CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: Politics In The Welfare State
Walzer, Michael
0NE DAY, NOT SOON, the welfare state will extend its benefits to all those men and women who are at present its occasional victims, its nominal or partial members. That day will not be the end...
...popular participation declines sharply...
...Local politics has never been competitive with business and family...
...Once again, the formula is too pat, but surely contains an element of truth, and its significance may plausibly be extended to politics as well...
...He seeks to close the circle (not every circle) against bureaucratic intrusions...
...Fundamental social change would require that the state embody this willfulness, inviting its new members to choose their own limits and measurements...
...When his rulers claim to serve him, the claim is not a lie...
...That day will not be the end of political history...
...And the better the living the world promises, the more good behavior it requires...
...Eventually, every anti-social act is interpreted as a demand for increased benefits...
...The state is always immoral when viewed from the standpoint of its invisible and degraded men...
...A balance is struck, breaks down, is struck again...
...For these same reasons, the individual member is taken into account in a new way...
...This is true even though his congressman is elected in a democratic fashion, while the officers of his union are probably co-opted and the lobbyist appointed...
...That means, with those "lifegiving nucleii," as Simone Well called them, within which the local, immediate character of work and culture is determined Such secondary associations exist, or can exist, within the welfare state, but insofar as they are of some human value, they exist in permanent tension with the centralized administrative system necessary to welfare production...
...it is his political destiny to receive services...
...It obviously means more today, though just how much more is unclear...
...Newspapers provide us daily with intimations of such a pattern...
...Unlike the welfare state itself, the struggle groups which have demanded and won the various benefits the state now provides— the unions, parties and movements—have been shaped to a human scale...
...And this suggests a lesson which is not easy to learn: that political power must always be twice-won...
...But here too the direction of political utilitarianism is clearly marked out...
...The modern welfare state is an example of limited government, but not yet of popular sovereignty...
...liberals have also been interested in local government and voluntary association...
...The government of representatives cannot be made responsible to the people on a day-to-day basis, but its general responsibility can be maintained by periodic elections and, more importantly, by continuous political activity between elections...
...It is worth reflecting on what that day will be like—what will we want then?— even while we fight to perfect the system of benefits and argue among ourselves about the best strategies...
...Happiness begins and ends at home...
...THERE IS NO READILY accessible meaning 1 in the frequent assertion that socialism lies "beyond the welfare state...
...Happiness is good behavior, and this equation, fervently endorsed by the authorities, is the ultimate sanction...
...But insurgency is, or ought to be, very different from this...
...In the past that has generally meant of all property owners, for they have been the most important welfare recipients...
...nor do we know if they can win any substantial allegiance from their own members, establish some more or less effective control over the local politics of work and culture, and generate significant cooperative activity...
...But I have, perhaps arbitrarily, excluded foreign policy and war from this discussion...
...He calls into question the omnicompetence of the service state and of all the organizations created in its image...
...To make these points and to make them stick is the major purpose of socialist politics in the welfare state...
...Nor would a socialist government create a socialist society...
...the world of the emotions, friendship, sex and love—all these have been set outside its limits...
...If no man is invisible, the state is not immoral...
...Precisely because they are not seen as citizens, they are exposed to arbitrary cruelty and neglect...
...In the U.S...
...Bureaucratic benevolence even bolsters inequality insofar as it neutralizes the struggle groups, decomposing and privatizing popular willfulness...
...Most of the previous forms of radical politics have involved demands for wider and wider systems of integration...
...But insurgency is different from revolution (more limited, more immediate) precisely in that it seeks no more extensive unity, but calls instead for the multiplication of diverse and independent unities...
...Welfare politics thus has a dialectical pattern: pressure from below for more protection or benefits meets pressure from above for better (more disciplined, or orderly, or sociable) behavior...
...Political life, if it is to have any significance, must now be chosen for its own sake, and only now can be chosen for its own sake...
...And it ends, or will one day end, with the voluntary passivity of enlightened men, their human desires recognized and (in part) gratified by the public authorities...
...But its solution would not necessarily even raise the question of democratic decision-making...
...Perhaps they will...
...The quality and authenticity of emotional commitment, for example, does appear to vary with population size, though not absolutely or without reference to other factors: human emotions are more easily manipulated the wider their focus and the more they are cut away from immediate personal experience...
...For there is no obvious reason why the officials of the welfare state, pressed by their constituents or by their own ambitions, should not move beyond the narrow limits of liberal utilitarianism...
...If men really do seek the common achievements and shared excitements of politics, then they will have them, in one form or another...
...Neither of these claims is true...
...These are the most likely arenas of a genuinely democratic politics...
...That is the end of its history, the culmination of its legitimacy...
...whose own organizations, however powerful, cannot do so by themselves...
...Indeed, the established forms of social and economic (that is, corporate) power are likely to be strengthened just as state power has been strengthened: by the general expansion in scale, by the increase in legitimacy that derives from the admission, however reluctant, of all outsiders, by the universal improvement in everyday social behavior, by the new forms of bureaucratic surveillance and record-keeping...
...Its administrators will rarely feel themselves buoyed up and sustained by the zeal of their clients...
...IN THE LONG RUN, the issue for socialists is not state power,t but power right here, on this shop floor, in this university, in this city...
...Why should we be active in politics...
...only administration will be public...
...They have to be helped, guided, educated in the acceptable forms of aspiration and action...
...Few men who are actually poor would share it...
...So, at any rate, we have been led to believe by liberal writers...
...that he requires an active public life...
...What more can we possibly ask...
...In all these areas the state can be active, in all of them political energies can be expended and emotional commitments made, in all of them common goods can be discovered, goods to be shared and not merely distributed...
...Now OBVIOUSLY THIS is no description of our present experience...
...the state would become a neutral agency for the administration of security and welfare...
...Their purposes are not given up, or not wholly given up, but rather give rise, under new circumstances, to new organizational forms: the struggle groups become pressure groups...
...I suppose utilitarianism has also been the central creed of socialists-in-power, but socialists, perhaps fortunately for socialism, have been in power less often...
...it is a means of winning benefits and also, presumably, of determining their character and the nature of their administration...
...In fact, it is virtually certain that the quality of security and welfare need not change with the size of the population...
...it concerns the most immediate interests of workers and consumers...
...Politics has been the crucial means of becoming visible, of winning recognition for mass needs and desires...
...it accords recognitions, turning oppressed subjects into full-fledged members...
...But there is one further corollary of welfare production which raises the most serious problems for liberalism: the growth of state power...
...Its theorists claim that all the intellectual and emotional energies of political men can be rechanneled into private life, and their creativity coopted by intelligent administrators...
...In an article in DISSENT some five years ago, I used the term "resistance" to suggest the sorts of activities presently called insurgency by various New Left writers...
...Liberal theorists of the welfare state have always claimed to know what we want...
...And "enough" power always means power in some particular place and sufficient to inflict some particular injury...
...And so welfare is the obvious and only antidote to delinquency and riot...
...The perfection of the welfare state will require the organization of all possible functional groups, even, or rather especially, the group of those who receive direct state assistance...
...Patriotic communion is always a fraud when it is nothing more than the communion of an audience with its favorite actors, of passive subjects and heroes of the stage...
...Let them maximize our happiness...
...When contemporary writers talk about the "end of ideology," the disappearance of generalized aspiration, they are describing just this closing down of the possibilities for public intellectual and emotional commitment...
...For it cannot be established that security and welfare are more efficiently administered to 2 million or 50 million or 200 million people...
...At the same time, however, the same process cuts individuals loose, isolates them from communal ties, drives them into a material and then an emotional dependency on the central authorities...
...The fight over welfare is important enough...
...That success is possible must be the socialist's faith, t Nor is it corporate power: the problem of counterbalancing, regulating, or destroying the power of private corporations is primarily a welfare problem...
...In the long run, the two parts of society will merge into one world of absolutely visible men (that does not mean a world of equals), known not to each other but to the specialists in such knowledge, not personally but statistically...
...Beyond," in that hopeful phrase, has neither a historical nor a logical sense...
...And they will produce new ideologies to validate their new activities...
...Never have ordinary citizens been so well-known to the public authorities as in the welfare state...
...It is judged, as it ought to be, by the amounts of welfare it produces and by the justice and efficiency of its distributive system...
...of aspiration, initiative, intrigue, and argument...
...Once installed, however, won't they be driven to realize how much good might be done with their power if only it is kept intact . . . for a few years more...
...In both traditions, the individual is recognized as the ultimate value...
...They are knowledgeable about these modes and patronizing toward anyone who is ignorant or uncommitted...
...they have called one another brethren, citizens, comrades...
...And it absorbs the power of every defunct agency as it wins the support of every newly enfranchised member...
...39 MICHAEL WALZER or better, the wager that sustains his commitment...
...The chief concern of the best left-wing theorists has always been with that day-to-day cooperation in productive activity which occupies the foreground of social life...
...Politics is now concerned only with the provision of a plentiful and enjoyable external world and with the promotion of longevity so that this world can be enjoyed as long as possible...
...In fact, however, such recognition, when it is finally achieved, will be the outcome of centuries of struggle...
...In a society which still exploits masses of men, poverty is itself a function and no one so desperately requires representation as the man without an adequate income...
...For we cannot say what it is we want, until we have understood what we have got and are getting...
...Unorganized men are unrepresented and unprotected men, their claims unheard or but distantly heard at the centers of power...
...The expansion of the range of state benefits and the extension of the ballot to new social groups have been parallel and related processes...
...it must be hollowed out...
...Now insofar as the state becomes a general welfare state, excluding nobody, it meets these demands and so generates a legitimacy such as no previous political system has ever achieved...
...But I don't think it is unfair to suggest that utilitarianism has been for some time the dominant form of liberalism and, more important, that it has been the central creed of liberals-in-power...
...But first I must try to suggest the enormous achievements and the special 26 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE characteristics of welfare politics...
...It is difficult not to conclude, as the liberals do, that with the provision of individual material needs, the state reaches or ought to reach its limits...
...It is one of the odder features of political life that we characterize the common forms of oppression and domination with euphemisms and use words with the most violent connotations to describe modest acts of individual and popular selfassertion...
...Today it can provide only the material prerequisites of individual delight, that is, first security, and then all those services conveniently grouped under the rubric of "welfare"—education, public health, economic controls, relief for the aged and the unemployed, and so on...
...Never in human history has politics been so important to so many people, never have so many been active in politics, as in the past century and a half...
...Their word will do as well, though they are no more guerrilla fighters than I am...
...it protects racial and religious minorities...
...They have described it as a closely-knit body, dense and opaque, whose members were involved emotionally as well as materially, mysteriously as well as rationally, in the fate of the whole...
...Do the police claim to defend public security...
...Today it is palpably the executive rather than the legislative 32 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE branch of government that is copied...
...Welfare without representation," Sargeant Shriver has said, "is tyranny...
...Given the most immediate desires of the poor themselves, given the sheer avariciousness of the rich and the powerful, the fight for some minimal standards of distributive justice takes on all the moral significance that has been attributed to it in the past century and a half...
...This was a liberal even before it was a Marxian vision, as Marx himself suggested when he wrote that political emancipation, as practiced by the liberals, "was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics...
...Our emotions are merely tricked by parades and pageants, the rise and fall of political gladiators, the deaths of beloved chiefs, the somber or startling rites of a debased religion...
...Won't the citizens of such a state, the recipients not only of material but also of spiritual benefits, feel themselves to be members of a moral community, a world of rights and obligations...
...That requires a different kind of politics, not the kind to which we are all so well accustomed, aimed permanently at the state, but a politics of immediate self-government, a politics of (relatively) small groups...
...The quality of security and welfare is thus popularly determined, at only one remove...
...Administration has already outdistanced every other branch of government in the sheer accumulation of resources: competent staff, statistical knowledge, patronage, fiscal controls, regulatory powers, secrecy when that is required, publicity when it is not, and so on...
...For a brief moment in time they created a communion which was not mysterious or opaque precisely because it was a common creation...
...Whether this can actually be won and the victory sustained is another matter...
...This is so both because of the individualist bias of the welfare system and because of the perennial efforts of administrators to escape the system's utilitarian limits and meet the demand for meaningful citizenship in their own (fraudulent) fashion...
...For politics is something more than welfare production...
...The tiny political public of an earlier period has been broken into by successive waves of lowerclass invaders...
...pluralism, before it became an ideological catchword, was as much a liberal as a socialist theory, and for both liberals and socialists it emphasized the values of political participation and communal life...
...Oppressed groups must always win enough power either to threaten those who refuse to grant their demands or to threaten the general peace and so compel state intervention on their behalf...
...The history of the welfare state begins with the coerced passivity of invisible and degraded men, mystified by ideology...
...It amounts to saying that what we want next, and what we want to share, are the pleasures of power...
...He is not free to shape or reshape the system, for he has not seized and, except in minimal ways, he does not share political power...
...Beyond welfare the liberal state cannot go: the world of the mind, philosophy, art, literature and religion...
...The reception of services brings freedom of a limited sort, but of a sort rare enough to be valuable...
...It is a vital and exciting world of work and struggle...
...For the triumph of benevolent bureaucrats in virtually every local society has been one of the results, not so much inevitable as overdetermined, of the entrance of masses of men into the political world...
...Something like this will probably happen in the civil rights movement also, since the problems of the Negro community can not be solved until its activists transform such local power as they may win into national recognition and full admission into the welfare state...
...It gradually seeped away from local unions, for example, once bargaining rights were granted at the national or industry-wide level—and while this was certainly a democratic loss, it must be admitted that what the workers wanted could only have been won at the national level...
...Even their crimes, so long as they injure only one another, are not recorded...
...Second, all the local units of social life, work, education and culture: cities and towns, factories, union locals, universities, churches, political clubs, neighborhood associations, theater groups, editorial boards, and so on...
...perhaps one day it will simply administer the appropriate chemicals to its members...
...But it is also closely related to the very nature of the utilitarian service state and to the character of the political struggles of the past century and a half...
...Above all, we don't know if they can create new patterns of democratic responsibility, so that the militants of this or that rebellion don't simply become a new elite...
...Political parties might have served this purpose, but in the U.S., at least, parties have not developed as membership organizations capable of stimulating commitment and action on the grass-roots level...
...In a sense, the welfare state makes these new activities possible, even though it decrees that they must be pursued without the goad of material need and even though its officials hope that they will not in fact be pursued...
...Wherever possible they have sought to avoid even benevolent regimentation by giving those whose welfare is at stake "sovereign" power, that is, by establishing governments representative of everyone who receives benefits...
...Every attempt to restrict them to selected groups of people has been, and will surely continue to be, resisted...
...The pleasures of political struggle cannot be sustained once victory has been won...
...Thus an eighteenthcentury philosophe: "What is patriotism...
...they belong to a different sphere of activity...
...And as with Mill, so with us, "an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answers, No...
...Simultaneously, liberal politics has been freed from philosophy, art, literature, religion, friendship, sex and love...
...29 MICHAEL WALZER ALL THESE DEVELOPMENTS—the growing rationality and legitimacy of the state, the vast increase in its size, and the decline of political life—are not only compatible with classical liberal theory, but actually represent its fulfillment...
...it destroys the old corporations and regulates the new ones...
...Insurgency is a demand that bureaucratic services make possible, instead of replacing, local decision-making...
...The state itself they have made over from a "body-politic" into a machine, the instrument of its citizens (rather than their mythical common life), devoted to what Jeremy Bentham called "welfare-production...
...Insurgency has been a prominent feature of every struggle for recognition: the sit-in strikes of the 1930's are the classic example...
...This definition suggests that many of us are patriotic, if we are, for wrong or inadequate reasons...
...34 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE pular creativity...
...Its standard of utility is the welfare of an individual absolutely free to make his own choices and measure his own happiness...
...Representatives are to be delegates, asserting popular desires, and then legislators, enacting the popular will...
...At the same time, policemen, census takers, recruiting officers, tax collectors, welfare workers, radical organizers, and sociologists (in roughly that historical order) march in...
...Never before has the state stood at the center of so large a circle of conflict, agitation, and maneuver...
...the right to be visible is always hard-won...
...second, to avoid the boredom of success...
...The administrators are committed in advance to the common limits and measurements, to the established modes of security and welfare...
...And it has been the assumption of liberal theorists ever since Hobbes and Locke that once security and welfare were assured, once the utilitarian purposes of politics were achieved, men would turn away from public to private life, to business and family, or to religion and self-cultivation...
...The state still does depend on ideology and mystery, but to a far lesser degree than ever before...
...The great danger of the perfected welfare state is that all or most of them would be broken open, so that resources leak away, independence is lost, and the members turn outward to face the powerful state, where all the action is, from which all good things come...
...So long as the state establishes peace and —added later liberal writers—promotes welfare, public activity is a waste of time, positively dysfunctional in the economy of private life...
...Imagine, then, that the state moves into the field of "culture-promotion...
...They will be, they are already, tempted to do so, for two not entirely consistent reasons: first, to avoid the great difficulties that will inevitably be encountered in the expansion of welfare production beyond its present limits...
...He is dependent upon the muckraking of free-lance journalists and academic experts and, much more, upon the benevolence of the state...
...This will continue to be so for some time to come, probably for the foreseeable future...
...They are not and probably cannot be expected to become arenas of democratic decision-making (even though they will be the occasional focus of democratic revolts...
...Despite vague phrases about its withering away, they seem to presuppose, as they probably must, an efficient and benevolent bureaucracy, hovering, so to speak, in the background, its central offices as far away as possible...
...But to deny the claims of statist ideologies is not necessarily to assert a purely instrumentalist political theory...
...Against the private man of liberal theory, socialists have defended the free citizen.* THIS DISAGREEMENT is in no sense adequately summed up in the words "individualism" and "collectivism...
...So it is...
...But this does not mean that the character of political struggle will remain unchanged as new groups and new desires replace the old...
...If they are benefited at all, they are subject to the most extreme paternalism...
...But that is not quite accurate, for it implies a process that begins at the center and is, just for that reason, inherently unlikely...
...Because they are not numbered, they are always treated en masse...
...To some extent this has already happened...
...that the family does not provide an adequate arena for the human emotions...
...Once all men are recognized as members (even if only by a distant and powerful government), the sheer magnitude of state terrorism and economic exploitation, and so of human misery, will be enormously reduced...
...They demand or will demand some form of political participation, some share in political power...
...We are oppressed in the name of a public interest, a national purpose, a solemn commitment, which is neither yours, nor mine, nor ours, in any usual sense of those perfectly simple pronouns...
...Participation in cultural life probably varies the same way: the larger the audience, the more passive its members, the more stereotyped the products they consume...
...the attack upon the opacity of the traditional polity turns out to be an attack upon the value of political life...
...socialists and liberals unite in opposing any ideology which assigns to the state a moral being independent of the willfulness and rationality of its particular members...
...I will try to describe some of these reasons a little later on...
...If it does, the pledge is serious indeed...
...SECOND, THE EXPANSION of welfare production gives to the state a new and thoroughly rational legitimacy...
...What I propose in this essay is a theoretical examination of these effects, of the welfare state as our collective project, our common future...
...And what is more, the achievement of the welfare state might well entail the end of that public activity which has until now been a joy and a happiness to us...
...This was always the goal of liberalism and it is the key reason for the liberal insistence upon the transparent material purposes of the state...
...Nor is its usefulness at an end...
...Since loyalty was a gift for which there was to be no necessary return, it could not be predicated on anything so clear-cut as interest...
...Do the middle classes claim to increase the general prosperity...
...This it does not, perhaps cannot, do...
...Any political leader who claims that it is more than this, who claims, for example, that citizens should do more for the state than the state does for them, is a dangerous man...
...He reargues the old democratic proposition that decisions should be made by those who are most affected by them...
...It is in the nature of the welfare state, I think, that men break into it in groups, some sooner, some much later, some with only moderate difficulty, some after long and bloody struggles...
...The size of the citizen body of a Greek polis, like that of an early modern aristocracy, was limited by the requirement that its members be known to each other and so distinguishable from the faceless mass But once invisibility is banished, the need for political "friendship" is also banished...
...It is an enlightened love of ourselves, which teaches us to love the government which protects us . . . the society which works for our happiness...
...IN THEORY, of course, the purpose of representative government is to make the mass of people all-powerful...
...that man has both a mind and a passion for society...
...SOCIALISM, it has often been said, requires decentralization...
...Hence the crucial principles of welfare distribution are first, that benefits ought to be distributed to individuals and, second, that they ought to be designed to enhance private worlds...
...by an uncertain trial of a little vain-glory to undergo most certain enmities . . . to hate and be hated . . . to lay open our secret councils and advices to all, to no purpose and without any benefit...
...This requirement is first of all an extreme restriction upon the pursuit of happiness—because political activity is or might be one of the forms that pursuit takes for many people...
...local activity drops off...
...Government must be responsive to their concrete wills and not merely (as at present) to their conventionally defined desires...
...Now that there really are concrete benefits to be divided, the first political problem is distribution...
...The state cannot at the moment provide any sort of direct delight...
...Legislative activity has ceased in virtually every respect to be the central feature of the governmental process...
...Won't the possibilities of cooperative choice and political self-determination be enhanced...
...They have been freed from politics, protected against heavy-handed and intolerant magistrates...
...Exactly what constitutes a human scale is and ought to be a subject of debate, but this is a debate likely to be carried on chiefly among radical democrats and socialists...
...If they do not share power, they inevitably become the prisoners of the established social systems which they invade or into which they are admitted...
...THE TERMS OF THE INDICTMENT have not often been made clear in the recent past because so many of us who regard ourselves as socialists have found a kind of political fulfillment in the struggles for the welfare state...
...The pursuit of private happiness may be endless, but its direction, for most of us, is given...
...It is, so to speak, the crucial licensing agency of modern society, increasingly the only one...
...Wild hopes for equality and fraternity have been proclaimed...
...He insists on his intentions as well as his needs...
...What do we want now...
...Suffrage is the first badge of membership...
...FIRST OF ALL, the development of the welfare state has generated a pervasive enlightenment about the functions of political organization...
...their members have also been colleagues...
...It is not the natural tendency even of liberal bureaucracy to encourage the formation of autonomous groups...
...We have allied ourselves with the crowds of men battering at the gates of American society...
...Even if the welfare state were to be perfected under the best possible conditions and under socialist auspices, the dangers of bureaucratic omnicompetence and popular passivity would not be avoided...
...31 MICHAEL WALZER IBERALS HAVE NOT BEEN UNAWARE Of L the dangers of administrative tyranny...
...asked Thomas Hobbes, and his sarcastic reply suggests the central animus of liberal theory: —to have our wisdom undervalued before our own facts...
...It takes the form of wildcat strikes, welfare unions, student rebellions...
...Only much later does it turn out that the price and the purchase are very nearly the same thing...
...The ultimate defense against bureaucratic omnicompetence is the self-interested assertiveness of ordinary men...
...For all that time liberals (and socialists too) have been like that character of Gogol's who "wanted to bring the government into everything, even into his daily quarrels with his wife"—though some of them would have stopped short at the seat of domestic bliss...
...Indeed, the state has been an instrument absolutely necessary to reformers of every sort: it shatters the authority of local and traditional elites...
...It must be won first with the help of the state or through the creation of parallel bureaucracies against established local or corporate elites...
...In the perfected welfare state, enjoyment will always be private...
...THE PERFECTED WELFARE STATE will bring with it an end to the terrible oppressiveness of poverty and invisibility...
...T HE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL the modern state is a battle for the perfection of the welfare system...
...For the first time in history, masses of men know with absolute clarity that the state ought to be doing something for them...
...But having said that, it is still worth adding: It's the regiment of the contented/ That haunts me...
...Gradually, with the development of the welfare state, all this changes...
...Erstwhile militants are isolated and immobilized by the sheer size of the state into which they have won admission, mollified by its apparent legitimacy, by the obvious sincerity of its administrators and the transparency of their purposes...
...When the modern state moves beyond welfare, it does not bring us the satisfactions of citizenship, but only vicarious participation, the illusion of a common life...
...Given the continued creation of new groups, the continued raising of the level of material desire, the perfection of welfare production may well be an asymptotic goal and the state an eternally progressive force...
...But all these organizations, as I have argued, tend to become integrated into the welfare system: for them, success is integration...
...For from a certain point in time, the new groups will almost certainly cease to have the same communal structure as the old...
...They are then trapped in more or less stable bargaining arrangements with governmental or corporate bureaucracies and forced to discipline their own members...
...the policeman and the welfare administrator will be the only public men...
...The citizen of the welfare state is free (and, in many cases, newly enabled) to pursue private happiness within the established social and economic system...
...Even more important, it involves a surrender of everyone's say in the determination of further restrictions (or expansions), a surrender of any popular role in determining the shape and substance, the day-to-day quality, of our common life...
...outside, other models are still possible...
...Obviously, it does so with considerable success...
...State recognition of new groups obviously affects the structure of social power and value, but there is very little evidence to suggest that it does so in fundamental ways...
...That is why welfare administration, especially in its more direct forms (social work, for example), tends so generally toward paternalism...
...People want pleasure, but such pleasure as cannot be shared, individual delight, egoistic satisfaction...
...Public life ceases to engage the minds and emotions of their members...
...Now all such pursuits and promotions lie outside the competence of the state...
...Already a sense of professional esprit is growing up among those who know, or think they know, how to "handle" such outbursts...
...Individuals and groups win public recognition, learn good behavior, and march out of the slums and ghettos...
...Liberal theorists and politicians have discovered that there are no necessary limits on the size of the public—so long as its members are conceived as individual recipients of benefits, so long as the problems of political communion, the sharing of a common life, are carefully avoided...
...The members of the welfare state need not have even the most remote acquaintance with each other...
...The newer welfare recipients are not and are not likely to become self-determining men...
...THE FOURTH TENDENCY of successful welfare production is to decrease the importance of politics itself and to turn the state from a political order into an administrative agency...
...Their work rests on two assumptions: first, that politics ought to be the instrument of human desire...
...LIKE THE PUBLIC RECOGNITION Of needs, SO the recognition of men—our hard-won visibility— becomes a source of intensified social control...
...If things have not worked out this way, and do not seem likely to, it is at least partly because liberals never developed a system of democratic activism sufficient to bind administrators to representatives and representatives to constituents...
...And it begins this process with a modest but urgent demand for a share right now in the management of this community...
...It is a function of integration...
...It suggests that socialism awaits the triumph of a national movement whose leaders are ready to sponsor the fragmentation and dispersion of the power they have so recently won...
...The members ought to be involved, it was said, not for the sake of concrete benefits of any sort, but, simply, for the sake of communion...
...In part, this increase stems directly from the progressive enlargement of bureaucratic systems and from improvements in the training and discipline of their personnel...
...And it is the great paradox of socialist politics that the state toward which we must always remain tense, watchful, and resistant is or will almost certainly become the most legitimate, rationally purposive and powerful state that has ever existed...
...They are rationalists-of-everydaylife, each one demanding, "What has it done for me...
...of organized hostility...
...Many of us are inside already, better served by machines and bureaucrats than men ever were by servants and slaves...
...every successful revolution has produced such a system...
...Individual men can still recognize the pleasures of politics, can still choose political life as an end-in-itself...
...It has been the great triumph of liberal theorists and politicians to undermine every sort of political divinity, to shatter all the forms of ritual obfuscation, and to turn the mysterious oath into a rational contract...
...The state will never again be so easy to challenge as it was in the days of mass invisibility...
...That is one of its purposes...
...But the invaders have burst into a world they never chose...
...It has been replaced in part by administration itself, in part by bargaining between state bureaucrats and the (nonelected) representatives of a great variety of social constituencies...
...Indeed, it was this turning away—which might be called legitimate apathy since it rests on the satisfaction of all recognized needs and desires—that would assure the stability of the liberal achievement...
...Socialist writers have never had a great deal that was new or interesting to say about the state...
...Let them increase our prosperity...
...Associations and neighborhoods continue to provide important social space for agitation and activity...
...our feelings are not always under our own control...
...It depended instead on all sorts of ideological and ceremonial mystification: anointed kings, oaths, rituals, divine laws, and so on...
...This is the socialist indictment of liberal utilitarianism...
...Though their announcements are at the very least premature, they linger in our minds as disturbing predictions...
...WHAT SORTS OF GROUPS can fill the shell...
...Two are of especial interest here...
...But each success has turned out to be a further triumph for what might best be called political utilitarianism...
...Because they are never polled, they are thought to have no opinions...
...Every newly recognized need, every service received, creates a new dependency and so a new social bond...
...And it has been discovered that the enhancement of private life through public welfare really does not require any very rigorous and energetic self-government...
...The welfare state is not the name of our desire...
...THE FAILURE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT reveals the fundamental difficulty of liberal utilitarianism...
...It clearly does not do so in the ways anticipated during the long struggles for recognition, that is, it does not open the way to social and economic equality...
...Conflict would disappear...
...For who would be unwilling, if actually given the chance, to pay the price of social discipline, orderly conduct, hard work, and public decency for the sake of the pursuit of happiness...
...But the process is by no means so far advanced as some of the more extreme versions of the theory of "mass society" suggest...
...Their cause has been our public passion...
...For we are not entering, we are not going to enter, the new world of state-administered prosperity all at once...
...First, the great functional organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and so on: these are the crucial representative bodies of the present day...
...But the vitality of such associations depends finally on those who associate...
...We find ourselves as if in a dream, living once again in a world which is morally dense and 36 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE opaque, mystified by ideologies, dominated by leaders whose purposes are not obvious...
...Instead, welfare administrators function, whether consciously or not, as double agents: serving the minimal material interests of the invaders and upholding at the same time the social system that is being invaded...
...And the members of the state, precisely because they are recognized as needful persons, seen by the impersonal public eye and assisted by an impersonal administration, need no longer be able to recognize and assist one another...
...THIS BENEVOLENCE has its price: the increased power of the benevolent administrators, the increasing control over the recipients of benefits...
...But it will represent the end of a particular history, and one in which socialists have been very much involved, if not always on our own terms...
...Its participants are not concerned that bureaucrats be sensitive and warm, but that they be reticent and limited, less imposing, less intrusive than they often are...
...Although socialist parties and movements have often been in the forefront of the struggle for welfare, and above all for equality in the distribution of benefits, it remains true that socialist theory belongs to a tradition of thought and aspiration not only different from, but also in perennial competition with liberal utilitarianism...
...These are axioms of liberal enlightenment...
...We are all counted, numbered, classified, catalogued, polled, interviewed, watched, and filed away...
...It could be done to anyone, whereas patriotism ought to be the pride of a particular man, the enjoyment of particular activities...
...An extraordinary traffic opens up between the visible and the previously invisible sections of society...
...The state becomes an arena in which men do not act but watch the action, and, like other audiences, are acted upon...
...they require a smaller scale of organization...
...One of the ways in which the welfare state promotes happiness is by encouraging men to stay home...
...The increasing size of the state, the growing power of administration, the decline of political life: all these turn politics from a concrete activity into what Marx once called the fantasy of everyday life...
...But this is probably not the case with regard to the fulfillment of nonmaterial desires...
...DUT IF WE ARE RIGHT in thinking that there are human desires that the welfare state cannot fulfill, then surely these desires will continue to be expressed in the form of collective demands and claims...
...And so the welfare state is potentially of infinite extent...
...Administrators are to be nothing more than servants of the people, bound absolutely by legislative decree...
...second, that the nature of human desire is obvious...
...Everywhere else the agents of government have been invited to roam...
...There is no state beyond the welfare state...
...they remain subject to the determinations of others, 33 MICHAEL WALZER not only in the state, but in society and economy as well...
...Do the rulers of the welfare state claim to maximize the happiness of the greatest number...
...38 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE ANY MEMBER OF THE WELFARE STATE who is willful as well as desirous and who seeks some local space in which to act out his willfulness can be called an insurgent...
...Against the utilitarians, socialists have argued that mere private life, however enhanced by state action, cannot sustain a significant human culture...
...We ought, of course, to insist that state officials do as much as they can to encourage the growth of secondary associations independent of themselves, not forming wheels within wheels of their welfare-producing machine...
...Perhaps the most im30 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE pressive feature of modern welfare administration is the sheer variety of its coercive and deterrent instruments...
...The welfare state offers no satisfactory substitute for any of these...
...They believe that insurgency is a repudiation of services rendered, stupidly self-destructive since the services are so obviously helpful, even if they are often ineptly or impersonally delivered...
...Thus a modern worker or farmer is far more usefully represented, his interest more successfully defended, by the Washingtonbased lobbyist of his union than by his locallybased congressman...
...Politics is an activity with a purpose 28 POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE and not itself an enjoyable activity...
...Political unreason survives, of course, and especially in the form of an extraordinary devotion to the modern nation-state and to its leaders, a collective zeal all-to-often unmitigated by individual interest or by any demand for functional transparency...
...At the same time, it needs to be said that security and welfare are not open-ended categories whose final character will be determined by the freedmen of the liberal state...
...In the long run, the second is the more important: while the building of the welfare state will have its exciting and morally significant moments, its administration will not...
...It is virtually a law of political life that power be imitated, that those who seek benefits copy the organizational style of those who dispense benefits...
...it establishes minimal standards for masses of men * The single greatest factor in the expansion of state power has, of course, been external war, and it is probably true that the greatest dangers posed by the modern liberal state are not those which its own citizens must face...
...These might be conceived as overlapping circles of engagement and action, closed circles (though not closed in any coercive sense), whose members face inward at least some of the time, and within which resources are contained...
...Nevertheless, as we campaign for this or that welfare measure, we are driven to ask ourselves John Stuart Mill's famous question: "Suppose that . . . all the changes in institutions and opinions which you [are] looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a joy and a happiness to you...
...It might be met by the state itself...
...It is in response to the expectant faces of these "liberated" individuals that state administrators proclaim the mysteries of national purpose and decide that they must pursue "excellence" or promote culture (or defend freedom), rewarding their eager, needful and bored constituents with inflated rhetoric and byzantine artifacts, and all-too-often eliciting from them an irrational and unreflective patriotism...
...The cumulative effects, the likely future: effects, of these successive triumphs are now becoming visible, even though there are important victories yet to be won (and the last battles may be the hardest...
...In practice, however, it is something less than this...
...This was true even during the brief moment of laissezfaire, for the restrictions on commerce which were then overcome were largely local and corporate, and only the central government could overcome them...
...In the heat of battle, goals have sometimes been suggested which elude or transcend the liberal definition of human desire...
...How shall their demand be met...
...Whatever the nature of our past demands, what we want next is not on any of the liberal lists...
...If we or our ancestors or our comrades in this or that struggle have sought the actuality of freedom and love, we have settled readily enough for the pursuit of private happiness—so readily, indeed, that it would be difficult to deny that private happiness is all we ever wanted...
...This is due not only to increase in the rates of infant and adult survival—the first benefit of the welfare state is life—but also to the progressive extension of political membership to previously invisible men...
...Men live in groups and always find that they have limited choices and share, without having chosen, social measurements...
...He aims to avoid the problems of welfare production, or he seeks some sort of totalitarian "transcendence" (or he is preparing the nation for one or another kind of imperial adventure...
...This is true only insofar as the world—economy and state—actually provides or promises a decent living to the wife and child...
...Thus it happens that communion is replaced by distribution, generalized aspiration by concrete expectation...
...Let them defend our security...
...It's the anarchy of poverty/Delights me . . . " wrote William Carlos Williams...
...The welfare state has turned out to be perfectly compatible with inequality...
...When their country goes to war, they are impressed (that is, kidnapped), but not conscripted...
...At least, it is copied by those secondary associations already within the welfare system...
...In fact, however, no such individual has ever existed...
...Indeed, we know they will, for the modern state always intrudes, in greater or lesser degree, into areas that lie beyond welfare, most often in the name of political socialization...
...And they may well be right...
...If they are ever free to choose new limits and measurements, they must do so in some cooperative fashion, arguing among themselves, reaching a common decision...
...The welfare state has grown through invasion—a clear tribute to its attractiveness...
...Whatever the ideologies of which they are the primary victims, oppressed classes come eventually to regard the claims of their rulers with a deep-rooted skepticism and hostility...
...In schools, factories, and neighborhoods, where social workers pursue their errands of decency, or union officials defend the interests of their members, or provosts and deans plan the educational experiences of the young, insurgency is likely to be a perennial phenomenon...
...it is not a debate in which liberal utilitarians take much interest...
...We don't know if local organizations of rebellious citizens can displace entrenched officials, sanctioned and supported by the central state...
...it will probably expand to absorb each future wave...
...Americans who have already won national recognition are, hopefully, ready for the second...
...Invisible men are invisible first of all to the officials of the state (and that is a worse bondage...
...Therefore the hostility of the oppressed takes a new form: not sullen and inarticulate disbelief, but a positive demand that the claims be realized...
...today, the Negro is still fighting the first battle...
...Socialism then requires insurgency, that is, self-government within the welfare state and against it whenever necessary...
...The recognition of its members as concrete individuals with needs and desires may seem a minimal requirement of any political system and 27 MICHAEL WALZER hardly capable of producing significant moral attachments...
...And the central assumption of insurgent politics is that such power must always be won "from below"—which is also to say, against all the odds...
...That is certainly true...
...UNLIKE THE DEFENDERS OF the welfare state, theorists of citizenship have always been concerned with the problem of social scale...
...of collective effort, mutual recognition, and amour social...
...But so long as the goal of the oppressed is (as it ought to be) membership in the greater society rather than autonomy for the smaller one, such power is largely a means to an end, and it disappears when it ceases to be a necessary means...
...They are, in a word, newly licensed to have needs, but not yet intentions or plans of their own...
...But it is not the case that the only alternative to tyranny is a full-scale democracy...
...As the organizations of the oppressed win their battles, however, they are gradually integrated into the system of welfare administration...
...But the claims of the liberals are of a different sort, not mysterious but hypocritical...
...Then it must be won again by new popular forces against the state...
...It has expanded to absorb each wave...
...These are vitally important services, and liberal theory is vindicated, at least in part, by the fact that they are in great demand...
...Nor is it obvious that the closely articulated representative system that might make such activity worthwhile is really feasible, given the potentially infinite size and the extraordinary administrative complexity of the modern state...
...It must be built on a human scale, accessible to our minds and feelings, responsive to our decisions...
...But to do this, to act collectively like the sovereign individual of the utilitarians, they must share political power...
...No evidence suggests that socialism represents the next stage of history, or that the full development of welfare-production entails a socialist society...
...Pre-welfare theorists have generally denied the validity of this simple question, insisting that the state always is more than it does...
...The state is not going to wither away...
...The IBM card is the very means of our visibility, the guarantee that we are not forgotten among so many millions—even as it is simultaneously a symbol of our bondage to the bureaucratic machine...
...In any case, the electoral process has gradually taken on the character of an outer limit, a form of ultimate popular defense rather than of popular self-government, while the day-to-day visibility of workers and farmers and the legitimacy of their government are both maintained by processes largely, though by no means entirely, independent of democratic elections...
...nor ought the state to be the only focus of contemporary political struggle...
...But all this has nothing to do with socialism or with a meaningful common life, for reasons which go to the very heart of the theory of citizenship and participation...
...But it will also involve a new kind of exposure: to the developing administrative sciences of anticipation and prevention...
...of public venture and social achievement, of personal triumph and failure...
...Their strength and inclusiveness is the best guarantee we can 37 MICHAEL WALZER have of the benevolence of the welfare bureaucracy...
...Indeed, it needs to be said that the advance of the liberal state often transforms traditionalist communities (like the old churches) into new political arenas...
...The pride they may well take in the material services they render will never be elevated by the inner conviction of a higher purpose...
...The welfare state requires the virtual withering away of political energy and the disappearance, at least from public life, of any very significant po* Utilitarianism is not, of course, the only form of liberal politics...
...What socialism requires, then, is not that the welfare state be surpassed or transcended, whatever that would mean, but that it be held tightly to its own limits, drained of whatever superfluous moral content and unnecessary political power it has usurped, reduced so far as possible to a transparent administrative shell (overarching, protective, enabling) within which smaller groups can grow and prosper...
...They are agents simultaneously of distributive justice and social control...
...If human emotional and intellectual needs are to be partially fulfilled within political society, they have argued, then that society cannot be of any size or shape...
...Nevertheless, it is not the only fight...
...And it is in the nature of the infinitely expandable welfare state that victories can, in fact, be won...
...Thus the Negro is one kind of invisible man, bound to his fellows in a community of suffering and anger and therefore capable of collective action...
...I want to argue that the success, or the likely success, of welfarism makes necessary (as it makes possible) a new and radical challenge to political utilitarianism...
...But beyond welfare there are many areas 35 MICHAEL WALZER in which such purposes might be sought: education, culture, communications, mental health, city planning (and, most tempting and dangerous of all, though not within the range of this discussion, foreign policy...
...This demand for local self-determination, since it is made in the face of a state whose power is unprecedented in human history, is sometimes called by the melodramatic but useful name "insurgency...
...Or rather, it is the acting out of a new dialectic, which denies conventional definitions of good behavior and seeks to make the "helpfulness" of the welfare bureaucracy into the starting point of a new politics of popular resistance and self-government...
...I am going to assume that liberal ideologists' predictions of the "end of ideology" are wrong and that large numbers of people (not all people) are prone to make this choice...
...He was too easily delighted, or rather, his delight was that of an onlooker and not a participant in the "anarchic" culture of the poor...
...There can be no question that the development of welfare programs has involved (or required) an extraordinary expansion of the machinery of everyday state administration and therefore an increase in the degree, intensity and detail of social control...
...Precisely because of the privatizing results of the benefits he has already won (his automobile, for example), he now stands alone and helpless in the face of one or another sort of corporate power...
...to neglect the affairs of our own families...
...It is not difficult to imagine a kind of permanent insurgency, generating marginal but never major disturbances in the welfare state, always asserting its claims, never able to enforce them, capable of staging riots, never capable of building a movement or a new community...
...The universal character of this new knowledge doubtless will protect individuals from magisterial whim and prejudice...
...The deprivations of their members are more likely to be experienced by each man in his private, stateprotected world, experienced simultaneously but not shared...
...Nor has it been only a means: political activity has also brought the first joyful sense of membership in a community It has provided the positive pleasures of selfassertion and mutual recognition, of collective effort and achievement...
...THIRD, THE DEVELOPMENT of the welfare state has gone hand-in-hand with a transformation in the scale of political organization...
...It may well require a period of sustained struggle, but once that has been won, continued political participation (beyond occasional voting) seems unnecessary and even uneconomical...
...The politics of insurgency and the politics of welfare obviously overlap, both in time and technique, and their different purposes are sometimes confused...
...A wife and a child are so many pledges a man gives to the world for his good behavior," wrote Jeremy Bentham...
...Each new balance is achieved at a higher level of welfare production, includes more people, provides new reasons (and new sanctions) for good behavior...
...The man who drives a dangerous car or breathes polluted air is another kind, largely unaware of the risks he shares with others, only marginally aware of the existence of others, and probably incapable of significant efforts on his own behalf...
...and the liberal state which finally recognizes all men and grants them their humanity will inherit from those centuries an extraordinary moral power...
...The tenacious sense of detail peculiar to highly qualified bureaucrats replaces the enthusiasm of members: it is more useful, even to the members themselves...
...The state is an instrument and not an end in itself...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
