Civil Society Watch

 

Solidarity as a voluntary act of recognizing others as deserving one's esteem, care and support is possible in a secular society where the responsibility to help is not always already commanded by religion, tradition, or status (noblesse oblige). Yet, solidarity seems to be almost impossible in a society based on contractual relations governed (a) by the principle pacta sunt servanda and (b) by the idea of liberty that establishes a system of limited irresponsibility (the limits being contracts and some obligations for "dependents"). That is why societies that we have come to regard as modern do not rely on social solidarity but rather on some kind of insurance system or welfare regime that externalizes the costs of the market economy by means of a mixture of risk distribution, economic compensation, poor relief, and social control. Typical of these welfare regimes are the following traits:

1. The underlying dualism of civil and/or political rights (freedom) and of social rights (justice) implies that "social entitlements" are not genuine individual rights but mere programs for government action.
2. In the German context the program of social rights/justice is constructed as self-executing mandate laid down in the constitution and partly removed from social conflicts.
3. The welfare state program is oriented toward reintegrating the recipients into the labor society and is executed by a social bureaucracy on the basis of contributions paid into an insurance scheme or means tests for welfare payments.
5. The most striking critical feature of the welfare state is the clientelization and the demoralization of citizens in the welfare labyrinth.

The critics of the welfare state have generally accepted the dualism of freedom and justice and, to a lesser degree, the notion of social justice as a matter of state action. They have focused, instead, on the way this governmental task has been executed, criticizing its operation as "social control," political disenfranchisement, or "colonization of the life-world" and its results as unjust or problematic for the proper functioning of capitalism. Consequently, therapies have shifted between nationalization and privatization, between restricting or expanding welfare expenses and services, and have tried to strengthen the legal position of the claimants, or to shift power and funds from the state agencies to self-help groups and non-state organizations.

 

 

I would like to redirect the critiques and therapies for the welfare state. The starting point is the theory of secularization, which then informs the concept of civil society and may help to solve the seeming paradox of solidarity.

Secularization is usually discussed as a problem of how to establish and legitimize political authority in a disenchanted world. Yet this view is too limited. Secularization affects not only the question of authority in modern society but also the problem of social integration. In the absence of a plan of salvation, or any laws of evolution (progress, decay), and after the breakdown of the traditional hierarchies, social ties, and responsibilities, a new symbolic social bond has to be constructed. The question is not only how societies can govern themselves (self-rule, law-rule), but also what constitutes their unity. Liberalism has answered these questions with a model guided by market rationality: the social contract as the precondition for an endless series of contractual relations. The dangerous supplement to this model has been referred to as "the social  question." The welfare state was invented as liberal society's last resort--the only medium through which the society of individuals could act upon itself.

A theory of civil society addresses the problem of rationalizing social integration and political legitimacy. It attempts to correct the "liberalist" misunderstanding and negation of solidarity and its externalization in the form of the welfare state. Central to this approach is the concept of public freedom as practiced in the public sphere, where citizens articulate their opinions, organize and bring to the fore their interests, and try to shape their polity. This notion of secular, radically pluralist politics is informed by the experience of a conflict-ridden society bereft of any transcendent authority that might guarantee consensus or harmony. Hence all resolutions of conflicts are always temporary.

The civility of social struggles presupposes a "basic convention"--a horizontal and mutually binding promise of the members of civil society to accept one another as different but politically equal, and which has to show in the way they resolve their conflicts. This implies free access to the public sphere for everyone and conflict settlements that respect everyone's physical and psychic integrity. The spirit of such a "convention" depends on the willingness to tolerate others as different and as political opponents rather than banning them from the public sphere as political enemies. Hence, a basic convention of this kind is more demanding normatively than a mere pacta sunt servanda agreement. The "other" is regarded not just as the abstract partner of a contract, but as constitutive of individuality and autonomy. Without others, one cannot be recognized as an autonomous self; without others there is no life in society. Individuals need others to be able to identify themselves.

Mutual recognition therefore includes the obligation to enable every other member of society to support the "basic convention." This thought has already played a minor role in the French Revolution: that a society of individuals cannot look the other way when the autonomy of its members is threatened. Political or public freedom and social rights therefore do not reside in totally different, disconnected spheres, but constitute together the status of the citizen in a civil society.

 

 

 There are at least two ways in which public freedom and social justice can be regarded as coexisting. First, social rights can be considered as necessary conditions for the enjoyment of public freedom. Without a modicum of social security--minimum income, shelter, food, and clothing--citizens are virtually deprived of their chance to participate in a polity's public life. Second, the freedoms of political communication may be seen as the necessary conditions of active citizenship, joined by social rights as the sufficient conditions. This argument presupposes that the enjoyment of public freedom as well as the duty of mutual support are part of some kind of basic convention. It avoids the unrealistic idea that every aspect of social life is governed by the requirements of political communication (which would imply that we owe welfare payments, public housing, or a winter coat to our public freedom). Moreover, this argument makes it quite clear that social rights interfere with the autonomy of those who have to contribute to the transfer of wealth: the self-imposed restriction of autonomy to enable autonomy. While the first alternative suggests that social rights come automatically as the functional annex of political rights, the second alternative stresses the fact that social rights and justice are a project that has to stand the test in public debates, rather than be grudgingly accepted as an abstract constitutional mandate or functional imperative.

This kind of basic security for all citizens could indeed be called "social security." It would no longer combine economic compensation with social control but with political empowerment, thus informing the recipients that they are not clients but members of a civil society who are equally entitled to public support. Such social security would create a cadre d'appartenance, a thin and vulnerable social bond between the members of society.

 

 

Similar to social movements that organized the protest against nuclear war or the destruction of natural environment, similar to the workers' and women's movements, quite a few association and self-help groups have broken through the asphalt of the bureaucratic organization of social services. They have made visible the social structures that are usually severed by the individualist structures of market competition and commodity production or excluded from a bureaucratic perspective. Thus, at the margins and in the niches of the society of individuals we see a civil society of greater density. Instead of exaggerating the achievements of selfhelp and totalizing the idea of group solidarity we should connect community and community (or group) membership on the one hand with society and the status of citizenship on the other to increase the "visibility of the social" (Rosanvallon) and to clarify the conditions of solidarity. While citizenship calls for some kind of basic protection, the recognition of pluralism and of social security as a communal task calls for efforts such as a genuine "social law" that enhance a non-statist type of solidarization.