Classification of political systems and theories

Graph of political systems (click image for full resolution)

It is possible to analyze much of the history of modern political philosophy -- political theory since Hobbes and Locke -- in terms of answers to a few primary questions. (This post expands upon a discussion of the "topology" of the space of political theories; link.) The answers to these primary questions can in principle generate a tree-structure of variants of political theories and systems. This is depicted in the graphic above, derived from these primary questions. 

1. Is a system of coercive law required for a peaceful human society?

Hobbes has a decisive answer to this question, based on his analysis of the state of nature. But it is also possible to make a case for a human community based on free cooperation among equals (anarchism).

2. Must a legitimate state provide strict protections of individual rights and liberties? (constitution)

Locke and Jefferson argued for the necessity of establishing protections of central rights and liberties that were essentially protected from legislation by the sovereign state -- a constitution.

a. Are there distinct limits to the exercise and purpose of state power? (constitutionality)

b. Do these limits create constraints on the kinds of legislation that can be adopted by a majority of citizens for the whole of society?

The most common view of the content of a governing constitution for a legitimate state is the idea that it should embody the moral facts of liberty and equality for all citizens. But what does liberty involve? And what kinds of equality must be protected? Here are a few possible answers to the latter question.

a. Equality of worth and treatment
b. Civil and legal equality
c. Equality in opportunities to fulfill human capacities and plans

3. Is majority rule morally mandatory in a just state? (democracy) 

Is democracy required in a legitimate state, given the moral realities of human beings in association with each other? Is majority rule morally superior to other possible political decision rules -- dictatorship, oligarchy, random assignment of citizens to positions in government, ....?

What moral principles are involved in defending the idea that a majority is entitled to impose its will on a minority with respect to various issues of public policy?

4. Are there moral reasons for concluding that a just state must embody programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens -- health, education, old age, decent housing, adequate nutrition? (public good)

a. Does the moral equality of all citizens create a broad social requirement that all citizens should be in a position to realize their human capacities and freedoms?

b. Do all members of society have obligations of concern for each other?

c. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more politically stable and cohesive than one without those provisions?

d. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more economically efficient and progressive than one without those provisions?

5. Do groups, nations, religious communities, classes, or races have independent moral value, over and above the value of the individuals who compose the population? (community)

a. Do citizens owe something to their fellow citizens (beyond not violating their constitutional rights)?
b. Should the state encourage or incentivize involvement in voluntary civil associations?
c. Can / should important collective tasks be left to the authority and competence of community associations?

The graph provided at the top of the post represents a tree diagram of kinds of political theories, depending on the YES/NO answers that a give theory provides to these questions.

If we conclude with Hobbes that a sovereign state is needed in order to secure public order and security in a society of independent and free individuals, then we are committed to the idea of a coercive state and system of law. If we reject that position, then we end with anarchism. (See Robert Paul Wolff's brilliant In Defense of Anarchism for coherent arguments along these lines.) As a next step, we ask whether there are moral limits on the scope of the state. Does a legitimate state require a constitution guaranteeing the rights, liberties, and equality of citizens? If yes, should the constitutional order be governed by majority rule (within the constraints of the constitutional protections)? if yes, then we get liberal democracy. 

We can next ask the question about the need for state-funded programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens and protecting against life's unfortunate contingencies (illness, unemployment, disability, old age). If yes, we get social democracy (or the welfare state). If no, we get the classic laissez-faire constitutional democracy, the minimal state. 

Taking the anti-democratic route through the tree, we get various forms of authoritarianism and illiberal democracy; and depending on the answer to the question of redistribution for public wellbeing, we get fascism, populist authoritarianism, oligarchy, and populism.

The question of the moral importance of community is to some extent separate from this series of distinctions. But it can be related to a number of the outcomes in the diagram -- on both the conservative and the progressive side of the spectrum. Philosophers defending anarchism have argued for the ability of a community of equals to find cooperative ways of handling its social life. Republicanism attributes independent value to the whole, over and above the value of the individual citizens. Populism in its various versions highlights the primacy of specific groups (racial, ethnic, national, gender, ...). And communism puts the future of society as a whole ahead of the importance of individuals in society. 

One consistent set of political values leads us through this tree to a particular solution: the favored political system should be a constitutional social democracy. If we favor individual freedom, human equality, democracy, and social wellbeing, then what John Rawls refers to as a "property-owning democracy" (link) is the best solution. This system can be spelled out simply:

a. Constitutional guarantees of full and equal rights and liberties as citizens

b. Economic life is carried out in a market economy regulated to ensure fair equality of opportunity.

c. Taxation to ensure inequalities of wealth do not create inequalities of dignity and fulfillment of capacities

d. Public provision (tax-financed) of reasonably high level of basic needs -- food, shelter, education, healthcare

This amounts to Rawls's two principles of justice and his argument for a property-owning democracy (Rawls, Justice as Fairness). The liberty principle ensures the first point and the difference principle ensures the second point. The constraints involved in the idea of a property-owning democracy provide a solution to the apparent tension between liberty and equality.

Carlyle's critique of modernity

What is wrong with life in the modern world? The complaint that modern society represents a toxic reduction of the importance of community in the lives of individuals is a familiar one. One version of this critique is the idea is that modern society has replaced all personal bonds and relationships with a single "cash nexus". And the observation that modern market economies function to create cruel and increasing misery and inequality is entirely well founded. It may surprise some readers to learn that this complaint is nearly two centuries old. At the time that Karl Marx was denouncing capitalism for its immiseration of the industrial working class, Thomas Carlyle was bitterly castigating British government for its policies of laissez-faire and its refusal to address the problems of destitution seriously. And Carlyle introduced the idea of the cash nexus in his essay on Chartism in 1840:

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men! On the whole, we will advise Society not to talk at all about what she exists for; but rather with her whole industry to exist, to try how she can keep existing! (Chartism, 61)

Consider the opening paragraphs of Past and Present, which draw attention to the two Englands that existed in the 1830s:

THE condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind, yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with work- shops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, “Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers, none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!” On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; but on the rich master-workers too it falls; neither can the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, but all are like to be brought low with it, and made ‘poor’ enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one.

Of these successful skilful workers some two millions, it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have ‘out- door relief’ flung over the wall to them,—the workhouse Bastille being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger.* They sit there, these many months now; their hope of deliverance as yet small. (Past and Present, 1)

Carlyle was aware of two highly visible "diseases" of English society in the first half of the nineteenth century: the poverty and degradation of working people, and the unfairness of the prevailing social and economic relations between privileged and poor. In passage after passage in Past and Present he denounces the extreme misery of working people:

Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Laborer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel. (Past and Present, 3)

And these inequalities of economic wellbeing are grossly unfair:

We have more riches than any Nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any Nation ever had before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success, if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. (Past and Present, 5)

It is 'for justice' that he struggles; for just wages, — not in money alone! An ever-toiling inferior, he would fain (though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a superior that should lovingly and wisely govern: is not that too the 'just wages' of his service done? (Chartism, 22)

This is Carlyle, an intelligent observer of modern economic society in the 1840s. Carlyle's prescriptions for a better future for England were reactionary: rule by well-intentioned kings, a well-established social hierarchy in which each person knew his or her place, and revitalized religious institutions. His political vision of the future was romantic and backward looking. But his analysis of the current pathologies of England's social and economic life was profound. And so thought Frederick Engels, who wrote an extensive review of Past and Present almost immediately upon its publication:

This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle landowning aristocracy which “have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief", a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, “captains of industry", are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn-out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interests, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own “brute individuality", a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of “soul", that is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness, in furious discontent and rebellion against the old social order, and hence a threatening, irresistibly advancing democracy – everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility. – That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle’s particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says. He, alone of the “respectable” class, has kept his eyes open at least towards the facts, he has at least correctly apprehended the immediate present, and that is indeed a very great deal for an “educated” Englishman. (Engels, Review of Past and Present)

Now consider the concerns and criticisms offered of our own era by an equally astute observer, Tony Judt. His 2010 book of reflections, Ill Fares the Land, offers a remarkably similar set of criticisms that are both systemic and moral. Consider first the title. This phrase calls us back to Oliver Goldsmith, who used the line in his 1770 poem "The Deserted Village":

Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay ..." -- Goldsmith, Carlyle, and Judt all denounce the same characteristic of a modern wealth-based economy. The single-minded quest for wealth and material advantage leads to social disaster.

Here is how Judt begins his critique, writing in 2010:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. (Introduction)

Judt highlights three aspects of our current economic realities: the ludicrous levels of concentration of wealth that we have reached in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the conspicuous consumption that accompanies it; the widening inequalities that western economies have witnessed since the 1970s, leading to every-more severe disparities of outcomes between affluent and poor (health, education, employment, mobility); and the absolute immiseration of the poor in many advanced capitalist economies, including the US. These facts lead to appalling outcomes: misery, to be sure; but also, erosion and extinction of social trust, commitment to the public good, and a sense of community that is broader than "involvement in a market economy". A society based entirely on the "cash nexus" is a bankrupt society -- this was Carlyle's view, and it is Judt's view as well. And, paradoxically enough, the erosion of trust and community is ultimately toxic for the stability and health of the market-based capitalist society itself.

The collapse of the value of community is marked by the conservative movement towards small government, privatization, elimination of public support, and minimal (negligible) regulation of industry and economy. This collapse signals an important moral fact: the idea that the citizens of a minimal state have no obligations to their fellow citizens through public programs. The affluent are "self-made" and the poor are incompetent and unmotivated -- undeserving of compassion and public support. But for Judt this is insane: it reflects a solipsism worthy of Ayn Rand, imagining self-sufficiency of the individual with no dependency on social arrangements. This view of modern society is truly deranged; without public roads, honest co-workers, and peaceful citizens, we are back in the world that Hobbes imagined. Or, as Judt quotes JS Mill: “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought ” (151).

What is genuinely noteworthy is how similar the outlines and concerns are of Judt's critique in 2010 to Carlyle's critique in 1841. Judt's solution for the coming generation is simple: to bring new energy into the moral and social ideal of "social democracy" -- a liberal society based on freedom and wellbeing for all its citizens, a system of mutual cooperation and respect. And the mechanics of a just society are reasonably well understood, both in practice and in theory. Most generally, they are the institutions of what John Rawls calls a "property-owning democracy":

Both a property-owning democracy and a liberal socialist regime set up a constitutional framework for democratic politics, guarantee the basic liberties with the fair value of the political liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and regulate economic and social inequalities by a principle of mutuality, if not by the difference principle. (Justice as Fairness 138)

Or in other words, a just polity based on the equal dignity and worth of all citizens will involve protections of fundamental liberties; secure and equal democratic institutions; and extensive provision of public benefits such as education, healthcare, adequate nutrition, and a dignified life (link). And these are precisely the premises of social democracy in Europe for over a century.

Inclusivity as a democratic goal

Many organizations express the goal of embracing diversity and inclusiveness. This is an admirable goal, but it is often only weakly pursued in practical terms. Efforts towards this end will be stronger in enhancing diversity and inclusiveness if we think carefully about what we have in mind when we think of that better future we are trying to create. Let's think about the inclusive university in particular.

We are a multi-racial, multi-cultural society. The legacies of race and discrimination are heavy upon us. We want the twenty-first century university to be genuinely multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic. We want these “multi’s” because our country itself is multicultural, and because we have a national history that has not done a good job of creating an environment of equality and democracy across racial and ethnic lines. And we want the universities to change, because they are key locations where the values and skills of our future leaders and citizens will be formed. So if universities do not succeed in transforming themselves around the realities of race and difference, we cannot expect the larger society to succeed in this difficult challenge either.

Universities are social environments. We bring with us the stereotypes and attitudes of the society in which we live, which often embody negative assumptions about other groups. And yet we wish to create a community in which students, faculty, and staff are actively accepting of one another, actively interested in learning from each other, and eager to work together on important projects.

We can change the culture and practices of the university in ways that enhance inclusiveness and equality. And if we succeed, our society will become more inclusive and equal as well.

We are creating the future, for better or worse. We have to create the kind of democratic, embracing society we want to live in. We want community, mutual respect, compassion for each other, and a civic culture that values all of us. But this is rarely true in America today.

What is inclusion? It is a social environment that deliberately and actively embodies the idea of mutual respect and concern. It values engagement with others, and it actively facilitates the creation of environments of learning and interaction in which every member feels welcome, equal, and valued. It is an environment that cultivates social trust.

Inclusiveness is more than diversity. It is an institution and culture in which people from all social groups -- race, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity -- are fully embraced and respected. It is an environment in which every individual is afforded the opportunity and space to do his or her best work, unimpeded by stereotype or discriminatory arrangements.

The challenge of creating a truly inclusive university is a difficult one for a variety of reasons. Important among these is the difficulty of overcoming limitations of perspective from the various groups, including especially the majority group. Practices that seem innocuous and neutral to majority group members are often experienced as demeaning and limiting by non-majority group members — what some students now refer to as “micro-aggressions”. In order to improve our university culture we must listen to each other with humility and respect, and we must craft new shared values and new ways of working together across the lines of race, ethnicity, wealth, religion, and gender and sexuality that so often divide us.

A university can be a very different place in twenty years -- more democratic, more inclusive, and more diverse. But to achieve these goals we must embrace new thinking about the challenges that we ourselves create for achieving these ideals. We must be honest and humble in recognizing these challenges.

Working towards these goals is important for many reasons. But perhaps at this time in our history, one of the most important reasons has to do with the currents of racism, xenophobia, and bigotry that have become so prominent in American politics and society in the past decade. Our democracy is weakened by hatred and intolerance. It can be strengthened by a genuine change of collective values -- values that allow us to embrace diversity and inclusion, and to embrace the strengths of our multicultural society.

Hobbes, Thucydides, and conflict

Anyone interested in the development of modern political philosophy is unavoidably interested in Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan and one of the earliest proponents of what came to be known as the "social contract tradition" of thinking about the moral legitimacy of state power. (Here is a post on Hobbes's intellectual development; link. And here is a post on Hobbes's framework for thinking about human society; link.) Hobbes's political philosophy depends on a theory of human nature -- how do human beings behave when they're at home? -- and a theory of the consequences of bringing a group of individuals with that kind of nature together. But it is worth asking the question: where did Hobbes's ideas about human nature as fearful, calculating, and self-interested originate? And it is very interesting to note that Hobbes's experiences as a young man involved quite a bit of practical experience and international exposure. (For example, it is likely that he met Galileo in Florence in 1630 while accompanying Sir Gervase Clifton on a trip to Italy.) So the potential influences on Hobbes's foundational ideas are quite broad.

In this light it is interesting to reflect upon the fact that Hobbes translated Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War as a young scholar in 1629, at the age of 41. And some aspects of Thucydides' treatment of the war between Athens and Sparta have suggestive features in common with some of Hobbes's later ideas. For example, the position taken by the Athenian delegates in the Melian Dialogue -- a crucial moment in the history of the war between Athens and Sparta -- is similar to the rule of the strong over the weak in Hobbes's description of the state of nature in Leviathan (1651). Was Hobbes influenced by this dialogue -- and the underlying Hellenistic conception of "international justice" -- in the formation of his own theory of the modern state? And did this view of the logic of expediency and the absence of moral limitation produce his most basic intuitions about the war of all against all?

Here is the relevant passage from the Melian Dialogue from Thucydides in Richard Crawley's translation:

Athenians. For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. (Book V, chapter XVII)

Here is Hobbes's translation of the same passage (link):

Ath. As we therefore will not, for our parts, with fair pretences; as, that having defeated the Medes, our reign is therefore lawful, or, that we come against you for injury done; make a long discourse without being believed: so would we have you also not expect to prevail by saying, either that you therefore took not our parts because you were a colony of the Lacedæmonians, or that you have done us no injury. But out of those things which we both of us do really think, let us go through with that which is feasible; both you and we knowing, that in human disputation justice is then only agreed on when the necessity is equal; whereas they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get. (Book V, sect. 89)

Now compare a few sentences about the individuals in the state of nature from Leviathan:

And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men, being necessary to a mans conservation, it ought to be allowed him. (Leviathan, Chapter XIII)

In each case the position is formulated in terms of the rational calculations of individuals involved in conflict, and the sole basis of reasoning is self-interest. Moral constraints have no purchase in these circumstances. The question arises, then: did Hobbes have the. moral worldview of Thucydides in mind as he formulated the chief arguments in Leviathan?

This question has been considered before. In a very interesting 1945 article Richard Schlatter noted the parallels between Thucydides and Hobbes (link). The year of publication of Schlatter's article is significant; the horrors of the twentieth century were surely still fresh in the minds of European and American intellectuals.

The idea of an unchanging human nature, the constant element in history, the common denominator which enables the historian to compare one event with another and construct a formula or pattern which is intelligible and useful, was a basic assumption of the science of history as Thucydides expounded it. Hobbes devotes the first third of the Leviathan to a detailed description of human nature which served as the foundation for his political philosophy. (357)

In the preface "Of the Life and History of Thucydides" Hobbes expresses his approval of the Athenian generals at Melos who refused to discuss the justice of their invasion--as soldiers their proper function was to carry out the will of the Athenian State by fair means or foul. As to whether the action of the state was just in this case, Hobbes puts aside the question with the observation that it "was not unlike to divers other actions that the people of Athens openly took upon them." (358)

Thus it appears that Hobbes' reading of Thucydides confirmed for him, or perhaps crystallized for him, the broad outlines and many of the details of his own thought. As an individual, he was said to have read little but to have digested thoroughly what he did read. As a translator, he was working in a great tradition which assumed that classical history was to be read as a preparation for political action. When he turned to Thucydides--perhaps at the suggestion of Francis Bacon--he had been meditating on political affairs for some time. (362)

So Hobbes generally agrees with the moral position taken by Thucydides on the actions of the Athenians. However, Schlatter believes that this represents evidence of agreement rather than influence. 

At a slightly more general level, it is clear that Hobbes was a creative and imaginative thinker. It is reasonable enough to expect that his philosophical framework was to some extent influenced by his immersion in Thucydides; but it is also well established that he conceived of his philosophical methods in analogy with the scientific ideas of Galileo as expressed in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World. There were many influences on the development of Hobbes's theories. So perhaps the most we can say, along with Sir Isaac Newton, is that great thinkers "stand on the shoulders of giants". Nonetheless, the parallel between Hobbes and Thucydides is striking and interesting.

*     *     *

Also interesting is a recent article by Robert Howse, "Thucydides and Just War: How to Begin to Read Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars"; link. Here is his abstract:

Thucydides is usually considered a realist thinker who denies a meaningful place to right or justice in international relations. In Just and Unjust Wars, however, Michael Walzer develops a powerful critique of realism through an engagement with Thucydides. This article compares Walzer’s treatment with Leo Strauss’s anti-realist interpretation of Thucydides, suggesting many similarities between Walzer’s approach and Strauss’s. Both Walzer and Strauss hold that, even in war, necessity does not eliminate meaningful margins of moral choice. Strauss’s much more expansive treatment of Thucydides helps us appreciate the subtleties of Walzer’s terse argument against realists.

 

The arc of justice

It has been over a month since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The horror, brutality, and relentless cruelty of George Floyd's death moves everyone who thinks about it. But George Floyd is, of course, not alone. Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and Eric Garner was choked to death by New York City police in the same year. The Washington Post has created a database of police shootings since 2015 (link), which includes shootings but not other causes of death. According to the data reported there for more than 5,000 deaths recorded in 2015-2020, black individuals are 2.38 times as likely to be shot and killed by police as white individuals, and Hispanic individuals are 1.77 times as likely to be shot and killed by police as white individuals. During the past five years, persons shot and killed by police included 2,479 white individuals (13 per million), 1,298 black individuals (31 per million), 904 Hispanic individuals (23 per million), and 219 "other" individuals (4 per million). Plainly there are severe racial disparities in these data. Black and brown people are much more likely to be shot by police than white people. Plainly these data demonstrate beyond argument the very clear arithmetic that black men and women are treated very differently from their white counterparts when it comes to police behavior.

Thanks to the availability of video evidence, a small number of these deaths at the hands of police have provoked widespread public outrage and protest. The Black Lives Matter movement has demanded that policing must change, and that police officers and superiors must be held accountable for unjustified use of force. But it is evident from the Washington Post data that most cases do not gain much public recognition or concern; and even worse, nothing much has changed in the five years since Michael Brown's death and Eric Garner's death in terms of the frequency of police killings. There has not been a sea change in the use of deadly force against young men of color by police across the country. According to the WP data, there were an average of more than 250 shooting deaths per year of black individuals, and only a few of these received national attention.

What change can we observe since Michael Brown's death and Eric Garner's death? The Black Lives Matter movement has been a persistent and courageous effort to demand we put racism and racist oppression aside. The public reaction to George Floyd's murder in the past month has been massive, sustained, and powerful. The persistent demonstrations that have occurred across the country -- with broad support across all racial groups -- seem to give some hope that American society is finally waking up to the deadly, crushing realities of racism in our country -- and is coming to realize that we must change. We must change our thinking, our acceptance of racial disparities, our toleration of hateful rhetoric and white supremacy, and our social and legal institutions. Is it possible that much of white America has at last emerged from centuries of psychosis and blindness on the subject of race, and is ready to demand change? Can we finally make a different America? In the words of Langston Hughes, "O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be!"

Michael Brown was killed at about the time of the 2014 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. A small group of sociologists undertook to write a letter -- a manifesto, really -- concerning the pervasiveness and impact of racism and racial disparities in America. Sociologist Neda Maghbouleh organized a small group of sociologists in attendance to draft the letter during the ASA conference in San Francisco, and over 1800 sociologists signed the letter. Nicki Lisa Cole contributed to writing the letter and summarizes its main points and recommendations here, and the text of the document can be found here. It is a powerful statement, both fact-based and normatively insistent. The whole document demands our attention, but here are two paragraphs that are especially important in today's climate of outrage about violent and unjustified use of force by police:

The relationship between African Americans and law enforcement is fraught with a long history of injustice, state violence and abuse of power. This history is compounded by a string of recent police actions that resulted in the deaths of Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mo.), Ezell Ford (Los Angeles, Calif.), Eric Garner (Staten Island, N.Y.), John Crawford (Beavercreek, Ohio), Oscar Grant (Oakland, Calif.), and the beating of Marlene Pinnock (Los Angeles, Calif.) by a California Highway Patrol officer. These events reflect a pattern of racialized policing, and will continue to occur in the absence of a national, long-term strategy that considers the role of historic social processes that have institutionalized racism within police departments and the criminal justice system more broadly.

Law enforcement’s hyper-surveillance of black and brown youth has created a climate of suspicion of people of color among police departments and within communities. The disrespect and targeting of black men and women by police departments across the nation creates an antagonistic relationship that undermines community trust and inhibits effective policing. Instead of feeling protected by police, many African Americans are intimidated and live in daily fear that their children will face abuse, arrest and death at the hands of police officers who may be acting on implicit biases or institutional policies based on stereotypes and assumptions of black criminality. Similarly, the police tactics used to intimidate protesters exercising their rights to peaceful assembly in Ferguson are rooted in the history of repression of African American protest movements and attitudes about blacks that often drive contemporary police practices.

These descriptions are not ideological, and they are not statements of political opinion. Rather, they are fact-based observations about racial disparities in our society that any honest observer would agree with. Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is an ethnographic documentation of many of the insights about surveillance, disrespect, and antagonism in Philadelphia (link).

Sociologists, public health experts, historians, and other social scientists have written honestly and passionately about the nature of the race regime in America. Michelle Alexander captures the thrust of much of this analysis in her outstanding book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and the phrase "the New Jim Crow" is brilliant as a description of life today for tens of millions of African-Americans. But the current moment demands more than simply analysis and policy recommendations -- it demands an ability to listen and a better ability of all of America to understand and feel the life experience that racism has created in our country. It seems that we need to listen to a poetic voice as well as a sociological or political analysis.

One of those voices is Langston Hughes. Here are two of Langston Hughes' incredibly powerful poems from the 1930s that speak to our times, "The Kids Who Die" and "Let America Be America Again".

The Kids Who Die
1938

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don't want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,
Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht
But the day will come—
You are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky—
The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

Let America be America again
1935

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Gross inequalities in a time of pandemic

Here is a stunning juxtaposition in the April 2 print edition of the New York Times. Take a close look. The top panel updates readers on the fact that the city and the region are enduring unimaginable suffering and stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with 63,300 victims and 2,624 deaths (as of April 4) — and with hundreds of thousands facing immediate, existential financial crisis because of the economic shutdown. And only eight miles away, as the Sotheby’s "Prominent Properties" half-page advertisement proclaims, home buyers can find secluded luxury, relaxation, and safety, for residential estates priced at $32.9 million and $21.5 million. In case the reader missed the exclusiveness of these properties, the advertisement mentions that they are "located in one of the nation's wealthiest zip codes". And, lest the prospective buyer be concerned about maintaining social isolation in these difficult times, the ad reminds prospective buyers that these are gated estates -- in fact, the $33M property is located on "the only guard gated street in Alpine".

Could Friedrich Engels have found a more compelling illustration of the fundamental inhumanity of the inequalities that exist in twenty-first century capitalism in the United States? And there is no need for rhetorical exaggeration — here it is in black and white in the nation’s "newspaper of record".

There are many compelling reasons that supported Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax. But here is one more: it is morally appalling, even gut-churning, to realize that $33 million for a home for one’s family (35,000 square feet, tennis court and indoor basketball court) is a reasonable “ask” for the super-wealthy in our country, the one-tenth of one percent who have ridden the crest of surging stock markets and finance and investment firms to a level of wealth that is literally unimaginable to at least 95% of the rest of the country.

Here is the heart of Warren's proposal for a wealth tax (link):

Rates and Revenue

• Zero additional tax on any household with a net worth of less than $50 million (99.9% of American households)
• 2% annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion
• 4% annual Billionaire Surtax (6% tax overall) on household net worth above $1 billion
• 10-Year revenue total of $3.75 trillion

Are we all in this together, or not? If we are, let’s share the wealth. Let’s all pay our fair share. Let’s pay for the costs of fighting the pandemic and saving tens of millions of our fellow citizens from financial ruin, eviction, malnutrition, and family crisis with a wealth tax on billionaires. They can afford it. The "65' saltwater gunite pool" is not a life necessity. The revenue estimate of the Warren proposal is roughly proportionate to the current estimate of what it will cost the US economy to overcome the pandemic, protect the vulnerable, and restart the economy -- $3.75 trillion. Both equity and the current crisis support such a plan.

Here is some background on the rising wealth inequalities we have witnessed in recent decades in the United States. Leiserson, McGrew, and Kopparam provide an excellent and data-rich survey of the system of wealth inequalities in the United States in "The distribution of wealth in the United States and implications for a net worth tax" (link). Since 1989 the increase in wealth inequality is dramatic. The top 10% owned about 67% of all wealth in 1989; by 2016 this had risen to 77%.

The second graph is a snapshot for 2016 (link). Both income and wealth are severely unequal, but wealth is substantially more so. The top quintile owns almost 90% of the wealth in the United States, with the top 1% owning about 40% of all wealth.

The website Inequality.org provides an historical look at the growth of inequalities of wealth in the US (link). Consider this graph of the wealth shares over a century of the top 1%, .1%, and .01% of the US population; it is eye-popping. Beginning in roughly 1978 the shares of the very top segments of the US population began to rise, and the trend continued through 2012 -- with no end in sight. The top 1% in 2012 owned 41% of all wealth; the top 0.1% owned 21%; and the top 0.01% owned 11%.

We need a wealth tax, and Elizabeth Warren put together a pretty convincing and rational plan. This is not a question of “soaking the rich”. It is a question of basic fairness. Our economy and society have functioned as an express elevator for ever-greater fortunes for the few, with essentially no improvement for 60-80% of the rest of America. An economy is a system of social cooperation, requiring the efforts of all members of society. But the benefits of our economic system have gone ever-more disproportionately to the rich and the ultra-rich. That is fundamentally unfair. Now is the time to bring equity back into our society and politics. If Mr. Moneybags can afford a $33M home in New Jersey, he or she can afford to pay a small tax on his wealth.

It is interesting to note that social scientists and anthropologists are beginning to study the super-rich as a distinctive group. A fascinating source is Iain Hay and Jonathan Beaverstock, eds., Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich. Especially relevant is Chris Paris's contribution, "The residential spaces of the super-rich". Paris writes:

Prime residential real estate remains a key element in super-­rich investment portfolios, both for private use through luxury consumption and as investment items with anticipated long-­ term capital gain, often untaxed as properties are owned by companies rather than individuals. Most of the homes of the super-­rich are purchased using cash, specialized financial instruments and/or through companies, and ‘the higher the price of the property, the less likely buyers were to arrange traditional mortgage financing for the home acquisition. Whether buyers are foreign or domestic, cash transactions predominate at the higher end of the market’ (Christie’s, 2013, p. 14). Such transactions, therefore, never enter ‘national’ housing accounting systems and play no part in many accounts of aggregate ‘national’ house price trends. For example, the analysis of house price trends in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation UK Housing Review is based on data relating to transactions using mortgages or loans, and EU and OECD comparisons between countries are based on the same kinds of data (Paris, 2013b).

Also fascinating in the volume is Emma Spence's study of the super-rich when at sea in their super-yachts, "Performing wealth and status: observing super-­yachts and the super-­rich in Monaco":

In this chapter I focus upon the super-­yacht as a key tool for exploring how performances of wealth are made visible in Monaco. A super-­yacht is a privately owned and professionally crewed luxury vessel over 30 metres in length. An average super-­ yacht, at approximately 47 metres in length, costs around €30 million to buy new, operates with a permanent crew of ten, and costs around €1.8 million per year to run. Larger super-­yachts such as Motor Yacht (M/Y) Madame Gu (99 metres in length), or the current largest super-­yacht in the world M/Y Azzam (180 metres in length) cost substantially more to build and to run. The price to charter (rent) a super-­yacht also varies considerably with size, age and reputation of the shipyard in which it was built. For example, a typical 47-­metre yacht can range between €100 000 to €600 000 per week to charter, plus costs. At the most exclusive end of the super-­yacht charter industry costs are much higher. M/Y Solange, for example, is an 85-­metre newly built yacht (2013) from reputable German shipyard Lürssen, which operates with 29 full-­time crew, and is priced at €1 million plus costs to charter per week.  The super-­yacht industry is worth an estimated €24 billion globally (Rutherford, 2014, p. 51).

A sense of injustice in China?

Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Here is how he put his central question:

This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation. For the most part, the book focuses on people at or near the bottom of the social order: those with little or no property, income, education, power, authority, or prestige. (xiii)

Moore is interested in a particular moment in history, the moment when ...

... people come to believe that a new and different set of criteria ought to go into effect for the choice of those in authority and the manner of its exercise, for the division of labor, and for the allocation of goods and services... In this chapter we are looking for general processes that occur at the level of culture, social structure, and individual personality, as groups of people cease to take their social surroundings for granted and come to reject or actively to oppose them. (81)

We might summarize this idea in these terms:

• A sense of justice is a broadly shared set of factual and normative beliefs about how existing society works when it comes to fair and equitable treatment of individuals by institutions and groups.
• People are likely to mobilize in an effort to change the social order when their sense of justice is profoundly offended.

Moore offers examples of how offenses to a prevalent sense of justice can influence collective behavior, mostly drawn from German working class history. But for other examples we can also turn to E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy of the crowd (link; also included in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture) and James Scott's application of this concept to the situation of rebellion and mobilization in SE Asia (The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance).

This set of ideas raises two different sets of questions. First, can we confirm the idea that the motivations that arise from the experience of justice and injustice are in fact important in influencing the outcomes of specific cases of social life? Or is the sense of justice simply an epiphenomenon? And second, can we empirically investigate the particulars of the sense of justice and injustice of a particular people at a point in time? Is the sense of justice itself a social fact that can be investigated and mapped?

These ideas seem especially relevant to the case of China since the Revolution. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Revolution depended upon a set of values that couched social justice in terms of equality across classes. On the other hand, China's economy and society have witnessed an explosion of inequalities of income and influence since the 1980s. It is natural to ask, then, whether people who came to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s in China acquired an egalitarian sense of justice and injustice; and whether they and their children experience today's inequalities as being unjust. And in fact, some observers believe that rising inequalities in China are contributing to dangerously high levels of dissatisfaction and outrage among ordinary citizens. Or in other words, China is ripe for the kind of morally induced protest and resistance that Barrington Moore described. China is a "social volcano" in the early stage of venting and steaming, with an eruption to follow.

Martin Whyte's recent study of this question leads to surprising findings (for me, anyway). In Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China Whyte sets out to use the tools of survey research to assess and measure the contours of the assumptions about justice and inequality that are shared by several generations of Chinese men and women. He and research colleagues (including Shen Mingming and Yang Ming) conducted a national survey in 2004 aimed at probing Chinese attitudes towards inequalities. The survey involved responses from about 4,344 individuals, stratified in terms of region and rural/urban status.

Here is Whyte's assessment of the survey data (chapter 3):

How can we summarize Chinese citizens' feelings about issues of inequality and distributive justice? Which aspects of current inequalities in China do they accept and view as fair, and which do they see as basically unjust? In general, our survey results indicate that the majority of respondents accept and view as fair most aspects of the unequal, market-based society in which they now live. There is little sign in our results of strong feelings of distributive injustice, of active rejection of the current system, or of nostalgia for the distributional policies of the planned socialist era. (kl 1191)

In fact, Whyte describes a set of attitudes that place China squarely within what we might call the values of social democracy, favoring a social safety net and a market society that provides widespread opportunities for advancement. Here is a particularly relevant chart (figure 3.3):

The results in this chart display an intriguing blend of liberal and socialist commitments. Equal distribution (the Mao principle) receives 29.1% support, significantly lower than the 44.7% who oppose the principle. But another anti-liberal principle, government guarantee of jobs, receives higher positive than negative support (57.3% in support, 23.9% against). And there is overwhelming support for the idea of a government guarantee of a minimum living standard (80.8%).

Whyte singles out a number of principles of legitimacy and justice that he discerns in the survey findings (quoting from chapter 3, kl 1191 ff.):

• There should be government-sponsored efforts to provide job and income guarantees to the poor ...
• There should be abundant opportunities for individuals and families to improve their livelihoods ...
• There should be equality of opportunity ...
• Material advancement and success should be determined by merit factors ...
• The pronounced social cleavage between China's rural and urban citizens ... are unfair
• Since individuals and families vary in their talents, diligence, and cultivation and deployment of merit-based strategies for success, society will have a considerable amount of inequality ...
• Upper limits should not be set on incomes ...
• It is acceptable for the rich to use their advantages to provide better lives for their families
• People in positions of political power should not be entitled to special privileges ...

It is the generally optimistic character of these findings that leads Whyte to doubt that China is a "social volcano". He finds that the bulk of the Chinese population possesses a conception of justice and economic expectation that aligns fairly well with China's current social and economic realities. He does not find a rising sense of injustice and resentment that might fuel anti-regime mobilization. So China is not approaching a social eruption driven by a deepening sense of injustice among ordinary people; or at least this is how Whyte reads the data.

But it seems possible to read the data in another way as well. The principle of equal distribution -- the Maoist principle -- does actually correspond to the moral sense of a very large number of Chinese men and women in the survey (29.1%). (This number falls to 11.3% if it is specified that inequalities derive from a system of equal opportunity; figure 3.5.) How strongly does this minority hold this egalitarian view? Who are they? Is there a generational split on this question? And how about perceptions of conflict? Figure 3.7 presents opinions about the severity of conflict between various groups in Chinese society; there we find that 38.5% of respondents find large or very large conflicts between poor and wealthy people. Is this a large number or a small number?

In fact, there is an alternative reading of Whyte's data that comes to a somewhat darker conclusion. It is true that there is a large majority in Chinese society who are optimistic about the direction of change China is undergoing, and who are optimistic about their futures and those of their children. But there also seems to be a meaningful percentage of China's population who do not share these attitudes and beliefs. And perhaps this group is large enough to portend the kind of social conflict that Whyte is so skeptical about. When it comes to the likelihood of social unrest, perhaps it is not the modal individual but the disadvantaged minority who is most salient. So maybe a Moore-ian crisis is brewing in China after all.

Polanyi's substantive theory of a decent society

Karl Polanyi is underrated as a theorist of capitalist modernity. Margaret Somers and Fred Block's latest book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique aims to correct this failure and to work out in some detail the analysis and critique that Polanyi provided between the wars. The book is an important contribution to the history of economic thought in the twentieth century. But even more important, it is also a substantive contribution to the role that Polanyi's thinking might play in efforts to formulate a progressive basis for mass politics in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 8 provides what might serve as a freestanding statement of their interpretation of Polanyi's thought. Here they encapsulate Polanyi's thinking into three related ideas about the role of markets (and theories about markets) in the modern world (219).

i. The first part is the idea that, while markets are necessary for organizing society, they also represent a fundamental threat to social order and human wellbeing.
ii. The second dimension of our conceptual framework is that the self-regulating invoked by market fundamentalists exists only in ideology; in reality, markets are always and everywhere embedded in social structures of politics, law, and culture.
iii. The final dimension of our conceptual framework probes into the special appeal of the free-market doctrine; after all, despite all its notable and self-evident harms, it still endures beyond all expectations.

Once we think through this analysis of Polanyi's core theory, we can see that it has a deeply important relationship to the economic and political development of a number of European societies since the 1930s. In particular, these ideas position the Nordic model of social democracy at the center of the story: a decent society will involve both markets and politics, both self-interested striving by individuals and companies and organized struggles by groups and organizations aimed at securing social protections from the pathologies of markets. In Esping-Anderson's phrase, a decent society involves both markets and politics, with the state taking the responsibility of regulating and supplementing markets in support of the wellbeing of its citizens (Politics against Markets). And this amounts in the end to a form of social democracy. (Here is an earlier discussion of the "Nordic" model; link.)

It is striking to see how powerfully this framework works as a diagnostic for the politics and dominant ideologies of the current era. The ideology of the market is in the position of complete ascendancy while the politics of mobilization around organized self-defense of ordinary working people from the excesses of the market are at their nadir. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor speak militantly about the moral primacy of the market and the bankruptcy of the "welfare state." Ayn Rand and Von Hayek are raised to the status of omniscient prophets. And the social supports that were introduced to ameliorate the worst excesses of unconstrained markets are being eviscerated -- SNAP support for food supplement, extended unemployment benefits, conservative attacks on Pell grants.

Block and Somers identify what Polanyi takes to be the central cleavage in modern society:

On the one side, the forces of laissez-faire justify an ever-expanding process of commodification by invoking the utopian promise of a fully self-regulating market society free of politics. On the other, multiple social movements mobilize in opposition to defend society against market domination by establishing institutional protections.... [Polanyi] is above all committed to democratically-motivated procedures to manage markets. (220)

And this statement once again underlines the striking anomaly of our time: the virtual absence of effective popular mobilization in support of efforts to manage the worst effects of unconstrained markets. Most visible is the protracted struggle over the Affordable Care Act and the choice by many Republican governors and legislatures to block extension of Medicaid eligibility to millions of their most vulnerable citizens. The fact of massive numbers of Americans without access to health insurance is both a consequence and an indictment of the failure of market society to provide effectively for one of the most fundamental dimensions of quality of life, decent access to healthcare. It is plain that this market failure demands state intervention. And yet the very modest reforms established by President Obama have been resisted with a virulence not often seen in this country. But most surprising, there is little by way of effective popular demand for preservation of these much-needed reforms, even by those who most benefit from them.

Block and Somers attempt to understand this anomaly in terms of a central failure of Polanyi's social theory: his expectation that a new set of ideas about the proper role of government would emerge and would permanently shift the terms of debate. This did not happen post-war. Instead, there was a resurgence of free-market fundamentalism in the 1970s that has gained ground ever since (220).

So the Polanyian question is perhaps a key question for us in the twenty-first century as well: where is the foundation for large scale political mobilization to reassert the state's role in moderating the effects of unconstrained markets in everything?

Sociologists on race

It is apparent that society in the United States is racialized in deep ways that greatly disadvantage the African-American population in the country, from health to longevity to education level to income and wealth levels. The disparities in all these areas of life are well documented (for example, here). Moreover, they seem to be more durable and intractable than those that exist for other ethnic and national minorities in the US.

It is crucial that the social and behavioral sciences do a better job of diagnosing the dynamics and the structural realities of race in the United States.  If we are to reverse these patterns of injustice, we need to understand better how they work.

One key mechanism producing these racial disparities is the continuing fact of residential segregation by race. Elizabeth Anderson, a highly accomplished philosopher at the University of Michigan makes this argument and its consequences very clearly in The Imperative of Integration.  Here is her central finding (summarizing a great volume of social science research):

Segregation of social groups is a principal cause of group inequality. It isolates disadvantaged groups from access to public and private resources, from sources of human and cultural capital, and from the social networks that govern access to jobs, business connections, and political influence. It depresses their ability to accumulate wealth and gain access to credit. It reinforces stigmatizing stereotypes about the disadvantaged and thus causes discrimination. (2)

And here is how Anderson summarizes her conclusions:

I have argued that integration is an indispensable goal in a society characterized by categorical inequality.  It is necessary to block and dismantle the mechanisms that perpetuate unjust social inequality, and to realize the promise of a democratic state that is equally responsive and accountable to citizens of all identities. (180)

Two areas of the social sciences pay particular attention to race in society. One is social psychology, where experts like Claude Steele and many others engage in theoretical and empirical work investigating how people think and act with respect to racial features of the social environment. Steele's studies of stereotype threat are an important example here (Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do).

But it is sociologists who have given the most comprehensive studies of race in American society. And here it is crucial to observe that there are several fairly different paradigms of thought that have guided sociological thinking about race.

One tradition has tried to frame issues of race within a more general framework of ethnic and cultural groups. The Chicago School of sociology gave voice to this approach, including especially Robert Ezra Park (Race and culture). The idea here is that groups enter society, they struggle for a while, and they eventually assimilate to positions of approximate equality in a complex and open society. The paradigm draws on the experience of various immigrant groups in American history. Distinct ethnic and cultural groups are a fact of life, and the goal of policy should be to find ways of cultivating harmonious relations among them. This is the "race relations" paradigm.

Stephen Steinberg argues in Race Relations: A Critique that this tradition started us off on the wrong foot and has made it more difficult to discover the social realities of the race system in the United States:

While the term "race relations" is meant to convey value neutrality, on closer examination it is riddled with value. Indeed, its rhetorical function is to obfuscate the true nature of "race relations," which is a system of racial domination and exploitation based on violence, resulting in the suppression and dehumanization of an entire people over centuries of American history. (kindle location 203)

Another important paradigm of race theory begins in a very different place. It emphasizes the inequalities of power and opportunity between majority society and the African-American population over time and it highlights the power relations through which these inequalities have been maintained from slavery through Jim Crow laws into the modern system. Robert Blauner's Racial Oppression in America offered an important instance of this approach in 1972. This perspective emphasizes the violence and domination that has been the face of the US racial system between white and black citizens. This we can call the "racial domination" paradigm.

The first paradigm fails to pay enough attention to the coercive aspects of the race system in the United States and tends to be "accomodationist". The second framework emphasizes the role that violence and oppression played (and play) in the subordination of African-American people in many important social structures.  Both frameworks pay attention to the role that prejudice and overt discrimination play in the racial disparities we currently observe, but the second paradigm gives greater attention to domination and a structure of systemic exclusion that is part of the history of race in the United States.  Michelle Alexander's recent The New Jim Crow is a very good contribution to the second perspective.

An important effort to make a new beginning within sociology on understanding race in the United States has been offered by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their presentation of racial formation theory in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s.  Winant summarizes much of this new thinking in a review article, "Race and Race Theory," published in Annual Review of Sociology in 2000.  Here is the text of the article that is posted on Winant's research webpage.

History and contemporary social realities require that we come to grips with race more honestly than we have in most of our past in the United States. This in turn mandates that we honestly confront the permanent ongoing costs that racialized social structures, including segregation, have imposed on African Americans in the US. We need to have an intellectual framework and narrative that honestly faces these facts, and we need to resolve to correct these injustices within a reasonable period of time.

How much inequality?

How much inequality is too much?  Answers range from Gracchus Babeuf (all inequalities are unjust) to Ayn Rand (there is no moral limit on the extent of inequalities a society can embody). Is there any reasoned basis for answering the question?  What kinds of criteria might we use to try to answer this kind of question?

John Rawls offered a fairly simple criterion of the extent of inequalities that a just society can tolerate in A Theory of Justice.  His background assumption is that the wealth of a society is a joint product of all members of society.  The rules of distribution create more or less inequality among citizens.  Citizens are concerned to "protect" their interests in case they wind up being in the worst-off positions in society.  So justice requires that institutions should create the least degree of inequalities subject to maximizing the position of the least-well-off position in society.  (He also stipulated an equality of opportunity principle: positions need to be open to all through a fair system of competition.)  If the empirical theory is true that economic inequalities sometimes create more wealth (through incentive effects), then it is just to increase inequalities up to the point where any further increase would leave the position of the least-well-off member of society unchanged.  This is the least system of inequalities subject to maximizing the position of the least-well-off.  Rawls justifies this principle (the difference principle) on the ground that it expresses an important sense of fairness: everyone is fairly treated when higher incomes are assigned to some individuals only when doing so benefits all individuals.

By this principle, current inequalities in the United States and Great Britain are demonstrably unjust: it would obviously be possible to lower the incomes of the 1 percent without lowering the income of the bottom forty percent.  So current inequalities are plainly more extensive than they need to be for the purpose of increasing overall output and improving the condition of the least-well-off.

Joseph Stiglitz offers a different kind of theory of inequality in his recent The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. (Here is the anchor essay as it appeared in Vanity Fair; link.) His argument is a pragmatic one based on a theory of social stability.  Essentially he argues that when inequalities become too extreme in a given society they breed social conflict and instability. This happens perhaps because of raw deprivation -- the bottom 40% really do have pretty desperate lives -- but more because of what Stiglitz identifies as erosion of the social contract.  Here is how he puts the point in the Vanity Fair article:

Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

So for Stiglitz, inequality is not simply a moral issue, but is also an issue of social stability and cohesion.

Here is another way of answering the question: perhaps extreme inequalities are actually bad for a population's health.  There is one sense in which this is obviously true: extremely poor people have worse health outcomes than affluent people.  But maybe the simple fact of inequalities is itself a toxic influence on public health, for poor and rich alike.  This is the argument that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett make in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.  Their argument is a complex one that suggests several causal explanations for why this might be the case; but their core idea is that great inequalities create widespread "stress" that is harmful to each individual's health.  Wilkinson and Pickett are public health experts and their argument is a cross-national statistical one.

So we might adapt their analysis into an answer to the question posed above: inequalities should be reduced until there is not measurable harm to public health.  (These arguments are considered in earlier posts.)

There is even a utilitarian argument for greater equality of income.  If we accept the plausible point that income makes a diminishing marginal contribution to happiness as income rises (perhaps after some inflection point), then under many realistic circumstances a more equal society with lower GNP will have a higher level of happiness than a more unequal society with higher GNP.  Lower-income people have more to gain from an additional $1000 of income than higher-income people.  So if we think it is a good thing to maximize happiness, then we ought to regulate inequalities accordingly.  Benjamin Page makes some of these arguments in an Institute for Research on Poverty position paper, "Utilitarian Arguments for Equality" (link).

Are we forced to choose among these frameworks in order to conclude that our economy has generated vastly too wide a set of inequalities of wealth and income?  No, we aren't, because these arguments are mutually supportive.  A system of greater equality, regulated by a tax system designed for that purpose, would be more fair, more supportive of equality of opportunity, more harmonious, likely healthier, and likely happier.  We have lots of good reasons for preferring greater equality of wealth and income and lots of good reasons to reject the "anything goes" philosophy that currently drives much of the political discourse on the right.

Rawls on a property-owning democracy

John Rawls's critique of capitalism was deeper than has been commonly recognized -- this is a central thrust of quite a bit of important recent work on Rawls's theory of justice. Much of this recent discussion focuses on Rawls's idea of a "property-owning democracy" as an alternative to both laissez-faire and welfare-state capitalism. This more disruptive reading of Rawls is especially important today, forty years later, given the great degree to which wealth stratification has increased and the political influence of wealth has mushroomed. (I've addressed this set of issues in prior posts; link, link.) Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson's recent volume, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, provides an excellent and detailed discussion of the many dimensions of this idea and its relevance to the capitalism we experience in 2012. It includes contributions by a number of important younger political philosophers.

O'Neill and Williamson make the point in their introduction that this issue is not merely of interest within academic philosophy. It also provides a powerful conceptual and normative system that might serve as a basis for a more successful version of progressive politics in North America and the UK. Politicians on the left have found themselves locked into a defensive battle trying to preserve some of the features of welfare state capitalism -- usually unsuccessfully. The arguments underlying the idea of a property owning democracy have the potential for resetting practical policy and political debates on more defensible terrain.

The core idea is that Rawls believes that his first principle establishing the priority of liberty has significant implications for the extent of wealth inequality that can be tolerated in a just society. The requirement of the equal worth of political and personal liberties implies that extreme inequalities of wealth are unjust, because they provide a fundamentally unequal base to different groups of people for the exercise of their political and democratic liberties. As O'Neill and Williamson put it in their introduction, "Capitalist interests and the rich will have vastly more influence over the political process than other citizens, a condition which violates the requirement of equal political liberties" (3).  A welfare capitalist state that succeeds in maintaining a tax system that compensates the worse-off in terms of income will satisfy the second principle, the difference principle. But in the striking recent interpretations of Rawls's thinking about a POD, a welfare state cannot satisfy the first principle. (It would appear that Rawls should also have had doubts about the sustainability of a welfare state within the circumstances of extreme inequality of wealth: wealth holders will have extensive political power and will be able to effectively oppose the tax policies that are necessary for the extensive income redistribution required by a just welfare capitalist state.) Instead, Rawls favors a form of society that he describes as a property-owning democracy, in which strong policies of wealth redistribution guarantee a broad distribution of wealth across society. Here is how Rawls puts it in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:

Property-owning democracy avoids this, not by the redistribution of income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of assets and human capital (that is, education and trained skills) at the beginning of each period, all this against a background of fair equality of opportunity. The intent is not simply to assist those who lose out through accident or misfortune (although that must be done), but rather to put all citizens in a position to manage their own affairs on a footing of a suitable degree of social and economic equality. (139)

O'Neill and Williamson draw out the implications of this view of a just society by contrast with the realities of 2012:

The concentration of capital and the emergence of finance as a driving sector of capitalism has generated not only instability and crisis; it also has led to extraordinary political power for private financial interests, with banking interests taking a leading role in shaping not only policies immediately affecting that sector but economic (and thereby social) policy in general.... The United States is now further than ever from realizing what Rawls termed the "fair value of the political liberties" -- that is, the core value of political equality. (5)

How would the wide dispersal of wealth be achieved and maintained?  Evidently this can only be achieved through taxation, including heavy estate taxes designed to prevent the "large-scale private concentrations of capital from coming to have a dominant role in economic and political life" (5).

It seems apparent that progressives lack powerful visions of what a just modern democracy could look like. The issues and principles that are being developed within this new discussion of Rawls have the potential for creating such a vision, as compelling in our times as the original idea of justice as fairness was in the 1970s.  It is, in the words of O'Neill and Williamson, "a political economy based on wide dispersal of capital with the political capacity to block the very rich and corporate elites from dominating the economy and relevant public policies" (4).  And it is a society that comes closer to the ideas of liberty and equality that underlie our core conception of democracy than we have yet achieved.

(Williamson and O'Neill provided an excellent exposition of the idea and some of the foundational questions that need to be explored in 2009 in "Property-Owning Democracy and the Demands of Justice" (link).  The concept of a property-owning democracy originates in writings by James Meade, including his 1965 Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property.)