Revisionism as Statecraft: David Marquand, the SDP Split and the Politics of Community

This article addresses a surprisingly neglected aspect of David Marquand's intellectual development: his career as a politician. Hence, it locates his intellectual efforts from the mid-1970s through to the end of the 1980s in relation to the travails of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Marquand was one of the foremost figures seeking to develop a social-democratic ‘statecraft’, which might ease the pressures on an ‘overloaded’ state by combining constraints, on public spending and wage claims, with political decentralisation and participation. Such thinking would shape the platform of the new Social Democratic Party (SDP), albeit Marquand would go further than most of his colleagues in questioning the value of 'equality'. However, by the late 1980s, influenced by the experience of Thatcherism and David Owen's leadership of the SDP, Marquand's project became less a recantation of the objectives of social-democratic interventionism than an effort to lay the cultural foundations upon which it might succeed.