Writing in last month’s Progress, the director and chair of Demos, Richard Reeves and Philip Collins, set out a bold prospectus for Labour’s future. They call on the party to embrace the goal of a liberal republic in which power will lie with people, not institutions or groups; markets will serve liberal ends by dispersing power to individuals (though not when economic power is concentrated in monopolies or cartels); dissent and diversity will be encouraged and embraced; people will determine for themselves what a ‘good life’ is, not have someone else’s idea of the ‘good society’ forced on them; and individuals will be independent because they possess ‘capabilities’ such as financial resources, education, skills and health.

Much in this is attractive: most of all the commitment to decentralisation and an end to suffocating command and control from Whitehall. The fierce attachment to pluralism and liberalism is also important, while the cheerful belief that, as Albert Camus put it, ‘there is no shame in preferring happiness’ is very welcome. But their prospectus is radically incomplete.

Missing are four old social democratic commitments. We still need them, even as we seek new modes for their realisation. Each seeks to secure rich individuality, not aggrandising, possessive individualism.
First, the commitment to fellowship, or social solidarity. Social democrats seek to empower the individual, yes, but we fear the spread of what Michael Sandel calls the ‘unencumbered self’ – that creature detached from the public sphere, civic virtue, citizenship and the sentiment of fraternity. A genuine republicanism knows that self-rule means citizens deliberating with each other about the common good. And, as Sandel has pointed out in Democracy’s Discontent: ‘To deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose one’s own ends and to respect others’ right to do the same. It requires a knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is shared.’

Second, the commitment to equality. The research is in – the widening gulf is bad for everyone. A Sennian commitment to ‘capabilities’ is not a good enough answer. A genuine republicanism would ask what kind of social relationships foster civic engagement.

Third, the commitment to what the philosopher of social democracy, Sidney Hook, called ‘democracy as a way of life’. And that includes economic democracy, understood as ‘the power of the community organised as producers and consumers, to determine the basic question of the objectives of economic development’. A genuine republicanism would ask what economic arrangements are hospitable to self-government.

Fourth, the commitment to reclaim our self-identity as a movement. Popular social movements strengthen and sharpen progressive governments. No significant cultural change has taken place in the last 40 years without a social movement being at its heart.

Reeves and Collins are hostile to the notion of ‘the common good’, whether that of a medieval Pope or a modern social democrat. But we will struggle to critique global capitalism without a sharp confrontation with its baleful logic in the name of the common good. And yes, it really does have a baleful logic, not just the odd monopoly that has to be broken up.

As a description of what is, to argue that ‘power lies with people, not institutions or groups’ is just silly. As a description of what could be, it is unserious if it lacks an awareness that the recent financial crisis was not an aberration but rather a systemic crisis of financialised capitalism – a crisis that rests on the collective power of particular institutions such as capital markets, hedge funds, private equity funds and so on. To imagine that individualised packages of capabilities (‘freedom requires resources’) is an adequate response to that kind of power is not enough.

The cult of the liberal ‘unencumbered self’ has been the basis for the neglect of the public sphere, the degradation of our culture, the decay of our polity and a refuge-seeking in fundamentalism and violent extremism. The ‘unencumbered but capable self’ of Reeves and Collins is not so great an improvement, and is certainly not an adequate foundation on which to renew social democracy.