The paperback is out, complete with a detailed new afterword and some lavish reviews on the cover, and I'll be starting the relaunch of The Liberal Defence of Murder this Wednesday at 7pm, in the very swish Mosaic Rooms, between Earl's Court and High Street Kensington.  This will be a very, very glamorous evening, and you are all expected to comport yourselves in a manner befitting the affair: principally by turning up, laughing at my jokes and then tastefully buying several copies of my fancy new paperback.  So, shape up, and remember: I shall be quietly judging all of you in the audience, and making mental notes as to who is 'in' this season.  Effectively, you will be auditioning.

This will be formally launched in July, but the hard copies are out there.  They include a brand new Afterword approximately 16,000 words in length, which takes us up to the Middle East revolutions and the Libyan war.  I have also made various corrections - including some responding to the more bilious critics, recalling the old saw about stopped clocks.  And they have a swell looking new cover with lots of press recommendations.  You know the deal: if you want to fight the warmongers, you need this book.

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

George Clooney, Hollywood's meridian liberal, offers a story about a liberal politician making a run for president.  This could be good, or it could be insufferable.  (The presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman is a reasonable guarantee that it won't be too insufferable, though).  You think you're going to get something like Bulworth, where the hero's progressive views are met with disapproval by party bosses and rich donors alike, but stimulate popular enthusiasm.  Or you think, as the ambiguous title invites you to, that there's an assassination in the post.  And indeed the movie obliquely alludes to this possibility - there's a brief, tense 'Wellstone' moment as the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, and his advisors sit in a small jet air craft passing through turbulence.  There are other allusions - a dead intern, redolent of Chandra Levy, perhaps.  If the CIA doesn't off him, if his donors don't hang him out to dry, if the media doesn't destroy him, maybe someone will frame him.  Somehow, our liberal lion will be sacrificed to the Christians.  But no.  

At a simple didactic level, this film is closer to The Candidate, where an intelligent, principled reformist allows his campaign to be corrupted, dumbed down and pulled to the right in order to win.  But that's not really the basis for two hours in the cinema - not for my money.  And indeed if this film were reducible to its explicit politics, it would be fairly appalling.  This is often the case with Clooney films.  Up In the Air, for example, was a deeply conservative movie whose argument was that only families provide the durable emotional and financial bedrock that allow people to survive unemployment.  Syriana was critical of the neoconservatives and the oil companies, but its hero was a fairly repulsive CIA agent.  So, consider the elements of the candidate's appeal: the unproblematised liberal nationalism (we want America to lead the world again), the imperial chauvinism (we fight the war on terror by not needing "their product", which is oil), the hypocritical populism (the governor attacks the rich for not paying their dues, but his own wealth, the fact that rich people dominate the political system, is not seen as being problematic).  This is 'Obamamania' reheated, without the story of racial redemption.  In fact, on that subject, the film's racial politics are reprehensible.  The only major black character is a Senator played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who is depicted as the basest, most reactionary snake oil salesman - in some respects, he's like a cross between John Bolton and (the fictional) Clay Davis.  As I say, if this was all there was to the film, there would be little to admire.

The core of the narrative is the 'corruption' of Ryan Gosling's innocent, idealistic, blue-eyed, K Street consultant employed by the campaign who, we are led to believe, is not a completely cynical, self-serving piece of shit.  He is a believer.  He thinks Morris is the man who will make a difference.  A wised up columnist from the New York Times tells him that he's an idiot, that the presidential race will make no difference to the average working "fuck", that the only real difference it makes is between him working in the White House, or going back to K Street to work for a million dollars a year.  He demurs, charmingly.  Events, which we won't describe in any detail here, lead the cornflower-eyed sap to revise his idealism, and realise that the drive for success has led both himself and the candidate to compromise themselves, and undermined the progressive content of the campaign.

Again, so far so boring.  We have heard all this before.  We've heard some of it from Joe Klein.  There's very little of political substance here.  For many who watched and enjoyed the film, it was yet another sermon about the corrupting effect of politics on integrity.  If only we had a better media.  If only the political system didn't smile on the ruthless.  The liberal lament.  And indeed they wouldn't be wrong to see all that.  And ultimately, this has a tendency - if pushed to its conclusions - to collapse into the patronising argument that the average working fuck is at fault for being so suadible.

What I think makes the film a bit more interesting is the way it works as a deflation and desublimation of its own 'Obamamania', or rather of the elevating liberal discourse that Obama has mastered.  At the start of the film, the basic liberal assumptions are in place.  We have a charismatic liberal hero, someone who can make the difference, if only the media and the Republicans can be fought off.  The system can be made to work for the good guys - Democrats, as far as this film is concerned - if only talented hucksters will come to their aid.  By the end of the film, none of these comforting ideas have been directly contested or challenged: this is not Brechtian film-making.  Rather, they are simply cast in a new light in which they appear to be worthless.  It's not that the progressive potential of the campaign has been betrayed; it's that it was never there.  The impoverished tropes of idealism, integrity, re-taking this country, etc., are just so much sublimated avarice, the language of bourgeois esurience levitated to the plane of 'the general interest'.  And it's the affective level on which this case is made; it is only a shift of perspective that transforms dutiful conscientiousness into pitiless, self-serving ruthlessness.  After which, the cynosures of Democratic liberalism, which Clooney undoubtedly believes in wholeheartedly, leave a sour taste on the palate of the working fuck.

In chapter three of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek lays out of the neoliberal conception of 'progress'. In this, he was consistent with previous rightist thought by conceiving of 'progress' not as a movement toward a desired end, but as the constant, rapid accumulation of capital in its various forms, with no agreed end - change for change's sake, as he put it. Hayek called this essay 'The Common Sense of Progress', and if we listen to politicians we can see just how influential this conception is among elites, how it has indeed become a kind 'common sense', as Hayek vaunted. What follows is a step-by-step outline of Hayek's argument with some context supplied, the better to appreciate what this notion of 'progress' is for, and what kind of assumptions are embedded in it.

***

Hayek sets out his stall by outlining a defence of the idea of historical progress (particularly during 'the last two hundred years') against some of the more sceptical inquiries, which doubted that the twentieth century of Nazism, colonial genocides, Stalinism, imperial famines, and nuclear annihilation was an uncomplicated advance. Hayek grants that much of what has been claimed for 'progress' has been hubristic, and deterministic, that not all change has been necessary or beneficial. Nevertheless, "civilization is progress and progress is civilization". Modern "civilization" (he means capitalism) depend on "the operation of forces which, under favourable conditions, produce progress". Without these forces, we would lose "all that distinguishes man from beast". What does separate man from beast? Well, Hayek routinely decried "primitive instincts" of group solidarity, the basic human impulse to put the collective ahead of the individual. For a methodological individualist, who holds that there is no collective, that all corporative entities are fictions which boil down to discrete, self-sufficient individual units, the idea of putting the group first is undoubtedly scandalous.

Thus in the chapter we're considering, he complains that "in some respects man's biological equipment has not kept pace with that rapid change, that the adaptation of his non-rational part has lagged somewhat, and that many of his instincts and emotions are still more adapted to the life of a hunter than to life in civilization. If many features of our civilization seem to us unnatural, artificial, or unhealthy, this must have been man's experience ever since he first took to town life, which is virtually since civilization began. All the familiar complaints against industrialism, capitalism, or overrefinement are largely protests against a new way of life that man took up a short while ago after more than half a million years' existence as a wandering hunter, and that created problems still unsolved by him." So, what distinguishes man from beast is the suppression of primitive instincts in favour of market "rationality", the willingness to accept the "artificial rules" of the marketplace which produce a "spontaneous order" and thus make progress possible. Interestingly, Hayek's quirky anthropological assertions do not support the classical fiction of homo oeconomicus. On the contrary, it is stated again and again that the principles of a "rational economy" are "artificial", at variance with our instinctive predilections. The neoliberal assumption, grounded in bitter struggle, is that human beings are not naturally disposed to living in a market based system, and will tend to rebel against it and seek to abbreviate it by various means. Indeed, Hayek later queries whether people even want most or even all of the results of "material progress". It seems a most "involuntary" affair. Thus, people must be somehow coerced or 'educated' into accepting it, and it must be upheld through effective political combat.

A little context here. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek very clearly draws out the political point he is making about social solidarity and the demands for 'social justice' which it produces. The market order depends upon the law being neutral, with everyone subject to the same rules. But legislation in the name of social justice meant that the law was 'socialised', giving special privileges and exception to certain classes for the purposes of ameliorating their situation. He cites 'New Deal' legislation in the US among his examples. This is, as William Scheuerman and Renato Christi have pointed out from different perspectives, remarkably similar to the legal critique of social democracy that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1920s, when - so Christi argues - he an authoritarian liberal, rather than the counter-revolutionary conservative he had been during the 1918 revolution and would become again when he bedded with the Nazis. (Christi's analysis suggests that the difference between the two is purely one of context). So, this is an important punctuation point: Hayek's ideas concerning progress and civilization are directly drawn from radical right political thought in the interwar years, which sought to rephrase classical liberalism in light of the challenge of mass democracy and socialism. If we hear Hayekian ideas of progress espoused by politicians, we know that they are not neutral, but were fashioned as weapons in a hegemonic struggle. Let's continue.

***

Progress is not, for Hayek, characterised by advances toward a fixed aim - say, equality, or liberty. He rejects such teleological conceptions. Rather, progress is "a process of formation and modification of the human intellect, a process of adaptation and learning in which not only the possibilities known to us but also our values and desires continually change. As progress consists in the discovery of the not yet known, its consequences must be unpredictable. It always leads into the unknown, and the most we can expect is to gain an understanding of the kind of forces that bring it about." Hayek's preferred metaphor here is the scientific process, the gradual accumulation of knowledge and power over nature, and the consequential transformation of our desires and intent.

A corollary of progress being unpredictable, is that it is unplannable. One cannot really master the forces which produce progress, bend them to any design or end goal, only come to understand them a little bit better in order to maximise their potential. It is not incidental that Hayek has used the example of scientific progress to make his case. Hayek's concern with the problems of knowledge is central to his outlook. In arguing against economic planning (see 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', The American Economic Review, September 1945), he maintained that a "rational economic order" could not be brought about by any single intelligence, because knowledge of the circumstances of which those who would construct such an order must make use is not concentrated but distributed in "bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" among "separate individuals". For this reason, the best system is one in which individuals act on their own self-interest, disregarding traditional morality, civic responsibility and so on, responding only to price signals. In doing so, by blindly obeying artificial rules and paying no attention to any greater end, they assure progress.

Hayek does pause to acknowledge that progress in this sense may not by itself leave human beings better off than they would have been had all progress halted a century, or a millenium, ago. He says that the question is "probably unanswerable", but that the answer "does not matter". He goes on: "What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable. It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement's sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence. The enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly."

If this seems an unsatisfactorily peremptory way to dismiss imposing questions of political justice, it can be explained by recalling Hayek's twist on what is called "preference utilitarianism". For Hayek, the society which promotes the general welfare is that society which maximises an anonymous individual's chances of obtaining his or her unknown preferences. Thus, whether we're materially better off or happier is less important than whether as many people as possible have the maximum number of chances to strive for their own ends. Only a society in its "progressive" state offers that possibility. Hayek credits Adam Smith this insight, but as usual distorts him entirely. Smith's defence of agrarian capitalism depended on it continually improving the employment and wages of "the labouring poor, of the great body of people". This was a crucial ethical argument for the system and it was tied to a moral philosophy that was as far from posessive individualism as Hayek's is from socialism.

***

And here we come to another area where Hayek differs from Smith, and that is the former's belief in the virtues of hierarchy. In The Road to Serfdom, and The Constitution of Liberty, roughly the same case for inequality is made. The rapid economic advance that enables the greatest number to satisfy their preferences depends upon inequality and would "be impossible without it". Progress so rapid "must take place in echelon fashion, with some far ahead of the rest". The rich, therefore, are not exploiting anyone. They are simply the farthest ahead. But the reason why there must be some far ahead of the rest is that the growth of income that enables individual achievement depends on the growth of knowledge. This is more important than the accumulation of capital because, while material goods will always be subject to relative scarcity, knowledge, once created, is "gratuitously available for the benefit of all". (Hayek was not writing before the invention of intellectual property, so it is safe to call this a disingenuous observation). The production of that knowledge depends on the outlay of resources equal to many times the share of income that, were resources distributed equally, any one person would enjoy.

Thus, progress, civilization itself, requires a wealthy class, a leisure class. It requires that there are luxury goods for the exclusive enjoyment of a few, because it is only through first having been luxury goods that new inventions eventually are made available to the majority - be they airplane trips or refrigerators. The wealthy who enjoy luxury goods are thus like "scouts" who "have found the goal" and made the same road easier for "the less lucky or less energetic" (whose contribution may merely have been to produce the luxury goods in question). A progressive society is a highly unequal one. The more unequal the society, the faster progress is achieved, and the better the eventual lot of the poor.

Moreover, the rich stand as an example to the rest of us. In the tradition of conservative polemic from Burke onward, Hayek maintains that the things we strive for are things that we want because others already have them. These desires act as "a spur to further effort". The "progressive society" must recognise the spur, but disregard "the pain of unfulfilled desire". To sidestep the inevitable charge that he is engaging in "cynical apologetics", which he is, Hayek attempts to show that even a planned society, which he cannot help but think of as a stagnant society, a kind of "serfdom", must have a few who try out the latest goods before they are widely available. There must be production for some before there is production for all, and if there is to be growth, there must be the incentive of desiring what others have and what one does not have. The only difference would be that inequalities would result from authority rather than the market, "and the accidents of birth and opportunity". Rather than deepening the persuasive power of the argument, however, this merely restates the same set of axioms, which contain the same set of implied observations about human behaviour.

***

The commitment to inequality poses a problem for Hayek's commitment to liberty, inasmuch as he does not want anyone's progress to be inhibited by unfair and arbitrary advantage or disadvantage. But he maintains that as long as there no large gaps between the rich and the rest, so long as the income scale is well graduated, with each step along the scale well occupied, it can "scarcely be denied" that the advance of some benefits the rest. Of course, the income scale has never quite looked like a well graduated pyramid. These days, a more applicable metaphor is the L-curve.

Nonetheless, Hayek is convinced that we will see the justice of this if we only abstract a little from our immediate circumstances and look at the global situation. Yes, we are all interdependent, but the advancement of some has not deprived others of anything. "Although the fact that the people of the West are today so far ahead of the others in wealth is in part the consequence of a greater accumulation of capital, it is mainly the result of their more effective utilization of knowledge." And that more effective utilization of knowledge has been made possible by internal class distinctions: "a country that deliberately levels such differences also abdicates its leading position - as the example 0f Great Britain so tragically shows." And he goes on to lament the decline of the British empire. There is thus no injustice or exploitation, either globally or domestically, for the rich are not claiming exclusive title to something that would otherwise be widely available. They are pioneers, who have simply used their knowledge more effectively in the market place, and thus given us all an example to imitate and learn from. (Here, as elsewhere, Hayek deals with contentious observations not by acknowledging their contentiousness, but by asserting their certainty all the more forcefully - "there can be little doubt that", "it can be scarcely denied that", "it is worth remembering", etc.).

Hayek's conception of progress is naturally anti-traditionalist. Having acknowledged the resistance of populations to markets and the changes they bring, he explains that even the conservative peasant, happily enjoying a "way of life", owes her mode of existence to "a different type of person", the innovators and wealth creators of the past who forced the static, peasant farmer mode of living on the previously nomadic people. The "changes to which people must submit are part of the cost of progress", and every such change is involuntary. Indeed, picking up on a point earlier, Hayek states: "I have yet to learn of an instance when the deliberate vote of the majority (as distinguished from the decision of some governing elite) has decided on such sacrifices in the interest of a better future as is made by a free-market society." But in their own self-interest, people must be coerced into accepting such changes, because the things they actually want, not just material goods but even the social improvements they desire, depend on them being so coerced. They must be compelled to abandon their happy little ruts, their traditional morality, and their primitive instinctual desire for social solidarity.

***

When Mrs Thatcher declared of The Constitution of Liberty that "this is what we believe", she embraced a set of ideas consciously fashioned for rightist political struggle. And she engaged in that struggle with gusto, and was as ideologically combative as she was politically authoritarian and repressive. Her ideology mandated her anti-democratic, inegalitarian politics as being essential for progress and civilization. When the neoliberals, who presently enjoy a near monopoly over our parliamentary system, speak of progress, I think it is just this conception above that they have in mind. Blair's "forces of progress" were those of neoliberal globalization, while his "forces of conservatism" were those who indignantly upheld traditions of trade union solidarity, welfare, employment protections, regulation, economic interventionism, grassroots democracy, and so on.

However, the fact that the political advocates of the British ruling class do not today have the self-confidence to declare themselves open Hayekians, to embrace the principle of inequality - quite the reverse! - suggests that their ideological position is weak. That they have to adopt a 'fairness' criterion while attacking us, that they have to claim to be egalitarians interested in rebuilding social solidarity, that this is the only way they can cobble together a viable political base, is an index of just how much the initial popular base of Thatcherite neoliberalism, always a minority but at first a large one, has crumbled since the late 1980s. If neoliberalism is hegemonic in that its assumptions are reproduced in all the dominant institutions, from business to parliament, to the media, and the academe, this is not because these assumptions coincide with the views of the majority, who remain stubbornly primitive.

Zizek has dusted off some of his old routines - the tolerant liberal, the chocolate laxative, decaffeinated Otherness - and tenuously connected them to some current political controversies in order to visit this upon us. As amusing as these whiskered old gags may once have been, and as much as I once thought Zizek quite sharp on the limitations of multiculturalism, the more he repeats himself (or repeats on himself), the less persuasive he becomes. And that's when he's not, you know, bigging up empire, traducing Lenin, reflating Euro-supremacism in the guise of the liberal tolerance that he criticises, and generally carving out a niche as the Roy Chubby Brown of European philosophy.

The basis of Zizek's polemic is that while once European politics was polarised between centre-right and centre-left, it is now increasingly polarised between a large pro-globalisation centre, and a smaller but growing anti-globalisation xenophobic right. The pro-globalisation centre is the hypocritical tolerant liberal who 'respects' the Other in a certain way, but only respects a non-invasive Otherness that doesn't intrude on his/her private space, this being the political space of Europe. Thus, while the centrists attack the populist right, they celebrate diversity and Otherness in the same way that 'moderate' antisemite Robert Brasillach celebrated the achievements of Chaplin, Proust and Yehudi Menuhin, while insisting that instinctive antisemitism could only be constrained by the practise of moderate antisemitism. The populist right can only be appeased by the practise of a moderate anti-immigrant racism. The example of Brasillach does, admittedly, resonate. Bourgeois politicians whipping up racism do indeed rely on the idea that there's something instinctive and commonsensical about it, and that it can only be controlled through moderate, sensible, prudent racism.

But the rest completely fails as an index of the concrete political realities on race and globalisation in Europe. First of all, when the pro-globalisation "centre" attacks the xenophobic right, it is usually not in the name of liberal multiculturalism. Rather, it is in the name of an alternative nationalism based on cohesion, integrationism, an acceptance of "legitimate concerns", and a regretful conclusion that multiculturalism (read: multi-racial society) "didn't work" and that immigration has to be severely limited while minorities are to be disciplined and coerced into internalising some core set of national or European or Western values. It is culturally dominative, hierarchical and authoritarian, not 'tolerant', libertarian or egalitarian. Official multiculturalism has its limits, but it is not to blame for the right-wing anti-immigrant turn of mainstream politics. Indeed, the tolerant liberal, Zizek's sock puppet opponent, is entirely innocent of this bullying. He, let's suppose it's a he, is obviously white, but he's not all bad. He supports attempts to attack and undermine the material legacy of white supremacy, such as affirmative action. His worst crime is that he doesn't want to hear loud rap music in the privacy of his home. (Because, as I'm sure you already know, black people uniformly walk around white neighbourhoods with ghetto blasters playing NWA's 'Fuck The Police' at top volume. White people, by contrast, play Bach on gramophones while writhing with ecstasy over Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This has been confirmed by our finest evolutionary psychologists - it's hard-wired behaviour, and there's nothing we can do about it.) It seems rather unfair to blame him for those who want to destroy affirmative action and purge the country of immigrants.

Secondly, it fails because some of the most hawkishly pro-globalisation forces in European and American politics are also the most right-wing xenophobic anti-immigrant forces. If you look at the Tory Right and UKIP, or even the Law and Justice Party, they may be Eurosceptic, but they aggressively favour US-led globalisation. In the US, many the same right-wingers who favour 'free trade' and other shibboleths of globalisation are also among the most pungent anti-immigrant racists. There are, of course, nativists and fascists who fit into Zizek's characterisation of the xenophobic right as anti-globalisation, but these are still minority fringe currents, and not by and large the people who lead Law and Justice, or the Dutch Freedom Party, for example. The Tea Partiers, meanwhile, may have some nativists among them, but their texts are Austrian, and their 'Contract from America' contains a great deal about economic freedom and nothing at all about restricting globalisation or free trade. The opposition being created here between multiculturalist globalisation and xenophobic reaction is illusory. This is because globalisation is an imperialist process that is entirely compatible with restrictions to migration. It does not entail free movement for labour, except on terms amenable to Euro-American capital, since its purpose is precisely to facilitate the exploitation of labour and the extraction of surplus largely for shareholders based in the core capitalist economies.

Lastly, Poland, Zizek's "best example", is not actually typical of a European trend. The legacy of Stalinism, and the postcommunist purges, has meant that politics has been narrowed to a division between liberal-conservatism and right-wing nationalism. But there is a new left emerging there, reflecting dissatisfaction with - well - 'globalisation' among other things. The bulk of the continent is still bissected between left and right, weakly reflected at parliamentary level by parties of the centre-left and centre-right. Despite the best efforts of capital to coopt electoral processes, and despite the illusory transcendence of left and right by 'Third Way' politicians, organised labour retains the ability to uphold some basic social democracy. Indeed, the capitalist crisis is accentuating this polarisation between left and right, and bringing that struggle to a head, as the victor will determine whether labour bears the costs of crisis, or whether the bankers and the rich do. It goes without saying that if the right wins, immigrants and minorities will be among the first to suffer, and the fragile institutions of multiculturalism will be in tatters.

During the Pope's visit, amid some low key hysteria about Muslims plotting to kill his wholly holy holiness, there was some excitement among liberals and a few left-wingers, who took the opportunity to protest himself. The usual oblocutors of faith were there, among them Richard Dawkins and Johann Hari. We heard much of pontiffs and pederasts, papists and paedophiles, nuncios and nonces, as the Church's opponents outlined what they charge is a criminal conspiracy by leading figures up to and including Ratzinger himself to cover up the widespread beating and rape of children by appointed patriarchs in Catholic churches. In doing so, they allege, Ratzinger helped perpetuate the torture, when he ought to have stamped it out with the assistance of the police.

First of all, I must lay out my on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand/stating the patently obvious position. From what little I have read and seen on this subject, I suspect that on this issue the 'new atheists' are correct, and that Ratzinger is indeed every bit as indictable as they say he is - just as in general they are correct to charge religion, and not merely its institutions, with promoting patriarchy, oppression and ignorance. On the other hand, that is not all that religion does. I myself have religious friends and comrades who make far better allies of Enlightenment, and of the oppressed and exploited, than a great many of those who claim to be atheists. Religion is not only far from being the major force promoting oppression in this world - for some, it is an inspiration and an alibi in the struggle against it. The diversity of interpretations of religious doctrine, especially on social and political matters, simply does not support any narrow, literalist reading off of prescriptions from texts. I note, with some satisfaction, that for all the theological ignorance of Dawkins et al (an ignorance which, I hasten to add, I share), they are at one with the fundamentalists on the stable meaning of religion and its texts.

Further, I don't accept the explanations of child rape within the Catholic church which attribute it to Catholic practises producing sexual repression - as if were priests allowed to marry, they would not be tempted to abuse boys from the laity. Sexual repression is regrettable in itself, but I doubt that it produces predatory child rapists. The rape of children typically takes place in institutions and situations where adults have too much unaccountable power over children - in children's homes, and in families, for example. The principle of patriarchy does not begin and end in church, and it does not operate in isolation from institutions of the body politic which demean, control, vilify and commodify children, the better to socialise them for a world in which they are commodities, the better to make them governable. If the Catholic church hierarchy is implicated in this scandal, this does not necessarily support the wider arguments of the 'new atheists' on religion, least of all their reductionist account of religion as a sole and sufficient cause of so many more ills than it can plausibly have produced, which we will come back to. Even so, on the face of it, it is quite sensible to protest against a pope with such a record.

That said, some left-wingers looked askance at the weekend's protest, and at the smug bourgeois secularists around 'Ditchkins'. For although the spectacle over the weekend was one of secular protest against theocratic patriarchy, the issue is saturated with meanings that extend well beyond this. This is, after all, a country with an established Anglican church. There is still a dominative Anglo-Saxon culture at work, whose supremacist posture was quite explicit not so very long ago. It is a country which still has an imperial relationship of sorts to Catholics in the north of Ireland, and where there is still a toxic residue of anti-Catholic bigotry - more than a residue in Scotland and Ulster. While I myself was never one of the 'Billy Boys', I was exposed to enough of this bigotry to know it when I see it. I also know imperial condescension when I see it - when I first came to England and found that people here believed that Northern Ireland was torn apart for thirty years or so because of religious sectarianism, because Prods didn't get on with Tims, I was shocked. And I was offended, as I still am when I think of it. When Dawkins et al repeat this ridiculous canard and apply the same logic, mutatis mutandis, to the explanation of the Israel-Palestine conflict (or worse, to the 'civil war' in Iraq), I know all too well that this isn't really about atheism, or secularism. It is about representing those who do not partake of the relative wealth and stability of the Anglophone imperial core as tribal-minded, bloodthirsty, backward idiots. We do not have conflicts based on rational interests, each making a claim to universalism, in which imperialist powers have weighed in on one side. We have petty, parochial struggles over atavistic ideas which are childish premonitions of modern, scientific truth claims, and where imperial power is invisible. Indeed, as Eagleton suggests, part of the whole basis of Dawkinsian befuddlement and outrage over religion is the feeling that things couldn't be so bad as to require a spiritual, much less messianic, solution. Class privilege benights its beneficiaries in this respect.

So, when secularists protest against the Pope, and not against the established church which has far more political clout in the United Kingdom than does the papacy, I can well understand why some Catholics would feel that their faith, their Church, was being singled out. I do not think that most of those protesting against the pope were motivated by bigotry - far from it. Rather, the spectacle was a knowingly vacuous performance, a simulacrum of a political-cum-journalistic campaign whose apparently determinate goals are really empty gestures. There were calls for the pope to be 'arrested', for example. Fair enough. There is prima facie evidence that the man with a crook may be a crook, and it's an amusing idea. But presumably such a campaign should have more immediate, more tangible, more attainable goals. Did it? Not so far as I can see. Did the protest mobilise significant social forces, outwith bourgeois liberals? Did it perhaps tie into the intra-Catholic campaigns for justice for the victims of rape, or indeed any other significant campaign? Did it add anything to the fightback against a resurgent patriarchy? I don't think so. It was pure street theatre, and at that more 'Theatre of the Absurd' than 'Theatre of the Oppressed'. It confirmed that those who had turned out were part of an embattled minority defending science, enlightenment and liberal values. Rather than offering a model of humanism that could transcend the divisions and sectarianism that bourgeois liberals accuse religion of producing, it made a spectacle of difference, in particular of their own alienation from, and condescension toward, the religious.

Significantly, or perhaps predictably depending on your viewpoint, the leading 'new atheists', notably Dawkins and Sam Harris, are purveyors of a reactionary, reductionist biologism that naturalises an extremely savage neoliberal order, featuring the gene as a utility maximiser. That is their 'materialism', which they range against the claims of religion. (Hitchens merely duplicates this reductionism in his own bestselling addition to the God non-debate). The claims of evolutionary psychology have long fuelled reaction over gender, race and class, and have evidently provided a far more compelling narrative of the inevitability of patriarchy, inequality and bigotry than religious texts. The latter may have a peculiar importance in the United States, from 19th Century pro-slavery arguments through Jim Crow and beyond, but the seminal texts justifying and re-coding inequality and oppression today adopt the forms of reductionist evolutionary psychology. Thus, some of those assailing religion have themselves played a key role in naturalising patriarchy and white supremacy, even though they always insisted that this was not their intention. Dawkins would argue that "genetic kinship" and reciprocation offer an explanation of, and evolutionary basis for, solidarity, equality and altruism amid the cruel, harsh and competitive world that his version of Darwinism evokes. But this is neither orthodox Darwinism, nor is it adequate. It does not explain the range of sacrifices that some people are prepared to make for others. The theory of gene kinship entails, as per Haldane's quip, that one will sacrifice oneself for other people who are genetically close to oneself. That would lead us logically to insularity rather than universalism. Indeed, for Dawkins' case to work, he has to suggest that we can subvert our 'selfish', competitive, vicious biological basis through a metaphysically strong 'free will', which is ultimately every bit as idealist as any statement made from the Vatican.

Dawkins' own free will still seems to be constrained by his selfish, competitive genes, however. To the imperial chauvinism mentioned above, we could add his intolerance of cultural difference - he has said, for example, that he experiences a visceral revulsion at the sight of a woman in a burqa, a sensation which is probably similar to that which I feel on witnessing an upper middle class white Oxonian telling Muslim women that what they're wearing disgusts him. In relation to the Pope's visit, he described his Romanness as the head of the second most evil religion in the world. What, I wonder, might come first? Buddhism? Judaism? Hinduism? Jainism? Zoroastrianism? No? Ah, right - so it'll be Islam again. One form of religious intolerance informs another prejudice, one which is bound up with race-making processes across the 'white' world. Such a ranking of religions according to alleged harm is not really to do with atheism. Far from having an emancipatory, enlightened content, it precisely reinforces a hierarchical ordering of human societies and cultures at the apex of which invariably sits largely bourgeois, largely white, and largely male liberals of no faith, other than in the sanctity of the Holy Profit. For these and other reasons, the 'new atheism' is mainly a reactionary current, and I would hesitate to join those leftists and feminists who are tempted to applaud protests in its name.

John Gray has an interesting, though typically pessimistic, article on Ralph Miliband, his sons and the prospects for social democracy in the coming period in today's Guardian. He is astute, and appropriately scathing, on the failure of New Labour and of the US-led financialised capitalism that underpinned the New Labour model. I find myself less satisfied, though, by his account of Miliband's thought and of social democracy's dilemmas, and therefore of the glib 'irony' of his conclusion.

First of all, briefly, it is not strictly accurate - or rather, it is incomplete - to claim that Miliband "had always bitterly attacked" the Labour Party. He had of course criticised Labour's record in office, and Labourist ideology. He had long argued that Labour was not a socialist party, and that a socialist party was needed. But his attitude to Labour was far more complicated than Gray's summary suggests. Labourism, he wrote, was concerned above all with "the advancement of concrete demands of immediate advantage to the working class and organised labour". This accounted for the modesty of its demands, and the tendency for Labour governments to go from being adminstrations of reform to being adminstrations of conservative retrenchment. Still, the achievement of reforms advantaging the working class was not to be sniffed at, and Miliband was aware of the value of social democratic reform. "For all its limitations," he wrote, "the victory of 1945 was a great advance". He also, despite disagreements with the Labour Left, had a great deal of sympathy for them, and tried to work alongside them. He understood the necessity of socialists relating to the Labour Party, it being where most of the working class was situated.

***

Secondly, on Bennism, Miliband's position was not exactly the naive one that Gray attributes to him, of believing that Benn could lead a socialist revolt and capture the Labour Party for the Left. There is an interesting story here, but it is not the one Gray tells. Miliband had long argued, as he put it in 1976, that "the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone." ('Moving On', Socialist Register 1976) In the 1980s, it is true that in despair at the extraordinary difficulty of building support for a socialist alternative to the Labour Party, he decided that the question of whether a new generation of left-wing activists could challenge the Labour leadership was "more open" than he had previously conceded. Nonetheless, he wrote: "I have for more than ten years written that this hope of the left to transform the Labour Party - which has always been nourished by the Labour Left - was illusory ... I am far from convinced that I was mistaken." ('Socialist Advance in Britain', Socialist Register 1983).

Surely, you might say, either prospect, of forming a new socialist party out of the disintegration of Labourism (which Miliband assayed very insightfully), or of claiming Labour for the Left and driving out the right, had slim chances at that point. That is not an argument that I think Miliband would have dissented from, however. Whatever his flaws, unsophisticated utopianism was not among them. Moreover, I would say that Miliband's basic assessment that the disintegration of Labourism was long-term, and that it would eventually lead to activists in the Labour Party and in the trade union rank and file considering a wholesale political secession, was both accurate and in a way prophetic - if that isn't a polite way of saying 'premature'.

Miliband's position on Tony Benn, far from reflecting a deluded belief that he was poised to capture the big batallions of the labour movement for socialism, owed itself to the fact that Benn had extraordinary experience working at senior cabinet levels and within the state for someone on the Left. Through that experience, he had derived radical conclusions about the basic institutions of the British state and society that few of his predecessors had. Compared to Lansbury, Cripps, Bevan, or Foot, his critique of the capitalist state seemed to go much farther than most of the reformist left had ever done. Oweing to this experience and his radical conclusions, he was a natural leader of the Left.

Contrary to the impression given by Gray, it was long after the SDP split, after the right-wing had taken control of the NEC, and the leadership, after Militant had been expelled, and the miners' strike defeated, that Miliband started to look to Benn. It was not out of a delusional belief that Labour was about to become a socialist party at the height of Bennite radicalism that he began to cultivate Benn. It was in a period of right-wing hegemony when, out of his growing pessimism that a socialist alternative to Labour could be created, and his worry that Kinnock's attacks on the Labour left would farther reduce the scope for socialist agitation in the UK, he sought to draw Benn into a sort of unofficial national leadership role for the Left. In fact, he did not encourage Benn to try to take control of Labour, regretted his running for the shadow cabinet and strongly advised him not to run against Kinnock in 1988 - advice that Benn ignored.

Miliband's collaboration with Tony Benn is thus interesting less because it signals illusions in the Labour Party than because it signals disillusionment in his other major project of building a left-of-Labour alternative. I think this was the inevitable result of Miliband's relative isolation. That may seem like an odd thing to say about someone who was constantly organising conferences, polemicising, intervening in debates, lecturing, and so on. Yet, strangely for a figure whose analysis was so geared to socialist strategy, intelligently assessing the resources and class capacities available to the Left, and figuring out possible paths for future development, Miliband never put applied his insights inside any organisation. He was of the 'independent Left', which meant that in his particular views he was sometimes in a party of one. He never felt he could join any party - not the Labour Party, not the IMG, not the SWP.

A marxist intellectual without a party is not necessarily a marxist disarmed, but such a person will in practise either orient himself to existing currents that he is in principle opposed to, or retreat into arid theory or utopianism. An individual of Miliband's tremendous talents could resist the gravitational pull of larger social forces to some extent, but not completely. Unable to persuade sufficient numbers to build a new socialist party to replace Labour, unwilling to join the small revolutionary parties, in practise Miliband navigated between the academics around the New Left Review and the Labour Left. This isn't a terrible space to occupy, but it does seem a shame that Miliband's organisational gifts were squandered on a premature attempt to build a left-of-Labour vehicle to hegemonise the organised working class, and then on the possibility, which he knew to be distant, that socialists in the Labour Party might eventually be able push the question and eventually refound it on different principles.

By the end of the 1980s, he was no longer convinced that capturing Labour was even a remote possibility. He continued to be friends with Benn, but he saw that the 'long run' was going to be even longer than he had conceived, that the decline of the Left would continue, and that the 'new realists' around Kinnock and the TUC bureaucracy would hold the rank and file in check. Unlike his sons, of course, he did not consider that this was a good enough reason to actually join Kinnock and the Labour right.

***

Thirdly, Gray is even wider from the mark when he suggests that Miliband did not notice the ascendancy of the radical free market right, the failing fortunes of the socialist Left, and the fundamental changes in capitalism that took place in the twenty years before his death in 1994. Remarking on Miliband's lifelong socialism, he says that "it was capitalism that proved to be the revolutionary force in the late 20th century, consigning socialism to the memory hole". But Miliband, having no illusions in 'democratic socialism' and few in the USSR, had no reason to expect that either of these two major poles of attraction on the socialist Left were destined for any fate other than the memory hole. His brief, as he saw it, was to help reconstitute a more adequate socialism that was equipped to withstand the domesticating pressures of capitalist democracy.

If Miliband was ultimately unsuccessful in this mission, he was not deluded about the impact that the collapse of Labourism and Stalinism would have on the Left as a whole. Miliband's private thoughts, (recorded in Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the politics of the New Left, 2002), tend to concur with his public writings on this point. While in the mid-1970s amid powerful labour militancy, he saw opportunities for fundamental political realignment, by the time of the early 1980s and the political success of Thatcherism, he was less sanguine. In 1982, he was privately of the view that the Left was in a "terrible mess". In 1983, he was publicly of the view that Labour's defeat was "a major defeat not only for the Labour Party but for all socialist forces", and reflected "the most dramatic manifestation of a deep-seated, long-term crisis, for which no immediate remedy is at hand". Worse, it had conferred "a new legitimacy upon an exceptionally reactionary Conservative government".

As to the nature of this reaction, writing with Leo Panitch ('Socialists and the 'New Conservatism'', Socialist Register 1987) he noted its "major success" in shifting "political debate much farther to the right" so that much that was taken for granted in the post-war era was now being "powerfully and effectively challenged". He gave witness to the defeat of Bennism in Britain and the retreat from the Common Programme in France, both demonstrating the resilience of right-wing social democracy against left-wing attempts to supercede it, even as social democracy was itself increasingly reliant on conservative solutions to economic crisis. Above all, he stressed, the 'new conservatism' enjoyed much of its success because of the detumescence of the radical Left, itself the result of the failures of social democracy upon which too many socialists had pinned their hopes. Conservative retrenchment, and socialist retreat, was not blithely ignored by the elder Miliband in a hasty conversion to socialist Labourism - rather it was part of the perspective that led to him increasingly seeking allies in Labour itself.

In support of his case, lastly, Gray cites the fate of the USSR as a decisive point against Miliband's socialist faith. Miliband's own (highly ambivalent) attitude to the collapse of the Soviet Union is instructive here. He saw that at one level it would be a victory for the free marketeers, and knew what that meant for the foreseeable future. He visited Czechoslovakia and was very depressed to see privatization in action. But he also celebrated that a great weight had been lifted from the shoulders of socialists, that being the burden of 'actually existing socialism' which he insisted was at best a monstrous "perversion" of the socialist idea. Miliband never entirely broke with the idea that the USSR represented some kind of socialism, which he had held from his early days as a Communist Party member. Indeed, he was initially uneasy about the force with which some in the New Left denounced the USSR and the so-called People's Democracies. For that reason, EP Thompson accused him of being 'soft' on Stalinism. But this sympathy more and more became opposition in later years. He supported dissidents in Eastern Europe, and criticised Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan. The "immensity of evil" that Stalinism represented convinced him that the whole idea of a socialism that was both undemocratic and inegalitarian was preposterous and perverse. The formula he came to prefer when assessing the USSR was that it was 'oligarchic collectivist'.

Miliband did have a soft spot for Gorbachev, whom he believed had recognised that socialism needed democracy. However, he saw the demise of the USSR coming, believing that whatever Gorbachev's intentions he would be quickly pushed aside by opportunists, and any chance for a democratic socialism would be crushed. And given his disillusionment in the USSR as a bastion of socialism, his failure to shed tears at its downfall is perfectly reasonable. On the prospects for reviving socialism after the USSR, he wrote: "I am not a Pangloss, but I do think there is more going on than meets the eye, and that the opposition will make itself felt." I think he is vindicated in this. Although there is a hell of a long way to go in reconstructing the Left, the germinal revival of systemic critique with the anticapitalist movements and the global rebellion since 2003 against the very US hegemony that was consolidated with the fall of the USSR, do constitute opposition making itself felt. And I am convinced that we will see it more often, and feel it more deeply, than we have until now.

If Miliband tended to foreground his optimism, it was sober optimism, and he was also alert to the dangers of a climate where socialism was off the agenda. As he wrote in Socialism for a Sceptical Age, his last book, the political and intellectual reaction in the West that was strengthened by the USSR's collapse "plays its own part in creating a climate of thought which contributes to the flowering of poisonous weeds in the capitalist jungle—weeds whose names have already been noted—racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatreds, fundamentalism, intolerance. The absence from the political culture of the rational alternative which socialism represents helps the growth of reactionary movements which encompass and live off these pathologies and which manipulate them for their own purposes." The return of fascism as a serious electoral option in parts of Europe, the growth of xenophobic street gangs, and genuinely terrifying pogroms in Italy and Hungary, shows that Miliband was not exaggerating.

***

The difference between Gray and Miliband is that the latter was a socialist, and was always concerned with a scrupulous assessment of class forces and particularly the structural capacity of the working class to assert its interests. This is not to assent to Gray's caricature of Miliband as someone who was unaware of the fact that "politics is driven by far more than class conflict", much less as someone who failed to notice that the "interests of capitalists are often at odds". No one who had actually read the texts cited by Gray - Parliamentary Socialism, and The State in Capitalist Society - could have made that mistake. But it is to say that as a socialist, he was first and foremost interested in what forces the exploited and oppressed had at their disposal, and particularly how robust the working class's organisational capacities were. His assessment of whether social democracy would survive a worldwide systemic crisis, or even give way to more radical alternatives, would be shaped first by his view of how well placed the working class was to resist the incursions of capital, and secondly by his assessment of the institutional capacities of the Left.

For Gray, of course, this is not even an issue. The only real agencies are global capital, and the hopelessly inadequate representatives of social democracy fighting a rearguard action to defend the welfare state against capital's demands for austerity. Though he speaks of "class conflict", I'm not convinced that the whole idea, inasmuch as he grasps it at all, isn't faintly ridiculous for him. Similarly, the "Marxian insight" that capitalism is inherently unstable, constantly mutating and volatile could just as well be an "Austrian insight" or a "Schumpeterian insight". Because he refers to marxism doesn't necessarily mean that he means the same thing as most marxists do by it. The story, as far as Gray is concerned, is of one revolutionary utopian movement, socialism, being overtaken and diplaced by another, the 'false dawn' of neoliberal capitalism. In that light, it is easy to condescend to Miliband a little, and appropriate some of his more convenient critique, now that his dangerous utopian ideas are harmlessly consigned to the memory hole. Unfortunately, that means that the Milibandism which young Labourites should be reading up on, even as they're sticking up 'twibbons' advertising young Edward, has been somewhat mangled and traduced in the process. Which, as I say, undermines an otherwise savvy critique of our New Labour ex-overlords.

If you want to understand the relationship between conservatism and capitalist modernity, you could do worse than consult the Canadian marxist C B Macpherson and his brief guide to Edmund Burke. The apparent paradox of Burke is that he is a defender of aristocracy, of tradition and hierarchy, a scourge of liberal revolutionaries, a natural law conservative, at the same time as being a bourgeois liberal, a pro-market Whig and a vehement opponent of British imperialism. It is true that conservatism gradually integrated aspects of liberalism throughout the 19th Century so that, in its dominant Angl0-American variant, it eventually became a more ardent defender of classical liberalism than the liberals of the 20th Century. But Burke was there at the beginning, as it were - along with Joseph de Maistre, a founder of modern conservative thought, such that his paradoxical embrace of aspects of liberalism can not be treated as merely part of that adaptive process. His liberalism, and his modernism, were always-already constitutive of his conservatism.

Macpherson intriguingly suggests in his introduction that the key to resolving this conundrum is Burke's support for capitalism:

"There is no doubt that in everything he wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order. But his traditional order was already a capitalist order. He saw that it was so, and wished it to be more freely so. He had no romantic yearning for a bygone feudal order and no respect for such remnants of it as still survived, notably in the royal household ... He lived in the present, and made it his business to study the economic consequences of actual and projected state policies. As MP for Bristol (1775-80) he could scarcely have done otherwise, for Bristol was then one of the greatest commercial ports in England. But his interest in economic affairs had, as we shall see in some detail, begun earlier and lasted longer than his connection with Bristol..." (C B Macpherson, Burke, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 5).

In chapter five, he draws this out further, but it is necessary to further elaborate on his market liberalism, as well as his hierarchical conservatism. The former manifested itself earlier in his career, the latter after the French revolution. From his earliest undergraduate polemics on political economy in Dublin, Burke's position on the rights of property was impeccably bourgeois, as befitted a member of the Ascendancy. He was no leveller, but he believed that the owners had a duty to "improve" their property, to augment their own wealth and thereby increase the wealth of all classes. For this reason, he was to find himself far more at home in England, where most landowners were commercial proprietors, than in Ireland, where absentee landlordism was still rife. He was taken up by literary London, joining the 'Club', among whose luminaries was Adam Smith, and taking up residence in Grub Street (though, in a rather more august capacity as a writer than the street is notorious for). His entry into politics was equally facilitated by a superior taking him under his wing, when William Gerald Hamilton MP asked him to be his private secretary. As a bourgeois, he owed much of his career to patronage, and later to the accomodating abundance of 'rotten boroughs' that enabled him to be 'elected' as MP for Wendover by grace of Lord Wendover.

It was Burke's career as an MP that marked him out as a moderate Whig, a reformer, and an opponent of colonial abuses. His liberalism was as opposed to a priori reasoning as was his later conservatism. Rejecting abstract accounts of liberty, as he had earlier rejected Rousseau, he denied that freedom bore "any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysicks, which admit no medium". Liberty in real social life was "variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in different degrees ... according to the temper and circumstances of every community". This anti-theoretical approach informed his response to the American revolution, in which he urged the British government not to see the abstract virtues of liberty, but the concrete virtues of a peace obtained by tolerating liberty in some degree. Consistently, against inductions from general principles, he posed complex empirical reality, the frailty and imperfection of human beings, and the hard reality of "human nature" about which he held bourgeois assumptions. His assumptions about human nature provided the foundation for his principled attack on Irish penal laws, for he maintained that the law was of necessity grounded on two aspects of the human condition: equality of original condition, and rationality. The law must therefore apply equally to everyone within a given polity, and must be of use to the whole of society.

If the law was to apply equally, and be of use to the whole of society, this had some ramifications for Burke's views on property. For the law must protect property, the better to further industry for the benefit of he commonwealth. Any law that abridged the rights of property, in just that proportion also curtailed the propensity toward industry. But if private acquisitiveness benefited society by stimulating industry, and if Burke was happy to defend the rights of property no matter how it was originally acquired, he was not content with property-holders who lacked industry. His attack on the Duke of Bedford, provoked by the latter's attempt to deprive him of a pension in his retirement, displayed bourgeois resentment of lazy aristos in gloriously contemptuous prose. His pension, he noted, was a reward for "merit", while the Duke's holdings were his despite his "few and idle years", and his inability to "know anything of public industry in its exertions".

So, from the ground of "human nature" to the lofty principles of law, economics and justice, he was a thorough bourgeois. But the bourgeois revolution in France produced, apparently, quite a different Burke, the Burke that is most familiar today from his Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. The latter part of the title is of course crucial - it was that the French revolution was being held up as a model for Britain to emulate which inspired Burke to produce his conservative manifesto. The revolution, the "plague", must be quarantined - and if this quarantine eventually called for an all out war by 1796, on an ideological level it entailed detailed elaborations on the nature of society, and government. The sacrosanct position of property, and of inheritance, was above all what he sought to conserve. He did so by citing, or rather inventing, a tradition grounded in transcendent principles. He noted that in English law, liberty was itself "an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers", in contrast to the French revolutionary assertion of liberty from natural right. Liberty, along with privilege, peerage, the crown, property, franchises, etc., were all heritable goods, and all goods worth conserving. Such principles did not exclude gradual improvement, but they did exclude radical innovation which was likely to be motivated by a selfish spirit. Institutions of longevity having demonstrated their worth, their utility for the whole of society, ought not to be overthrown in a fit of revolutionary pique, by the fiat of revolutionary pick-axes. If the sentiment is clear, Macpherson claims, the logic is not: a prolonged sequence of momentary choices is not logically superior to a single momentary choice. The distinction between small changes, of which Burke approves, and large, qualitative changes against which he sets himself is not clear. Burke's argument amounts to a case for prejudice in favour of tradition.

But that tradition is that of the Leviathan state, the subjection of all to the rule of the sovereign, the constitutional impediment to natural passions that human beings enter into by tactic acquiescence. The "real" rights of man are those which he derives from having submitted to that rule, most particularly the right to property, to the fruits of the labour mixed with his property, and to the inherited accumulations of that property. All men, he agrees, have "equal rights", but "not to equal things" - a man with five shillings on his person has as much right to that as a man with five hundred pounds. And "as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of men in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention." Convention, then, has proved the unequal rights of man to property and to say in government. It has produced a "natural aristocracy", a leisured and cultured class whose entitlement to privilege, and whose usefulness for society as a whole has been proven over generations. Moreover, it has established a set of rights, differing for each man according to his concrete specificity, which it would be irresponsible to deny to future generations through some radical overthrow of the old order.

What is continuous, then, what unites the market liberal with the hierarchical conservative, is capitalism. Burke was a bourgeois political economist about whom Adam Smith is said to have claimed that he was the one man to have thought exactly the same way as Smith himself without having conversed with him. It was as a bourgeois economists that he sought to defend his property, his estate of some six hundred acres, against the possibility of non-market-based payments to labourers. In neighbouring Berkshire, the Justice of the Peace in Speenhamland had introduced a system of supplementary payments for workers depending on the size of their families to alleviate the distress caused by the market - it was payment according to need rather than industry. Scandalised, and afraid that the government might nationalise such a policy, Burke argued that such policies by arbitrarily curtailing the rights of property would undermine enterprise, thus ultimately leaving workers worse off. It would, in a word, create a culture of dependency. By contrast, free markets were ultimately the most efficient and equitable means of distributing the social product. Burke did not defend a feudal system of small producers selling surplus product on the market, but specifically a capitalist economy with the drive for accumulation as its motor. He held that it reflected the natural propensities of humans, and that it was thus an inevitable expression of human aspiration. He was happy for capitalists to accumulate surplus since this would compel them to be interested in the welfare of their workers, and to reinvest the surplus in further production for the good of all. He was equally insistent that the able-bodied must all not merely work, but work as wage labourers, since this alone would provide the surplus that would drive on further accumulation and improvement. That labour should be a "commodity like any other" whose price fell and rose according to demand was "in the nature of things".

Burke, it should be said, was fully aware of how much bourgeois society had to answer for. He was aware of the great social misery that it produced, since he documented it in some detail. But to all this, he insisted that it would be "pernicious" to follow his own instinct to "rescue [the labouring poor] from their miserable industry", since it would disturb the "natural course of things" and inhibit "the great wheel of circulation". That wheel of circulation was divinely ordained, every bit as much as the right of monarchs to rule - in a formula mirroring Smith's "invisible hand", he insisted that: "the benign and wise Disposer of all things ... obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success". The free contract between employer and labour was also a customary status, a convention deriving from natural law, an expression of divine will, and thus of necessity providential and tending toward social harmony. For, in such a contract, he maintained, there was no possibility of conflicting interests - it was in the interest of the farmer "that his work should be done with effect and celerity", which would only be assured of his labourer was well-fed, clothed, healthy, etc. This did not merely imply, but vociferated, an attititude of subjection toward the worker. The relationship between the labourer and his employer was analogous to that between the beast and the labourer, or the tool and the labourer. In each case, the latter stands as the executive, reasoning authority, that directs his subordinate man, beast or tool to his higher ends. To "break this chain of subordination in any part" was "absurd".

Thus Burke the conservative, the propagandist of hierarchy and natural law, is nothing if not a modernist, a bourgeois, and a liberal. His 'tradition' is an invented one, I need hardly add. Capitalism was no more in the natural order of things than monarchs or pontiffs. But it was an invention convoked in his intellect by the challenge of the French revolution, and the egalitarian menace that it promised. Had he been, Macpherson suggests, a 19th Century historian with the benefit of hindsight, he might have moderated his position on the French revolution, seeing that it might expand the dominion of capital. But as it was, he saw only the immediate, urgent battle between the classes. Therefore, his foundation of modern conservatism, of reaction against liberal egalitarianism, is motivated by the desire to conserve the kernel of liberalism, capitalist social relations, against the rationalist dilations of liberty and equality that were infecting the salons of London, rousing the labouring poor, and threatening precisely the "absurd" disturbance of subordination in England, in the very countryside where he resided, that he so dreaded.