ABSTRACT
Blond’s proposal for the new social configuration of the Big Society is the notion of an educated elite, the ‘philosopher kings’ (Smith, 2012: 335), among whom Blond himself has been named in the British press, who will guard against people acting according to their own self-interest and making those ‘wrong choices’ to which his historical account of British liberalism gives emphasis. The individualism and self-satisfaction generated by liberalism has removed any sense of collective responsibility from society, where care for each other overrides the desire to look after oneself. The proposed new world of the Big Society restores society and the individuals who comprise it to an elevated position over and above the state and market, which, so far, have conspired to reduce a large proportion of its constituent members to serfdom. Heading this new social configuration are appropriately educated persons, an elite who embody those essentially Christian values required for Blond’s moral market to exist. ‘Moral markets, and a return to civic association, require Christian values: mutuality, subsidiarity, reciprocity, solidarity, mediation (both in the theological and institutional sense)’ (Blond, cited in Beckford, 2011).
