A progressive politics of responsibility What would it look like?

A progressive politics of responsibility What would it look like?

Stuart WhiteJesus College, Oxford

The concept of responsibility stands alongside

opportunity and community as part of the core

rhetorical trinity of Third Way politics. Yet, for

progressives, the rhetoric of responsibility carries

dangers. What would a genuinely progressive

politics of responsibility look like? What would

be its implications for public policy? This paper

does not offer a full response to these questions

but aims to provide some ingredients of a fuller

answer.

I approach the topic by discussing five

distinct perspectives on the politics of

responsibility beginning with an outline of

what I call the civic conservative perspective. This

calls for tough behavioural conditions in the

welfare system to improve the functioning of

the disadvantaged. The perspective has been

recently elaborated by the political scientist

Lawrence Mead – who coined the phrase ‘civic

conservative’ – but has a long historical

pedigree.

While not without some insight, I argue we

should not rest content with the civic

conservative perspective and go on to discuss

four alternative perspectives – the social

democratic, ethic of care, civic republican and

anarchist perspectives – that can each be seen

as picking up on a problem or deficiency

within the civic conservative perspective. By

examining how they each correct weaknesses

in the civic conservative approach, we begin

to see what an alternative, progressive

conception of the politics of responsibility

looks like.

The civic conservative perspectiveIn recent years, the civic conservative perspective

has been eloquently developed in the work of

Mead (see Deacon, 2002). His first book, Beyond

Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship,

published in 1986, focused on the problems of

the welfare system in the United States. Mead

concluded that rather than scrapping the

welfare system, it needed to become more

authoritative. Specifically, welfare should be

accompanied by the determined enforcement of

work norms. The ethical premise here is that

citizenship brings with it obligations to

function in certain ways, and that one pivotal

function of citizenship is employment. Welfare

should not be provided on terms that allow

people to neglect this function or lose the

capacity to meet it.

In later work, Mead expanded on his

arguments for work enforcement (Mead,

1992). Liberal thinkers, he claims, assume that

the main problems facing the long term

welfare poor are structural. This ‘sociologism’

leads liberals to assume that, given the right

structural conditions, the welfare poor will

improve their material position through work.

Mead argues that this ‘competence assumption’

is misplaced; the root of the problem is an

inability on the part of the long term welfare

poor to hold down a job. While they may well

subscribe to the value of work, they cannot live

up to their own values. The solution is to use

the authority of the state, through the welfare

system, to help the long term welfare poor

Document2.qxd 07/03/2005 16:02 Page 7

ppr – March 20058

overcome their limited competence.

Government must place them in an

environment where they have little choice but

to buckle down, get a job and keep it.

Mead’s work influenced the shift in welfare

policy in the US towards greater work

enforcement. During the 1990s, experiments

with welfare conditionality branched out from

work enforcement, grappling with a range of

issues from teenage pregnancy and substance

abuse to single parenthood. Mead saw this

development in social policy – what he calls

the ‘New Paternalism’ (Mead ed., 1997) – as

broadly desirable. He has since explored the

institutional and cultural conditions that make

for the successful application of New

Paternalism (Mead, 2004).

Mead’s work tends to excite negative

reactions amongst the left. However, much of

what centre-left governments have done in

social policy in recent years arguably reflects

similar thinking, if not his direct influence.

Third Way thinking on social policy arguably

seeks to blend Mead’s focus on the agency of

the disadvantaged with a traditional left

concern with structural barriers and inequity

(see Deacon and Mann, 1999). The British

Labour government’s social policies have

typically sought in some way to expand

opportunity for the welfare poor, but often

with a coercive element. Behind its New Deal

for Young People, for example, is the belief that

the young unemployed must be provided with

opportunities for training, education or work

experience, but must also be constrained to

take advantage of these opportunities.

We should note here an ambiguity in Mead’s

civic conservatism which has wider relevance to

thinking about the politics of responsibility.

This is the ambiguity as to whether the

behavioural conditions attached to welfare are

there to ensure that people meet their

responsibilities to others or to help ensure that

people act more effectively to advance their own

interests (or both). Strictly speaking,

paternalism involves using state authority to

coerce people to act in their own best interests.

This is quite distinct, analytically, from coercing

people to meet some responsibility they have

to others, where few of us would deny that, in

some cases at least, coercion is justifiable.

However, in a free society, there is properly a

strong presumption against paternalism. For the

most part, people should be free to make their

own judgments as to what risks it is worth

taking in pursuit of a good life. If the rationale

for a given piece of policy is paternalistic, we

thus need to offer a good reason for overriding

this presumption. Paternalist measures are most

defensible when: (1) they direct people to do

what they themselves think is in their best

interests and (2) where they themselves think

there is a problem of weakness of will or myopia

that otherwise prevents them doing this. Here

paternalism does not override a citizen’s own

judgments of value but helps her to act more

effectively on these judgments. This would

suggest that if the rationale for, say, benefit

conditionality policies, is paternalistic, evidence

should be sought on the values of those likely to

be subject to such conditions. Do they endorse

the restrictions in question as a means to pursue

more effectively their own goals (see Dworkin,

1971)? For the remainder of this paper I assume

we are less concerned with paternalism, in the

strict sense of the term, than with policies to

promote responsibility to others.

The social democratic perspectiveLet us focus first on work. What I here term the

social democratic perspective asks us to

consider the background social context in which

this notional responsibility is enforced. It is

plausible – though controversial – to say that,


A progressive politics of responsibility 9

in a just society, each citizen who is able to

work has an obligation to do so. In such a

society, nobody should free ride on the labours

of fellow citizens but should reciprocate the

benefits derived from others’ labours by

beneficial labour of their own. As John Rawls

puts it: ‘…all citizens are to do their part in

society’s cooperative work’ (Rawls, 2001:178).

We might then agree that it is appropriate to

condition welfare benefits on work to prevent

the welfare system becoming a device to assist

free riding.

However, it is by no means clear that our

society is a just society. From a Rawlsian point

of view, for instance, social justice requires,

firstly, ‘fair equality of opportunity’: a

distribution of wealth, educational and

employment opportunity, that ensures that two

people with similar talents and motivation

have roughly equal chances to develop their

talents and reap the rewards. Secondly, it

requires that if rewards to work are unequal,

this inequality works to maximize the absolute

living standard of the least well-off group of

workers (the so-called ‘difference principle’; see

Rawls, 1999 [1971]). It is very questionable as

to whether our society meets this standard of

justice. If it does not, can we proceed and

enforce work in the welfare system as we

arguably could in a just society?

There are two worries here. One is a worry

that work enforcement could make life worse

for those already unjustly disadvantaged.

Imagine a group of citizens which is unjustly

disadvantaged in education and in initial

holdings of wealth. Lacking skills and capital,

they feel pressured to take low-paying,

unpleasant jobs. Work enforcement in welfare

reinforces this pressure and so consolidates the

effects of injustice. A second worry is inequity:

forcing some people to meet responsibilities

that others are left free to ignore if they want.

For example, if some wealthy citizens have

inherited enough wealth to avoid work if they

wish, is it equitable to enforce work on those

who lack such good fortune (see White, 2003,

2004b, 2004c)?

Animated by these two worries, the social

democratic perspective prompts us to consider

the broader opportunity structure within which

policies such as work enforcement are

implemented. Without asserting that the

problems of the poor are wholly structural in

origin, it does hold that the justifiability of

such policies is affected by the extent of unjust

structural inequality. This challenges the civic

conservative approach, and also throws out a

challenge to Third Way efforts to blend

voluntarist and structuralist perspectives. Where

there is an element of coercion in a given social

policy, are we confident enough is being done

to expand the opportunities of those affected?

What more could and should we do to ensure

that the burdens of responsibility are not

falling solely on the poor, while the wealthy are

free to ignore them?

Does the social democratic concern apply to

civic responsibilities other than work? Few

would seriously argue that the enforcement of

all our civic responsibilities – such as basic

duties of non-aggression and civility – should

be sensitive to background economic injustice

in this way. However, for what might be called

our economic responsibilities (responsibilities

to avoid placing undue resource burdens on

our fellow citizens) the social democratic

concern is generally a valid one. Take, for

example, proposals to make health-care

entitlements more conditional on personal

behaviour. In a world where everyone starts out

with a fair share of resources, it might well be

acceptable to make subsequent welfare claims

sensitive to lifestyle choice. But where starting

points are far from fair, the impact of such a


proposal could be to make unjustly

disadvantaged people even worse-off.

The ethic of care perspectiveA number of feminist writers have recently

developed a distinctive ethic of care approach

in social policy (see Sevenhuijsen, 1999,

Williams, 2001). If the social democrat focuses

on the context in which our putative

responsibility to work is enforced, then the

ethic of care advocate raises awkward questions

about the content of this responsibility.

Specifically, is the work we do for the market

the only kind of work that counts in meeting

this responsibility? What about the care work

we do as parents, or as friends and relatives to

the ill or the elderly? Ethic of care advocates

argue that civic conservatives and Third Way

thinkers neglect the productive contribution

people make as – unpaid – primary care-givers.

If we accept that citizens have a duty to make

a productive contribution to their society in

return for the benefits they derive from other

people’s labours, then we need to ask what

counts as a form of contribution that meets

this principle of reciprocity. What validates a

supposed contribution as contributive? Is it

simply consumer demand: if people are willing

to pay for a good or service, does this perhaps

validate the labour involved as genuinely

contributing to the good of society? This

almost certainly cannot be the whole story.

There are surely objective public interests that

limit what can legitimately be put onto the

market – consider the case of dealers in hard

drugs – and which constrain what kinds of

labour can count as contributive. Likewise,

there may also be labour outside the market

that serves objective public interests and which

therefore counts as contributive. At least some

kinds of primary care-giving could fall into this

category. A number of theorists have argued

that by raising healthy, well-adjusted children,

parents provide an important public good.

They are not only doing something of benefit

to themselves, but of benefit to the wider

community and therefore other members of

the community ought to support or reward

them for this effort. Similarly, those who care

for the ill or the disabled arguably provide a

service not only to those individuals but to the

community (since members of the wider

community share in the responsibility to assure

the ill or disabled good quality care; see White,

2003: ch. 5).

If some unpaid care work has this

contributive status, then social policy needs to

acknowledge this. While this may not mean

that someone who has care-giving

responsibilities is exempt from any duty to

work in the formal economy, it does mean that

the way we enforce responsibilities to work

would take the contribution already being

made into account.

If the rationale for giving primary care-givers

public recognition and support is that they are

providing a service to the community, the

question arises as to whether, and how, the

community should hold the care-giver

accountable for providing the service. If care

work is a form of civic labour, for the good of

the community, and supported or rewarded by

the community, then perhaps the community

has a legitimate stake in ensuring that the care

work meets civic objectives. One possible way

to build some accountability into public

support for care-givers might be to condition

some aspects of this support on activities that

increase the likely quality of the care given. For

instance, support to parents might come with a

requirement to attend parenting classes. While

the ethic of care perspective poses a challenge

to one kind of welfare conditionality (that

which seeks to push primary care-givers into

ppr – March 200510


the formal economy regardless of the age and

needs of their children), it could conceivably

call for another kind (that which seeks to build

care-giving capacity). Social democratic

concerns will also come into play here, and on

both sides of the argument. Concern to help

assure each child good parenting, on equal

opportunity grounds, could push us towards

conditionality. But concern to prevent inequity

in the enforcement of civic responsibilities will

force us to think hard about whether such

policies are unfairly impacting on poorer

households compared to richer ones.

The civic republican perspectiveCivic conservatism, certainly in the form

articulated by Mead, tends to focus primarily

on the citizen’s responsibility to work.

However, as Mead would acknowledge, our

duties as citizens extend much further. Civic

republicans stress our responsibility to

participate in the task of democratic self-

government. As well as being active in politics,

the citizen must also be animated by a real

concern for the common good.

In recent political theory, there has been a

revival of interest in the civic republican

conception of citizenship, tied to a growing

interest in forms of ‘deliberative democracy’

(Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, Cohen and

Sabel, 1997). According to deliberative

democrats, democracy is not simply a matter of

aggregating votes in competitive elections. In a

purely ‘aggregative’ democracy, a majority

might impose its will without offering citizens

in the minority anything like a good reason for

the decision in question. The legitimacy of

political decisions depends crucially on their

being backed up by a certain kind of public

deliberation in which parties seek to justify

alternative policies to others on grounds they

think others can reasonably accept. This points

towards something akin to the civic republican

model of citizenship characterized by an active

political engagement oriented towards the

common good.

To function as a citizen on the civic

republican model, the individual must keep

informed about public affairs and examine

policy issues from the standpoint of all who

stand to be affected, weighing the various

interests, rather than looking simply to her

own individual or sectional interest. The citizen

must seek to develop, exercise and maintain a

strong deliberative capacity.

What, then, is the state’s role in enabling

citizens to meet this responsibility? Citizenship

education in schools is obviously consistent

with this goal and citizens’ service schemes for

youths might also help to develop the public-

spiritedness required of the responsible citizen.

More generally, it is important for governments

to define and preserve a public sphere in social

life that serves to support deliberative capacity

and this may mean restricting the free play of

the market in some areas.

Consider, for example, whether government

should regulate working hours, defining and

enforcing a maximum working week. The

maintenance of deliberative capacity requires

real time and effort which very long working

hours might make it impossible for individuals

to invest. Simply encouraging workers to limit

the number of hours they work may not be

effective as many will not be in a position to

do so unless this becomes a society-wide norm.

So, to enable citizens to develop and maintain

their deliberative capacity, it may be necessary

for the state to put a formal restriction on

working hours (see White, 2004a). Strong

public service broadcasting requirements

arguably also help maintain the deliberative

quality of democracy, but also represent a

restriction on the free play of market forces.



Third Way thinkers often allude favourably to

civic republican thinking, and – certainly in

Britain – policy initiatives, such as the

introduction of citizenship education in schools,

are indebted to this tradition. But there is also a

strong current in Third Way thought that stresses

the need to adapt to the pressures of the modern

market economy. The civic republican

perspective suggests this approach to

responsibility can appear contradictory.

An anarchist perspectiveFinally, a progressive politics of responsibility may

have something to learn from thinkers in the

anarchist tradition. In the tradition of Peter

Kropotkin and thinkers such as Colin Ward,

‘anarchy’ is essentially about mutuality. It is about

people freely forming associations that are

inclusive, internally egalitarian, and which

operate in a cooperative spirit towards meeting

shared needs. ‘Anarchy’, in this sense, is already a

part of our social life (Ward, 1973). It is

embodied in parent–baby groups, self-help

therapy groups, tenant cooperatives and credit

unions.

Arguably what makes mutuality attractive is

the way it combines an emphasis on self-help

with solidarity and cooperation. A simple state-

market dichotomy might be inclined to set these

two ideas against each other, looking to the

market to push people into self-help and the

state for a corrective solidarity. Mutuality

integrates the two and intuitively, this seems to

fit with some of our basic ideas about the

character of the ‘responsible citizen’. The

responsible citizen is active, problem-solving,

concerned not to rely excessively on the

contributions of others, but to do her bit. At the

same time, she is oriented to a common good,

concerned about the welfare of others and not

merely with her own lot. Anarchists such as Ward

worry that a heavy reliance on the market or state

for addressing needs will undermine this spirit of

personal responsibility. While a turn to the

market may promote excessive individualism,

undue reliance on the state may foster

dependency and make individuals reluctant to

take direct action to address their own needs. The

anarchist and civic conservative perspectives

overlap in seeing state welfare as potentially

corrosive of individuals’ ability to act for

themselves.

A progressive politics of responsibility should

not be focused solely on state coercion, on issues

of benefit conditionality, market regulation, and

so on. It should also be concerned with enabling

mutualist forms of self-help. This offers an

alternative take on the competence issue raised by

civic conservatives such as Mead, where the

solution to the alleged lack of competence

amongst the long term welfare poor is for the

state to coerce them into different patterns of

behaviour. The anarchist perspective looks at the

problem, instead, in terms of how disadvantaged

individuals can be energised by forms of

community self-help (see also Halpern in this

volume). Whereas the civic conservative approach

risks reinforcing inequalities of power in society,

the anarchist approach has the potential to reduce

them. In addition, mutualist self-help can readily

shade into forms of collective political action

which bring the disadvantaged together to press

for greater resources and fairer treatment (see

Ward, 1996: 51–62).

Third Way thinkers in Britain have engaged

with the agenda around mutuality, articulating

similar intuitions in the language of social capital

(Putnam, 2000). ‘Active communities’ has been a

social policy goal of Britain’s Labour government,

informing the New Deal for Communities, early

years programmes and policies on anti-social

behaviour. However, there is a tendency for the

centre to be distrustful of, or impatient with,

grass-roots autonomy and activism, and a



tendency to withdraw support when the centre’s

goals shift. A progressive politics of responsibility

cannot be wholly top-down. It has to flow out of

the groups and networks that are organically

there in the community already, taking their

concerns to the centre.

A pluralist approach A progressive politics of responsibility might

draw on all of the perspectives outlined here.

From the civic conservative perspective we can

retain the idea that there is, in principle, a

legitimate role for the state in attaching

behavioural conditions to welfare. This might be

either for paternalistic reasons, or to promote

responsible behaviour towards others. However,

this basic principle needs to be implemented

carefully, in a way that takes on board the

insights provided by our four other perspectives.

From the social democratic perspective we

can take the idea that the background

distribution of wealth and opportunity can make

a crucial difference to the justifiability of coercive

social policies aimed at changing behaviour. In

an unjust society, ways of promoting responsible

behaviour might be unacceptably harmful or

inequitable. Thus, efforts to enforce responsibility

will sometimes depend on sufficient efforts to

expand and equalize opportunity.

From the ethic of care perspective we can

take the idea that our conception of civic

responsibility needs to incorporate the hard

work many citizens do as primary care-givers,

often outside of the formal economy. We

should beware of narrowly ‘productivist’

notions of responsibility that overemphasise

employment as the expression of citizenship.

From the civic republican perspective we

can take the idea that our responsibilities as

citizens lie centrally in the political sphere (as

well as the economic), consisting in an active,

public-spirited engagement with public affairs.

We can assume that such engagement will not

arise spontaneously, but must be carefully

nurtured through the establishment and

protection of a distinct public realm.

From the anarchist perspective we can take

the idea that the experience of mutuality is likely

to be important in cultivating the kind of

character we associate with responsible

citizenship. Community self-help might be

another, potentially better way to achieve

desirable behavioural or attitudinal changes than

state coercion.

This may help us to identify some of the

questions that progressives need to consider:

Where the policy rationale is strictly paternalistic,

how far do the relevant restrictions on individual

freedom track the value judgments of the people

who are subject to them? Is government going far

enough on the opportunity and equality fronts

to justify what it proposes on the responsibility

front? Is enough being done to recognize and

support care-givers and what is government

entitled to demand of care-givers in return? What

role does market regulation have in securing the

public realm and how far is government willing

to contain the market to achieve this goal? How

far is government acting to encourage – or at

least not discourage – forms of mutualistic self-

help and how far can mutualism serve as an

effective alternative to more authoritarian

responses to behavioural issues?

In combining these perspectives and seeking

answers to these questions, I believe we can

begin to see the outlines of a progressive

politics of responsibility.

Cohen J and Sabel C (1997) ‘Directly-Deliberative

Polyarchy’ European Law Journal 1997(3), pp.313–42

Deacon A, 2002 Perspectives on Welfare Open University

Press

Deacon A and Mann K (1999) ‘Agency, Modernity and

Social Policy’ Journal of Social Policy 28(3), pp.413–35




Dworkin G (1971) ‘Paternalism’, in Wasserstrom R ed.

Morality and the Law Wadsworth, pp.107–26

Gutmann A and Thompson D (1996) Democracy and

Disagreement Harvard University Press

Mead L (1986) Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of

Citizenship The Free Press

Mead L (1992) The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking

Poor in America Basic Books

Mead L (2004) Government Matters: Welfare Reform in

Wisconsin Princeton University Press

Mead L ed. (1997) The New Paternalism Brookings

Institution Press

Putnam R (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of

American Community Harvard University Press

Rawls J (1999 [1971]) A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition

Harvard University Press

Rawls J (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement Harvard

University Press

Sevenhuijsen S (1999) Caring in the Third Way University of

Leeds, Centre for Research on the Family, Kinship and

Childhood, Working Paper 12

Ward C (1973) Anarchy in Action Allen and Unwin

Ward C (1996) Social Policy: An Anarchist Response London

School of Economics

White S (2003) The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and

Obligations of Economic Citizenship Oxford University Press

White S (2004) ‘Markets, Time and Citizenship’ Renewal

12(3), pp.50–63

White S (2004) ‘What’s Wrong With Workfare?’ Journal of

Applied Philosophy 21(3), pp.271–84

White S (2004) ‘A Social Democratic Framework for Benefit

Conditionality’, in Stanley K and Lohde L A with White

S Sanctions and Sweeteners: Rights and Responsibilities in

the Benefits System ippr, pp.9–24

Williams F (2001) ‘In and Beyond New Labour: Towards an

Ethic of Care’ Critical Social Policy 21(4), pp.467–93


A progressive politics of responsibility What would it look like?

Documents

Transcript of A progressive politics of responsibility What would it look like?