This post is about Tony Giddens, not Tony Blair.
In other words, it’s about the intellectual foundations of the ‘Third Way’, rather than an assessment of how political parties that described themselves as ‘Third Way’ did in government.
And Anthony Giddens is probably the writer most strongly associated with the ‘Third Way’ as an theoretical project. His 1998 book The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy provided an intellectual justification for, and both reflected and influenced the practice of, New Labour in the UK and its overseas counterparts. (I’ll discuss the impact of ‘Third Way’ thinking on the Clark government in New Zealand in an upcoming column.)
Giddens is an academic sociologist who, by the time he came to write The Third Way, had already been working and publishing for over 25 years, starting with Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber in 1971. Much of his work was heavily theoretical rather than closely related to contemporary political debates. An Australian collection, Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers, published in 1991, described his career up to that point:
Over the past two decades he has published more than twenty books and established himself as a central thinker. Giddens’ writings combined a detailed exegesis of the classics with a sensitivity to the issues at the forefront of contemporary social theory. He brings these concerns together under the rubric of an overarching project. This project involves identifying and criticising the shortcomings of traditional thought and developing a way of theorising issues that are obscured or ignored within that framework.
. . . This involves a reconceptualisation of the concepts of action, structure and system in order to integrate them into a new theoretical approach. Giddens calls this new approach the ‘theory of structuration’.
Giddens has been heavily involved with the UK-based Policy Network over the last decade, and this year he has published two essays for them reflecting on New Labour and his book The Third Way. These essays provide a useful insight into which features of his mid-90s project he feels are likely to endure.
‘The Third Way’ as a phrase is not one of them. In his essay “The Third Way revisited” Giddens expresses some regret that he didn’t stick with his orginal (if less flashy) choice, The Renewal of Social Democracy, rather than relegating it to a subtitle: “If I had published the book under the original title, it would have been clear that it was rooted firmly in social democratic traditions.”
Giddens insists that for him ‘the Third Way’ was never about “a ‘middle way’ between left and right, socialism and capitalism, or anything else, but a left-of-centre political philosophy, concerned with exactly what was stated in my original title, the renewal of social democracy. It was NOT a succumbing to neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism.”
I’d just about be ready to buy this, and accept that that fateful title was just an unfortunate phrase that was doing the rounds at the time (thanks to the Swedish Social democrats and Bill Clinton). Except that Giddens’ previous book, where he began his exploration of some of the themes of The Third Way was entitled Beyond Left and Right — the Future of Radical Politics (1994).
Moreover, we then come to this:
On the contrary, I argued that social democrats had to move beyond two failed, or compromised, philosophies of the past, one being neo-liberalism, the other being “old-style social democracy,” characterised by a top-down state ownership of the “commanding heights of the economy” and Keynesian national demand management.
And we are back to ‘equidistance’. Despite his earlier denials, Giddens instinctively depicts his ‘Third Way’ as being as far away from traditional social democracy as it was from neo-liberalism.
Similarly, in “The rise and fall of New Labour”, Giddens again tries to have it both ways. Early on, he states: “A different relationship of government to business had to be established, recognising the key role of enterprise in wealth creation and the limits of state power. No country, however large and powerful, could control that marketplace: hence the ‘prawn cocktail offensive’ that Labour launched to woo the support of the City.” But towards the end, he admonishes: “It was a fundamental error, however, to allow the prawn cocktail offensive to evolve into a fawning dependence and turn the UK into something like a gigantic tax haven.”
Giddens’ positions about both the Third Way’s relationship to traditional social democracy and its relationship to wealth are not inherently contradictory, but in both cases they require a delicate balancing act. And I’m not sure that he provides sufficient guidance about how to achieve that balance.
Giddens and his ‘Third Way’ project have attracted many critics over the years, including some extended and detailed rebuttals. But, from my perspective, the most effective challenge came when he debated Will Hutton, another reformist social democrat who had an early influence on Blair, in their co-edited volume On the Edge (2000). At one point Hutton says to Giddens:
Well, which is to be — regulation because capitalism can be destructive now that communism has left a gap or starry-eyed faith in capitalism’s boundless creativity? Don’t traduce Schumpeter. Your argument and his are essentially the same: capitalism may be ruthlessly destructive but it is also creative. At one moment you want to celebrate capitalism, at another you’re wary of it, but without — unlike Schumpeter — offering an integrated view of how both propositions could be true.
Giddens was right that social democracy needed renewal. The ascendancy of neo-liberalism, and the faltering of progressive thinking in the face of it, suggested that new ideas were required, which took into account new social and economic contexts.
And the changes that he identified in 1998 (and restates in “The Third Way revisited”) still seem convincing as new elements a modern progressivism needs to take on board, perhaps even moreso today. These were: the intensifying of globalisation; expanding individualism; the growth of reflexivity; and the increasing intrusion of ecological risk into the political field.
But in the end the failure of the Third Way was its inability to repeat the task that Weber and Keynes, between them, had achieved a generation before. This was to set out a compelling account of, not only the need for but also the effectiveness of, state action.
That theoretical failing was to be reflected in the limitations of early-21st century progressive governments in practice. And it is this that a new wave of progressive leaders and progressive thinkers need to remedy.
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Further Reading
(2009), while Rees is president of the Royal Society. From the post:
(1998).
(2000).
