Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
hegel
"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Library
Links - weblogs
Links - Political Rationalities
Links - Resources: Philosophy
Public Discussion
Resources
Cafe Philosophy
Philosophy Centres
Links - Resources: Other
Links - Web Connections
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

market populism « Previous | |Next »
September 28, 2006

In this article on market populism in Australia in the Australian Review of Public Affairs Marian Sawer says that market populists went on the offensive with their solutions of winding back government interference with market mechanisms in the 1980s. She says:

Traditional populism interprets the world through an 'us and them' frame. At the same time, insecurities produced by a global economy helped stir the kind of resentments that encourage traditional populism, manifested in Australia during the 1990s by Pauline Hanson's One Nation. Traditional populism interprets the world through an 'us and them' frame and seeks to mobilise the people (us) against untrustworthy cosmopolitan elites (them). At this time the full brilliance of the market populist strategy was revealed. Market populists ridiculed One Nation for its naive economic nationalism and opposition to free trade and competition policy. However, they appropriated its 'anti-elitism', shorn of its hostility to banks, big business, and international financial elites. The 'great divide' was now between liberal elites and the mainstream.

Sawer says that the sources of such market populism are twofold.: new class theories and public choice theory, as developed in the United States from the 1950s by figures such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Though new class theory and public choice theory have different intellectual origins, they are drawn together within market populism.

Sawer says that the idea of a ‘new class’ was developed by American neo-conservatives in the 1970s and promoted by influential elements in the Republican Party.

The new class consisted in university graduates who had been radicalised by the social movements of the 1960s and who had moved into positions in the public sector and communication industry. They had a vested interest in the expansion of the public sector that provided them with privileged positions as definers of values.....In March 1989, Quadrant editorialised that the new class with its values of environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism had replaced totalitarianism as the major threat to freedom. The idea of the new class fused readily with populist anti-elitism. 'New class elite'’ became the object of attack. Christopher Lasch .... assigned these new class elites an additional key characteristic: they were
contemptuous of the values of ordinary people or of the 'mainstream', as John Howard called them.
The neo-conservatives appropriated the quasi-Marxist idea of a class defined by ownership of cultural capital and with a class-interest in maximising redistribution from wealth producers. In contrast, the public choice school is neo-liberal as it took over the idea of the utility maximising individual from neoclassical economics and applying it systematically to all collective and institutional behaviour. Sawer says:
As Hayek had said, social justice was a mirage, and those who purported to be pursuing the public interest were really 'special interests'. Equality-seekers were rent-seekers, calculating they could do better out of the state than out of the market. They were people who would do well out of equality. Public choice theorists discarded the term 'welfare state' as too positive, replacing it with terms such as the 'overloaded state', the outcome of a cosy conspiracy between budget-maximising bureaucrats and their clients. Similarly, they replaced terms such as non-government organisations, community groups, or public interest groups with the now ubiquitous term 'special interests'.
She says that market populism denies any legitimacy to the central value of the welfare state: equal opportunity and that it is is in direct opposition to the liberalism that inspired the welfare state--'social liberalism' prioritised equal opportunity over freedom of choice, when the latter was at the expense of the former. It had its roots in T. H. Green’s 19th century critique of the oppressive effects of freedom of contract in conditions of inequality. Green regarded ideas of negative liberty as more appropriate to an earlier era, and he argued for positive liberty, which provided the basis for advocated public intervention and social provision to ensure everybody had the means to realise their potential.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:53 PM | | Comments (0)
Comments