The Middle Ground
Over the past 150 years, we have seen dramatic changes in countries and their governments. As the time of the divine right of kings and emperors gradually faded away, we saw various experiments in how nations could be ruled. It was if people were exploring alternatives across a continuum, all the way from communism’s rule of the people by the people through to domination by fascist dictatorships. New approaches appeared, revolutions replaced rebellions, and almost unavoidably, wars grew from conflicts between neighbouring countries into global conflagrations.
It might appear cynical to suggest nothing has changed, but in the past twenty years it seems we’re living through a time of equally dramatic change, with commentators and experts noting evidence that emerging leaders are pulling us even further over to one extreme or another. In part it’s a function of the actors on the scene. Donald Trump in America is an expert at this game. So is Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Vladimir Putin in Russia. The consequence of the actions and claims of people like these is to push their opponents into moving towards one or other end of the continuum. Among the many consequences of all this turbulence is the realisation it is proving hard to encourage choosing the middle ground, almost as if that is some kind of failure.
What do we mean by the middle ground? One view is this is where ‘moderate’ political parties put forward platforms that draw on both socialist and capitalist ideas. For example, social democrats want people to be able to choose their government, they want it to offer various social welfare programs, including accessible health care, aged pensions, and forms of income support. These activities are supported through some kind of progressive income tax scheme. Alongside, these same leaders want their countries to be economically competitive, winning trade wars, developing innovative and improved goods, increasing the profits of business enterprises, while their companies offer guidance on economic policy, tax levels and trade regulations.
This isn’t the middle ground, but more of a middle melange made up of a mixture of socialist and capitalist measures. However, there is an alternative view, a middle ground which isn’t merely compromises but rather than approach which establishes an alternative basis for a successful society. Rather than a mash-up drawn from watered-down versions of more extreme measures, this draws on a quite different basis for a nation. Twice in the past fifty years, there have been strong arguments put forward as to how to operate differently, how to create this kind of middle ground. Academics were key to providing justifications for these middle ways, albeit with mixed success.
Back in 1994, Anthony Giddens, both an academic and a prolific writer on political issues, published Beyond Left and Right: the Future of Radical Politics. It was a powerful critique of the political scene in the United Kingdom, and something of a blueprint for the thinking of politician Anthony Blair. Blair had just been appointed leader of the UK’s Labour Party and began a search for what he was soon to call the Third Way. The evidence suggests Blair and the UK Labour Party learnt from Bob Bob Hawke and his Australian government in the 1980s as to how to govern as a Third Way party. In 1994 Blair wrote a Fabian pamphlet describing two prominent variants of socialism, one based on economic determinist and collectivist tradition (a Marxist model) and the other ‘ethical socialism’ based on values of “social justice, the equal worth of each citizen, equality of opportunity, community”.
Blair made it clear his thinking drew on the ideas and writings of Giddens. The Third Way was a term that stood for a “modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left … But it is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests; and a New Right treating public investment, and often the very notions of ‘society’ and collective endeavour, as evils to be undone” (as summarised in Romano, Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the Third Way. Routledge 2006).
In his 1994 book Giddens had put forward what he called a “framework for a reconstituted radical politics, one which draws on philosophic conservatism but preserves some of the core values hitherto associated with socialist thought.” His agenda was broad based and transformational. It rested on a series of key initiatives, designed to challenge what he saw as an emerging neoliberalism consensus. Neoliberals placed a great deal of weight on individualism, which they claimed underpinned and exemplified the “self seeking, profit-maximising behaviour of the marketplace”. Giddens’ alternative was one of reconciling autonomy and interdependence in the various spheres of social life, including the economic domain.
As an illustration of what this might mean, he considered the family. He pointed out that neoliberals kept seeking a return to ‘traditional family values’, which he considered a non-starter. In the 21st Century he proposed there should be a balance between autonomy and solidarity. “Enhanced solidarity in a detraditionalizing society depends on what might be termed active trust, coupled with a renewal of personal and social responsibility for others. Active trust is trust which has to be won, rather than coming from the tenure of pre-established social positions or gender roles. Active trust presumes autonomy rather than standing counter to it and it is a powerful source of social solidarity, since compliance is freely given rather than enforced by traditional constraints.”
More broadly he emphasised what he called life politics as an alternative to both the formal and the less orthodox domains of the political order. The socialist political outlook had always been closely bound up with the idea of emancipation. He saw ‘emancipatory politics’ as a politics of life chances and hence central to the creation of autonomy of action. He saw this as vital to a radical political programme. Giddens argued it resulted from a series of concerns resulting from the changes that had taken place in the last 100 years, a series of transformations in tradition and nature resulting from a globalizing, cosmopolitan order. “Life politics is a politics, not of life chances, but of life style. It concerns disputes and struggles about how (as individuals and as collective humanity) we should live in a world where what used to be fixed either by nature or tradition is now subject to human decisions”.
If that sounds challenging, Giddens took it further and argued the importance of dialogic democracy. He saw democracy not just as a vehicle for the representation of interests, but also as a way a way of “creating a public arena in which controversial issues – in principle – can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue rather than through pre-established forms of power.” In this approach greater transparency of government would help ‘democratise’ democracy, but he saw this extended into areas outside of the formal political sphere, to areas of personal life, including parent-child relations, sexual relations, friendship relations, together self-help groups and social movements.
Giddens put forward a broad ambit of change. He felt it was time to rethink the welfare state in a fundamental way. He suggested a new ‘settlement’ was urgently required, no longer in the form of a top-down dispensation of benefits. Welfare measures should be aimed at countering the polarising effects of what after all, he observed, remained a class society. These new measures must be concerned with the reconstruction of social solidarity given the changes that were taking place both at the level of the family and in the wider civic culture. He emphasised such a ‘settlement’ had to be one that gave due attention to gender, not only to class.
This brief set of comments offers a small window into the massive reform program that was being proposed. It initiated an agenda, one that many saw as largely technocratic, and by 2002, it was already stumbling. Giddens had identified several problems facing the New Labour government, in particular what he called Labour’s ‘half-way houses’, including the health services, together with environmental and constitutional reform. Within a few years, the impetus for change faltered and British society fell back into its familiar individualistic, materialistic and class-based structure. Why did this important initiative fail? Perhaps another writer, discussing similar issues some years before, gives us some clues.
Anthony Giddens was writing nearly a quarter of a century after John Rawls, an American, who had published his major work, A Theory of Justice, in 1971. Like Giddens, Rawls had been concerned about inequality, but his starting point was justice, and his focus was on the legitimate use of political power. In that sense, Rawls was tackling the issues that Giddens would later explore at a more practical and applied level. He wanted to imagine how we could construct of ‘just’ society, and having done that there would be a platform on which political reformers like Giddens could then develop the mechanisms they saw as being necessary. Curiously, despite citing a variety of authorities, Rawls didn’t figure in Gidden’s analysis.
If Giddens was linked into the world of party politics, Rawls was a philosopher, and his ambition was an all-encompassing theoretical framework. Justice as fairness was the core of Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls was concerned with what he described as a ‘liberal society’, and as part of his political conception of justice in practice it provides a framework for the legitimate use of political power. Yet Rawls regarded legitimacy as only the minimal standard of moral acceptability. After all, as we know to the cost of many nations in the Twentieth Century, a political order can be legitimate without being just. Rawls’s concept of justice was to set a superordinate standard, that the arrangement of social institutions should be what is morally best.
Rawls constructs justice as fairness around detailed consideration of a number of key ideas, that citizens are free and equal, and that society should be fair. Well aware of the much-debated tensions between the ideas of freedom and equality, which were critical elements of the socialist critique of liberal democracy and also of the conservative critique of the modern welfare state, Rawls perspective rested on the fundamental belief that justice as fairness was superior to what had been the dominant tradition in modern political thought for some time. That approach was Bentham’s utilitarianism, ‘that which benefitted the most people most of the time’.
In Rawls’s approach, often described as egalitarian liberalism, citizens relate to each other as equals within a social order defined by reciprocity, rather from within unjust status hierarchies, the world that is so familiar to us today. As he made clear, significant political and economic inequalities are readily associated with inequalities of social status, to the point that those of lower status are encouraged to be viewed, both by themselves and by others, as inferior. This status inequality leads to widespread attitudes of deference and servility, on one side, and a will to dominate underpinned by arrogance on the other. These consequences of social and economic inequality were traditionally obvious in countries like the United Kingdom, but Rawls saw them running through supposedly ‘class free’ American society, too. If anything, they are even more evident today.
In a way that Giddens was to develop a couple of decades later, Rawls argued justice as fairness was to be achieved through a just and fair arrangement of the major political and social institutions of a liberal society: the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family, and so on. This was the basic structure he considered as essential to realise justice, as these institutions distribute the benefits and impose the costs of social life: they determine who will receive social recognition, who will have which basic rights, who will have opportunities to get what kind of work, what the distribution of income and wealth will be, and so on.
As Rawls saw it, social cooperation is necessary for citizens to be able to lead decent lives, but, of course, he realised they are not indifferent to how the benefits and burdens of cooperation will be divided amongst them. To develop as set of principles of justice as fairness Rawls adopted a distinctive approach. He started with the idea that no-one ‘deserves’ to be born into a rich or a poor family, to be born naturally more or less gifted than others, to be born female or male, to be born a member of a particular racial group, and so on. Since these features are morally arbitrary, citizens are not entitled to more of the benefits of social cooperation simply because of them. For example, the fact that a citizen was born rich, white, and male provides no reason in itself for this citizen to be favoured by social institutions.
From this point, Rawls then considered how social goods should be distributed. His conclusion was that all social goods should be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution would be to everyone’s advantage. His principle was that since citizens are fundamentally equal, justice should begin from a presumption that cooperatively produced goods should be evenly divided. However, the force of his view (the part cited in italics above) is that if there are any inequalities these must benefit all citizens, and particularly must benefit those who will have the least. In other words, if equality is the baseline, then any inequalities must improve everyone’s situation, but especially the situation of the worst-off.
Looking at Rawls and Giddens today, it is remarkable that Giddens didn’t draw on Rawls. Rawls set the fundamental base for a ‘third way’, but Giddens was quickly drawn into application. He needed Rawls principles as a touchstone for decision-making. As a philosopher, Rawls was less interested in application, and so he lacked a clear working through of how his principles would work in contemporary society. We need both. Indeed, in 2024 as we continue to confront extremists and fools, a middle ground remains as distant and elusive as ever.
