ABSTRACT
Britain is, or was, the keystone of the great arch that stretches from the most free-market oriented to the most state-centralized of the postindustrial societies. It has, or had before the privatizations of the Thatcher era, the most balanced mixed economy, a pioneering welfare state and one of the most concentrated business sectors in the free world. In Europe, if indeed not in the world, it led the way in most of the major trends of professional society: in the rise of living standards until the mid-1960s, the swing to services, the rise of professional hierarchies in both public and private sectors, a modest degree of meritocracy with more upward mobility from the working class than in most countries west of the Iron Curtain, the legal emancipation of women, the growth of government and the welfare state, the opening of higher education to a wider section of the population, the concentration of business in large corporations, and a long-standing involvement in the global economy. Yet it is idiosyncratic in its professionalism, curiously backward in the rivalry between its public and private sectors, still class-conscious in its politics and industrial relations, the slowest growing of Western economies, and the least successful of the major democratic postindustrial societies.
