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Philip S. Golub and Noëlle Burgi
It is time to rebuild the consensus for equality that was destroyed by neoliberal hegemony.
The social-democratic contracts adopted throughout the West in the aftermath of the thirty years of war and depression of the first half of the twentieth century implied that public policies would henceforth be geared towards establishing and consolidating a society in which individual empowerment (liberty) went hand in hand with collective solidarity and the common good (equality). Understood as a philosophical ideal, the common good implied that all members of society, whatever their gender, their origins or social class, would have equal access to public goods and would be actors in the polis, constructing a society that promoted justice, solidarity and fairness.
That philosophical idea was the horizon that informed social practices for a few decades, but it was supplanted from the 1970s onwards by an emerging hegemonic order ('neoliberalism') that radically and misleadingly dissociated liberty and equality, and erected market-driven competition as the unique rationale of social relations. The very meanings of these words were transformed, as part of a deliberate effort to discredit and submerge collective and individual aspirations for social fairness.
Individual 'freedom' or 'liberty' became synonymous with unbridled competition of all against all, leading to the naturalisation of social inequality. In the new order, which in fact represented a return under new conditions to late nineteenth-century social relations, social violence and what Axel Honneth calls 'disrespect' once again became the norm. People are treated as objects, denied their subjecthood, becoming elementary particles in the global commodification of life, values and labour.
There is no need to delve here into the details of the inequities of the new normative order. Nor is there much need to point out that the philosophical and theoretical edifice underpinning that order has now fallen apart, though without as yet generating a transformation of dominant practices. What is needed now is a political-philosophical perspective that renews and reinvents the essential purposes, ethical and practical, of the historical social and democratic tradition.
The first step in this direction must be to restore the legitimacy of the notion of equality, and the essential link between equality, fairness and liberty, and between freedom and social justice. Equality, which entails the notion of rights, is of course understood here as the right of all individuals who are members of a democratic polity to equal universal access to public services such as health, education, energy, infrastructure, etc. Needless to say, in order to guarantee social and democratic outcomes, the principle of access requires in turn the conception and implementation of appropriate distributive policies, the explicit aim of which must be to prevent the reproduction of class structures and social stratifications.
Although most social democrats would agree on this understanding of what equality should mean, the question of its legitimacy is less consensual. Legitimacy implies the internalisation of values, norms and worldviews that support widespread beliefs regarding the highly desirable goals that can and must be met. Legitimacy is, in Foucault's terms, the outcome of a power/knowledge struggle in which the power elites seek to establish 'the truth' (e.g. an acceptable and coherent picture of their views and interests), and to justify the deployment of force in order to impose that truth.
Struggles over 'the truth' - over the best definition of the common good - are a normal feature of democratic societies so long as public debate is allowed to invent compromises that preserve pluralism and the essential balance of social forces and interests. However, while formally encouraging 'partnerships' and multiple forms of 'social dialogue', during the past decades the ruling classes have increasingly sought to gag any critique of, or overt opposition to, the emerging hegemonic ideology. In the name of 'modernisation' and 'competitiveness', governments have devised and implemented illiberal policies, threatening civil liberties and weaving administrative webs of constraint and control to keep the poor and other vulnerable social groups in submission. During the course of this process many social democrats have abandoned the power/knowledge battlefield, and behaved as if there were no alternative.
Restoring the legitimacy of equality, then, means reinvesting that battlefield, and building a new consensus around objectives of fairness and social justice. This can only be accomplished through a sustained and uncompromising effort at intellectual and political levels.
Noelle Burgi is a political scientist and sociologist at the Sorbonne, who has worked extensively on labour issues and the transformation of European social 'models' in comparative perspective. Her books include L'Etat britannique contre les syndicats (Kime, Paris 1992) and, more recently, a monograph critically assessing the back to work ('activation') policies of the French authorities.
Philip Golub is codirector of the International Relations programme, Institut d'études européennes, Université Paris 8, and contributing editor of Le Monde diplolmatique. His forthcoming book, Power, Profit and Prestige: a History of American Imperial Expansion will be published by Pluto in May 2010).
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