Welfare, Right and the State

A Framework for Thinking

David P. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415771993
• eBook ISBN: 9781134002764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book develops a creative theoretical framework for understanding the welfare state: the theory of the state and the idea of welfare connected to autonomy.

Written by a well-known expert of political economy and welfare, it explores the nature of welfare and connects welfare not to basic needs, but to what Levine refers to as the capacity to lead the self-made life, considering different ways of grounding the claim that providing for the welfare of citizens might be considered a duty of the state.

Among the ideas explored are:

• shared membership in a community
• rights
• compassion
• and security.

Welfare, Right and the State will be of interest to academics and advanced students working in the field of social administration, sociology, political science, economics, philosophy, international studies and social work.

1 Introduction

In this book, I explore the question: What kinds of institutions are best suited to securing welfare and how should they be involved in doing so? Institutions involved with welfare may be public or private, though the distinction between the two will not be as easily drawn as it might at first appear. Markets are settings for private transactions and private provision of welfare, but they are also publicly instituted and can be made part of public welfare provision. The family is the setting for private life, but this does not exclude public involvement and regulation, for example in the interests of protecting the welfare of children. Public involvement with welfare need not stand as an alternative to the use of markets. When public institutions provide or subsidize insurance for those unable to afford insurance offered by private enterprises or for those whom private enterprises simply refuse to insure, they facilitate the use of markets in the acquisition of services, but do not replace markets. Public institutions may contract with private organizations to provide welfare services. And the state may regulate private industry in a manner designed to assure that it will do a better job of securing welfare.

The close relationship between public and private does not mean that no distinction can or should be drawn or that the distinctions we draw are of no importance. Trends in theory and practice that treat the end of government as achieving market-like outcomes where markets fail incorporate a minimal distinction between public and private, one that, I would argue, serves us poorly. This is not, however, because they subsume institutions under a single broad ideal, but because they draw no distinctions in the form that ideal takes and the way it applies in the different spheres. What I will argue here is that state and market, which are the institutions with which I am mainly concerned, should be understood to embody the same ideal though in importantly different forms. I will argue that this shared ideal is the ideal of self-determination and that the distinction between public and private expresses the distinction between conceiving that ideal as a potential or possibility considered in abstraction from its particular form on one side and as an actual shape of life on the other. The primary concern of public life and public institutions is securing the potential and opportunity for a uniquely individual life; the primary work of the private world is to facilitate the translation of that potential into a particular and personal way of living. The distinction between potential and its realization in a particular shape of life is also the distinction between what is universal in living and what is particular and contingent. The potential to which I have just referred can be understood as the moment in which what we do and how we live are not yet determined. This moment of indeterminacy is the moment of freedom.

The idea of a way of living yet to be determined distinguishes the modern welfare ideal from an older ideal linked to a notion of subsistence and of government as a surrogate for the original welfare institution: the family. The older welfare ideal applies in a world where membership in a group or community is the essential element in well-being and, thus, where identity and way of life are already determined by custom and tradition. The newer welfare ideal is appropriate to a world where the group no longer plays this role, and welfare no longer refers to the predetermined way of life of a member but to the way of living outside the group as a separate individual. Central to the notion of the individual life lived outside the group is the shaping of an individual identity different from the group identity shared by its members. Welfare in this context refers to the capacity and opportunity for the individual to determine how he or she will live.

When our particular way of life develops out of and in this sense expresses or contains the universal moment (the moment of indeterminacy, potential, or opportunity), it can be said to realize freedom. The simplest model we have for this development of the particular out of the universal is the model of choosing. Choosing is important only to the extent that it represents one modality of the transition from universal to particular. But choosing is only the most superficial form of the transition, and sometimes it is not even that. When we choose we may or may not be in the process of making our freedom concrete as a particular way of life, and the mere behavior we interpret as choice may or may not be an expression of freedom. I argue that there is little to gain and much to lose by moving too quickly to the matter of choice and toward ideals of welfare that make the act of choosing its central feature. Theories of welfare as choice, no matter how loudly they proclaim their adherence to an ideal of freedom, fail, I think, precisely because they lack any coherent and meaningful idea of freedom, or, in the language I will use here, of right as freedom. Having no real concept of freedom, they are unable to determine when choice expresses freedom and when it does not, which, I think, is the essential matter.

Much depends, of course, on what we mean by freedom. One important limitation of the choice-centered conception of freedom is that it limits the individual to selecting among opportunities already determined for him, which eliminates the creative element in the subjective orientation toward the world; it leaves out of account what Erik Erikson refers to as the “freedom of opportunities yet undetermined” (1964: 161–2). This does not mean that making choices has nothing to do with freedom, but only that more than the availability of choices must be present for freedom to become meaningful. A second important limitation of the choice-centered conception is that we can make choices that do or do not express freedom, which is only possible if freedom and choosing are not taken to be synonymous. In the following, I will treat freedom not as choice but as an orientation toward the world that makes choosing possible and invests choice with a special meaning. This is the orientation toward the world in which what we do reveals the presence within us of a special capacity, which is the capacity to make what we do express an inner force variously referred to as subject, agent, or self. In brief, I will treat freedom as the condition of acting on this internal or self-determination.

Our ability to act on an inner or self-determination is simply the other side of the idea of a potential or moment of indeterminacy in conduct referred to above. Only when what we want and what we do are not already known to us can they become an expression of our potential to want and to do what is suitable to our selves, which is something we cannot know fully in advance. Freedom then is also the moment of discovery of the not already known, and it requires that we establish our selves as the potential to become rather than as something already fully formed. This existing as a potential is the universal moment, and it is with the security of and the opportunity to express this potential in conduct that public institutions are especially concerned. When we conceive our selves as a potential to become something not yet determined, we make our selves the locus of subjectivity and we establish living as a creative act. Doing so realizes a welfare ideal of a special kind, which I refer to here as the self-made life.

The absence in the choice-centered literature of a real concept of freedom is what makes it so hard within that framework to conceive a meaningful role for the state in securing welfare. In other words, it is not the centrality of the ideal of freedom that lends support to a minimal ideal of the state, but the weakness of the ideal of freedom that leads in that direction. The main weakness to which I have just alluded has to do with the relationship between freedom and need. In the choice-based conceptions, freedom has nothing to do with what people need (or the end toward which satisfying their need would take them), but only with the mechanism by which the means to satisfy need are pursued. Only, however, when freedom is understood to shape what and how we need, and thus the end gained by need satisfaction can we begin to see how securing welfare cannot be left to the needy individual by him or herself or even to the system of needy individuals left to its own devices.

Some students of the welfare state have sought to resolve the problem of the relation between freedom and need by formulating a universal need for autonomy or for the material requirements for autonomy, or for the capacities needed to be autonomous. Arguments along these lines, I think, move the discussion in the right direction, but generally stop short of offering the kind of conception of the capacities and requirements, material and otherwise, needed to live the sort of life we would describe as selfdetermined. Thus, for example, some authors have advanced a strong argument that acute-enough material deprivation breeds dependence of a kind that erodes freedom by eliminating choice. Yet, it clearly does not follow, and I do not think these authors would argue that it does, that having adequate material resources makes us free. This is because, as I suggested earlier, freedom is only, in part, a matter of available options. It is also a matter of the capacity to choose in a way that expresses our freedom. This last observation raises some complicated questions, but these are not questions we can resolve by bringing into play concepts from politics and economics or from any of those disciplines concerned primarily with systems of social interaction, because these questions have rather to do with the inner life of man. It is only by turning toward this inner life that we can begin to understand the meaning of freedom as selfdetermination.

By inner life, I have in mind our psychic being and psychic experience; and it is to the concepts available for understanding that being and experience that I propose to turn in this book. Those concepts come largely from psychoanalytic theories, especially those that make the problem of agency a primary concern as is the case in psychoanalytic selfpsychology and in certain versions of psychoanalytic object-relations theory. In the following chapters, I attempt to show how these concepts can help us develop a meaningful formulation of the problem of right as freedom and of the burden that commitment to the ideal of right as freedom places on institutions.

The core concept that these theories help us to develop is the concept of the self as an enduring configuration of the inner world. That is, they enable us to conceive the self not only as a way of relating to others but as a way of being that enables us to relate to others in ways consistent with freedom. The idea of the self as a structure in this sense makes the self also an attribute that only exists because the organism bearing it has undertaken a specific development. A self in this sense is not something with which we are born or that we can gain simply because others recognize it in us, though recognition plays an important role as some students of welfare have emphasized most often implicitly, but occasionally explicitly.

If we take this ideal of the self as structure seriously, then the idea of self-determination in living takes on a new meaning since it refers to that kind of living in which something referred to as a self plays a decisive part. The term self-made life is meant to capture this ideal of self-determination in living. The point of this term is to suggest that right as freedom does not simply mean the opportunity to choose, or the availability of choice, or the possession of material resources adequate to make choice real, but also the presence of the self.

This presence of the self as the condition for freedom means that freedom cannot be constituted out of rights, and that is why I use the term right as freedom rather than freedom as rights. I have in mind to suggest that the normative ideal of modernity can be formulated as the self-made life and that establishing that it is right to lead the self-made life provides freedom with a substantial and concrete meaning, one that has been and can be instantiated in institutions. In the following, I place greater emphasis on what is right than on what are our rights so that we can escape from the idea that we can be made free by being given certain rights, however important having certain rights is to our freedom, as I have no doubt that it is.

Linking right as freedom to the self as a structure of the inner world implies that we cannot have or sustain our freedom simply because institutions are designed to recognize or even secure it. There can never be enough rights to assure that we can lead the self-made life if doing so requires us to bring to what we do capabilities that cannot be provided from outside. Saying this does not make institutions unimportant. On the contrary, without the appropriate institutions, freedom cannot be established as right and the self-made life can never be anything more than an abstract idea. Although insisting that institutions cannot assure our freedom does not make them less important, it does lead us toward a somewhat different understanding of their importance and of the meaning of a self-made life normatively compelling institutions are designed to embody. In this understanding, our capacity to lead the self-made life is always at risk not simply because institutions or those who have control over them might threaten that life, but because its development is always a matter of degree, because regression is always as real a possibility as development, and because, for each of us individually, the loss of the capacity to lead the self-made life is inevitable. This, I think, is the tragic dimension of the ideal of the self-made life; it is also a dimension to which we pay too little attention.

Indeed, much of our theorizing is intended to ignore, if not deny, the tragic dimension of freedom, which is that we cannot assure or ultimately secure it, but only hold it imperfectly for a relatively short period of time. So much of the popular rhetoric of rights and some of the scholarly rhetoric as well is caught up in the manic denial of limits to which the language of right has become almost inextricably connected. I think this has happened at considerable cost to the project of putting in place institutions consonant with the welfare ideal of modernity.

In the following, I formulate this tragic dimension in the language of impairment. Many authors have, of course, considered the questions I pose under this heading. What I think they have not done is to formulate a general notion of impairment suited to the welfare ideal I refer to as the self-made life. In other words, what we need is not simply to recognize impairment, but to have a clear understanding (1) of what is meant by impairment of the capacity to lead the self-made life, which is the kind of impairment of special concern to the normative theory of welfare and the state and (2) of the implications of impairment and of the limits that stand in the way of our overcoming it. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that impairment of the capacity to lead the self-made life is simply something we accept as we find it and that, in general, nothing can be done about it. On the contrary, it is only by giving up our manic denial of the tragic dimension that we can begin to address impairment in a realistic and effective way. Dealing with impairment in a way that does not derive from the manic denial I refer to here defines an important part of the work of the state in the area of welfare.

I will argue that the central idea shaping the work of the state so far as the matter of impairment is concerned is the idea of vulnerability. If our subjectivity were not vulnerable, the state could limit itself to oversight of what I refer to as a facilitating environment. If subjectivity could be conceived entirely as a part of our natural or physical endowment, then its vulnerability would be entirely a matter of the need for physical maturation and the inevitability of physical decline. If vulnerability were exclusively a matter of physical maturation and decline, then the “able bodied” by definition would not be vulnerable, and the most they would need from the state would be protection of their rights and oversight of the facilitating environment.

But, subjectivity is also vulnerable to internal factors not derived from the physical maturation and aging processes. Prominent among these, and the one emphasized in Chapter 2, is shame. Shame expresses the loss of our ability to make an emotional investment in, therefore to value, our selves. Shame attacks and destroys subjectivity from within, though it may gain momentum from an attack originating outside. Since factors that promote shame are factors that seek to destroy the self, when these are internalized the self becomes vulnerable in a sense more profound than any vulnerability due to physical factors or the failure of the state to secure the system of interaction. Once again, were shame entirely or even mainly a function of the deprivation of specific rights, then the state could deal with shame by securing those rights, and the conception of the state as guarantor of rights would serve to protect the individual against the vulnerability of the self and in this way make the self secure, so far as that is possible, both internally and externally. In other words, where there is no inner world, but instead only the world of interaction with others, protecting rights prevents shame and eliminates the vulnerability derived from shame. But, where there is no inner world, there is no self-experience; there is no turning inward of the kind that can make what we do an expression of our self-determination; there can be no self-made life and therefore no freedom. This means that protecting our rights cannot by itself protect us from the self-destroying power of shame.

Self-determination has no meaning where there is no inner world separate from the world of interaction with others. By protecting the separateness of this world, or securing the self-boundary, we make it possible to call on the self as the origin of action and of relating. But, we also establish the special vulnerability that I emphasize here, which is the vulnerability born of a weakness in the self. This weakness in the self is the same thing as the devaluation of the self, but it is now a devaluation not produced by interaction with others, but by our own attack on our selves. In other words, our ability to turn inward is born of our ability to substitute a selfjudgment for the judgment of others and this makes shame no longer a matter of external relations, but an enduring quality of our self-experience.

In my discussion of welfare, I consider poverty to mean impoverishment of self-experience, and I consider impoverishment of self-experience to mean the inability to invest value in the personality as a whole. I consider the more visible expressions of poverty, especially the inability to do work of a kind appropriate to full participation in society, symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself. This manner of conceiving the problem makes the question of state involvement in welfare more complex than it would be if by poverty we meant a level of income too far off the mean or the lack of access to a set of well-defined goods needed by all, or simply an expression of deprivation of rights. The problem is that my definition of welfare limits the access of institutions to it and their control over it. This does not mean that institutions have nothing to do with welfare, but only that their involvement in welfare must be considered complex and problematic.

I divide this involvement into two parts: oversight of the facilitating environment on one side and dealing with the problems faced by those unable to make use of that environment on the other. Part of the latter problem falls under the heading of social insurance. Part of the problem falls under the heading of education and other support needed for the individual to develop the capacity to make living an expression of the presence of the self. And part of the problem falls under the heading of what I refer to as stewardship for those who cannot and will not make living an expression of an inner determination and especially do the kind of work that will secure their welfare. These three parts of the problem overlap, and the particular circumstances of individuals may not clearly place them in one or another of the relations of dependence on the state indicated. The aspects of the problem outlined above distinguish different groups of persons to some degree, but only to some degree. Thus, some individuals whose work can hardly be considered to express the presence of the self in doing have little use for or dependence on government aside from its oversight of the facilitating environment.

Impairment creates a conundrum for institutions committed to the welfare ideal as the self-made life, which is the life not already determined. The greater our impairment, the more we depend on others and on institutions to determine how we will live. So far, however, as institutions are shaped according to an ideal of creative living and freedom from predetermination, they are not well suited to those unable to lead the selfmade life. This difficulty is especially apparent in the institutions of private contract that incorporate an especially strong assumption of autonomy, an assumption that does not hold to the degree that the capacity for selfdetermination has been impaired.

Impairment in the ability to lead the self-made life means impairment in the ability to link universal to particular by determining the concrete shape that the potential for creativity in living will take. This means that the organization of institutions around the distinction between universal (public) and particular (private) leaves no space for many who must nonetheless lead their lives in a world organized in that way. The more the state organizes its thinking and action around the universal moment of the ideal of the self-made life, the less it can reach out effectively to those impaired in their capacity to imagine themselves without predetermination and use that imagined moment to begin to shape a life uniquely their own. In other words, they cannot make the transition from universal to particular on their own and a public institution with its eye on the universal is ill suited to their needs.

To the degree that they instantiate the ideal of right as freedom, neither state nor market is well suited to the stewardship role required by those whose subjectivity is significantly impaired. It is then not a matter of state or market, public or private, but of establishing organizations capable of mediating between the individual and both state and market. These organizations do not stand in a relation to those dependent on them typical of either the market or the state. Their constituents relate to them neither as property owners nor as citizens. A central problem of the welfare state is to conceive this relationship and the kinds of organizations well suited to it. My intent in the following is not to offer a full treatment of this problem, but only to frame the issue in a way that suggests how a fuller treatment might be developed.

Part I

2 Welfare and the self-made life

The older argument for the welfare state

In the fourth decade of the last century, when doubts about the ability of market economies to provide for the well-being of citizens were at their height, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered a series of programs aimed at providing individuals the security that the market could not. In doing so, he summarized what we might refer to as the older argument for the welfare state.

The President begins by noting how the dangers that threaten livelihood have changed with the development of a modern industrial economy: “.. . as the Nation has developed, as invention, industry and commerce have grown more complex, the hazards of life have become more complex.” As a result of these changes, “man has discovered that his individual strength and wits” may not be sufficient to assure livelihood (Roosevelt 1938). In the older world of the family economy, those whose strength and wits failed to secure livelihood would turn to their neighbors. But now, in a modern industrial economy, this recourse is no longer available or sufficient. Because of this, “where hereto...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• References