Ideas move from margin to mainstream

John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the greatest political economist of the 20th century, once said that in the long run, the course of history is determined as much by ideas and intellectuals as by politicians. He did not mean special advisers, or producers of programs for immediate use and writers of speeches for presidents and prime ministers. Nor did he mean the newspaper and television commentators and pundits whose writings provide the background music to politics. He meant the authors of truly seminal ideas, like his own notion that from time to time capitalism must be saved by state intervention to manage aggregate demand.

Keynes, of course, also reminded us that in the long run we are all dead. When his own influence was greatest -- in the 1950s and, above all, the 1960s -- he in fact was dead. Others who had inspired (if that is the correct word) the totalitarian menaces of the 20th century had long been dead by the time their ideas came to fruition. Thus, the political effect of intellectuals is rarely immediate. It must bide its time.

This has to do with another characteristic of the great ideas that define historical periods, namely the fact that they come from the margin of prevailing orthodoxies. When first produced and published, these ideas seem almost irrelevant, and at any rate out of tune with the spirit of the times.

This was true of Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies, both published at the end of World War II. Their real triumph occurred in 1989, when Communism collapsed and the emerging new societies needed a language to express their goals. It was no accident that the books were then translated into almost every language of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Similarly, Milton Friedman's panegyrics to pure capitalism seemed curiously out of place during the heyday of the social democratic age, the 1960s. But then stagflation -- the combination of weak economic growth and inflation -- set in, in the late 1970s. While gloomier economists like Mancur Olson surmised that only revolution or war could dissolve the rigidities of the status quo, former US president Ronald Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher remembered Friedman's worldview, along with that of Hayek and others. Again, it was a question of giving substance and a language to vaguely perceived intentions that were slightly ahead of the popular mood but in keeping with its thrust.

I never believed that the "Third Way" politics that held such sway in recent years had quite the same significance or intellectual pedigree. Squaring the circle of justice and growth was a necessary idea but not one that could ever inspire widespread enthusiasm and popular support. Even John Rawls' seminal Theory of Justice remained a pastime for the few rather than a precept for the many.

While Third Way lasted, however, another set of ideas, which originally seemed marginal and even absurd, gained ground. It built on the Friedman-Hayek conception of rolling back the social-democratic welfare state, but added a new set of ideas to the rudimentary state that remained -- a state imbued solely with what Joseph Nye called "hard power." Such hard power means "law and order" within and military might without. It is a state for a Hobbesian world in which security is the highest value.

Such notions go back a long way. In the 20th century, some trace them to the German-American emigre Leo Strauss, even to Carl Schmitt, Hitler's Jurist. More recently, authors assembled around the American magazine Commentary have espoused them. Washington think tanks helped turn them into a powerful intellectual arsenal for the neo-conservatives who thrive within the George W. Bush administration (although the president himself is not one of them).

So, once again, we find ideas that go back a long way coming to the fore. They were generated at the margin of an age with a much more liberal orthodoxy and picked up when the time was ripe by politicians who have found in them a useful organizing principle. They provide both maxims for action and a language to "sell" such action to the wider public. They dominate the intellectual scene to such an extent that alternatives seem to have no chance. They make even liberals look a bit faded. Or is there another Keynes in the wings somewhere?

Ralf Dahrendorf, the author of numerous acclaimed books, is a member of the British House of Lords, a former rector of the London School of Economics and a former warden of St. Anthony's College, Oxford.

Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences