Albrechtsen tied herself in a series of knots trying to find the “gotcha” moment in Rudd’s ideological discourse. In point of fact, it’s quite possible to reconcile fiscal conservatism with being a social democrat, but the Hayek worshippers seem stuck in an age when there was supposedly a slippery slope between any view that markets are social institutions and socialism itself.

Here, it’s perhaps interesting that Gordon Brown chose to invoke Adam Smith on several occasions, a thinker to whom the authors of Hayekian dribble pay only occasional and meaningless obeisance:

Now, let me put markets in context. They can create unrivalled widening of choices and chances, harnessing self-interest to produce results transcending self-interest. When they work, they will fulfil the promise of Adam Smith that individual gain leads to collective gain, that even when people are pursuing private interests and private wishes they can nevertheless deliver public good.

But as we are discovering to our considerable cost, the problem is that, without transparent rules to guide them, free markets can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest; as Jonathan Sacks has said, they can reduce all sense of value to consumer choice, all sense of worth to a price tag. So, unbridled and untrammelled, they can become the enemy of the good society.

And we can now see also that markets cannot self-regulate, but they can self-destruct and, again, if untrammelled and unbridled, they can become not just the enemy of the good society; they can become the enemy of the good economy. Markets are in the public interest but they are not synonymous with it.

Gordon Brown, a former university lecturer with a History PhD from Edinburgh, perhaps has a better claim to public intellectual status than Kevin Rudd. His whole speech is worth a read, and the full text is here (as is Rudd’s).

So why was Brown conjuring up the spirit of Adam Smith (aside from the Scottish angle)?

In 1960, Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred to Marxism as a body of thought that no longer had life, but felt that liberated Marx himself to speak more clearly. That’s a sentiment echoed by many – and Marx as a philosopher enjoyed something of a revival after the demise of Soviet Marxism in 1991. Something similar might be happening to Adam Smith. The body of practices, and the free market ideology underpinning and supporting them, which invoked Smith as a founder, are now in rapid decay. We can now read Smith for what he says, rather than for what ideologues have made him say, and that gives his insights much more contemporary force.

In this context, I’d gesture again to the fact that “free markets” are not identical with capitalism. A recent student of Smith, the Italian-American economist and historical sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, argues:

One of the major problems on the left, but also on the right, is to think that there is only one kind of capitalism that reproduces itself historically; whereas capitalism has transformed itself substantively—particularly on a global basis—in unexpected ways. For several centuries capitalism relied on slavery, and seemed so embedded in slavery from all points of view that it could not survive without it; whereas slavery was abolished, and capitalism not only survived but prospered more than ever, now developing on the basis of colonialism and imperialism. At this point it seemed that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalism’s operation—but again, after the Second World War, capitalism managed to discard them, and to survive and prosper. World-historically, capitalism has been continually transforming itself, and this is one of its main characteristics; it would be very short-sighted to try to pin down what capitalism is without looking at these crucial transformations.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, the Nobel prize winning economist Amyarta Sen makes a complementary point:

What are the special characteristics that make a system indubitably capitalist—old or new? If the present capitalist economic system is to be reformed, what would make the end result a new capitalism, rather than something else? It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?

All affluent countries in the world—those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others—have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.

Also, the market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services—some of which have taken people well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions—publicly funded education, medical care, and mass transportation are just a few of many—that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.

Sen goes on to discuss Smith:

Indeed, early advocates of the use of markets, including Smith, did not take the pure market mechanism to be a freestanding performer of excellence, nor did they take the profit motive to be all that is needed.

Even though people seek trade because of self-interest (nothing more than self-interest is needed, as Smith famously put it, in explaining why bakers, brewers, butchers, and consumers seek trade), nevertheless an economy can operate effectively only on the basis of trust among different parties.

There’s a clear echo there in Brown and Rudd’s rhetoric.

Sen also observes:

It is also worth mentioning in this context, especially since the “welfare state” emerged long after Smith’s own time, that in his various writings, his overwhelming concern—and worry—about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.

It’s probably time – along with Arrighi and Sen – to reread Adam Smith as well as Keynes. And it is time to recognise that Hayek was much more of an ideologue than a serious thinker, providing a range of justifications for a particular form of capitalism – now dubbed neo-liberalism – rather than making any real contribution either to public welfare or to economic policy. Geoffrey Barker:

Keynes was, moreover, hostile to the general equilibrium assumption of the laissez-faire advocates. As early as 1926 he wrote: “It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.” Perhaps most significantly, he did not he see economic planning as an encroachment on “freedom.” In 1944, two years before his death, Keynes wrote to Friedrich Hayek about his book The Road to Serfdom, which argued against economic planning. While acknowledging that he agreed with most of the book, Keynes took Hayek to task over his attack on planning.

“You agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the logical extreme is not possible,” he wrote. “But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it… [A]s soon as you admit that the extreme is not possible, and that a line has to be drawn, you are, on your own argument, done for, since you are trying to persuade us that so soon as one moves an inch in the planned direction you are necessarily launched on the slippery path which will lead you in due course over the precipice.”

Keynes’s logic, of course, is impeccable; his judgement is mature and balanced. The question is not whether or not Keynes is “back” but whether today’s politicians can put together packages for economic and financial recovery with similar logic and balance.

Today, many social conservatives still blame Friedan and feminism for inducing women to abandon the home for the workplace, thus destabilising families and placing their children at risk. But feminism was more of a response to women entering the labour force than its cause.

In Western Europe and the United States, early capitalism drew huge numbers of young, single women into industries like textiles. Mill owners often built dormitories to house young female workers. Many of these workers became early supporters of both the anti-slavery and the women’s rights movements, while middle-class women were energised by (and sometimes envious of) working women’s vigorous participation in the public sphere.

By the time Friedan’s book was published in 1963, capitalism was drawing married women into the expanding service, clerical, and information sectors. Friedan’s ideas spoke to a generation of women who were starting to view paid work as something more than a temporary break between adolescence and marriage, and were frustrated by society’s insistence that the only source of meaning in their lives should be their role as housewives.

Wherever women enter the labour force in large numbers, certain processes unfold. Women begin to marry later and have fewer children, especially as they make inroads into higher education or more remunerative careers. They are also more likely to challenge laws and customs that relegate them to second-class status in the public sphere or mandate their subordination within the family. Often, governments and employers then find that it is in their interest to begin to remove barriers to women’s full participation.

The dramatic decrease in laws and customs perpetuating female subordination over the past 40 years has been closely connected to women’s expanded participation in paid employment. Societies where women remain substantially under-represented in the labour market, such as in the Middle East, remain especially resistant to women’s rights

A couple of observations are to the point.

First, there’s a very striking issue here for those who would argue that the status of women in Middle Eastern societies is to be primarily attributed to religion (a discourse which itself disempowers and disdains the validity of the choices many Islamic women make) and falsely attribute women’s gains to some sort of hyper-secularism, resembling French laicite much more closely than anything that goes by that name in countries with an English heritage. That – of course – completely ignores that the status and position of women in France and Turkey (the only other country that historically really does secularism in the essentially anti-clericalist way it’s done in France) is not particularly well correlated with public discourses and practices about the religious, but rather with economic and consequent social change.

In fact these same people – let’s call them “feminists of convenience” – are often most reluctant, to put it as charitably as I can, to endorse any legislative change which would expand women’s rights in the domestic workplace, and to want to simultaneously declare Western societies to be post-feminist and to blame “Western Feminists” for the absence of women’s rights in Middle Eastern societies (again completely effacing and silencing actually existing Middle Eastern women, except for a select few who provide object lessons in some sort of weird political game). Instead we get all sorts of back to the kitchen mantras, panics over fertility, and attributions of selfishness to women who want to lead a professional or vocational life, and generally function within the public sphere.

Secondly, the association of the needs of capitalism for an expanded labour force and various rights movements is not highlighted – neo-liberal “cosmopolitan” arguments are relatively upfront about the functionality for the economy of sucking in as much labour as possible – including that of women and often migrant women (as spectacularly in the US but also in many other countries including this one), but seek to deny that collective social movements and struggle have anything to do with our advancement once we get there. There’s a “business case”, but no feminist movement, or there shouldn’t be a feminist movement. In fact the historical dialectic of the expansion of the social relations of labour under capital is closely interlinked with working people’s own struggles for a fairer share, and feminism – historically – can be seen (but not reductively) in this light. But in the sphere of globalised human capital, it’s always enlightened employers who deign to grant rights, and the plight of many working women is completely overwritten and turned around by an exclusive concentration on the middle class professional women and her apparently selfish choices. The women who clean the CEO’s office and change the sheets in the Human Resources Manager’s hotel room conveniently fade from view.

Coontz has something else interesting to tell us:

“The best hope for improving family life today is not to roll back women’s rights, but to further women’s economic and political integration. Increases in women’s power and resources are most threatening to family stability in societies marked by gender inequality, where successful women often rebel against marriage. In countries such as Japan, Italy, and Singapore, where the terms of marriage remain favourable to men, and women have a hard time combining work and family, working women postpone marriage and motherhood much longer than in the US, leading to declines in birth rates that threaten these societies’ future.

As women gain collective rights, and especially as men accept women’s changed roles, many of the disruptive effects of family change are ameliorated. In the US, divorce rates for well-educated women are now much lower than for less-educated women, and women with good jobs or who have completed college are more likely than more traditional women to be married at age 35. In the past, when a stay-at-home wife went to work, the chance that her marriage would dissolve increased. Today, going to work decreases the chance of divorce. In families where the wife has been employed longer, men tend to do more and better child-care, with measurable payoffs in child outcomes.

Of course, marriage will never again be as stable or predictable as when women lacked alternatives. But even where family change continues apace, it has far less negative consequences when women have access to economic rights than when they do not. In the Nordic countries, out-of-wedlock births are much higher than in the US, but children of single mothers are much less likely to experience poverty, and spend more time on average with both biological parents, because cohabitation there is more stable than in many American marriages.

In poorer countries, women’s access to paid labour is a better predictor of children’s well-being than the stability of marriage. In parts of Africa and Latin America, children are better nourished and have more access to education in female-headed households where the woman has a job than in two-parent households where the man earns the income. Children from female-headed households in Kenya, Malawi, and Jamaica, for example, do as well or better than children from male-headed households in their long-term nutritional and health status, despite lower household income.

Far from being a threat to family life, the further progress of women’s rights may be our best hope for well-functioning families.

I’m no defender of the “institution of marriage” as such, and indeed my hesitation about the campaign for same sex marriage relates to a belief that we should give voice to and name all sorts of pluralistic forms of relationship which don’t fit into the trad family mould, but it’s interesting to see that the “defence of marriage” in the United States should actually revolve around championing the rights of women to education and to careers. On the evidence. I’m not familiar with any comparable statistics or studies in Australia, and I’d be very interested if anyone could point me to any. But I’m not surprised to find further evidence for the proposition that most of the talk in the public domain about women is completely out of kilter with reality.

And I want to tip my hat to Betty Friedan! For her contributions to continued Enlightenment…

Elsewhere: Skepticlawyer picks up on Coontz’ work to argue divorce may be a good thing.

There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more.

- is such an incoherent notion. In part that would be because the bricks she’s used to construct her discourse (her word, not mine) now no longer fit together anywhere so neatly as they once did, because the mortar of her political obsessions has grown old and cracked. But I’m not particularly interested in doing that, so I’ll use her as a segue to a consideration of the latest shot in the “higher education wars” – an article today by Gavin Kitching entitled “Paralysed by Postmodernism”.

I’d have thought that Australian universities might be more accurately characterised as paralysed by cloying bureaucracy and crippled by underfunding, but anyway. Kitching is a Professor of Politics at UNSW. In a decade of teaching politics at tertiary level – on and off – I haven’t come across any of the scholarly work which underpins his professorial chair. No doubt that’s my problem, not his. But I do know the work of Professor John Frow, whose acerbic reply to Kitching in today’s ALR hasn’t been published on the web. I don’t actually care much for Kitching’s argument. You know as soon as he starts going on about Alan Sokal exactly what’s coming, and Frow is quite right to suggest that the notion of “postmodernism” in the context of academia lacks all, well, rigour. If there was ever a postmodern tide that washed through the academy, it well and truly receded about a decade or so ago. But I dare say that the culture warriors – like the largely imaginary object of their critique – never bother much with empirical evidence or that self-same truth they claim to hold in such high regard. Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t want to run across Frow as a thesis examiner if you had any weak points in your argument or methodological meanderings. His critique of Kitching’s lack of rigour and offences against logic is withering, and justified.

But what concerns me is something we had a foretaste of last year – with the unprincipled attacks on QUT PhD student Michael Noonan and his film project on disability and comedy – which sought to use him and his works as political footballs in the service of several agendas, some of which had a lot more to do with very mundane matters internal to QUT than the grandiloquent claims made about the defence of scholarly values in which they were clothed. Kitching attempts to prove his thesis, as Frow observes, not by engaging with the works of any of the philosophers he criticises (and he doesn’t handle Wittgenstein very adroitly either), but by examining – as evidence – a sample of honours theses from his own School.

Kitching claims that the students who choose to write on theoretical topics are “the best and the brightest”. That may or may not be so – we have no way of veryifying the assertion, and perhaps some of those who pursued theses in empirical political science at UNSW may differ. As Frow points out, to show that there is a lack of precision in student work on Foucauldian concepts shows nothing whatever relevant about the rigour of Michel Foucault’s thought itself, and given that one would not expect work of the same standard as a doctoral thesis from an honours student, is totally meaningless unless there’s some way of assessing whether there’s more “rigour” in the work of those students who might write from a perspective informed by, say, John Rawls or Jurgen Habermas. In other words, Kitching’s own essay lacks even a basic standard of methodological rigour, and his conclusions are therefore worthless except as petitio principi assertions.

But, since the golden thread that runs through a thousand and one attacks on “postmodernism”, and a thread that is woven tightly into Albrechtsen and Ali’s webs, is the political claim that the consequences of such scholarship is ethical relativism, a Professor of Politics might wish to consider ethics in this context. It’s here that I find it astonishing that Kitching can blithely hold up work by students in his own School as objects of ridicule in his polemic. In some, but not all, universities, honours theses are publicly available. Doctoral theses are universally so, because they are public contributions to knowledge.

But many universities do not make honours dissertations available for public dissemination, because they haven’t been examined in the same way as higher degrees (a process more rigorous, if you like, than normal peer review) and because their point is to train a student for higher level research rather than produce knowledge from research practice. What Kitching is actually doing, of course, is not using the insights of these student authors but rather using them as data for the point he (so sloppily) makes. Had Kitching made a proposal to his own university for ethics clearance (though perhaps articles in the papers and books for Allen and Unwin don’t actually constitute research), I very much doubt that it would be granted. And it should not have been. The idea that students’ work should be appropriated to make polemical and political points is an ethically reprehensible one. These theses were not written to form part of some sort of public political intervention, and Kitching very plainly has a duty of care to students who study in his own university and discipline.

I suspect this trap – which incredibly the anti-relativist Kitching fails to see he’s fallen into – arose because he’s trying to take the “dumbing down” narrative beloved of Kevin Donnelly and his epigones and the “postmodernism is evil” one employed in a different if overlapping culture wars context, and to conflate them. But if he’s actually concerned with standards in his own School, and here obviously the examiners and supervisors of student dissertations have input into quality just as much if not more than the students themselves, surely a Professor is well placed to raise such concerns internally? And surely that would be the way an ethical scholar concerned for rigour and truth would behave?