David Willetts
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.” --David Willetts in Prospect, March 1998 |
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David Willetts, (born 9 March 1956) is an English Conservative Party politician, life peer, and academic. From 1992 to 2015, he was the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Havant in Hampshire. He was the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until July 2014. Willetts became a member of the House of Lords in 2015.
Civic conservatism
Civic conservatism is a form of modern conservatism developed by the Conservative intellectual David Willetts. First introduced in his 1995 pamphlet, "Civic Conservatism", is the idea of focussing on the institutions between the state and individuals as a policy concern (rather than merely thinking of individuals and the state as the only agencies). The pamphlet wished to "place the free market in the context of institutions and values which make up civil society". The examples of these institutions were the "network of voluntary organisations", from hospitals to guilds, which had been "weakened if not destroyed by the advance of the State". [D. Willetts, Civic Conservatism (1994), pp 15, 18]
Fourteen years after the publication of "Civic Conservatism" Willetts gave the inaugural Oakeshott Memorial Lecture to the London School of Economics in which he made an attempt to explain how theory can be used to help think about how to improve social capital. Willetts attempted to use the works of Ken Binmore to explain how such a civic-centred policy could emerge, and in what conditions it would thrive.
