LEWIS COSER
77
members' standard of living is now declining . Supermarket customers
nowadays can choose between British, German, Danish , and New
Zealand butter, but all butter prices have steadily increased, along
with the prices of everything else . Just like tuberculosis at an early
age , inflation, though prevalent elsewhere , seems
to
have become
a peculiarly British disease .
Retail prices in England, as the German sociologist Ralf
Dahrendorf, now head of the London School of Economics, recently
reminded us, fluctuated around the same level from the middle of
the seventeenth century until the beginning of World War
I.
They
reached unprecedented peaks during that war, yet later fell again
to
roughly the 1913 level. But after 1948, they rose annually by between
three and five percent throughout the fifties and most of the sixties,
with a much steeper rise thereafter. Since 1973 the annual rise has
been in two-digit figures , and it now amounts
to
over twenty-five
percent. This means that something unheard of in terms of order of
magnitude and impact is happening
to
the British economy in the
1970s.
A creeping inflation of this scale surely must undermine the
relatively stable assumptions on which British society has hitherto
rested. In the fifties and up
to
the middle sixties, Britain, as well as
the rest of Europe, revelled in unprecedented prosperity . Enough of
the increasing national product seeped down
to
the hitherto under–
privileged strata to make it possible for the Bells and Lipsets of this
world to proclaim that European capitalism, gilded by a coating of
welfare state planning, had finally solved the major problems of the
West. The end of ideology in their view was, so
to
speak, the super–
structural reflection of an affluence in which everybody, though to an
unequal extent, had access
to
the great barbecue . All this now reads
like a dim echo from a vanished past.
Inflation at the present scale has seriously unsettlinK effects on
the class structure .
As
Dahrendorf puts it , "Inflation has become the
medium of a more or less hidden redistribution struggle between
those who are able to keep the pace, because of their market capacity ,
and those who are not; the potential of this conflict, like all concealed
struggles, is nasty. " Some strata, most particularly big labor and big
business, have up to recently been able to live with inflation or even
to
increase their share of the pie . The major industrial unions , in
