Liberal Guilt: Some Theoretical Origins of the Welfare State

Liberal Guilt: Some Theoretical Origins of the Welfare State

Description

Is Milton Friedman the legitimate heir of Adam Smith? Did Locke's antagonism to political tyranny imply a repudiation of public provision for the needs of the poor? Does Marshall's famous sequence of legal rights, political rights, and social rights map the smooth unfolding of an initial promise or a step-by-step disavowal of the past? What is the relation between the old Rechtsstaat and the new Sozialstaat, between constitutional rights and welfare rights? These questions are neither uninteresting nor unanswerable. But the point of asking them is not immediately clear. Even if we could announce that public assistance represented a betrayal or a consummation of classical liberal principles, no political consequences would follow, one way or the other. The perpetuation of traditional values may be a sign of heroic tenacity; but it may also be a symptom of moral sclerosis. Some adversaries of the welfare state try to make us feel derelict for having abandoned our noble libertarian heritage. Contrariwise, friends of the welfare state commend us for having thrown off the shameful inheritance of Social Darwinism. Depending on one's perspective, in other words, historical continuity can deserve praise or blame. I stress this admittedly obvious consideration to avoid a misconstrual of my objectives in these remarks. While aiming to highlight the similarities and interconnections between eighteenth-century liberal rights and twentieth-century welfare rights, I remain conscious that such an exercise has limited value. Policy debates, for one thing, cannot be sensibly conducted as legacy disputes. The liberal movement, moreover, was complex and diffuse. It evolved over the course of centuries and assumed different forms in different national contexts. Even when studying a single country during one and the same period, we can only use “liberalism” (which before the nineteenth century is always an anachronism) as an umbrella term covering a variety of political tendencies and outlooks. As a result, diverse historical perspectives on liberal thought remain possible; and they will inevitably yield divergent answers to the continuity question. Furthermore, a similarity or correspondence of beliefs, which is all I shall attempt to document, does not constitute proof of historical continuity. Evidence of transmission and reception would be required to support any kind of stronger claim. Normative continuity, moreover, the bequeathing and inheriting of a system of moral values, even if it could be established, would not provide a causal explanation of the emergence and stabilization of contemporary welfare regimes. General affluence, a dramatic increase in state revenues during wartime, the need to secure political stability in the face of boom-and-slump cycles in the economy, the growing bargaining power of previously disenfranchised groups-these and many other factors played a decisive role in the emergence of contemporary economic rights. Public relief programs have sometimes been embraced by political elites for purely self-interested reasons: because, for example, “Rebellions of the Belly are the worst” or because “poverty in the midst of a generally wealthy society is likely to increase the incidence of crime". Similar considerations were no doubt relevant to the enactment of modern redistributionist legislation. If normative continuity outweighed normative discontinuity, as I think it did, it was only one element among the many that contributed to the rise of the welfare state. The erroneous assumption that classical liberals would have been utterly hostile to transfer programs is such a commonplace, however, that a succinct refutation can still be useful.

Source Publication

Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State

Source Editors/Authors

J. Donald Moon

Publication Date

1988

Liberal Guilt: Some Theoretical Origins of the Welfare State

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS