neoliberalism
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea – review
Jonathan White‘s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea examines how changing political conceptions of the future have impacted democracy, arguing that contemporary challenges like economic slowdown and climate change have led to reactive politics and short-termism. Though the book proposes ways to revitalise democracy, Aveek Bhattacharya suggests we may need to seek beyond our political institutions for strategies to build a more open future.
You can read an interview with Jonathan White about the book here. On Monday 11 March at 6.30pm White will speak at an LSE panel event, The politics of the future – find details and register here.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Jonathan White. Profile Books. 2024.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea is a book about the history of the future, and what it means for the present. More precisely, it describes how the way people think about the future has evolved over time, and the impact of these changes on democracy. Jonathan White’s central argument is that while optimism for the future once helped build democracy, economic slowdown, climate change, new technology and geopolitical tension mean that “the future no longer seems its [democracy’s] friend”.
For democracy to function, White observes, it is critical that people believe an “open future” is possible: that there are alternatives to the status quo, that society can evolve in a range of different ways, and that the people can choose between them. One of the key defining characteristics of democracy – the peaceful handover of power – is premised on changeability of the future: election losers believe that they will get their chance to achieve their vision of society again.
For democracy to function, White observes, it is critical that people believe an ‘open future’ is possible
In the present, White says, it is harder to maintain that patience and faith. The future is regarded with fear and claustrophobia. At various points he describes the future, far from being open, as “closing in”. Catastrophe – societal decay, conflict, environmental collapse – feels hard to avert. Insofar as there are options, they involve deferring to technocrats. There is a “now or never” urgency about politics, and a fear that waiting your turn means leaving it too late because the other side will destroy everything.
Via a tour of historical political thinkers, White sketches the ideas of the future that make for the most vibrant democratic system. Political and social outcomes must seem open, but not in such a destabilising manner as to trigger counter-revolution from those attached to the present. A strand of utopianism can be energising but must be linked to near-term political tactics to be practicable. Efforts to limit uncertainty, to render the future predictable, through calculation and technocracy risk squeezing out the necessary imagination and mass participation of vibrant democracy. At the same time, chaotic impulsiveness and pure disregard for expertise risks descending into fascism. Trying to control the future by keeping it secret is likely to generate conspiracy theories and discontent. Consumerism individualises the future and means we no longer share in it – we move from valorising Victorian steam trains to wanting our own personal cars.
Our perpetual state of emergency, while creating unpredictability, produces reactive politics, designed mainly to return things to the way they were.
The conception of the future we have arrived at today is not, in White’s opinion, sufficiently conducive to democracy. Our perpetual state of emergency, while creating unpredictability, produces reactive politics, designed mainly to return things to the way they were. Short-termism dominates – most notably, through the election cycle, but even longer-term threats like climate change are tractable only by converting them to benchmarks and deadlines. Managerialism and secrecy dominate, empowering organisations like the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund and triggering impulsive populist backlashes.
White’s proposals for rebuilding a more positive conception of the future and revitalising democracy are somewhat surprising. He is sceptical of direct democracy – while more referendums might give ordinary citizens more chance to shape the future, they raise the stakes and perpetuate the “all-or-nothing” politics he thinks is so baleful. Small-scale councils are too small-scale to create significant change, citizens’ assemblies too short-lived to pursue a persistent vision.
White calls for ‘radical representative democracy’, with mass participation in the development of party policy and party members having greater opportunity to recall politicians who fail to deliver on those agreed goals.
Instead, he puts his chips on political parties as the crucibles of a more inclusive, compelling and hopeful vision of the future. He calls for “radical representative democracy”, with mass participation in the development of party policy and party members having greater opportunity to recall politicians who fail to deliver on those agreed goals. It’s an argument with echoes of Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void, which also claimed that the disengagement of ordinary members and politicians from their political parties had led to “the hollowing of Western democracy”.
White’s rebooted party system sounds good in theory, but invites scepticism about its practicality. His central assumption is that citizens’ disempowerment is the root cause of our current democratic malaise, and that the opportunity for greater influence will suffice to tempt enough people to give up their evenings and weekends to political causes. It is not encouraging that the existing parties that have done most to engage with mass movements and improve participation with things like online platforms – Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy – do not seem to have restored democratic confidence in their countries.
The Victorian capitalists who built the factories and railroads may not have been personally attractive, but they inspired progressives and socialists to dream about how their innovations could be used to benefit all.
White is oddly dismissive of the pockets of optimism that do exist outside the political system – most notably Silicon Valley, where ideas like “Effective accelerationism”, the view that technological progress is likely to obviate many of our deepest societal challenges, has taken root. For White, they display the wrong sort of optimism: too consumerist and individualistic, too inclined towards anti-system chaotic thinking, tendencies encapsulated in the figure of Elon Musk, presented as fascistoid, if not fascist. Setting aside whether that is a fair characterisation of Musk, the question it raises is why the confidence of tech companies seems so divorced from the sentiments of wider society. The Victorian capitalists who built the factories and railroads may not have been personally attractive, but they inspired progressives and socialists to dream about how their innovations could be used to benefit all. There are some – figures like Aaron Bastani on the far left and Derek Thompson on the centre left – that are trying to do something similar today, but White does not recognise them as such.
White assumes that the problems of democracy are endogenous: that they are caused by political institutions and must be resolved by them.
Most fundamentally, White assumes that the problems of democracy are endogenous: that they are caused by political institutions and must be resolved by them. But there are more straightforward explanations for the modern morosity. Stagnant economic growth, and the failure of new technologies to demonstrably improve living standards, would naturally be expected to undermine confidence that things will improve. The demographic shift to an older population in rich countries may also have contributed to a lack of vitality and enthusiasm, and a tendency to look back with nostalgia rather than forward with hope. Even among the young, we should not necessarily take perceptions at face value. Phenomena like “climate anxiety” seem to reflect anxiety at least as much as they reflect the climate, and as such will often be psychological, not just political in nature.
That’s not necessarily a comforting thought. Maybe technological abundance is around the corner, maybe the economy will turn around, maybe the mental health crisis will abate – whether by sheer luck or unusually effective action – and people will start to feel better about the future. But In the Long Run suggests that fixing democracy’s problems, renewing our faith in the open future, is a much bigger task than tweaking its institutions.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler on Shutterstock
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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth – review
In the face of soaring wealth inequality, Ingrid Robeyns‘ Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth calls for restrictions on individual fortunes. Robeyns puts forward a strong moral case for imposing wealth caps, though how to navigate the political and practical hurdles involved remains unclear, writes Stewart Lansley.
Watch a YouTube recording of an LSE event where Ingrid Robeyns spoke about the book.
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. Ingrid Robeyns. Allen Lane. 2023.
Ingrid Robeyns’ Limitarianism is the latest in a long line of critiques – such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Branko Milanovic’s Visions of Inequality – of the soaring wealth and income gaps of recent decades. Limitarianism focuses on personal wealth, which is much more unequally distributed than incomes, and is arguably the most urgent of these trends. It draws most closely on the United States, where, according to Forbes, nine of the world’s top 15 billionaires are citizens.
Robeyns argues that given the wider damage from the enrichment of the few, with its negative impact on economic strength and on wider life chances and social resilience, we must now impose a limit on individual wealth holdings. Thinkers have been making the case for this “limitarianism” and the capping of business rewards for centuries. The Classical Greek Philosopher, Plato, argued that political stability required the richest to own no more than four times that of the poorest. The Gilded Age financier, J. P. Morgan – one of the most powerful of American plutocrats of the nineteenth century – maintained that executives should earn no more than twenty times the pay of the lowest paid worker. In 1942, President Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent top tax rate, stating that “[n]o American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year (about $1m in today’s terms).” “The most forthright and effective way of enhancing equality within the firm would be to specify the maximum range between average and maximum compensation”, wrote the influential American economist J. K. Galbraith in 1973.
The Gilded Age financier, J. P. Morgan […] maintained that executives should earn no more than twenty times the pay of the lowest paid worker.
One of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis was to trigger a debate about the role played by excessive compensation packages in banking. Others have argued that the introduction of guaranteed minimum wages – which limits employer freedom over employees – should come with a maximum too. As wealth inequality has deepened in recent decades, there have been growing calls for measures to reduce this concentration, not least among some members of the global super-rich club. Yet there has been perilously little political action. Each year the world’s mega-rich, facing few constraints, carry on appropriating a larger share of national and global wealth pools.
Robeyns sets out a powerful moral case against today’s wealth divide and asks the all-important question: “how much is too much?”. She calls for setting limits to the size of individual fortunes that would vary across countries. In the case of the Netherlands, where she lives, “we should aim to create a society in which no one has more than €10m. There shouldn’t be any decamillionaires.” This, she argues should be politically imposed. She also adds a second aspirational goal, an appeal to a new voluntary moral code applied by individuals themselves: “I contend that … the ethical limit [on wealth] will be around 1 million pounds, dollars or euros per person.”
Although there are many critics who dismiss the philosophical concept as either unfeasible or undesirable, history suggests the idea is far from utopian. Limits operated pretty effectively among nations – including the UK and the US – in the post-war decades and became an important instrument in the move towards greater equality.
War has long proved a powerful equalising force, and the post-1945 decades brought peak egalitarianism.
War has long proved a powerful equalising force, and the post-1945 decades brought peak egalitarianism. States shifted from their pre-war pro-inequality role to become agents of equality. This brought (albeit temporary) upward pressure on the lowest incomes and downward pressure on the highest. These limits operated in two ways: through regulation and taxation, and changes in cultural norms. Nations imposed highly progressive tax systems, with especially high tax rates at the top – that were sustained in the UK until the 1980s – the expansion of protective welfare states, and a shift in bargaining power from the boardroom to the workforce.
These policies were also enabled by a significant pro-equality cultural shift. This brought a tighter check on top business rewards and the size of fortunes. Until the early 1980s, business behaviour became more restrained, and wealth gaps narrowed. The kind of business appropriation that has become so widespread today would, for the most part, have been unacceptable to public and political opinion then. Gone were the public displays of extravagance and the high living of the inter-war years. Up to the 1970s, and the return of what Edward Heath called the “unacceptable face of capitalism”, executive salaries in the UK were moderated by a kind of hidden “shame gene”, an unwritten social code – similar in some ways to Robeyns’ call for voluntary limits – which acted as a check on greed. It was a code that was largely adhered to, partly because of fear of public outrage towards excessive wealth.
Up to the 1970s, and the return of what Edward Heath called the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, executive salaries in the UK were moderated by a kind of hidden ‘shame gene’
Robeyns is making a conceptual case. She doesn’t give much detail of how limitarianism might work in practice, and doesn’t draw lessons from the post-war experience (though this was the product of the particular circumstances of the time). She recognises the hurdles needed to make the politics of limitarianism a reality. There are plenty of questions of detail that would need to be settled. How, as a society, would we determine the appropriate “rich lines” above which is too much? Would the “undeserving rich” whose wealth is achieved by extraction that hurts wider society, be treated differently from the ‘deserving’ who through exceptional skill, effort and risk-taking, create new wealth in ways that benefit others as well as themselves?
The expectation that the tremors of the 2008 meltdown would trigger a shift towards a more progressive governing philosophy that embraced a more equal sharing of wealth has failed to materialise.
The greatest hurdle is political. The expectation that the tremors of the 2008 meltdown would trigger a shift towards a more progressive governing philosophy that embraced a more equal sharing of wealth has failed to materialise. The pro-market, anti-state politics of recent decades are now largely discredited. International Monetary Fund staff, for example, have called neoliberal politics “oversold”. There are widespread calls for the reset of capitalism, with as Robeyns puts it, “a more considerate, values-based economic system”. Although such a system may yet emerge, there are few signs of the kind of value-shift and new cultural norms that would be a pre-condition for a politics of restraint and limitarianism.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image Credit: dvlcom on Shutterstock.
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