More than 40 years ago, Samuel Brittan and I joined within a week or two of each other the editorial staff of the Financial Times. He soon became (and remains) the leading British commentator on the passing economic scene, and the issues which lie behind it, contributing more to our understanding than at least 90 per cent of academic economists and acquiring in the process a unique international reputation. But his interests have always extended far beyond the purely economic, as these essays, addresses and papers from the past couple of years bear out.
His critique of so-called communitarianism, a fancy name for a form of collectivism which has become fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic, is brief and wholly convincing. His analysis of the nature and consequences of globalisation is also excellent. I am less convinced by his essay on what he calls "Redistributive Market Liberalism." He is seeking some principle by which the state should intervene to smooth out the inequalities that inevitably emerge in a liberal market economy, of which he is a robust defender. His philosopher's stone is John Rawls's concept of a "veil of ignorance": we are to imagine what sort of redistributive arrangements we would like to see in place if we were unaware of our own income, wealth, abilities or any other relevant particular.
To my mind the Rawlsian principle is valueless and the question it addresses pernicious. As Brittan himself points out, the system which Rawls derives from answering his own question is unlikely to be the answer that most people would give. More fundamentally, there is no determinate answer at all. It is, I suppose, possible that enough people might be persuaded to engage in the Rawlsian thought experiment to produce an interesting opinion survey, but even then there is unlikely to be unanimity-and as Brittan argues elsewhere, the virtue of democracy is that it provides a peaceful means of removing an unpopular government: it does not mean that we should construct a system based on the views of the majority of the moment.
One of the many problems of egalitarianism is that, once it is admitted as a principle of policy, it becomes, in practice, insatiable: however much equality is imposed, the cry will always be for more. We should forget altogether about inequality, and focus instead on the problem of poverty and its relief; with the relief financed from the non-poor on as close to a strictly proportionate basis as is practicable. To be sure, this still leaves a number of tricky questions about the definition of poverty, the extent and nature of its relief, whether strings should be attached, and so on. But these questions are in any event inescapable. What we can and should abjure is the profoundly illiberal notion of an imposed hierarchy of material wealth, the focus on inequality (which invariably leads to attacks on the rich taking precedence over relief of the poor), and the chimera of a just distribution of incomes. Brittan seems to be pointing in this direction when he commends Churchill's formulation of the ladder (of opportunity) and the safety net. But this is incompatible with the concepts of redistributive justice and the Rawlsian approach to which he is perversely wedded.
The most thought-provoking, if the most dubious, essay is on Darwinian psychology, political economy, and what Brittan calls the problem of groups. This whole area, where psychology, philosophy and the natural sciences come together, is arguably the most interesting field of intellectual endeavour at the present time.
Brittan was one of the first to draw the parallels between the spontaneous natural order produced by Darwinian evolution and the spontaneous economic order produced, as Adam Smith explained a century before Darwin, by the free play of the market. The fact that most people nowadays are far readier to accept Darwinism than they are Smith's invisible hand is no doubt explained by the fact that even if we don't like the consequences of the former there is precious little we can do about it-unlike the case with the latter. But it is also in a sense surprising: the very fact that there can be and indeed have been different economic systems gives us clear empirical basis for choosing the market economy, whereas the trouble with modern Darwinism is that it leads far too easily to confident assertions that are unsusceptible of empirical verification or falsification-such as the claim, unhesitatingly accepted by men (and not by women or old men), that they are genetically programmed to engage in a struggle to fertilise as many ova as possible.
Brittan is far too intelligent to be unaware of this weakness of neo-Darwinism, but he brushes it aside too easily. One of the keys to the whole of Brittan's thought is contained in a single sentence in the introduction to this essay. "As a matter of temperament," he writes, "I have been attracted both to individualism and to reductionism." His individualism is well-argued and commendable; but this predilection for reductionism, which he has manifested for as long as I have known him, leads not only to his embracing the dubious proposition that the whole of human behaviour can be reduced to genes seeking reproductive success, but also, and rather more seriously, to his taking his individualism just that bit too far.
Unlike Hayek, Brittan will not adulterate his belief in classical liberalism with the espousal of Burkean conservatism. Indeed, in the chapter on Hayek in Brittan's excellent 1995 collection, Capitalism with a Human Face (all who admire Brittan should read the disarming fragment of intellectual autobiography which forms the introduction to that volume), he condemns Hayek's belief in the superior wisdom of institutions, arguing that there was precious little to admire in the institutions of the former Soviet Union. But this is to miss the point. An evil system will produce evil institutions. What Hayek was talking about were institutions which have evolved within a liberal order of freedom and the rule of law.
It is here that I most strongly part company with Brittan, as I do over his abiding hatred of the nation-state, prompted by a mixture of his reductionism (for Brittan, there is no such thing as the nation) and his horror of the crimes committed in its name. Yet as Brittan himself points out in the essay, "In Defence of Individualism," there can be no market economy without private property, and no private property without good government. What he sadly fails to recognise is that, in the world as we know it, there can be no good government without the nation-state. As the late Susan Strange observed in The Retreat of the State: "The market economy could not function properly without the framework provided by the state. National sentiments of identity and loyalty provided the glue that gave social cohesion to the political framework."
Brittan is too good and too honest an economist to pretend that there is any economic advantage to be gained from British membership of the single currency: the best he can bring himself to say is that "with the economic case so unclear, it is reasonable to base a vote in an Emu referendum on political instinct." And it is all too clear where his political instinct lies-although on what ground he assumes that whatever federation or similar order emerges from all this will be more liberal and less authoritarian than a self-governing Britain is less clear.
It is true that Hayek, more than 50 years ago, in his prophetic polemic, The Road to Serfdom, expressed an interest in the idea of a European federation; but he did so explicitly on the grounds that, while national governments felt competent to plan their national economies, no federal European government could possibly be so stupid as to try and plan an economy so large and diverse as that of Europe. He underestimated the hubris of succeeding generations. In Capitalisme contre Capitalisme, a much more recent polemic, almost as influential in France as Hayek's was in England, Michel Albert argues for a European federation explicitly on the grounds that in the modern world of the Anglo-Saxon global market and giant multinationals, only a European federal government would be big enough and strong enough to plan a European social market economy.
I understand why Brittan is where he is. But when I read him declaring, in the conclusion to an address (not in the book) which he recently gave in Amsterdam, ? la Helmut Kohl that, "It is surely better that European nations should get together financially than that they destroy each other physically and set fire to each other's homes," I cannot help feeling that somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, he must be aware that the ground on which he stands has become very shaky. But Brittan's commendably clear writing, intellectual integrity, strong feelings, penetrating analysis and profound humanity are in evidence in this book as in everything else he has written. The many readers who admire his writing will not want to miss it.
Essays, moral, political and economic
Samuel Brittan
David Hume Institute/Edinburgh University Press, ?9.95
