Political Essays is a collection of old and new pieces, with five new essays on current economic policies and ideologies combined with a selection of previous writings on topics ranging from housing policy and planning to the values imbuing policymaking in the public service, education and research. Such collections often need a lot of justifying. They tend to be ragbags of bits and bobs, at best stitched together by contrived linkages which fail to disguise the diverse character and provenance of the original components, and almost never achieving a genuine intellectual coherence. This collection is quite different. The older pieces have been sufficiently modified to take account of intervening changes and interpolated to allow Stretton to refer to arguments made elsewhere in the book. These are, of course, the technical requirements for making a set of essays into an intelligible whole, and the author and publisher should be congratulated for providing what should really be, but often is not, the minimum acceptable basis for a collection of this kind.

Far more important, and overriding the considerable diversity of the topics treated, is the common intellectual focus provided by a small number of closely intertwined themes which run through all these essays. Irrespective of which part of our institutional and ideological anatomy on which our gadfly looses his venom, his message is the same. Western societies are becoming more selfish and uncaring, less concerned to protect the vulnerable, because the old self-interested politics of the Right has been conjoined with the amoralism that stems from the supposed value neutrality of the modern social science professions. Most conspicuous among these latter is that band of neo-classical gravediggers of an egalitarian welfare society, the professional economists for whom the market is everything and society nothing. To Stretton, that message is one which has a particularly poignant relevance to his own society, for ‘until recently a majority of Australians have favoured more equal distribution of wealth and income than market outcomes would provide’. The intellectual disaster of our times is that this is rapidly ceasing to be the case.

The trouble with economists is, according to Stretton, that they make mistakes. Throughout the book we are treated to a litany of mistakes: the Thatcherite mistake that privatisation of public enterprises would enhance equality by spreading share ownership more broadly; the Hawke/Keating mistake that the financial deregulation would bring greater stability to financial markets; the almost universal mistake of western economies in the era of double-digit inflation that capital markets could perform equitably despite vast increases in nominal interest rates; and the economic theorists’ mistake that the protectionist and regulatory insulation which had long sheltered the Australian economy from outside forces should be abandoned just when the world economy was sliding into depression. But economists’ mistakes are far worse than other people’s mistakes, for they are not presented as the partial views they clearly are, but rather as value-free scientific knowledge and professional expertise. When governments make mistakes, they may be taken to task by oppositions and electorates, when economists make mistakes, there is, in Maggie Thatcher’s phrase, ‘no alternative’. As I read Stretton, what he is saying is that modern economists’ mistakes are particularly pernicious and long-lasting, because the politicians and policymakers in transforming them into policy also assume the mantle of false objectivity with which that profession clothes its endeavours.

There is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement with Stretton’s characterisation of what have been economic policy mistakes, and he exaggerates not a little, in the best gadfly tradition, when he implies that the vast majority of the economics profession seeks wholly to exclude moral considerations from their analysis. But he is certainly right in pointing out that professionalisation in the social sciences frequently does tend in this latter direction, and, as he notes, not merely amongst professional economists. The new professions inculcated by the positivist ethos are not in any real sense value-free; their beliefs start from certain assumptions and those assumptions favour certain class interests, but the positivist appeal to scientific objectivity does shelter those values from likely sources of self-criticism. Thus ‘if you combine a positivist ban on serious or normative discourse with an exclusive professional curriculum in a single discipline, you get a reliable intellectual vasectomy’.

In Stretton’s view, the depth of the intellectual wound inflicted by the scalpel of professional economics training is too deep to be readily reversed, and it is just for that reason that he offers us a specimen of an alternative approach designed to make aspiring young economists into more self-critical and socially aware policy practitioners. This is an attempt at political education in the very best tradition of reformist pedagogy. It is the logical culmination of the whole of Stretton’s argument for, if much of modern policy is made counter-productive by intellectual error, then the only solution lies in removing those errors through education. Given Stretton’s own analysis, it seems highly unlikely that the professional schools of economics will entertain such a revamped approach themselves – it would mean conceding that their theories are partial and incomplete as scientific policy panaceas – and it is typical, and admirable, that Stretton puts his money where his mouth is, and tries to do it himself. Whether he will be successful, and whether he, in turn, understands sufficient of the strengths as well as the weaknesses of economic analysis to embark on a critical reformulation, are quite other questions. They are not ones which make the attempt any the less fascinating.

This is not just a book for those interested in economic policy. Many of the essays are concerned with the theory and practice of public administration in a mixed economy, and the policy prescriptions offered are far from being a reiteration of orthodoxy from any political camp. Indeed, it is one of Stretton’s refreshing virtues that his ideas take him to unexpected places. Who would expect to find a socialist intellectual extolling the virtues of trading relations rather than power relations between government and business? Who would expect a greater concern for ideas and intellectual errors than for material conditions or class exploitation? Stretton might disagree with that comment and point to chapter and verse where he stressed the importance of these latter, but he would be belied by the whole tenor of what he has written. Finally, who would expect a radical critic, a gadfly on the rump of Australian society, to be so nostalgic about the Australian past, whether the housing policies of the Menzies era or traditional moral values, not least of them motherhood?

This is a book which should be a compulsory inclusion on social sciences reading lists – not least in economics – for years to come, not so much in order that students learn and accept its views, but rather in order that they learn how to question the views of their teachers. Presumably, amongst gadflies, as in other species, what gives the moral purpose to motherhood is the reproduction of the young. One feels sure that Dr Stretton would be pleased if his efforts led to a proliferation of little gadflies. In the long film, Australian society might well have reason to be pleased as well!