and words;

When men find that something can be said in favor of what… they have thought utterly indefensible, they grow doubtful of their own reason; they are thrown into a sort of pleasing surprise; they run along with the speaker, charmed and captivated to find such a plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. This is the fairy land of philosophy… There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober part of truth…[14]

Stanlis is emphatic on this point; Burke “was convinced that words continue to influence people psychologically, even after they have rejected any belief in a historical state of nature.”[15] There can be little doubt that what Burke developed from his study of the Enlightenment was an utter revulsion for the immodest, elaborate, and self-contained historical and intellectual fictions such as ‘the state of nature’ and the abstract ‘rights of man’;

We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born…[16]

For Burke, the present state of British government, Constitution and society represented centuries of achievement. The Enlightenment in large part was represented by irreverent and self-satisfied schemers who would dare risk this for the sake of their untested speculations. It is a result of his study of the Enlightenment then that Burke, according to Jeffrey Hart,

was the first to recognize the deep moral division of the West, which was just then opening up, and which today, across the board, is decisive for our moral, political, and metaphysical opinions: and because Burke, having recognized the division and defined its doctrinal grounds, took sides.[17]

If Edmund Burke did not side with the doctrine that asserted no limits to the application of human reason and claimed universal rights and freedom for men, where then, did his values lie? The answer, of course, is that there were many things which Burke held in high esteem, but the three I wish to focus on are his conception of the ‘Moral Natural Law’, civil society, and government. On the ‘natural law’, my understanding of this in relation to Burke comes largely from the work of Peter J. Stanlis. Burke wrote;

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.[18]

God gives man his nature, and although we may not perceive clearly our origins or our end, let alone our purpose, Burke is arguing that we are able to perfectly perceive our ‘moral duties’, our obligation to which is the observance of the ‘natural law’.

Burke understood that there was a fundamental distinction between Natural Law and the philosophes’ natural rights.[19] The leveling zeal of the revolutionaries threatened the natural law, no matter how widely beneficial their egalitarian principles on the surface seemed. For Stanlis, this, rather than Price, or political economy, is the key to Burke’s response to the French Revolution;

To Burke the moral Natural Law was so basic to the ancient inherited social order of Europe that its subversion was enough proof that the revolution was the most extensive project ever launched against all religion, law, property, and real civil order and liberty.[20]

For Burke, because man’s nature was ordained by God, who prescribes his place in the ‘chain of being’, and it is in man’s nature to form society, civil society is then a divine bestowal.[21] Thus the subversion of the moral Natural Law was but one part of the blasphemy of the revolutionaries, in addition to which, Burke understood “that the spirit of the Revolution… was at its roots characterized by a hatred of the very idea of society.”[22]

In imagining a fictitious time where man in a ‘state of nature’ was uncorrupted, freer and supposedly happier than his modern counterpart, due to a lack of social roles and obligation which he must fulfill, the revolutionaries believed they could remove the ‘chains’ of society and free man within it, and without destroying it.

If Burke did imagine a ‘state of nature’, which I am not convinced he did, I imagine it may have been more akin to Hobbes than Rousseau; a ‘war of all against all’. Perhaps more telling than the comment on the ‘state of nature’ in Frank O’Gorman’s assessment is the view of civil society; “for Burke, the state of nature was anarchic and primitive from which civilised social life was a thankful deliverance.”[23] The use of the word ‘deliverance’ is perhaps no accident, through civil society might be achieved the redemption for the ‘fall’ from the biblical ‘state of nature’;

To Burke, man’s relationship to civil society is a moral necessity; it cannot be voluntaristic, for that would exalt will above right reason; nothing could be more false and wicked than the Lockian theory of a voluntary and revocable social contract based upon a hypothetical state of nature.[24]

In that man is a social creature by his ordained nature, and does not choose society but is born into it, he may not choose to forgo society and its rights or obligations. Natural Law, civil society and obligation are inextricably bound with religion. Indeed, Seamus F. Deane argues that;

The belief that the atheist should have no existence in the community because his creed denied the foundations of civil society is one of the most persistent and unshakable of Burke’s convictions.[25]

Thus the separation of church and state pursued by the revolutionaries is to Burke a repudiation of the divine gifts of government, society, and religion. Moreover, it is the interconnection of all these elements, what Rousseau would call ‘chains’, which shelters man and links him with his past and with his species

Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy – all of which radical man would rip off – man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy.[26]

The demystification of institutions removes the awe and respect with which Burke believed they should be viewed. None of these could be perfect for all at any given time, yet they were an inheritance that linked man with his past, and it was their duty to preserve or cautiously reform them as needed for future generations.

Kramnick asserts that “Burke repudiates the fundamental liberal belief that institutions are produced by the willful choice of specific individuals.”[27] Not only would the abolition of social institutions with the view to create new ones in their place not succeed to any specified plan, it would disinherit those yet unborn of the link to their history. Reformers in government, then, should approach with caution, with the preservation of the spirit of their institutions in mind and without false hope or millenarian pretenses; for Burke, “all that wise men ever aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst.”[28]

With more in mind, I believe, than simply preventing things coming to the worst, Burke would actively defend the principles of his convictions and the values of the moral Natural Law wherever he found them to be in danger. These occasions included the attempt to impeach Warren Hastings with regard to the abuses of the East India Company in India, and defense of the British Constitution to the point of sacrificing personal friendships. As a politician, O’Gorman argues, Burke’s

main concern was… to preserve the balanced constitution of the eighteenth century, with the separate spheres of influence apportioned to King, Parliament and People no matter from whatever quarter a threat to it might appear.[29]

The affairs of India, the actions of the East India Company, and the impeachment trial of the Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, were a significant part of the business of Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s. Burke sought to impeach Hastings on the basis of natural law. He argued that no-one had the right to exercise arbitrary power. That the British Parliament enabling Hastings to govern as he saw fit was not a justification for the exercise of arbitrary power, nor was the excuse of arbitrary power being a general and accepted mode of government in Asia.

Stanlis demonstrates that Burke’s attacks against Hastings’s justifications of the exercise of arbitrary power “derives wholly from his ardent faith in Natural Law”.[30] Burke is seeking to defend not only the rights of the people of India as he saw them under the Natural Law, but also to defend against the introduction of “‘Eastern’ principles into England.”[31]

Against what was essentially the cultural relativist position of Hastings, Burke invoked something he believed to be universal;

Mr. Hastings has no refuge… let him fly from common law, and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born; let him fly from acts of parliament… still the Mohammedan law condemns him… Let him fly where he will… law, thank God, meets him everywhere – arbitrary power cannot secure him against law; and I would as soon have him tried on the Koran, or any other eastern code of laws, as on the common law of this kingdom.[32]

Yet what Burke considered to be universal was inimical to the definition supplied by the philosophes. So deep ran the convictions that Burke held regarding the French Revolution, that it had the effect of separating Burke both politically and personally from many of his allies and friends who sympathized with it, notably Charles James Fox and Sir Philip Francis. Burke’s conception of his duty to the British Constitution apparently left him with no other option.[33] His words in Parliament with regard to the break with Fox are included by Jeffrey Hart, and are worth repeating here for the sense they give of Burke;

It is indiscreet at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies or give friends occasion to desert me. Yet firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution places me in such a dilemma; I am ready to risk it, and with my last words exclaim, ‘Fly from the French Constitution’… yes, there is a loss of friends. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.[34]

Far from viewing events in France as a change of government, Burke observed the specter of rational revolution across the channel beginning to haunt the chambers of the British parliament. For Burke, the French Revolution wasn’t merely a turn of events he did not approve of, it was the culmination of decades of the sort of Enlightenment philosophy that he abhorred. The remaking of a constitution upon abstract universal rights and formalities invented through speculation would not be worth the paper it was printed upon. Rather, “Burke insisted upon the concrete realization of man’s natural rights in civil society, through the incorporation of basic moral principles in constitutional law.”[35]

An ailing constitution was neither the grounds for experimental surgery nor drastic doctrinal measures. In the following famous passage from his ‘Reflections’, Burke’s rhetoric paints a macabre and graphic picture of those that would tamper  irreverently with the institutions of state;

he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion… he should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father’s life.[36]

To Burke, who spent his entire adult life in opposition to the main intellectual current of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was the culmination of that movement. In this he saw the Revolution as a continuity of the Enlightenment, rather than an accidental misuse of its principles. Deane argues that in Burke’s view, the philosophes “helped to cause the Revolution. Burke, then, saw the French Enlightenment in terms of the Revolution.”[37] But we know that this is simply not true. Burke had strong feelings toward the Enlightenment thinkers which he expressed decades before revolution.

Burke knew that the threat to Europe didn’t originate in the French Revolution; it was born in the philosophy of sensibility which inspired and found full expression in the revolution. The combining of Cartesian reason with individualism and a conscience based on the feeling of the individual. For Stanlis, Burke’s condemnation of sensibility is the reverse side of the coin which put Natural Law at the heart of his response to the Revolution;

sensibility permeated an epicurean philosophy of pleasure, power, and will with moral feeling; it corrupted people by teaching them to justify evil means in practice for noble ends in theory, to act without restraint or a conscious reference to any legal precedents or moral code.[38]

In this is evidence of an idea that Burke would have found preposterous. The idea that the creation of a better future justified whatever speculative methods the rational politician could devise. As we have seen, Burke did not believe it possible for men to construct institutions according to their will, thus justifying harm to those living for an undeliverable benefit to those yet to be born was a frightful proposition which he saw in naked terms; “justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end.”[39]

Peter Stanlis saw that it was on this reasoning that Burke was able to predict the Terror. The Terror was murder done in the name of public good in the service of abstract rights, and “the ethical norms common to man in civil society would be extinguished in favor of emotional appeals to political slogans favoring the general welfare.”[40]

The attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the principles of government, with the view that through this reason might be discovered the perfect system that would be universal in its application, suitable and true for all men at all times, for Burke is an assault upon society and the divine. Deane remarks it unsurprising that Burke “should connect the abstract, universal theory of the philosophes with atheism” and that to declare this universality “is to assert human despotism against the divine plenitude.”[41]

Indeed, this despotism would also be extended over people in society in the exercise of arbitrary power in the name of abstract speculation and millenarian zeal, with no reference to the moral Natural Law. Burke detested arbitrary power, it is precisely this he sought to defend against in the impeachment of Hastings and his criticisms of Britain’s treatment of the American colonies. His support of the Americans and subsequent condemnation of the French confused many observers, but like his willingness to defend the balance of the British Constitution against the King, Parliament and the people as the need arose, so too would he employ what seemed conflicting intellectual defenses against the varied dangers of the Enlightenment thinkers; “Burke exalted reason over will when he opposed the excesses of Rousseau, and sentiment over reason when he opposed the extremism of the philosophes.”[42]

Government should be formed on a strong foundation of concrete moral standards, not on any formal division of power or scheme which is guided by theoretical and speculative rights. For Burke, the French Revolution simply provided the evidence of the intellectual sin and hubris of the Enlightenment philosophes. It was a realization of his deepest fear

that speculative abstract rationalism had the power to destroy all social institutions and conventions, all that people had constructed with great care and labor over centuries of building civilization up from crude barbarism to its present degree of perfection.[43]

What right had the philosophes to disinherit future generations of their property in society? What right to, at their fancy, undo the legacy left for them? While the philosophes would justify such actions against the universal freedom which they believed was the right of man, to Burke, this would be a liberty that encroached arbitrarily on others, those yet unborn. Sovereignty placed in the hands and whims of a majority of the people was neither legitimate or just. It was arbitrary power without check, and without deference to a moral code; and Burke would have none of it;

The French Revolution, say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority of any other people, the people of England for instance, wish to make the same change, they have the same right. Just the same undoubtedly. That is, none at all.[44]

Burke’s opposite conception of freedom and rights, argues Jeffrey Hart, was the essential element in Burke’s reaction to the Revolution; “ for Burke, freedom was a concrete and historical thing, the actual freedoms enjoyed by actual Englishmen: they enjoyed the historic rights of Englishmen.”[45] This is by no means to say that, because Burke regarded his freedom as privilege of being a member of English society, he would thus deny those same freedoms to other societies which had not managed to cultivate their own liberties and freedoms. Burke’s speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings demonstrate this conclusively.

Burke recognised that  “to govern is to restrain man.”[46] Man left to his own devices without the bonds of society, the links rather than the ‘chains’, was corruptible and capable of much darkness and evil. Man’s ‘state of nature’ was civil society, and in this he had proved both wicked and good. “The restraints on men,” argued Burke,

as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule: and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.[47]

Man’s place in society was his link to the divine. Although he knew not how this came to be, nor for what purpose, as far as man could perceive what was moral and what was just, such was his duty. So far as man could humbly and venerably influence the institutions of his society, which were the legacy of his ancestors who themselves through civil society were connected to the divine, man’s duty was to infuse these institutions with the moral Natural Law.           

Would the opportunity to create the ‘best of all possible worlds’ justify a sacrifice of human suffering to attain it? No; from this the best that could be created is the ‘second-best of all possible worlds’. The ‘best of all possible worlds’ would not require any extension of human suffering to bring it into being. Burke understood this, that although we could imagine something greater, we are restricted by what is possible. Burke believed that we always have the opportunity to work slowly and cautiously by degrees in effecting our reforms; but we do not have the ability to construct a new society from the wreckage of the old. The descent of the French Revolution into terror and violence is no small vindication of the principles of Edmund Burke.

 

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955.

Deane, Seamus F., ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 295-320.

Dreyer, Frederick, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 239-56.

Hart, Jeffrey, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-74.

Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977.

O’Gorman, Frank, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986.

Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 275-94.

Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991.

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[1] Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977, p. 68.

[2] Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991, p. 39.

[3] Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 239.

[4] Dreyer, p. 241.

[5] Ibid., p. 253.

[6] J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 278.

[7] Dreyer, p. 251.

[8] Pocock, p. 278.

[9] Seamus F. Deane, ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 319.

[10] Stanlis, p. 163.

[11] Dreyer, p. 256.

[12] Kramnick, p. 7.

[13] Stanlis, p. 150.

[14] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 148.

[15] Stanlis, p. 167.

[16] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 178.

[17] Jeffrey Hart, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-8.

[18] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 47.

[19] Stanlis, p. 39.

[20] Ibid., p. 49.

[21] Ibid., p. 43.

[22] Hart, p. 262.

[23] Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986, p. 14.

[24] Stanlis, p. 42.

[25] Deane, p. 301.

[26] Kramnick, p. 33.

[27] Ibid., p. 25.

[28] Ibid., p. 22.

[29] O’Gorman, p. 13.

[30] Stanlis, p. 33.

[31] Ibid., p. 34.

[32] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 35.

[33] Hart, p. 259.

[34] Edmund Burke, quoted in Hart, p. 259.

[35] Stanlis, p. 45.

[36] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955, pp. 109-110.

[37] Seamus F. Deane in Hampsher-Monk p316

[38] Stanlis, pp. 186-7.

[39] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 177.

[40] Stanlis, p. 177.

[41] Deane, p. 317.

[42] Ibid., p. 310.

[43] Stanlis, pp. 149-50.

[44] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 93.

[45] Hart, p. 260.

[46] Kramnick, p. 30.

[47] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 67.

Neoliberalism and the Welfare State

“The Australian welfare state has outlived its usefulness. While it may once have been necessary for the government to provide the mass of the population with schooling, health care, age pensions and other necessities of life, it is not now. We live in an age when most people could afford to buy most or all of the services they need if only they were not taxed so highly to pay for the services the government wants them to have. The welfare state has become a costly anachronism which compels us to pay for inadequate or inferior services which we could purchase at a higher quality or lower price if we were left to spend our own money ourselves.”[1]

From early in the twentieth century, states and governments began to assume larger roles for themselves in maintaining the welfare of their people. Following the end of the second world war, a new social democratic trend emerged in left-leaning governments that desired to adhere to the common socialist slogan  ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ In many countries the welfare state has assumed different forms, arguably which fit the aspirations and individual character of their societies. From the residual models of Australia and the US to the social insurance style of the Scandinavian countries of Europe.

The rise of the ‘new right’ or neo-liberalism from the 1980s and its particular views on individuals, economics and societies saw renewed focus being applied to the welfare state. Neo-liberalism sees the welfare state as ‘anachronistic’[2] and argues that in affluent societies it is no longer required.[3]

The first part of this essay shall thus be dedicated to examining the elements of this perspective and the merit of the neo-liberal case. Much of the background and themes for this argument will be taken from the series of three articles by Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies titled ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare’ and discussed in relation to this series and the Australian context. These elements include an emphasis on individual choice, lower taxation, efficiency, market provision, self-reliance and smaller government. The Australian context is one of residual welfare, means-tested payments, and of recipients experiencing negative stigma in politics and the media.

The second part of this essay will then consider whether the neo-liberal case for dismantling the welfare state will result in a society that is still able to provide for those groups who were identified to necessitate it in the first place, and if so, will it be more or less adequately than before. That is, can the market provide us with all the services that we require that are currently provided by the welfare state at the same or better quality and reduced cost? Can this be of benefit to societies as well as individuals?

Neo-liberalism, often referred to as the ‘new right’ (although the ‘new right’ also includes conservatives who are often at odds with some neo-liberal thinking), is a doctrine which argues the belief that the market should provide us with all the goods and services we need. The market, unlike governments, is responsive to the needs and preferences of individuals and is more efficient. Exchanges which occur in the marketplace are supposed to be effected to the mutual advantage of both parties.

One reason why debates and opinion on the welfare state are so divided is because they are tied up with opposing views of human nature:

Liberalism stresses rational motives and behaviour and the role of reason in social life… and sees people as reasoning beings who will flourish and develop under conditions of minimal restrictions on their liberty.[4]

This view is at odds with those that emphasize the instinctive, emotional or even altruistic nature of people.

Schmidtz and Goodin liken an economic system to a race, where protecting winners or ensuring equal opportunity is neither its function nor ability (this implicitly suggests also that protecting runners-up and losers is also not within its ability):

Its purpose is to give people reason and opportunity to race for the finish line and thereby participate in, contribute to, and ultimately create society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.[5]

In the neo-liberal view, the market, made up of competition and dealings between groups and individuals will be responsive to the needs of people by seeking out new opportunities, as a way to ameliorate the risk of people choosing other goods or services.

Much neo-liberal thought has its origins in the work of Adam Smith,[6] and more recently in the more radical thinking of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, whose ideas respectively influenced both Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US. The emphasis again here is on a reduced role for governments and the responsibility of the individual to provide for themselves, and indeed make choices for themselves, free from government intervention and interference.

The quote included in our topic for discussion is taken from a series of three essays written by Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies titled ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare’. These essays are of interest as they present a neo-liberal argument (albeit with some conservative overtones) with direct reference to the Australian context.

In these essays, Saunders outlines his argument for how Australia could reduce or even abandon the welfare state. In general terms, his essays seek to answer three questions: could this be done; should this be done, and if so; how could this be done?

To Saunders, the question of abandoning the welfare state is not so much about whether we could do without it, but rather it is a question of how we would like the money we all contribute (directly through income tax or indirectly through GST) to be managed.

A key element to Saunders argument is the concept of ‘welfare churning’, of which he discusses two types: ‘simultaneous churning’, and ‘lifetime churning’. The first refers to the situation of people who are taxed while at the same time receiving welfare benefits directly, such as child care subsidies or the Family Tax Benefit. The latter concept refers to the situation where individuals at different times of their lives may be net beneficiaries or net contributors of welfare, however over the course of their life the distinction between contributor and beneficiary is less marked. That is, most people over the duration of their lives pay in taxes most of what they receive in welfare. According to Saunders, “we are borrowing and lending money to ourselves as much as transferring it to other people.”[7]

Saunders estimates that if this churning were eliminated, $85 billion less in taxes would need to be raised each year,[8] and most of us would be able to fund ourselves the services we require. Part of his proposal (Saunders stresses a number of times that these essays are intended to stimulate debate, rather than be considered as a blueprint) for achieving this is to increase the tax-free threshold from the current $6,000 p.a. to $20,000 p.a. and reduce the rate of tax for all to 10 cents for each dollar above this level. He argues that even with these cuts we would “still have enough left over to scrap the Medicare Levy, Fringe Benefits Tax and tax on superannuation contributions.”[9]

In effect, this would take many on low incomes almost entirely out of the tax system, at least notionally, except for the indirect taxes they pay in GST. Saunders even suggests in a later article titled ‘A Welfare State for Those Who Want One, Opt-outs for Those Who Don’t’ that even those on low-incomes who wish to pursue the services provided by the welfare state in the private market could be helped to ‘opt-out’ by a system of exempting them from paying GST on any of the goods or services they buy (Saunders’ sources suggest this is an average of as much as $3,000 p.a. for those in the bottom income quintile).[10]

Would removing all obligation of taxation from the lowest income earners be a viable means of assisting them, or would it serve to further distance them from government? If nothing else, and regardless of whether the overall premise is equitable, the GST at least allows all to make a contribution on something approaching an even basis. If those already on welfare find themselves stigmatized by their perceived lack of contribution, could this additional concession make the problem worse? As Rudd argues, despite Hayek’s initial long preoccupation, neo-liberalism is not overly bothered by questions of social justice, or necessarily inclined to believe it exists or is attainable.[11]

Additionally, if we accept that in some instances that welfare stigma can be politically induced through publicized campaigns to expose welfare fraud and other abusers of the ‘system’, then perhaps it is plausible that Saunders’ suggestion of a sort of self-managed welfare (if not self-funded) might help to relieve the negative image. It is an image that is perhaps largely undeserved if we consider that 93% of men will receive some form of welfare payment over their lifetime.[12]

While it is possible that taking on the responsibility of privately managing their own health and education funding by ‘opting-out’ might have positive follow-on effects, Saunders sees ‘opting-out’ ideally as a permanent decision, with disincentives to opting back in.[13] This is troublesome when considered alongside Saunders’ observation that “not everybody… could afford to self-provision… even if they spread the cost over their entire lives through saving, borrowing and insurance.”[14] Would those in this situation who ‘opt-out’ be required to experience high levels of indebtedness at various stages of life?

It is thus that Saunders is forced to concede that the role of government in providing and ensuring welfare “cannot be abolished”.[15] The concern here might be that there would be growing disparity between a widely used private system and a shrinking and ailing government system deprived of its former levels of funding and perhaps no longer able to operate with the same economies of scale as it once did. But he does not see that this should be a case of business as usual for certain groups who may already be dependent on welfare.

He argues that “households whose lifetime earning capacity is limited… may… need the state to ‘top-up’ their spending power before they can join everybody else in self-providing”,[16] but explains in a footnote to this section that ‘top-up’ here refers to a ‘voucher’ system of paying for education, healthcare and income insurance.

In the second essay of the series, Saunders identifies six arguments that he uses in favour of moving toward self-funding. He argues that money is wasted administrating welfare churn and enforcing compliance. He believes that the decreases in taxes mentioned earlier would have a stimulating effect on economic growth. He asserts that a move to self-funding would help to mitigate the effects of an ageing population.

Furthermore, Saunders believes self-funding is personally empowering and argues that “the welfare state ends up infantilizing us.”[17] He also sees self-funding as a way to build social cohesion, believing this is created from “the bottom up”. There is a hint here of the conservatism that I alluded to earlier, when he links the growth of the welfare state with a rising instance of crime (however, he stops short of asserting any causal link between the two, but it seems clear which way he would prefer our minds be made up). Last of the six key arguments is that a move to self-funding would result in a depoliticisation of civil society.[18]

Of these six arguments, there are two whose implication deserve consideration in greater detail; that of social cohesion, and of depoliticisation. With regard to social cohesion, a case which is often cited when advocating the dismantling of the welfare state is that of the ‘friendly societies’. The summary of attributes identified by Schmidtz and Goodin of the ‘friendly societies’ as being highly desirable is worth repeating here:

the ability to contain costs, to provide clients with an effective voice, to provide state-of-the-art service with a personal touch, and to reach all segments of society effectively. They also provided services like old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, life insurance, workmen’s compensation, and day care, at the same time serving as a form of community association.[19]

This model probably appeals to sentiment as much as anything, but it is interesting to see praise for this form of collectivism recurring amongst thinkers who favour individualism as an explanation for human behaviour and needs. Whether the environment is right for a reimagining of ‘friendly societies’ or whether this would require policy assistance, it is plausible that Schmidtz and Goodin are correct when they argue that ‘friendly societies’ offer a real alternative to private insurance.[20]

Indeed, I would argue that there is merit to a ‘friendly society’ alternative to equally impersonal private insurance and state welfare. There could, for example, be scope for local or regional models with reciprocal arrangements with other societies that could insure members could access services wherever they happened to be (perhaps much the same as ambulance membership of one state service offers comprehensive cover in other states).

The second argument (that of depoliticisation) that I wish to draw attention to is even more significant than the last. While in some respects it may well be positive to reduce or remove the politicisation of the welfare state (such as the removal of stigma surrounding the unemployed, single mothers, disability pensioners, etc.), in others it is quite frightening.

The welfare of society is a ‘public good’ regardless of whether that welfare is provided by the market or by the state. High standards of education and skills can have a beneficial effect on the economy (growth tends to benefits all, if unequally), and doubtless a healthy society has the capacity to be more productive than an unhealthy one, not to mention the benefits of high levels of employment. Yet, if we entrust these ‘public goods’ to self-funding and the market and celebrate the depoliticisation of health, education, and unemployment (how pleasant to be free from hearing of these troublesome old things), then what recourse have we if the market or segments of it fail?

These issues are, and should be political, precisely because positive outcomes are in the public interest and require laws to guarantee our protection.

Saunders has made a convincing argument in his series of essays. He makes provision for the poor (how adequately is difficult to say, but at least they are not ignored) and shows with examples that it is plausible that many of us could be better off if we were to self-fund our own welfare needs.[21] Whether Saunders is right in part (which I suspect he may be) or in whole is not the key issue, as he himself recognises “at this stage, it is important just to get the debate started.”[22]

A society making provision for its welfare is vital if we hold that people have certain inalienable rights. Yet the debate on how to provide this welfare is even more essential than that, as it is divided between fundamentally opposed views of human nature. Whether we subscribe entirely to the liberal view of people as rational, logical, self-centred individuals or not, we can all identify with the value of choice. Therefore, exploring alternatives to a dichotomy of a one-size-fits-all welfare state or one-size-fits-all self-funded approach may result in people having a real choice of participating in a system that suits them, and not just the system that they are currently find themselves able to afford.

References:

Burden, T., Social Policy and Welfare: A Clear Guide, London, Pluto Press, 1998.

Rudd, K., ‘What’s Wrong With the Right: A Social Democratic Response to the Neo-Liberals at Home and the Neo-Conservatives Abroad’, addressed to the Centre for Independent Studies, 16 November 2006.

Saunders, P., ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, Issue Analysis, no. 57 (7 April 2005), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA57/IA57.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009.

Saunders, P., ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: Six Arguments in Favour of Self-Funding’, Issue Analysis, no. 61 (14 July 2005), p. 2. Available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA61/IA61.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009.

Saunders, P., ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: Twenty Million Future Funds, Issue Analysis, no. 66 (21 December 2005), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA66/IA66.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009.

Saunders, P., ‘A Welfare State for Those Who Want One, Opt-outs for Those Who Don’t’, Issue Analysis, no. 79 (30 January 2007), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA79/ia79.pdf, accessed 4 June 2009.

Schmidtz, D. and Goodin, R. E., Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[1] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, Issue Analysis, no. 57 (7 April 2005), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA57/IA57.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009, p. 2.

[2] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 2.

[3] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, pp. 3-4.

[4] Tom Burden, Social Policy and Welfare: A Clear Guide, London, Pluto Press, 1998, p. 36.

[5] David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 85.

[6] Kevin, Rudd, ‘What’s Wrong With the Right: A Social Democratic Response to the Neo-Liberals at Home and the Neo-Conservatives Abroad’, addressed to the Centre for Independent Studies, 16 November 2006, p. 7.

[7] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 10.

[8] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 1.

[9] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 12.

[10] Peter Saunders, ‘A Welfare State for Those Who Want One, Opt-outs for Those Who Don’t’, Issue Analysis, no. 79 (30 January 2007), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA79/ia79.pdf, accessed 4 June 2009, p. 11.

[11] Kevin, Rudd, ‘What’s Wrong With the Right: A Social Democratic Response to the Neo-Liberals at Home and the Neo-Conservatives Abroad’, pp. 2-3.

[12] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 10.

[13] Peter Saunders, ‘A Welfare State for Those Who Want One, Opt-outs for Those Who Don’t’, p. 8.

[14] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 12.

[15] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 12.

[16] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: The $85 Billion Tax/Welfare Churn’, p. 12.

[17] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: Six Arguments in Favour of Self-Funding’, Issue Analysis, no. 61 (14 July 2005), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA61/IA61.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009, p. 1.

[18] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: Six Arguments in Favour of Self-Funding’, p. 1.

[19] Schmidtz and Goodin, p. 69.

[20] Schmidtz and Goodin, p. 72.

[21] Peter Saunders, ‘A Welfare State for Those Who Want One, Opt-outs for Those Who Don’t’, pp. 9-11.

[22] Peter Saunders, ‘Restoring Self-Reliance in Welfare: Twenty Million Future Funds, Issue Analysis, no. 66 (21 December 2005), available http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA66/IA66.PDF, accessed 4 June 2009, p. 6.

Victorian Government and Sustainability 2008

Has the Victorian government developed a coherent approach to the question of sustainability? Are there any areas where its policies have appeared insensitive to sustainability, or inconsistent in addressing it?

The purpose of this essay is to examine the current Victorian Labor government’s approach and level of commitment to sustainability; and to highlight and explore any inconsistencies in its approach to – or disregard for – the principles of sustainability. This exploration occurs in the context of a Federal Labor government that has ratified the Kyoto protocol after years of recalcitrance by the Howard government, and which has committed to the establishment of a carbon-trading scheme.

I shall begin this essay with a sophisticated definition of sustainability and a discussion of how it differs from environmentalism. This will then be used as a frame of reference in assessing the policies and practices of the Victorian government. This assessment shall be conducted in two parts: firstly, an overview and synthesis of the Victorian Labor Party’s (VLP) policies on water from the 2006 election that relate to sustainability and a look at the VLP’s subsequent water management polices and projects.  And secondly, an overview of the Victorian Labor Party’s (VLP) policies on energy from the 2006 election and an examination of the VLP’s subsequent policy and approach to energy and power generation.

In focusing on these two major categories, it is hoped that this essay shall reveal any contradictions in a way that is both topical and relevant.

In considering the Victorian government’s approach to sustainability, it is important to understand how this concept differs from environmentalism. Victoria has long had a focus on protection of the environment, with the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) established through the Environment Protection Act of 1970. This Act preceded similarly named Acts passed in Western Australia in 1986, South Australia in 1993, and Queensland in 1994. Yet while these demonstrate a legislative commitment to protecting the health of the natural environment, inclusive of areas of human habitation and not simply confined to recreation areas perceived as ‘wilderness’, they do not broach the subject of sustainability beyond a recognition that the quality of the environment we live in is correlative to our quality of life.

Sustainability as a concept asks broader and much deeper questions. It places quality of life at the centre of its concerns and asks whether this can be maintained. In this context it “refer[s] to the capacity of human systems to provide for the full range of human concerns in the long term.”[1] That is, to achieve sustainability, human systems, insofar as we conceive them as separate, must be integrated into the natural systems of our planet in a way that does not outpace their ability to regenerate.

Most relevant to the two major issues of this essay, power-generation and water, is the commonly used phrase ‘sustainable development’. It is an acknowledgement our society has needs relating to population, infrastructure and consumption. Sustainable development has been defined most influentially by the Brundtland report in 1987 as that which “seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those in the future.”[2] Australia, including Victoria, in the 20 years since this statement was made has enjoyed a period of economic growth and what might be called an atmosphere of prosperity, where increasing aspirations were both desirable and acceptable. However, there is a growing consciousness that levels of consumption, fueled by aspiration rather than need, must be curtailed to help avert ecological crisis.

Therefore, there must be two aspects to the question of whether the Victorian government has a consistent approach to sustainability. Is the infrastructure and projects they are planning sustainable according to the above principles, and; is enough being done to encourage reduced consumption by individuals and business?

Much debate has changed since Premier Steve Bracks led the VLP to a second election victory in 2006. Bracks stepped down, and was succeeded as Premier by John Brumby. Australia is now governed at Federal level by the Labor Party. But despite these changes, it would be short-sighted to see the 2006 election promises made by the VLP under different leadership as old news or irrelevant. With these we can measure the consistency and focus of the VLP on the question of sustainability in relation to their water and energy policy.

On paper, the VLP’s water policy for the 2006 election seems comprehensive. It covers household efficiency in the form of rebates as well as regulations for new homes, reduction in industrial use, minimizing wastage from distribution system, upgrades to existing recycling plants, investment in storm-water projects, and funding for river health programs.[3] These appear consistent with sustainability principles, in that they are designed to reduce consumption, prevent waste, and protect natural systems. However, water management and policy will fall short on perhaps the most important criteria for a sustainable system, that is integration into natural systems. As the first article in The Age’s Watershed series points out, “it’s not that we’re exactly short of water – it’s just that water cannot be relied on always to be where it should.”[4]

The appropriate policy then should be one that does not remove water from natural systems beyond their capacity to provide. It is not the place of this essay to assess the quality or effectiveness of these policies, but rather their consistency.

A significant change since the 2006 election policy has been the Government’s plans to contract the building of a saltwater desalination plant to augment Melbourne’s water supplies. Another addition has been the continuing construction of the North-South pipeline linking the Goulburn River with Melbourne. But while opposition is still vocal against each, they also seem to have attracted the most favour.

Yet they are not the only schemes to have been championed and ridiculed in the debate. Suggestions and plan have been put forward for consideration of piping water across Bass Strait from northern Tasmania, and for damming the Mitchell River in the Gippsland region. Yet, as The Age report says, “the policies and philosophies that determine Australia’s water supplies are so complex, varied and competitive, they defy any sense of cogency or purpose.”[5]

The Victorian government sees desalination as the most secure method of guaranteeing Melbourne’s water needs in the coming decades. It is a technological solution that also brings employment opportunities. Additionally, it is an approach consistent with legislation which rules against any new dams being constructed.

However, one of the biggest concerns against the proposed Wonthaggi desalination plant is the amount of electricity required to power the process. It is estimated to require 90 megawatts of power to desalinate the proposed capacity of 150 billion litres of water. The government fact sheet on the project suggests that this power use is the equivalent of connected households operating a 4-star rated fridge per household per day.[6]

The problems with this provide a snapshot into the issue of energy. The VLP has promised to power the plant using renewable energy (which in reality would most likely mean purchasing the equivalent amount of power on the grid elsewhere in Australia), however, even supplying the plant with coal-fired electricity is problematic, with suggestion it may even require its own power plant.

Labor’s 2006 election policy approach to energy follows very similar principles to their water policy. It stresses efficiency and reduction in use through rebates and funding for better appliances and insulation, as well as continued concessions for those on low incomes. These principles were promised to be applied to government operations with 25% green power use, and a 20% drop below 2000 usage levels by 2010.[7]

But unlike water, for energy generation to be sustainable the most pressing concern is not its end use or supply, so much as the manner in which it is generated. Election promises of approximately $87 million related to investment in ‘clean coal’ infrastructure and regulation for the Latrobe Valley industry, compared with a $50 million investment in a proposed solar plant. Furthermore there was a commitment to targets of 10% renewable energy by 2016, and 20% renewable and low emissions power generation by 2020.[8]

While this suggests a commitment to achieving the diversification that is associated with sustainable systems, it is arguable that the targets are set too low to be meaningful. Additionally, the policy puts forward the merits of a solar power station for northwest Victoria as having greenhouse gas emission savings equivalent to “removing 90,000 cars from our roads.”[9] This is perhaps a little misleading, as while this assertion may be correct it is difficult to ascertain whether this results in overall fewer greenhouse emissions in Victoria. For example, Drive reports that new car sales exceeded one million in Australia in 2007 and are expected to again in 2008.[10] Figures like this, in conjunction with the Melbourne’s population forecasted to reach 5 million by 2030 suggest demands for increased energy production may outpace the development of renewable sources, and the ability for emission reduction.

Perhaps appropriately, when considering that 89% of Australia’s brown coal reserves is in the Latrobe Valley,[11] both the Victorian government and the Federal government are putting their faith in ‘clean coal’ technology. Brumby in April this year announced $127 million of funding into demonstration projects for carbon capture. It is questionable whether this can eventually provide a zero emission solution when cleaner burning processes are combined with capture and storage measures. It does fit with our definitions of sustainability however, in that it seeks to maintain our present needs and aspirations in such a way that attempts to minimize harm to natural systems. Whether it can deliver on this, and whether the outcome of Australia’s ‘clean coal’ experiments will have any bearing on global warming both remain unknown quantities.

The Victorian government has developed a considered and balanced approach to the question of sustainability in its water and energy policies. There are many dissenting voices who criticize their approach. Yet each area has a diverse range of policies aimed at reducing consumption, more efficient production and better distribution. It must be remembered that in the context of this essay ‘sustainability’ is not synonymous with ‘environmentalism’. To many, however, it is. Which is why many see investment in ‘clean coal’ technology as an insignificant step in tackling global warming. But with the largest proportion of the worlds electricity being generated from coal, finding a meaningful, cleaner process of burning coal is perhaps a more significant contribution to reducing global emissions than expecting both the developed world and the developing world to convert to renewables en masse.

References:

ABS, ‘Profiles of major minerals, oil and gas’, Year Book Australia 2007, Available: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/97D983DC8C663895CA25723600027F57?opendocument, Accessed: 30/10/08.

The Age, Insight, ‘Water, water everywhere – but going nowhere’, 23 Oct. 2008, p. 6.

Goldie, J., Douglas, B., Furnass, B., ‘An urgent need to change direction’, in In Search of Sustainability, eds. J. Goldie, B. Douglas, B. Furnass, Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2005, p. 3.

Our Water Our Future: Victorian Desalination  Project Fact Sheet, Available: http://www.ourwater.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/474/Fast-Facts—Merged-September-2008.pdf, Accessed: 29/10/08.

Spinks, J., Drive, ‘It’s official: new-car sales break 1 million barrier’, 7 Jan. 2008, Available: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=47114.

Victoria’s Energy Challenge, Available: http://www.alpvictoria.com.au/Policies-and-Platforms/Policies/Climate-Change/Victorias-Energy-Challenge.html, Accessed: 30/10/08.

Water: Making Every Drop Count’ from ALP Victoria, Available: http://www.alpvictoria.com.au/Policies-and-Platforms/Policies/Climate-Change/Water-Making-Every-Drop-Count.html, Accessed: 29/10/08.

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[1] J. Goldie, B. Douglas, B. Furnass, ‘An urgent need to change direction’, in In Search of Sustainability, eds. J. Goldie, B. Douglas, B. Furnass, Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2005, p. 3.

[2] Brundtland report, quoted in Goldie et al. p. 2.

[3] ‘Water: Making Every Drop Count’ from ALP Victoria, Available: http://www.alpvictoria.com.au/Policies-and-Platforms/Policies/Climate-Change/Water-Making-Every-Drop-Count.html, Accessed: 29/10/08.

[4] The Age, Insight, ‘Water, water everywhere – but going nowhere’, 23 Oct. 2008, p. 6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Our Water Our Future: Victorian Desalination  Project Fact Sheet, Available: http://www.ourwater.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/474/Fast-Facts—Merged-September-2008.pdf, Accessed: 29/10/08.

[7] Victoria’s Energy Challenge, Available: http://www.alpvictoria.com.au/Policies-and-Platforms/Policies/Climate-Change/Victorias-Energy-Challenge.html, Accessed: 30/10/08.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Jez Spinks, Drive, ‘It’s official: new-car sales break 1 million barrier’, 7 Jan. 2008, Available: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=47114.

[11]ABS, ‘Profiles of major minerals, oil and gas’, Year Book Australia 2007, Available: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/97D983DC8C663895CA25723600027F57?opendocument, Accessed: 30/10/08.

The European Union and the Schuman Declaration

Despite its political rhetoric, the European Union (and its predecessors) has been, from the very beginning, primarily an economic project. Its main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe. Do you agree?

Synopsis: The intention behind this essay is to investigate the rhetoric in the founding declaration of the European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC was an economic project that was intended to pave the way towards closer integration of the original signatories. Because the plan was created with ‘functional spillover’ in mind, and because the EU considers the date of the Schuman Declaration to be its own beginning, I thought it would be interesting to consider whether the rhetoric in Schuman’s declaration could be taken seriously, or whether it was simply gloss for an economic project. This examination found that many of the key themes and ideas expressed in the declaration are part of the core values and aims of the European Union today.

This essay shall investigate the claim that the European Union (EU) and its predecessors have been primarily an economic project; and that its main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe. In this essay, unless stated or a distinction is otherwise required, I shall use ‘European Union (EU)’ as an umbrella term for it and its predecessors.

I shall argue that it was primarily an economic project, but that the ‘competences’ (to adopt the jargon) of the EU have expanded to include many social and cultural projects which manage to defy the primacy of economics in the agenda. In addition, I shall consider how some of the early rhetoric has paved the way for future projects and initiatives.

To do this, I plan to discuss the rhetoric of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), particularly the text of the Schuman Declaration; and its present day significance in the newer institutions like the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the Single Market. I think to argue that the EU’s main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe is problematic. One would have to critique the contribution of the Marshall Plan to European recovery; and also, to try to understand what the individual states might have achieved without the EU. Instead I shall argue that the EU has been successful in shaping the way Europe is today – that is, yes, recovery and development were largely its achievement – but not necessarily that these would have been impossible or more successful without the EU.

This essay is written with an awareness of the causal relationship between economic policy and the society it in which it operates, thus arguing that the European Union has always been an economic project is not to suggest that there exists a disregard of European polity or society. The European project has undeniably been radically political, however a critique on the effectiveness or legitimacy of the EU’s political institutions are beyond the scope of this work.

I want to begin this essay by talking about the ECSC, which is officially regarded as the foundation of the European Union that we know today.[1] I want to assess this idea against the question of economics and political rhetoric. The brainchild of French bureaucrat Jean Monnet, the ECSC was brought into being with the Treaty of Paris 14^th April 1951,[2] and was predicated upon the idea that Franco-German political and economic relations were central to the reconstruction of Europe.

The most explicit aim of the plan was to prevent the threat of war by elevating all responsibility and authority for coal and steel production of the joining nations (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the original signatories to the 1957 Treaty of Rome) to a supranational body, theoretically making it impossible for one country to arm itself against another. Implicitly, it had grown from a plan to rebuild the French economy with German coal and steel.[3] Yet, despite its somewhat radical nature, it was not an ambitious project along the political lines of the Pan-European Union, which had sought to implement a parliamentary system of representation both for the people of Europe, and for its states. Instead, its influence has been felt in other ways.

In the post-war years there was much talk and campaigning for a federation of Europe, including a strong voice from Winston Churchill (who had no desire for Britain to be part of this).[4] Grand political schemes like the Pan-European Union never really made the leap from vision to reality, however it is interesting to note that similar rhetoric is not at all downplayed in the functionalist approach of the ECSC. In my view, the declaration delivered by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on the 9^th of May1950 has served to enshrine many of the core values of the present day EU.

It states that “[t]he pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe.”[5] Here Schuman links the acceptable economic to the controversial political. ‘Common foundations’ is a principle that has gone on to inform initiatives such as the EMU and the contentious Common Agricultural Policy, whereas ‘federation’ to this day remains a divisive subject, and instead, the less controversial and less constitutionally predicated principle of ‘subsidiarity’ is adhered to.[6]

Yet Schuman goes further, touching upon the historical, cultural and the ethnic divisions of Europe, saying that the ECSC “may be the leaven from which may grow a wider and deeper community between countries long opposed to one another by sanguinary divisions.”[7]

Not only have the language of the ideas of ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’ – whether considered complimentary or opposing – continued to be expressed in the debates over EU enlargement and expansion of competences, but we can see also that this is a process (rhetoric or not) that has been consistently engaged. As an example of widening we can observe the increases in member states in 1973, 1981, 1986, 1995, 2004, and finally 2007, bring the total number to 27 (with currently three more candidate countries). For an example of deepening, the direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979 and the introduction of the Euro in 2002 (although not its stated intention) shows some of the ways the EU has attempted or been able to come closer to its citizens.[8]

Consistent with this theme of the evolution of rhetoric into policy agenda is the vision of community between ‘sanguinary divisions’ put forward in the same quote above. In this context, I take ‘sanguinary’ to refer both to the idea that the peoples of the different nations of Europe are in fact different peoples by blood (a dubious, yet popular assumption), and to the destructive nature of the conflicts between them. 2008 has been proclaimed the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and the Europe Day poster for this occasion sports the slogan “It’s not them and us, it’s you and me”.[9] The poster depicts two children of distinguishable ‘sanguinary’ origins interacting (finger-painting a picture of Earth). What this shows is a consistent commitment to bridging both the perceived and real ethnic and cultural divisions which abound in Europe. Yet this also highlights what remains one of the EU’s most significant challenges as it works with Turkey on its accession process in what could be a very complicated integration project fraught with many similar difficulties as are faced by Germany with regard to its own Turkish minority.[10]

A further idea I wish to draw attention to in the Schuman Declaration is one based primarily on the economic rationalism of facilitating and not restricting trade, yet its evolution has had profound implications for the people and visitors to Europe, and to the process of enlargement itself. Schuman states that “[t]he movement of coal and steel between member countries will immediately be freed from all customs duty, and will not be affected by differential transport rates.”[11] This freedom of movement was to provide the precedent for the future creation of the Common Market and later the Single Market in 1993.[12] Now, in addition to coal and steel, people, goods, services and capital all enjoy a previously unprecedented freedom in moving between the states of Europe. Europeans have regularly crossed borders, but now in what is known as the Schengen area they can move from one state to the next without passing through border controls.

It is interesting to see an economic project being expressed in the above terms. It is true that a certain degree of rhetoric might be required to ‘sell’ an initiative like the ECSC, but still we must not forget that Monnet had already gained private approval from many of the key figures such as Konrad Adenauer and the US Secretary of State (as a step towards securing US presidential support) before Schuman made his address.[13] The ECSC was partly formed in the interests of securing peace and to meet US political pressure against imposing punitive measures against Germany in the style of the Versailles Treaty.[14]

Yet, other parts of the Declaration perhaps are not so benign or benevolent as they seem. Schuman makes a reference to one of Europe’s “essential tasks” being “the development of the African continent.”[15] At the time of the address, France still retained extensive colonial possessions in Africa and was involved in a war in Asia to retain its possession of what is now Vietnam, and by 1954, became involved in a long war against independence movements in Algeria.

What I hope I have demonstrated with this essay is that, behind the somewhat lofty and inflated language of the Schuman Declaration has been a theme of integration simultaneously economic, political and social that has since come into being in various guises.

The recovery of Europe is perhaps a misnomer, for prior to the Treaty of Rome founding the European Economic Community in 1957, Europe for centuries had been a peninsula of warring states. In contrast to a Europe resurgent and divided, is a Europe united. Rather, it could be argued that the European Union is responsible for the creation (a continuing process) of Europe, and although considerable differences remain, desire for unification at the political level remains strong. Yet, it’s success has been mixed, while both international and domestic business enjoy the uniformity of regulations and currency within the Single Market and EMU; on the other hand, it is questionable whether citizens of Europe identify with the EU as much as the integration project would hope. Kolakowski identifies that

The greatest achievement of European unification will certainly be a lasting peace. But the possibility of achieving such a peace depends on a number of conditions, nor just on the presence of a bureaucracy in Brussels.[16]

This may be true, but equally important has been the stabilizing effect of European unification. The benefits of joining the Union, primarily access to the Single Market (and it is in fact this which the EU regards as one of its greatest achievements[17]), requires potential members to accept the values of the Union that are formalized as the Copenhagen Criteria. These relate to democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law (among others), in addition to a market economy.[18] The creation of a union of states with a commitment to similar values and with the ability to openly and easily pursue economic relations is largely the result of a bureaucracy following the lead of the various treaties set out and agreed to by the individual member states. It is in this way that the European Union has been able to create a degree of political unity upon the strengths of its economic project, and, in my view a certain amount of rhetoric is useful in establishing the broader goals of a narrower project like the ECSC.

References

Churchill, Winston, ‘United States of Europe: Extract from speech at the University of Zurich, 19 September 1946,’ in Dick Leonard and Mark Leonard, The Pro-European Reader, London, Palgrave, pp. 13-16.

Cini, Michelle, European Union Politics: Glossary, on Oxford University Press, Available: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199281954/01student/flashcards/glossary.htm#S, last updated 2007, accessed 15 April 2008.

Dinan, Desmond, ‘Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Integration, 1945-1957’, in Ever Closer Union, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005.

The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

Europa, Europe Day Poster Gallery, 2008 ‘It’s not them and us, it’s you and me’, available:   http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/gallery/2008/index_en.htm, accessed 24 April 2008.

Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps,  http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008.

Europa: Ongoing Enlargement, available: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/s40015.htm, Europa, accessed 27 April 2008.

Europa, Overview of the European Union Activities: Internal Market, available: http://europa.eu/pol/singl/overview_en.htm, last updated December 2007, accessed 26 April 2008.

Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.

Europa, What is Europe Day?  http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/euday_en.htm, Europa, accessed 23 April 2008.

Kolakowski, Leszek ‘Can Europe Happen?’, The New Criterion, May 2003, pp. 19-27.

Schuman, Robert, Declaration of 9 May 1950, on Europa, Available: http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm, accessed 15 April 2008.

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[1] Europa, What is Europe Day?  http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/euday_en.htm, Europa, accessed 23 April 2008.

[2] Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps,  http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008.

[3] Desmond Dinan, ‘Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Integration, 1945-1957’, in Ever Closer Union, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005, pp. 21-22.

[4] Winston Churchill, ‘United States of Europe: Extract from speech at the University of Zurich, 19 September 1946,’ in Dick Leonard and Mark Leonard, The Pro-European Reader, London, Palgrave, pp. 13-16.

[5] Robert Schuman, Declaration of 9 May 1950, on Europa, Available: http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm, accessed 15 April 2008.

[6] Michelle Cini, European Union Politics: Glossary, on Oxford University Press, Available: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199281954/01student/flashcards/glossary.htm#S, last updated 2007, accessed 15 April 2008.

[7] Schuman Declaration.

[8] Information on newly joined countries found on Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.  Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps, available: http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008. Ongoing Enlargement, available: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/s40015.htm, accessed 27 April 2008.

[9] Europa, Europe Day Poster Gallery, 2008 ‘It’s not them and us, it’s you and me’, available:   http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/gallery/2008/index_en.htm, accessed 24 April 2008.

[10] The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

[11] Schuman Declaration.

[12] Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons.

[13] Dinan, p. 24.

[14] Dinan, p. 20.

[15] Schuman Declaration.

[16] Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Can Europe Happen?’, The New Criterion, May 2003, pp. 19-27.  p23

[17] Europa, Overview of the European Union Activities: Internal Market, available: http://europa.eu/pol/singl/overview_en.htm, last updated December 2007, accessed 26 April 2008.

[18] Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.

On Private Property

‘The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.’ (F.A. Hayek)

Their positions on private property have exposed distinct division between ideologies of the left and the right. How has private property as a fundamental right been defended ideologically? How have criticisms of private property been sustained? To what extent, if at all, should the ‘rights’ of private property be infringed for collective purposes?

The ideological differences between the left and right on the question of private property are not so distinct or opposite as might be first assumed. The literature on the subject is peppered with all sorts of qualifications depending upon what sort of property is in question. To take the question to ideological extremes, the differences between the left and the right could be characterised on the one hand as the abolition of all private property in favour of communal property; and, on the other hand as the ability for each individual to acquire unlimited private property as a natural right. The reality of course, is not so simple.

The following essay considers some of the ways that the institution of private property has been justified and understood. This will include what exactly is referred to by the term property, as this can be essential to understanding other types of property such as ‘common’ and ‘state property’.

Additionally, this essay will also consider some of the sorts of criticisms which have been leveled at the ‘right’ of private property. These are generally always concerned with questions of equality and justice. However, we shall see that the language used in these cases is often not altogether different from the language used to support the right to private property.

In the literature, the term ‘property’ is used to refer to a right to a thing – rather than the thing itself, – which extends beyond actual possession of the thing. Macpherson argues that

to have a property is to have a right in the sense of an enforceable claim to some use or benefit of something, whether it is a right to share in some common resource or an individual right in some particular thing.[1]

It is this sort of definition of property that allows us to make sense of ‘common property’ as opposed to ‘individual property’. Rather than trying to make sense of how everyone together might own something as they might individually own something is much more straightforward when ‘property’ is considered as a right to make use of something.

‘Private property’ however is considered an exclusive right to a thing. It is this concept which has caused difficulty to political and social thinkers. That is, what is the basis for this exclusive right, and how can it be justified if that exclusive right might be harmful to others, albeit indirectly?

Locke argued that it was the labour of removing something from its state in nature which guaranteed and justified the property right to the individual; the right of man to the exclusive use of the fruits of his own labour. “The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them.”[2]

This principle of man having a right to the means of labour, and an exclusive right to the product of his own labour is common to both the left and the right, although it has not always been conceived in the same way.

W. L. Sheldon, writing in 1893 identifies a current of thought that asserts property as a fundamental right:

            They claim the right of ownership to other property on the same principle that they assert ownership to the muscles of their body, the capacities of their brain, the qualities of their soul. They believe it to be an institution of nature, and so an institution of God.[3]

There is in this a sympathetic link with the labour principle of John Locke. That is, that although the fruits of nature are given to man in common, the facts of human life requires them to be made use of by individuals for their survival. Through their labour they can assure this survival, which is their right, thus the product of that labour is theirs by exclusive right.

This example, however, would have had limited relevance for the society Sheldon found himself in, and he seems acutely aware of this. While private property gained through the exercising of one’s labour might be justified, Sheldon saw that the actual origin of property existing in private hands could not be accounted for, that the question of its just or unjust acquisition could not be established. For this reason he argued that “it is equally positive that we cannot justify the private ownership of wealth through the causes of its first establishment as an institution.”[4]

Therefore, whatever social pressures that may have caused the establishment of the institution of private property do not necessarily continue to provide its justification. Yet even so, many writers have felt a need to explain in historical terms how the institution of private property came to be. Sometimes this was done with reference to an imagined prehistoric state of nature, as did Locke, or in the conjectural transition from hunting stage to shepherd stage to agricultural stage put forward by Adam Smith.[5] “The most general point” writes Macpherson, “is that the institution – any institution – of property is always thought to need justification by some more basic human or social purpose.”[6]

What then, of criticisms to private property? The classic criticism against the individual ownership of private property is provided by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto. The position seems clear when Marx states that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”[7]

But how clear is it? Marx qualifies the position taken by distinguishing between bourgeois private property and that of the petty artisan or peasant. He seems incredulous when dealing with criticisms that Communists have “desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour”.[8]

There seems to be a consensus that man must have a right to what he creates with his own hands. But despite his use of this sort of language, Marx was deeply critical of the use of this argument to justify the institution of private property which he observed around him:

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.[9]

This begs the question: can private property really be considered as a fundamental right, even under the principle of labour? Sheldon argues that “labor would give title to private property if only we could first pay off that infinite array of obligations which we owe to our fellow-men and to the race which we belong.”[10] Thus, as the vast majority of us do no lead a life that could be considered that of ‘a state of nature’, it is by and through another’s labour that we are able to produce things ourselves.  We are raised by the labour of our parents; the skills we learn are an outcome of the labour of those who have come before us.

In the present day, it can be difficult to distinguish any form of property that is not private property, and a ready general definition for common property might be hard to come by. Our institutions, which manage common property, sometimes like to refer to its users as customers, as though they were buying a service.

But Macpherson argues that “common property, rather than being ruled out by the very concept of property as rights (enforceable claims) of persons, turns out to be the most unadulterated kind of property.”[11] Unadulterated, in the sense that rights to common property are always held by ‘natural’ persons; whereas, private or state property can be held by ‘artificial’ persons.

This leads to another point. Even assuming the right of a ‘natural’ person to own property is a fundamental right related to the nature of that person’s being; what justification can be given for property owned by the state, an ‘artificial’ person? Many socialists have argued for state ownership of resources and the means of production as a way to ensure greater equality for all. But by what right may the state take this on?

Hayek is critical of those who take this view against the institution of private property. He warns,

What these people forget is that in transferring all property in the means of production to the state they put the state in a position whereby its action must in effect decide all other incomes… To believe that the power which is thus conferred on the state is merely transferred to it from others is erroneous. It is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses.[12]

Marx, on the other hand might argue that the new power that Hayek is talking about is actually already controlled by class. But supposing this class acted entirely in its own interests, how cohesive is the result? It is here that Hayek supposes the ability of private property to be a guarantee of freedom:

So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people – nobody is tied to him except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else.[13]

But history has shown that these owners do not necessarily act independently. Collusion and price and wage fixing occurs now, just as it did under early industrial capitalism with fewer regulations.

There is perhaps a hint of irony in that the language which describes an exploitive capitalist class is very similar to the language that the right has typically used to describe human nature. While the left generally has a more optimistic view of human nature than is composed in the claim that it operates purely in its own rational self-interest, it is curious to see that the injustices that Marx saw perpetuated by one class could be rooted in the same view of human nature that argues a breakdown of society would occur if all wealth was distributed equally. Jeremy Bentham argued in this way, that

If all property were equally divided, at fixed periods, the sure and certain consequence would be, that presently there would be no property to divide. All would shortly be destroyed. Those whom it was intended favour, would not suffer less from the division than those at whose expense it was made. If the lot of the industrious was not better than the lot of the idle, there would be no longer any motives for industry.[14]

But it might be countered that under a socialist model of community ownership, the community itself would retain the ability to ensure the inducement of others to work. There may no longer exist an individual reward for labour, but the benefits of belonging to the community would far outweigh the ‘freedoms’ of being ostracised. Rational self-interest would dictate a pattern of behaviour which encountered the least resistance and hardship. That is, acting in the community’s interests rather than attempting to live outside of it.

Can the community and individual interests both be satisfied by a more equal distribution of property? A utilitarian case might argue that it could, provided any redistribution raised the general level of happiness more than it lowered it. The key problem is, however, that assuming the need for redistribution was universally accepted  (and thus that man would not have exclusive right to the product of his own labour), how could this then be effected. Thus even in abandoning private property, Hayek identifies the same problem

once the claim of the individual worker to the whole of ‘his’ product is disallowed, and the whole of the return from capital is to be divided among all workers, the problem of how to divide it raises the same basic issue.[15]

That is, by the very nature of some industries, some workers would benefit more than others, without it necessarily being a reflection on their specific tasks or skills.

It is perhaps in the work of Sheldon that a satisfactory justification for the right of private property can be found, one that does not rely upon the problematic labour principle or natural law. He argues  that “it is because that sense of possession in some form or another prevails so universally in the individual consciousness, that private property may be said to have received the sanction of human civilised society.”[16]

At first glance this may sound similar to the argument of an institution having ‘stood the test of time’, one which Sheldon rejects. But rather, it is one which does not seek an historical justification, nor that of natural law or right for private property, but rather an assumption of unspoken tacit agreement. This sense of possession is the tacit agreement. Thus, “we can believe that it is right to own property because it is sanctioned by the original owner of all wealth, – human society itself.”[17]

But insofar as there is qualification over what we can do with what the law recognises as our private property, there must therefore also be qualification of what we may own. As for the limits of how much we should be able to own, this is a much more difficult question.

Bibliography

Bentham, J., ‘Security and Equality of Property’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 39-58.

Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

Locke, J., ‘Of Property’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 15-28.

Macpherson, C.B., Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Marx, K., ‘Communist Manifesto’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 59-74.

Reeve, A., Property, London, MacMillan Education, 1986.

Sheldon, W.L., ‘What Justifies Private Property?’,  International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (October, 1893), pp. 17-40.

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[1] C.B. Macpherson, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, p. 3.

[2] John Locke, ‘Of Property’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, p. 18.

[3] W.L. Sheldon, ‘What Justifies Private Property?’, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (October, 1893), p. 28.

[4] Ibid., p. 27.

[5] Andrew Reeve, Property, London, MacMillan Education, 1986, p. 61.

[6] Macpherson, p. 11.

[7] Karl Marx, ‘Communist Manifesto’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, p. 61.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p. 64.

[10] Sheldon, p. 31.

[11] Macpherson, p. 6.

[12] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 77.

[13] Ibid., pp. 77-8.

[14] Jeremy Bentham, ‘Security and Equality of Property’, in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, C.B. Macpherson (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1978, p. 43.

[15] Hayek, p. 83.

[16] Sheldon, p. 33.

[17] Sheldon, p. 36.