Lecture on Australian liberalism for Norman Abjorensen 12 March 2008 Tim Rowse In this lecture I am going to tell you about two books that I have written: Australian liberalism and national character (1978) and (with Murray Goot) Divided Nation? Indigenous affairs and the imagined public (2007) The concept that links the two books is ‘liberalism as hegemonic ideology’. I want to explain ‘hegemony’. The term is used in international relations to refer to the military, political and cultural leadership of a Great Power, but that is not the sense to which I will be referring. I will restrict myself to leadership within a domestic political setting, and I will refer to the leadership of a class (the Australian ruling class) and of a race (the White Australian people). The source of the concept ‘hegemony’ is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), an Italian Marxist who wrote much of his work in one of Mussolini’s prisons. Gramsci was puzzled by some of the greatest political events in his times: the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the failure of parallel socialist revolutions in Germany and other parts of Western Europe immediately after the first world war. According to classic Marxist theory, the first nations to experience a transition to socialism should have been the nations in which capitalism was in the most advanced state of development – nations such as Britain and Germany. Instead, the socialist breakthrough had occurred in the part of Europe where capitalism was least developed, Russia. One of the tasks of Gramsci’s generation of Marxists was to adapt the Marxist theory so that it could make sense of this unexpected turn of events. Gramsci’s theoretical contribution was to lay new emphasis on the nature of ‘civil society’ – those institutions that were not formally part of the state but that nonetheless played a part in the governance of society: churches, trade unions, the press, voluntary associations, sporting clubs, etc. Gramsci argued that Marxists had underestimated how important these institutions of civil society were. Marxists had developed an account of capitalist society in terms of the acute contradiction between social classes around the social relationships of production; Marxists had also developed a theory of the state as the servant of the capitalist class. But Marxists had failed to see how deeply embedded were the spheres of work and politics in a wider social order. The bourgeoisie ruled not only through its mastery of the work place and not only through its dominant position in the making of state policies; it ruled also through its leadership of the institutions of civil society. In short, Gramsci drew attention to the ways that the struggle between the classes took place in the context of a wider culture that was saturated with assumptions and ways of thinking that reinforced the capitalist social order. The reason why socialist revolution was going to be very difficult in Western Europe, compared with Russia, was that in Western Europe the capitalist social order had much stronger cultural defences: the institutions of civil society reproduced a political culture in which it was easy to take capitalism for granted, the natural order of things reflected in all aspects of our way of life. Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist theory was that he pointed to the
political significance of struggle over everyday culture and over what people take to be ‘common sense’. Another way to say this is that capitalism is not just the social relationships between the buyers of labour and the sellers of labour, it is also a whole way of life, a culture, an ideological system, a taken for granted way of making sense of the world. The term ‘hegemony’ sensitises us to the cultural leadership given by the dominant social class. It is possible to study liberalism as a hegemonic ideology. In order for liberalism to be a hegemonic ideology, liberalism has to be internally flexible. When Gramsci referred to hegemony – the cultural leadership of the dominant class – he was not trying to say that it works by forcing us all to think the same way. To be effective, hegemony must allow a certain range of conflict, class struggle within limits. So liberalism has to be a flexible set of ideas. To be hegemonic the principles of liberalism have to be open to conflicting interpretations, while providing an overall framework within which social conflict can be conducted without subverting the basic principles and institutions on which capitalist society rests: private property, and the sale of labour power as a commodity. In the two books that I have written, 29 years apart, I have tried to show this internal flexibility of liberalism, its availability to both sides of the class struggle and, more recently, to both sides of what we might call post-colonial politics. In Australian Liberalism and National Character, I was interested in the containment of the organised working class within the structures of capitalist state and society. The Australian working class became powerful as the trade union movement in the 1880s and 1890s and then as a voting constituency in the years 1890-1910. Sometimes historians refer to the agenda of the Labour Movement as ‘Labourism’. That agenda included: compulsory arbitration in which trade unions were recognised and encouraged as the representatives of labour, state-owned banks and other enterprises, protectionist trade policies (to secure jobs), racially restricted immigration. This agenda was successfully pursued by a combination of Labour and Liberal politicians in the twenty years before the first world war, and it formed some of the basic institutions of the Australian state until the 1970s. In my book, I argued that the success of Labourism owed something to a development within late C19 liberal political theory: the formation of a version of liberalism known as ‘New Liberalism’ or ‘Social Liberalism’, whose main philosopher was T.H.Green. Subsequent to my book, Marian Sawer has given an excellent account of ‘social liberalism’ in Australia. As she phrases it, ‘social liberalism’ was a ‘critique of contract’. To understand what she means let us consider two different models of what an individual is. In a classic liberal view, an individual is or should be a freely contracting agent who optimises the conditions of his/her life by forming all sorts of contractual arrangements with others: to buy or sell goods, to buy or sell labour power, to be within or without a political community. This version of liberalism was very useful in helping to establish a capitalist society characterised by policies of free trade, a widening franchise and minimal regulation of the labour market. However within this classic liberal conception of social order there were few answers to the
‘social question’ that a capitalist society poses. By the late nineteenth century many intellectual were appalled by the lack of social cohesion in liberal capitalist society. A society that was supposed to rest on nothing but contracts between individuals was turning out to be a society with a large and demanding working class, governed by a state with no concern for social inequality and without any policies for securing social cohesion. Liberals who deplored this model of liberal society outlined an alternative liberalism in which the individual was understood not as a self-sufficient atom who related to others through contracts but as a person who needed social bonds to be an individual. Matching this revised notion of the individual as an intrinsically social being was a revised idea of the state as the guarantor of social solidarity. This revised liberalism was the New Liberalism or Social Liberalism By the late nineteenth century, social reformers who wanted the state to take action to relieve social inequality of various kinds could draw their concepts and ideas from Social Liberalism. When they called for more state intervention to regulate the contracts between individuals, they were no longer at risk of being dismissed as liberal heretics or as people who did not understand liberalism; they were espousing a new version of liberalism, an intellectually and ethically respectable revision of liberalism that was capable of addressing constructively the urgent social questions of the day. In Australian Liberalism and National Character, I argued that New/Social Liberalism became powerful in Australian politics because it became the common ground between the interests of the increasingly powerful Labor Party and the political representatives of the capitalists in the manufacturing sector. One of the issues that nearly prevented Federation was whether trade should be free or protected by tariffs. The protectionist manufacturers won because through their political representatives, the MPs around Alfred Deakin, they formed an alliance with the MPs elected by the Labour Movement. That is, a section of the capitalist class aligned their own need for protection from cheap imports with the labour movement’s need for protection of the wage levels of the working class. The public policies in which these two needs came together were: racially restrictive immigration policies (eliminating cheap labour) and the arrangement known as ‘New Protection’ in which manufacturers were allowed to charge high prices for their goods (shielded from competitive imports by tariffs) as long as the state could recognise trade unions and regulate the minimum wage. From the point of view of classic liberalism, these restrictions on immigration, trade and the regulation of the labour market were highly offensive; they were ruinous departures from the doctrine that the state should never interfere with the market. But from the point of view of New/Social Liberalism, these state interventions into markets were justified by the state’s higher duty to guarantee social peace and the conditions in which individuals could flourish as persons. In this way Labourism can be understood as the Australian political program of New/Social Liberalism. What has this got to do with hegemony? The story I have told is about liberalism proving its ability to be a hegemonic ideology. When political adherence to classic liberalism tended to produce too much social division and social
chaos, threatening the existence of capitalism itself, the intellectuals produced a new variant of liberalism that made certain concessions to the rising working class. If the working class could be satisfied by these concessions, they would be less likely to find socialism to be the answer to their problems. Liberalism produced, within itself, an alternative not only to socialism but also to the harsh liberalism that had previously refused to act on working class grievances. This new version of liberalism – New/Social Liberalism – gave the political representatives of the working class a voice within liberal capitalism. In Gramsci’s terms, Labourism/New Liberalism/Social Liberalism became the hegemonic form of liberalism. Liberalism had to adapt itself to political challenges to remain hegemonic. It did, and we call that adaptation by various names: Labourism, New/Social Liberalism or ‘the Australian Settlement’, even (in one book) ‘the Australian way’. At least one element of the Australian Settlement remains powerful: the two Prime Ministers that have most threatened labour market regulation, S.M.Bruce and J.W.Howard, both lost not only their governments but their seats in 1929 and 2007 respectively. In 1978, my account of the hegemony of liberalism and of the moments of New Liberal ascendancy within it, did not consider the fact that Australia is not only a capitalist society – with endemic tensions between social classes – but also a settlercolonial society – with unmet grievances by the colonised Indigenous people. My more recent book (with Murray Goot) Divided Nation? can be understood as an attempt to make up for what is missing from the earlier book. Divided Nation? works on two levels: it is a history of measured public opinion about Indigenous issues, and it is a study of the role that public opinion polls have played in Australian debates about Indigenous issues. That is, Murray and I were not only interested in what Australians en masse have thought about Indigenous issues; we also wanted to know what kind of attention political actors have paid to public opinion polls, or how have polls have affected the way that ‘the public’ is referred to. In the rest of this lecture I will not pursue this second question, but confine myself to some observations about what the polls show about how Australians think about Indigenous issues. But to get to those phenomena of public opinion I first have to give you some history. Indigenous Australians had to contend with the hegemony of social liberalism. What did this mean? Those who have written on ‘social liberalism’ and ‘the Australian way’ and ‘the Australian Settlement’ have said little about how it affected the government of Indigenous Australians. I see two phases in the impact of social liberalism on Indigenous Australians. In the first phase, social liberalism was expressed through an idea of nationhood that was explicitly racial. Australia was supposed to be a nation of white people. That is, people of British stock were thought to be best suited for settling in Australia, because Australia was a fundamentally a fragment of British civilisation. National cohesion would be secured by making sure that future settlers were people of British stock and British values. This ideal social composition of the nation would be secured by an immigration policy, known as the White Australia policy, and by various measures to
encourage the breeding out of a distinct Aboriginal population – the policy of assimilation by ‘absorption’. The high point of official confidence in this policy was in the 1930s. However social liberalism did not have to be expressed in these terms. Indeed, there were tensions within liberalism. Liberal thought is also the source of firmly anti-racist ideas, as Australians found whenever they got into a dialogue with the brown and black members of the British Empire and Commonwealth. There was a critique, from within the liberal tradition itself, of the assumption that Australia’s experiment in social liberalism depended on ethnic homogeneity, on racial exclusiveness. This critique flourished from the 1940s to the 1970s, when it became possible to reformulate the doctrine of Australian nationhood as ‘multiculturalism’. The critique said that Australia could be a cohesive society even if there was some ethnic diversity within it, as long as the different peoples of Australia agreed to work within the same broad framework of political institutions and to commit themselves to the Australian economy. In other words, the critique said that the nation could be coherent on the basis of its practices and values, not on the basis of its single ethnicity: a common set of civic values and practices could unify an ethnically diverse population. In the sphere of Indigenous affairs, the strongest expression of this reformulated version of social liberalism (let’s call it civic social liberalism, replacing ethnic social liberalism) was the ‘assimilation’ policy. Under the ideological leadership of Paul Hasluck – a minister in the Menzies government 1951-63 and one of the most intellectually able MPs to serve in Australia – ‘assimilation’ no longer meant absorption or interbreeding. Rather Aborigines of any hue or any degree of Aboriginal descent were to be ‘assimilated’ by education and experience. As an expression of social liberalism, ‘assimilation’ placed a very high value on ‘equality’. One of the most important ideas that I want you to take away from this lecture is that ‘equality’ is never a simple idea. The essence of its complexity is that it is in an unstable relationship with the concepts ‘sameness’/’difference’. When Australians committed themselves to assimilation, they were invited to think of equality as being about ‘sameness’: people having the same values and same way of life. But lurking in the background, never completely extinguished as a liberal idea, is the notion that ‘equality’ is also about the right to be different. The continuing coexistence of the notions of ‘equality (sameness)’ ‘equality (difference)’ is an inescapable feature of liberalism. When Australia became committed to the equality of Aborigines with other Australians, how much were Aborigines obliged to become the same as other Australians and how much were they permitted to remain different from other Australians? This proved to be a controversial question. One expression of the fuzzy egalitarianism of Australian liberalism was the 1967 referendum that changed two sections of the constitution so that their wording was no longer racially discriminatory. I will not say anything in this lecture about the issue of whether this reading of the constitution was correct: the important point is that the popularity of the constitutional change expressed a popular commitment to the idea that Australians should not exclude but include Aborigines. Discrimination was not the Australian way.
However, ‘discrimination’ is an unstable concept in liberalism, because while ‘racial discrimination’ may generally be understood to be a bad thing to which liberalism is firmly opposed, there are at least two arguments in favour of discrimination coming out of liberalism. One argument is that because there has been a heritage of racial discrimination, Indigenous Australians are now systematically disadvantaged in socio-economic terms, and so it is the duty of the liberal state to relieve their disadvantage with special, targeted policies. This is sometimes called ‘positive discrimination’ or we could call it ‘catch-up’ discrimination. In this perspective, it is justified to discriminate in favour of Indigenous Australians; as a structurally disadvantaged minority they are entitled to remedial help. This idea has strong, but certainly not universal, support in Australian public opinion. The second liberal argument in favour of discrimination for Indigenous Australians has emerged in liberal thought since world war two: the idea of ‘Indigenous rights’. In international human rights discourse, the notion of ‘indigenous rights’ started to be taken seriously in the 1950s. It did not acquire strong support in Australia until the 1970s, in the form of ‘land rights’. In this version of liberal thought, the equality of Indigenous Australians with other Australians is founded on respect for their difference, and this version of liberalism is hostile to any assumption that, to become equal, they must become the ‘same’ as other Australians. When Murray Goot and I examined public opinion poll data, we found that people will affirm both versions of ‘equality’. If you ask people a question that uses the word ‘same’ to refer to the position and the entitlements of Indigenous Australians, you will get a very strong commitment to the idea that all Australians have the same rights and entitlements. The idea of equality as sameness is very popular. However, if you word a question in such a way that it makes sympathetic reference to ways that Indigenous Australians are different (religion, culture, relationship to land, priority of their occupation, or their suffering under colonisation) then it is easy to elicit, from many of the same people, strong support for the idea that Indigenous Australians have different entitlements. That is, the idea that equality rests on respect for difference is also powerful, though perhaps not as powerful as the idea that equality entails sameness of entitlement. Equality(sameness) and equality (difference) coexist as value frameworks in the minds of many Australians. This is not an indication of their stupidity but of the internal richness of liberalism: its ideas of ‘equality’ are sensitive to context. Liberalism in Australia (and in similar settler-colonial societies such as New Zealand, Canada and the USA) has evolved so that there are now several versions of liberalism through which the Indigenous agendas can speak. At the risk of being schematic, we could say that in issues of Indigenous affairs, there are three versions of liberalism in play: Equality as sameness. The strongest version of this liberalism will not tolerate any special measures for Indigenous Australians. Rather, everyone is understood to have the same chances in this land of opportunity, and if people’s lives are not good they have only themselves to blame. Everyone is responsible for their own prosperity
Equality through the relief of socio-economic difference. In this version of liberalism, it is conceded that Indigenous Australians are different, but their difference is regarded as largely a series of disadvantages. The state is responsible for helping people to overcome their own disadvantage. Equality through the recognition of Indigenous rights. This is the version of liberalism in which many (but not all) Indigenous leaders nowadays ground their arguments. It gives rise to the idea that the state has a responsibility to recognise the Indigenous people and to come to some formal agreement with them through which the different peoples of Australia can co-exist. In Australian political history, this version of liberalism has gained only a tenuous hold, though it sometimes receives spectacular and controversial expression. One of the effects of the Howard years has been to put this version of liberalism on the defensive. Settler colonial societies are a form of hegemony: the colonists are in hegemonic leadership of the colonised. The terms of that leadership vary historically, and we can write that history as a history of Australian liberalism. Liberalism is available as the hegemonic ideology, but which version(s) of liberalism will be applied? Indigenous Australians cannot reverse the fact that they have been colonised. They must adapt to their colonised condition by helping to develop versions of liberalism that are suited to their aspirations and identities. And non-Indigenous Australians cannot reverse or dismantle Australia’s colonial structure either. They can only modify it. They must struggle amongst themselves, and dialogue with Indigenous Australians, to work out how to adapt their liberalism so that it incorporates Indigenous people on terms that are broadly acceptable to both sides. At the moment the politically ascendant version of liberalism is that which acts upon socio-economic disadvantage, but this version of liberalism has continually to deal with challenges from both sides: a discourse that object to any concession to Indigenous people’s difference (the special programs to relieve disadvantage are unjustified favouritism), and the discourse that upholds ‘Indigenous rights’ (the special measures to relieve disadvantage are necessary but not sufficient). All three versions of liberalism and social justice circulate and we may find ourselves voicing and thinking more than one of them, as ‘liberalism’ affords us more than one framework.