Ralf Dahrendorf
NO THIRD WAY
As I allow my enthusiasm for the open society to run away with
rational argument, it occurs to me that you may be a little too pleased with
some of my remarks. You too have your doubts about Hayek, and you want
some mixture of socialist achievements and liberal opportunities to prevail.
Unbridled capitalism, you think, is not such a good thing, and you may there–
fore wish to enlist me as one of your supporters on the road to Social
Democracy. I do not share the widespread obsession with labels and am
therefore not particularly upset about being called a Social Democrat, though
I have difficulties with the Italian epithet,
liberalsocialista,
because I prefer to
think of myself as a radical liberal for whom the social entitlements of
citizenship are as important a condition of progress as the opportunities for
choice, which require entrepreneurial initiative and an innovative spirit. But
before we get to normal politics, the point has to be made unequivocally that
socialism is dead , and that none of its variants can be revived for a world
awakening from the double nightmare of Stalinism and Brezhnevism.
Lest you think such language unneces arily cruel, let me tell you about
a book which has to do with my own political philosophy, George Danger–
field's
The Strange Death of Liberal England,
which first appeared in 1935.
Dangerfield traces the curious story of the great triumph of the British Lib–
erals under the Asquith ministry after 1908, and the hubris which led to their
rapid decline from 1913 onward. "It was in these years that that highly
moral, that generous, that dyspeptic, that utterly undefinable organism known
as the Liberal Party died the death.
It
died from poison administered by its
Conservative foes, and from disillusion over the inefficacy of the word
'Reform.' And the last breath which fluttered in this historical flesh was
extinguished by War." Dangerfield is not naive; he knows that political par–
ties can appear to survive their death. "I realize, of course, that the word
'liberal' will always have a meaning as long as there is one democracy left in
the world, or any remnant of a middle class: but the true pre-war Liberalism
- supported, as it still was in 1910, by Free Trade, a majority in Parliament,
the Ten Commandments, and the illusion of Progress - can never return.
It
was killed, or killed itself, in 1913." Dangerfield adds, for good measure,
"And a very good thing too."
It
is hard to resist the temptation to replace the year 1913 in these
observations by 1989, and the word "liberalism" by "socialism," or at any
rate "Social Democracy" - supported, as it still was in the 1970s, by
/
Editor's Note: From the forthcoming book
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
by
Ralf Dahrendorf. Copyright
©
1990 by Ralf Dahrendorf. To be published by
Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
