The New Right thought about welfare articulated three cardinal misconceptions. It imagined that the human interest in rising income and increased consumer choice, which the free market supposedly protects and promotes, always outweighs that in the control of economic risk. It understood welfare institutions as mechanisms for income transfer or poverty relief, rather than as services for security against common risks and the dangers of exclusion; it accordingly favoured forms of selectivity in welfare provision that carried with them huge incentive costs and the moral hazard of creating cultures of dependency where none had existed before. Rejecting the very idea of social justice as being either indifferent or complacent about the impact of these freedoms on social cohesion, it neglected the vital role of welfare institutions in counteracting the indifference to fairness of unfettered market exchange, and so promoting social solidarity and common citizenship.
All three errors arose from a common cause. This is the neo-liberal "canard" that markets are free-standing social relationships, justifiable - if the need for a justification for them is admitted at all - as embodiments of individual freedom and the human propensity to trade to mutual advantage. It is this fundamental error of neo-liberal thought which accounts for the inability of neo-liberal policy to perceive that markets generate systemic economic risk and a pervasive sense of unfairness even when they produce rising incomes. A dynamic market economy can be politically legitimated, in a democratic regime such as that of contemporary Britain, only insofar as it is complemented by institutions and policies which counteract these hazards, and which remove market competition form some social contexts altogether.
The disposition to constitute for itself different cultures or ways of life appears to be universal and primordial in the human animal. Yet the idea of a universal human civilization, as we find it in Condorcet, J. S. Mill, Marx and Rorty, is compelled to treat cultural difference as transitory or epiphenomenal, a passing stage in the history of the species. Modern thinkers have been led accordingly to misconceive the telos of political life. The end of politics is not the construction of institutions that a universally rationally authoritative. It is the pursuit of a modus vivendi among cultures and communities. Because way of life are always changing, the terms of peaceful coexistence among them are permanently unfixed. For that reason the end of politics is always unfinished.
Yet the idea of humans as thinking beings remains, perhaps, the chief obstacle to thinking in our age. It embodies what must first of all be given up if we are to begin to think, which is the certainty that we know already what we are and how we are to live.
Beginning p. 186