Raymond Plant

The neo-liberal state

The aim of the book is two-fold. First of all it is to provide a fair, complete and analytical account of the Neo-liberal conception of the role and function of the state in modern society. The second aim is to provide a critical assessment of some of the central elements of this conception. The book will look at the emphasis of Neo-liberals on procedural and rule governed approaches to the role of the state rather than outcome or end state views of the role of government and to consider how this conception of politics relates to issues such as the rule of law, freedom, justice, rights, the relationship to the market economy, to civil society and to look at the role of government in relation to the provision of welfare and public sector services more generally. It builds up the Neo-liberal case in respect of these aspects of modern society by drawing upon the works of central Neo-liberal thinkers such as Hayek, Mises, Menger, as well as thinkers such as Oakeshott, Nozick and Rotbard who are not directly Neo-liberals but whose works have been important for the development of central Neo-liberal themes. The second part of the book provides what might be regarded as an immanent critique of the Neo-liberal case built up in the first part of the study. It takes Neo-liberal ideas very seriously and shows how incoherences arise within and between those ideas such that a plausible form of Neo-liberalism as opposed to Libertarianism on the one hand and Social Democracy on the other is very difficult to state. The theme of this book is very germane given the considerable debate which is now taking place in the context of the world financial crisis about the appropriate role for the state.

Social and Economic Rights Revisited

THE ISSUE of social and economic rights looks set to become an important one in the discussion of public policy over the next year or two. This is because the Convention on the European Union which has been charged with developing long term thinking about the EU and formulating a constitution for the EU will recommend the incorporation of The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union into the proposed constitution. This Charter includes a clear set of social and economic rights and in its preamble it recognises the significance of the European Social Model to the EU and to the Charter. The social rights include inter alia a right to education, access to a job placement service, a right to work, a right to social security/social assistance, a right to benefit from medical treatment and a right of access to services of general economic interest.1 The inclusion of these rights has been used to criticise the nature and scope of the Charter and it has been argued that such social and economic rights are not genuine rights, that at the best they are political aspirations and matters of debatable (and perhaps dubious) public policy.2 As such they should play no role in such a constitutional document and will be found to be non justiciable. The present legal status of the Charter and thus the rights contained within it is rather unclear. It was solemnly “declared” by the EU Council, the European Parliament and the Commission in Nice on 7 December 2002 and has been utilised in some of the recent judgments of the ECJ. But it is not currently directly legally enforceable. Given that part of the political objection to the Charter lies in its recognition of the centrality of the role of social and economic rights it seems a reasonable moment to look at the issue of the nature and status of social and economic rights to see whether in fact these political criticisms of such rights are sustainable. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the characteristics of rights as they are generally conceived, features which in the view of critics entail that social and economic rights, including rights to income, cannot be regarded as genuine rights. I shall not seek to develop a general theory of rights because of limitations of space. Rather

T. H. Green: citizenship, education and the law

This study situates Green’s educational philosophy and practice in the context of his overall approach to philosophy. In Green’s view, education should aim at the realisation of the common good, but what Green means by this term is closely connected to his views on human nature, ethical endeavour and indeed the evolution of human history. These ideas are central to his main philosophical works. For Green the common good is to be found in the achievement of qualities of mind or character which involve the individual making the best of himself/herself. The content of education and particularly the development of reason assist centrally in this process. Access to resources and education are important conditions for achieving the common good, but since they involve scarce resources and competition for them, they are not part of the common good as such. The paper goes on to link these ideas with Green’s account of citizenship and his involvement with school and university education in Oxford.

Freedom, Coercion, Necessary Goods and the Rule of Law

In this lecture I want first of all to focus on the idea of the rule of law found in many liberal social, political and legal thinkers. I believe that a critical analysis of some of the central ideas of the liberal Rechtsstaat position can in fact throw a good deal of light on issues to do with the rule of law and its relationship to some of the fundamental building blocks of liberal political and legal thought and in particular freedom, rights and justice. First of all, I shall give a sketch of how these elements hang together in Rechtsstaat types of ideas and I shall go on to offer what will basically be an immanent or internal critique of this system of thought. I shall argue in favour of the view that the idea of the rule of law can in fact be made compatible with a welfare state—an idea which many economic liberal thinkers such as Hayek have denied. First of all, the neo-liberal idea of the rule of law is a normative one—it is not a positivist idea of the rule of law as legality—that is to say, of government and public authorities acting within a framework of law enacted by whatever or whoever in a particular society is a legitimate source of law. On the contrary, the rule of law is an ideal and, as such, it has several crucial features. These include the following:

Liberal Government, Civil Society and Faith Communities

Abstract This article explores the relationship between faith communities and the liberal system of government which operates in contemporary Britain. The problem addressed is as follows: liberal democracy relies upon the assumption of the validity of certain general truths: human rights, social justice, individual autonomy, and so on. In our postmodern society, however, social fragmentation has eroded the validity of such assumptions, leaving no universal or neutral benchmark through which to judge competing truth-claims. In particular, different faith traditions posit potentially incommensurable claims about what constitutes a good society. This article assesses the suggestion that in our pluralistic and differentiated society, more and more social decisions should be left to the market or to private rather than collective judgment and responsibility. It suggests various possibilities for reconceptualizing liberalism: for instance, as a modus vivendi providing a framework within which different moral outlooks can ‘live and let live’, but suggests that liberalism can have a positive moral content of its own, and need not be merely a coping mechanism for dealing with diversity.