re-enchanting the social world

I remember being invited to a think tank seminar a few years ago on the topic of how to help "children at risk of becoming criminals". There is a lot immediately wrong with this idea, and the Minority Report-style hint of pre-crime that it carries. As Michael Power argues in Organized Uncertainty, there was an explosion of risk analysis and management in the mid-1990s, that seems to have been especially seductive and widespread in Britain. Every eventuality is to be conceived in advance, then statistically analysed for its probability, and factored into a model. But when this is applied to the moral intentions of mentally healthy human beings, then some sort of line has been crossed. Economic modelling becomes a more important tool of government than law. So the question has to be asked - who lost respect for the sovereignty of law first, was it the hoodies, or was it the wonks?

Power's identification of the mid-1990s as the critical period is interesting. It coincides with the panic that followed the 1993 killing of James Bulger, which led quite directly to Britain investing billions of pounds in CCTV, making us the most watched people in the world. The tabloids insisted that Bulger's ten-year-old murderers were 'evil', as 'criminality' didn't seem an adequate category, nor prison an adequate penalty. Against such biblical ravings, political elites offered a radically secular alternative, namely to treat the event as something that could have been foreseen and managed, through better audit, surveillance and risk assessment. When children behave in a seemingly nihilistic fashion, the stark policy choice becomes between theocracy and technocracy. Liberals have to opt for the latter.

Philosophically, however, this involves a complete fissure between 'political metaphysics' (ideas of justice, the good, debt to society) and 'political physics' (measures of risk, behaviour, deviance, discipline). In a sense, the function of law is to marry the two together, by seeming both transcendent and tangible at the same time. Law has both a sacred element (it is the law, not just a rule) and a technical element, lending itself to expert analysis and implementation. But when children behave violently and anarchically, somehow this seems to break in two. Because we don't really know how to hold children accountable for their actions, we either want to see the devil at work, or some manifestation of risk. There is no fully formed moral self available to regulate, and so the social world splits in two.

Many of the most exciting developments in economic sociology at the moment are those which follow Boltanski and Thevenot's ground-breaking 1991 book On Justification (a new special issue and edited collection both expand on this) and they relate directly to this question of how to re-unite scientific and moral approaches to society. The objective of this field, following Durkheim (and to a lesser extent, Weber), is to uncover the moral and sacred concepts that have been buried within our secularised, rationalised society. Every split that social scientists (especially economists) are taught, between 'efficiency' and 'equity', 'value' and 'values', objectivity and ethics, is treated with suspicion. Fully secular, rationalised and 'objective' views of society seek to eliminate more romantic or metaphysical ideas of institutions and rules, but never fully succeed. 'Political metaphysics' leaves its trace.

Hence Boltanski and Thevenot follow Hirschman's analysis of market liberalism, as dependent on a particular moral view of market actors, reuniting Smith's Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments in the process. Alain Desrosieres asks why certain forms of behaviour (such as suicide or unemployment) became objects of statistical analysis, and not others. Durkheim analyses secular legal contract as derivative of religious oaths. David Stark and Jens Beckert focus on what things are worth and how they are judged, as constitutive elements in how they become priced. From these perspectives, we are all constantly exercising intrinsic forms of judgement and moral evaluation, in the way we apply apparently secular, amoral techniques. Even concepts of risk and efficiency have moral assumptions buried within them somewhere. We just forget this and deny this, and insist that society can run like a giant econometric model.

The effort to empty social and economic institutions of their moral and metaphysical dimensions is often seen as a hallmark of modernity. The alternative is viewed as mysticism, romanticism or postmodernism. But once this emptying out succeeds, then we realise we're in very serious trouble indeed. When market prices become merely technical figures on a screen, and no longer representative of something that is valued, then markets blow up. When a market exchange becomes a game to be won, rather than something founded on mutual respect (as Adam Smith insisted) then it becomes a tool of exploitation. And when law becomes just another technique with which to 'intervene' in behaviour, to tweak incentives, and reduce risk, then it is no surprise if it becomes broken without any sense of shame. The law then possesses no more metaphysical or ethical authority than a speed-camera, though is far less effective than a speed camera at actually constraining choices, seeing as law exists partly as an idea. I discuss this economistic view of law in this journal article.

There is a common intellectual and political challenge today, of trying to re-combine the technical and the ethical, as a unity (see The Romantic Economist for a fascinating example of this). The problem with communitarianism, like 'corporate social responsibility', was that it only achieved political influence once the hard political business of technocracy had been taken care of. Once markets were efficient, risks had been managed, security been achieved, then religious faith and warm beer were ushered in, as ways of softening the harsher corners of managerial capitalism. What about morality in the market, in corporate governance, in the exercise of surveillance and policing?

Institutions, as pragmatists recognise, are basically bundles of rituals. Their value lies not only in their efficiency (often, not even in their efficiency), but in the fact that they endure over time, make life meaningful, by making it faintly predictable. Even the "hooded masses yearning to be free", as they shall henceforth be known, inhabit institutions, with rituals and authorities, just fiercely localised, private ones, with very little overlap with 'public' institutions. A youth worker or anthropologist would discover that they have their taboos and sacred objects, but operating in highly encrypted codes, designed to exclude. 'Society' can scarcely allow such rituals to remain a law unto themselves, but nor can it be run as if rituals are entirely irrational and unncessary. Law itself is a ritual.

The problem is, that if their 'behaviour' becomes just another risk to be managed, and law just another scientific technique with which to do so, can we really be all that surprised if they start to view theft as an economic preference, with a small and calculable risk of punishment attached to it. Our government now calculates the risk of a given child becoming involved in crime, but if the child also calculates the risk to themselves, and where the crime is repeated, low level and insurable, then they may conclude that it is not prohibitively high.

Comments

[Dick Pountain]

First class analysis Will. I believe the only way forward for any sort of "Left" critique is along exactly such lines - an analysis incorporating elements from Weber and Veblen (Debord and Christopher Lasch even) that puts back that moral/emotional content into social criticism which crude Marxism and neo-liberalism have both leached out. Speaking of Boltanski at al, have you read "Cool Capitalism" by Jim McGuigan - worth a scan.

[Turkle]

Thanks for another fantastic article. I love this blog.

I just wanted to mention that Foucault's later work on governmentality and neoliberalism is foundational to understanding the relationship between abstract technocracy and its hidden moral assumptions and coercions.

I have perhaps too many economist friends. They are utterly mystified, and more than a little offended, when one points out the hidden (and often reprehensible) moral claims hidden in their analyses.

[pat kane]

Having just read through Jesse Norman's Big Society treatise, I am fascinated by what seems like an intellectual convergence, from around the political spectrum, towards what he calls a 'theory of institutions'. I just watched Inside Job, which shows how financial institutions were given the regulatory room to act in knowingly destructive and sometimes explicitly criminal ways - risk management with almost no constraints. But you reel away from the movie wondering exactly where politician-regulators would get the resources to exercise "morality in the market", if the political classes are so riddled by collusion (or starry-eyed enchantment) with the titans of neo-liberalism. Maybe (as your Smith reference indicates) there needs to be a revival of political/moral economy thinking, overturning the business school consensus so mercilessly skewered by Inside Job - Yochai Benkler's new book http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Leviathan-Cooperation-Triumphs-Self-Interest/dp/0385525761 seems like a new populist summary of all that. But again, who are the organised advocates of that remoralised economics (other than the expected nexus of Labour Party/Labour movement)? And isn't the problem of a renewed lawfulness very acute with the young rioters and the looting opportunists that followed them, identifying the police as almost fictional characters ("the Feds")? I keep hoping that some kind of street-level community autonomism will emerge - a cross between Militant and Transition Towns - that will begin to actually break the enchantments of lifestyle consumerism, and substitute the making and construction of the fabric of community-life instead. I guess this is also "institution-forging". But it's hard to see what kind of Left-Green activism could bring it about.