The Politics of Community: New Labour and the Eclipse of Society

Abstract

In political discourse, ‘society’ has been out of fashion for some time, having become eclipsed by the more fashionable ‘community’ as a collective noun for the interaction of individuals and groups above the level of the family and household but below that of the state. Why this should be so requires an understanding of how in Britain (but not only here) political leaders from both of the two major parties have sought to disassociate their political vision from one that identities too readily with the impersonal, instrumental, anonymous, mass, distanciated world of human relations which the notion of ‘society’ appears to summon up, in favour of the altogether more benign term community — which we are led to believe — is about the familiar, the local, the ‘here and now’, the cooperative and the altruistic aspects of civic life. In following the discursive shift in the policy statements and positions of the Labour Party and its leadership, this chapter aims to show the influences that communitarian and ‘Third Way’ writers and thinkers have had on the shaping of New Labour’s social vision, and to highlight the close relationship between social scientific and theological notions of ‘community’ and those propounded by the political elites who seek to depoliticise the concept of the social for the rhetorical purpose of an inclusive, conflict-free construction of collective identity which seeks to elide difference rather than, in Stuart Hall’s words, developing ‘the capacity to live with difference’ (original emphasis) (Hall 1993: 361).

Never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994: 428)

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ […] and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. […] There is no such thing as society.

Margaret Thatcher, Interview for ‘Woman’s Own’ (23 September 1987)