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Discussions with David Marquand were always enjoyable and stimulating occasions through the pluralist forums in which we were both involved, notably Charter 88 and Compass. After his death, it has remained a delight to continue the dialogue through his writings.
A more personal attraction to Marquand has been its crossover with my quest to understand more deeply my own political journey. I was brought up ‘a little Liberal’, my father being a Liberal MP. Radicalised by the US war in Vietnam, the Young Liberals, the student movement of the late 1960s and 1970s socialist feminism, I became a libertarian socialist. My father and I had many strong, but mainly amicable, arguments.
The contradictions in liberalism, centrally between the belief in individual freedom and self-realisation, and the reality of growing inequality making personal fulfilment a distant dream for the majority, led me and many others to become socialists. Being a socialist meant, for me, a constant process of exploration and experimentation rather than advocacy for an existing system.
An historical journey to socialism: John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill's journey from liberalism to socialism is perhaps the classic case. He argued that the extent of inequality produced by capitalism prevented millions from enjoying personal liberty. Mill had come to believe that state action to redistribute wealth and economic opportunity was a precondition of individual liberty for all. That led him finally to socialism of a democratic and participative kind. Mill originally believed that everyone had a right to personal liberty—human flourishing and the ‘free development of individuality’. This led him to be highly critical of the power imbalance under capitalism, arguing for an economic system based on cooperative ownership and forms of organisation.
A philosophy of the state
David Marquand's distinctive approach was identifying the individualist philosophy underlying the nature of the British state. He started from a concern with major public problems, criticising New Labour's constitutional reforms because: ‘Its constitutional agenda has looked like a rag-bag of concessions to radical-individualist chic (rather) than a set of building blocks for a politics of social cohesion and public purpose.’
This motivated his passionate commitment to constitutional reform aimed at ending the feudal residue of monarchical symbols, rituals and mentalities that continued to play an active part in government and the dominant political culture. He also declared the need for institutions of decentralisation and participation through which citizens could become active.
Civic republicanism, not socialism
Interestingly, Marquand's vehement critique of liberal individualism led to democratic civic republicanism, but not to an explicit and consistent espousal of socialism. I argue here, that in fact, the two are necessarily complementary. Adapting Bernard Shaw’s remark that socialism was the ‘the economic side of the democratic ideal and its achievement as the completion of the freedom which Liberalism had begun to establish’, Marquand wrote that ‘democratic civic republicanism is the political dimension of the democratic socialist ideal.’
Indeed, Marquand's devastating attack on unregulated capitalism in Mammon’s Kingdom demonstrated the need for democratic civic republicanism to have an economic dimension. But Marquand did not supply it, beyond several limited measures aimed at curbing the power of capital.
One explanation is that Marquand’s philosophy of the state overrode extensive consideration of the purposes to which a republican state might, ideally, be put.
Marquand had little interest in such a state-centred socialism. His main concerns were fundamentally about the very nature of government itself.
His political philosophy was about procedure. He stressed the need to master capitalism, but not to abolish it. He is not precise, however, about what it is about capitalism that can be mastered, not abolished.
The challenge of climate change
The public problem of climate change and how to reduce the carbon emissions which exacerbate it illustrates why democratic civic republicanism and democratic socialism are mutually necessary dimensions of the social change that could very likely be a shared aim.
Climate change is clearly a public, shared problem of existential proportions and there is widespread debate among citizens on how to tackle it. However, it has few reverberations in Westminster, owing in good part to an undemocratic, disproportionate electoral system.
Constitutional reforms based on civic republicanism would enable parliamentary representation to reflect proportionally the views expressed by the majority of citizens. They would also open up the otherwise opaque workings of the executive to public scrutiny, opening up the secretive relations between government and the fossil fuel industry to create a fully public debate.
Republican government does not, however, on its own, have the power to transform production radically in the direction of low-carbon emissions. For such a transformation, it needs an ally within production—a material and democratic counter-power to the corporate interests that all too often have captured the state. Here is where socialism might come in.
I would suggest that worker- and citizen-led initiatives, combining the industrial power of workers with the civic power of citizens’ organisations, provide an ally for republican state institutions to take effective action over climate change.
Republicanism's allies within production
In North Wales during the Covid-19 pandemic, faced with the collapse of aviation demand and looming job losses, the Unite branch representing engineering workers at the Airbus factory in Broughton rapidly converted a production line from manufacturing aircraft wings to assembling ventilator components for the NHS. This was as much driven by the strength of feeling in the local community about the need to unite to overcome the health emergency, as by the need to resist job losses. Other examples, historical and contemporary, at Lucas Aerospace, Rolls Royce and elsewhere all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to extend collective bargaining for public benefit. In doing so, they were both, in Marquandian terms, deepening the public dialogue around the shared, public problem of climate change—taking it beyond electoral politics. More specifically, they were challenging production priorities driven by private profit and acting as a force (and potential ally of a republican government) to socialise production.
Marquand's limited concept of agency
Marquand’s detailed and sympathetic description of the feminist movement perhaps indicates an intuition that movements could provide part of the answer to the complicity of political parties in the monarchical UK state for which he had such disdain. Had he looked more closely at social movements, he would have found, I believe, a basis for a reconciliation of civic republicanism with participatory socialism.
The importance of process
The innovative substance of these movements concerned the way they valued process, rather than being focussed exclusively on the goal or final institution. In his general statements of democratic civic republicanism, Marquand, too, stresses process. As a political activist and advocate, however, he is focussed on political parties. His notion of a national dialogue is at times strikingly narrow, based on debate around codified knowledge, taking no explicit account of the tacit, practical knowhow and insight which was the lifeblood of social movements—most notably the women’s movement—to which, as a historian, he otherwise paid so much attention.
The politics of knowledge
Through ‘consciousness raising’ groups, we shared personal experiences (often previously dismissed as ‘gossip’). In doing so, we were making tacit knowledge—embedded in emotion, everyday social relations and capacity—explicit. This shared knowledge then became the basis for explicit strategy, policies and even institutions (rape crisis centres, women’s support centres and community-controlled childcare, for example).
This recognition that, through everyday social relations, tacit knowledge can be socialised—through appropriately democratic and participatory or movement-like forms of organisation—provides a fundamental challenge to both Hayek and the Fabians.
A ‘movement Marquand’ beneath the Lib-Lab politician?
Maybe radical Marquand found his voice through moving far away from Westminster and joining Plaid. Most tantalising of all, however, is the way he ends The Progressive Dilemma and, indeed, seeks to resolve the dilemma that he dissects. ‘What is needed,’ writes Marquand, ‘for anti-Conservative Britain … is a marriage between the communitarian, decentralist, participatory radicalism to which the Liberal Democrats are heirs, and the communitarian, decentralist, participatory strands in the socialist inheritance: a marriage if you like between Thomas Paine and William Morris.’ What a marriage!
In his conclusion to The Progressive Dilemma, he issued what amounts to a call to republican action: ‘The peoples of Eastern Europe, it is worth remembering, did not wait for citizenship to be handed down by a party establishment. They took it for themselves. What is needed is [for us] to emulate them.’ Now there is ‘movement Marquand’! It's a pity we didn't see more of him.
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