HAYEK AND THE LEFT

A paradoxical claim?

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and New Labour's election in the United Kingdom, the political economist Andrew Gamble wrote that 'Hayek has much to contribute to the renewal of the socialist project'. Gamble's claim is surprising. Friedrich Hayek dedicated most of his long life to fighting socialism, declaring in the late 1970s that it was 'high time for us to cry from the rooftops that the intellectual foundations of socialism have all collapsed'. Hayek was an important influence on the new right and on senior figures in the British Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher praised the 'powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state' found in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Waving his later tome, The Constitution of Liberty, published in 1960, Thatcher is said to have told an audience, 'This is what we believe'.

While Gamble's attempt to claim elements of Hayek's work for the left at the end of the twentieth century was relatively rare, it was not unique. In 1994 Hilary Wainwright, the founding editor of the radical left-wing magazine Red Pepper, argued that 'Reading Hayek' should 'contribute to new foundations for the left'. In fact, from the late 1980s onwards several authors produced left-wing reinterpretations of Hayek's work. For some on the left, the engagement with Hayek was limited to a tentative discussion of arguments that were closely associated with him—such as his case for the market and against socialist planning. For others, the engagement involved a thorough and careful investigation of his work. In this book I focus on the work of four thinkers on the left who engaged significantly in different ways with Hayek's ideas: David Miller, Raymond Plant, Hilary Wainwright and Andrew Gamble. I look at how their different attempts to reinvent the left are influenced by that engagement.

This book is an attempt to explain the unusual engagement with Hayek, and to reflect upon its significance. I argue that what these authors were doing is worth examining for several reasons. First, the engagement provides one example of how ideologies change, and particularly the importance of enmity and context in shaping and transforming ideology. The various authors discussed here were responding in different ways to common contextual shifts: the perceived failure of the Keynesian consensus, the electoral success of Thatcherism and the collapse of 'actually existing' socialism after 1989. These events led to a period of re-evaluation on the left. The engagement with Hayek only occurred with the collapse of the relationships of enmity that dominated political thought for much of the twentieth century: the divisions between socialism and communism; planning and markets; and the Soviet Union and the United States, for example.

Second, the engagement with Hayek provides a case study that allows reflection on the fate of socialism. Did socialism survive the twentieth century? Did it collapse as Hayek claimed? Or did it transform into something else, and if so what? I argue that the authors examined in this book are part of a wider transformation of socialist thought. This has occurred as a result of a wide variety of new engagements, reevaluations and new discoveries—the engagement with Hayek was just part of this larger story. Taken together, however, by the end of the twentieth century socialism had ceased to exist in the forms that had been dominant earlier that century, which were statist and paternalist. Socialism now largely survives as part of a hybrid ideology—its components found, for example, in liberal, pluralist or feminist varieties. In the conclusion, I reflect on the broader fate of socialism in the early twenty-first century.

Third, the debate about ideological change raises questions about historical periodization: was the engagement with Hayek part of a wider end to a long period of political thought? Was there an ideological continuity in the twentieth century that did not survive its ending? The thinkers examined in this book offer a variety of attempts to rethink the left. They reject the forms of socialism that had dominated the twentieth century. In doing so, they often draw on libertarian and anti-paternalist themes neglected within mainstream socialist thought or upon aspects of liberalism and pluralism. Often their engagement with Hayek evokes—implicitly or explicitly—debates that were prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, the thinkers discussed here reflect a wider claim: that political thought in Britain at the end of the twentieth century had more in common with debates that had existed eighty years before than it did to discussions from the middle of the twentieth century.

Finally, the engagement with Hayek was significant because it had an influence on party politics, particularly on the 'modernization' of the Labour Party after the electoral failure of 1983 and on the later development of New Labour. The debate also raises wider questions on the role of the market for the left today. In particular, it shows how the left is vulnerable if it bases its strategy on market-led growth, something that has become far clearer since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent global recession.

It is this limited and surprising engagement with Hayek's work, involving only a handful of figures on the left, which provides the thread that runs through the book. Hayek was not the only thinker to undergo a radical reinterpretation at the end of the twentieth century: the British left's engagement with the ideas of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt—a onetime Nazi—is perhaps more remarkable. (I explore the rediscovery of Schmitt in more detail in the book's final chapter.) Nor was Hayek a lone voice on the right. For example, John Anderson's article, 'The Servile State', published in 1943, anticipated many of the arguments found a year later in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. However, although other fascinating engagements occurred at the end of the twentieth century, there is a more compelling case for examining the engagement by the left with Hayek than there is over any other figure.

First, Hayek was one of the main intellectual inspirations for the changes that occurred in Britain after 1979. His influence on Margaret Thatcher and on the wider Conservative Party has already been noted. Thatcher was explicit on Hayek's influence, arguing that her Secretary of State 'Keith Joseph gave the best political analysis of what was wrong, and what had to change. But behind him lay the wisdom of people like Friedrich Hayek, bodies like the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a host of thinkers who had swum against the tide of collectivism which at one time threatened to sweep away our national foundations'. As such, for those authors on the left seeking to...