Fifty years ago, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote a rather gloomy essay about the state of the “socialist movement” in Britain. There was, she said, a “moral void in the life of the country”, and on the left in particular. Where the left had once been the source of an animating vision of the good society, now it was the repository of a drearily technocratic utilitarianism. An obsession with central planning and the streamlined organisation of social relations had triumphed over older, more explicitly ethical traditions: Christian socialism, say, or the critique of injustice that had driven early Marxism (before it, too, had gone technical and scientific).
It is sobering to reread Murdoch’s piece now, for the landscape she described is instantly recognisable: a mainstream left intellectually hollowed out, this time by the lingering intoxications of historic election success rather than, as then, the satiation and dissipation of reforming energies by that great achievement, the creation of the welfare state.
Content from our partners
