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CHAPTER 3 Libertarian conservatives are not, however, consistent liberals. They believe in economic individualism and ‘getting government off the back of business’, but are less prepared to extend this principle of individual liberty to other aspects of social life. Conservatives, even libertarian conservatives, have a more pessimistic view of human nature. A strong state is required to maintain public order and ensure that authority is respected. Indeed, in some respects libertarian conservatives are attracted to free-market theories precisely because they promise to secure social order. Whereas liberals have believed that the market economy preserves individual liberty and freedom of choice, conservatives have at times been attracted to the market as an instrument of social discipline. Market forces regulate and control economic and social activity. For example, they may deter workers from pushing for wage increases by threatening them with unemployment. As such, the market can be seen as an instrument that maintains social stability and works alongside the more evident forces of coercion: the police and the courts. While some conservatives have feared that market capitalismwill lead to endless innovation and restless competition, upsetting social cohesion, others have been attracted to it in the belief that it can establish a ‘market order’, sustained by impersonal ‘natural laws’ rather than the guiding hand of political authority. Nevertheless, the relationship between conservatism and economic libertarianism deepened further as a result of the emergence of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism During the early post-1945 period, pragmatic and paternalistic ideas dominated conservatism through much of the Western world. The remnants of authoritarian conservatism collapsed with the overthrow of the Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships in the 1970s. Just as conservatives had come to accept political democracy during the nineteenth century, after 1945 they came to accept a qualified form of social democracy. This tendency was confirmed by the rapid and sustained economic growth of the postwar years, the ‘long boom’, which appeared to bear out the success of ‘managed capitalism’. During the 1970s, however, a set of more radical, market-based, ideas developed within conservatism, challenging directly the Keynesian-welfarist orthodoxy. These neoliberal or liberal New Right ideas had their greatest initial impact in the USA and the UK, but they also came to be influential in parts of continental Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and had an effect on Western states across the globe. (In the USA, this market-based set of economic ideas is commonly called ‘neoconservatism’, a term that has a quite different meaning elsewhere, as discussed later in the chapter.) Neoliberal thinking is drawn from classical rather than modern liberalism. It amounts to a restatement of the case for a minimal state. This has been summed up as ‘private, good;
KEY CONCEPT NEW RIGHT
Right, or neoliberalism. The second element in the New Right is traditional conservative – and notably pre-Disraelian – social theory, especially its defence of order, authority and discipline. This is called the conservative New Right, or neoconservatism (see p. 67). The ideological coherence within the New Right stems from its defence of a strong but minimal state: although it seeks to ‘roll back’ the state in the economic sphere, it aims to strengthen it in the social sphere.
The New Right is a marriage between two apparently contrasting ideological traditions. The first of these is classical liberal economics, particularly the free-market theories that were revived in the second half of the twentieth century as a critique of ‘big’ government and economic and social intervention. This is called the liberal New
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