In chapter three of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek lays out of the neoliberal conception of 'progress'. In this, he was consistent with previous rightist thought by conceiving of 'progress' not as a movement toward a desired end, but as the constant, rapid accumulation of capital in its various forms, with no agreed end - change for change's sake, as he put it. Hayek called this essay 'The Common Sense of Progress', and if we listen to politicians we can see just how influential this conception is among elites, how it has indeed become a kind 'common sense', as Hayek vaunted. What follows is a step-by-step outline of Hayek's argument with some context supplied, the better to appreciate what this notion of 'progress' is for, and what kind of assumptions are embedded in it.

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Hayek sets out his stall by outlining a defence of the idea of historical progress (particularly during 'the last two hundred years') against some of the more sceptical inquiries, which doubted that the twentieth century of Nazism, colonial genocides, Stalinism, imperial famines, and nuclear annihilation was an uncomplicated advance. Hayek grants that much of what has been claimed for 'progress' has been hubristic, and deterministic, that not all change has been necessary or beneficial. Nevertheless, "civilization is progress and progress is civilization". Modern "civilization" (he means capitalism) depend on "the operation of forces which, under favourable conditions, produce progress". Without these forces, we would lose "all that distinguishes man from beast". What does separate man from beast? Well, Hayek routinely decried "primitive instincts" of group solidarity, the basic human impulse to put the collective ahead of the individual. For a methodological individualist, who holds that there is no collective, that all corporative entities are fictions which boil down to discrete, self-sufficient individual units, the idea of putting the group first is undoubtedly scandalous.

Thus in the chapter we're considering, he complains that "in some respects man's biological equipment has not kept pace with that rapid change, that the adaptation of his non-rational part has lagged somewhat, and that many of his instincts and emotions are still more adapted to the life of a hunter than to life in civilization. If many features of our civilization seem to us unnatural, artificial, or unhealthy, this must have been man's experience ever since he first took to town life, which is virtually since civilization began. All the familiar complaints against industrialism, capitalism, or overrefinement are largely protests against a new way of life that man took up a short while ago after more than half a million years' existence as a wandering hunter, and that created problems still unsolved by him." So, what distinguishes man from beast is the suppression of primitive instincts in favour of market "rationality", the willingness to accept the "artificial rules" of the marketplace which produce a "spontaneous order" and thus make progress possible. Interestingly, Hayek's quirky anthropological assertions do not support the classical fiction of homo oeconomicus. On the contrary, it is stated again and again that the principles of a "rational economy" are "artificial", at variance with our instinctive predilections. The neoliberal assumption, grounded in bitter struggle, is that human beings are not naturally disposed to living in a market based system, and will tend to rebel against it and seek to abbreviate it by various means. Indeed, Hayek later queries whether people even want most or even all of the results of "material progress". It seems a most "involuntary" affair. Thus, people must be somehow coerced or 'educated' into accepting it, and it must be upheld through effective political combat.

A little context here. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek very clearly draws out the political point he is making about social solidarity and the demands for 'social justice' which it produces. The market order depends upon the law being neutral, with everyone subject to the same rules. But legislation in the name of social justice meant that the law was 'socialised', giving special privileges and exception to certain classes for the purposes of ameliorating their situation. He cites 'New Deal' legislation in the US among his examples. This is, as William Scheuerman and Renato Christi have pointed out from different perspectives, remarkably similar to the legal critique of social democracy that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1920s, when - so Christi argues - he an authoritarian liberal, rather than the counter-revolutionary conservative he had been during the 1918 revolution and would become again when he bedded with the Nazis. (Christi's analysis suggests that the difference between the two is purely one of context). So, this is an important punctuation point: Hayek's ideas concerning progress and civilization are directly drawn from radical right political thought in the interwar years, which sought to rephrase classical liberalism in light of the challenge of mass democracy and socialism. If we hear Hayekian ideas of progress espoused by politicians, we know that they are not neutral, but were fashioned as weapons in a hegemonic struggle. Let's continue.

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Progress is not, for Hayek, characterised by advances toward a fixed aim - say, equality, or liberty. He rejects such teleological conceptions. Rather, progress is "a process of formation and modification of the human intellect, a process of adaptation and learning in which not only the possibilities known to us but also our values and desires continually change. As progress consists in the discovery of the not yet known, its consequences must be unpredictable. It always leads into the unknown, and the most we can expect is to gain an understanding of the kind of forces that bring it about." Hayek's preferred metaphor here is the scientific process, the gradual accumulation of knowledge and power over nature, and the consequential transformation of our desires and intent.

A corollary of progress being unpredictable, is that it is unplannable. One cannot really master the forces which produce progress, bend them to any design or end goal, only come to understand them a little bit better in order to maximise their potential. It is not incidental that Hayek has used the example of scientific progress to make his case. Hayek's concern with the problems of knowledge is central to his outlook. In arguing against economic planning (see 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', The American Economic Review, September 1945), he maintained that a "rational economic order" could not be brought about by any single intelligence, because knowledge of the circumstances of which those who would construct such an order must make use is not concentrated but distributed in "bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" among "separate individuals". For this reason, the best system is one in which individuals act on their own self-interest, disregarding traditional morality, civic responsibility and so on, responding only to price signals. In doing so, by blindly obeying artificial rules and paying no attention to any greater end, they assure progress.

Hayek does pause to acknowledge that progress in this sense may not by itself leave human beings better off than they would have been had all progress halted a century, or a millenium, ago. He says that the question is "probably unanswerable", but that the answer "does not matter". He goes on: "What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable. It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement's sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence. The enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly."

If this seems an unsatisfactorily peremptory way to dismiss imposing questions of political justice, it can be explained by recalling Hayek's twist on what is called "preference utilitarianism". For Hayek, the society which promotes the general welfare is that society which maximises an anonymous individual's chances of obtaining his or her unknown preferences. Thus, whether we're materially better off or happier is less important than whether as many people as possible have the maximum number of chances to strive for their own ends. Only a society in its "progressive" state offers that possibility. Hayek credits Adam Smith this insight, but as usual distorts him entirely. Smith's defence of agrarian capitalism depended on it continually improving the employment and wages of "the labouring poor, of the great body of people". This was a crucial ethical argument for the system and it was tied to a moral philosophy that was as far from posessive individualism as Hayek's is from socialism.

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And here we come to another area where Hayek differs from Smith, and that is the former's belief in the virtues of hierarchy. In The Road to Serfdom, and The Constitution of Liberty, roughly the same case for inequality is made. The rapid economic advance that enables the greatest number to satisfy their preferences depends upon inequality and would "be impossible without it". Progress so rapid "must take place in echelon fashion, with some far ahead of the rest". The rich, therefore, are not exploiting anyone. They are simply the farthest ahead. But the reason why there must be some far ahead of the rest is that the growth of income that enables individual achievement depends on the growth of knowledge. This is more important than the accumulation of capital because, while material goods will always be subject to relative scarcity, knowledge, once created, is "gratuitously available for the benefit of all". (Hayek was not writing before the invention of intellectual property, so it is safe to call this a disingenuous observation). The production of that knowledge depends on the outlay of resources equal to many times the share of income that, were resources distributed equally, any one person would enjoy.

Thus, progress, civilization itself, requires a wealthy class, a leisure class. It requires that there are luxury goods for the exclusive enjoyment of a few, because it is only through first having been luxury goods that new inventions eventually are made available to the majority - be they airplane trips or refrigerators. The wealthy who enjoy luxury goods are thus like "scouts" who "have found the goal" and made the same road easier for "the less lucky or less energetic" (whose contribution may merely have been to produce the luxury goods in question). A progressive society is a highly unequal one. The more unequal the society, the faster progress is achieved, and the better the eventual lot of the poor.

Moreover, the rich stand as an example to the rest of us. In the tradition of conservative polemic from Burke onward, Hayek maintains that the things we strive for are things that we want because others already have them. These desires act as "a spur to further effort". The "progressive society" must recognise the spur, but disregard "the pain of unfulfilled desire". To sidestep the inevitable charge that he is engaging in "cynical apologetics", which he is, Hayek attempts to show that even a planned society, which he cannot help but think of as a stagnant society, a kind of "serfdom", must have a few who try out the latest goods before they are widely available. There must be production for some before there is production for all, and if there is to be growth, there must be the incentive of desiring what others have and what one does not have. The only difference would be that inequalities would result from authority rather than the market, "and the accidents of birth and opportunity". Rather than deepening the persuasive power of the argument, however, this merely restates the same set of axioms, which contain the same set of implied observations about human behaviour.

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The commitment to inequality poses a problem for Hayek's commitment to liberty, inasmuch as he does not want anyone's progress to be inhibited by unfair and arbitrary advantage or disadvantage. But he maintains that as long as there no large gaps between the rich and the rest, so long as the income scale is well graduated, with each step along the scale well occupied, it can "scarcely be denied" that the advance of some benefits the rest. Of course, the income scale has never quite looked like a well graduated pyramid. These days, a more applicable metaphor is the L-curve.

Nonetheless, Hayek is convinced that we will see the justice of this if we only abstract a little from our immediate circumstances and look at the global situation. Yes, we are all interdependent, but the advancement of some has not deprived others of anything. "Although the fact that the people of the West are today so far ahead of the others in wealth is in part the consequence of a greater accumulation of capital, it is mainly the result of their more effective utilization of knowledge." And that more effective utilization of knowledge has been made possible by internal class distinctions: "a country that deliberately levels such differences also abdicates its leading position - as the example 0f Great Britain so tragically shows." And he goes on to lament the decline of the British empire. There is thus no injustice or exploitation, either globally or domestically, for the rich are not claiming exclusive title to something that would otherwise be widely available. They are pioneers, who have simply used their knowledge more effectively in the market place, and thus given us all an example to imitate and learn from. (Here, as elsewhere, Hayek deals with contentious observations not by acknowledging their contentiousness, but by asserting their certainty all the more forcefully - "there can be little doubt that", "it can be scarcely denied that", "it is worth remembering", etc.).

Hayek's conception of progress is naturally anti-traditionalist. Having acknowledged the resistance of populations to markets and the changes they bring, he explains that even the conservative peasant, happily enjoying a "way of life", owes her mode of existence to "a different type of person", the innovators and wealth creators of the past who forced the static, peasant farmer mode of living on the previously nomadic people. The "changes to which people must submit are part of the cost of progress", and every such change is involuntary. Indeed, picking up on a point earlier, Hayek states: "I have yet to learn of an instance when the deliberate vote of the majority (as distinguished from the decision of some governing elite) has decided on such sacrifices in the interest of a better future as is made by a free-market society." But in their own self-interest, people must be coerced into accepting such changes, because the things they actually want, not just material goods but even the social improvements they desire, depend on them being so coerced. They must be compelled to abandon their happy little ruts, their traditional morality, and their primitive instinctual desire for social solidarity.

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When Mrs Thatcher declared of The Constitution of Liberty that "this is what we believe", she embraced a set of ideas consciously fashioned for rightist political struggle. And she engaged in that struggle with gusto, and was as ideologically combative as she was politically authoritarian and repressive. Her ideology mandated her anti-democratic, inegalitarian politics as being essential for progress and civilization. When the neoliberals, who presently enjoy a near monopoly over our parliamentary system, speak of progress, I think it is just this conception above that they have in mind. Blair's "forces of progress" were those of neoliberal globalization, while his "forces of conservatism" were those who indignantly upheld traditions of trade union solidarity, welfare, employment protections, regulation, economic interventionism, grassroots democracy, and so on.

However, the fact that the political advocates of the British ruling class do not today have the self-confidence to declare themselves open Hayekians, to embrace the principle of inequality - quite the reverse! - suggests that their ideological position is weak. That they have to adopt a 'fairness' criterion while attacking us, that they have to claim to be egalitarians interested in rebuilding social solidarity, that this is the only way they can cobble together a viable political base, is an index of just how much the initial popular base of Thatcherite neoliberalism, always a minority but at first a large one, has crumbled since the late 1980s. If neoliberalism is hegemonic in that its assumptions are reproduced in all the dominant institutions, from business to parliament, to the media, and the academe, this is not because these assumptions coincide with the views of the majority, who remain stubbornly primitive.

Harvey says that the academics are refusing to learn from the capitalist crisis, that they are still retailing the same vulgarising neoclassical theories that they have been for a century, and especially since the Seventies. The theories don't work, don't explain anything, reduce complex historical processes to dicta of vicious circularity, but they continue to be orthodox. Proof, surely, that the purpose of higher education is to indoctrinate more than it is to educate, encouraging intelligent people to believe that in studiously internalising capitalist ideology, they have been inducted into a caste of rational beings from which the great unwashed are excluded. If you've had a read of Dan Hind's book The Threat To Reason, you'll remember that it is his argument that a primary threat to reason arises from the corporate annexation of Enlightenment. This takes place in two ways: first, in the sense that the tools made available by the scientific revolution are hoarded and deployed solely in order to accumulate capital, in strict secrecy (this is Occult Enlightenment); secondly, in the sense that capitalists denounce their opponents - be they environmentalists, opponents of nuclear energy, peaceniks, or anticapitalists - as counter-Enlightenment forces. In this Folk Enlightenment view, as Hind calls it, the forces of reason are on the side of markets, big business and - let us not forget - war. I mentioned the recent example of BA boss Willie Walsh describing BASSA workers as "reactionaries" opposing the rationalisation of the airline industry.

One aspect of this specious conception of "reason" is the encroachment of a set of analytical principles established by marginalist economics into other fields of social science. Though specifically concerned with the workings of markets, it is assumed by their advocates that these could apply universally. And, as Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis argue (From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics, Routledge, 2009), the 20th Century saw a growing tendency for various authors, including the writers of such ordure as Freakonomics, to extend them as universally as possible. Freakonomics (and its Super- sequel) discovers a market logic behind a bewildering variety of social phenomena. Gary Becker finds that market logic explains a wide range of phenomena including crime and punishment. For Robert H Frank, "economics explains everything", and he encourages his students to find ways to apply market laws to all manner of questions. Everything up to and including romantic relationships can be understood in terms of utility maximization. Thus, the search for a partner can be interpreted as a petty entrepreurial activity in a competitive market, in which - acting on information and incentives - couples form property-based relational contracts as a means for effectively utilizing resources, and the relationship is only sustained for as long as each maximises the utility that the other receives.

Underpinning this approach is three basic analytical principles. The first is individualism. The individual is taken to be the self-sufficient unit of all forms of behaviour, the real basis of all fictitious corporate entities. The second is rational self-interest. The individual behaves in ways that will maximise utility to herself, on the basis of a rational assessment of the information available in the market. Here, utility is purely subjective - whatever is useful to an individual is whatever she thinks is useful, while there is an assumption of an "implicit market" in all walks of life, even where there are no commodities, no price signals, and no currency. The third principle is exchange. Utility maximisation optimally takes place through the act of exchange, and that exchange can take place between the drug dealer and the addict as much as the lover and the pursued. This kookiness, where it is not merely circular and vulgar, descends into absurdity when the suitability of the theory can only be established through an ad hoc proliferation of conceptual innovations, as when - for example - Becker explains criminal recidivism in terms of a "preference for risk". This naturalises and universalises the cut-throat self-advancement of career-minded bourgois WASPs, distilling it into a set of puerile anthropological axioms. Middle market books such as The Economic Naturalist probably aggrandise the narcissism of the bourgeois, allowing them to read about themselves and their conduct in flattering terms, giving it a metaphysical twist, endowing it with transcendent validity. And small wonder that such people like to hear that everyone else has exactly the same petty, criminal mentality that they do - it is not capital that is self-maximising, it is humanity itself! - and that they have merely been more successful utility-maximisers than the majority of humankind.

This imperialism of "reason" ("economic imperialism", as Fine and Milonakis dub it), has policy consequences. 'Public choice' economics, for example, has acquired a prized position in the academia, in think-tanks, and among policy 'wonks'. Its apostles have usually found a place in policymaking institutions. William Niskanen, for example, had worked in the Kennedy administration, was appointed to Reagan's 'Council of Economic Advisors', and his Bureaucracy and Representative Government was required reading material for higher civil servants during the Thatcher era. This tendency has been very useful for ruling class neoliberal praxis. The principles of 'public choice' economics were first outlined by James Buchanan, and later refined by Gordon Tullock and Anthony Downs, and then Niskanen. Essentially it involved the idea that public sector bureaucratic workers are, like marketplace actors, utility maximisers. Buchanan allowed that there were other motivations, "unexplained residues" that weren't covered by the principles of market rationality - ethical considerations, for instance - though such exiguous constraints on the applicability of the theory have tended to be lost in its subsequent development. This model of the individual as a 'utility function' is obviously circular - it is simply assumed that everything human beings do is maximizing. It is not a falsifiable assertion, but more in the way of an articulation of faith, a capitalist theology.

Niskanen's account says that bureaucrats are budget maximisers. But this is only a proxy for the maximisation of other utilities, such as "salary, perquisites of the office, public reputation, power, patronage, output of the bureau, ease of making changes and ease of managing the bureau”. Bureaucrats act on incentives to maximise their budget. If they do not, their tenure will be brief, their reputation diminished, their power limited, and their income reduced. This behaviour takes place in circumstances like those of a private sector monopoly: a "bilateral monopoly" as Niskanen has it. The politician requires services that only bureaucrats can provide, and the bureaucrats require funding that only politicians can allocate. As monopolists, bureaucrats have considerable ability to control the information pertaining to the production processes, and thus to inflate the costs of their product. Without competition, they drive up spending and over-supply services. Meanwhile politicians act on incentives to service clients and special interests, thus increasing their clout, consolidating votes, and sometimes getting hefty back-handers. Niskanen's solution was to introduce competition among public sector bureaus, and between public sector bureaus and the private sector; cap taxes and spending to the lowest sustainable levels; change the incentive structure within bureaucracies so that they become more transparent; and severely restrict the scope for legislators to increase taxes, insisting that such increases could only be passed if approved by two-thirds of legislators, thus reducing the potential for politicians to service interest groups.

The technocratic cadences of this school only partially obscure the rightist political animus driving it, and particularly its roots in radical right-wing political theory and pro-capitalist economics. The theory has little predictive value, and there has been little evidence that public sector bureaucrats are in fact 'budget maximisers'. The reforms introduced into the public sector under the influence of such theories, have usually been part of an attack on organised labour. The Tories, for example, introduced something called Compulsory Competitive Tendering in various aspects of service delivery throughout the 1980s. It meant that public authorities were compelled to introduce competition between public sector service providers and private sector contractors. This was supposed to introduce a new era of streamlined administration, but it was also intended to weaken public sector unions as part of the Tories' project of shifting the balance of power from organised labour to employers - if the public sector protected unionised employees from 'market forces', this had to be stopped. Wages should be cut and jobs shed, if necessary. Nicholas Ridley argued at the time that poor quality services was the result of a grip exerted by trade unions, who ensured that services costs mere and delivered less for "the consumer". In local government, this meant reduced wages and lost jobs across the board - part of the overall downsizing of the state that has been a continuous project since the Thatcher era - even where private bidders didn't win the contract. It often meant that the quality of such services was run down, but even more gravely it was an assault on democracy. The Thatcherites didn't object to local administration as such, but they did object to the idea of a local authority exercising the full range of devolved powers under democratic scrutiny and control. In place of such authorities, they introduced a network of single-function or area-specific bodies that were not democratic, or democratically accountable, to administer local services. It was through such reforms that undemocratic quangos were propagated, of which there are now 1200, controlling a vast budget and thus a great deal of public life in the UK.

Such reforms have also opened up new avenues for capital accumulation, and this has tended to increase bureaucratic costs rather than - as should theoretically be the case - diminish them. Bureaucracy has proliferated, as has rent-seeking, as corporate interests became interwoven with public service delivery. For a paradigmatic example of private rent-extraction from the public sector, you might consider SERCO. This private enterprise has built a vast empire in public service delivery in the UK. It runs schools, trains, prisons, hospitals, immigration detention centres, the Docklands Light Railway, the Woolwich Ferry, speed cameras, nuclear weapons, local education authorities - the works. SERCO holds 40% of contracts for the Home Office, making a mint out of 'control orders' and 'anti-terrorist' legislation, has run some of the most abusive and repressive detention centres, and will certainly be bidding for the control of the new "GP-led" health authorities. It is already bidding to run Hinchingbrooke hospital in Cambridgeshire. The Tories 'free schools' programme, in which parents can set up state-funded schools independently run, and free of local education authority oversight, has already provided SERCO with its first whiff of profits, as the Birkenshaw, Birstall and Gomersal Parent Alliance has procured the firm to run a new 900-place secondary school. Its activities in the Private Finance Initiative Industry are almost three times as profitable as its other private sector activities. But what does SERCO actually do? By itself, nothing. It is a parasitic entity that accumulates immense profits by telling other people what to do, or rather by contracting other suppliers to tell other people what to do. And, as Private Eye revealed a while back, its chief executive is sponsored in his hobby of Ferrari driving by three companies who have been suppliers to SERCO. This is just one, albeit one very large and typical, example. Of course, SERCO works hard to reproduce the doctrines legitimising its extraction of rent from the public sector, through its research sector, the SERCO Institute, and its publications are widely distributed among local and national government officials.

Now that the Tories are back in power, they are promising to democratise and devolve power in the public sector - down with Big Government, up with the Big Society. But their rationale and means have not altered. They are taking crucial public service functions in the NHS and education out of democratic oversight and 'devolve' them to non-elected bodies and private sector firms, under the pretext of a spurious market rationality. What I'm describing as the imperialism of market "reason" is nothing other than the ability of the ruling class to naturalise and universalise its accumulation activities, to express it as an ideology, a pseudo-sociology with pseudo-explanations for social phenomena, and to use that ideology as a justification for advancing on and enclosing all areas of public life that are not commodified, not subject to the laws of accumulation. It's an ideology of primitive accumulation, or accumulation-by-dispossession, and the fact that its intellectual product is so impoverished, vulgar and circular will not reduce its appeal for as long as there is capitalism, and for as long there is some human activity that is not making someone a profit.

If you want to understand the relationship between conservatism and capitalist modernity, you could do worse than consult the Canadian marxist C B Macpherson and his brief guide to Edmund Burke. The apparent paradox of Burke is that he is a defender of aristocracy, of tradition and hierarchy, a scourge of liberal revolutionaries, a natural law conservative, at the same time as being a bourgeois liberal, a pro-market Whig and a vehement opponent of British imperialism. It is true that conservatism gradually integrated aspects of liberalism throughout the 19th Century so that, in its dominant Angl0-American variant, it eventually became a more ardent defender of classical liberalism than the liberals of the 20th Century. But Burke was there at the beginning, as it were - along with Joseph de Maistre, a founder of modern conservative thought, such that his paradoxical embrace of aspects of liberalism can not be treated as merely part of that adaptive process. His liberalism, and his modernism, were always-already constitutive of his conservatism.

Macpherson intriguingly suggests in his introduction that the key to resolving this conundrum is Burke's support for capitalism:

"There is no doubt that in everything he wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order. But his traditional order was already a capitalist order. He saw that it was so, and wished it to be more freely so. He had no romantic yearning for a bygone feudal order and no respect for such remnants of it as still survived, notably in the royal household ... He lived in the present, and made it his business to study the economic consequences of actual and projected state policies. As MP for Bristol (1775-80) he could scarcely have done otherwise, for Bristol was then one of the greatest commercial ports in England. But his interest in economic affairs had, as we shall see in some detail, begun earlier and lasted longer than his connection with Bristol..." (C B Macpherson, Burke, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 5).

In chapter five, he draws this out further, but it is necessary to further elaborate on his market liberalism, as well as his hierarchical conservatism. The former manifested itself earlier in his career, the latter after the French revolution. From his earliest undergraduate polemics on political economy in Dublin, Burke's position on the rights of property was impeccably bourgeois, as befitted a member of the Ascendancy. He was no leveller, but he believed that the owners had a duty to "improve" their property, to augment their own wealth and thereby increase the wealth of all classes. For this reason, he was to find himself far more at home in England, where most landowners were commercial proprietors, than in Ireland, where absentee landlordism was still rife. He was taken up by literary London, joining the 'Club', among whose luminaries was Adam Smith, and taking up residence in Grub Street (though, in a rather more august capacity as a writer than the street is notorious for). His entry into politics was equally facilitated by a superior taking him under his wing, when William Gerald Hamilton MP asked him to be his private secretary. As a bourgeois, he owed much of his career to patronage, and later to the accomodating abundance of 'rotten boroughs' that enabled him to be 'elected' as MP for Wendover by grace of Lord Wendover.

It was Burke's career as an MP that marked him out as a moderate Whig, a reformer, and an opponent of colonial abuses. His liberalism was as opposed to a priori reasoning as was his later conservatism. Rejecting abstract accounts of liberty, as he had earlier rejected Rousseau, he denied that freedom bore "any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysicks, which admit no medium". Liberty in real social life was "variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in different degrees ... according to the temper and circumstances of every community". This anti-theoretical approach informed his response to the American revolution, in which he urged the British government not to see the abstract virtues of liberty, but the concrete virtues of a peace obtained by tolerating liberty in some degree. Consistently, against inductions from general principles, he posed complex empirical reality, the frailty and imperfection of human beings, and the hard reality of "human nature" about which he held bourgeois assumptions. His assumptions about human nature provided the foundation for his principled attack on Irish penal laws, for he maintained that the law was of necessity grounded on two aspects of the human condition: equality of original condition, and rationality. The law must therefore apply equally to everyone within a given polity, and must be of use to the whole of society.

If the law was to apply equally, and be of use to the whole of society, this had some ramifications for Burke's views on property. For the law must protect property, the better to further industry for the benefit of he commonwealth. Any law that abridged the rights of property, in just that proportion also curtailed the propensity toward industry. But if private acquisitiveness benefited society by stimulating industry, and if Burke was happy to defend the rights of property no matter how it was originally acquired, he was not content with property-holders who lacked industry. His attack on the Duke of Bedford, provoked by the latter's attempt to deprive him of a pension in his retirement, displayed bourgeois resentment of lazy aristos in gloriously contemptuous prose. His pension, he noted, was a reward for "merit", while the Duke's holdings were his despite his "few and idle years", and his inability to "know anything of public industry in its exertions".

So, from the ground of "human nature" to the lofty principles of law, economics and justice, he was a thorough bourgeois. But the bourgeois revolution in France produced, apparently, quite a different Burke, the Burke that is most familiar today from his Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. The latter part of the title is of course crucial - it was that the French revolution was being held up as a model for Britain to emulate which inspired Burke to produce his conservative manifesto. The revolution, the "plague", must be quarantined - and if this quarantine eventually called for an all out war by 1796, on an ideological level it entailed detailed elaborations on the nature of society, and government. The sacrosanct position of property, and of inheritance, was above all what he sought to conserve. He did so by citing, or rather inventing, a tradition grounded in transcendent principles. He noted that in English law, liberty was itself "an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers", in contrast to the French revolutionary assertion of liberty from natural right. Liberty, along with privilege, peerage, the crown, property, franchises, etc., were all heritable goods, and all goods worth conserving. Such principles did not exclude gradual improvement, but they did exclude radical innovation which was likely to be motivated by a selfish spirit. Institutions of longevity having demonstrated their worth, their utility for the whole of society, ought not to be overthrown in a fit of revolutionary pique, by the fiat of revolutionary pick-axes. If the sentiment is clear, Macpherson claims, the logic is not: a prolonged sequence of momentary choices is not logically superior to a single momentary choice. The distinction between small changes, of which Burke approves, and large, qualitative changes against which he sets himself is not clear. Burke's argument amounts to a case for prejudice in favour of tradition.

But that tradition is that of the Leviathan state, the subjection of all to the rule of the sovereign, the constitutional impediment to natural passions that human beings enter into by tactic acquiescence. The "real" rights of man are those which he derives from having submitted to that rule, most particularly the right to property, to the fruits of the labour mixed with his property, and to the inherited accumulations of that property. All men, he agrees, have "equal rights", but "not to equal things" - a man with five shillings on his person has as much right to that as a man with five hundred pounds. And "as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of men in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention." Convention, then, has proved the unequal rights of man to property and to say in government. It has produced a "natural aristocracy", a leisured and cultured class whose entitlement to privilege, and whose usefulness for society as a whole has been proven over generations. Moreover, it has established a set of rights, differing for each man according to his concrete specificity, which it would be irresponsible to deny to future generations through some radical overthrow of the old order.

What is continuous, then, what unites the market liberal with the hierarchical conservative, is capitalism. Burke was a bourgeois political economist about whom Adam Smith is said to have claimed that he was the one man to have thought exactly the same way as Smith himself without having conversed with him. It was as a bourgeois economists that he sought to defend his property, his estate of some six hundred acres, against the possibility of non-market-based payments to labourers. In neighbouring Berkshire, the Justice of the Peace in Speenhamland had introduced a system of supplementary payments for workers depending on the size of their families to alleviate the distress caused by the market - it was payment according to need rather than industry. Scandalised, and afraid that the government might nationalise such a policy, Burke argued that such policies by arbitrarily curtailing the rights of property would undermine enterprise, thus ultimately leaving workers worse off. It would, in a word, create a culture of dependency. By contrast, free markets were ultimately the most efficient and equitable means of distributing the social product. Burke did not defend a feudal system of small producers selling surplus product on the market, but specifically a capitalist economy with the drive for accumulation as its motor. He held that it reflected the natural propensities of humans, and that it was thus an inevitable expression of human aspiration. He was happy for capitalists to accumulate surplus since this would compel them to be interested in the welfare of their workers, and to reinvest the surplus in further production for the good of all. He was equally insistent that the able-bodied must all not merely work, but work as wage labourers, since this alone would provide the surplus that would drive on further accumulation and improvement. That labour should be a "commodity like any other" whose price fell and rose according to demand was "in the nature of things".

Burke, it should be said, was fully aware of how much bourgeois society had to answer for. He was aware of the great social misery that it produced, since he documented it in some detail. But to all this, he insisted that it would be "pernicious" to follow his own instinct to "rescue [the labouring poor] from their miserable industry", since it would disturb the "natural course of things" and inhibit "the great wheel of circulation". That wheel of circulation was divinely ordained, every bit as much as the right of monarchs to rule - in a formula mirroring Smith's "invisible hand", he insisted that: "the benign and wise Disposer of all things ... obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success". The free contract between employer and labour was also a customary status, a convention deriving from natural law, an expression of divine will, and thus of necessity providential and tending toward social harmony. For, in such a contract, he maintained, there was no possibility of conflicting interests - it was in the interest of the farmer "that his work should be done with effect and celerity", which would only be assured of his labourer was well-fed, clothed, healthy, etc. This did not merely imply, but vociferated, an attititude of subjection toward the worker. The relationship between the labourer and his employer was analogous to that between the beast and the labourer, or the tool and the labourer. In each case, the latter stands as the executive, reasoning authority, that directs his subordinate man, beast or tool to his higher ends. To "break this chain of subordination in any part" was "absurd".

Thus Burke the conservative, the propagandist of hierarchy and natural law, is nothing if not a modernist, a bourgeois, and a liberal. His 'tradition' is an invented one, I need hardly add. Capitalism was no more in the natural order of things than monarchs or pontiffs. But it was an invention convoked in his intellect by the challenge of the French revolution, and the egalitarian menace that it promised. Had he been, Macpherson suggests, a 19th Century historian with the benefit of hindsight, he might have moderated his position on the French revolution, seeing that it might expand the dominion of capital. But as it was, he saw only the immediate, urgent battle between the classes. Therefore, his foundation of modern conservatism, of reaction against liberal egalitarianism, is motivated by the desire to conserve the kernel of liberalism, capitalist social relations, against the rationalist dilations of liberty and equality that were infecting the salons of London, rousing the labouring poor, and threatening precisely the "absurd" disturbance of subordination in England, in the very countryside where he resided, that he so dreaded.

If 'Red Toryism' was anything more than an ambient noise-machine intended to mystify the real social basis and institutional structure of the Conservative Party and add some vaguely 'progressive' sounding notes to its vocabulary, this is what it would sound like:

"All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms, and the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these days,--may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to us: Behold! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man,--how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself: these also, if you will continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will learn them, behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet work and prosper with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature is against him; he shall not be able to do work in Nature's empire,--not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred, isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look or be, is not success, but the want of success.

"Supply-and-demand,--alas! For what noble work was there ever yet any audible 'demand' in that poor sense? The man of Macedonia, speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us," did not specify what rate of wages he would give! Or was the Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays, Bridgewater Bequests, and a 'minimum of Four thousand five hundred a year?'' No demand that I heard of was made then, audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or other the like emporium and hiring establishment; silent were all these from any whisper of such demand;--powerless were all these to 'supply' it, had the demand been in thunder and earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage, have we wandered; like adventurous Sindbads;--where the men go about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach! The haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to behold; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as the brutish god-forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting- clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as the Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men!"