Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T06:09:44.212Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Civic republicans and liberal individualists: the case of Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

David Marquand
Get access

Extract

The Relationship between the market and the forum, between exchange and persuasion, between the public realm of the citizen and the private realm of the consumer, has been a central preoccupation of social thought since the days of Aristotle. For most of the post-war period, however, and in most western countries, the tensions inherent in that relationship appeared to have been resolved. Then came the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s, the rise of the New Right, the associated rebirth of economic liberalism and a variety of more or less successful attempts to clip the wings of the post-war welfare state. Classic questions, which the post-war generation imagined it had answered, returned to the agenda—among them the questions of what citizenship means in a market economy, and of how the promise of citizenship is to be realised in complex modern societies. These questions are of significance to all advanced societies, of course; as the most cursory reading of Vaclav Havel's essays shows, they resonate with particular force in eastern Europe. Perhaps because she has been the chief European testing ground for New Right theory, however, they have also begun to resonate with unusual power in Britain; and it is plausible to imagine that the British case may be more relevant to the rest of the western world than are the various East European cases. Hence, this essay. It begins by looking at the British debate and the factors which have given rise to it, and then tries to clarify some of the issues it poses.

Type
Citizenship and social bonds
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , November 1991 , pp. 329 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

(1) Havel, Vaclav, Living in Truth (ed. Vladislav, Jan) (London, Faber and Faber, paperback edition, 1989).Google Scholar

(2) Hurd, Douglas, Citizenship in the Tory Democracy, New Statesman, 29 04, 1988.Google Scholar

(3) See Plant, Raymond, Citizenship, Empowerment and Welfare, and Julian Le Grand, Rethinking Welfare; a Case for Quasi-Markets?, in Pimlott, Ben, Wright, Anthony and Flower, Tony (eds.), The Alternative (London, W. H. Allen, 1990).Google ScholarPubMed

(4) H. M. S. O., Encouraging Citizenship: Report of the Commission on Citizenship, London, 1990.Google Scholar

(5) Dyson, Kenneth, The State Tradition in Western Europe: A Study of an Idea and an Institution (Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1980).Google Scholar

(6) Talking About Commitment: The Views of Young People on Citizenship and Volunteering, The Prince's Trust, Commission on Citizenship and Social and Community Planning Research, London, 1990.Google Scholar

(7) Raymond Plant, op. cit. pp. 39–40.

(8) I have elaborated this argument in more detail in Marquand, David, The Unprincipled Society: New Demands and Old Politics (London, Jonathan Cape, 1988).Google Scholar

(9) Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

(10) Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class and other Essays (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

(11) Crosland, C. A. R., The Future of Socialism (London, Jonathan Cape, 1956).Google Scholar

(12) See, in particular, Hart, Vivien, Distrust and Democracy: Political Distrust in Britain and America (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Kavanagh, Denis, Political Culture in Great Britain: the Decline of the Civic Culture, in Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, Little Brown, 1980)Google Scholar; Marsh, Alan, Protest and Political Consciousness (London and Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1977).Google Scholar

(13) Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. III, The Political Order of a Free People (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).Google Scholar

(14) Gamble, Andrew, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of That cherism (London, Macmillan, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(15) For the view that traditional civil liberties have been undermined see Graham, Cosmo and Prosser, Tony (eds.), Waiving the Rules, the Constitution Under Thatcherism (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

(16) Dahrendorf, Ralf, The Modern Social Conflict, an essay on the politics of liberty (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), pp. 161–162.Google Scholar

(17) Crouch, Colin and Heath, A. F. (eds.), Social Research and Social Reform, Essays in Honour of A. H. Halsey (Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

(18) Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, paperback edition, 1972).Google Scholar

(19) For this distinction see Oldfield, Adrian, Citizenship and Community, Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (London, Routledge, 1990).Google Scholar

(20) Oldfield, op. cit. p. 5.

(21) Bellah, Robert M., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1985).Google Scholar

(22) Hurd, op. cit.

(23) Oldfield, op. cit. p. 6.

(24) Oldfield, op. cit. p. 173.

(25) Bellah et al., op. cit. pp. 295–296.