The big news is that John Kenneth Galbraith has come to terms with reality. He has discovered that human beings "do not rise" to the heights of socialism: "Generations of socialists and socially oriented leaders have learned this to their disappointment and more often to their sorrow. The basic fact is clear: the good society must accept men and women as they are."
That human beings are not virtuous enough for socialism is, I suppose, a common view among idealists. As it happens, I take the view that socialism is not good enough for human beings, a point we shall come to. But first, for the younger generation, we might ask why anyone should care about the relation between Galbraith and reality.
Galbraith is now in his eighties. The Good Society is his 20th book. Back in the 1960s he was the voice of humane liberalism pointing to the contrast between private affluence and public squalor. A veteran of wartime bureaucracy, he believed it good that governments should plan societies and redistribute wealth.
Many people thought like that, but few expressed it as well as Galbraith. Familiar notions about what from time to time were thought to be the contradictions of capitalism were refreshed by a seductive set of stylistic mannerisms. He invented the idea of "the conventional wisdom" as a sneer. His own opinions were modestly presented as heretical or eccentric, those of others were flattered as "orthodox."
Galbraith was the greatest exponent in his time of the egalitarian paradox: that so many believers in equality also feel immensely superior to everyone else. He gave the Reith lectures in 1966 and presented a television programme on the modern world a decade later (the coffee table book was called The Age of Uncertainty). Here may be found his reflections on the Berlin wall. The modern passion for consumer goods, he said, along with the inexorable needs of modern social organisation, were making the wall an irrelevance. Life in Magnitogorsk and in Gary, Indiana was becoming increasingly similar.
A man as profound as this had better have something, and it is self-confidence. He is widely praised as a "witty and urbane" economic guru. I find his ironies laboured, but he writes lucidly. And there is always some generalisation about modern society to induce us to support a more activist government.
His most famous recent discovery is the inverted pyramid theory of democracy: the affluent now constitute the majority in western democracies. Like the affluent everywhere, they are increasingly indifferent to the needs of the poor. "There is democracy, but in no slight measure it is a democracy of the fortunate."
That leads Galbraith to a conclusion which has really simmered beneath the surface of his opinions for many years: "Democracy has become an imperfect thing." The concerned and compassionate people for whom Galbraith claims to speak are caught between the selfishness of the affluent and the passivity of the poor, most of whom do not even vote. All he can do is look forward to a revitalised Democratic party which will take up his idea of "the good society."
Galbraith is here facing up to a very old problem of socialism. The proletariat is no longer the majority, and modern society no longer depends as in the past on production lines and unskilled labour.
Even before these contemporary problems had emerged, the proletariat had turned out to be damp material for inflammatory revolutionaries. This was the problem that agitated socialists at the very beginning of this century. How could one make a revolution without a revolutionary class? Lenin's answer was the vanguard party, Mussolini's was fascism. Both ended up in Trotsky's "dustbin of history."
Galbraith has always kept his distance from vulgarities of this kind; his current solution is to defend the utopianism which those strident realists always despised. We need a target to aim at, and it is called "the good society."
It is no paradox to say that positing an ideal responds to Galbraith's new realism, which recognises that we live in what he calls "an age of practical judgement." Ideological identification, he remarks with a flash of the old weary superiority, "represents an escape from unwelcome thought." That leads him to a characteristic Galbraithian trope.
The trope is to show superior evenhandedness by positing two positions, left and right, which he has transcended. What he calls "comprehensive socialism" has "diminished and disappeared as an acceptable and effective ideology," but so too has privatisation, which has now become an irrelevance. The reason is-and here he is expressing the basic social democratic argument of our century-that the more complex society gets, the more we need government: "With economic development, social action and regulation become more important even as socialism in the classical sense becomes irrelevant."
So-socialism is dead, long live socialism! This is a remarkable feat of definitional abracadabra. Critics might well lock horns with this argument and suggest that the more complex society becomes, the less competent governments become in regulating it. Galbraith is able to straddle these positions because he has split himself in two. The authorial voice is Galbraith himself, the realist who has come to terms with the lessons of the 20th century, but he has a ventriloquial dummy called "the good society" which periodically tells us what is and is not acceptable.
What is not acceptable is leaving the poor poor. "Nothing... so comprehensively denies the liberties of the individual as a total absence of money." The poor are different from us. Yes, they have less money! It seems an odd, morally confused view to be taken by someone who has made a career out of being dismissive about "the consumer society." The problem of the poor now seems to be that they are not part of that society. As against the Marxists, who emphasise the active, productive side of the poor, Galbraith takes the poor to be regrettably passive. He is not even above giving a bit of false exactitude to his distributionism by tossing into the argument a set of those marvellously meaningless statistics purporting to show that x per cent of the population own y per cent of the wealth. It is almost enough to have one muttering that money cannot buy you happiness.
That the rich have a duty of charity to the poor is an irresistible moral proposition; Galbraith milks it for all it is worth. But as in most arguments of this kind, including those of political philosophers, there is a slipped cog in the argument: namely, how the wealth gets from the rich to the poor. The missing term of the argument is, of course, government. He does indeed recognise that bureaucracy is a weed likely to grow in the good society, but there is no index entry for "dependency culture."
There is plenty of scope in this area for a little "unwelcome thought," but we do not get it. Nor do we get any reflection on what is involved in utopianism. Historians of thought commonly find in it one of the roots of totalitarianism. The problem begins with the very idea of society itself. A society is simply millions of people engaged in pursuing their own version of happiness, individually or in groups, subject to the law of the land (or in quite a number of cases, not entirely subject to the law of the land). What Galbraith and other utopians are actually talking about is the good state, because their projects always involve the kind of rearrangement of what people want to do that could only happen if the state were to lean on them (heavily).
"Towards what, stated as clearly as may be possible, should we aim?" is the question Galbraith poses at the beginning of his argument; "the good society" is his answer. The fact that he is really talking about a dirigiste state brings to the surface the two basic problems of this entire literature.
The first is that any state that has ever got itself the power required for this project has gone on not only to fail in this particular task, but usually to do terrible things as well. Even in the benign welfarist versions of this ambition, states find themselves appropriating half or more of the wealth of the country and wasting it in bureaucratic adventures. Any discussion of these problems that talks about society and does not deal fully with the state is dishonest.
The second problem is more fundamental. The project of a good society strikes at the very heart of our civilisation, which even in secular times remembers the Christian doctrine that the point of being alive is not the satisfaction of needs (important in many ways though this is), but in testing ourselves by the way we respond to challenges. Socialism might be fun to struggle for in a bourgeois world, but it would be remarkably dull and unchanging to live in. Many well meaning people want to cut out competition-in schools, for example-in order to prevent the pain of failure, but the actual attention of everybody is focused on sport, politics, the courts and every other arena in which success and failure are of the essence.
Galbraith talks of a "rewarding life" as something that should be brought within the range of everybody, and such abstract formulas can induce a warm glow in the reader. What he means is essentially a consumerist ideal in which everybody enjoys a range of familiar pleasures, from food to music. But rewards only become rewards if we have done something that actually makes them a reward. They cannot be a gift of government.
The standard Galbraithian response to any argument of this kind is incorporated in the book. "Socially desirable change is regularly denied out of well-recognised self-interest... the comfortably affluent resist public action for the poor because of the threat of increased taxes or the failure of a promise of tax reduction." This is a sneer hardly relevant to states in which 40 to 50 per cent of the GDP is spent by governments, most of it on welfare. For all his newly minted pragmatism, Galbraith still looks forward to the time when those sorrowing socialist rulers who lament the lack of popular virtue can spend all the wealth we create according to the dictates of the good society.
The good society
John Kenneth Galbraith
Sinclair Stevenson, £12.99
