Page 78 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

66 JORGE LARRAIN

making new proprietors and incentivating self-interest. The great
conservative reformation is a return to the old ideological values of the
capitalist system which seemed to have been partially forgotten.
Paradoxically, Hall is quite aware of this aspect of Thatcherism when he
argues that

In some quite obvious and undeniable ways, the whole point of
Thatcherism is to clear the way for capitalist market solutions, to
restore both the prerogatives of ownership and profitability and the
political conditions for capital to operate more effectively, and to
construct around its imperatives a supportive culture suffused from
end to end by its ethos and values. Thatcherism knows no measure of
the good life other than ‘value for money’. It understands no other
compelling force or motive in the definition of civilization than the
forces of the ‘free market’.
(Hall, 1988b:4)

Even more, Hall is able to formulate the return to the ideological values of
the market in practically the same terms as I have just done above:

our ideas of ‘Freedom’, ‘Equality’, ‘Property’ and ‘Bentham’ (i.e.
individualism)—the ruling ideological principles of the
bourgeois lexicon, and the key political themes which, in our time,
have made a powerful and compelling return to the ideological stage
under the auspices of Mrs Thatcher and neo-liberalism.
(Hall, 1988a:70)
Yet he fails to make the connection between this and Marx’s concept of
ideology.
Habermas (1972), Marcuse (1972) and other authors had been arguing
for a long time that the traditional political ideology based on the market
had all but disappeared from advanced capitalism. The new legitimating
ideology of capitalism was technocratic, it arose not from the free market
but from state interventionism, it was the belief in the power of science and
technology, and resulted in depoliticization and the emergence of new
discursive barriers to freely achieved rational consensus. Although they
exaggerated the ideological shifts and overemphasized the demise of the
ideology based on the market, their approach pointed to some true changes
in the capitalist system and its ideological legitimation. The construction of
the welfare state after the war and the Keynesian policies of full
employment seemed to go hand in hand with economic growth and were
conditions very different from pre-war capitalism. The Thatcherite
discourse breaks with this kind of interventionist, welfare, full-
employment, rationalized capitalism and goes back to the supremacy of the