POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE
Walzer, Michael
One 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...
...Never before has the state stood at the center of so large a circle of conflict, agitation, and maneuver...
...He calls into question the omnicompetence of the service state and of all the organizations created in its image...
...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...
...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...
...Their word will do as well, though they are no more guerrilla fighters than I am...
...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 administrators are committed in advance to the common limits and measurements, to the established modes of security and welfare...
...it is his political destiny to receive services...
...At the same time, policemen, census takers, recruiting officers, tax collectors, welfare workers, radical organizers, and sociologists (in roughlythat his -torical order) march in...
...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...
...In a society which still exploits masses of men, poverty itself is a function and no one so desperately requires representation as the man without an adequate income...
...they have called one another brethren, citizens, comrades...
...This was true even during the brief moment of laissez1 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 modem liberal state are not those which its own citizens must face...
...WHAT SORTS OF GROUPS can fill the shell...
...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...
...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 290 last battles may be the hardest) . What I propose in this essay is a theoretical examination of these effects, of the welfare state as our collective project, our common future...
...In the past that has generally meant of all property owners, for they have been the most important welfare recipients...
...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...
...outside, other models are still possible...
...Public life ceases to engage the minds and emotions of their members...
...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...
...The universal character of this new knowledge doubtless will protect individuals from magisterial whim and prejudice...
...The tenacious sense of detail peculiar to highly qualified bureaucrats replaces the enthusiasm of members: it is more useful, even to the members themselves...
...they require a smaller scale of organization...
...The perfected welfare state will bring with it an end to the terrible oppressiveness of poverty and invisibility...
...And the better the living the world promises, the more good behavior it requires...
...it will probably expand to absorb eachfuture wave...
...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...
...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...
...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, simultaneously, agents of distributive justice and social control...
...They have been freed from politics, protected against heavy-handed and intolerant magistrates...
...It must be built on a human scale, accessible to our minds and feelings, responsive to our decisions...
...The welfare state is not the name of our desire...
...The struggle to control the modern state is a battle for the perfection of the welfare system...
...Precisely because of the privatizing results of the benefits he has already won (his automobile, for example), he now stands 294 MICHAEL WALZER alone and helpless in the face of one or another sort of corporate power...
...Whether this can actually be won and the victory sustained is another matter...
...But first I must try to suggest the enormous achievements and the special characteristics of welfare politics...
...Administrators are to be nothing more than servants of the people, bound absolutely by legislative decree...
...Why should we be active in politics...
...I will try todescribe some of these reasons a little later on...
...by an uncertain trial of a little vain-glory to undergo most certain enmities...
...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...
...it destroys the old corporations and regulates the new ones...
...But the vitality of such associations depends finally on those who associate...
...Newspapers provide us daily with intimations of such a pattern...
...And "enough" power always means power in some particular place, sufficient to inflict some particular injury...
...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...
...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 knowledgeable about these modes and patronizing toward anyone who is ignorant or uncommitted...
...The reception of services brings freedom of a limited sort, but of a sort rare enough to be valuable...
...The welfare state has grown through invasion—a clear tribute to its attractiveness...
...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...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...
...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...
...every successful revolution has produced such a system...
...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...
...In fact, however, no such individual has ever existed...
...Everywhere else the agents of government have been invited to roam...
...to lay open our secret councils and advices to all, to no purpose and without any benefit...
...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...
...nor do we know if they can win any substantial allegiance from their own members, establish some more or less effective control over the * Nor is it corporate power: the problem of counterbalancing, regulating, or destroying the power of private corporations is primarily a welfare problem...
...The state will never again be so easy to challenge as it was in the days of mass invisibility...
...for a few years more...
...They are rationalists-of-everydaylife, each one demanding, "What has it done for me...
...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...
...In fact, however, such recognition, when it is finally achieved, will be the outcome of centuries of struggle...
...Gradually, with the development of the welfare state, all this changes...
...It could be done to anyone, whereas patriotism ought to be the pride of a particular man, the enjoyment of particular activities...
...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 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...
...Nor has it been only a means: political activity has also brought the first joyful sense of membership in a community...
...Wild hopes for equality and fraternity have been proclaimed...
...Nevertheless, it is not the only fight...
...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...
...Simultaneously, liberal politics has been freed from philosophy, art, literature, religion, friendship, sex and love...
...Like the public recognition of needs, so the recognition of men—our hard-won visibility— becomes a source of intensified social control...
...But it is not the case that the only alternative to tyranny is a full-scale democracy...
...304 MICHAEL WALZER...
...Invisible men are invisible first of all to the officials of the state (and that is a worse bondage...
...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...
...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...
...Do the middle classes claim to increase the general prosperity...
...That means, with those "lifegiving nuclei," as Simone Weil called them, within which the local, immediate character of work and culture is determined...
...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...
...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...
...How shall their demand be met...
...Do the police claim to defend public security...
...faire, for the restrictions on commerce which were then overcome were largely local and corporate, and only the central government could overcome them...
...that man has both a mind and a passion for society...
...For a brief moment in time they created a communion which was not mysterious or opaque precisely because it was a common creation...
...For it cannot be established that security and welfare are more efficiently administered to 2 million or 50 million or 200 million people...
...But beyond welfare there are many areas 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...
...We are all counted, numbered, classified, catalogued, polled, interviewed, watched, and filed away...
...If men really do seek the common achievements and shared excitements of politics, then they will have them, in one form or another...
...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...
...For we are not entering, we are not going to enter, the new world of state-administered prosperity all at once...
...liberals have also been interested in local government and voluntary association...
...But the invaders have burst into a world they never chose...
...Each new balance is achieved at a higher level of welfare production, includes more people, provides new reasons (and new sanctions) for good behavior...
...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...
...It amounts to saying that what we want next, and what we want to share, are the pleasures of power...
...Perhaps the most impressive feature of modern welfare administration is the sheer variety of its coercive and deterrent instruments...
...Beyond," in that hopeful phrase, has neither a historical nor a logical sense...
...The state still does depend on ideology and mystery, but to a far lesser degree than ever before...
...In the U.S...
...it must be hollowed out...
...They have described it as a closelyknit body, dense and opaque, whose members were involved emotionally as well as materially, mysteriously as well as rationally, in the fate of the whole...
...Beyond welfare the liberal state cannot 'go: the world of the mind, philosophy, art, literature and religion...
...Few men who are actually poor would share it...
...and the liberal state which finally recognizes all men and grants them their humanity will inherit fromthose centuries an extraordinary moral power...
...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...
...And it is in the nature of the infinitely expandable welfare state that victories can, in fact, be won...
...Every newly recognized need, every service received, creates a new dependency and so a new social bond...
...The recognition of its members as concrete individuals with needs and desires may seem a minimal requirement of any political system and hardly capable of producing significant moral attachments...
...They have to be helped, guided, educated in the acceptable forms of aspiration and action...
...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...
...they belong to a different sphere of activity...
...And so welfare is the obvious and only antidote to delinquency and riot...
...But to deny the claims of statist ideologies is not necessarily to assert a purely instrumentalist political theory...
...local activity drops off...
...Politics has been the crucial means of becoming visible, of winning recognition for mass needs and desires...
...Precisely because they are not seen as citizens, they are exposed to arbitrary cruelty and neglect...
...The expansion of the range of state benefits and the extension of the ballot to new social groups have been parallel and related processes...
...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...
...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...
...Won't the possibilities of cooperative choice and political self-determination be enhanced...
...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...
...These are axioms of liberal enlightenment...
...But I have, perhaps arbitrarily, excluded foreign policy and war from this discussion...
...For these same reasons, the individual member is taken into account in a new way...
...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...
...Happiness begins and ends at home...
...POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 303 local politics of work and culture, and generate significant cooperative activity...
...It might be met by the state itself...
...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...
...Welfare without representation," Sargeant Shriver has said, "is tyranny...
...nor ought the state to be the only focus of contemporary political struggle...
...And as with Mill, so with us "an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answers, No...
...In part, this increase stems directly from the progressive enlargement of bureaucratic systems and from improvements in the training and discipline of their personnel...
...Fundamental social change would require that the state embody this willfulness, inviting its new members to choose their own limits and measurements...
...But the claims of the liberals are of a different sort, not mysterious but hypocritical...
...Let them maximize our happiness...
...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...
...It is a function of integration...
...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 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 takes the form of wildcat strikes, welfare unions, student rebellions...
...This istrue only insofar as the world—economy and state—actually provides or promises a decent living to the wife and child...
...Against the utilitarians, socialists have argued that mere private life, however enhanced by state action, cannot sustain a significant human culture...
...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 state becomes an arena in which men do not act but watch the action, and, like other audiences, are acted upon...
...it concerns the most immediate interests of workers and consumers...
...the attack upon the opacity of the traditional polity turns out to be an attack upon the value of political life...
...They are, in a word, newly licensed to have needs, but not yet intentions or plans of their own...
...The state cannot at the moment provide any sort of direct delight...
...People want pleasure, but such pleasure as cannot be shared, individual delight, egoistic satisfaction...
...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...
...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 important, by continuous political activity between elections...
...If they are benefited at all, they are subject to the most extreme paternalism...
...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...
...But all these organizations, as I have argued, tend to become integrated into the welfare system: for them, success is integration...
...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...
...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...
...This will continue to be so for some time to come, probably for the foreseeable future...
...But here too the direction of political utilitarianism is clearly marked out...
...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...
...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...
...it establishes minimal standards for masses of men whose own organizations, however powerful, cannot do so by themselves: it protects racial and religious minorities...
...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...
...Now all such pursuits and promotions lie outside the competence of the state...
...Prewelfare theorists have generally denied the validity of this simple question, insisting that the state always is more than it does...
...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...
...So long as the state establishes peace and —added later liberal writers—promotes welfare, public activity is awaste of time, positively dysfunctional in the economy of private life...
...And this suggests a lesson which is not easy to learn: that political power must always be twice-won...
...And it begins this process with a modest but urgent demand for a share right now in the management of this community...
...only administration will be public...
...The welfare state requires the virtual withering away of political energy and the disappearance, at least from public life, of any very significant popular creativity...
...Representatives are to be delegates, asserting popular desires, and then legislators, enacting the popular will...
...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...
...Obviously, it does so with considerable success...
...The pleasures of political struggle cannot be sustained once victory has been won...
...In an article in DISSENT some five years 302 MICHAEL WALZER 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...UNLIKE THE DEFENDERS OF the welfare state, theorists of citizenship have always been concerned with the problem of social scale...
...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...
...Socialism then requires insurgency, that is, self-government within the welfare state and against it whenever necessary...
...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...
...In fact, it is virtually certain that the quality of security and welfare need not change with the size of the population...
...And they may well be right...
...But its solution would not necessarily even raise the question of democratic decision-making...
...Americans who have already won national recognition are, let us hope, ready for the second...
...To some extent this has already happened...
...There is no readily accessible meaning in the frequent assertion that socialism lies "beyond the welfare state...
...2 This disagreement is in no sense adequately summed up in the words "individualism" and "collectivism...
...And it absorbs the power of every defunct agency as it wins the support of every newly enfranchised member...
...of personal triumph and failure...
...In the heat of battle, goals have sometimes been suggested which elude or transcend the liberal definition of human desire...
...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...
...For the first time in history, masses of men know with absolute clarity that the state ought to be doing something for them...
...The history of the welfare state begins with the coerced passivity of invisible POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 293 and degraded men, mystified by ideology...
...The tiny political public of an earlier period has been broken into by successive waves of lowerclass invaders...
...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...
...When his rulers claim to serve him, the claim is not a lie...
...It obviously means more today, though just how much more is unclear...
...And they will produce new ideologies to validate their new activities...
...Most of the previous forms of radical politics have involved demands for wider and wider systems of integration...
...So it is...
...Associations and neighborhoods continue to provide important social space for agitation and activity...
...Neither 2 Utilitarianism is not, of course, the only form of liberal politics...
...It is, so to speak, the crucial licensing agency of modern society, increasingly the only one...
...Their strength and inclusiveness is the best guarantee we can have of the benevolence of the welfare bureaucracy...
...the state would become a neutral -agency for the administration of se292 MICHAEL WALZER curity and welfare...
...Perhaps they will...
...Two are of especial interest here...
...First of all, the development of the welfare state has generated a pervasive enlightenment about the functions of political organizations...
...He is dependent upon the muckraking of free-lance journalists and academic experts and, much more, upon the benevolence of the state...
...Bureaucratic benevolence even bolsters inequality insofar as it neutralizes the struggle groups, decomposing and privatizing popular willfulness...
...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...
...Politics is an activity with a purpose and not itself an enjoyable activity...
...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...
...Already a sense of professional esprit is growing upamong those who know, or think they know, how to "handle" such outbursts...
...It must be won first with the help of the state or through the creation of parallel bureaucracies against established local or corporate elites...
...The politics of insurgency and the politics of welfare obviously overlap, both in time and technique, and their different purposes are sometimes confused...
...Its administrators will rarely feel themselves buoyed up and sustained by the zeal of their clients...
...The ultimate defense against bureaucratic omnicompetence is the self-interested assertiveness of ordinary men...
...the policeman and the welfare administrator will be the only public men...
...that he requires an active public life...
...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...
...We find ourselves as if in a dream, living once again in a world which is morally dense and opaque, mystified by ideologies, dominated by leaders whose purposes are not obvious...
...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...
...The welfare state has turned out to be perfectly compatible with inequality...
...a 3 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...
...Political unreason survives, of course, and especially in the form of an extraordinary devotion to the modem nation-state and to its leaders, a collective zeal all-too-often unmitigated by individual interest or by any demand for functional transparency...
...It's the anarchy of poverty/Delights me...
...This is due not only to increases 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...
...But that is not quite accurate, for it implies a process that begins at the center and is, just for that reason, inherently unlikely...
...We have allied ourselves with the crowds of men battering at the gates of American society...
...He insists on his intentions as well as his needs...
...The perfection of the welfare state will require the organization of all possible func•ional groups, even, or rather especially, the group of those who receive direct state assistance...
...our feelings are not always under our own control...
...In theory, of course, the purpose of representative government is to make the mass of people all-powerful...
...It has been replaced in part by administration itself, in part by bargaining between state bureaucrats and the (non-elected) representatives of a great variety of social constituencies...
...Exactly what constitutes a human scale is and ought to...
...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...
...Liberals have not been unaware of the dangers of administrative tyranny...
...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...
...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...
...Thus it happens that communion is replaced by distribution, generalized aspiration by concrete expectation...
...It depended instead on all sorts of ideological and ceremonial mystification: anointed kings, oaths, rituals, divine laws, and so on...
...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...
...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...
...POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 301 FIRST, the great functional organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and so on: these are the crucial representative bodies of the present day...
...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...
...What do we want now...
...That is why welfare administration, especially in itsmore direct forms (social work, for example), tends so generally toward paternalism...
...Because they are not numbered, they are always treated en masse...
...perhaps one day it will simply administer the appropriate chemicals to its members...
...THIRD, THE DEVELOPMENT of the welfare state has gone hand-in-hand with a transformation in the scale of political organization...
...Therefore the hostility of the oppressed takes a new form: not sullen and inarticulate disbelief, but a positive demand that the claims be realized...
...The pursuit of priPOLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 297 vate happiness may be endless, but its direction, for most of us, is given...
...We don't know if local organizations of rebellious citizens can displace entrenched officials, sanctioned and supported by the central state...
...The welfare state offers no satisfactory substitute for any of these...
...The state is an instrument and not an end in itself...
...To make these points and to make them stick is the major purpose of socialist politics in the welfare state...
...Because they are never polled, they are thought to have no opinions...
...be a subject of debate, but this is a debate likely to be carried on chiefly among radical democrats and socialists...
...That is the end of its history, the culmination of its legitimacy...
...That is one of its purposes...
...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...
...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...
...In practice, however, it is something less than this...
...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...
...Insurgency is a demand that bureaucratic services make possible, instead of replacing, local decision-making...
...He aims to avoid the problems of welfare production, or he seeks somesort of totalitarian "transcendence" (or he is preparing the nation for one or another kind of imperial adventure) . The fight over welfare is important enough...
...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...
...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...
...to hate and be hated...
...popular participation declines sharply...
...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...
...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...
...it is not a debate in which liberal utilitarians take much interest...
...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...
...If it does, the pledge is serious indeed...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The failure of self-government reveals •the fundamental difficulty of liberal utilitarianism...
...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...
...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...
...One of the ways in which the welfare state promotes happiness is by encouraging men to stay home...
...They are then trapped in more or less stable bargaining arrangements with governmental or corporate bureaucracies and forced to discipline their own members...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It has provided the positive pleasures of self-assertion and mutual recognition, of collective effort and achievement...
...In the long run, the second is the more important...
...Against the private man of liberal theory, socialists have defended the free citizen...
...Every attempt to restrict them to selected groups of people has been, and will surely continue to be, resisted...
...Socialist writers have never had -a great deal that was new or interesting to say about the state...
...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...
...Nor would a socialist government create a socialist society...
...Individuals and groups win public recognition, learn good behavior, and march out of the slums and ghettos...
...They demand or will demand some form of political participation, some share in political power...
...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...
...their members have also been colleagues...
...today, the Negro is still fighting the first battle...
...of public venture and social achievement...
...But this does not mean that the character of political struggle will remain unchanged as new groups and new desires replace the old...
...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...
...But there is one further corollary of welfare production which raises the most serious problems for liberalism: the growth ofstate power...
...Imagine, then, •that the state moves into the field of "culture promotion...
...These are vitally important services, and liberal theory is vindicated, at least in part, by the fact that they are in great demand...
...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 deprivations of their members are more likely to be experienced by each man in his private, stateprotected world, experienced simultaneously but not shared...
...The state is not going to wither away...
...In the long run, the two parts of society will merge into one world of absolutely visible men (that does not mean aworld of equals), known not to each other but to the specialists in such knowledge, not personally but statistically...
...Indeed, the state has been an instrument absolutely necessary to reformers of every sort: it shatters the authority of local and traditional elites...
...second, that the nature of human desire is obvious...
...Only much later does it turn out that the price and the purchase are very nearly the same thing...
...THESE are the most likely arenas of a genuinely democratic politics...
...So, at any rate, we have been led to believe by liberal writers...
...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...
...Liberal theorists of the welfare state have always claimed to know what we want...
...When their country goes to war, they are impressed (that is, kidnapped), but not conscripted...
...The pride they may well take in the material POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 299 services they render will never be elevated by the inner conviction of a higher purpose...
...The quality of security and welfare is thus popularly determined, at only one remove...
...The newer welfare recipients are not and are not likely to become self-determining men...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Never have ordinary citizens been so well-known to the public authorities as in the welfare state...
...Its standard of utility is the welfare of an individual absolutely free to make his own choices and measure his own happiness...
...But this is probably not the case with regard to the fulfillment of nonmaterial desires...
...But to do this, to act collectively like the sovereign individual of the utilitarians, they must share political power...
...Many of us are inside already, better served by machines and bureaucrats than men ever were by servants and slaves...
...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...
...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...
...to neglect the affairs of our own families...
...It is not the natural tendency even of liberal bureaucracy to encourage the formation of autonomous groups...
...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...
...wrote William Carlos Williams...
...the world of the emotions, friendship, sex and love—all these have been set outside its limits...
...But 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...
...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...
...while the building of the welfare state will have its exciting and morally significant moments, its administration will not...
...But insurgency is, or ought to be, very different from this...
...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...
...It is a vital and exciting world of work and struggle...
...This benevolence has its price: the increased power of the benevolent administrators, the increasing control over the recipients of benefits...
...NOW OBVIOUSLY THIS is no description of our present experience...
...The modern welfare state is an example of limited government, but not yet of popular sovereignty...
...If no man is invisible, the state is not immoral...
...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...
...Do the rulers of the welfare state claim to maximize the happiPOLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 291 ness of the greatest number...
...Now that there really are concrete benefits to be divided, the first political problem is distribution...
...And so the welfare state is potentially of infinite extent...
...An extraordinary traffic opens up between the visible and the previously invisible sections of society...
...What more can we possibly ask...
...Men live in groups and always find that they have limited choices and share, without having chosen, social measurements...
...A wife and a child are so many pledges a man gives to the world for his good behavior," wrote Jeremy Bentham...
...Even their crimes, so long as they injure only one another, are not recorded...
...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...
...This definition suggests that many of us are patriotic, if we are, for wrong or inadequate reasons...
...There is no state beyond the welfare state...
...of aspiration, initiative, intrigue, and argument...
...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...
...Its participants are not concerned that bureaucrats be sensitive and warm, butthat they be reticent and limited, less imposing, less intrusive than they often are...
...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...
...it accords recognition, turning oppressed subjects into full-fledged members...
...Then it must be won again by new popular forces against the state...
...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...
...Today it is palpably the executive rather than the legislative branch of government that is copied...
...Government must be responsive to their concrete wills and notmerely (as at present) to their conventionally defined desires...
...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...
...It has expanded to absorb each wave...
...of organized hostility...
...IN THE LONG RUN, the issue for socialists is not state power, 4 but power right here, on this shop floor, in this university, in this city...
...298 MICHAEL WALZER of these claims is true...
...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...
...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...
...of collective effort, mutual recognition, and amour social...
...Nor is its usefulness at an end...
...It gradually seeped away from local unions, for example, once bargaining rights were granted at the national or industrywide 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...
...Unorganized men are unrepresented and unprotected men, their claims unheard or but distantly heard at the centers of power...
...asked Thomas Hobbes, and his sarcastic reply suggests the central animus of liberal theory: —to have our wisdom undervalued before our own faces...
...Thus an eighteenthcentury philosophe: "What is patriotism...
...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...
...SECOND, THE EXPANSION of welfare production gives to the state a new and -thoroughly rational legitimacy...
...This is the socialist indictment of liberal utilitarianism...
...second, to avoid the boredom of success...
...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...
...Suffrage is the first badge of membership...
...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...
...This is true even though his congressman is elected in a demo296 MICHAEL WALZER cratic fashion, while the officers of his union are probably co-opted and the lobbyist appointed...
...He POLITICS IN THE WELFARE STATE 295 was too easily delighted, or rather, his delight was that of an onlooker and not a participant in the "anarchic" culture of the poor...
...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...
...Socialism, it has often been said, requires decentralization...
...In the perfected welfare state, enjoyment will always be private...
...Legislative activity has ceased in virtually every respect to be the central feature of the governmental process...
...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...
...But once invisibility is banished, the need for political "friendship" is also banished...
...Their cause has been our public passion...
...In both traditions, the individual is recognized as the ultimate value...
...Let them increase our prosperity...
...Thus a modern worker or farmer is far more usefully represented, his interests more successfully defended, by the Washingtonbased lobbyist of his union than by his locally based congressman...
...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...
...When the modern state moves beyond welfare, it does not bring us the satisfactions of citizenship, but only vicarious participa300 MICHAEL WALZER tion, the illusion of a common life...
...Their work rests on two assumptions: first, that politics ought to be the instrument of human desire...
...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...
...A balance is struck, breaks down, is struck again...
...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...
...the right to be visible is always hard-won...
...But it will also involve a new kind of exposure: to the developing administrative sciences of anticipation and prevention...
...Happiness is good behavior, and this equation, fervently endorsed by the authorities, is the ultimate sanction...
...The members of the welfare state need not have even the most remote acquaintance with each other...
...ago, I used the term "resistance" to suggest the sorts of activities presently called insurgency by various New Left writers...
...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...
...Individual men can still recognize the pleasures of politics, can still choose political life as an end-in-itself...
...Whatever the nature of our past demands, what we want next is not on any of the liberal lists...
...Let them defend our security...
...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...
...Though their announcements are at the very least premature, they linger in our minds as disturbing predictions...
...that the family does not provide an adequate arena for the human emotions...
...The state is always immoral when viewed from the standpoint of its invisible and degraded men...
...That day will not be the end of political history...
...But having said that, it is still worth adding: It's the regiment of the contented/ That haunts me...
...Eventually, every antisocial act is interpreted as a demand for increased benefits...
...At least, it is copied by those secondary associations already within the welfare system...
...Insurgency has been a prominent feature of every struggle for recognition: the sit-in strikes of the 1930s are the classic example...
...For we cannot say what it is we want, until we have understood what we have got and are getting...
...It is an enlightened love of ourselves, which teaches us to love the government which protects us . . . the society which works for our happiness...
...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...
...He seeks to close the circle (not every circle) against bureaucratic intrusions...
...Conflict would disappear...
...That success is possible must be the socialist's faith, or better, the wager that sustains his commitment...
...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.' 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...
...they remain subject to the determinations of others, not only in the state, but in society and economy as well...
...That is certainly true...
...This it does not, perhaps cannot, do...
...it is a means of winning benefits and also, presumably, of determining their character and the nature of their administration...
...As the organizations of the oppressed win their battles, however, they are gradually integrated into the system of welfare administration...
...But the process is by no means so far advanced as some of the more extreme versions of the theory of "mass society" suggest...
...For politics is something more than welfare production...
...He reargues the old democratic proposition that decisions should be made bythose who are most affected by them...
...But each success has turned out to be a further triumph for what might best be called political utilitarianism...
...No evidence suggests that socialism represents the next stage of history, or that the full development of welfare production entails a socialist society...
...Local politics has never been competitive with business and family...
...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...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
