over inequality, has further entrenched elite privilege. Sandel urges us to challenge the harsh judgements that liberals and progressives impose on those who are viewed as ‘unsuccessful’ in a meritocracy – not least in the resentment this builds, fuelling backlash. It adds to a sense of cultural detachment in politics and a disrespect for the work performed by many of our fellow citizens. Having valorized financial and educational achievement, we appear ill-equipped to understand the feelings of those that live outside these defined parameters of success. This needs to change, as today’s progressives are developing a politics tacitly aimed at, and embraced by, society’s winners.
The third theme relates to the meaning and future of work and how this will affect the lives we wish to lead. Our economies have been reoriented away from building things to managing money. Material reward and social esteem have closely followed, drifting away from the traditional jobs carried out by the working class whose prospects look increasingly endangered. We are told that technological change might further erode the dignity of such work or render it obsolete. Many on the progressive left have embraced such thinking.
For instance, for Tony Blair and New Labour, knowledge work signalled the end of the post-war economy and traditional Labour approaches to work. The working class was on the wrong side of history. Knowledge work was the future, and the famous meritocratic slogan ‘education, education, education’ captured an economic policy focused on human capital. This false technological nirvana is resurrected today by utopian ‘post-work’ theorists who embrace Universal Basic Income (UBI) to take us there. Such an approach can suggest a certain disdain for jobs not considered worthwhile, reinforce the detachment of progressive thinking and help build the forces driving authoritarian populism. Whether we wish to welcome or resist such a future in the years ahead, the nature and future of work will be critical themes for progressive politics in any new telos.
Finally, Sandel requests renewed concern for the moral significance of national boundaries, a philosophical request for politics to return to its classical origins in terms of the creation of community. The rise of the populist right is inseparable from the politics of community and nation – unfashionable terrain for the left.
In order to rebuild the ethical character of the left, therefore, it must accept its own culpability in any account of our unstable democracies. This will not be easy. It requires a politics of work, something we have lost. Moreover, modern progressive thinking has tended to embrace a liberal cosmopolitanism in ways that assert a privileged global citizenship over other forms of fidelity and attachment. Sandel suggests a set of moral obligations to specific electorates whereby politicians seek to build resilient, stable communities – ones that share sacrifice, risk and reward within defined boundaries.
Overall, to challenge the modern story of dispossession and abandonment offered by the populist right, progressives must forge a positive reimagination of community and nation anchored within a politics of work. This will not be straightforward because it returns to the contested terrain of belonging, community and nation where many immediately detect reactionary, exclusive associations.
The Challenge
It is often remarked that we are living through a crisis of neo-liberalism, a specific approach to the market, economy and society that captured politics; a doctrine now exposed as unable to deliver what it promised. The resulting discontent has sought to reconfigure domestic politics and found expression in Brexit. The three creeds that dominated the last century, conservatism, liberalism and social democracy, encased within our Tory, Liberal and Labour traditions, are all threatened by their embrace of the market through the neo-liberal turn. Each now seeks reinvention with mixed success.
Conservatism capitulated to the economic liberals. Fundamental beliefs, such as order, freedom and the preservation of our national institutions, were compromised as a fringe thought experiment took over and derailed a once great political party. This has inhibited its ability to widen opportunity through a property-owning democracy and forge inclusive growth protected by sound money. In response, and having secured Brexit, Boris Johnson and his top team now seek a ‘blue-collar’ conservatism and spending plan to appeal to its new ‘Red Wall’ constituencies. Their future success post-pandemic will depend on how far the party and wider conservative intellectual movement remain attached to the economic arguments of the liberal purists.
Social democracy remains a stale project barely recognizable when compared to the post-war movement to civilize capitalism. Thatcher’s legacy hung over the ‘Third Way’ project to manage the proceeds of growth; it won three elections but was swept out of office without growth to manage. Corbyn broke with the ‘Third Way’ and delivered a 10-point jump in support at the 2017 election. ‘Corbynism’ had energy because it stood outside the neo-liberal appropriation of UK politics; yet much of the party did not. The party was battered in 2019 and under new leadership remains a brittle, nervous coalition.
Within the Liberal Democrats the centre-left social liberal tradition lost out to the ‘Orange Book’ economic hardliners. This takeover secured a move into coalition government, but with a significant price attached on becoming the fall guys for the 2017 election defeat.
These tensions predate the shake down of a global pandemic. All three traditions appear ill-equipped to offer post-pandemic renewal. Something new is desperately needed as epic economic contraction will likely see austerity and neo-liberalism re-emerge despite having endangered liberal democracy since the financial crisis. In 2007–8, after the bankers broke the financial system, politicians absolved the finance sector with little penance and imposed austerity on the backs of the poor. The public rightly identified the bailout as breaching the laws of natural justice, especially when forced to pay for it in shrinking incomes and service cuts. Such immorality inspired populist revolt, yet the cycle is in danger of being repeated. With such limited intellectual resources to draw on, we are in danger of repeating history with disastrous implications for how we live together. Renewed austerity looks economically inevitable and yet politically impossible.
Sandel’s four building blocks can help shape a radical rethink. His argument is subtle and asks philosophical questions we cannot indefinitely avoid. On the one hand, progressives have been too concerned with allocating resources; technocratic and limited in their appreciation of the lives people wish to live which stretch beyond material concerns. On the other, we recoil from moral questions because of our insistence on liberal neutrality. In doing so, we disengage from the fundamental issues that feed the populist right: questions of worth, esteem, resentment and humiliation. We inhabit a world detached from the people, in our language of rights, opportunity and fairness that ‘flattens questions of meaning, identity and purpose’.
This is all quietly devastating. It helps account for the populist right by diagnosing how social democracy succumbed to the drumbeat of neo-liberalism. Yet it is not just that we handed ethical questions to the market. It is the way, even today, our continued belief in liberal procedural justice has removed moral questions from public discussion and allowed authoritarian voices to monopolize this terrain. Sandel echoes, on a larger canvass, the day-to-day concerns revealed by Bloodworth. The challenge is to align the insights of both writers to rebuild a politics of work, part of a wider public philosophy to combat the insurgent populist right.
The End of Work?
Before the pandemic took grip, the future world of work was attracting widespread attention. It was regularly discussed within popular culture, modern literature, journalism and social, economic and political commentary; it had become part of the everyday conversation. Two poles emerged in the general debate. One signposts a post-work nightmare of escalating inequality amongst a threatened humanity subservient to technology, the other a future utopia of abundance, numerous routes to self-actualization and even enhanced transhuman possibilities, with lots in between.
This renewed interest in work futures, existing before a global health crisis derailed the economy, reflects a widespread
