A comment from a Woman’s Own interview in 1987 is often repeated, but rarely in context: ”There is no such thing as society”. Its relevance was made explicit with the publication of the second volume of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography in 1993:
“they never quoted the rest. I went on to say: There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour. My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations.“
That detail derives from the work of Friedrich Hayek, which was much admired by Margaret Thatcher. The unifying theme of Hayek’s extensive writing is that the most enduring social institutions are shaped by spontaneous evolution, rather than by intellectual design. That “there is no such thing as society” reflects the idea that inter-dependent social systems and institutions bring a natural order to human affairs. Its details are evident in the common law, in rituals and in customs and practices handed down the generations. This evolving order allows individuals to give expression to their personal choices; and, by those choices, systems and institutions are shaped through continuous adaptation.
Such “natural” structures are denigrated by left-of-centre intellectuals who sense that humankind can achieve a more rational order by design. Or, as Hayek writes, “One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence.”
Any practical consideration of the broadest interests of “society” vanished with the emergence of a world economy structured upon the division of labour, free access to markets and individual choices. Our atavistic dispositions to the morality of the tribe, where individuals are bound by personal relationships, could never have supported the extended socio-economic order that has brought unsurpassed material benefits. Beyond the tribe, it is impossible for anyone to aim directly at the well-being of the community, because it is impossible to comprehend the vast network of interactive obligations and the full consequences of any single human action. Any attempt to impose an order created by rational design would be undermined by a complexity of detail that cannot be understood holistically as “society”. For those reasons, Hayek concluded that “society” is a term deployed when people “do not quite know what they are talking about.”
Yes, where Adam Smith talked about the division of labour, Hayek emphasised the division of knowledge — a devastating argument against central planning. I’m always impressed, too, by Hayek’s point that even the person who knows the most knows only a tiny fraction of all the knowledge that is available to someone. The gentleman in Whitehall may know better (than a child of four!), as Douglas Jay said, but he doesn’t know very much (and it’s not even clear that he learns from his mistakes).
The problem with the term ’society’, and the same applies to ‘community’, is that everyone thinks they know what it is, and so use the term in an unreflective manner. This means that people can use the term without having to be specific about what they are actually referring to.
Somebody from the IoD was telling me today that they were speaking at a Tory conference event on whether small government was more compassionate. Same problems arise. ‘Compassionate’ means ‘to suffer with’. Mother Theresa was compassionate; a young person looking after their disabled father is compassionate. A government that takes a pound from my next door neighbour to give to the person across the road is not being compassionate – it is forcing my next door neighbour to suffer, but nobody in the government suffers. As it happens, my next door neighbour may be suffering but he is not being compassionate either because compassion is a virtue and therefore has to be chosen.
Anti-market intellectuals employ the famous phrase to avoid the bother of producing an argument. Mrs Thatcher says that ‘there is no such thing as society’. This is flat wrong and she is plainly bonkers and, literally, anti-social. A woman who argued long and hard for the utility of markets, self-help and charity is held to have no understanding of the social order and societal relations between free persons. Mrs Thatcher simply meant that society is an interdependency of things, human agents, but no thing in itself. It is no person and neither acts nor cares to. Politics now, however, supposes that society wants a thing done and Mr Leviathan is just the person to do it.
The right never learned the lesson though, they went on to try and design institutions which mimic markets. The fatal flaw however is they are still designed and controlled politically.If the right truly believed in markets they’d relinquish state control over them, but they’d rather use legislation and regulation to allow their favoured interests to flourish at the expense of everyone else.
John Seddon speaking on systems thinking in the public sector and the most innovative and transformational change of the last decade at the conservative party conference http://conservativerealreform.eventbrite.com/An hour of your time and a lifetime of benefit
Change the wording to ‘communities’ and you have the same concepts around today. Government and politicians are constantly referring to ‘communities’ but such abstract things do not exist, as Mrs Thatcher pointed out. On terminology – ‘civil society’ is used to mean anything which isn’t run by government (not much these days). I’m fonder of this term, as it implies government is ‘uncivil’! What confuses me is how many local voluntary action groups consider themselves ‘left-wing’ and view their actions as somehow ‘anti-capitalist’ when in fact, by organising voluntarily and achieving desired aims which the state cannot deliver they show the fallacy of a state-based system!
Yes, where Adam Smith talked about the division of labour, Hayek emphasised the division of knowledge — a devastating argument against central planning. I’m always impressed, too, by Hayek’s point that even the person who knows the most knows only a tiny fraction of all the knowledge that is available to someone. The gentleman in Whitehall may know better (than a child of four!), as Douglas Jay said, but he doesn’t know very much (and it’s not even clear that he learns from his mistakes).
The problem with the term ’society’, and the same applies to ‘community’, is that everyone thinks they know what it is, and so use the term in an unreflective manner. This means that people can use the term without having to be specific about what they are actually referring to.
Somebody from the IoD was telling me today that they were speaking at a Tory conference event on whether small government was more compassionate. Same problems arise. ‘Compassionate’ means ‘to suffer with’. Mother Theresa was compassionate; a young person looking after their disabled father is compassionate. A government that takes a pound from my next door neighbour to give to the person across the road is not being compassionate – it is forcing my next door neighbour to suffer, but nobody in the government suffers. As it happens, my next door neighbour may be suffering but he is not being compassionate either because compassion is a virtue and therefore has to be chosen.
Anti-market intellectuals employ the famous phrase to avoid the bother of producing an argument. Mrs Thatcher says that ‘there is no such thing as society’. This is flat wrong and she is plainly bonkers and, literally, anti-social. A woman who argued long and hard for the utility of markets, self-help and charity is held to have no understanding of the social order and societal relations between free persons. Mrs Thatcher simply meant that society is an interdependency of things, human agents, but no thing in itself. It is no person and neither acts nor cares to. Politics now, however, supposes that society wants a thing done and Mr Leviathan is just the person to do it.
The right never learned the lesson though, they went on to try and design institutions which mimic markets. The fatal flaw however is they are still designed and controlled politically.If the right truly believed in markets they’d relinquish state control over them, but they’d rather use legislation and regulation to allow their favoured interests to flourish at the expense of everyone else.
John Seddon speaking on systems thinking in the public sector and the most innovative and transformational change of the last decade at the conservative party conference http://conservativerealreform.eventbrite.com/An hour of your time and a lifetime of benefit
Change the wording to ‘communities’ and you have the same concepts around today. Government and politicians are constantly referring to ‘communities’ but such abstract things do not exist, as Mrs Thatcher pointed out. On terminology – ‘civil society’ is used to mean anything which isn’t run by government (not much these days). I’m fonder of this term, as it implies government is ‘uncivil’! What confuses me is how many local voluntary action groups consider themselves ‘left-wing’ and view their actions as somehow ‘anti-capitalist’ when in fact, by organising voluntarily and achieving desired aims which the state cannot deliver they show the fallacy of a state-based system!
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