Vol. 18 No. 10 · 23 May 1996
pages 16-17 | 3093 words
No Exit
David Runciman
- The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain edited by S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting
Cambridge, 403 pp, £40.00, February 1996, ISBN 0 521 45537 5
A Thatcherite history of the state in 20th-century Britain is simple: up until 1979 the state got bigger, clumsier, greedier; after 1979 it started to get smaller, nimbler, leaner. It is the story of a steady, seemingly inexorable advance, followed by a sudden and rapid retreat, as the state was determinedly ‘rolled back’. It is a heroic story, with an obvious heroine, and that alone ensures that it has not gone unchallenged. Many people doubted at the time, and continue to doubt, the purity of Margaret Thatcher’s motives, and of her crusade, strewn as it has been with incidental casualties. Many others have questioned whether history is ever this simple, whether the state really did grow as steadily, and contract as rapidly, as the Thatcherites would have us believe. Little attention, however, has been paid to the language in which Mrs Thatcher’s ambitions were expressed. We accept as given the terminology of advance and retreat, of boundaries and frontiers. But we shouldn’t. It didn’t mean anything then, and it doesn’t mean anything now. Thatcher’s ambitions with regard to the state were neither wicked nor unfulfilled; they were simply meaningless.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 14 · 18 July 1996
From S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting
David Runciman’s review of our book, The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (LRB, 23 May), criticises our view of the state as simplistic and misleading: simplistic because it encourages a view of the state as ‘extending’ or ‘rolling back’ at any given time, and misleading because it confuses what governments do – things for us or against us – with what the state is, namely ourselves in our political form. Thus, according to Runciman, there may be questions about how we organise ourselves, but not about whether this state is encroaching upon, or retreating from, our lives.
But is Runciman’s characterisation of the state either helpful in itself, or more accurate than our territorial image? Our book stresses the uneven changes which the activities of the state have revealed in contemporary Britain; in this sense we share Runciman’s view – indeed it was one of our basic points – that there is no simple story of extension and retreat. Our use of the term ‘boundaries’ also implied a state which was ‘ours’ but – and this is crucial – which could appear to be against us; similarly, one which might in some moments be present, in others, absent. Few, we suspect, pace Runciman, will find such a view unacceptable. It embraces the state as embodying part of our needs – for law, for welfare, for economic stability, for the deployment of force, for the acknowledgment of sacrifice – but also challenges our judgment about what kind of state, and how much state activity, we want. This seems to be the only way to describe what amounts to real changes in the way we will tolerate power over us in our name. And it is because there are, in this sense, changing boundaries to the state that we find stakeholding such an uncertain idea. To the extent that it means a stake in someone else’s private or corporate property, it may be a cause of unease, even legitimate opposition.
Runciman also offers criticisms of two statements made in the conclusion. (a) He criticises the seeming conflation of states and monarchs in the sentence: ‘For good or ill, the British state is less frequently obeyed and more frequently criticised by its subjects than ever before.’ States, he helpfully points out, do not have subjects, only members; states cannot be disobeyed, only criticised. True, in the abstract. But the British state, to which we clearly and specifically referred, is monarchical in its form; headed by the monarch, activated in her name. A monarch does have subjects, and can be disobeyed. Did we really mislead anyone here? (b) He picks up on the apparent conflation between governments and states in the phrase ‘fewer and fewer national governments’ are willing to pay for universal state benefits. Fair enough. But the unfortunate phrase is his, not ours. We pointed out that, indeed, it was the state which paid state benefits. As he rightly observes, that is what makes them state benefits. We referred to a ‘price’ in diminished labour activity/social participation which fewer and fewer governments were willing to pay. Nowhere in the relevant sentence did we refer to ‘universal state benefits’ or, in fact, to the state at all.
S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting
University of Leeds
