ABSTRACT
The advanced industrial countries are in the throes of transition to a new social order of high technology which involves a renegotiation of the division of labour between men and women, family and workplace, community and government. Against the background of the disarray of the political Left since the mid-1970s, the Church of England and its bishops in the House of Lords emerged in the 1980s, perhaps quaintly, as the voice of a socially responsible collectivism before the juggernaut of a triumphalist individualism. Both economic liberalism and democratic socialism claim to be effective political responses to the problems of advanced industrial society. Economic liberal polarization points to social containment by minimal state welfare, police and burglar alarms with individualized failure, anomie and apathy made public only fitfully by occasional urban riot. The challenge to replace atomistic anarchy, exploitation and inequality by a welfare society has presented itself in shifting guise in all the phases of industrial development.
