Abstract
This is a slight book and there is a question whether it is fair to review it in a journal such as this. Though it is very nicely presented, it is a short book, printed in a generous format on small pages. I imagine it would amount to a longer than average article in a UK law journal. It is also theoretically slight. It is a polemic written without a scholarly apparatus in a language which would not be accepted by a scholarly journal by an author that does not – some claims made are unfortunate – have a scholarly command of the history and theory of her subject (outside of aesthetics). Polemic is, of course, in principle perfectly legitimate, as is the absence of scholarly apparatus, but in this writer’s opinion a lack of scholarship itself reduces this polemic to a diatribe.
However this is, this book seems to have the wind in its sails. Being published in a series entitled ‘Provocations’ edited (‘curated’, the book jacket tells us) by the influential columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, it benefits from an endorsement by another media figure of, if anything, even more influence, Simon Jenkins, and has already received what an academic at least sees as wide attention, including being discussed on the BBC. This book can in some ways be compared to Joel Stein’s In Defence of Elitism, but its specific argument is at the heart of current left-wing politics and theory, certainly as they concern regulation understood widely. It is the virtue of this book, justifying this review, to, if not illuminate, then vividly illustrate a crisis in the left-wing understanding of economic and political power which is exhibited by many of the other than ‘technical’ submissions on regulation which I read for this journal and other academic outlets across the common law world.
This book defends elitism, but this is a ‘good elitism’ de nos jours, the entire plausibility of which rests on the extent to which it can distinguish itself from the elitism to which one conventionally thought the left was opposed. Inequality of power and therefore domination, discrimination on a wide range of claimed grounds and therefore racism, and inequality of wealth and therefore poverty, especially on a claimed global scale, are all condemned. But the condemnation is so strident that this provides the first indication that we are a long way away from – in a sense a lot further to the left than – the social democratic leftism informing the creation of the welfare state, the legacy of which is described in this book as ‘The Great Capitulation’.
The author does all that objectivity requires when she begins her book by telling us that ‘I teach at a university’ (she is an Oxford English graduate who now holds a Readership in the School of Creative Studies at Bath Spa University), ‘I live in north London’, ‘I work in the media’ (she is a BBC radio producer and has written for inter alia The Guardian and The London Review of Books), and ‘I live a very comfortable life’. In sum, she insists that she is a representative member of the ‘liberal, metropolitan elite’. Whatever her personal comfort, the author portrays this elite as a very embattled group, attacked not merely by ‘the populist right’ but by populists on the left ‘who have lost their backbone’, and – there is a regrettable vagueness about this – the overall tone is that things look bleak for a ‘not-too-distant’ future in which vital cultural institutions – the BBC is to the forefront – will be destroyed or transmogrified and ‘demagoguery will be normalised’. If this is the overall tone, it runs counter to the book’s intent to mount a ‘progressive defence’ of the ‘cultural excellence’ maintained by an elite of ‘those who work to improve society, increase the sum of human knowledge and hold our leaders to account’, who ‘fight for our rights, question assumptions, and…create brilliant and beautiful works of art’, etc.
The bulk of this book is a left-wing sally into the various disputes in the ‘culture wars’ which is entirely familiar. The good elite are, it is claimed, the fruits of liberal democracy, but the book completely turns on the influential variant understanding of both terms in which one’s views – on ‘austerity’, ‘climate science', ‘accuracy’ in journalism, etc. – have to have a certain left-wing cast or those views cannot be genuinely liberal or genuinely the product of democracy. This breathtaking yet commonplace petitio principii will receive no further direct comment. The issue appropriate for discussion here is the book’s by no means commonplace claim that ‘Excellence is Not Privilege’.
What is more axiomatic in stratification theory than that those who enjoy elite status – however defined – may well have enjoyed some advantage in obtaining that status? A refinement allows that some of these persons have what we might call objectively elite qualities, but in part attributes the possession of those qualities itself to the enjoyment of advantage. There is some awkwardness about an example which speaks to the main concerns of this book: the number of prominent and I understand actually good film actors who are Old Etonians. While the effect is dissipated because of a dreadful havering about its membership, this book is refreshing in its refusal to dissimulate about the value of the good elite qua elite. But crucially it does dissimulate about both of these aspects of stratification theory. Even if we allow the good elite has objectively elite qualities, that the ‘liberal, metropolitan elite’ is substantially composed of persons who enjoyed advantaged life-chances and now enjoy positions of advantageous influence, principally in the publicly administered sector, are merely empirical observations.
Though it does not seem so at first, the way found around this is of interest. A ‘brilliant and devastating coup’ has been effected. ‘The real economic elites’ composed of ‘Big business’, or the ‘eight people, all men [who] now own as much wealth as half the world’s population’, or ‘hedge-fund managers who ride in golden lifts and private jets’, or whatever, ‘have pulled off a grand deceit’. These elites and those who ‘serve’ these ‘powerful interests’ have ‘successfully deflected’ the grievances of the mass so that they are now levelled against the good elite, whose cultural excellence and ability to define and promote the public interest are now the target of populist vilification. The tragedy of populism is that ‘public anger’ has been turned against ‘the very individuals and institutions whose job it is to ensure fairness’, and so objectively elite qualities, just the qualities needed to set things right, are denigrated, and those that possess them are reduced to powerlessness.
Now, to describe all this as ‘top-down ideological re-engineering’ invites, indeed obliges, one to see it as just a reversal of populist conspiracy theory. This is not the place to discuss this as such. What it turns on, however, is a sharp separation between economy and state, for this is needed to give sense to the idea that, while the economic elite has the upper hand now, this would be reversed if the good elite were able to fulfil its political vocation. The good elite ‘are the only ones able to regulate and rein in financial power’, and for their own sake the populist mass should concede the ‘progressive defence of good elitism’. We should specifically ‘defend professional expertise, high culture, political representation [ie the autonomy of political representatives] and…journalistic scrutiny [ie by truthful journalists]’ because we should ‘trust professionals, academics and artists to get on with what they want to do, rather than making them waste time on inefficient performances [ie demonstrations] of [their] public value’. (The current writer is not a member of the good elite but approves of this unreservedly.)
It would not be fair to expect this book to address or even register the fundamental theoretical weakness of this: it is a concession of the spontaneity of ‘spontaneous’ economic action, for the economy is set quite apart from its legal constitution by the state. This again cannot be discussed here, but this book is telling in the way it excuses the good elite from responsibility for the legal constitution of the economy we have now, for that economy somehow just exists. It also authorises the revivification of the schemes of improvement of ‘exhausted utopians’, for considering resource constraint is malapropos when virtue lies precisely in political opposition to the economic. The approach to the author’s main interest, high culture, is significantly ethereal, with the important institutions, notably the BBC, being acknowledged to be now sadly debased, being fundamentally ascribed their Platonic forms. A more mundane focus on those running back and forth from public to private loci of power over, well, everything, even high culture, even the BBC, would have been instructive. Reading The State in Capitalist Society, a great book about the ‘advanced capitalist’ economy, would have been particularly instructive. It described the coronavirus BBC 50 years before the first lockdown panegyric.
‘Progressive elitism’, in sum, turns on disregard of one important way in which the theory of regulation has sought to accommodate the experience of the welfare state. The repeated disappointments were, of course, seized upon to justify the neoliberal revolution. It must be acknowledged – just what this book cannot do as disappointments are the economy’s fault – that this revolution exposed inherent and abiding failures in our political capacity to formulate and implement welfare-enhancing policy. This book is further evidence that left-wing thought generally lacks such an acknowledgement, but this has not entirely been the case. At the level of broad political theory I have space only to give the example of Plant’s outstanding The Neo-liberal State, but consciousness of government failure has come to play a subordinate but significant part in left-wing regulatory theory.
I repeat that this book shows no scholarly command of these issues, but I do so only because this is its significance. Like this book, most left-wing thought on regulation makes sense only if one assumes the separation of a malign economy and a, whenever given the chance to be true to itself, benign state. This is not a sensible assumption and it has long not been a plausible one. When it goes beyond the ‘structural’ imagination and considers the doings of concrete persons in concrete settings, this book hammers it home that this benignity, and the wisdom to give it effect, would have to be characteristic to those doing the doings. Who can such people be? This book gives unsophisticated but vivid and representative expression to the answer that this writer believes currently finds greatest favour in left-wing politics and thought.
