David Marquand: Neither Hayek or Lenin: The Suitability of Cameron's Conservatism
[David Marquand is former principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. Among his many books are The Unprincipled Society (1988)and Ramsay MacDonald (2nd edition, 1997).]
The term 'Old Whig' was coined by Edmund Burke during the bitter disputes over the French Revolution that tore apart what was left of the Rockingham Whigs in the 1790s. Charles James Fox, the party leader, was enthusiastically for the French Revolution; Burke was passionately against. Burke called himself an 'old Whig' so as to claim the mantle of the Whigs who had made the British Glorious Revolution in 1688, and who had shaped the revolution settlement. He denigrated Fox and the Foxites as 'new Whigs' to suggest that, so far from standing by the principles of 1688 as they pretended to be doing, they were betraying them.
Hayek, it seems to me, was not a Whig in either sense. He certainly wasn't a Foxite 'new Whig'; patently he would have been against the French Revolution. But I don't think he was a Burkean Old Whig either. He was an individualist, first and last; he believed, not just in a market economy, but in a market society - a highly mobile society of freely-choosing, rationally calculating individuals held together by the exchange relations of the market. Burke would have been horrified by such a vision. He thought society was a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, in which individual choices were shaped by the supra-rational ties of history and culture.
Similarly, I don't think Thatcher was a Hayekian. She talked like one at times, but she didn't act like one. Hayek wanted a weak state - indeed no state in some of his moods. Thatcher wanted a strong state; and used every ounce of power available to the British state in order to re-make society from the top. In a very real sense, she was closer to Rousseau and the Jacobins - or if you prefer to Lenin and Trotsky - than to either Hayek's ultra-liberalism or Burke's organic whiggism....
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The term 'Old Whig' was coined by Edmund Burke during the bitter disputes over the French Revolution that tore apart what was left of the Rockingham Whigs in the 1790s. Charles James Fox, the party leader, was enthusiastically for the French Revolution; Burke was passionately against. Burke called himself an 'old Whig' so as to claim the mantle of the Whigs who had made the British Glorious Revolution in 1688, and who had shaped the revolution settlement. He denigrated Fox and the Foxites as 'new Whigs' to suggest that, so far from standing by the principles of 1688 as they pretended to be doing, they were betraying them.
Hayek, it seems to me, was not a Whig in either sense. He certainly wasn't a Foxite 'new Whig'; patently he would have been against the French Revolution. But I don't think he was a Burkean Old Whig either. He was an individualist, first and last; he believed, not just in a market economy, but in a market society - a highly mobile society of freely-choosing, rationally calculating individuals held together by the exchange relations of the market. Burke would have been horrified by such a vision. He thought society was a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, in which individual choices were shaped by the supra-rational ties of history and culture.
Similarly, I don't think Thatcher was a Hayekian. She talked like one at times, but she didn't act like one. Hayek wanted a weak state - indeed no state in some of his moods. Thatcher wanted a strong state; and used every ounce of power available to the British state in order to re-make society from the top. In a very real sense, she was closer to Rousseau and the Jacobins - or if you prefer to Lenin and Trotsky - than to either Hayek's ultra-liberalism or Burke's organic whiggism....