David P. Levine - Welfare, Right and the State: A Framework for Thinking

Welfare, Right, and the State

Progress in thinking about welfare and the state has been hampered by two important limitations. The first has to do with the absence of a wellarticulated concept of autonomy and the second has to do with the failure to develop a normative theory of the state.

In this book, David P. Levine seeks to address both of these problems and in so doing to begin to develop a framework for thinking about the welfare state. Levine starts with an exploration of the nature of welfare, which he connects not to basic needs as might be expected but to what he refers to as the capacity to lead the self-made life. He then considers different ways of grounding the claim that providing for the welfare of citizens might be considered a duty of the state. Among the ideas explored are shared membership in a community, rights, compassion, and security. At this stage, the ideas of right and the state are more fully examined, emphasizing the relationship between right and rights and applying insights from Hegel and Durkheim about the role of the state in relation to society. Finally, he explores the ideal of freedom and its relation to markets.

This scholarly work should be of interest to academics and advanced students working in the field of social administration, sociology, political science, economics, philosophy, international studies, and social work.

David P. Levine is Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, USA.

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First published 2008
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2008 David P. Levine

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ISBN 0-203-94050-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-77199-4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-94050-4 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-77199-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-94050-1 (ebk)

In preparing the manuscript of this book, I have benefited in various ways from the insights of a number of colleagues. In particular I would like to thank Abu Rizvi, Ritu Vij and Matt Wilson for their comments on early drafts of the manuscript, and Daniel Whelan for numerous discussions of the issues explored in it.

In this book, I explore the question: What kinds of institutions are best suited to securing welfare and how should they be involved in doing so? Institutions involved with welfare may be public or private, though the distinction between the two will not be as easily drawn as it might at first appear. Markets are settings for private transactions and private provision of welfare, but they are also publicly instituted and can be made part of public welfare provision. The family is the setting for private life, but this does not exclude public involvement and regulation, for example in the interests of protecting the welfare of children. Public involvement with welfare need not stand as an alternative to the use of markets. When public institutions provide or subsidize insurance for those unable to afford insurance offered by private enterprises or for those whom private enterprises simply refuse to insure, they facilitate the use of markets in the acquisition of services, but do not replace markets. Public institutions may contract with private organizations to provide welfare services. And the state may regulate private industry in a manner designed to assure that it will do a better job of securing welfare.

The close relationship between public and private does not mean that no distinction can or should be drawn or that the distinctions we draw are of no importance. Trends in theory and practice that treat the end of government as achieving market-like outcomes where markets fail incorporate a minimal distinction between public and private, one that, I would argue, serves us poorly. This is not, however, because they subsume institutions under a single broad ideal, but because they draw no distinctions in the form that ideal takes and the way it applies in the different spheres. What I will argue here is that state and market, which are the institutions with which I am mainly concerned, should be understood to embody the same ideal though in importantly different forms. I will argue that this shared ideal is the ideal of self-determination and that the distinction between public and private expresses the distinction between conceiving that ideal as a potential or possibility considered in abstraction from its particular form on one side and as an actual shape of life on the other. The primary concern of public life and public institutions is securing the potential and opportunity for a uniquely individual life; the primary work of the private world is to facilitate the translation of that potential into a particular and personal way of living. The distinction between potential and its realization in a particular shape of life is also the distinction between what is universal in living and what is particular and contingent. The potential to which I have just referred can be understood as the moment in which what we do and how we live are not yet determined. This moment of indeterminacy is the moment of freedom.