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Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter:
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Tony Judt |
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The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of 'planning'.
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Tony Judt |
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However, there is something worse than idealizing the past--or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.
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Tony Judt |
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place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of 'blacks', 'students', 'women' and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the 'repressive tolerance' of its most advanced forms: precise..
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Tony Judt |
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Above all, the new Left--and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency--rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor.
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Tony Judt |
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The only democracies left in continental Europe were the tiny neutral states of Sweden and Switzerland, both dependent on German goodwill.
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Tony Judt |
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Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through
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Tony Judt |
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Nonetheless, he was sensitive not just to the need for countercyclical economic policies to head off future depression, but also to the prudential virtues of 'the social security state'.
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Tony Judt |
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Until fairly recently it would only have been a slight exaggeration to say that most Norwegians, if they were not themselves farmers or fishermen, were their children.
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Tony Judt |
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Size and homogeneity are of course not transferable. There is no way for India or the USA to become Austria or Norway, and in their purest form the social democratic welfare states of Europe are simply non-exportable: they have much the same appeal as a Volvo--and some similar limitations--and may be hard to sell to countries and cultures where expensive virtues of solidity and endurance count for less.
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Tony Judt |
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The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expenditure became the main budgetary responsibility for modern states.
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Tony Judt |
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there is clear evidence that while homogeneity and size matter for the generation of trust and cooperation, cultural or economic heterogeneity can have the opposite effect. A steady increase in the number of immigrants, particularly immigrants from the 'third world', correlates all too well in the Netherlands and Denmark, not to mention the United Kingdom, with a noticeable decline in social cohesion.
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Tony Judt |
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There may be something inherently selfish in the social service states of the mid-20th century: blessed for a few decades with the good fortune of ethnic homogeneity and a small, educated population where almost everyone could recognize themselves in everyone else. Most of these countries--self-contained nation-states exposed to very little external threat--had the good fortune to cluster under the umbrella of NATO in the post-1945 decades,..
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Tony Judt |
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It is, quite simply, humiliating.
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Tony Judt |
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We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health.
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Tony Judt |
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An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:
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Tony Judt |
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Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes.
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Tony Judt |
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we have smuggled in a misleadingly 'ethical' vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments,
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Tony Judt |
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These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.
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Tony Judt |
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The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data.
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Tony Judt |
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The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that "[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances."12"
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Tony Judt |
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For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.
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Tony Judt |
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So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence.
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Tony Judt |
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usually without giving the matter too much thought, we see ourselves as part of a civic community transcending generations.
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Tony Judt |
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The more equal a society, the greater the trust. And it is not just a question of income: where people have similar lives and similar prospects, it is likely that what we might call their 'moral outlook' is also shared.
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Tony Judt |
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By the early '70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted.
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Tony Judt |
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This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority--or even a majority--will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project.
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Tony Judt |
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The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous.
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Tony Judt |
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The welfare states of continental Europe--what the French call the Etat providence, or providential state--followed yet a third model. Here, the emphasis was primarily on protecting the employed citizen against the ravages of the market economy. It should be noted that 'employed' here is no casual adjective. In France, Italy and West Germany it was the maintenance of jobs and incomes in the face of economic misfortune that preoccupied the w..
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Tony Judt |
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The Scandinavian model followed a more selective but also more ambitious program: its goal, as articulated by the influential Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, was to institutionalize the state's responsibility to "protect people against themselves."11 Neither Americans nor British had any such ambitions."
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Tony Judt |
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Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.
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Tony Judt |
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The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.
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Tony Judt |
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The European dilemma is
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Tony Judt |
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We have entered an age of insecurity--economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.
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Tony Judt |
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Insecurity breeds fear. And fear--fear of change, fear of
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Tony Judt |
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decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world--is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.
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Tony Judt |
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All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century.
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Tony Judt |
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financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity.
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Tony Judt |
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From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty.
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Tony Judt |
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But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.
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Tony Judt |
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Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.
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Tony Judt |
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We have become insensible to the human costs of apparently rational social policies, especially when we are advised that they will contribute to overall prosperity and thus--implicitly--to our separate interests.
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Tony Judt |
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More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune.
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Tony Judt |
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Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts:
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Tony Judt |