It is to the credit of Stuart Macintyre that in Winners and Losers he steers a sensible and judicious course between these two paths. Not once does he lose sight of the anomalies which have existed in terms of social justice in the Australian setting, and which persist to create urgent problems for our own times: the success of the translation of concepts of social justice into public policy has not taken a linear or irreversible path to improved conditions. Nevertheless, he does not hector or disparage as foolish the efforts of those past proponents of social justice who are the focus of his study. Instead, he enters with perception into their world view, clarifying their own meaning systems and intentions, while reserving his right to evaluate outcomes of which they were necessarily ignorant. While admitting that the concept of social justice is both imprecise and emotive, Macintyre explores it not in the abstract, but as the goal emerged and changed in the context of a changing society. ‘In the end’, he writes, ‘social justice concerns real human beings in real historical circumstances, with all the untidiness that involves’. His rejection of empty theory, his avoidance of jargon, and his energetic attachment to empirical detail, result in a fresh and illuminating assessment of this critical concern in Australian history.

Stuart Macintyre suggests that ideas of social justice arose historically with the emergence of a dynamic capitalistic class society from the hierarchical order of pre-industrial Europe. In traditional society, those of high status and power sustained a moral duty towards the poor and needy. Within a modem, liberal democratic state, the working class demanded that governments enshrine in law services which once had been customary. By contrast, those people who enjoyed the chief benefits of a capitalistic economic order preferred a notion of the state which involved regulation, control, and discipline. The story he outlines is of demands for justice, emanating from working-class protagonists, which were modified and shaped both by their own visions, and by conflicting vested interests within the shifting political and economic context of the past century and more.

The new society founded by British colonists in the nineteenth century putatively offered freer paths to a just society than the Old World knew. Macintyre argues that opportunities were lost because colonial radicalism, muted because of the absence both of intense class conflict and of a hereditary ruling class, eschewed more searching social critiques for the traditional invocation of the rights of the ‘free-born Englishman’, and faith in liberal reform. The twin drives, firstly for full civil rights and constitutional democracy, secondly for land reform, resulted in concessions which at the same time failed to touch fundamental problems of poverty and insecurity. Inequality of wealth continued to be a feature of colonial life, and union organisations failed in the 1890s depression to prevent the loss of earnings and job opportunities which proved catastrophic for many working-class people. Unionists, radicals, and socialists turned to the state as a countervailing power, formed the Labor Party, and pressed for welfare benefits for the most materially insecure of their number. Arbitration and conciliation through courts were established, and among other apparent victories was the acceptance by 1907 of a guaranteed minimum wage for male workers, the so-called ‘family wage’ of the Harvester Judgement. Macintyre finds distinctively Australian the gender-based Labor ideal of protection of the subsistence of wives and children, not so much ‘in the origins of its parts, but in the way they were given force and coherence …’ For women, the wage system enshrined dependence on the family in face of the potential of paid, public work for increasing female autonomy. It was a telling example of ways in which gains for one group might imply losses for others.

In the latter section of Winners and Losers, Stuart Macintyre focuses on a range of issues confronting our own society – problems of the unemployed, of equity in the education system, of Aboriginal and women’s rights – reviewing the twentieth-century context for each. In terms of unemployment, he traces the abandonment by working-class leaders of an earlier attachment to demands for self-reliance and provision of work, and their acceptance of direct relief. In the high unemployment of the eighties, he perceives the creation of two special inter-dependent groups, the ‘new middle-class’ of salaried and professional people, opposed to the ‘welfare class’ of the unemployed, single parents and their children, the aged and the invalid: it constitutes a gloomy impasse given the current direction of public policy.

In a particularly pertinent chapter, Macintyre examines the skill with which a Protestant business and professional elite has not only sustained a private school system as a potent means of reproducing their own class advantages in their young, but have even induced recent governments to assist them handsomely with finance to do so, all in the self-serving guise of ‘freedom of choice’. He asserts the duty of governments to insist on at least two minimal principles: that government schools should receive first charge on the government purse, and that private schools, as recipients of public support, should be properly accountable for their policies in areas with direct implications for the public sector. This is all challenging and unequivocal evaluation. If there is any area less fully treated, it is perhaps social justice in relation to women’s interests, which feminists would wish to find more fully examined. The experiences of women do, however, figure integrally if often descriptively through the study, and Macintyre concludes with a useful commentary on recent affirmative action initiatives.

Winners and Losers reveals Macintyre’s firm command of a wide range of historical detail. He indicates always the complexity of the issues, while maintaining a lucid, directed, and constructive argument. His book represents a very considerable achievement in intelligent, critical writing which must command the attention of all who are concerned to expand their understanding of Australia’s past.