Neoliberalism, conservative politics, and ‘social recapitalization’

Abstract

Although embedded neoliberalism takes different forms, it is nonetheless defined by its commitment to ‘roll back’ the state in terms of its role as a social provider, as a mediator between capital and labour, and as an ameliorator of perceived market failure. Having said this, the British state, certainly if measured by taking government spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), has proved stubbornly resistant to retrenchment processes. Against this background, some on the right have periodically turned to social recapitalization and ways of developing greater civic engagement and voluntary effort in place of state provision. Such projects seemed to offer the promise of redefining the relationship between the individual and the state. Yet, while often seen as communitarian and thereby the antithesis of neoliberalism, such projects constitute a counterpart or corollary. Nonetheless, although the Conservative-led government in the UK has through the austerity measures pursued from 2010 onwards been able to ‘shrink’ the state (considered as a proportion of GDP), it has not had the capacity or commitment to bring about social recapitalization. Although some broader inclusion initiatives have been pursued, the ‘Big Society’ itself has made only a limited impact. The history of neoliberalism suggests that the shrinkage of the British state may therefore, as a consequence, be vulnerable to later ‘roll back’.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• fiscal retrenchment
• social capital
• civic conservatism
• localism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the members of the Center for Civil Society Studies and Ole Helmersen (Copenhagen Business School) as well as two anonymous referees for their comments and observations.

Notes

1. Flew (2012, 5) draws a parallel with the widespread (and arguably promiscuous) use of the term ‘monetarism’ during the 1980s which was at times invoked to described nearly all forms of neoliberal economic policy.

2. More recently, it has rightly been argued that the focus on neoliberalism in much of the academic literature has crowded out analyses of Thatcherism and Reaganomics (Farrall and Hay, 2014, 4).

3. Pierson emphasizes that there were significant differences between policy sectors. Health provision and pension systems remained largely intact, but institutional arrangements permitted the selling off of council housing stock during the early years of Mrs Thatcher’s governments. It was, as Pierson (1994, 87) notes, ‘… a striking example of retrenchment success’.

4. The picture in the US has been, from the perspective of the free market right, even more of a frustration. Again, the state has proved ‘sticky’. Federal spending levels, measured as a proportion of GDP, fell only marginally and as has been widely noted, the federal government budget deficit was higher (again as a proportion of GDP), when President Ronald Reagan left the White House than when he entered it.

5. Akin to physical and human capital, social capital is at its simplest ‘getting things done’ (Foley and Edwards 1997, 551). It encompasses civic engagement and what are sometimes dubbed the ‘habits of the heart’. In other words, social capital consists of the

… values that people hold and the resources that they can access, which both result in, and are the result of, collective and socially negotiated ties and relationships. The focus is on networks, norms and trust, and resources, and the relationship between them. (Edwards 2004, 2)

6. It may also have been the commitment to offer tax concessions to married couples that forced Cameron to throw his support behind calls for same-sex marriage. If the tax benefit had only been open to heterosexual couples, he would have been open to charges of prejudice.

7. There were, at times, also hints that that the lack of ‘balance’ included growing economic inequality. At one point, although it was not pursued, David Cameron himself seemed to echo the findings of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, and has noted that more unequal societies do worse ‘according to almost every quality-of-life indicator’ (The Economist 2011).

8. Arguably, these shifts are being accompanied by a reconfiguration of citizenship. Neoliberalism has brought forth market citizenship and displacing social conceptions of citizenship: ‘market citizenship tends to define social association in terms of access to, and participation within, the market’ (Jayasuriya 2006, 239). Third Way politics implied that citizenship required inclusion in the marketplace. The localism agenda appears to suggest that citizenship also requires civic engagement outside of market relations.