Review Essay by Robert J. Cottrol
The last decade has witnessed a measurable decline in the political and economic fortunes of organized labor and its constituents in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Structural changes in the workplace and work force and increased international industrial competition have, of course, played significant roles in that decline. But the diminished power of the labor movement in both societies is more than a simple reflection of changed economic circumstances. Labor's decline in both nations has been accompanied, not coincidentally, by a resurgence of classical liberal ideology that is currently labelled as conservatism. The most obvious manifestations of that resurgence in the 1980s were the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in the United States and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Both leaders were more than simply the heads of the designated conservative parties of their respective nations. Their political careers had been defined by an adherence to and a commitment to advancing nineteenth-century liberal economic precepts. As such, their elections represented a triumph for an economic world view many had previously considered moribund. Those elections also presaged a curtailing of the power of organized labor and its political allies, including those who were members of Ronald Reagan's Republican and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative parties. These political developments helped erode the postwar social welfare consensus that labor had helped forge in both nations.
That classical liberal resurgence was represented by more than simple electoral triumph. The 1980s would see renewed vigor on the part of conservative social theorists, both scholarly and popular, writing in such fields as law and economics and the policy sciences more generally. These writers were vigorous champions of the virtues of the minimally restricted market and questioned long-standing beliefs concerning the benefits of economic regulation, including the benefits of such regulation to ordinary working people. If, after all is said and done, the classical liberal counterrevolution of the last decade or so was only able to make a marginal dent in the edifice of social welfare and labor protection painstakenly built in the United States and the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, nonetheless the new thinking brought about an increased reluctance to expand governmental protections for working people and a new skepticism fueled in part by the renewed classical liberal ideology concerning the value of such protection.
About the Author
Robert J. Cottrol. Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law, Camden. A.B., 1971, Ph.D., 1978, Yale University; J.D., 1984, Georgetown University Law Center.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 1531 (1993)