Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (76 page)

This led Popper to the most famous passage in his book, the attack on Plato, Hegel, and Marx. (The book was originally going to be called
False Prophets: Plato, Hegel, Marx.)
Popper thought that Plato might well have been the greatest philosopher who ever lived but that he was a reactionary, who put the interests of the state above everything, including the interpretation of justice. For example, according to Plato, the guardians of the state, who are supposed to be philosophers, are allowed the right to lie and cheat, ‘to deceive enemies or fellow-citizens in the interests of the state.
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Popper was attacked for his dismissal of Plato, but he clearly saw him as an opportunist and as the precursor of Hegel, whose dogmatic dialectical arguments had led, he felt, to an identification of the good with what prevails, and the conclusion that ‘might is right.’
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Popper thought that this was simply a mischaracterisation of dialectic. In reality, he said, it was merely a version of trial and error, as in the scientific method, and Hegel’s idea that thesis generates antithesis was wrong – romantic but wrong: thesis, he said, generates modifications as much as it generates the opposite to itself. By the same token, Marx was a false prophet because he insisted on holistic change in society, which Popper thought had to be wrong simply because it was unscientific – it couldn’t be tested. He himself preferred piecemeal change, so that each new element introduced could be tested to see whether it was an improvement on the earlier arrangement.
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Popper was not against the aims of Marxism, pointing out, for example, that much of the
program outlined in the
Communist Manifesto
had actually been achieved by Western societies. But that was his point: this had been achieved piecemeal, without violence.
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Popper shared with Hayek a belief that the state should be kept to a minimum, its basic raison d’être being to ensure justice, that the strong did not bully the weak. He disagreed with Mannheim, believing that planning would lead to more closure in society, simply because planning involved a historicist approach, a holistic approach, a Utopian approach, all of which went against the scientific method of trial and error.
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This led Popper to consider democracy as the only viable possibility because it was the only form of government that embodied the scientific, trial-and-error method and allowed society to modify its politics in the light of experience, and to change government without bloodshed.
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Like Hayek’s writings, Popper’s ideas may not seem so original today, for the very reason that we take them so much for granted. But at the time, with totalitarianism in full flood, with the stock market crash and the depression still fresh in the mind, with World War I not so far in the past as it is now, many people took the view that history did have a hidden structure (Popper specifically attacks Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
thesis as ‘pointless’), that it had a cyclical nature, particularly in the economic sphere, that there was something inevitable about either communism or fascism. Popper believed that ideas matter in human life, in society, that they can have power in changing the world, that political philosophy needs to take account of these new ideas to continually reinvent society.

The coincidence of these four books by Austro-Hungarian emigrés was remarkable but, on reflection, perhaps not so surprising. There was a war on, a war being fought for ideas and ideals as much as for territory. These emigrés had each seen totalitarianism and dictatorship at close hand and realised that even when the war with Germany and Japan ended, the conflict with Stalinism would continue.

When he completed
Christianity and the Social Order
in 1941, William Temple was archbishop of York.
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By the time the book appeared, in early 1942, published as a Penguin Special, Temple was archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England. Leaders of the church do not often publish tracts of a social scientific, still less a political, nature, and the book’s high-profile author helped ensure its success: it was reprinted twice in 1942 and soon sold well over 150,000 copies. Temple’s book perfectly illustrates one aspect of the intellectual climate in the war years.

The main part of the book was rather general. Temple took some time justifying the church’s right to ‘interfere’ (his word) in social questions that inevitably had political consequences, and there was an historical chapter where he described the church’s earlier interventions, and in which he revealed himself as extremely knowledgeable about economics, providing an original and entertaining interpretation of what the biblical authorities had to say on that score.
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He tried to sketch out some ‘Christian Social Principles,’ discussing such matters as fellowship in the workplace, God’s purpose, and the
nature of freedom. But it was really the appendix to Temple’s book that comprised its main attraction. Temple thought it wrong for the Established Church to put out an ‘official’ view on what ought to be done once the war was over, and so in the body of the book he kept his remarks very broad. In the appendix, on the other hand, he set out his own very specific agenda.

To begin with, he agreed with Mannheim over planning. Right at the beginning of the appendix, Temple writes, ‘No one doubts that in the postwar world our economic life must be “planned” in a way and to an extent that Mr Gladstone (for example) would have regarded, and condemned, as socialistic.’
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Temple had concluded the main part of his book by outlining six fundamental principles on the basis of which a Christian society should be governed; he now set about describing how they could be brought about. His first principle was that everyone should be housed with decency, and for this he wanted a Regional Commissioner of Housing with power to say whether land should be used for that purpose.
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Draconian powers were to be given to these commissioners, who were to prevent speculation in land. The second principle was that every child should have the opportunity of education to the years of maturity, and for this Temple wanted the school-leaving age to be raised from fourteen to eighteen. The third principle concerned an adequate income for everyone, and here he advocated straight Keynesianism, with a certain number of public works being maintained, ‘from which private enterprise should be excluded,’ and which could be expanded or contracted according to need. Fourth, all citizens should have a say in the conduct of the business or industry where they worked; Temple advocated a return to the mediaeval guilds with workers, management, and capital represented on the boards of all major undertakings. Fifth, all citizens needed adequate leisure to enjoy family life and give them dignity; Temple therefore recommended a five-day week with ‘staggered’ time off to help enterprises cope; he also proposed holidays with pay.
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Last, he advocated freedom of worship, of speech, and of assembly.

This last provision was by far the most unexceptional. As for the others, Temple was anxious to make it plain that he was not anti-business and went out of his way to say that ‘profit’ was not a dirty word. He also underlined his awareness that planning could lead to a loss of freedom, but he thought that certain freedoms were hardly worth having. For example, he quoted figures which showed that ‘three-quarters of the businesses which are started go into liquidation within three years. Frankly, it would seem to be a gain all round that there should be less inducement to start these precarious businesses, of which the extinction must cause inconvenience and may cause real distress.’ He thought that a percentage of profits should be used for a ‘wage-equalisation fund,’ and he looked forward to a time whereby the capital accumulated by one generation was made to ‘wither’ away over the next two or three generations by death duties. For Temple, money was ‘primarily an intermediary.’ The prime necessities of life, he said, were air, sunshine, land, and water.
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No one claimed to own the first two, and he made it plain that in his view the same principle should apply to the others.

The huge sales of Temple’s book reflected the wide interest in planning and
social justice that lay behind the more immediate contingencies of war. The scars of the stock market crash, the depression, and the events of the 1930s ran deep. How deep may be judged from the fact that although ‘planning’ was anathema in some quarters, for others it wasn’t strong enough. Many people in Britain and America, for example, had a sneaking respect for the way Hitler had helped eliminate unemployment. After the experience of depression, the lack of a job seemed for some more important than political freedom, and so totalitarian planning – or central direction – was perhaps a risk worth taking. This attitude, as was mentioned earlier, also transferred to Stalin’s ‘planning,’ which, because Russia just then was an ally, never received in wartime the critical scrutiny it deserved. It was against this intellectual background that there appeared a document that had a greater impact in Britain than any other in the twentieth century.

Late on the evening of 30 November 1942 queues began to form outside the London headquarters of His Majesty’s Stationery Office in Holborn, Kingsway. This was, to say the least, an unusual occurrence. Government publications are rarely best-sellers. But, when HMSO opened the following morning, its offices were besieged. Sixty thousand copies of the report being released that day were sold out straight away, at 2 shillings (24 old pence, now 10 pence) a time, four times the cost of a Penguin paperback, and by the end of the year sales reached 100,000. Nor could it be said that the report was Christmas-present material – its title was positively off-putting:
Social Insurance and Allied Services.
And yet, in one form or another, this report eventually sold 600,000 copies, making it the best-selling government report until Lord Denning’s inquiry into the Profumo sex and spying scandal twenty years later.
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Why all the fuss?
Social Insurance and Allied Services
became better known as the Beveridge Report, and it created the modern welfare state in Britain, stimulating a whole climate of opinion in the postwar world. The frenzy that attended its publication was as important an indicator of a shift in public sensibility as was the report itself.

The idea of a welfare state was not new. In Germany in the 1880s Bismarck had obtained provision for accident, sickness, old age, and disability insurance. Austria and Hungary had followed suit. In 1910 and 1911, following agitation by the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and other Fabians, Lloyd George, then chancellor in a Liberal British government, introduced legislation that provided for unemployment and an old age pension insurance. At Cambridge, in the 1920s, the economist Arthur Pigou held that, so long as total production was not reduced, the redistribution of wealth – a welfare economy – was entirely feasible, the first real break with ‘classical economics.’ In America in the 1930s, in the wake of Roosevelt’s New Deal and in light of Keynes’s theories, John Connor, Richard Ely, and Robert La Folette conceived the Wisconsin Plan, which provided for statewide unemployment compensation, with rudimentary federal provision for the old, needy, and dependent children following in 1935.
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But the Beveridge Report was comprehensive and produced in wartime, thus benefiting from and helping to provoke a countrywide change in attitude.
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The report came about inadvertently, when in June 1941
Sir William Beveridge
was asked by Arthur Greenwood, Labour minister for reconstruction in the wartime coalition, to chair an interdepartmental committee on the coordination of social insurance. Beveridge was being asked merely to patch up part of Britain’s social machinery but, deeply disappointed (he wanted a more active wartime role), he quickly rethought the situation and saw its radical and far-reaching possibdities.
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Beveridge was a remarkable and well-connected man, and his connections were to play a part in what he achieved. Born the son of a British judge in India in 1879, into a household supported by twenty-six servants, he was educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read mathematics and classics. At Balliol, like Tawney, he fell under the influence of the master, Edward Caird, who used to urge his newly minted graduates ‘to go and discover why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty and how poverty can be cured.’ Like Tawney, Beveridge went to Toynbee Hall, where, he said later, he learned the meaning of poverty ‘and saw the consequence of unemployment.’
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In 1907 he visited Germany to inspect the post-Bismarck system of compulsory social insurance for pensions and sickness, and on his return several articles he wrote in the
Morning Post
about German arrangements came to the attention of Winston Churchill, who invited him to join the Board of Trade as a full-time civil servant. Beveridge therefore played a key role in the Liberal government’s 1911 legislation, which introduced old-age pensions, labour exchanges, and a statutory insurance scheme against unemployment. Churchill himself was so taken with social reform that he declared liberalism to be ‘the cause of the left-out millions.’
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After World War I, Beveridge became director of the LSE, transforming it into a powerhouse for the social sciences. By World War II he was back in Oxford, as Master of University College. His long career had brought him many connections: Tawney was his brother-in-law, Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton had been hired by him at the LSE, and were now in Parliament and the government. He knew Churchill, Keynes, and Seebohm Rowntree, whose alarming picture of poverty in York in 1899 had been partly responsible for the 1911 legislation and whose follow-up study, in 1936, was to help shape Beveridge’s own document.
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His assistant at Oxford, Harold Wilson, would be a future prime minister of Britain.
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