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New Labour is defined partly by its respect for the achievements of the New Right over
the eighties and nineties. In various areas, such as market regulation and welfare policy,
it has simply taken the policies of the Right further in their logical direction, seeking to
produce and nurture markets that are as open and dynamic as possible. But in one
important respect, it has pursued these policies in a fashion that owes more to traditional
Leftist sensibilities than to the New Right. For in keeping with an intellectual and political
tradition that dates back to Marx, New Labour has abstained from debating the moral
qualities of markets, preferring instead to focus on their empirical mechanics. The rubric
of evidence-based policy and the sociological frame of globalisation have both been
instrumental in facilitating this.
Thatcherism was certainly shaped by the neo-liberal economics that displaced
Keynesianism from the seventies onwards, but economics rarely provides the emotional,
psychological or moral fuel for far-reaching political change. It was the moral qualities of
markets, and not simply their efficiency-maximising tendencies, that inspired the New
Right. Markets were associated with individual freedom, the traditional family, protection
from tyranny and hard work. With the exception of the last of these virtues, which has a
place close to Gordon Browns heart, New Labour has snubbed this normative legacy of
the New Right, viewing the market not so much as immoral, but amoral. This is in
keeping with scientific socialism. Marx may have had a deep-lying distaste for how
capitalism treated people, but it was its structural flaws that led him to predict its collapse
and not its moral ones. When New Labour came to accommodate the free market into its
political economy during the 1990s, it was primarily on account of a sociological
narrative about its inevitability provided by the likes of Anthony Giddens, and not due to
a sudden conversion to the moral worldview of Friedrich Hayek or Keith Joseph.
The varying moral dimensions of capitalism have therefore been a curiously absent topic
from mainstream political discourse since Thatcherism imploded fifteen years ago. This
is a significant gap, because as Boltanski and Chiapellos wonderful book demonstrates,
the moral promises made by capitalism are a critical feature of how it defends and
sustains itself. The simple reason for this is that people must be provided with good
reasons for engaging with it in the first place. As the authors put it capitalism will face
increasing difficulties, if it does not restore some grounds for hope to those whose
engagement is required for the functioning of the system as a whole.
This sort of claim immediately raises the suspicion that the authors are talking about
ideology, in other words, a mode of thinking that is diffused on behalf of capital in order
to conceal the real nature of society. It was through bracketing liberal and neo-liberal
moral philosophy as mere ideology that the Left managed to avoid engaging with it on
its own terms. Think tanks, universities and other bourgeois publishing channels were all
culpable in this respect of draping a layer of moral fiction over the truth of capitalist
relations. But The New Spirit of Capitalism is far from an ideology critique. Its chief
inspiration is not Marx at all but, as its title hints, Max Weber.
it cannot make good on. Most profoundly, the promise of authenticity and freedom is
always compromised by the need for managerial control and a diffuse feeling of
inauthenticity. Consequently we live in a new era of suspicion.
More significantly for the Left are the promises that capitalism no longer makes at all,
namely those once spawned by the social critique of capitalism. Drunk on the dreams of
independence and networks, we no longer challenge capitalism on grounds of equality
or security. Efforts to defend those excluded from this new connexionist world look
conservative and inflexible. Policies that might support greater equality are presented as
barriers to the fulfilment of authentic selves. Under the new spirit of capitalism, the most
exploited individuals do not even show up on our moral radar at all.
Occasionally one cannot help feeling that Boltanski and Chiapello are demonstrating
guilt by association. The causal chain connecting a Tom Peters management text and
how employees actually feel about their work is itself a matter for sociological
investigation, and perhaps not something that can be assumed. Whos to say that
management theory isnt simply a self-reinforcing sham, which nobody outside of it takes
seriously? Similar suspicions have been raised in the past when Leftist sociologists have
attempted to trace the origins of neo-liberalism to right-wing think tanks.
This complaint does little to tarnish a magnificent work of social theory, of quite aweinspiring scope. What marks it out best from Marxist approaches is the way in which it
dignifies employees with real agency. It is not inevitable that people will turn up to work
from one week to the next, indeed the book demonstrates that capitalism nearly came to
a complete halt in France in the early seventies due to its failure to strike an adequate
moral bargain. If capitalism were as mendacious as the Left has sometimes assumed,
Boltanski and Chiapello ask us, do we really believe that it would have survived to
exploit us for quite so long? This is not to say that it is entirely honest either.
One of the uncomfortable lessons of this book for policy-makers is that they are not
currently the decisive influence over the moral character of capitalism. But with the
exception of commentators such as Will Hutton, there has been a marked reluctance
within the British left to discuss different types of capitalism in moral terms anyway. The
implication of Boltanski and Chiapellos book is that the next time capitalism hits a crisis,
it will be fuelled once more by a social critique of its injustices, and less by an artistic
critique of its inauthenticity. Now would be the time to develop the new theories of
political economy and corporate governance to succeed under the next spirit of
capitalism, but these are currently few and far between.
William Davies is a sociologist and policy analyst