ABSTRACT
After Labour’s election defeat in 1983 the Fabian Society established the Socialist Philosophy Group, whose objectives included the clarification of socialist principles and their defence against the arguments of the new right. In January 1984 Raymond Plant, one of the founders of the Socialist Philosophy Group, published his Fabian pamphlet Equality, Markets and the State. Plant maintains that the distinctive feature of socialism is its concern for equality. His pamphlet goes on to argue a case for equality on two grounds - first as an instrument for maximising individual freedom and second, as a means of securing a greater sense of fraternity.Much the same case for equality, as a means to liberty, was a major theme of Roy Hattersley’s Choose Freedom: the future for democratic socialism, published just in time for Labour’s third successive defeat in 1987. Hattersley explicitly links his claim that the true object of socialism is 'the creation of a genuinely free society* (Hattersley, 1987: xv) to Crosland’s view that socialism is about equality. To that end his opening chapter concludes by quoting one of Crosland’s more obscure formulations: ‘Socialism* he said, ‘is about the pursuit of equality and the protection of freedom - in the knowledge that until we are truly equal we will not be truly free.’ It is that self-evident truth that Choose Freedom seeks to demonstrate. (ibid: xix) There are several problems with this line of argument. First, there is indeed a widely held view that socialism is, in some sense, basically about equality. Apart from the two texts just mentioned it
can be found in an influential tradition of British socialist thought, for example, in Tawney’s Equality (1931), Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956), and an important body of post-war social-policy research. It is, at best, a remarkably limited view of what socialism has been about. Socialists have been concerned to subordinate production and distribution to political regulation according to various criteria generally regarded as desirable. Precisely what criteria have been most important here and opinions as to how they might be implemented have varied over time and from one society to another. They have also been matters of dispute between socialists.In contemporary western societies socialists have been concerned to reduce economic instability, minimise unemployment, eliminate poverty, and defend the position of workers against their employers - all matters that Crosland, writing in 1956, claimed had now been resolved. Many have been concerned to promote a greater sense of fraternity and to develop co-operative and democratic organisation of significant aspects of social life. Finally, of course, socialists have also aimed to reduce significant inequalities in the provision of education, health, housing, and other major components of the quality of life, and to do something about the gross inequalities of income and wealth that help to sustain them.1However, my aim in this chapter is not so much to debate the various meanings of socialism as it is to demonstrate the unacceptable limitations of the account of socialism as if it were about equality, conceived primarily as a means to liberty. The reduction or elimination of various gross inequalities have certainly figured prominently among the concerns of socialists, but it hardly follows that those concerns all derive from a desire to implement some one general principle of equality. If that view represents a drastic simplification of a complex and somewhat amorphous set of socialist concerns, the account of equality as a means to liberty narrows the focus of socialist concern even further.At one point in Anarchy, State and Utopia Nozick complains that ‘there is no shortage of unsupported statements of a presumption in favour of equality* (Nozick, 1974: 233). His complaint is not without justice, although much the same could be said about the
presumption in favour of the primacy of freedom in the writings of Nozick himself, Hayek, and others on the right We shall see shortly that the case for equality in terms of liberty turns out to be little more than an unargued reassertion of a presumption in favour of equality. Far from responding to Nozick’s challenge by attempting a stronger case for equality, I argue that it is a serious mistake to debate with the right in those terms.In order to bring out what is involved in that mistake I begin by considering the aforementioned defence of equality in terms of liberty. Apart from the problems just noted, we shall see that it adopts the individualism of the liberal tradition of political thought. In other words, it takes human individuals as the ultimate point of reference for decisions about social conditions and objectives. To accept that principle is to treat all social goals as in some sense reducible to the goals of individuals. I argue that there are important actors in the modern world other than human individuals (government agencies, unions, large corporations, churches). Such actors have concerns and objectives that are not reducible to those of human individuals. They may be subjected to controls and restrictions with varying degrees of effectiveness, but in general they cannot be dispensed with. The individualism of the liberal tradition obscures the political significance of corporate actors.As for liberty and equality, there are severe limitations on the use of such general principles in political analysis and the formation of political programmes. There is no good reason to treat liberty as an undifferentiated unity, such that every encroachment should be resisted. The freedom of individuals to do what they want is by no means the only worthwhile social objective. Certain liberties are indeed desirable and certain forms of equality are associated with some of them. If socialists are to have anything to say about the range of social choices facing Britain today, they must give considerably more content to their views than can be derived from any notion of freedom. For the rest, I have already indicated that it is more than a little misleading to suggest that socialism is about the implementation of some principle of equality. It would be more realistic to say that socialists have always been concerned to minimise the social consequences of significant gross inequalities.
