Prospect Magazine - September 2006

Page 33

ESSAY/ KRUGER

in The Third Way, “was perhaps just … a more emotive way of saying equality. Brothers are equal.” The right disagrees. What matters to brothers is not their notional equality but their relationship, their shared memories and common home—their fraternity. This is not the same as equality. Society and state are distinct. But for this reason, the right is reluctant for politics to get involved with society. It argues that fraternity is self-creating; that it consists of the voluntary association of free individuals. And so, for all its talk of community, the left imagines that fraternity is just another word for equality, and the right imagines that fraternity will be taken care of by liberty. Yet these days fraternity is moving above ground. Francis Fukuyama has conceded that the premise of his book The End of History is limited only to economic and political structures. History has not “ended” in the sphere of culture—indeed, Fukuyama agrees with his antagonist Samuel Huntington that, as he puts it, “the chief issue in world politics henceforth will be the cultural issue.” Most obviously, our agonised debates about community cohesion, about the integration of immigrant groups and national identity, are debates about fraternity. How do we accommodate some, a cohesive and exclusive social grouping, if that grouping both suppresses one (the individual) and admits little allegiance to all (the nation, represented in the state)? But fraternity is also the ghost in the machine of the debates about health and education, about housing and the environment, and about crime and its causes. In each of these areas the vital issue is how communities themselves, not the individual or the state, can address the challenges that face them. Even in matters of apparently individual concern such as healthcare, research convincingly demonstrates how the influence of one’s wider group, one’s family and neighbourhood, determines one’s propensity for good health and one’s rate of recovery. The link between educational attainment and local social influences is also evident. Nor is crime solely an individualist phenomenon. The classical liberal position is that a criminal is a rational being who has weighed risk and reward and decided to break the law; the response must be to rebalance risk and reward so that a different calculation is made. By contrast, the classical egalitarian position is that poverty causes crime: crime is the consequence of national disparities in income and opportunity, which must be redressed by the state. Of course, individual rationality and glaring

inequality both play their part in criminal behaviour. But a full analysis must take into account cultural factors. Crime is disproportionately prevalent in certain families and certain subsets of communities. There is, as we say, a “criminal fraternity”—the response must be to transform it into a law-abiding one. This requires work in local culture, the sphere of some, as much as in the sphere of individual rationality (one) and the distribution of income (all). of fraternity—of community, solidarity, civic obligation—is not exclusive to the right. New Labour has said similar things. But the widespread sense that both parties now inhabit a soggy centre ground derives from the poverty of our political language, and our persistence in seeing things only in terms of equality and liberty, of statist left and individualist right, so that any move by Labour or Conservative away from their core principle must be a move towards the other and a betrayal of their philosophy. In fact, the leaderships of both parties are being true to their party’s principles. They are approaching the subject of fraternity from opposite directions, and the point of departure determines their approach to the subject. To understand how, it is helpful to employ the famous scheme of GWF Hegel. In the simplification of Hegel’s dialectic, a thesis is established which is then challenged by the antithesis to produce the synthesis, which becomes the thesis of the next stage, and so on through time. The thesis is an abstraction, a pure idea, a blueprint which is only made real by its accommodation with the antithesis. The synthesis is the realised thesis. In our politics, then, the thesis of the left—the pure governing idea that is realised through the dialectic—is equality. The thesis of the right is liberty. And for both, the antithesis—the messy reality into which they are accommodated—is fraternity. The two parties appear close together in the competition for office only because the dialectic process—

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