The global race to reinvent the state
by Nick Spencer
Two journalists from The Economist want to “fix Leviathan” through efficiency and better management.
Pity poor Francis Fukuyama. When seaweed curtains Nelson’s column, the shores of the English Channel lap at Highgate Heath and war-painted tribes with cannibalised AK47s battle for control of the South Downs Way, he will still be remembered as the man who declared that history ended in about 1992.
He didn’t, of course; at least not in the way many people think. He never denied that stuff would go on happening. If history is a trash bag of random coincidences torn open by the wind, as Joseph Heller once claimed, Fukuyama never imagined there would be an end to the debris that went blowing down the street. But he did believe – and apparently still believes – that liberal democratic capitalism constitutes the final stage in humanity’s social, political and economic progress and that there was, in essence, nowhere now left to go. It might not be perfect but it was about as good as it got, and certainly as good as we could hope for.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge don’t so much take direct issue with Fukuyama’s view in their new book, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, (their sixth together) as argue that the state has repeatedly moved on over the last 500 years (even when it appears to have arrived at an obvious terminus) and that the liberal democratic capitalist station at which Fukuyama saw us finally pulling in is not as stable or successful as we like to think.
The first three revolutions behind their title are those that effected the nation state in the 17th century, the liberal state in the 19th, and the welfare state in the 20th. To these they add the half-revolution of Thatcherism in the last quarter of the 20th century, which (began to) address the more egregious excesses of the third revolution. Their retelling of this story, which they pivot on Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb, and Milton Friedman respectively, is admirably succinct and clear if, inevitably, unduly tidy and schematised.
Their central contention, however, is not simply that the state train chugs ever onwards but that it does so because it needs to. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are undoubtedly liberal, democratic and capitalist in their preferences but they believe that this particular combination is not working very well.
As one would expect from writers for the Economist newspaper, much of their diagnosis is fixated on a bloated state. “Government used to be an occasional partner in life… today it is an omnipresent nanny.” Theirs is no Tea Party placard, however. Indeed they shoot some well-aimed arrows at US libertarians, not least in pointing out that the Tea Party’s eschatological view of a government so small as to be non-existent finds its closest echoes in Karl Marx. That barb goes deep.
Rather, they point out (as many now do), that for all the talk of benefit scroungers, a disproportionate amount of state spending “is sucked up” by middle class voters who, “having overloaded the state with their demands…are furious that it works so badly.” The surface storms – the US fiscal mess, the Euro crisis – severe as they are, are generated by deeper and still more powerful public forces: over-expectation, simmering discontent, self-righteous disengagement – and all that is without factoring in what demographic trends or environmental crisis could do to us. We need a fourth revolution because the state we’re in can’t cope with the state we’re in.
What this fourth revolution might actually involve is less clear. Micklethwait and Wooldridge have no big idea that can take its place alongside the ‘nation’, the ‘liberal’ and the ‘welfare’ state, and there is quite a bit of discussion about “fixing Leviathan” through efficiency and better management.
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He didn’t, of course; at least not in the way many people think. He never denied that stuff would go on happening. If history is a trash bag of random coincidences torn open by the wind, as Joseph Heller once claimed, Fukuyama never imagined there would be an end to the debris that went blowing down the street. But he did believe – and apparently still believes – that liberal democratic capitalism constitutes the final stage in humanity’s social, political and economic progress and that there was, in essence, nowhere now left to go. It might not be perfect but it was about as good as it got, and certainly as good as we could hope for.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge don’t so much take direct issue with Fukuyama’s view in their new book, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, (their sixth together) as argue that the state has repeatedly moved on over the last 500 years (even when it appears to have arrived at an obvious terminus) and that the liberal democratic capitalist station at which Fukuyama saw us finally pulling in is not as stable or successful as we like to think.
The first three revolutions behind their title are those that effected the nation state in the 17th century, the liberal state in the 19th, and the welfare state in the 20th. To these they add the half-revolution of Thatcherism in the last quarter of the 20th century, which (began to) address the more egregious excesses of the third revolution. Their retelling of this story, which they pivot on Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb, and Milton Friedman respectively, is admirably succinct and clear if, inevitably, unduly tidy and schematised.
Their central contention, however, is not simply that the state train chugs ever onwards but that it does so because it needs to. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are undoubtedly liberal, democratic and capitalist in their preferences but they believe that this particular combination is not working very well.
As one would expect from writers for the Economist newspaper, much of their diagnosis is fixated on a bloated state. “Government used to be an occasional partner in life… today it is an omnipresent nanny.” Theirs is no Tea Party placard, however. Indeed they shoot some well-aimed arrows at US libertarians, not least in pointing out that the Tea Party’s eschatological view of a government so small as to be non-existent finds its closest echoes in Karl Marx. That barb goes deep.
Rather, they point out (as many now do), that for all the talk of benefit scroungers, a disproportionate amount of state spending “is sucked up” by middle class voters who, “having overloaded the state with their demands…are furious that it works so badly.” The surface storms – the US fiscal mess, the Euro crisis – severe as they are, are generated by deeper and still more powerful public forces: over-expectation, simmering discontent, self-righteous disengagement – and all that is without factoring in what demographic trends or environmental crisis could do to us. We need a fourth revolution because the state we’re in can’t cope with the state we’re in.
What this fourth revolution might actually involve is less clear. Micklethwait and Wooldridge have no big idea that can take its place alongside the ‘nation’, the ‘liberal’ and the ‘welfare’ state, and there is quite a bit of discussion about “fixing Leviathan” through efficiency and better management.
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