The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. - book review

The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers. 166 pages. $19.95.

After twenty years of New Right ascendance in Europe, voters in the past two years returned the parties of the left to power: Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France, and the Social Democrats, in coalition with the Greens, in Germany.

Unfortunately, these leftist victories do not represent the reemergence of class politics in Europe. The new governments are not attempting to subordinate the interests of capital to the public good and the needs of working people.

The left's electoral victories reflected a growing popular rejection of policies favoring corporate priorities and market rule. Nevertheless, we should not soon expect to hear calls for "power to the people" from today's Euro-left leaders, especially Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schroder, who represent a dramatic break from their parties' ideological past. This departure goes by the trendy name "the Third Way" and is the title of Anthony Giddens's new book.

Rarely used with any precision, "the Third Way" basically refers to a politics and governing vision that is supposed to differ from both the market fundamentalism of the right and the statism of the socialist tradition. The term originated on this side of the Atlantic. Clinton campaign consultant Dick Morris has recounted how, in the wake of the Republican triumphs in the 1994 Congressional elections, he advised the President to "triangulate, create a third position, not just in between the old positions of the two parties, but above them, as well." Morris claims he suggested "triangulation as a to change, not abandon, the Democratic Party." So Clinton began to speak of having discovered a "Third Way" for government: neither Reagan Republicanism nor New Deal/Great Society liberalism.

Clinton didn't have to go very far to distance himself from liberalism, since he ran in 1992 as a New Democrat eager to execute people and "end welfare as we know it." And those weren't just campaign slogans; he actually followed through on them. Since his signing of the so-called Welfare Reform Act in 1996, it's been hard to tell how his Third Way fundamentally differs from the Republican way. Meanwhile, his supporters in the Democratic Leadership Council, the business-oriented right wing of the party, have taken to touting the Third Way as a "progressive global political movement" attuned to the "new challenges of the information age."

Blair, the Third Way's foremost European champion, appropriated and inflated such rhetoric for his "New Labour" campaign and succeeded in keeping it aloft long enough to soundly defeat the Tories in the May 1997 elections. Though Blair never spelled out exactly what the Third Way entails, he cleverly promoted it by recruiting to his campaign not only some sharp public relations people, but also some impressive intellectuals. Giddens is the most prominent among them.

Giddens has established himself as one of the world's leading social theorists. His first major work, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1971), firmly secured Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim as the founding trinity of modern sociology. Thereafter, in a string of books, Giddens engaged in the sociological debate, negotiating between those who argued that "structural" factors (class, money, power, access) determine policy and those who emphasized the role of "social agency" (individuals and groups acting intentionally to effect change).

In the 1990s, as professor of sociology at Cambridge University, Giddens took to the pages of the political weeklies to write about issues like inequality, family, and the welfare state. In 1994, he published Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford University Press), which made him appear a natural candidate to help a young, rising leftist politician develop a fresh political vision. Adding to his stature, in 1996 Giddens was elected director of the prestigious London School of Economics. He quickly recruited a host of academic celebrities to advise a "New Labour" government. Prolific and seemingly indefatigable, Giddens has had the responsibility of trying to inject some intellectual substance into Blair's rhetoric.

Reading Giddens's The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, I found myself recalling radical sociologist C. Wright Mills on intellectuals and politics. Mills insisted that intellectuals who are committed to democracy should aspire neither to the role of philosopher-king, nor to that of adviser to the king. Rather, Mills argued, a democratic intellectual should always seek to challenge the powerful and cultivate democratic publics.

Sadly, Giddens has aligned himself with the powerful. His book defers to the ideological claims of the right and the political economy of global capital. More than once, he capitulates by saying there is no alternative to capitalism. And he reduces the politics and aspirations of the left to "helping citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalization, transformations in personal life, and our relationship to nature."

Admittedly, he acknowledges that the pursuit of equality, social justice, and an "emancipatory politics" must remain at the heart of social democratic politics. But he construes equality to mean merely "inclusion" in the mainstream, and he defines "emancipation" to mean simply having the wherewithal to participate in society (that is his rationale for supporting universal health care and life-long learning opportunities). While these would be an improvement, they hardly constitute an inspired politics of radical change.

Still, Giddens goes out of his way to make sure his tepid goals do not offend the economic elites, and so he advances a new motto for the new politics: "no rights without responsibilities." In the end, I find it hard to distinguish such rhetoric from that of George Bush, the elder or younger, or from many other Republicans, including Wisconsin's Governor Tommy Thompson.

Giddens's most radical statement is "no authority without democracy." However, democracy does not just happen. To secure, preserve, and enhance it requires popular struggle, organization, and diligence. But aside from a few words about "citizen initiative groups," he makes no reference to real social struggles.

In the face of concentrating corporate power, he ignores the question of how to limit the power of capital, which threatens democratic life. And he neglects the role of a potentially reinvigorated working class.

He is platitudinously vague as to what Third Way democracy would look and feel like. I infer that it will involve active-but-limited government by morally well-intentioned politicians, pursuing policies fabricated by elite academic intellectuals, in favor of empowering highly individualized citizens to be all that each one of them can be.

On the international front, Giddens argues that while global free trade and finance cannot be controlled, they must at least be regulated (he has held lengthy conversations with international financier George Soros). But Giddens's references to possible multinational regulating agencies never really get at matters of power and inequality.

The faddishness of the Third Way represents not simply the acceptance of the triumph of capital, but also the Clintonization of European politics and ideas. This is not an export we should be proud of. It behooves the left, in the United States and Europe, to articulate a truly progressive alternative vision and politics.

Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of the forthcoming young people's biography "Thomas Paine: Firebrand of the Revolution" (Oxford University Press).

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