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Contemporary Cultural Theory

English-speaking world. In its most recent manifestation, as ‘neo-
liberalism’ or ‘economic liberalism’—what in Britain was known
as ‘Thatcherism’; in the United States, ‘Reaganism’; in Australia,
bizarrely enough, ‘economic rationalism’—it has provided the
major analytical framework for the policy-making of govern-
ments both of the Left and of the Right. For the substance of
economic Reaganism continued under Clinton, and that of
economic Thatcherism under Blair. As a Conservative member
of the British House of Lords, updating Milton for the twenty-
first century, observed shortly after the 2001 general election:
‘New Labour was but old Thatcherism writ large’ (Gilmour, 2001,
p. 16). Both in Australia and in New Zealand, this shift towards
neo-liberalism was actually initiated by the Labor Party.
There is in utilitarianism, moreover, not only a theory of the
market and of the state, but also a quite explicit theory of culture.
The Canadian political philosopher C.B. Macpherson described
utilitarianism as a ‘theory of possessive individualism’, and
argued that from Hobbes onwards it had presupposed a model
of ‘possessive market society’. In such a society, Macpherson
explained, ‘individuals are free to expend their energies, skills and
goods as they will’; they ‘are not given or guaranteed, by the
state or the community, rewards appropriate to their social func-
tions’; and they ‘seek to get the most satisfaction they can for a
given expenditure’ (Macpherson, 1962, p. 51). It requires only the
further postulate that objects of cultural preference, be they
literary genres or religious doctrines, can be treated as commod-
ities for sale in the marketplace to lead us to the conclusion that
every individual is entitled to whatever cultural pleasures they
might please, for so long as they are practically procurable in the
cultural marketplace. Thus each person becomes their own
church or court. Or as Bentham had it: ‘push-pin is of equal value
with... poetry’ (Bentham, 1962, p. 253).
Such strictly Benthamite utilitarianisms implicitly endorse the
reduction of cultural values to the level of the marketable
commodity. But if this is the logical terminus of any consistent
cultural utilitarianism, it is not easily arrived at by those who
believe in notions of traditional cultural value such as are typically
sustained by the churches, the education system, and so on. Nor

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