Mammon's Kingdom: An Essay on Britain Now review – David Marquand's cry of despair

A funny thing happened on the way to this review: I saw Garrison Keillor perform. The Lake Wobegon author shared the stage with a jazz band, a blues singer, violinists and radio comedians. It was a dizzying, patchy and occasionally obtuse performance, punctuated with moments of brilliance.

In Mammon's Kingdom, David Marquand assembles his own supporting cast, all-star intellectuals from the past three centuries: Edmund Burke, RD Laing, John Stuart Mill, GE Moore, Amartya Sen, Avishai Margalit, Martha Nussbaum. Each gets a turn in the spotlight, giving the book the feel of an ensemble performance, rather than a solo. Like Keillor's kaleidoscopic show, Marquand's book is best read as a selection of insights and provocations on the state of the nation today. The theme loosely holding them together is pretty straightforward: things are going to hell in a handcart. Since the 1980s, hedonistic individualism has torn the social fabric, hollowed out the public realm and coarsened democracy. We are, Marquand warns, "a society sleepwalking towards a seedy barbarism".

Marquand commands our attention as a leading example of a rare species: a true public intellectual, a former politician as well as a formidable scholar. A founder member of the Social Democratic party, he has witnessed first hand the vicissitudes of centre-left politics, but has also delved deep into the intellectual undercurrents of political thought. Marquand has produced the definitive biography of Ramsay MacDonald, a deftly woven 20th-century history, Britain Since 1918, and in his masterpiece, The Progressive Dilemma, an outstanding analysis of the split between the labour and liberal political traditions in Britain.

But Mammon's Kingdom has a different tone. It is pure polemic, a raging against the dying light of a more decent age. The last three or four decades have, in Marquand's analysis, witnessed the defeat of decency at the hands of a hedonism. Widening inequality, rising poverty, consumerism, decline of public trust, class snobbery, family breakdown – all symptoms of the same disease: "moral individualism".

The fall of three elites – an intellectual clerisy, public service professionals, and working-class leadership – paved the way for the rapid triumph of an atomistic, relativistic individualism, market logic in economics, and supine obedience in the civil service. These "decent elites", Marquand laments, were replaced by "new elites, with little or no sense of public duty. Money and celebrity became society's chief yardsticks of merit and achievement, endlessly celebrated by a gawping media."

Marquand accepts that the old order had its flaws – lack of social mobility, sexism, racism, to name but a few – but he prefers these to the flaws of the new individualism. The old institutions "gave people something solid and reassuring to hold on to in a harsh world… They strengthened communities, generated loyalties and promoted public trust. They told people who they were and where they belonged."

And there's the rub. People no longer want to be told by others, even members of a well-meaning elite, where they belong. They don't want to be told who they are: they want to decide that for themselves. Marquand is quite right that society has, in this sense, become more individualist. It is also why such progress has been made towards racial tolerance, lesbian and gay rights, and gender equality. Certainly a price is paid. A society that prizes individuality and diversity will have less solidity. It will be messier, noisier and less predictable. But that's the choice we are making.

Marquand is at his strongest in articulating a Burkean case for stronger action on climate change, and the need to replace the "imperative of economic growth" with "the imperative of sustainability". What David Cameron is alleged to have described as "all this green crap" is in fact the greatest moral challenge of our time.

Marquand also makes a powerful republican case for a political economy based on strong citizens in a deliberative democracy. "Good capitalism is impossible without good people leading good lives," he points out: moral economy is a precursor to political economy. Channelling Mill and Sen, he makes the case that effective democracy is a process of dialogue and engagement, rather than merely a set of institutions: "The most formidable obstacles to a democracy of public reasoning and social learning are within us." He wants to restore local democracy, reform voting systems and establish a constitutional convention.

Unfortunately, these deeper arguments are too often lost. Before a line of argument is allowed to develop too far, Marquand veers off to describe another disgraceful aspect of modern Britain: "And another thing…" On his list of dislikes are All Bar One, the restaurant chain Carluccio's, cable TV, Tony Blair, Michael Gove, BSkyB, PR consultants, advertising firms, Fred Goodwin, council house sales, academy schools, rum and Grand Marnier cocktails, prostitution, family breakdown, internet gambling, four-by-four vehicles, and the "tedious committee-speak of the Revised Standard Version", which has replaced "the magical 17th-century prose of the King James Bible".

Marquand is a fierce defender of the public realm, defined on his terms: collective provision with limited individual choice. Take council house sales: "a blow for individual freedom", Marquand admits. "But also a blow against the property rights of the entire body of local authority citizens, the ultimate owners of all council property, including houses." This position puts Marquand well to the left of the modern Labour party, but is consistent with his "collective = good" maxim.

An outspoken critic of the imposition of tuition fees on college students, Marquand reserves his sharpest criticism for "Browne's barbarism" – a reference to the report of Lord Browne preceding the coalition government's decision to reform higher education funding. According to Marquand, the report simply "assumed that university education is a private good". This is unfair. Browne's report to the government reads: "Higher education matters. It helps to create the knowledge, skills and values that underpin a civilised society. Higher education institutions generate and diffuse ideas, safeguard knowledge, catalyse innovation, inspire creativity, enliven culture, stimulate regional economies and strengthen civil society."

The difficulty is that higher education is both a public good and a private good; the challenge is striking the right balance between public and private funding. You know what Marquand means when he urges us to see universities as belonging to "a worldwide republic of letters". And you can agree with him that "university graduates are public goods. They enrich the whole society." But Marquand simply ignores the deeply regressive nature of free university tuition, funded out of general taxation and subsidising mostly young adults from affluent backgrounds. He has no problem taxing plumbers to pay for the Oxbridge education of bankers' sons and daughters, in the name of the public realm. Some of us do.

There are hard questions about how best to finance higher education over the coming decades, but Marquand serves the debate poorly here. In part, this is a problem of tone, so we could always blame the publishing director, Stuart Proffitt. Marquand says that Proffitt, "when necessary, has persuaded me to rein in my tendency to extravagant hyperbole". Note to Mr Proffitt: you really needed to pull the reins tighter. Outlandish claims pepper the book. "History no longer counts"; "the British no longer know where they have come from or who they are''; "the notion... that the state's ask is to pursue the public interest seems to have vanished from Whitehall". The UK is the "second most dysfunctional society in the rich developed world", after – you guessed it – the US. Really? Italy, anyone?

Marquand wants more Edmund Burke in our political philosophy, more religion in our public culture (even though Marquand is not a believer himself), and more elitism, albeit of an "open, tolerant and accountable kind", in our social structures. It is possible to disagree with all of this and still get pleasure from the pen of one of our great public conversationalists. As with Keillor, you just need to sit back and enjoy the show.