I. Introduction
In a renewed attempt to explain the distinctiveness of their political project, leading New Labour figures have recently begun to employ the concept of the so-called 'third way'. However, they have thus far left the substance of this proposed third way r ather vague, just as they previously left vague the substance of the 'stakeholder society'. We know, of course, what the third way is not: it is not old-fashioned state socialism or statist social democracy, and it is not free market neo-liberalism. We kn ow also that it aims to reconcile a neo-liberal emphasis on economic efficiency and dynamism, with a traditional left concern with equity and social cohesion. But the positive content of the proposed third way approach to economic and social governance ha s not yet been authoritatively specified except in these very general terms.
This paper explores what the substance of the third way might be. It is relatively easy, of course, to say what one personally thinks the proposed third way is or ought to consist in - to write a personal manifesto. But that is not how I shall proceed. I shall try to be interpretive, rather than stipulative or prescriptive. There has been a healthy renaissance of creative left and centre-left thinking in recent years, both in the UK and the USA, and I think it is possible to construct a broad picture of what the third way might involve by drawing together some of the more important and recurring themes of this recent literature.
However, while trying to define the distinctive space of third way thinking, I shall also argue that this remains a relatively large space, and that there can be (and currently are) important intellectual divisions within this space - divisions which co rrespond to potentially very different political projects. Some of these projects hold out the prospect of a genuinely modernized and egalitarian social democracy. Others, however, may more accurately be seen as modernized versions of a leftish 'One Nation' Toryism. Thus, what citizens and politicians ultimately have to decide, I shall argue, is not simply whether they support 'the' third way, but what kind of third way project they favour.
II. Core Values: Real Opportunity and Civic Responsibility
One way to start the discussion is with values. What are the animating values of the putative third way approach to economic and social governance?
It is much too early to speak of a distinctive and coherent normative philosophy of the third way. Indeed, as I shall explain in section IV, I think the terrain of third way thinking is a wide one on which competing philosophical positions - meritocratic and egalitarian, liberal and communitarian - can find room. Proponents of these competing positions can agree on the central importance of certain basic values but disagree over their interpretation. All we can do, I think, is try to identify the basic values over which they will disagree. The risk in such an exercise is that the basic values one identifies as supposedly defining the shared normative framework of third way thinking may sound so general and abstract as to be vacuous or banal. Bearing this danger in mind, I shall therefore try to show how acceptance of these basic values can still mark out a distinctive space of third way thinking at the normative level from the spaces occupied by the 'New Right' and 'old Left'.
When one looks over recent attempts to articulate a left or centre-left philosophy of government (e.g., Commission on Social Justice, 1994, Blair, 1996), two concepts occupy the centre-stage: the concepts of opportunity and responsibility. Emergent third way thinking seems to be defined at the normative level by a dual commitment to these two values, regarded as mutually supporting or reinforcing. A third value that has featured prominently in recent literature - 'community' - can also be readily fleshed out in terms of these two basic values.
(1) Real opportunity
Now the bare concept of 'opportunity' can obviously be interpreted in various ways, a point I shall return to in section IV. It is clear, however, that the third way approach entails a commitment to something more than formal opportunity, i.e., to a cons ervative form of meritocracy of the kind defended by Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty. Rather, it entails a commitment to substantive or real opportunity for basic goods such as education, jobs, income, and wealth. The notion of a 'stakeholder society' can be readily understood as a society which guarantees all citizens at least some minimum level of real opportunity for these basic goods (see Layard, 1997, pp.5-6, for an example of such usage). And the evil of 'social exclusion' can be understood in terms of patterns of power and distribution that deny people access to minimally decent shares of these goods.
(2) Civic responsibility
Real opportunity is a traditional value of the left (though, when disconnected from a robust ideal of equality, not only of the left). Emergent third way thinking is distinguished, however, by the way this commitment to real opportunity is conjoined with a new - or renewed - emphasis on civic responsibility. Once again, the concept of 'civic responsibility' can obviously be elaborated in various ways. But perhaps one way of articulating the idea in play here is as follows: individuals must take responsibility for life-style choices and not seek to displace the costs of these choices onto others (Halpern and White, 1997). More abstractly: individuals have a responsibility not to act in ways that harm the shared, public interests of others when this can reasonably be avoided (Mill, 1985 [1859]). This entails, for example, that they should not try to free-ride on the productive efforts of their fellow citizens; that they take a primary responsibility for nurturing and providing for their children; that they bear a fair share of taxes so as to ensure adequate opportunities and public goods for all; and that they recognize and act on their responsibilities to the natural environment. Those who ignore these civic responsibilities offload certain costs of a civilized, common life onto others and thereby live at the latter's expense. As a matter of justice, the state should clearly define and, where necessary, enforce the obligations which derive from these basic responsibilities.
This emphasis on civic responsibility and its enforcement arguably marks a difference at the normative level between emergent third way thinking and what David Piachaud has termed 'mid-century Fabianism', perhaps the dominant ideology of social democratic reformists in Britain for much of the late 20th century (Piachaud, 1993). Mid-century Fabianism, most clearly expressed in the writings of welfare thinkers like R.M. Titmuss, saw the state as having all sorts of enforceable responsibilities towards its individual citizens, but, as Piachaud argues, tended to downplay the idea that the individual citizen also has enforceable responsibilities towards the wider community. While this aversion to the politics of civic responsibility was in part an understandable response to fears about 'blaming the victim', it was nevertheless a lop-sided and ultimately incoherent position. It was, moreover, completely out of line with the background tradition of civic liberalism in Britain. As articulated in the work of Hobhouse, Tawney, Marshall, and Beveridge, civic liberalism affirms the state's role in defining and enforcing responsible behaviour on the part of the individual citizen even as, at the very same time, it seeks to secure real opportunity for all (see especially Hobhouse, 1994 [1911], chs.7, 8).
This ethic of civic responsibility also needs to be clearly distinguished, however, from the New Right's ethic of 'self-reliance'. To be sure, when people discharge responsibilities of the kind described above - to work, to nurture and provide for their children, and so on - many of them will thereby attain a state of economic self-reliance. By the same token, a failure of self-reliance will sometimes be symptomatic of a failure to carry out these basic responsibilities. But it does not follow that the ethic of civic responsibility amounts to, or is coterminous with, universal self-reliance. For people can obviously suffer great misfortunes - unemployment, ill-health, etc. - through no fault of their own, and they will then have a legitimate claim to assistance which in no way impugns their status as responsible individuals or citizens (see Halpern and White, 1997, also Hutton, 1995, 1997). To deny this and to insist that people always 'stand on their own two feet' would be to renege on the commitment to guarantee real opportunity for all.
(3) Community To secure real opportunity for all, individuals must not stand alone, but in relationships of responsible, reciprocal support to each other. Or, as Labour Party politicians have recently put it, they must stand in a relationship of 'community' (Blair, 1994, 1996; Brown, 1994). One might say that a society exhibits the good of community when, and only when, it secures real opportunity for all on the basis of shared, equitably enforced, civic responsibilities. There is no genuine community without real opportunity for all, for without this some will suffer exclusion and second-class membership. But there is also no genuine community without a general acceptance of civic responsibilities, for without this some will live 'aristocratically', at the expense of others.
(4) Summary: A framework, but not a full philosophy
To sum up, I therefore think that emergent third way thinking is characterized at the normative level by a dual commitment to the values of real opportunity and civic responsibilty (and, derivatively, to the value of community understood by reference to these first two values). This cluster of commitments distinguishes the space of third way thinking at the normative level from that of the New Right and from that of at least some currents on the 'Old Left'.
However, and to repeat, it does not add up to anything like a complete political philosophy by itself. It describes a relatively general normative framework which can be rendered more determinate and concrete in a number of ways. As I shall show in section IV, different elaborations of the core values of real opportunity and civic responsibility can issue in very different political projects.
III. Methods and Instruments: Rethinking Collective Action
In recent years there has been a refreshing wave of new thinking about how governments can and should act to secure the traditional goals of the left. Third way thinking, in its present emergent state, is thus defined not only by a cluster of normative commitments, but by various new ideas about how to organize collective action to secure these commitments.
Perhaps the first thing to say here is that there is almost certainly no single 'Big Idea'. Rather, there seems to be a steady accumulation of small to medium-sized ideas which together could perhaps add up to something big. Here I shall simply list and describe, in no particular order, what I take to be the most important ideas or sets of ideas:
(1) The state should be seen as the guarantor, but not necessarily as the direct provider, of opportunity goods. (2) A receptivity to forms of 'mutualism' as a way of achieving left goals. (3) New thinking about public finance in connection with the state's role as guarantor of opportunity goods. (4) Employment-centered social policy. (5) 'Asset-based egalitarianism'.
(1) The state as guarantor, not necessarily provider
Traditional social democratic thinking held that the state is obliged to guarantee citizens access to certain opportunity goods (health-care, education, etc.) and that in general it ought therefore to provide these goods. According to third way policy thinking, the state has the responsibility of guaranteeing access to such goods but the state need not directly provide these goods itself in order to discharge this responsibility.
Firstly, the state might continue to finance provision of certain opportunity goods while at the same time leaving actual production of the goods to other agencies. For example, the state might grant each citizen funds to acquire some high minimum of education and training (through such things as 'Individual Learning Accounts'), but it does not necessarily have to provide that education and training itself. Or, in securing the citizen's 'right to work', the state does not necessarily have to employ the long-term unemployed itself, but might to some extent secure this right by offering them subsidies to attract private employers.
Another application of this general idea of separating finance and production roles is the use of 'quasi-markets' in organizing the provision of goods such as health-care and personal social services (Le Grand, 1989, 1997). A third way policy thinker will, I think, be open-minded and pragmatic about the potential of quasi-markets in the public sector rather than dogmatically in favour (as some Thatcherites are) or dogmatically opposed (as some traditional social democrats are).
Secondly, the state need not necessarily even be the primary financer of provision, but may confine itself to erecting a regulatory framework within which citizens are guaranteed access to opportunity goods. A pertinent example here would be recent proposals for a system of universal compulsory second pensions (Field, 1996, Layard, 1997). These proposals call on the state to require individuals to save some proportion of their income in funded pensions schemes, perhaps topping up the contributions of low earners from public funds. In this way the state can allegedly guarantee an adequate second pension for all in the long-term without itself being the primary financer of these pensions. This is an example of what Julian Le Grand has termed 'legal welfarism' in contrast with conventional 'fiscal welfarism' (Le Grand, 1997). Under legal welfarism, the state simply requires the individual, or more usually third parties, to undertake actions which ensure that he/she subsequently has access to important goods. Other examples of legal welfarism include: minimum wage legislation (requring employers to pay their workers at least some prescribed amount); child support legislation (requiring absent parents to contribute to the upkeep of their children); and school -parent contracts (which might, for example, require parents to prevent their children playing truant). Legal welfarism clearly coheres with the normative emphasis on civic responsibility in third way thinking.
There is (or ought to be) no dogmatic aversion to direct state provision of opportunity goods. The state should discharge its responsibility to secure specific opportunity goods pragmatically in terms of what, on balance, will give the best results. The Labour Party's proposal to replace compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) in local government with a requirement to secure best value services can be seen as exemplifying this open-minded, pragmatic approach. Local governments ought not to presume that they can always best serve local citizens by directly providing specific goods and services themselves, but nor should they be under pressure always to contract service provision out to whomever is the lowest bidder.
(2) Receptivity to forms of mutualism
Intersecting with this concern to rethink how the state might secure access to opportunity goods, on equitable terms, without necessarily providing them itself is a renewal of interest in various forms of 'mutualism'.
One set of proposals, for example, is that the state should help and encourage Friendly Societies and other secondary associations to play a greater role in the organization and administration of welfare provision (Field, 1996, Hirst, 1994). Similarly, it has been argued that the state should help and encourage the formation of local Credit Unions to provide financial services to vulnerable, low income families (Toynbee, 1998). Tim Bentley and Geoff Mulgan have argued for a new form of association, the 'employee mutual', to provide protection for individuals in the labour market. Owned by their members, employee mutuals would organize training for their members and would negotiate the sale of their members' services to employers (Bentley and Mulgan, 1996). They could also take on other welfare functions. Employee mutualism arguably provides a very specific third way between the atomistic labour market favoured by the New Right and the corporatist labour market traditionally favoured by social democrats. In addition, Peter Kenway and Guy Palmer have argued that public utilities and other service industries should be reorganized as customer mutuals as an alternative both to conventional nationalization and privatised industry (Kenway and Palmer, 1997).
An emphasis on the good of mutuality can also be discerned in recent 'stakeholder' theorizing about business strategy and organization (see especially Kay, 1996). Stakeholder theorists argue that enterprises should not be seen as necessarily hierarchical entities which exist solely for the good of shareholders, but as sites of long-term, mutually advantageous cooperation between capital-holders and employees. Institutionally, such enterprises will be characterized by the use of various forms of revenue/profit-sharing and employee involvement in decision-making. It is argued that such 'mutual gains' enterprises are likely to be more efficient, especially in pursuing quality-centered product market strategies (Fernie and Metcalf, 1995, Levine, 1995, Layard, 1997). There is an important difference, however, between those who think the state should confine itself to exhorting businesses to adopt such strategies and practices, and those who think the state also needs to take regulatory action to promote them, e.g., to mandate works councils, or to legislate to make hostile takeovers more difficult so as to discourage 'short-termism', and so on (Hutton, 1995, Layard, 1997).
The growing interest in mutualism is also related to a growing interest amongst social scientists in the effects and construction of so-called 'social capital' (see especially Putnam, 1993) - roughly speaking, stable interactive relationships that help bind people to cooperative norms and which thereby help to promote desirable social outcomes (economic, social, and political). Mutualist initiatives, such as the establishment of new Credit Unions in low-income communities, may provide a way of rebuilding social capital where it is currently lacking, with, it is argued, a wide range of positive knock-on effects for these communities and the wider society (Commission on Social Justice, 1994, King, 1997).
(3) New thinking about public finance
While many left and centre-left thinkers have argued in recent years that the state should recast its role in securing citizen access to opportunity goods, they have not in general denied that the state will continue to have a significant role in providing and financing the provision of such goods. The third way is not about a general 'rolling back' of the state. But there has, I think, been some interesting new thinking about how the state should go about raising the revenue necessary for its activities. I list just a few of the more notable ideas here.
(a) Increased use of environmental taxes. This is now a familiar idea. Such taxes, and related ideas (e.g., for road pricing), make clear sense in terms of the commitment to civic responsibility described above (they seem to follow from the obligation to make responsible use of the environment, paying the community for the extra costs one inflicts upon it). But some also argue that increased use of green taxes will allow for a reduction in taxes on earnings so boosting employment (Robertson, 1996, Holtham and Tindale, 1996). Thus there may be a link between this policy proposal and the idea of an employment-centered social policy which I shall describe below.
(b) Hypothecation at the margin. Some argue that voter resistance to new taxes can be reduced if the link between new taxes and benefits is made clearer. Hypothecation of new taxes to specific goods, e.g. education or health-care, is thought to offer one way of doing this (Mulgan and Murray, 1994).
(c) New consultative procedures on tax. It has also been argued that governments need to connect with citizens on tax issues more directly through new consultative procedures akin to 'deliberative opinion polls' (Halpern, 1997).
(d) Community Fund ('Topsy Turvy Nationalization'). This proposal has recently been made by Gerald Holtham (Holtham, 1995, see also James Meade, 1991). Under this proposal, the state gradually acquires a share of the nation's productive assets and places these assets in a special fund (private sector institutions may be contracted to manage the fund). The returns on the assets can then be used to finance provision of goods like education and health-care. Initial capital for the fund could come from a revitalized inheritance tax or even, more radically, a one-off capital levy.
(4) Employment-centered social policy (and skill-centered employment policy)
A fourth promonent feature of recent policy discussions on the left and centre-left is an emphasis on employment-centered social policy (a term I borrow from Haveman, 1997): the central aim of social policy must be to enable citizens to achieve a decent standard of living through employment, and, since employment is becoming increasingly knowledge-based, this must be based on encouraging the ongoing acquisition of skills (Rogers and Streeck, 1994, Commission on Social Justice, 1994, Brown, 1994, Layard, 1997).
Consequent policy proposals focus on (a) enhancing the capabilities of disadvantaged workers (through increased access to education and training and child care), and (b) increasing the work incentives of disadvantaged workers (through some combination of a minimum wage and new or reformed 'in-work benefits' (see Ellwood, 1988)). Since it will take a long time for new educational initiatives to feed through, it is sometimes argued that other complementary measures are necessary in the meantime to increase the demand for unskilled workers and/or to prevent entry into long-term unemployment (Phelps, 1997, Haveman, 1997, Layard, 1997). This general approach may be contrasted with a 'passive' benefits policy, on the one hand, and with a free-market approach to the problem which is almost certainly a recipe for social disaster (see Freeman, 1996). At the normative level, employment-centered social policy can be seen - and is certainly always presented - as a prime example of the dual, mutually reinforcing comm itment to real opportunity and civic responsibility. Employment-centered social policy also provides an important site of application for many of the more general policy ideas described in (1)-(3) above.
(5) Asset-based egalitarianism
Closely linked with the idea of employment-centered social policy is the idea of 'asset-based egalitarianism' (Freeman and Rogers, 1997). The basic idea is that the left's traditional distributive objectives should not only be pursued through income redistribution, or solidaristic wage policy, but by more concerted action to change the initial distribution of assets and productive endowments, e.g., skills, which people bring to the market in the first place (Rogers and Streeck, 1994, Commission on Social Justice, 1994, Freeman and Rogers, 1997). Employment-centered social policy can be seen as one application of this general idea. Other possible applications would include structuring tax policy to encourage saving by poor households; or, more radically, instituting a system of basic capital grants. Under a system of basic capital grants each individual would receive, on maturity, a grant which he/she would be free to use for approved activities such as education and training or setting up a new business (Haveman, 1988, White, 1991, see also Le Grand, 1989, on the idea of 'poll grants'). In the long-run, a Community Fund of the kind described above might offer one way of financing a generous system of basic capital grants.
IV. Not One Third Way, But Many
Drawing together various important and recurring themes of recent left and centre-left literature, I have tried above to describe the broad framework of third way thinking. Within this broad framework, however, there can also be (and currently are) important differences of opinion concerning the interpretation of the core (but rather general) values associated with third way thinking and how the state should seek to advance them. And these differences ultimately suggest very different, to some extent opposing, political projects.
In particular, I would argue that there are at least two important lines of division amongst those who subscribe to the broad framework of third way thinking as described above. There is, firstly, an important and potentially fractious division between 'leftists' and 'centrists' over the commitment to real opportunity: a philosophical division over exactly what this is a commitment to, and, derivatively, a division over exactly what policies are needed to satisfy it.
Secondly, there is a no less important and potentially fractious division between 'liberals' and 'communitarians' over the commitment to civic responsibility - more specifically, over the precise range of behaviours for which individuals are appropriately seen as responsible to the community and which the state may therefore legitimately seek to regulate.
(1) Leftists vs. centrists: the ambiguity of real opportunity
The people whom I am here terming centrists understand the commitment to real opportunity in meritocratic terms. The people I am terming leftists, on the other hand, interpret the commitment to opportunity in more egalitarian terms. Perhaps influenced by contemporary egalitarian political philosophy (see especially Rawls, 1972, Dworkin, 1981, and Cohen, 1989), the leftists argue that meritocracy allows for unjust inequalities in real opportunity grounded in morally arbitrary ('brute luck') differences in natural ability. They believe that, in principle, policy ought to seek to mitigate for these undeserved brute luck inequalities (see especially Halpern and White, 1997). (This commitment to prevent brute luck inequality in real opportunity is not be identified, note, with a commitment to 'equality of outcome'.)
From this philosophical difference, certain policy differences can of course follow. In particular, while accepting the need for a general reorientation towards 'asset-based egalitarianism', third way leftists will accord a larger continuing role to income redistribution in promoting genuine equality of real opportunity than centrists. Centrists will be more likely to downplay the importance of income redistribution. Indeed, as meritocrats, they will think it unjust to tax away the 'rent of ability' beyond a certain moderate point.
Some might argue that a repudiation of leftism, as I have here defined it, is in fact a defining feature of third way thinking (see, for example, Gray, 1997). But this is to be merely dogmatic. There is absolutely no reason why those who are committed to a form of equal opportunity that goes beyond meritocracy cannot try to rethink their 'strategy of equality' by reference to certain of the third way policy ideas described in section III. It is possible to be an egalitarian of a Rawlsian or near-Rawlsian variety at the philosophical level, and at the same time an open-minded modernizer at the level of policy.
(2) Liberals vs. communitarians: the ambiguity of civic responsibility
All those sympathetic to the broad framework of third way thinking, as I have tentatively outlined it above, acknowledge that individuals have important civic responsibilities and that the state may and often should act to enforce the obligations which derive from these responsibilities. Indeed, there is a plausible range of consensus on what these responsibilities include: the responsibility to work (in return for a share of the social product) and to make an effort to acquire relevant skills for work; the responsibility to be a good parent (if one chooses to be a parent); the responsibility to pay a fair share of taxes; the responsibility to respect the environment. Nevertheless, there can be (and currently are) important disagreements about the precise range of behaviours for which people can reasonably be held responsible to the community and which the state may therefore legitimately regulate. The people I am here calling communitarians interpret this range of behaviours quite broadly, while those I am calling liberals interpret it more narrowly.
Take the case of family policy. The typical communitarian, as I am here using the term, will argue that the state has a legitimate interest in encouraging married two-parent families and that public policy ought to reflect this interest, e.g., by favourable tax treatment, tougher divorce laws, etc. Through such policies, the state encourages or requires individuals to act on their responsibilities as spouses and parents with positive repercussions for the community as a whole. The typical liberal, on the other hand, will see such policies as unfairly restricting or infringing personal freedom. Or take the case of drugs policy. The typical communitarian will see drug use as paradigmatically irresponsible behaviour which ought to be prohibited and punished. The typical liberal, on the other hand, will make the basic Millsian distinction (Mill, 1985 [1859]) between punishing someone for harmful behaviour which results from use of a given substance (which punishment is legitimate), and punishing someone for mere use of the substance regardless of how the person then behaves (which punishment is illegitimate). Relatedly, the liberal will in general be more hesitant about recourse to 'legal welfarism' (Le Grand, 1997).
In short, the liberal will want to identify a limited number of very specific civic obligations and will acknowledge the legitimate role of the state in enforcing these specific obligations (witness, for example, John Stuart Mill's trenchant defence of the state's right to force parents to support and educate their children). But what the liberal will reject is the idea that the state may and should enforce 'good behaviour' in any very general sense. The liberal will see this as dangerously moralistic, i.e., as providing an alarming opportunity for elites or majorities to attack deviancy and non-conformity for its own sake. On the other side, the communitarian, following such thinkers as Etzioni (1993) and Galston (1991) might argue that the liberal has an impoverished view of the rich social capital which undergirds civilized life, and of what is necessary to protect such capital from erosion.
(3) A plurality of third ways?
These two lines of division - leftist vs. centrist, liberal vs. communitarian - cut across the political space within which discussion and speculation about the so-called 'third way' is currently taking place. Thus, within the broad framework of third way thinking as set out in sections II and III, significant differences of opinion on values and public policy are possible and these differences in turn define distinct, potentially opposing, political projects. On the one hand, for example, it is possible to speak of a 'leftist liberal' conception of the third way. This would combine a relatively strong emphasis on the continuing importance of income redistribution in pursuing the goal of real opportunity for all with a relatively narrow conception of the types of behaviour which the state may seek to regulate in the name of civic responsibility. On the other hand, it is also possible to discern a possible 'centrist communitarian' third way which would reverse these directions of emphasis.
The former political project, I would argue, is genuinely social democratic (as well as liberal), whereas the latter project could conceivably end up having as much or more in common with a leftish One Nation Toryism of the Macmillan variety or leftish variant of continental Christian Democracy. Nor do these two positions exhaust the possibilities. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a 'centrist liberal' conception of the third way (the current position of John Gray perhaps, and maybe also of DEMOS), or, indeed, a 'leftist communitarian' conception of the third way.
V. Conclusion
The concept of the third way does not - as yet - describe a single, well-defined project for economic and social governance. It is possible to identify certain basic values and policy ideas which seem to lie at the centre of recent efforts to articulate such a project. But these values and policy ideas together define a pretty broad framework within which there remains considerable potential for disagreement.
This internal pluralism is, I think, both a weakness and a strength. It is a weakness insofar as it implies that appeals to 'the third way' in political argument are likely to remain ambiguous and question-begging, and so intellectually unsatisfying for those who want political action to be grounded in a clear and determinate ideology. It is a strength insofar as it provides the kind of elasticity needed for building a broad-based political coalition stretching across the political spectrum to marginalize the free-market Right - such being Tony Blair's more or less explicitly stated ambition (Blair, 1996, pp.13-15). The lesson I draw for liberal-minded social democrats like myself, meanwhile, is this: it is essential for us to clarify the kind of third way we support, and to fight our corner (within both the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties) against those who will inevitably seek to 'decontest' the idea of the third way in a less egalitarian and/or more socially conservative direction.
References
Bentley, Tim, and Mulgan, Geoff, Employee Mutuals: The 21st Century Trade Union? (London, Demos, 1996).
Blair, Tony, Social-ism (London, Fabian Society, 1994).
--------- New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London, Fourth Estate, 1996).
Brown, Gordon, 'The Politics of Potential: A New Agenda for Labour', in David Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left (Oxford, Polity, 1994), pp.113-122.
--------- Fair is Efficient (London, Fabian Society, 1995).
Cohen, G.A., 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', Ethics 99, 1989, pp.912-944.
Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal (London, Vintage, 1994).
Dworkin, Ronald, OWhat is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources', Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, 1981, pp.283-345.
Ellwood, David, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York, Basic Books, 1988).
Etzioni, Amitai, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (New York, Touchstone, 1993).
Fernie, Sue, and Metcalf, David, OParticipation, Contingent Pay, Representation and Workplace Performance: Some Evidence from Great Britain', British Journal of Industrial Relations 33, 1995, pp.379-415.
Field, Frank, How to Pay for the Future: Building a Stakeholders' Welfare (London, Institute of Community Studies, 1996).
Freeman, Richard, 'Why Do So Many Young American Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do About It?', Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, 1996, pp.25-42.
Freeman, Richard, and Rogers, Joel, 'The New Inequality and What to Do About It', The Boston Review, December 1996/January 1997.
Galston, William, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Gray, John, 'The tasks ahead...', Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 1997.
Halpern, David, 'A New Consultative Procedure for Taxation', Nexus, 1997.
Halpern, David and White, Stuart, 'Partitioned Responsibility: A Basis for a Fair and Efficient Tax System?', Nexus, 1997.
Haveman, Robert, Starting Even: An Equal Opportunity Program to Combat the Nation's New Poverty (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1988).
-------- 'Employment with Equity', The Boston Review, Summer 1997.
Hirst, Paul, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Oxford Polity, 1994).
Hobhouse, Leonard T., Liberalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1911).
Holtham, Gerald, 'A community fund could save social democracy', The Independent, April 18, 1995.
Holtham, Gerald, and Tindale, Stephen, Green Tax Reform: Pollution Payments and Labour Tax Cuts (London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 1996).
Hutton, Will, The State We're In (London, Johnathan Cape, 1995).
-------- The State to Come (London, Vintage, 1997).
Kay, John, The Economics of Business (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996).
Kenway, Peter and Palmer, Guy, 'Stakeholding in Service Industries: Public Action to Change Institutional Behaviour?', The Political Quarterly 68, 1997, pp.406-411.
King, Loren, 'Constructing Democratic Solidarity in US Cities: Two Paths to Local Empowerment', paper presented to the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association, Washington D.C., September 1997.
Layard, Richard, What Labour Can Do (London, Warner, 1997).
Le Grand, Julian, 'Markets, Welfare, and Equality', in Julian Le Grand and Saul Estrin, eds., Market Socialism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.193-211.
--------- 'Knights, Knaves or Pawns? Human Behaviour and Social Policy', Journal of Social Policy 26, 1997, pp.149-169. Levine, David, Reinventing the Workplace: How Business and Employees Can Both Win (Washington D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1995).
Meade, James, Agathatopia: The Economics of Partnership (Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, 1991).
Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985 [1859]).
Mulgan, Geoff, and Murray, Robert, Reconnecting Taxation (London, Demos, 1994).
Phelps, Edmund, Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1997).
Piachaud, David, What's Wrong With Fabianism? (London, Fabian Society, 1993).
Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993).
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972).
Robertson, James, OTowards a New Social Compact: Citizen's Income and Radical Tax Reform', The Political Quarterly 67, 1996, pp.54-58.
Rogers, Joel, and Streeck, Wolfgang, 'Productive Solidarities: Economic Strategies and Left Politics', in David Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left (Oxford, Polity, 1994), pp.128-145.
Toynbee, Polly, 'Not quite a Wonderful Life, but a whole lot better', The Independent, January 19, 1998.
White, Michael, Against Unemployment (London, Policy Studies Institute, 1991).