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Headstart, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If this was America, it bore a curious resemblance to ‘old Europe’.
    Moreover, the ‘public sector’ in American life is in some respects more articulated, developed and respected than its European counterparts. The best instance of this is the public provision of first-class institutions of higher education—something that the US has done for longer and better than most European countries. The land grant colleges that became the University of California, the University of Indiana, the University of Michigan and other internationally renowned institutions have no peers outside the US, and the often underestimated community college system is similarly unique.
    Moreover, for all their inability to sustain a national railway system, Americans not only networked their country with taxpayer-financed freeways; today, they support in some of their major cities well-functioning systems of public transport at the very moment that their English counterparts can think of nothing better to do than dump the latter on the private sector at fire-sale prices. To be sure, the citizens of the US remain unable to furnish themselves with even the minimal decencies of a public health system; but ‘public’ as such was not always a term of opprobrium in the national lexicon.

ECONOMISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
    “Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.”
     
—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
     
     
     
     
    W hy do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘free market’ and the much-advertised horrors of ‘socialism’?
    Our disability is discursive : we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.
    We have been here before. In 1905, the young William Beveridge—whose 1942 report would lay the foundations of the British welfare state—delivered a lecture at Oxford, asking why political philosophy had been obscured in public debates by classical economics. Beveridge’s question applies with equal force today. However, this eclipse of political thought bears no relation to the writings of the great classical economists themselves.
    Indeed, the thought that we might restrict public policy considerations to a mere economic calculus was already a source of concern two centuries ago. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of the most perceptive writers on commercial capitalism in its early years, anticipated with distaste the prospect that “liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations.” The revolutions of the age risked fostering confusion between the freedom to make money . . . and freedom itself.
    We too are confused. Conventional economic reasoning today—ostensibly bloodied but apparently quite unbowed by its inability either to foresee or prevent the banking collapse—describes human behavior in terms of ‘rational choice’. We are all, it asserts, economic beings. We pursue our self-interest (defined as maximized economic advantage) with minimal reference to extraneous criteria such as altruism, self-denial, taste, cultural habit or collective purpose. Supplied with sufficient and correct information about ‘markets’—whether real ones or institutions for the sale and purchase of stocks and bonds—we shall make the best possible choices to our separate and common