Towards a Realignment of the Mind: Compass Lecture, Commonwealth Club, London, 10 February 2011

In: The political quarterly, Band 82, Heft 2, S. 140-145

Abstract

Britain urgently needs a national conversation about the economic, political and moral predicament it now faces. It should start with the economic crisis of 2008–09. Keynesians and neoliberals alike still seek to return to pre‐crisis business as usual, albeit with modifications. But the untamed capitalism that came to grief in 2008 had three major flaws. First, it undermined the public domain of equity, citizenship and civic virtue, whose creation was one of the great achievements of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries, exposing it to invasion by the market domain. Second, it led to a remorseless rise in inequality of resources and life chances, rendering British society one of the most dysfunctional in Europe. Third, it encouraged the emergence of a debased form of democracy, best called 'market populism', that mocks the dream of political equality that lies at the heart of the democratic ideal. Yet growth points of a better society can be detected amidst the gloom. Informal institutions and social movements like London Citizens and the burgeoning environmental movement show that the notion of the public good is still alive. So do the survival of Edmund Burke's communitarianism in the conservative tradition, of John Stuart Mill's social liberalism in the liberal tradition and of ethical socialism in the social‐democratic tradition.