Description
students are asked to identify a SOCIAL policy area they regard a) as important and b) in need of improvement (start reading quality newspapers or follow ABC journalism (e.g. 7.30 Report) to get a basic idea of possible policy areas. Students are asked to answer the following questions justifying their responses with appropriate evidence:
Unformatted Attachment Preview
1b – Social Policy Scoping Paper:
Word Count: 500 words +/-10%) Value: 20%
Due Date: 9:00 am, 8th March 2024 (i.e. before the first seminar).
Submission Details: To be submitted via Drop Box located under the Assignment 1 Tab.
This is an individual assignment.
In preparation for Seminar one, students are asked to identify a SOCIAL policy area they regard
a) as important and b) in need of improvement (start reading quality newspapers or follow ABC
journalism (e.g. 7.30 Report) to get a basic idea of possible policy areas. Students are asked to
answer the following questions justifying their responses with appropriate evidence:
1. What social problem does the social policy you have chosen to seek to address?
2. How (i.e. by which mechanism or intervention) does the policy do that?
3. Which government departments (at state/territory and federal levels) and agencies
(governmental and non-governmental) are involved in the implementation of this policy?
4. How is social work involved in your chosen policy area (if social workers are NOT involved in
the delivery of the policy, you need to change your topic)?
5. What are the social outcomes (negative and positive, if any) of your chosen policy?
6. Historically, is your chosen policy an iteration of past policies (if yes, what changes have
occurred over the last 10 years) or is this a brand-new policy (this is unlikely, make sure you
understand the background of this policy area)?
Marking Criteria:
Assignment 1b: Marking Criteria for Policy Problem Scoping
High Distinction
(10-8)
Demonstrates high
quality
understanding of
policy area and
high-quality
engagement with
Distinction
(7.99- 7)
Demonstrates
strong
understanding of
policy area
discussed and
high-quality
Credit (6.99 -6)
Pass (5.99 -5)
Demonstrates
good quality
understanding of
policy area
discussed and
good quality
Demonstrates
adequate
understanding of
policy area
discussed and
adequate with
Fail
(0-4.99)
Fails to
adequately
meet range of
standards
outlined in
this matrix
material at a
sophisticated
level; Presents a
high level of skill
in articulating and
presenting ideas /
issues in a clear
and concise way.
engagement with
material at a
strong level;
Indicates
advanced
recognition of
academic
register in
writing (e.g.
diction)
and analysis of
material
engagement with
material at an
adequate level;
Presents
moderate level of
writing skill.
material at a
minimal level;
Writing,
structure, syntax
& presentation is
inconsistent.
Writing &/or
structure
&/or
presentation
is/are poor.
The paper is
hard to read
due to
consistent
syntax and/or
language
errors.
TWO
Neo-liberalism and Social Policy
Alan Pratt
Outline Points
This chapter is devoted to an examination of one particular strand of liberal theory, that of possessive individualism
and its role in the rise of free-market capitalism to a position where it is currently the dominant form of economic and
social organisation across much of the globe.
The growth in international economic instability following the collapse of fixed exchange rates and oil price increases
in the 1970s.
The significance of these changes for the nature and direction of economic and social policy.
The crucial importance of the assumptions of methodological individualism, rationality and market supremacy for the
generality of neo-liberal theory.
The neo-liberal approach to liberty and its rejection of the concept of social justice.
Public choice theory
Neo-liberalism and the centre-left in British politics: towards a new consensus?
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to consider one particular strand of Liberal theory, that of
possessive individualism, and to attempt to judge its impact on British debates about economic
and social policy. It develops a synthesis of the economic and political theories, and the
behavioural assumptions on which they rest, and is located in the changed economic and social
circumstances of the early 1970s which saw Western European governments fail to maintain
the full employment and economic growth which underpinned the construction of post-1945
welfare states. It discusses the key individual components of neoliberalism as an intellectual
system, that is, rationality, the superiority of the market as an institution for optimal resource
allocation, public choice theory, the public burden theory of welfare, government overload,
and the supremacy of individual self-reliance and moral responsibility over the culture of
dependence. After examining the coherence and consistency of these ideas the chapter
concludes with an assessment of the extent to which this ideology has succeeded in creating a
momentum towards a convergence of welfare systems based on a residual model of state
welfare together with an enhanced role for voluntarism, the private market and occupational
welfare in the new Europe that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
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The Context
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Consensus policies became increasingly inappropriate to Britain’s evolving needs. They had to be either reformed or
replaced. In the mid-1970s they were, of course, to be replaced- ironically, by policies which closely resembled the very
ones which had been perceived to fail in the 1930s. (Lowe, 1990: 182)
This extract from Lowe’s essay on the historiography of the post-war consensus provides the
basis of our agenda, which is about the replacement of one ruling set of ideas by another.
Although significant, if unplanned, progress had been made in British social provision in the
inter-war period, it was chronic, involuntary unemployment that was the major problem of
economic and social policy. It dwarfed every other aspect of domestic politics, and, the work
of revisionist historians of the period notwithstanding, unemployment remains the single most
important image and memory of the age. The then dominant neo-classical Treasury view failed
to provide any real solutions, and only slowly did a coherent and intellectually rigorous nonMarxist alternative appear, and even then it took the transforming experience of total war to
force even the smallest crack in this orthodoxy.
At the heart of this new approach was Keynes’s critique of a central assumption of neoclassical economic theory, that full employment was a general case. In The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money (1936) Keynes demonstrated that equilibrium could exist at
a less than full employment level of output and, because the system was in equilibrium, unless
exogenous intervention occurred chronic, involuntary unemployment would persist. If
governments had the desire they now, thanks to Keynes, had the tools to do the job. Whatever
its equivocations and compromises might have been the 1944 White Paper on employment
policy suggested that henceforth policy would be different. The commitment it contained to ‘a
high and stable level of employment’ can be seen as the most important single event in the
construction of the British welfare state achieved by successive British governments in the
1940s. Amongst other things it satisfied the most important of the three assumptions on which
Beveridge based his plans for social insurance and allied services. (The other two were the
creation of a national health service and the introduction of a system of children’s or family
allowances.)
Just as the 1944 commitment to full employment signalled the dawn of a new collectivist age
with an active interventionist government at its heart, so the abandonment of full employment,
and the economic theories which had led to its achievement, by Callaghan and Healey after
1976 can be seen as the harbingers of a new-old world, a world shaped by exactly those
theories which Keynes had seemingly dethroned 40 years earlier. In a very real sense the
world had come full circle. Hayek, one of the twentieth century’s most important classical
liberal theorists, emerged from relative obscurity and became the single most important
intellectual influence on the Conservative government which took office in 1979 armed with an
agenda very different from the norm of the post-war period.
The Collapse of Consensus
Ideas by themselves rarely change the direction of public policy: for them to have any lasting
and real effect they must conspire with circumstances and in the 1970s the circumstances that
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
Created from ballarat on 2024-03-04 01:47:24.
had made possible the long post-war boom changed suddenly and dramatically. One of the
most important achievements of international economic policy after 1945 was the creation of
an ordered pattern of trading relationships between nations based on the system of fixed
exchange rates that had emerged from the Bretton Woods conference. Cooperative and
relatively free trade governed by institutions and structures such as the World Bank and GATT,
designed to prevent the competitive devaluations and economic autarky that compounded the
depression of the 1930s, was seen as the best hope for the capitalist world. However, this
ordered system was unable to cope with the instabilities generated by the financial needs of an
American government engaged in a shooting war in Southeast Asia and a war on poverty at
home. The Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971 failed to contain the pressure and in
1973 a new system of floating exchange rates was introduced, one that provided the basis for
the integrated world currency markets trading 24/7 we have become so familiar with today.
If, to these important changes in the capitalist world’s financial system, we add the reality of
profound technological change, an explosion in commodity prices (especially of oil) and the
ending of the long post-war boom, the sudden collapse of the Keynesian system becomes more
understandable. As a consequence a crisis in state authority developed throughout the
advanced capitalist world and the search began for a new analysis and for policy prescriptions
more in tune with this new world order. Britain, the weakest of the world’s major economies,
experienced this crisis earlier and more deeply than anywhere else. The failure of the
corporatist attempts at modernisation in the 1960s and early 1970s meant that ‘the existing
policy regime was severely discredited by the dramatic worsening of performance on
unemployment, inflation, economic growth and the balance of trade’ (Gamble, 1987: 192).
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Neo-liberal Theory: the Substance
Although there are differences in emphasis and approach reflecting the predilections of
individual writers, neo-liberal theory in general offers a coherent and consistent theory of how
the world works and ought to work. The failures of the past can be quickly remedied if the old
verities are reasserted and the proper relationships re-established between government and
economy, state and individual, state and civil society, and between individuals themselves.
Drawing especially on economics, politics and philosophy a powerful synthesis has been
forged, one whose influence has been immense over the last thirty years as it has provided a
new sense of direction to governments whose assumptions about the world have been changed
by the events alluded to earlier. This set of ideas has led to a transformation of both the
language and objectives of public policy throughout the world.
Assumptions
Although detailed aspects of neo-liberal theory can be complex the totality is relatively clear
and simple, resting as it does on a very particular set of assumptions about the nature of human
behaviour and institutions. Of these assumptions the most important are methodological
individualism, rationality and the supremacy of the free market.
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
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Methodological Individualism
Methodological individualism asserts that ‘all phenomena are reducible to individual
behaviour; organic entities such as “society” or the “state” are comprehensible only in terms of
the activities of their constitutive individuals’ (King, 1987: 94). In Margaret Thatcher’s
memorable phrase: there is no such thing as society. Free individuals go about their business
within the general framework of the ‘rule of law’, knowing wherein their best interests lie,
pursuing pleasure rather than pain. Embodied in contractual relationships these individual
pursuits produce a set of collective outcomes which by themselves are neither good nor bad.
They simply are. Others may take a moral position about these outcomes but methodological
individualism would suggest that such positions are irrelevant. Discussion of them belongs to
another realm.
Rationality
The individual pursuit of self-interest only makes sense if individuals act rationally. So
important is this assumption that without it the whole edifice of neo-liberal thought would be
endangered. For, if individuals do not always behave in a rational fashion in all circumstances,
what can we conclude about the outcomes of such behaviour? In this universe rationality is
understood as the pursuit of perfectly informed self-interest. Any other kind of behaviour is
inconceivable.
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Market Supremacy
The perfect location for the exchanges of these rational, perfectly informed self-interested
individuals is the market. Markets are about exchange, and for neo-liberals market
relationships are infinitely preferable to other forms of transaction such as those of the
political world. Although sometimes used as a synonym for capitalism, markets pre-date the
capitalist mode of production. They have existed since the first act of trade took place and they
are the best institutional setting for the conduct of economic affairs. We now turn to some of the
most important of neo-liberalism’s economic theories and begin with a more detailed
examination of the market.
Economics
The Market
In essence neo-liberal economics differs little form the classical political economy developed
by the followers of Adam Smith from the late eighteenth century onwards, although it needs to
be said that they detached Smith’s preference for the market from his wider moral vision, one
that includes a genuine sympathy for the poor. At the heart of classical political economy is a
belief that the market is the best institution yet created by human activity for the conduct of
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
Created from ballarat on 2024-03-04 01:47:24.
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
economic matters.
Individuals bring their preferences to markets and the collective weight of these preferences
represents a powerful set of signals that producers of goods and services would be foolish to
ignore. It would not be a sensible business decision to carry on producing commodities that
consumers have shown through their actions they do not want. Failure to comply with the
consumers’ revealed preferences would guarantee the failure of any business to behave in this
way. Given freedom of entry into the market other potential suppliers are always available
who will recognise the facts of consumer sovereignty. These characteristics make markets
efficient, sensitive and speedy signalling mechanisms, doing spontaneously that which is
impossible or very difficult for governments or the former command economies of Eastern
Europe.
Modern industrial societies are such complex entities that the idea of government taking
responsibility for the myriad decisions necessarily involved in the optimal allocation of
resources is foolish. It is beyond the capacity of governments to do that which markets do
naturally. Hayek (1944) derided the whole concept of government planning, and argued that
any attempt to replace the market with a system of politically determined decision-making was
bound to end in tyranny and disaster. The collapse of the economies in the former Soviet bloc,
the emergence of a system of state-sponsored capitalism in the People’s Republic of China and
the retreat of managed economies everywhere all testify to this. Capitalism has triumphed and
free market capitalism in particular.
In markets decision-making is delegated to the lowest possible level, that of the individual
consumer and firm, and this de-centralisation of decision-making not only renders unnecessary
the complex and over-staffed public bureaucracies of non-market economies (at a great saving
to the public purse) but also produces outcomes that are autonomous, spontaneous and, because
they represent the choices of free, perfectly informed and rational individuals, valid. In
markets freedom of choice is guranteed and respected and, as Marquand notes, ‘in the market
liberal ideal, free men, freely exchanging goods and services without intervention by the state
maximise the general interest by pursuing their own interests’ (Marquand, 1987: 66). For neoliberals the question is not so much what goods are allocated through the market but what
goods must the state, and the state alone, provide. That is, it is concerned with the nature of
true public goods. If we can establish the identity of these public goods, then it must follow,
given the market’s superiority as an institution for the allocation of scarce resources, that all
other goods can and should be allocated through the market. Although there are differences of
emphasis between individual neo-liberal theorists the general outlines of agreement are clear.
Typical of them is Seldon, who argues that public goods have characteristics that clearly
separate them from non-public goods. Thus, Seldon says that public goods are:
Supplied collectively rather than separately to individuals or small groups;
Provided by general agreement to pay jointly, ‘that is, they require voluntary collective arrangements to coerce one
another and also individuals who do not want the services at all but who cannot help benefiting from them’ (Seldon, 1977:
17).
Non-rival in the sense that until full capacity is reached they can be used by more and more people at no additional cost;
For Seldon though, ‘the essential characteristic of public goods is that they cannot be refused to people who refuse to
pay, and who would otherwise have a “free” ride if they were not required to pay. Public goods, to be provided at all,
cannot therefore be produced in response to individual specification in the market: they must be financed collectively by
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
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the method known as taxation’ (Seldon, 1977: 18–19).
If we accept the validity of Seldon’s characteristics of true public goods can we establish a list
of those functions that the state alone can provide? It is not a lengthy list and comprises
defence, a system of law and order, protection against contagious disease, and what he
describes as ‘a not obvious but important one: the production of knowledge and information’
(Seldon, 1977: 19). Street lighting, lighthouses and externality problems such as pollution,
together with provision to protect children and the mentally infirm are sometimes added to
extend the list slightly.
The expansion of the state’s role to include the provision of services other than true public
goods is the hallmark of what has been termed the interventionist state. (Hall, 1984) This
expansion, which normally includes education health care, housing, a variety of income
maintenance programmes and the personal social services has led to a very large increase in
public expenditure’s share of national income in all OECD countries in the twentieth century,
but especially since the end of the Second World War. The implications of this trend for public
finances, and for the efficiency of the market economies within which this expansion has been
located, is a particular concern of neo-liberal political economy.
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
The Problem of Public Expenditure
In 1979 the first public expenditure statement of the incoming Conservative government
asserted that excessive public expenditure lay at the heart of Britain’s economic problems. In
this it was no different from its predecessor led by Edward Heath in 1970 and the manifestos
on which the Conservatives fought the elections of 1970 and 1979 share the same economic
analysis and advocate the same prescriptions for recovery, with the exception that in 1970
monetarism had not yet established a significant presence on Britain’s intellectual and political
landscape, certainly nothing like the hold it was to have on Thatcher’s administrations.
Public expenditure is invariably seen as a major problem, as a real and present danger to
economic efficiency. Hence the popularity of the public burden theory of welfare with all neoliberal theorists. As governments moved further and further away from their proper concern
with the provision of public goods and took on responsibilities that ought to have remained
with individuals in markets they inevitably found themselves in conflict with the private,
productive sector of the economy for available resources. In this conflict there could only be
one winner. Governments could offer a guaranteed rate of return on any borrowing they might
need from the financial markets, a security that the private sector could not match. The public
sector was also in competition for available supplies of labour, and even though government
could not always match the salaries paid to educated and skilled labour in the private sector,
job security and guaranteed, inflation-proof pensions could always sugar that particular pill. In
brief, wealth creation in the private traded goods sector of the economy was in danger of being
crowded out in this competition for resources (Bacon and Eltis, 1976). If this process was
allowed to continue, negative-sum welfare-efficiency interactions were a certainty (Geiger,
1979). In other words, the productive ability of the economy would be compromised by the
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
Created from ballarat on 2024-03-04 01:47:24.
excessive demands of rising public expenditure.
The expansive and expensive welfare regimes of social democracies place a great strain on
governments’ revenue raising capacity. Impelled by the insatiable demands of greedy
electorates and self-interested bureaucrats intent only on empire building, government has to
tax more and borrow more. The level of direct taxation is of particular concern to neo-liberal
economists and they take it as a given that if personal and company taxation is too high at the
margin, work incentives and risk-taking will both be damaged. Why should employees work
harder and take on more responsibility if they know that the value of the marginal pound earned
by them is going to be significantly reduced by the government’s depredations? The end result
is bound to be that productivity will decline, output be reduced, and investment and risk-taking
discouraged. In order to reverse this debilitating tendency it is essential that government
reduce those taxes on companies and individuals that have led to the miserable situation
described above. Do this and output and real incomes would both increase and Britain’s long
relative economic decline arrested.
For neo-liberals the dismal reality of a high tax, low growth economy is compounded by the
possibility that if income in periods of non-earning is greater than income from employment,
after taking into account such things as travel and other work-related expenses, there will be
those who would prefer the leisure of unemployment to the demands of work. Traditionally the
neo-liberal response to this has been not to raise employment income through devices such as
the minimum wage and the expensive and wide-ranging system of tax credits favoured by the
present government as part of its ‘make work pay’ strategy, but to widen the gap between
earned income and benefit income by reducing benefits and making them more difficult to
claim.
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
The Labour Market
Labour is a commodity and, like any other commodity there is a market for it and that market
can be cleared if the price of labour, i.e. wages, is determined by the normal market forces of
supply and demand. If the market is left to its own devices and not distorted by government
intervention (through initiatives such as a minimum wage) and the activities of powerful trades
unions armed with significant legal immunities, the tendency would be towards little or no
involuntary unemployment. There would always be frictional and structural unemployment of
course, these are the desirable and natural features of any dynamic market economy as people
changed jobs and employers in their search for better wages and conditions and as old
industries decline and new ones emerge in response to new technologies and changing tastes. If
involuntary unemployment does exist it is because of artificial rigidities in the labour market
occasioned by the behaviour of organised labour. Neo-liberals’ response to involuntary
unemployment would always have an assault on the bargaining power of unions and whatever
legal immunities they might enjoy at its heart. This would assist the necessary progress back
towards a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment in a deregulated and more flexible labour market.
Any other approach would be doomed to failure in the long run. Keynesian inspired attempts to
reduce unemployment below its natural market-determined rate might have some temporary
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
Created from ballarat on 2024-03-04 01:47:24.
success but eventually these would lead to greater inflation as governments resorted to deficit
financing to stimulate aggregate demand and, ultimately, higher unemployment. As Hayek said,
‘unemployment has been made inevitable by past inflation; it has merely been postponed by
accelerating inflation’ (quoted in Marquand, 1987: 86). It is interesting to observe that since
1997 New Labour has done relatively little to restore unions’ legal position to that they
enjoyed before the Conservatives’ succession of employment acts eroded their immunities and
it has made no secret of its belief that the creation of significant labour market flexibility has
been one important factor in Britain’s much lower unemployment rate than the average for the
European Union, not least in Germany where unemployment has recently reached five million.
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Inflation
The suppression of inflation is the key policy objective of neo-liberal economics. Secure this
and a number of benefits will flow. Regular and sustainable increments to economic growth,
low unemployment, rising disposable real incomes, and even improvements in the quality of
justifiable public services can only be secured if inflation is conquered. If this meant some
temporary hardship and misery for some as the toxin of Keynesianism was expelled then, as
Norman Lamont said, unemployment was a price worth paying.
The precise nature of the relationship between excessive public expenditure and inflation
has varied over time. All that neo-liberals are sure of is that there is such a relationship. If
governments cannot raise all the revenue they need to fund their spending from taxation and
charges then they will have to borrow. The government may be forced to a form of borrowing
that would enable the banking system to increase its credit base and hence the supply of money
in the economy. The theory was that after a time lag of around two years this increase in money
supply would lead to an increase in the rate of inflation, thus demonstrating a mechanistic,
causal relationship between the money supply and the general price level. In their earlier years
the governments led by Margaret Thatcher were especially enamoured of this theory, an
attachment that manifested itself in the Medium Term Financial Strategy(MTFS) which
incorporated clear fixed targets for monetary growth, targets that were in line with
expectations of growth rates in the real economy. While monetary aggregates are clearly
important in macro-economic theory and obviously to the practical realities of economic life,
for the neo-liberal approach to inflation they are critical. However, this aspect of the theory
has proven to be most disappointing as it proved to be very difficult to reach an agreed
definition of M (the money supply) that is so critical to monetarists’ equations while in terms
of economic policy it was difficult to control any definition of M at all. Eventually the MTFS
was abandoned and with it went one of the central planks of monetarist theory. Although the
control of inflation remains a major policy objective of neo-liberal theory the reduction of
inflation experienced by most western economies in the last few years owes little to the
application of monetarist ideas, with a rather more compelling reason being the pressure on the
price of consumer goods being generated by rapidly expanding economies such as China and
India together with the ability of industrial end commercial enterprises to relocate their
operations to these and other new centres of capitalist enterprise. Only in those countries in the
Lavalette, M., & Pratt, A. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy : Theories, concepts and issues. SAGE Publications, Limited.
Created from ballarat on 2024-03-04 01:47:24.
European Union that are bound by the strictures of the stability and growth pact does a
semblance of theoretical monetarist orthodoxy exist and this has led to the European Union as a
whole having a rate of economic growth far below that of the OECD in general. It is hardly
surprising that France and Germany have both broken their obligations in this regard but are
still experiencing unemployment levels far higher than the post-war average. It is likely that
pressure from these two will force a major revision in the pact or even its de facto
abandonment altogether. In Britain Gordon Brown gave operational independence for the
management of monetary policy to the Bank of England with an obligation to meet an
asymmetric inflation target of 2 per cent; any significant deviation from this requires the
Governor to put his explanation in writing to the Chancellor. Britain’s present institutional
arrangements for the administration of monetary policy have general approval in the financial
community and it is not without significance that the Conservative Party has abandoned its
earlier opposition. The system could well become a blueprint for some badly needed changes
in the European Union.
Activity 1
In what ways do neo-liberals’ behavioural assumptions affect their views on the
economy?
Copyright © 2005. SAGE Publications, Limited. All rights reserved.
Neo-liberalism: Aspects of Political Philosophy
The value premises of neo-liberalism are determined by its assumptions and methodological
individualism, rationality and a preference for the free market are as important here as they are
in its economics. Indeed economics and philosophy are part of that seamless whole that is neoliberal political economy and: ‘When properly presented, their arguments strike at the
normative presumptions of the post-war welfare state’ (Plant, 1990: 7). Plant’s analysis of the
normative content of neo-liberalism provides a coherent framework which we can use to
develop a relatively complete account of its values and preferences.
Liberty
For Hayek, liberty was the supreme virtue, far outweighing any other be it democracy or social
justice or fraternity. The great tragedy of modern European civilisation was the gradual retreat
from the understanding of liberty developed by British liberals from Locke onwards in face of
the advance of the German tradition of an authoritarian, interventionist state possessed of a
belief in its right to shape the e
