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The Origins of the Age of Responsibility

To argue that we live in the age of responsibility is, in one important sense, misleading. For it implies that earlier ages did not talk about responsibility, or admitted talk of responsibility to fewer realms, or had a more restricted conception of what responsibility entails. I do not wish to make any of these claims: the welfare state has been shaped by moral distinctions between the “deserving poor” and the “work-shy” since its very inception.1 Similarly, in many political epochs, and especially at the height of the Cold War, public rhetoric revolved around responsibility in important ways: as one of John F. Kennedy’s most famous quotes reminds us, this was a time in which it was possible for politicians to rouse audiences to rapturous applause by demanding that Americans “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”2
What I wish to argue, then, is subtler than some blanket claim about the unprecedented importance of responsibility. In my view, the most widely used conception of responsibility has been radically transformed over the past decades. Whereas, in an earlier age, talk of responsibility primarily evoked the individual’s duty to help others, it now primarily invokes our responsibility to take care of ourselves—and to suffer the consequences if we fail to do so. In the terminology I propose to use throughout this chapter, we have moved from a world in which the conception of “responsibility-as-duty” predominated to one in which a new conception of “responsibility-as-accountability” has taken center stage. It is the predominance of this transformed conception of responsibility, rather than the prominence of responsibility as such, that is characteristic of both the responsibility framework and the age of responsibility as a whole.
This transformation is particularly visible in popular political rhetoric. Nowadays, when politicians promise their followers that they believe in “individual” or “personal” responsibility, they do not mean that each of us has a duty to make life better for others, or even to make sacrifices for our nation. What they mean is that we must strive to be self-sufficient—and that the extent to which we have lived up to this responsibility determines how willing the collectivity should be to help us in an hour of need. This conditionality of the state’s concern for its citizens stands at the core of the notion of responsibility-as-accountability.
But while the change to what we take responsibility to entail has been particularly striking in the context of political rhetoric, this isn’t just a story of the wider population failing to follow the intellectual consensus established among specialists (as Samuel Scheffler, among others, has argued).3 Nor is it a story about a broad consensus about responsibility giving way to a cacophony of voices in a so-called age of fracture (as Daniel Rodgers, among others, has maintained).4 On the contrary, the intellectual roots of this transformation go surprisingly deep. As a result of this transformation, we are approaching something like a new consensus.
A comprehensive account of the intellectual history of the concept of responsibility over the past half century, and the many ways in which this concept is anchored in a wider change of the intellectual and academic climate, would require a whole book in its own right. So, in lieu of a full intellectual history, I wish to accomplish a rather more modest task in this chapter: to show how some of the roots of the new paradigm of responsibility-as-accountability lie in a changing intellectual consensus in a number of important academic disciplines, including philosophy and the social sciences.

Politics

During the Cold War, mainstream political rhetoric across the West focused on freedom: this was the cherished value that, so politicians in North America and Western Europe assured their peoples, hung in the balance in the grand clash between the free world and the Soviet bloc. But if the incessant invocation of freedom was, in some ways, directed at a world audience—a way of winning favor not only with the people languishing behind the Iron Curtain but also with the populations of countries whose ultimate allegiance between East and West had not yet been definitively settled—it was also designed for home consumption. Leaders were perennially preparing their own citizens for the necessity of sacrifice, immediate or lurking in an uncertain future. And so the high language of freedom of which they made such frequent use had a distinctly moralistic hue: it was social rather than individual; in a way, it recalled Niccolò Machiavelli’s warning—sounded at a time when a very different set of self-governing republics faced a very different kind of autocratic threat—that liberty could only be preserved if the citizens of free states lived up to their collective responsibilities.5
This feature of public rhetoric was particularly marked in American political discourse. As Daniel T. Rodgers emphasizes in his analysis of the presidential rhetoric of the Cold War era in the Age of Fracture, there was a close connection between the language of freedom and the notion that each citizen had substantive responsibilities toward others and the state:
In the generation after 1945, the assumptions that saturated the public talk of presidents were the terms of the Cold War. In language and setting, a sense of historically clashing structures dominated the presidential style. Urgency and obligation were its hallmarks. The Cold War political style clothed the events of the moment in high seriousness; it bound them into a drama of global struggle; it drew leaders and nations into tight and urgent relationships.… Freedom was at the center of Cold War political rhetoric, but within these urgent contexts, freedom was inescapably social and public. That was what John Kennedy meant in urging the nation “to seize the burden and the glory of freedom.” That was what Barry Goldwater’s speechwriters meant in 1964 in ringing their changes on the word: “Freedom! Freedom—made orderly … Freedom—balanced so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.” To act freely within these terms was to act not alone but within a larger fabric of relationships, purposes, obligations, and responsibilities.6
Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between the “positive liberty” supposedly central to communism and the “negative liberty” supposedly central to the self-conception of liberal states.7 So it is all the more striking that, for much of the Cold War, the language of freedom revolved as much around burden as it did around the lack of interference with the actions of an individual. In the West as well as in the East, freedom and responsibility remained closely linked. But just as the concept of freedom invoked by American presidents had a particular hue, so, correspondingly, did the concept of responsibility. They were talking not about the kind of personal responsibility so prominent in today’s speeches, but rather about a kind of responsibility that now seems impossibly demanding: the responsibility to contribute to the well-being of the whole. In other words, they were holding panegyrics on a conception of responsibility-as-duty, which emphasized our duties to help others and contribute to a larger whole, rather than on a conception of responsibility-as-accountability, which limits our duties to providing for ourselves.
This understanding of responsibility remained prominent even in the early 1980s. “If there was a key word in Thatcher’s public speech,” Rodgers writes, “it was ‘responsibility.’ She quoted not the radical Tom Paine but Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of striving, burden-bearing, imperial England. ‘What I am working for is a free and responsible society,’ Thatcher urged.”8 Similarly, the speeches of Ronald Reagan at first continued to draw on the standard repertoire—standard not only in the utterances of other public figures, but also in Reagan’s own speeches over two decades of public service—about each American’s duty to the collectivity. “Freedom,” Reagan warned in the accustomed style, “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”9
But as Reagan’s presidency set out to define its own rhetorical style, the occasions when he spoke about the “responsibilities of freedom … grew rapidly fewer.”10 Over the following years, duty, obligation, and danger gradually bled out of Reagan’s speeches; in its place arrived individual freedom, opportunity, and the promise of the future. The more important the occasion, the more Reagan invoked the language of dreams: as he put the point in the address to Congress that announced his radical tax and budget proposals, the launch of the Columbia space shuttle had “started us dreaming again”; dreaming is “what makes us, as Americans, different”; indeed, even the American republic itself “is a dream.”11 The contrast to the language of duty that had once been so prominent could hardly have been starker: “[a]bdicating the high presidential style,” Rodgers summarizes, Reagan “let mountains of responsibility roll off his and his listeners’ shoulders.”12
As in so many other realms, Reagan’s rhetorical model was widely copied. Learning from his success, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, too, preferred to talk in the hopeful tones of dreams and aspirations rather than in the admonishing register of duty and danger. Barack Obama, meanwhile, staked his pitch to the American people in the same cadence even before he formally entered politics: the memoir that first propelled him to prominence was called Dreams from My Father.
Since Rodgers is primarily interested in the demise of an older consensus, he portrays the transformation that began with Reagan as a wholesale shift away from responsibility. But this is too simple. In fact, the word responsibility continued to be highly prominent in the speeches of the post-Reagan era—it just came to have very different connotations.
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous denial that there is such a thing as society was an early sign of that shift. But as the last half-sentence, which is rarely quoted, indicates, it still coupled the exhortation for each of us to take responsibility for ourselves with an implicit demand that we also take responsibility for others:
There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us is prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.13
Thatcher’s successors at the helm of the British Conservative Party are usually thought to have taken a less strident stance. In particular, they have rejected her infamous denial that there is such a thing as society, instead emphasizing the need for what they call a “Big Society.”14 But at the same time, the centrality of the notion of responsibility-as-accountability, as well as its punitive hue, have only become more explicit in their own justifications for cuts to the welfare state. David Cameron, for example, wrote in the pages of the Guardian “that many of today’s big issues come down to questions of responsibility. In the past, politicians have shied away from these questions, for fear of seeming judgmental. But we’re never going to create a stronger, fairer society unless we address them.”15 George Osborne, when he served as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, duly drove the concrete implications for welfare policy home in a speech to the Conservative Party conference:
Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? … We modern Conservatives represent all those who aspire, all who work, save and hope, all who feel a responsibility to put in, not just take out.16
If talk of responsibility has long since become a central rhetorical feature of the right-wing justification for cuts to the welfare state, it has, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, also become increasingly central to the rhetorical strategy of center-left politicians. Giving up their traditional preference for structural explanations, they too have begun to focus on the individual and his or her responsibilities. A recognition that the modern Left needed to adopt the rhetoric of responsibility for itself was, for example, a crucial component of New Labour’s “Third Way,” a point Tony Blair did not tire of emphasizing:
In welfare, for too long, the right had let social division and chronic unemployment grow; the left argued for rights but were weak on responsibilities. We believe passionately in giving people the chance to get off benefit and into work. We have done it for 1¼ million. But there are hundreds of thousands more who could work, given the chance. It’s right for them, for the country, for society. But with the chance comes a responsibility on the individual—to take the chance, to make something of their lives and use their ability and potential to the full.17
Nor is this an exclusively Anglo-Saxon story. The invocation of various linguistic equivalents of responsibility has played an increasingly important role in the political discourse of most countries on the European continent as well. German and Austrian politicians n...