Public Benefits, Private Vices: The Impact of Politics on Education

Abstract

The title of this article has been borrowed unashamedly from Bernard de Mandeville's verse satire, that is to say from the 1714 edition, familiarly known as The Fable of the Bees.' We also, it seems, are faced with a paradox no less striking than Mandeville's much maligned contention that the sum of private selfishness amounted to large-scale social benefit. Deprived of vice, economic activity would prove barren; supported by it, society flourished. To-day the 'public benefits' incorporated in the modern provision of welfare, particularly in the case of education, health and social security, offer some hope of a permanent diminution of mankind's traditional evils of which the principal are poverty, disease and ignorance. Mandeville, however, was refuted by many of the serious-minded commentators of his age; and we may detect a similar questioning among ourselves as to whether the social virtues and political acumen which have produced so many 'public benefits' may not have done so at too high a cost in private disillusion and personal frustration. This is not to say that the advance in social welfare in the richer industrial societies of the modern era is to be regretted because of the price paid in incidental imperfections. That would be absurd. But there is a case for considering some of the methods used and the assumptions made in effecting these largely beneficial achievements. There is also a case for asking whether we could not both clarify our theories and improve our machinery in this field in such a way as to diminish the 'private vices' without unduly imperilling the 'public benefits'. Foremost among the factors to be considered in this connection is the major change in the role and function of political authority in modern communities. The changes are quite evident and reasonably easily explained in practice. Less obviously there has been a theoretical shift too often taken for granted, despite the large scale literature of the last two centuries which documents this development. Very briefly, what has occurred has been the relegation or obscuring of the traditional role of political authority in western culture by the impact of its new, much wider scope and enhanced powers. Such a process of transformation of the significance of politics has, hardly surprisingly, led to a conviction that all kinds of economic, professional, including educational and medical, and other miscellaneous services have become themselves quasi-political spheres. At the same time the previous view of the tasks of government has not so much been denied as forgotten. In the well known opening words of A. J. P. Taylor's English History I914-I945: Until August I914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman.2 There were, indeed other public services even in the last century, but they were not obtrusive. This is no longer the case. Increasingly, for a hundred years and more it has become evident that the provision of the services most desired by every citizen, education, health