The emergence of something which became known as `Thatcherism' has caused no end of problems for writers on politics and the social sciences over the last two decades. One of the problems has centred on the radicalism of the phenomenon, since it is partly its radicalism which appeared to mark `Thatcherism' out as a distinct form of conservative politics, or possibly even a `new' Right way of thinking. Of the many reasons for which the New Right may deserve the label `new' - for its self-conscious attempt to be more openly principled than previous forms of thinking on the Right perhaps, or merely by virtue of the very different historical circumstances in which it emerged - one of the most significant is the fact that it was more self-consciously radical than previous varieties of conservative thought. It is this radicalism, and the way others have attempted to understand it, that interests me, for it essentially destabilized the established political vocabulary.1 This destabilization has proved highly demanding for social and political thinkers generally, and the Left in particular. For social and political theory it soon became clear that new ways of grasping the `conservative' nature of the New Right were needed; for the Left the problem related to the kind of strategy to adopt in tackling it. This was particularly true of Britain, partly because `Thatcherism' appeared to be the most intense manifestation of New Right politics and partly because of the spectacular failure of the Left in this country.2

In this article I shall argue that, although it might appear rather late in the day to be discussing the New Right, the central questions raised by New Right politics are still pertinent. The destabilization of the established political vocabulary has resulted in a rethinking of what it means to talk of radical politics today. Much of this rethinking is of a decidedly reactionary nature, and, I shall claim, the policies of Tony Blair's New Labour are a continuation of this reactionary rethinking. I shall be taking a rather circuitous route, beginning and ending with Anthony Giddens's recent attempt to move social theory `beyond Left and Right'. I argue that, although the New Right did indeed constitute a new form of radicalism which marked it off from traditional conservative thinking, the nature of this radicalism needs to be better understood. Like earlier forms of `radical conservatism', the New Right is best seen as a form of reactionary modernism. This reveals the rethinking of the nature of `radicalism' by social theorists such as Giddens as little more than a theoretical justification for the continuation of reactionary policies by New Labour.

Anthony Giddens and the `radicalism' of contemporary conservatism

Amidst the current fetish for `ends' - of ideology, history, socialism, and so on - it is increasingly assumed that, compared with the intellectual and political morass in which the Left has found itself, the emphatic radicalism of recent conservative thought marks it out as the only form of radicalism left. This is expressed most explicitly by Anthony Giddens in his recent work. For Giddens, the historic conjuncture in which we live is a period in which the Left has become increasingly conservative just as conservatism has become increasingly radical. Giddens presents this simultaneous radicalizing of conservatism and declining radicalism of the Left as the grounds for a rethinking of what it means to be `radical' today. Since the most recent example of radicalism is given to us by conservatism, Giddens concludes that `philosophic conservatism' (by which he means a philosophy of protection, conservation and solidarity) acquires a new relevance for political radicalism today, to the extent that any radical project must reconstitute itself by drawing on this tradition.3 There is no contradiction in the Left becoming philosophic conservatives, Giddens tells us, because the context in which this new radicalism emerges is one in which the old dichotomies of Left and Right are dead. Thus `we should all become conservatives now, but not in the conservative way.' `The left', Giddens writes, `were for modernization, a break with the past, promising a more equal and humane social order - and the right was against it, harking back to earlier regimes.... [T]oday, there is no such clear divide. It is not the need for a radical political programme that disappears ... [but] conservatism in the shape of neoconservatism and philosophic conservatism can be drawn on positively, if critically, to help shape such a programme.' And he suggests the new slogans: `too conservative not to be radical' and `too radical not to be conservative'.4

It is not insignificant that Giddens here reaches the political climax of an intellectual project started some years ago with his Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Volume one of that critique was intended as the first of two volumes, the second of which was to be an argument `Between Capitalism and Socialism'. The second volume turned into a discussion of the nation-state and violence and thus had to announce that it was the second of three volumes. Beyond Left and Right can thus be seen as the third volume of this critique.5 That this critique should end with the introduction of a set of reactionary political concepts contributing to an ideological onslaught on working-class politics is an irony not to be missed.

The shifting language and politics in Giddens's work can be found in the writings of other sociologists on the Left, as well as political scientists who have struggled to grasp the radicalism of governments operating under the New Right banner. In their attempt at reconceiving the radicalism of the struggles of the past in The Revolt Against Change, for example, Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook argue that resistances of the past can be understood as forms of conservatism - a desire to hold on to existing ways of life. The fact that radicals were often close to conservatives throws doubt on what it means to talk about being conservative and radical. The affinity between popular conservatism and popular radicalism - for Blackwell and Seabrook even the most radical moment of transformation in Britain in the 1940s carried within it a profoundly conservative resistance to inflictions of capitalist society - makes it difficult to distinguish between them, as such a true radicalism is less a commitment to change and more a `return to roots', an essentially conservative project to nourish the survival and growth of these roots. Hence the book's telling subtitle: Towards a Conserving Radicalism.6

For other writers the New Right appears radical enough to some to warrant the term `revolutionary'. For this reason the term `conservative revolution' has come into vogue as a way of describing the New Right and `Thatcherism', whether at the heart of texts in political science or political journalism,7 or as a passing reference in popular works of political economy,8 or as a broad-brush approach to understanding the New Right.9 One problem is that those who use the term soon discover that it is oxymoronic and thus shy away from saying what it actually means, or explaining why this oxymoron is the appropriate label for the phenomena in question. One of the most distinctive features of Adonis and Hames's edited collection A Conservative Revolution?, for example, is that there is in fact no entry for `conservative revolution' in the index; neither is there an entry for `revolution'. This seems a little odd, given the book's title, but only until one reads the contributions. For one soon discovers that the concepts `conservative revolution' and `revolution' barely make an appearance in the text itself. Only one of the contributors, Peter Riddell, uses the term `conservative revolution', and then only once, in an article where he also refers to the conservative counter-revolution; the two concepts are not distinguished.10 It takes another two hundred pages before the term appears again, in the editors' Conclusion; but just as the reader begins to think that the nature of a conservative revolution will be disclosed, the book ends, two pages later. In each of the chapters the question as to whether the Thatcher and Reagan governments constituted a conservative revolution, and thus how the neologism `conservative revolution' can be explained, gets bypassed by that old favourite of political scientists, the comparative method. Most of the chapters are merely comparisons of the two regimes in terms of specific issues such as economic policy, party structures, the constitution, culture, and so on.11 Just as political scientists faced with the oxymoronic nature of the concept `conservative revolution' retreat to the safety of the comparative method, so sociologists who treat conservatism as the new radicalism have tended to retreat to overgeneralized sociological musings.

This would not be that interesting were overgeneralized sociological musings as irrelevant and harmless as one would like, but sociology is often a far more politically charged discipline than some of its own practitioners claim. Giddens's work, for example, is highly influential in the Labour Party and on its intellectual fringes.12 What is ultimately at stake in these debates is the nature of `radical' politics in contemporary society and the terrain on which new forms of radicalism can be mapped out. But the increasingly common assumption that the real place of radical (or even revolutionary) politics is on the right fails to grasp where the radicalism of the New Right truly lies: namely, in its reactionary nature. By identifying where it truly lies we can more clearly see the danger behind the rethinking of the meaning of `radicalism' by Giddens and others. To do this I shall briefly turn to an earlier group of `radical conservatives'.

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