potlatch

who will defend liberalism?

People will always round on 'liberalism' (in the European, not American, sense of the word) at times of perceived crisis. Opponents of liberalism will even seek to engineer crises in order to attack it. New Labour was blessed with one of those rare periods of human history, when military conflict is minimal and wealth seems to grow almost naturally. In response, Tony Blair and John Reid invented a fantasy of ubiquitous Arab terror, so as to advance their instinctive political assault on liberalism. This had the no-doubt-anticipated consequence of re-framing 'liberals' as a special interest group, obsessed with human rights law, magna carta, old men in grey wigs and Europe. Even the Liberal Democrats no longer want anything to do with that kind of liberalism.

That those in the executive branch of government like to hurl rocks at the judicial branch is not so surprising. Even in the US, Presidents simply have to refer to something as a 'war' (on terror, on drugs) to know that they are then virtually free from judicial interference. But it bothers me when the Left starts to beat up on liberalism. The leftwing New Statesman's editorial this week argues that "with its emphasis on abstract individualism, liberalism, the great driver of social emancipation and economic prosperity, now feels inadequate to this new age of insecurity." This repeats the line espoused by Blue Labour and Red Toryism, that both the 'social liberalism' of the 1960s and the 'economic liberalism' of the 1980s have now reached their limit, and some sort of more substantive, collectivist communitarianism is needed.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own definition of 'liberalism'. But allow me to offer my own interpretation of the term, and question what on earth the Left would be left with, if it became genuinely 'post-liberal', as for instance the think tank Demos has been recently proposing. Liberalism doesn't favour 'abstract individualism', because it doesn't want to get entangled in culture or history. What it favours is identifying a common and stable basis on which to judge people, actions, institutions and economic distributions, that is robust enough to survive inspite of cultural or historical contingency.

This is, admittedly, partly a search for principles, giving it a necessarily philosophical and discursive dimension. Certain ideas are at work, especially regarding what it means to be a human being. But this is an open philosophical or anthropological debate. 'Deontological' liberals, such as Kant and Rawls, view humans as reasoning creatures. But there are more materialist answers to this question, including those provided by Marxists, which represent human beings as productive creatures. Hayek, if he believed anything at all about humanity, probably believed that we're all equally prone to be wrong about the world. There is no reason whatsoever why liberal debates about common humanness couldn't now be entered by neuroscientists or neo-Darwinists, if they weren't so busy re-categorising details of the pope's religious affiliation or the sylvanian geography of bear's toilet habits.

But it is never only about principles. It is also about the material, technical and institutional means by which equal judgement on people is to be enacted. For neoliberals, this is some notion of price (often mutating into an audit of competitive performance). As Stuart White's fascinating article, Revolutionary Liberalism, details, liberals of the early 20th century saw worker ownership and profit-sharing as the institutional basis on which to ensure individuals could attain equality in the public and political realm. There is a long tradition of liberal socialism, now exemplified by people such as Robin Blackburn and Erik Olin Wright, who would view capitalism as the main enemy of liberalism.

There are multiple philosophical liberalisms, and even more technical or practical manifestations of liberalism. All that they essentially share is a vain Enlightenment hope, that there might be some basis on which to govern people, that does not discriminate according to contingency. Or rather, to flip that round, they are explicit about which element of contingency they are using as the basis for discrimination. For judges, it is the contingent fact that one is guilty of something. For neoliberals, it is the contingent fact of being able to pay for something. For republican liberals, it is the contingent fact of being a skilled orator. And so on. But there must be a criterion, it must be named in advance, and there must be some publicity surrounding how it is employed. That is all liberalism necessarily means.

Abandon this in favour of what? I can at least understand the catholic theological critique of liberalism, that underpins John Milbank's theological critique of modernity, Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, possibly John Cruddas's Blue Labourism, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor's communitarianism. The basis for political judgement ceases to be purely institutional and philosophical, and attains an element of divinity. Ordinary people may not understand how judgement is meted out, but they can believe that it is good nevertheless. But what do we secularists have? There are some answers to this question, and some of them are hideous.

The other question I would put to 'post-liberals' is this. Why do you automatically assume that liberalism is a watchword for elitism, technocracy and establishment, whereas post-liberalism will usher in community, organic relations and rekindled tradition? Isn't that the same lie that Karl Rove based George W Bush's political career on, whereby working class anger with judicial rule (in the US case, Roe v Wade) is channelled to facilitate a cynical extension of power by existing elites? Surely elites are often delighted to see liberalism diminished. Remove rule of law or rule of market, and elites - including technocratic ones - simply acquire new freedoms to meddle and rearrange institutions in their own interests.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses a horribly simple ethical question: do we side with Nietzsche or Aristotle? Or to put that another way, do we abandon morality altogether, or sign up to virtue ethics? MacIntyre opts for the latter. But when a choice is put this starkly, there is a dangerous tendency of people to flip from one to the other, or even dwell in both realms simultaneously. The only solution to nihilism is the church. The only freedom from moral repression is a form of hedonistic nihilism. MacIntyre's dilemma works very well for many cynical elites, who talk Aristotle, but act Nietzsche. The post-liberals are naive about politics, if they think that the rhetoric of 'faith, flag and family', as Maurice Glasman likes to put it, will actually install virtue ethics into modern public life. The abandonment of liberalism can create a polarity, in which some select substantively meaningful rituals (as Blue Labour and Red Tories hope), while others enjoy an even greater form of hedonism.

Neoliberalism, of a certain variety, is able to proceed without having much of a liberal component, other than a basic common recognition of money (but even money is now constantly propped up by the executive branch of government, via central banks). The neoliberal tradition had thrown off much of its 'liberal' heritage (such as the ordoliberals and Henry Simons) by the time it achieved its political takeover in the 1970s. The effect of the financial crisis on neoliberalism was to shed the remnants of its claim to treat all market actors equally. Today, the poor aren't even trusted with money...

I've written a couple of papers on what 'post-liberal' neoliberalism looks like, and I'm not convinced that it involves morris dancers swilling warm beer on the white cliffs of Dover. As I argued here, a version of technocratic communitarianism is now increasingly plausible, to replace technocratic liberalism. And as I argued here, a type of Schmittian market exception, in which the market is sustained only through periodic acts of extra-legal emergency measures, may be what we're left with, post-2008. These are examples of 'post-liberalism', in which the status quo is defended out of fear, but not on the basis that it serves the common good.

Maybe this is all a problem of definitions. If the issue is, how can secular, modern societies find a basis on which to sort 'good' from 'bad', then I'm sure that I would find far more common cause with a catholic communitarian like John Cruddas than with a neoliberal such as Larry Summers or a legal liberal such as Shami Chakrabarti. But why is liberalism the problem, and not, say, utilitarianism, with its brutal statistics, expert weightings and clinical interventions? Or why not defend democracy, with its specification of voice, rather than community, with its darker implications of exclusion and suppression? Somebody other than just the liberty 'lobby' needs to defend liberalism, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the secular left.

For what it's worth, I would view the present as the moment to do neoliberalism all over again, though this time with a sociologically coherent notion of what economic freedom (and domination) means, where it is likely to arise, and the types of institutions and public policies that are likely to support it. Thatcherite belief in 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurship' was never liberal in the first place, because it treated some individuals (the 'talented', the 'leaders', the 'innovators') according to a different set of standards from everybody else. That's the opposite of liberalism. Real economic liberalism would be a monumental achievement. Whether it's compatible with capitalism is another question altogether.

how to restore pricelessness

The inestimable Simon Hoggart, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Guardian, has a neat test which he applies to political rhetoric, to check whether or not it means anything: if it's impossible to imagine anyone demanding the opposite of what is being argued for, then you know it's hot air. Hence, much of what Tony Blair claimed to stand for - 'more money in your pocket, less crime on the streets, better public services' - wasn't actually a set of policies or political values at all, seeing as nobody could sensibly disagree with any of it.

I feel that the same may be true of David Cameron's 'Big Society'. It's not that the idea is too bad to be helpful, but that it's too good to be helpful. Everybody already wants to live in neighbourhoods that are thriving, where people look after each other, where the state is not relied upon. There's nothing remotely controversial about this aspiration. It's why house prices in Stoke Newington are more than double what they are a few miles east in Leyton. Of course the state would rather let us look after one another, as would we. This doesn't go any way to explaining why it is that we don't.

I was minded of this when I saw this advert for the P&G Capital Cleanup on the tube earlier:

Down the right-hand side are the logos of various household cleaning product brands and Procter and Gamble itself. In case you can't read the text, it says the following:

You know when your mum's coming round to your flat and you give the place a quick tidy? Well that's exactly what we're doing. Except our "flat" is London and our "mum" is the rest of the world coming round. So we're cleaning London in time for the London 2012 Olympic Games. But that's a big job so we're asking people like you to lend us a hand. We have litter to pick [sic], graffiti to scrub, and flowers to plant. To help London look its best go to P&GCapitalcleanup.com. Come on. Make your mum proud.

This isn't going to turn into another curmudgeonly anti-Olympics rant (read this if that's what you're after). Nor do I have any objection whatsoever to people donating their time for free to cleaning up London, which strikes me as an excellent idea, rather like having "more money in your pocket, less crime on the streets, better public services". The problem with this advert is the huge vacuum of justification at its heart. When Procter & Gamble invites ordinary members of the public to clean up a viciously unequal financialised city, where services of this nature are typically outsourced to private contractors, to prepare the ground for a vast splurge of securitised and brand-controlled two-week corporate entertainment, we might be entitled to respond to our 'mum' with a somewhat adolescent response: why the hell should I?

This response is far from inevitable, universal or praise-worthy, but it has a logic to it in this context that shouldn't be ignored. If, for example, the advert had appeared without the very prominent backing of a large corporate sponsor, or was not linked directly to an extremely complex and expensive act of megaproject management, then it might appear merely as a 'nudge' towards greater public spiritedness. I'm always rather charmed by the ads that London buses have, in which a cartoon teenager says "I won't play my music loud" next to a cartoon old woman saying "and I won't put my bag on the seat", in an effort to encourage slightly greater conviviality on public transport. But the fact that those ads are innocent of any strategic economic interests (beyond the 'consumer satisfaction' of bus users), and are simply branded with the reassuring Edwardian logo of London Transport, surely contributes to their efficacy. By contrast, the P&G Capital Cleanup is demanding uncalculated acts of generosity in pursuit of private profit. This is clean-up work that would otherwise be paid for.

The central problem of voluntary or community action in a neoliberal society is this: it is far easier to move from the realm of gift exchange to the realm of calculated exchange than it is to do the opposite. Where calculation and a calculating mindset is pushed further into the realm of informal social relationships, via audit, managerialism and social media, it becomes extremely difficult to suddenly appeal to the power of 'society' to reverse this or alleviate its malign effects. Simply arguing that it would be nice for people to act decently and public-spiritedly is not enough of a response, to a 30-year policy and management project built specifically on the claim that people can not be trusted to act decently or public-spiritedly unless kept under audit and surveillance.

This isn't to say that economisation and calculation are inevitable, irreversible or irresistable. Relationships and exchange surely can be returned to the realm of uncalculated gift-giving. But this won't come about by simply demanding that we all stop counting the costs or calculating the price, especially not in a society where cost-counting and pricing are still such dominant forces in public life. Right now, being nice does not appear to pay, either in a monetary or a non-monetary sense. To change this requires some form of strategy, which must firstly be built on a more sophisticated understanding of the problem.

The economistic fallacy, which only dates back to the late 19th century and not the whole way back to Adam Smith, is that 'social' uncalculated exchange is a derivative or even deficient variety of 'economic' calculated exchange. This assumption is present in the term 'externality', as employed by welfare economists since Pigou (1912), which treats the public as an accidental side-effect of the market, rather than vice versa. Economic anthropologists, dating back to Marcel Mauss, have challenged this very successfully, by demonstrating that gift exchange is primary, and market exchange is secondary. Georges Bataille's work on 'general' and 'restricted' economy also explores it brilliantly, starting with the recognition that all value originates in the immeasurable force of the sun. The same critique of calculated exchange has been made more recently by David Graeber in relation to credit relations.

Neo-classical economics therefore turns the world upside down, by assuming that calculation is 'normal' and that altruism is unusual. Game theory develops this problem and tests it experimentally. But eventually, as I argued in relation to the riots last summer, this inverted worldview becomes realised as a normal way to think and to interpret relationships. Once prices have been put on certain goods, they cannot simply be removed simply because it would be nice to remove them. But that seems to be the extent of the Big Society's logic.

The only alternative is to develop new practices, norms and techniques of valuation, to replace those of price. Time-banking and alternative currencies are clear examples of this. New types of credit, which are not entirely fungible (in strong contrast to credit securitisation) can be developed, in which norms of reputation, trust and shame are actively involved in how they bind people. This needn't simply be a form of conservatism, if new instruments can be invented. There is both a modernising and a conserving spirit to how something like the Big Society might actually be pursued. 

Finally, this would also require the deliberate dismantling of corrupt forms of market exchange and calculation. If prices are to be removed from certain areas of public and social life, then there must be a clear political strategy to undermine those institutions which benefit from such pricing. This includes much of the current banking system. It also includes FTSE100 companies urging us to donate our time for the benefit of their media circus and shareholders.

CRESC debate on Big Society, 6th June, Manchester

The ever-interesting CRESC is holding a debate on the Big Society, in Manchester on 6th June, which I'll be speaking at. Full programme and registration details are here. I'll probably be arguing something along these lines. Come along!

Durkheim as wonk

I recently read Suicide by Emile Durkheim (one of the founding texts of sociology) for the first time and was repeatedly struck by how much it speaks to current UK policy concerns, especially regarding 'the Big Society' and subjective wellbeing. I've written before about how The Big Society is riven by a tension between its Schumpeterian agenda (innovate our way towards socio-economic reciprocity) and its Durkheimian agenda (conserve the social ties that we have, and temper the pace of capitalism). But I hadn't realised quite how pertinent Durkheim's sociology is to current political anxieties. In the manner of an Alain de Botton-style manual for wonks, here's my How Durkheim Can Change Your Ill-Thought-Out White Paper.

Durkheim's notion of 'anomic suicide' (which he distinguishes from two other forms, namely altruistic and egoistic suicide) is built on his observation that suicide rates increase at times of economic upheaval, regardless of whether people's circumstances improve or deteriorate. High achieving individuals and intellectuals are also more likely to commit suicide, as are protestants. The problem, in all such cases, is that the individual is left without tangible, mediating institutions to limit their desire or choices, and they end up facing a problem of limitless possibilty, which is the essence of anomie:

Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. It has been claimed, indeed, that human activity naturally aspires beyond assignable limits and sets itself unattainable goals. But how can such an undetermined state be any more reconciled with the conditions of mental life than with the demands of physical life? All man's pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity. Since the distance between us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might as well have made the motions without progress from the spot. Even our glances behind and our feeling of pride at the distance covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

The policy implication here is quite clear. Telling people that they can achieve anything they want, can have anything they want if only they demand or work towards it enough, will exacerbate misery, not alleviate it. For example, the notion that hosting a global spectacle such as the Olympic Games will encourage more people to engage in prosaic acts such as going for a jog is a gross misunderstanding of how 'society' works (as the government has now accepted) and may in fact be the opposite of the truth. Where 'world class' becomes a normal benchmark of performance, the vast majority of people are - and feel themselves to be - an abject failure. Pete Sampras may not actually be infinitely better than me at tennis, but as long as he remains a symbol of what tennis means, my own sporting achievements will feel very close to zero (the same is true for those who make cultural revolution their benchmark of political achievement.)

Of course what the Seb Coes of this world also fail to appreciate is what John Kay calls 'obliquity', that aiming for an adequate performance may, inadvertently, be the best route to a winning performance. Aiming exclusively at a winning performance, meanwhile, can often end in something that isn't even adequate. Shareholder-oriented profit-maximising firms often make smaller profits than those which factor in other stakeholder interests. Equally, a nation such as Germany which invests money in sport for its own sake, not as some sort of target-based High Performance Athlete Outcome Leadership Framework as promoted by the British government and its coterie of private sector consultants, ended up thrashing our deeply unpleasant national football team at the last World Cup.

Nick Clegg's new agenda for social mobility invites a similar criticism. Of course social mobility is a difficult thing to be against, but that is very different from making it one's defining moral principle. As much evidence from the past fifty years would suggest, social mobility has tended to be greatest during those periods when nobody was actively trying to generate it; it is best pursued obliquely. The post-Thatcher era of meritocracy and open competition has seen a collapse in social mobility. But then what could be more dispiriting, more conducive to anomie, than being repeatedly told that there is no limit to how high one should aim? Sadly that is an injunction that excites the alumni of Eton and Westminster, and intimidates or depresses nearly everybody else. Richard Sennett's Respect details the forms of anomie that accompany societies even when (or especially when) they do deliver on something approaching meritocracy.

But if unhappiness is an effect of excessive upheaval and competitiveness, writing in the same year (1897) as the world's first psychology laboratory was created, Durkheim is scarcely asking for unhappiness itself to be targeted:

Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life. The taste for happy expansiveness must be moderated by the opposite taste; only on this condition will it retain measure and harmonize with reality. It is the same with societies as with individuals. Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality.

Policy lesson number two: keep a lid on that positive psychology, Prof Layard. Indeed the central thesis of Suicide, and what makes it a pioneering piece of social science, is the claim that something as apparently psychic as suicide is, in fact, sociological (how Durkheim would have dealt with the neuro-brigade, I'm not sure). And if we're to avoid the slippery slope towards endemic prozac prescriptions and cognitive behavioural therapy, it might be necessary to view happiness and unhappiness as indicators of deeper, sociological realities, and not as objects of policy themselves. Certainly, Durkheim would warn against seeking to maximise happiness, just as he would likely warn against seeking to maximise anything.

The final chapter of the book is called 'Practical Consequences', and addresses the question of what to do on the basis of his findings. Evidence-based policy, no less. On one level, Durkheim's proposals are music to Progressive Conservative and Blue Labour ears:

Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the state. But since this is far from them, it can exert only a distant, discontinuous influence over them; which is why this feeling has neither the necessary constancy nor strength.... While the state becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organise them.

As Phillip Blond or Maurice Glasman would eagerly agree, individuals need sources of morality and collectivism that are external to themselves, but less abstract and distant than the state. They need their desires delimited and channelled into institutions that are finite, tangible and authoritative. The state, from a Durkheimian perspective, is no better at dealing with anomie than X Factor: both are too distant, too universal and too amoral to provide rules that constrain in a tangible and moral way. The intermediary level of social organisation, between the individual and the state, is what will rescue modern society from anomie.

But on what would such an intermediary level of sociability be built? Durkheim dismisses regionalism and parochialism as too hostile to the larger structure of 'society'. Instead he offers the following:

The only decentralization which would make possible the multiplication of the centers of communal life without weakening national unity is what might be called occupational decentralization.... [We should] make the occupational group the base of our political organisation.

He refers to the 'occupational group or corporation' as holding out hope for non-state-based forms of solidarity. I assume this means professional associations, unions, guilds and - possibly - worker co-operatives. But with the exception of the government's new-found enthusiasm for public sector mutuals, how else is this area of civil society and economy being nurtured or invigorated? I've written about the possibility and benefit of happiness economics opening up a new politics of production, though the necessary institutional accompaniments for this are as yet unknown. Again, the Durkheimian-Schumpeterian dilemma arises: to re-affirm those 'occupational groups' that have been there for the last 150 years, or start building some new ones?

desire and duty in The Big Society

I was at The Young Foundation last week, to listen to Geoff Mulgan speak about their new report, Investing in Social Growth: Can the Big Society be More than a Slogan? There is something quite canny about this - with admirable brevity, the report sets out various tangible actions that the Coalition could take towards their declared goal, and which it can therefore be judged by. 

There is an emerging consensus, which Mulgan adheres to, that if The Big Society does mean anything at all, that it transcends left and right. Various former and non-former Labour thinkers have stressed that they must fight for this territory, and not dismiss it merely as state-shrinking rhetoric. But during the event, it struck me that there is one very notable schism within this agenda, which may not be a conventional Left-Right divide, but is still a (small c) conservative-progressive divide. 

In theoretical terms, this is between Schumpeterians and Durkheimians. Or in more intuitive terms, between people who think we are inspired to engage with one another out of excitement, and those who think we are bound together by obligation. Larkin tells us that "life is first boredom, then fear". In which case perhaps the Schumpeterians can target the first, and the Durkheimians the second. But I wonder how much the Big Society enthusiasts have really considered the latter.

Mulgan himself is an unabashed Schumpeterian, fascinated by innovation and institution-building, though not so much so that he overlooks the need for long-standing institutions in incubating and supporting this. He pointed out the paradox of Tory political rhetoric, that it claims that 'society' is both broken and the answer to all our problems. Something surely has to endure (or be added to the mix, such as the state) if the embers of civic activism are to be reignited. 

Then there are the government's own cheerleaders for The Big Society, such as Nat Wei, whose authority to advise on civic action derives from their own high levels of energy and entrepreneurial zeal. They possess, in Weberian terms, charismatic authority. They come to motivate, to build, and to renew, offering youthful dynamism to lure people away from their televisions and out into their neighbourhoods. The contrast with the bankrupt traditional authority of the leader of the biggest society of all, who visits London this weekend, is dramatic. 

But there is a foundational sociological question here which needs addressing, and which entrepreneurs are uniquely ill-equipped to address: to what extent can society be held together out of volition?

Social bonds, if that's what we want more of, are just that - bonds. They constrict, oblige and demand. The primary bonds that people experience in a modern society are provided by three institutions, the family, religious institutions and (as Durkheim explored) the division of labour, resulting in work. It also transpires that these institutions, along with physical health, are most crucial in generating the 'wellbeing' that the Young Foundation report suggests we start to measure.

If we are to use the paradigm of wellbeing, there is one very indicative finding that it points us towards. As Daniel Kahneman and others have explored, there is a major difference between 'experienced' happiness and 'life satisfaction', where the former is a moment in time, and the latter is a reflection based on a narrative about oneself. And the finding is this: that being at work is an unpleasurable experience, but that being unemployed has an extremely negative impact on life satisfaction. 

Most policy-makers would read this and say that the latter is a higher priority. But then they need to follow the logic. The reason work is so important is precisely that it structures social relations without depending on pleasure and on life satisfaction. It is repetitive, predictable, often dull and often demanding. Richard Sennett views this as a quality of sorts. This is a (small c) conservative insight, namely that what people find fulfilling is often less choice - and certainly less upheaval - not more. To put this in more positive terms, they want to feel needed, valued and capable, but in ways that don't require them to reinvent themselves or their environments. 

It stands to reason that a conservative, and maybe even a (big c) Conservative, government would do anything it could to defend families, religious institutions and, above all, work. From the perspective of The Big Society agenda, it appears like a historical quirk that the first two of these have ended up as rightwing ambitions, and the third as a leftwing one. Every time policy-makers are celebrating some social innovation, charismatic entrepreneur, or optimistic individual who bucked the trend towards ennui, they should also ask the following question - how much bigger would society be, how much more well would we be, if only we could all have reliable, honestly-rewarded work?

It is not, then, so much that The Big Society is being used to disguise a shrinking state (although the jury's still out on that), but that it is likely a poor substitute for relationships of obligation and sustained reciprocity, especially within the economy itself. Why is it that 'social capital' is only ever found outside of markets and firms? Or as Marxists (e.g. Ben Fine) would say, why is volunteering or tweeting considered 'social', but production not?  And this brings me back to the Schumpeterians and the entrepreneurial blindspot. 

Entrepreneurs, by definition, find it plausible to that things can be built out of nothing. They find the creation of new social ties a doddle. But they also get easily bored, and want to then move on to something else. If there's one thing they get most bored by, it's that the rest of us struggle to keep up. "But it's easy", imply the public faces of The Big Society. "Just be a bit more like me".  The entrepreneur shares something with the situationist: artistic, disruptive, mildly solipsistic. And the situationist attitude to the repetition of capitalist labour is well known.

When David Willetts suggested that young people who fail to get into university should go out and volunteer, he implied that institutions and volition can be substitutes for one another. The difference between being inside an institution (be it a university or a workplace) and outside of one could be dealt with through a little more will-power. The sad fact is that it is probably those who are already inside institutions that also have the greater degree of volition, energy and desire to use in their free time. The notion that unemployed people can view free time as their resource is economistic in the extreme. 

All of this suggests that there is something wrong with the word 'volunteer', and which the Schumpeterian worldview might cloud. Action that is unpaid or uncoerced is considered 'voluntary', but we then leap to the assumption that it has bubbled up from within, either through an economic preference or a psychological urge. But has it? I wonder how much civic action is experienced this way. Certainly those fund-raising posters on the tube ("text 'disaster' to give just £1 and save this child's life") operate on our volition in this way, reducing gift-giving to the twitch of a neuron followed by a few prods of a thumb. But sustained, bonded, repetitive civic engagement cannot rely on a wellspring of desire and charisma, which is by its very nature explosive and unreliable. Duty and sustained recognition motivate when desire is absent.

The question of whether 'society' can plug the gap left by a shrinking state is one thing. But the question of whether it can compensate for a reduction in reliable work is a whole other problem altogether. The production of an entirely new sociological category, neither 'work' nor 'welfare' but as solid and binding as either, may be required. I can't even imagine it, but then I guess that's because I'm not an entrepreneur.

Cameron's national service and pier-to-pier activities

One of the contradictions that Conservative politicians have to navigate, at least in the current era of fast-moving media, is that they constantly have to have new policies. A true Tory would probably prefer to have the same policies today as he had last year, and the year before that. And a small-state conservative would probably prefer to have fewer policies altogether.

Spare a thought for David Cameron, as he is forced into coming up with a policy on teens, beyond the rather peculiar one of hugging them. His announcement of a "national citizen service" for 16 year olds enables the Tories to have something to say, when accused of not caring about unruly kids on the street. That is its main function, and it should work for the time being. The question is whether one pretty flaky policy is enough to get through 10 minutes of assault from Paxman or Humphries, but good luck to them.

What is peculiar about this particular problem is that nobody has thought to re-target dependency theory, away from the welfare state, towards the (lets call it) 'civilising state'. I argued as much in this paper [doc]. The argument of dependency theorists in the 1970s was that the welfare state undermined the possibilities for the working classes (in the US, black families in particular) to develop independence, self-respect and recognition from others. The welfare state was scaled back - or transformed gradually into a 'workfare state' - in order to reduce this alleged dependency culture and the stigmatisation that accompanied it.

Whatever one thinks of this argument (and it remains controversial, although decreasingly so)  it at least challenges the assumption that good intentions are sufficient to warrant State activity. Blair was particularly famous for his 'politics of good intentions' - I wonder if Jonathan Myerson's radio drama has the nous to represent how dangerous well-intentioned people can be. The particular dangers of an interventionist 'civilising state' run in parallel to those of the welfare state, but with an added contradiction. The contradiction is that the desired goal of such policies is less government and more peer-to-peer, voluntary engagement. But having the State there to enforce it means that it isn't peer-to-peer and isn't voluntary. Cameron has only moved slightly further on from his absurd idea of paying children to behave.

The dominant political-ethical vision today, shared by Brown and Cameron, is of civic laissez-faire. Yet they are unable to go through with this, because of their compulsion to make policy announcements. Imagine a neo-liberal, free market economist who recommended that employers had to be regulated to develop a hire and fire culture or that consumers had to be incentivised to max out their credit cards. We're living with the civic equivalent.

Where the analogy to the welfare state may have real purchase in the future is the possibility that the State is polluting social relations in this domain. I am very suspicious of the Tocquevillian, Robert Putnam vision of American community, in which the State recedes to allow leagues of volunteers, neighbourhood groups, bowling teams and the like to emerge. But the problem is not that these groups don't exist, but the structural and ethnic injustices that this vision conceals.

That's a separate issue. For the sake of analysis, think about what these groups look like when they do exist. Here's where I went on Saturday:

The key word is written on the white plastic buoy: free. A voluntary group called Hudson River Recreation was formed, simply to allow people to, err, go Kayaking on the Hudson. Why? Who knows. But the overwhelming sense of encountering this sort of voluntary project is how ungoverned it is. It's a form of anarchy, lacking rationale or quantified outputs. How much does it cost? I doubt the organisers know. What do people get out of it? They get to go Kayaking. What are the social benefits that result? Who gives a shit.

There is little way that this could possibly benefit from any form of government intervention, be it well-intentioned or otherwise. Whether this type of activity is ever conceivable in Britain is open to question. It fills the spaces left by the American legalistic, dispassionate State, partly out of disgust for the rampant money-making and social indifference that is afoot elsewhere in this society. Yet a State that intruded further into civil society would only succeed in pushing this sort of activity further to the margins. After all, a great deal of antisocial behaviour (in contrast to most crime) is not-for-profit.

So this is David Cameron's problem. Proper Toryism might be the best way of pursuing his (and Gordon Brown's) goal, admittedly dressed up in the theory of Edmund Burke than Alexis de Tocqueville. Leave people alone for a moment. See what they come up with. Then leave that alone as well. But that's not really an option in Britain right now.

reasons to take off veils

This is either a bad lapse of journalistic standards, or an outrageous piece of politics: this article reports that Alan Johnson views Muslim veils as a threat to the "safety and security" of teachers, but omits to provide a single example of how the garment might potentially be unsafe or dangerous. Is Mr Johnson perhaps worried about the danger of sparks flying from nylon-based veils? I think we should be told.

Elsewhere a completely different story is being told. Dr Tag Hargey explained that "When you conceal the face, that actually not only dehumanises the person involved, but also creates a chasm, a gap, a bridge of non-understanding between communities and I think the sooner we can get rid of this veil, this face veiling, this face masking in Muslim societies across Britain, so much the better." Suddenly we are talking about a different policy all together.

Why such policies are introduced is surely as crucial as whether they are introduced. The French have their argument and Jack Straw had his (which I was inclined to agree with). But without so much as an anecdote in defence of his argument, Johnson simply ends up looking paranoid in the extreme, and making this government appear even more obsessed with its Panoptical power to watch without being watched.

Lets be clear. Protection of 'safety' involves minimisation of certain known risks. Protection of 'security' involves defence against certain known attackers. In what sense does a veil undermine either? This isn't a rhetorical question; Johnson ought to be able to answer it if he's to use this language.

new labour's governmentality

The ippr journal, Public Policy Research, has its latest edition out looking at power with pieces by David Miliband, Andrew Gamble and others, and I've contributed a piece on the governmentality of New Labour. Introducing Foucault to a policy audience is a slightly perverse thing to do, and liable to create hostility and misunderstanding, but I've tried to draw on the Foucaultian understanding of power to demonstrate aspects of New Labour policy that I think are liable to fail even on their own terms.

In summary, my argument is as follows (email me if you'd like the full piece). Foucault demonstrates that governmental strategies of power have to pull in two directions at once. As the liberal state has shrunk over the past 200 years, opening up a new space of 'civil society' and 'economy', so a variety of governmental strategies have to extend into that space in order to regulate and produce it, such as welfare services, professional expertise, accounting standards and so on (this is the core claim of all governmentality research). Hence, although sovereign powers of violence become more restrained, governmental powers of calculation and control become more widespread. Foucault himself says nothing about whether this is good or bad, but simply maps it historically.

What I've argued in this piece is that New Labour's community-oriented, double devolution agenda starts to reverse this process. Because the creation of community is not a scientific project, there are very few governmental, calculative processes available to govern it through; there are no expert networks (give or take the odd social capital analyst) who will be able to produce community to the extent that Labour hopes, and so this policy becomes heavily dependent on traditional sovereign powers of surveillance and violence, that is, the police.

I conclude with what I thought was quite a  neat analogy:

At present it is difficult to conceive of power being decentralised, especially in cities, without the constant presence of the state’s disciplinary and coercive functions. Marxists always believed that the passage from capitalism to communism would have a transitory totalitarian phase – ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ – before power was devolved to workers councils, and the state would ‘wither away’. The Soviet Union proved unable to move out of this transitory phase. Will double devolution suffer an analogous obstacle, with communities never quite able to wean themselves off the supporting hand of sovereign powers? One solution to this is to include a more radical devolution of police and judicial powers to the community, a communitarian measure that might prove too illiberal for this government.

against community

I have an article in this month's Prospect, attacking the prevalance of the word 'community' in contemporary political discourse. For subscribers, the link is here. The core of the argument is this:

When a faltering politician reaches for “community,” it is not in the hope of revealing or referring to anything, only of performing an act which they hope is beyond reproach. This “warmly persuasive word,” as Raymond Williams put it, summons diffuse feelings of ethical and cultural simplicity, not as an illumination of social reality but as a distraction from it. That it appears in the title of the recently rebranded office of the deputy prime minister, now department for communities and local government, may indicate something about the ebbing confidence of the Labour government nine years in.

It's a term I've never been comfortable with for various reasons. At least social capital is - by intellectual design - a measurable empirical entity. But with the Communities Minister on the rampage, there is no longer enough time or space to critically dissect all the various political sleights of hands that this word currently performs. My critique is actually inspired by reading Bruno Latour for the first time over the summer, and his diagnosis of what was wrong with the concept of 'society'. The original draft of the Prospect article included an admission of debt in the form of this quote from Reassembling the Social: "in a time of so many crises in what it means to belong, the task of cohabitation should no longer be simplified too much".

As far as Latour's critique is concerned, I would simply say that I am far more comfortable with the erroneous simplification that is 'society' (the myth that we are all connected into an integrated political-economic system) than that of 'community' (the myth that we are defined by our different histories, ethnicities and religions, to the point where we can barely communicate reasonably across the boundaries that separate them). For instance, in a political culture animated by the vision or myth of 'society', it is not only acceptable to ask another human being to remove their veil, it is a mark of shared humanity and reason (just as it is acceptable and reasonable for them to decline this request). But in a political culture obsessing over 'communities', the foreign qualities of a muslim woman become so magnified that the most basic of requests come to be deemed insulting and dangerous. I know which lie I would rather subscribe to.

not being against human rights

If there is one thing more damaging for human rights than being widely represented as nothing more than a regulatory infringement on government's democratically-granted duty to punish, it's to have them adopted by David Cameron and his postmodern, playschool approach to politics. His Bill of Rights nonsense is the equivalent of placing fresh fruit and vedge near the entrance of a supermarket, as a way of lulling shoppers into forgetting that the place is full of manufactured crap. It was one thing for consumer capitalism to develop a pastiche of Leftist political rhetoric (as in 'the conquest of cool'), but another for politics itself to do so. Say what you like about Blair, but at least he never went as far as pretending to be a liberal.

So now that the language of rights is banned by one side and pastiched on the other, perhaps we can only talk about them negatively: while we may not believe in human rights, judicial neutrality or, for that matter, anything very much, perhaps we can at least admit that politics without rights amounts to nothing more than strategies for getting people to do things they don't want to. Such strategies can be dressed up in utilitarianism or communitarianism, often very handsomely, but neither can claim to say anything about why humanity might be worth saving in the first place. This negative definition of rights was actually there in the beginning, when Kant stated that people "never be treated as a means only", on the metaphysical basis that there is something about people that we can't fully know. The sanctity of a human being is not defined positively or theologically, but negatively, and so politics transcends mere bullying when it recognises that there is more to life than the efficacy of policies and strategies.

The nihilism of post-liberal politics is revealed every day in Iraq, as another 20 or 30 people are blown up for no reason at all, but perhaps the very same phenomenon is present in this recent policy initiative picked up by Kevin Harris: anti-social behaviour "mission squads". Surely the (laudable) goals of the government's Respect agenda cannot survive this reduction of politics to pest control. Defeatist as it may sound, those who believe in human rights may now be better off not talking about them, leaving them as something un-named, but requiring us simply to oppose nihilistic, bald coercion.