The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (251 page)

 
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A contract between persons in a prepolitical or pre-social condition specifying the terms upon which they are prepared to enter society or submit to political authority. For many authors, the social contract ‘explained’ or illuminated a transition from a
state of nature
to a social and/or political existence. The ‘terms’ of such a contract depend for their plausibility upon the depiction of the gains and losses of such a transition, and thus upon the plausibility of the depiction of the state of nature. Adherents of social contract theory need not suppose the historical reality of the agreement, for they are often interested in exploring the limits of political obligation by reference to what a rational actor would be prepared to agree to, given such gains and losses. A great variety of social contract theories have been propounded, and despite the scepticism of authors like
Hume
, the contract tradition is still important in political theory.
AR 

 
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A political movement which has enjoyed some success in various parts of the world, but has often been perceived as a populist fringe organization advancing unorthodox ideas. The ideas on which Social Credit were based were advanced towards the end of the First World War by an engineer in the Royal Flying Corps, Major C. H. Douglas (1879–1952). Douglas was preoccupied by what he perceived to be the problem of underconsumption. He developed the
A
+
B
theorem, a method of analysing costs which endeavoured to show that in peacetime there is a gap between the total buying power of individuals and the total prices of goods ready for sale. Additional purchasing power had to be created by manufacturers selling their goods below cost, the difference being made up by grants of credit through the issue of paper money. Every citizen was to be given a National Dividend as of right, although the inflationary implications of this injection of free money into the economy never seem to have been thought through.
Keynes
, although critical of the ‘mystifications’ associated with Douglas's work, commented in the
General Theory
that ‘Major Douglas is entitled to claim, as against some of his orthodox adversaries, that he at least has not been wholly oblivious of the outstanding problem of our economic system’. Social Credit as a political movement achieved its greatest electoral success in Canada. Under the leadership of the charismatic William
(‘Bible Bill’)
Abelhart it won control of the Alberta provincial government in a landslide victory in 1935, providing the premier until 1970, and of the British Columbia provincial government in 1952, remaining the governing party for all but three years up to 1991. There was also an upsurge of Social Credit support in Quebec in 1962. It faded from the federal scene in the 1970s, but the Reform Party may have drawn on a similar basis of support in Western Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In New Zealand, Social Credit support peaked at 20.7 per cent in the 1981 general election, slipping back to 7.6 per cent in 1984. In 1985, New Zealand Social Credit changed its name to the Democratic Party. Small-scale business people and farmers have provided many of the party's activists in Canada and New Zealand. For such a movement, political education can be as important as electoral success which Social Credit has never achieved at a national level.
WG 

 
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A term not widely used in Europe and America until after 1880 and then almost invariably employed as a pejorative tag, to mean the belief, based on a (?mis-)reading of Darwin, that natural selection entails the elimination of weak societies, or people, by strong ones. Popular in the innocent 1890s, social Darwinism seemed wholly discredited after Nazism. Some have seen its recurrence in
sociobiology
, which has therefore been controversial; but the ‘new social Darwinism’, if that is what it is, is based on the new genetics, which shows that Darwinism entails none of the racist or eugenicist inferences that were widely made between the 1890s and the 1930s (that one part of the human race is genetically superior to another, or that it is feasible and desirable to breed exceptionally good offspring from exceptionally good parents).
Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to ‘survival of the fittest’ entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A ‘social Darwinist’ could just as well be a defender of
laissez-faire
as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist. Many of the foremost thinkers conventionally labelled ‘social Darwinist’ established their arguments independently of the findings and methods of Darwinian biology. This is the case, for instance, with
Spencer
and W. G. Sumner , the former being an unrepentant Lamarckist and dedicated believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the latter an enthusiastic disciple of
Malthus
. With all of this in mind, it may very well be that the term ‘social Darwinism’ has merely a narrow rhetorical and ideological usage and consequently is of only passing historiographical interest.
JH/IM 

 
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social democracy
,
social democrat

(1)  The title taken by most Marxist socialist parties in the period between 1880 and 1914, especially the German and Russian Social Democratic Parties. In Britain, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was a late nineteenth-century Marxist group which was eventually absorbed into the Communist Party.
(2)  Beginning with the split of the Russian Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks
, the term ‘social democratic’ was appropriated by, or pinned on, the more right-wing faction when socialist parties split or groups broke away from them. This has become the established usage.

By the 1960s there was a clear ‘social democratic’ faction in sense 2 within the British Labour Party. Its characteristic ideas were support for a mixed rather than a socialist economy, distrust of further nationalization, and to some extent liberal social policy. After many years of internecine tension some but not all of the social democrats in the Labour Party exited to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981.
The SDP wished to ‘break the mould of British politics’. It proposed a new—or at least rarely articulated—amalgam of strong social liberalism with fairly strong economic liberalism, under the slogan of ‘the social market economy’. In conventional terms, therefore, it was left-wing on social matters and right-wing on economic matters. However, this strategy faced two problems:

(
a
)  Although there was an increasing group of voters to whom this mixture appealed—typically well-educated people in professional rather than commercial occupations—they were not numerous enough to be electorally significant.
(
b
)  Some members of the SDP preferred to present themselves as the continuing Labour Party when the real Labour Party was seen as having moved far to the left. This was the basis of an appeal to a quite different sector of the electorate than in (a) above; but it involved much stronger support for
corporatism
and the traditional left in economic matters.

Electorally, the appeal under (a) had considerable success within its predetermined limits. That under (b) reached its peak at the General Election of 1983. But the narrow failure of the SDP/Liberal Alliance to push the Labour Party into third place in terms of votes at that election led to the crumbling of the vote under (b) except in places in the South of England where it was obvious to the rational voter that the SDP and its Liberal allies were the only force capable of beating the Conservatives. After acrimonious opposition from its leader, David Owen , the majority of members of the SDP voted to amalgamate with the Liberal Party in 1988 to form the Social and Liberal Democrats. For a while Owen's supporters continued as a rival force to the detriment of both. However, Owen's SDP was wound up before the General Election of 1992. The Liberal Democrats have dropped the word ‘Social’ from their title. All that is left of the SDP is a proportion of their membership and a constitution that is much more centralized than that of the former Liberal Party.
The German SPD (
Sozialdemocratisches Partei Deutschlands
) took its historic title from ‘social democracy’ in sense 1. However, at the party conference at Bad Godesberg in 1959, it voted to drop the Marxist programme which it had had since its foundation. It thus became, as it has remained, social democratic in sense 2.
Since 1932 the most consistently successful social democratic party in Europe has been the Swedish SAP. The Swedish model was a widely admired corporatist
welfare state
which, however, ran into serious problems of financial viability from the late 1980s onwards.