English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Pierre Rosanvallon contends that the welfare state needs rethinking because of a “philosophical crisis” that has two principal manifestations: traditional modes of solidarity underpinning the welfare state are disintegrating, and the framework of “social rights” no longer suffices to address problems of long-term social exclusion (unemployment, in particular). Rosanvallon, Director of France’s l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Siences Sociales, originally published this book in French in 1995. The English translation, just now available, offers some intriguing ideas, but it demands a real effort from the reader to overcome obstacles of presentation and clarity. The book’s first chapter (“Decline of the Insurance Society“) makes a relatively compelling argument concerning the first aspect of the crisis. Rosanvallon begins by noting that the traditional “insurance” mode of social policy depends on a Rawlsian generalized ignorance concerning risk factors leading to conditions that require aid. When a population imagines itself as homogenous, such that no one knows who is likely to get sick, experience unemployment, or become poor, then individuals are willing to contribute to an insurance scheme from which he or she is just as likely to benefit as anyone else. Given a vastly increased knowledge concerning risk factors for, say, disease (including genetic factors), however, those who lack such factors begin to wonder why they should contribute to a scheme whose benefits will almost surely go disproportionately to some sub-group whose members can be identified in advance. The argument works best in relation to insurance models for organizing health care, for obvious reasons that Rosanvallon explores effectively. There is also a cogent discussion of increasingly prevalent demands for “individual responsibility” concerning behaviors that lead to conditions that place heavy demands on public expenditures, e.g. smoking and alcohol abuse: “The smoker will soon be required to choose between his vice and the right to equal access to care, and the alcoholic will be threatened with [demand for] payment of social surcharges” (p. 21). Those who do not smoke or abuse alcohol believe that those who do so choose the behaviors that impose costs on others much as some people believe that many welfare recipients choose not to work because the availability of government aid simply makes it possible not to do so. To overcome the threats to solidarity that arise from such perceptions, Rosanvallon argues, a new form of solidarity is required one that seeks explicitly to compensate for inequalities rooted in inherited or objective factors rather than to smooth out temporary disparities in income. In practical terms, this new solidarity relies on a new funding mechanism whose nature is not yet clear, except that it must be something other than insurance “premiums” and the traditional income tax. The framework of social rights the second aspect of the crisis has become inadequate, Rosanvallon argues, insofar as it remains rooted in 17th century liberal individualism, where freedom and autonomy are the hegemonic values. Current economic conditions, under which large population segments remain unemployed for extended periods, expose the limits of such values and of a welfare state beholden to them. The problem itself is familiar, especially in Europe: as the ranks of the excluded and the payments they expect to receive grow, so too do the taxes necessary to fund such payments. Higher taxes mean decreased demand for labor and so we arrive at “a pernicious spiral we might call a social deflation: an increasing quantity of nonworking people are cared for by a decreasing number of workers” (p. 57). Increasing economic globalization only exacerbates the difficulty. The dilemma can be overcome, Rosanvallon contends, only by employing a framework of inclusion, as against the “passive welfare state” model of providing compensation for exclusion. A universal allowance as well as the extension of disability payments to the category of the “socially disabled,” i.e., those who remained unemployed after their unemployment benefits expired only dodges the problem and thereby exacerbates it. Inclusion, on the other hand, begins with the possibility of using public funds “to pay workers rather than to indemnify the unemployed” (p. 57). In practical terms, inclusion in the American context means workfare, and in France it is embodied in the somewhat broader program of the “minimum subsistence allowance” (RMI). “In both cases, social rights are reinterpreted as a contract articulating rights and obligations” (p. 87). In other words, according to Rosanvallon, an individual’s right to inclusion demands both that the individual make himself or Reviews

journal of political ecology

The New Social Question: Rethinking the Welfare State, by Pierre Rosanvallon, translated by Barbara Harshav ; with a foreword by Nathan Glazer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Reviewed by David Bartram