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Contemporary advocates of laissez-faire want to rewrite the history of the Industrial Revolution. They make little secret of their reason for doing so. Popular fears engendered by the on-going popular acceptance of the "collectivist myth" of the Industrial Revolution stands in the way of efforts to demolish the welfare state. In their view, the Industrial Revolution was not the cause of unnecessary social trauma. From its very beginnings, and even in the absence of protective state intervention, they say, it was a liberating force. "Dickens was wrong" declared the banner headline of the lead article in the review section of The Australian Financial Review (24.4.98). Written by Roger Kerr, the Executive Director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, the article claimed that the popular image we have of the Industrial Revolution is false. It derived from "misleading accounts, repeated exaggerations and occasional fabrications" about the alleged excesses of laissez-faire capitalism during the 19th century. Kerr's article should not be seen in isolation. It is one of the latest shots in a propaganda assault issuing from a network of economic rationalist think tanks. Kerr says the popular myth of the Industrial Revolution perpetuates the belief that the poverty and squalor thatwere said to be the fate of the industrial masses before the welfare state rescued them would soon return if any serious moves were made to shift the responsibility for welfare away from the state. But is the picture which economic rationalists want to paint good history, or is it special interest revisionism? Is it comparable in any way to those endless pictures propagated under Stalin and Mao - the ones showing joyful workers marching off to electrify Siberia or happy peasants singing and dancing to celebrate the Great Leap Forward? Kerr prefers the descriptions of working and living conditions during the Industrial Revolution by the writer Elizabeth Gaskell to those of Dickens. Unlike Dickens, Kerr says, Gaskell lived in the north of England where the new industrial towns were springing up. She directly experienced what writers like Dickens and Engels knew only from hearsay. She depicted the early factories, not as satanic mills, but as a "kind of social liberation for the poor".
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