Maurice Glasman Boeken

The book critiques the notion of a market-driven utopia, arguing that the dream of a world governed by managers is both unrealistic and potentially disastrous. Maurice Glasman challenges conventional management ideologies from both the New Right and New Left, asserting that managers hinder productivity rather than enhance it. He advocates for a reimagined relationship between democracy and liberalism, proposing that true democracy should operate within the economy while liberal principles should guide the state.

Labour has been on a wild ride over the past 30 years. New Labour argued that we had no choice but to accept a globalized free-market economy in which the race was to the swift, the open and the flexible. Corbynism reacted against this with a jumble of old school statism and identity politics. Both ultimately failed. In this book, Maurice Glasman takes the axe to the soulless utilitarianism and ‘progressive’ intolerance of both Blair and Corbyn. Human beings, he contends, are not calculating machines, but faithful, relational beings who yearn for meaning and belonging. Rooted in their homes, families and traditions, they seek to resist the revolutionary upheaval of markets and states, which try to commodify and dominate their lives and homes, by the practice of democracy, mutuality and pluralism. This is the true Labour tradition, which is paradoxically both radical and conservative – and more relevant than ever in a post-COVID world. This crisp statement of the real politics of Blue Labour – rather than the absurd caricature of its detractors – is Glasman’s love-letter to the left-conservatism that provides Labour’s best chance of moral – and indeed electoral – redemption.