Whose Keeper?
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
NEITHER MARKET NOR STATE WHOSE KEEFEH? Social Science and Moral Obligation Alan Wolfe University of California Press, $25, 371 pp. Jean Belhke Elshtcrin his is a timely and important book. Alan...
...A politics of resentment, evident in tax evasion, black markets, proliferation of asocial behavior, all adding up to socially generated selfishness as a form of revolt against an intrusive and abstract "caregiver," grows apace...
...On the other hand, many conservatives love the untrammeled (or the-less-trammeled-the-better) operations of the market in economic life, but call for a restoration of traditional morality, including strict sexual scripts for men and women, in social life...
...We cannot rely on either markets or states to make us decent or to create a decent society...
...It cannot be "solved" through managerial expertise...
...But over forty years of evidence is in and it is clear, he claims, that when the welfare state substitutes for those ties it works less and less well...
...would, if taken seriously and implemented, deepen rather than ameliorate our discontents by further corroding our particular ties and obligations to families, friends, neighbors...
...Wolfe speaks directly to our discontents...
...represents an important change in direction for him...
...Wolfe is alarmed, rightly so, for he fears we are in peril of losing the "gift of society...
...Some even go so far as to propose a free market in babies where "baby prices" are "quoted as prices of soybean futures...
...The welfare state emerged out of a set of ethical concerns and passions which ushered in the conviction that the state was the "only agent capable of serving as a surrogate for moral ties of civil society" once these began to succumb to market pressure...
...Where does this leave us...
...This is one of several hair-raising examples, noted by Wolfe, of market economics carried to an extreme...
...This is especially true of child care...
...He calls for a perspective on moral agency, grounded in a revivification of the theory and practice of civil society, that "allows us to view moral obligation as a socially constructed practice negotiated between learning agents capable of growth on the one hand and a culture capable of change on the other...
...His previous works were framed, roughly, by a horizon of Marxist political economic assumptions...
...Were this to be done, white baby prices would go higher than nonwhite baby prices, but, finally, the market would smooth it all out and we wouldn't have to mess with the murky business of adoption and fretting about children born out of wedlock...
...Is it not a solution to the problems thrown up by the operations of the market...
...Wolfe's conclusion, which I share, is that as our sense of particular, morally grounded responsibilities to an intergenerational web falters and the state moves in to treat the dislocations, it may temporarily "solve" problems of care, broadly defined...
...All the evidence amassed on this matter indicates to Wolfe that "people are more likely to volunteer and to give charity...
...The reasons are many but one stands out in his argument-the educated middle classes are in a better position to organize to take advantage of government-provided services...
...Indeed, the Swedish method of transferring children to foster homes and institutions became so extreme in the 1970s that Sweden developed a world reputation as the home of a "child Gulag...
...Even those Scandinavian societies, especially Sweden, pointed to by liberal democrats as exemplary welfare states, look far less attractive close-up...
...His book reminds us of just what a precious and precarious gift that is...
...This was a foreign idea even to Adam Smith, who understood, Wolfe insists, that were we to organize "all our social relations by the same logic we use in seeking a good bargain," we could not "even have friends, for everyone else interferes with our ability to calculate conditions that will maximize self-interest...
...This confusion permeates all levels, from the marketplace to the home, to the academy, especially the academy...
...For the assumptions of the market, and calculations of "marginal utility," ought to reign everywhere...
...But, having become the father of two small children, and having continued to think rather than allow his reflections to ossify into the dogmas of either the left or the right, Wolfe has accomplished a minor miracle...
...Eventually, support for the welfare state itself begins to decline...
...Both these logics, left and right alike, are doomed to self-destruct...
...The political fallout of our current moral crisis-Wolfe insists that the social sciences are moral sciences and politics an ethical practice-is reflected in the irony of a morally exhausted left embracing rather than challenging the logic of the market by endorsing the relentless translations of wants into rights...
...Obligation to impersonal others, including future generations, begins as a cluster of obligations to particular others...
...Government can strengthen moral obligations but cannot substitute for them...
...Welfare statism as a totalizing logic erodes "the very social ties that make government possible in the first place...
...But, Wolfe claims, their arguments and assumptions are very wide of the mark...
...But what about the welfare state...
...when family and community relations in the intimate sector of society are strong...
...Although, Wolfe observes, the left continues to argue for taming the market in a strictly economic sense, it follows the market model where social relations are concerned, seeing in any restriction of individual "freedom" to live any sort of lifestyle an unacceptable diminution of choice...
...Wolfe, an expert on Scandinavian social systems, agrees with the great social theorist Jurgen Habermas that a therapeutocracy, a world in which "professional expertise comes increasingly to substitute for family autonomy," is everywhere in evidence...
...Neither the theory nor practice of markets and states, it seems, makes possible a perspective that is both rule-governed and protective of individual freedom...
...Wolfe unpacks another irony: as the welfare state becomes the "primary moral agent in society" it increasingly transfers funds not from the rich to the poor so much as to the middle class, which garners a disproportionate amount of benefits in all welfare state systems...
...Those who most benefit are not those most in need...
...For ensconced within its ivy-less confines, various abstract moral philosophers and a growing number of practitioners of a brand of econometrics called "rational choice," insistently press their claims to truth and scientific veracity...
...Rates of crime, alcoholism and, to a lesser degree, suicide, are on the rise as are breaking and entering and other crimes that "break down the kinds of trust and mutual help networks of civil society...
...Wolfe throws down a challenge to his own discipline, sociology: if economics has become captive to markets and political science to the state, a grand sociological tradition-with its moral mesjsage that society is a "precious gift"-must be revivified...
...For all our successes in modern societies, especially in the United States, there is a sense, desperate in some cases, that all is not well, that something has gone terribly awry...
...Economists working with a "rational choice" model are determined to reinterpret every feature of human existence in line with a narrow market mode of behavior...
...When people do not behave as the model dictates, it is because they are aberrant in some important respect, unable to "make the optimal decision...
...He understands that the crisis of modernity is an ethical one...
...Genuine freedom is protected only if strong intimate relations "that enable us to resist mass society's pressure to conform" flourish...
...Although the Swedes have tried, as a result of criticism, to reduce the numbers of institutionalized children, nearly half of all Swedish children are born out of wedlock...
...Alan Wolfe notes in his preface that Whose Keeper...
...We citizens of liberal democratic societies rightly understand and cherish our freedom, Wolfe insists, but we are "confused when it comes to recognizing the social obligations that make...freedom possible in the first place...
...Wolfe responds: because they rely either on the market or the state "to organize their codes of moral obligation" when what we really need is "civil society-families, communities, friendship networks, solidaristic workplace ties, voluntarism, spontaneous groups and movements-not to reject, but to complete the project of modernity...
...Wolfe does not present a menu of premature policy proposals of his own...
...Wolfe argues that it is not and that we now know enough to understand why and to track the negative, if unintended, consequences of modern statism...
...Wolfe reminds the reader that early theoreticians of liberal civil society were quite careful to limit the sphere of capitalist economics by either assuming or reiterating a very different logic, the moral ties that bind in the realms of family, religion, voluntary association, community...
...The market was not to be extended as a metaphor for a process of all-encompassing exchange...
...He has written a book that offers genuinely fresh insights into the ever more intractable dilemmas of modernity...
...But these solutions, over time, thin out the skein of obligation...
...For example: the giant ABC child-care bill, the liberal democratic "answer" to the child-care dilemma, legislates transfers upward to two-career families with incomes of $37,000 or above...
...For example, the grand schemas of philosophers who rely on "abstract formulations of universal criteria of justice...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
