Economists, apartheid and “the common society”

Abstract

This paper deals with the emergence in the 1970s of the idea of “the common society” in response to segregationism, and to an awareness of South Africa's essential poverty. It considers the ways in which economists have either contributed to, or impeded, the development of this idea. The paper documents the construction by 1930 of a ‘radical liberal’ economic blue‐print for a non racial South Africa, but also demonstrates the failure of economists after 1945 to develop this viewpoint, or to mount an effective critique of apartheid legislation. The paper suggests a number of reasons for this failure. Among them were the retreat from ‘political economy’, the rejection of ‘welfare’ economics, and of history, fear of association with Marxism, the new respectability of cultural expanations of poverty, and the rise of economic ‘dualism’. The paper shows that it was only in the latter 1970s, and 1980s, that there was a rediscovery by some economists of political economy, poverty, and ‘the common society’.