The Modern State Subverted

Risk and the Deconstruction of Solidarity

Giuseppe Di Palma

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781907301919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Until recently, liberalism was, according to Karl Polanyi, embedded within civil society, working closely with a democratic state intent on addressing, in solidarity, the social risks associated with modern capitalism. Modern relations between society and the state. Today's neoliberalism is, to the contrary, a subversion of liberal embeddedness. It is the utopia of market fundamentalism intent, by the power of its perversity narrative of the past, on replacing socially embedded market and government with adispiriting, socially isolating Malthusian project.have been, at best, ones of shared language and goals rather than necessary conflict. Already under the polizeistaat, absolutist rulers took, in their own way, the care of their population as central to their rule. The welfare state was only the most innovative embodiment of such collective concerns.

Chapter One

The State and Civil Society: Revisiting the Past, Assessing the Present

From absolutism to liberalism and from liberalism to mass democracy, the modern Western state has been characterised by a special relation of concern and exchange with its people, at first as its subjects and eventually as citizens and members of civil society. In turn, the operation of modern civil society has been marked by a progressively active engagement with the state. Normative studies of the relations between government and society have a long tradition, especially strong in the second postwar period. More recently, studying the so-called quality of democracy, in order to strengthen it, has become a cottage industry, recruiting a large number of scholars. Quality democracies are unquestionably democracies formally and de facto guaranteeing freedom, the rule of law, political participation, political equality, competition, vertical and horizontal accountability, and responsiveness (Diamond and Morlino 2004).¹ Unquestionably, all of these qualities have to do with two aspects of the government-society pairing. They have to do with the proper set-up of each, and with the proper set-up of their relations. Without a doubt, in sum, proper government, proper society and proper relations have been at the core of what makes a democracy authentic. So much for norms and aspirations. Who would not agree? But there is a complication. Each of these norms and aspirations is broadly stated and therefore lends itself to different interpretations. Further, there is an unprecedented difference in the way in which norms were interpreted until the close of the last century, and the way they are understood today by a number of national and international systems of governance. This essay is interested in the impact of these differences upon present national democracies. Historically, how did matters stand, in norms and aspirations, and in practice? And how do they stand today?

I begin with the present day; I will then go back to the past. Speaking of proper government, proper society, and proper relations as understood today and practiced in the West, I wish to recall the often quoted statements which two major democratic leaders issued toward the closing of the last century. In 1981, in his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared, ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. On September 23rd, 1987, the British magazine Woman’s Own, in an interview with Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister since 1979, reported the following statement by the prime minister, ‘[People] are casting their problem on society. And you know what, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families […] and people must look to themselves first’. Thatcher repeated the statement almost verbatim in her speech at her party’s annual conference of the same year. Placed side by side, the two statements by Reagan and Thatcher converge in impeaching democratic government, civil society and their close, long-standing interaction as understood and operating since their very inception. They offer a completely different, deconstructing perspective on what had been considered and practiced as proper in all three aspects. Reagan’s and Thatcher’s were emphatically resonant statements, but uttered by two world political leaders they were more than mere rhetoric. In fact, they announced the final entrance of so-called neoliberalism in the life of advanced democratic states and their citizens. As a set of beliefs – anthropological, social and political as much as economic – neoliberalism goes back to the immediate postwar period. As practiced by international organisations, in programmes of international assistance and in the restructuring of dependent and peripheral states, neoliberalism became operative sometime before the 1980s. But it is only in the last thirty years or so that neoliberalism has come to display the full range of its ambitions and achievements: its pervasively ‘creative destruction’ of the politics and collective life of advanced democracies.

Certainly, the paths to neoliberalism have not been uniform, sequential and ordained; its geographical development has been uneven; different traces and combinations of it are found in different countries, in domestic and global organisations. An unmitigated cogent display of its achievements and ambitions is found among Western democracies, and more so in the United States than in the UK. Hence, this essay will devote progressive attention to the United States as an exemplary case of what is at stake. The essay does not study the history and global causes of neoliberalism. Rather, it wishes to observe its operation, its capacity for destructive creation, and the construction of its appeal. As to the external causes of neoliberalism, I limit myself to the observation that neoliberalism, not just as a doctrine but more importantly as an active political movement and a system of governance, developed from a concerted reaction to the objective crisis of advanced global and financial capitalism of the 1970s.² With the help of David Harvey (2005), who offers a synthetic but well-documented analysis of the earlier developments in the global politics of neoliberalism, I buttress the observation with a ‘history in time’ remark. The stagflation of the 1970s came at the end of a half-century stretch during which, in the United States, the income of common people grew, while the share controlled by the highest earners fell and remained restrained after the war and the economic expansions that followed it. Harvey comments,

While growth was strong, this restraint seemed not to matter. To have a stable share of an increasing pie is one thing. But when growth collapsed in the 1970s […] then upper classes everywhere felt threatened […] [I]n the 1970s [the control of wealth by the top 1 per cent] plunged precipitously […] The upper classes had to move decisively. […] (Harvey 2005: 15)

And move they did; reversing, with the decisive assistance of developing neoliberal policies, their decline. Blyth (2002) offers in this regard a comparative analysis of the 1930s’ and 1970s’ great transformations and the contrasting interests (labour vs business) they respectively mobilised and served.

But the unfolding of neoliberalism following the 1970s came, more significantly, from the construction of powerful alternative ideas pushing to replace the Fordist consensus with a new narrative. It is to this narrative aspect, and to its intellectual pedigree, that I will devote special attention throughout, because narratives can act, and did act in the case of neoliberalism, as performative agencies; they can fulfil their task by the compulsion of their declaratory display. Pierre Bourdieu announces the neoliberal feat as follows,

What if [neoliberalism] were, in reality, only the implementation of a utopia […], thus converted into a political programme, but a utopia which, with the aid of the economic theory to which it subscribes, manages to see itself as the scientific description of reality. (Bourdieu 1998: 94)

Utopia in epistemological garb turns itself axiomatically into ontology, and programme.

I stated that neoliberalism’s notable achievements and its still unrequited agenda are intentionally and formidably destructive. They are also ambitiously creative; but creative of what, exactly? Neoliberalism, so-called by its intellectual founders for its alleged roots in neoclassical economics, is not only an economic doctrine for the purposes of running an economy, it is at the same time, and above all, a way of governing a country and a way for upright citizens (Thatcher’s statement) to conduct themselves. As an economic doctrine, it borrows from monetarism, public choice and supply-side. In theory and in practice, economic neoliberalism pursues a free-market fundamentalism. But its pursuit, when convincingly attended to, has a range that goes well beyond the free exchange of material goods and services. It embraces a vast spectrum of political and societal conducts; it embraces their operations and their operators. It involves enclosing much of human action (I choose the verb on purpose) within the logic of market choices; it involves redefining within that logic what makes human operations and operators proper and natural. In human affairs, market-like competitive choices are proper, responsible and ultimately liberating. Is this not what modernity is all about? And is neoliberalism not a return to the roots of modernity? Or is it?

To show how revolutionary neoliberalism has been in reshuffling and indeed deconstructing the relations between state and civil society, I will revisit the ways in which we, political scientists, have variously theorised and tested those relations since the postwar growth of our discipline. In the process, I will offer my own reading of those theorisations and how neoliberal norms and practices overtook them. World War II marked the defeat of Fascism but also the expansion of Communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. In answer to the painful memories and the lingering realities of assorted Twentieth Century dictatorships, postwar students of democracy turned their main attention to the empirical-theoretical assessment of the conditions favouring the development and consolidation of democracy. They stressed the overlapping pluralism of society and the autonomy and diversity of its various social and economic components as the two necessary conditions for democracy. Whether what was necessary was also sufficient received comparatively less attention. Testing the conditions of democracy relied especially on behavioural, cultural-attitudinal, interest group and structural-functionalist approaches. These approaches soon came to dominate the field of political science in general. The approaches and their claims differed in many ways; yet, from their different perspectives, they all converged on the preeminent democratic importance of richly articulated civil societies. Civil society was conceived not as a congeries of separate individuals and their kin (Thatcher) but as an interactive set of primary and secondary formations freely attending to their own pursuits; hence, also capable of placing themselves as a relevant public sphere vis-à-vis government. From this perspective, the state and its institutions appeared as a sort of transmission belt or an other-directed black box. It was sufficient to study what society transferred to the box in order to know what would come out of it. Presumably, to study what went on within the box did not add much knowledge to democratic theory.³ Or, at best, attention to government institutions was limited to their function, in a sequential division of labour, as aggregators of the demands that the public sphere articulated. Aggregation was itself mainly conceived and documented as the task of political parties, themselves construed as a bridge between politics and society. It is no coincidence that, among the rules of the democratic game, electoral laws became a flourishing field of studies in political science.

Thus, with one interval which I discuss later, special attention to civil society has been a constant of empirical democratic theory since World War II. However, while in the first years after the war, scholars tended to focus on documenting how the autonomy of civil society was contributing to the success of postwar democratic governments, following the fall of right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s, and more so the fall of Communism in 1989, civil society attracted attention for its role as a censor and antagonist of distant unresponsive and arrogant governments. The change of emphasis is in part explained by the peaceful role that civil societies decisively played in the fall of the remaining European dictatorships; a peaceful role they did not play in the military defeat of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Successful antagonism toward oppressive governments helped lifting civil society from a necessary condition, a component, of democratic government to the Lockean embodiment, spontaneous, innovative and honest, of democracy itself. The new perspective found a receptive echo in the West, where distrust of governing institutions and professional politicians, often spurred on by the cultural upheavals that began in the late 1960s, was already spreading (and even today shows no indication of abating). To anticipate, suspicion of democratic governments fits comfortably, as we will see, with neoliberalism’s populist evangelisations.

Did the shifting of attention from a politically trusting to a suspicious civil society make a difference for democratic analysts? And if it did, what did the difference consist in? For some analysts, an autonomous civil society, while necessary for democracy, is compatible with trust as well as with Lockean distancing from government. For others, as in Robert Putnam’s analysis of declining social capital in the United States (1995), a decline in the richness of an interactive civil society (‘bowling alone’) went together, without fully explaining it, with falling trust. For yet others – and I place myself in this category – the emphasis on civil society as a necessary and sufficient democratic condition appeared overplayed and reductivist. After all, contrary to many analyses of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, German civil society was lively, articulate and unquestionably outspoken. Theories stressing civil society were, in effect, incomplete. They were incomplete or inattentive when, as in postwar functional theories, they placed greater stress, for analytical but also civic-political reasons, on the stabilising functional role of overlapping social pluralism than on the dysfunctions of internal social conflicts. Dysfunctions became, by deduction, nothing more than the destabilising flipside of functional equilibrium. Theories were incomplete when – as for instance in the cases of William Kornhauser (1959) and Hannah Arendt (1958: 315–23) – they explained why social conflict ushered democratic collapse by arguing deductively: Weimar was a mass society, and in a mass society social conflict is dysfunctional. They were incomplete when treating government as a transmission belt and overlooking its possible role in triggering popular discontent.

On the last point, in the 1980s there was finally a revival of attention to government and state institutions (the coined phrase called for ‘bringing the state back in’), spurred on by, and in turn spurring, a decline of the behavioural paradigm (Evans et al. 1985). After all, the study of institutions, administrations and public legal systems went way back to the origins of political science as a discipline. The revival offered an opportunity to look anew to the state as a relatively independent resourceful agent, called to insure, together with civil society, the legitimate operation of democracy. The revival, however, suffered from a problem of timing. Renewed attention to the state came on the heels of the increasing distrust of government and professional politicians, felt not only by the public but also in intellectual and political circles. The object of distrust was not generic. Fed most forcefully and successfully by emerging neoliberalism, distrust specifically impeached the model of twentieth century mass democracy, in the operation of which civil society and government institutions had progressively converged during a long stretch of that century. Hence, impeachment placed the practitioners and advocates of a more government-centred model on the defensive. The critics of the model had now set the ground and terms of discourse.

What was the model concretely about? What did civil society and government converge on and share? What they shared is best revealed not so much by recourse to postwar empirical democratic theories as by recourse to much earlier turn-of-the-century macro-sociological theories of modernity, modernisation and the modern state. They had offered a scenario of government and civil society under modernity that still allows us to make, in my view, better sense of the way fully developed democracies eventually came to operate. Modernity speaks the language of formal rationality, and formal rationality is what government and civil society came to share. Placed within rationality, the autonomy of civil society is a resource against subordination. However, other than that, autonomy does not declare its uses. It allows us to confront government, but confrontation with public institutions is not the rule. Elections, political parties, interest groups, labour unions and cooperatives, media, civil political and social rights, are not in themselves tools and arenas designed for antagonism. In sum, to stress the unquestionable autonomy of those who are governed from those who govern them, and vice versa, may not be the best way to capture the actual relations the two entertained during a large part of the past century. In Max Weber’s disenchanted analysis, the modern state and its bureaucratic apparatus was only one of the sites within which the iron logic of modernity asserted itself. It was the most striking, resistant, wilful embodiment of formal rationality as the final architecture of modernity. But beyond the state and partially without its assistance, modernity also moulded, conditioned and, in fact, ordered the individual as well as the collective, the private as well as the public, society as well as the state. Modernity and rationality reveal the common context within which state and society, each within their role and with their own resources, each with its own sense of institutional appropriateness (March and Olsen 1995, especially pp. 154–56), came to interact, communicate and, especially in the postwar era, sustain each other. Jürgen Habermas (1991) captured the place of civil society in the operation of this pairing in his concept of Öffentlichkeit (Public Sphere). The public sphere, as a historical premise for the political formation of liberal and liberal-democratic government, would prove itself the ‘institutional hinge between state and society’ (Gianfranco Poggi, personal communication).

I spoke metaphorically of formal rationality as the architecture of modernity, embracing state and society. Michel Foucault, closing his 1978–9 lectures at the Collège de France, takes that architecture back to the times of Machiavelli, when

one no longer tries to peg government to the truth; one tries to peg government to rationality […] It [becomes eventually][…] a matter of modelling government on the rationality of those who are governed […] as subjects of interest in the more general sense […] [T]he rationality of the governed must serve as the regulating principle for the rationality of government. (Foucault 2008: 311–12)

It could be said that, in so writing, Foucault goes beyond Weber. To say the least, government and society seem to be placed together as prime movers in defining the criterion for proper behaviour under modernity. In the course of this essay, I will return extensively to Foucault. In a nutshell and to anticipate, Foucault’s accent on the pervasiveness of modern rationality is central to what he calls the art of government, or also gouvernementalité; it is central to the disciplined conducts, in Foucault’s terminology, of homo oeconomicus and his government. Together with Weber, the French scholar offers us a convincing narrative of how state and society converged in the conduct of government. That convergence is now challenged by the practices and the narrative of neoliberalism and neoliberal governments. Weber and Foucault assist us in unravelling the nature of the challenge. The challenged convergence was predicated on the reciprocity of conducts and embodied in what I shall call the government of the social with (that is, jointly with) the social. It implies a shared Foucauldian discipline. Because the discipline is collective and reciprocal, neoliberalism takes it to be a source of dependency. Neoliberalism proposes to subvert it by replacing it with another discipline - presumably a liberating one because under it the individual initiates and is solely responsible for his own behaviour and choices; he carries, alone, the burden of their consequences. It follows that, in neoliberal preaching, government is an odious necessity to abstain from as much as possible (but neoliberal governance, as we shall see, cannot and does not practice abstinence, quite the contrary). It also follows that society as formulator and carrier of collectively relevant commitment is like government considered a hindrance to individually free agency.

State-sponsored social welfare is the first obvious target of neoliberal attack, as it is both financially unsustainable and individually degrading. ‘Welfa...