The Social Citizenship Tradition in Anglo-American Thought

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Constance MacRae-Buchanan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the

requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

The Social Citizenship Tradition in Anglo-American Thought

Constance MacRae-Buchanan, PhD 2013

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

Abstract

The right to belong and participate in some form of political community is the most fundamental social right there is. This dissertation argues that social rights have not been understood broadly enough, that there has not been enough attention paid to their historical roots, and that they must not be viewed as being simply passive welfare rights. Rather, they must be seen in their historical context, and they must be seen for what they are: a much larger and more substantive phenomenon than what liberal theory has projected: both theoretically and empirically. I am calling this body of discourse “the social citizenship tradition.” This dissertation hopes to show that there was more than one definition of social citizenship historically and that social rights are certainly not “new.” In surveying a vast literature in

Britain, the United States, and Canada, it points to places where alternative social rights claims have entered politics and society. By looking at writings from these three countries over three centuries, the evidence points to some similarities as well as differences in how scholars approached questions of economic and social rights. In particular, similar arguments over labour and property figured prominently in all three countries. The contextual ground of right was different in each country but the voice of social action was similar. The objective here is to reunite this common tradition of social citizenship with its past. It is because of classical liberalism that social right has lost focus and power, and a whole tradition of political thinking has been lost.This tradition has been narrowed to the point that it might be unrecognizable to the more radical forces, those who also fought for it, in the American, Canadian and British pasts.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis committee for excellent supervision and guidance during the course of writing this dissertation. In particular, David A. Wolfe (Supervisor), Joseph H.

Carens, and Ronald A. Manzer. I would also like to thank the internal examiner Robert C.

Vipond and the external examiner Professor Ronalda Murphy. This thesis could not have been written without the sustained intellectual and emotional support of Ruthanne Wrobel who read every word of many versions and whose suggestions improved the quality of the overall product.

Other important sources of support were, in alphabetical order, Mary Anne Appleby, Benjamin

Buchanan, Daniel Buchanan, Hormoz Khakpour, Patty MacRae, Mary McIlroy. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Charles and Elizabeth MacRae.

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Table of Contents

Page

Chapter 1: Uncovering Social Citizenship in Anglo-American Thought 1

Chapter 2: United Kingdom: Loss of the Commons 51

Chapter 3: United States: Producerism, Philanthropy and the Private Welfare State 93

Chapter 4: Canada: The Organic Community 134

Chapter 5: Whither Social Rights? 188

List of Figures

Page

Figure 1: Three Elements of Citizenship in T.H. Marshall 3

Figure 2: Concepts of Social Rights in T.H. Marshall 79

Figure 3: The Two-Tier Distinction of Rights in American Writings 117

Figure 4: Communal Expressions of Social Rights in Canadian Writings 136

Figure 5: Ideological Variations in Anglo-American Thought 191

Appendices

Page

Appendix 1: Text of the first Chartist petition, 1839 228

Appendix 2: The Four Freedoms Speech 230

Appendix 3: The Social Rights Index 232

Appendix 4: Selected Highlights from the History of Social Rights 234

Select Bibliography 240

Chapter One – Uncovering Social Citizenship in Anglo-American Thought

“Politics is the science which teaches the people of a nation to care for each other.”

William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861)

1.1 Some General Thoughts on Social Citizenship and Social Rights

Britain, the United States, and Canada, it points to places where alternative social rights claims have entered politics and society.

This dissertation on the social citizenship tradition in Anglo-American thought is an important undertaking for many reasons. There is tremendous ignorance when it comes to understanding social rights historically. It is true that many government programs embodying social rights in their modern form, such as old age security and pensions, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, mothers’ allowances, medical care etc. were mainly put

in place in the twentieth century,1 particularly after the first and second World Wars.2 This point is not being disputed, and is highly significant: the social legislation of the twentieth century in all industrialized countries is a considerable achievement. What is being questioned is the way in which the concept and content of social citizenship is presented in the literature, the media and public discourse as conceptually and historically “new” and specifically new to the twentieth century. For example, the Canadian Welfare Council said in 1969: “There is a growing interest in human rights; and the concept of social rights as distinct from civil and political rights is emerging.”3 Similarly, in 1991, The Globe and Mail writes: “A whole new brand of rights – social rights – is expected to be a big part of the national unity debate in the fall.”4

This study examines social citizenship in Canada and elsewhere and looks at its early forms and expressions and alternative ways to conceive it. Any work in the area of social citizenship must begin with the writings of Thomas H. Marshall. Marshall delivered his theory on citizenship and social class in the form of two lectures at Cambridge University in 1949.5

Marshall posited that citizenship rights have developed historically along a continuum, from first, the recognition of legal or civil rights in the eighteenth century, to second, the granting of political rights beginning in the nineteenth century, and then, finally, to the recognition of social and economic rights in the twentieth century. A substantial section of this thesis discusses

1 A chronology of important dates in twentieth century social welfare legislation can be found in Andrew Armitage, Social Welfare in Canada: Ideals and Realities (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), Appendix II, “Canadian Social Welfare (1900-1974): Chronology.”

2 In Britain, major liberal reforms took place in the years between 1906 and 1914, and in Germany major reforms took place during Bismarck’s regime.

3 Canadian Welfare Council, Social Policies for Canada Part I (1969), 1.

4 Globe and Mail. September 10, 1991.

5 T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class” (1950) in idem, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London: Heinemann, 1963), 67-127.

Marshall’s analysis of social citizenship, and reference to his work is frequently made due to its importance in the literature. Marshall’s work not only was important in itself: it also stimulated a tremendous amount of work in social and political theory. This has led to both the extension and refutation of his ideas in many profitable ways. Three distinct elements of citizenship, as outlined by Marshall in 1950, appear in the chart below.

Figure 1 Three Elements of Citizenship in T.H. Marshall

Civil Political Social

1700s – Revolutions 1800s – Reform Acts 1900s – Modern State

Individual freedom as a Participation in politics as Life as a “civilised being” person + citizen voter or legislator according to social standards a

Civil rights – freedom of Political rights – struggle Access to “a modicum of speech, thought, religion to win + exercise these economic welfare and rights security” b

Right to acquire + protect Right to engage in public Right to receive social property, sign contracts life, debate issues, benefits – health care, influence decisions housing, schooling

Right to justice upheld by Rights gradually extended Provided through public common law + courts from elites to lower education + social classes services

Independent, private, National consciousness, Dependent, passive economic actors patriotic citizens recipients of welfare benefits

a T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 74. b Ibid.

In some ways, Marshall’s entire approach obscures social rights as they developed historically. First and foremost, the tripartite classification between different types of right is a contrivance. The emphasis on social legislation and social rights as a product of the twentieth

3 century in Marshall’s account obscures the fact that this legislation had very deep roots, as he acknowledges, but insufficiently; that there were protracted struggles for even more radical forms of social rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than there ever were in the twentieth; and finally, that the division between rights is arbitrary which raises questions about his general narrative. The tripartite classification also does not see that by the early to mid- nineteenth century, political right itself was considered to be a social right, or a type of social right, and that the struggles for the franchise were intimately bound up with popular efforts to resolve “the social question.” The first and most obvious distortion then, and one that Marshall contributes to, is the idea that social rights are “new.” In some cases, it is said, they originated within the last few decades of the twentieth century.6 Indeed, what is required is a definition of rights that does not make a distinction between civil, political and social rights. At least not in the way Marshall did. His classification of rights too easily sanctions the status quo and prevents critical analysis.

So ambiguities and contradictions are widely evident within Marshall and other liberal thinkers. For this reason, this thesis argues that liberalism, even the “good” liberalism of

Marshall and others, is not the most appropriate paradigm to understand social citizenship.7 This is not to say that the ideas in Marshall should be discarded. In rejecting much of classical

6 For example, according to William H. Simon, Charles Reich’s article “The New Property” contributed to the view that “welfare benefits were not regarded as rights prior to the 1960s.” The argument was that welfare benefits “were regarded as gratuities to be dispensed with administrative whim.” Simon, however, traces the idea of a right to assistance back to 1945 with the publication of Charlotte Towle’s Common Human Needs: An Interpretation for Staff in Public Assistance Agencies, and then as far back as the 1910s and 1920s in America. See his “The Invention and Reinvention of Welfare Rights,” Maryland Law Review, Vol. 44, Nos. 1, 1-37. But, in some ways, this also seems too recent given the radical literature of the American Populists in the last decades of the nineteenth century who … spoke about “an inclusive entitlement to labor (and, to be inferred, a political economy organized to provide work for all who were willing).” See Norman Pollack, The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 147.

7 Liberalism is not the right framework to understand social rights because social rights have not been sufficiently understood in the liberal literature. The concept of social rights as it was developed historically has been diminished, obscured, and depoliticized by the liberal tradition.

4 liberalism, it is quite evident that Marshall himself outlined a theory of citizenship that contained the potential for a deeper, broader sense of social right. Marshall called for the kind of moral reform that requires a cultural change and a modification of the individual. Like so many of his

New Liberal predecessors, as well as those who followed after him, what Marshall advocated was the creation of a truly social individual: a person with a social vision, with deep social ties beyond merely the paying of taxes, in other words, a “community-conscious” citizen.8

By looking at writings from three countries over three centuries, the evidence points to some striking similarities as well as some distinct differences in how scholars approached questions of economic and social rights. In particular, similar arguments over labour and property figured prominently in all three countries. The contextual grounds were different in each country but the voices of social action were similar. The objective here is to reunite and reconnect this common tradition of social citizenship with its past. It is because of classical liberalism that social right has lost focus and power, and a whole tradition of political thinking has been lost. In fact this tradition has been narrowed to the point that it might be unrecognizable to the more radical forces, those who also fought for it, like citizens do today, in the American,

Canadian and British pasts.

To speak of this broader tradition simply means exploring all those attempts historically to assert, in the widest possible sense, the priority of labour over capital, or, in the slogan of the nineteenth century, “man first, property afterwards.” 9 This is an exploratory inquiry because of the lack of thinking on the subject. For this reason, even pulling various strands of the literature together and asking questions of it will in itself be a contribution to political science. However,

8 This phrase “community-conscious citizen” comes from Carl J. Friedrich, The New Image of the Common Man (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950). It is similar to the idea of “the generalized other” in Herbert Mead.

9 The Ontario Workman: A Weekly Paper, Devoted to The Interests of the Working Classes. A Paper For The Tradesman: Mechanic: Workingman: Labourer, May 23, 1872.

5 this dissertation hopes to do more than that. It hopes to show that there is an indigenous political tradition in these three countries which in specific thinkers and embedded in quite different political ideologies is concerned with the whole community and its members, or social rights in a deep sense.

In order to examine social rights in a deeper sense, political science must examine the society of which they are a part. Too often social rights are looked at in isolation, ensconced in discourses on poverty and social welfare that limit the kinds of questions that are asked. Seeing social rights in a broader context takes the analysis more directly into the fields of political science and history and it also provides a larger framework from which evaluations of social citizenship can take place. Since the effectiveness of social policy depends on the larger political issues and institutions of a society, and how they are resolved or not resolved, these other institutions in the culture of that society must be examined. Winton Higgins and Gaby Ramia have offered these criteria:

A society has provided social citizenship, we suggest, if it has established conditions under which all adults within it are autonomous, in which they enjoy justice and equality, and in which they are supported by democratic forms of association. The challenge of social citizenship is to bring the project of universal rights to fruition for ‘embedded and embodied’ individuals: individuals in the context of their specific gender, race, age, ethnicity and so on.10

Even on its own terms, there are deep theoretical problems with the concept of social citizenship in capitalist societies. The term social citizenship is arguably an oxymoron in the sense that rights imply an individualistic, competitive, atomistic, negative space from which to make claims, whereas citizenship is more social and engaged. Moreover, the power of rights discourse, seen by some as inherently democratizing, and positive, is seen by others as a slippery slope downwards – a result, it is argued, of rights being extended so broadly as to cover

10 Winton Higgins and Gaby Ramia, “Social Citizenship” in Wayne Hudson and John Kane, eds., Rethinking Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 138. All emphases are in the original.

6 conceivably “all goods that contribute to human flourishing.”11 According to this argument, the process of extension turns what are really values into rights.12 Obviously this kind of debate is highly political, and it reflects how far rights supporters and rights opponents are prepared to go in arguing over their view of democracy.

When the “complex” nature of Canada, as John Ralston Saul13 characterizes the country –

to give just one example from these three cases – is added to these problems, the task of analysing social citizenship is a daunting one. Further, when an inquiry is made into the actual structural constraints which limit the potential for a broad and meaningful social citizenship in a country such as Canada, and which limit the possibilities of even researching whether there were once such cultures, it is evident that the challenge is a profound one. The ambiguity of origins in

Canada; the ambiguity of citizenship and nationhood – including Canada’s problems with

Quebec, and Quebec’s problems with Canada – as well as important aboriginal questions; the ambiguity of class caused by the incorporation of radical politics into the state, causing the paradoxical notion (in all three countries) that the original demands of social citizenship are obscured by the implementation of social rights themselves; the ambiguity of federalism which

11 Thus George Armstrong Kelly writes about citizenship’s “problematic extension:” he speaks of the ways in which it has come to “denature” politics, and “massify” the phenomena in the liberal state which he refers to and mythologizes as: “a society of ‘civility,’ where, as in a great city, bonds can be forged with strangers through settled rules of conduct and with hardly a whiff of Geminschaft – a vast agora where strangers meet.” See his “Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?” Daedalus, Vol. 108, Nos. 4, 1979, 21-36. Similarly, other accounts of the overload thesis, that is, the ungovernability of a society overly mobilized along rights-based lines, can be found in the literature. In the Canadian context, see Rainer Knopff and Thomas Polkinglton, “Against Inflating Human Rights,” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, Vol. 2, 1982, 77-86, and “Morals, Politics, and the Inflation of Human Rights,” Windsor Yeabook of Access to Justice, Vol. 2, 1982, 331-340. See also on the notion of an out of control “rights virus,” John Gray, “Hobbes and the Dilemma of the Modern State,” The World and I, Vol.4, Nos.3, March 1989.

12 See Rainer Knopff, Human Rights and Social Technology: The New War on Discrimination (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 216: “The collapse of rights into values means that rights are ultimately whatever we choose or will them to be. This accounts for the unending proliferation of rights and our inability persuasively to deny the label to any claim that wishes to adopt it, thereby robbing the notion of rights of any real significance.”

13 John Ralston Saul: Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Viking, 1997), 1. Saul writes: “while all countries are complex, the central characteristic of the Canadian state is its complexity.”

7 obscures and dilutes social class, yet at the same time, funds and delivers social policy; and, finally, the ambiguity of rights themselves, as The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reveals, makes any discussion of social rights in Canada complicated and problematic.

1.2 Plan of this Dissertation and Chapter Outline

The structure of this dissertation is as follows: First, this work is comparative between three countries in the Anglo-American sphere of influence: the United Kingdom, the United

States and Canada. Within each chapter, there is a discussion on what the ideology and practices of liberalism have done to the original ideas behind social rights. This analysis is of the ways in which liberalism and capitalism narrow and diminish the social and political views inherent in the concept of social citizenship.14 Second, the broader deeper way investigates social citizenship through its relationship to other structures. In all chapters an attempt is made to reveal how the impact of other structures – social, economic, judicial, administrative, geographic

– affect the development of social rights. For example, social citizenship is affected by the extent to which working classes, women, and various minorities are incorporated into society and historically when these groups got the vote. Race is a major factor in derailing social citizenship in the U.S. Social citizenship is also affected by the quality of social science, the extent of bureaucratic development, and the ability of governments to act. This dissertation attempts to give voice to these actors and institutions.

Many themes in this study appear in more than one chapter, and each chapter brings a slightly different perspective to the problems that beset social citizenship at any given time. The concepts of labour and property appear in every chapter, as well as political discourse in a very

14 As Harris says, “Capitalism encourages individuals to narrow the focus of their interest to the pursuit of private advantage. Individuals are led not only to narrow their vision and consequently to underplay the significance of the wider social framework as an influence on their condition and opportunities for action, but also to conceive of their relationship with other individuals and the world in purely instrumental terms.” See his essay, “Returning the social to democracy” in Graeme Duncan, ed., Democratic Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 218.

8 broad sense, because a close reading of the language, imagery and metaphors used to put ideas about rights into words provides evidence of positions, shifts and obstacles to citizens naming and claiming their rights. This dissertation argues that social rights have become disembedded, cut off from their origins, narrowed, and depoliticized, and for the sake of the social fabric must be reconnected. One way to accomplish this task is to look at the themes that shed light on why this narrowing occurred in the first place. It can likely be seen from the discussion above that the culprit is classical liberalism. In this sense, this dissertation is a contribution to the defining characteristic of Anglo-Canadian political thought: a critique of the discourse of liberalism.

Indeed, the scope of social citizenship, and hence the problems with it, are evident in the following observation made by Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon in 1998: “the expression ‘social citizenship’ evokes themes from three major traditions of political theory: liberal themes of rights and equal respect; communitarian norms of solidarity and shared responsibility, and republican ideals of participation in public life (through use of ‘public goods’ and ‘public services’).” 15 These three traditions, which are consistent with T.H. Marshall’s three forms of citizenship, will be examined in more detail throughout this thesis, by closely reading authors and analysts from Britain, America and Canada.

All chapters explore the roots and cultural foundations of social rights in the three countries with the belief that it is important to examine the early development of each nation before understanding it. This is especially so in North America since the origins of social rights, and even their very existence, have been largely obscured and must be recovered. A weakened social citizenship in all three countries is probed in the context of the neoliberal welfare state, but

15 Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract versus Charity: Why is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?” (1992); reprinted in Gershon Shafir, ed., The Citizenship Debates: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 114.

9 it is counterbalanced by the emergence of the new paradigm of the commons explored in the concluding Chapter Five that might save social citizenship in the long run.21

All chapters attempt to address essential questions posed by political theory, such as, as

Joseph Carens has phrased it, “how we want to live together and why.”22 As pointed out in every chapter, civil and social rights comprise two different rationalities – one economic, the other social – which lead to two different views on the nature of humanity and the state. These are views which are extremely difficult to reconcile. Nevertheless, in all three countries, to a larger and smaller extent, an attempt was made to do just that with the advent of the welfare state. The thesis explores how successful that enterprise was, and is, since that reconciliation has now unravelled to a large extent.

There are important connective themes between chapters, and different patterns emerge.

The discourses of labour and property, for instance, described as life-enhancing forces in early chapters emerge as soul-destroying forces in the final chapter as a result of the ruthlessly new neo-liberal economic rationality. The labour movement today talks about “the return of the social question” where part-time, short term, ill paid, contract, offshore, semi- under- and unemployment are now the norm. This precarious employment has no past and no future. In the language of the nineteenth century, wealth has prevailed over virtue. Of course, the question is:

But what kind of wealth? And what about common wealth? These are some of the issues taken

21 Ed Wingenbach observes that “global space” is opening up. There is now a “worldwide space of the political, which entails “a recognition of cross-border and cross-cultural responsibilities we all share regarding the conditions in which people find themselves.” In other words, a postliberal democratic theory, “provides an account of political responsibility that is not limited by the boundaries of nation states, which need not presume the inevitability of capitalist organization and which takes as its work the transformation of the now world wide space of the political.” Indeed, for Wingenbach, “[p]ostliberal democratic theory demands the inclusion of all people, as global citizens, in the decision-making process on issues with implications for all such citizens (in late capitalism this would mean, at the very least, investment policies, labor policies, environmental standards, social welfare policy, and so forth).” See his essay, “Justice After Liberalism: Democracy and Global Citizenship” in Karen Slawner and Mark E. Denham, eds., Citizenship After Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 161.

22 Joseph H. Carens, “Dimensions of Citizenship and National Identity in Canada,” The Philosophical Forum, xxviii, no. 1-2, Fall-Winter, 1996-7, 111.

10 up by the commons literature, in what Chapter Five of this dissertation is describing as the new social citizenship paradigm.

So, in Chapter One, an attempt is made to outline the whole thesis in miniature and raise issues more deeply probed in later chapters. In particular, the rest of this chapter examines the gaps in social rights thinking; surveys the problems with the classical liberal paradigm; defines the content of social rights; discusses the struggles (past and present) for public life; and teases out the two very different liberal interpretations of the role of the state in society.

Chapter Two, on the United Kingdom, first, clearly establishes that social rights are not a

“new” phenomenon having existed for centuries. Indeed, the chapter emphasizes that charity itself was seen historically as a social right; it also states that social rights rather than civil rights are the “true” natural rights. Chapter Two examines the loss of the Commons in the Enclosure

Acts that made the historic right to common land a mere memory. It surveys the literature and ideas from as far back as the Levellers to the British Chartists, to the early modern guilds in

Britain and the creation of industrial villages: essentially a “cradle to grave” culture. There is a discussion of the right to the whole produce of labour in British socialism, and further claims that the fight for universal suffrage, or political rights, were also a fight for access to work, property and machinery: or nineteenth century social rights, defined broadly. Indeed, the whole chapter presents a maximalist reading of T.H. Marshall.

Chapter Three, on the United States explores producerism and republicanism as moral economies and ways of life stressing the workers’ independence and their means of livelihood.

As in the U.K. and Canada, rights to land and labour in the U.S. are linked historically to social citizenship, especially in the nineteenth century. Despite this history, the chapter discusses how philanthropy or private welfare developed in that country, outside the state. It is in civic society where social rights are located in the American case. This was caused by the weak sense of

11 collectivist producerist goals in the face of the overwhelmingly individualist liberal paradigm, conceived as classical liberalism. Indeed, in this liberal universe, a strong aversion to the social represents what this dissertation calls a Two-Tier distinction, arising from the writings of Hugh

Heclo and others, which subordinate social rights to civil rights.

In Chapter Four, on Canada, an attempt is made to show how Canadian society places limits on the market and individualism. In contrast to the United States, Canada affirms the idea of the social. Surveying the idealists from John Watson, in the nineteenth century, to John

Ralston Saul in the twenty-first century, it stresses the organic nature of community in Canada.

This makes Canada a liberal-plus welfare state. Canada’s geography and Metis mindset are especially responsible for this phenomenon. The chapter examines the roots of social rights in

Canada and finds them in conceptions of land and labour as well as in the Social Gospel and public education in the writings of Egerton Ryerson. Social rights are indeed seen as public property.

Chapter Five briefly sums up where these discussions on the past have brought the analysis and outlines the ideological and historical realities that continue to confront social rights in all three countries. Then it moves to a normative discussion of whether social rights can ever provide an adequate sense of community in a classical liberal or neoliberal world. It attempts to flesh out what a normative theory of social citizenship might look like, and speculate on its feasibility, despite difficulties in measuring social rights.23 It reaffirms the notion that the answer to the dilemma of providing community in a neoliberal world partially resides in efforts to move from a welfare state to a welfare society. With such a move, the ground of right becomes social rather than individual. It is centered in the community and the collectivity.

23 See Clair Apodaca, “Measuring the Progressive Realization of Economic and Social Rights” in Shareen Hertel and Lanse Minkler, eds., Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, and Policy Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 170-181.

The discussion then moves naturally into an analysis of the feminist critique of social citizenship as well as an examination of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri simply call “the common.” There is an overlap between feminism and the commons literature, both stressing care of the self and the world and marginalizing difference. Indeed “citizenship work” is necessary to achieve life affirming economies and polities worldwide.

1.3 Gaps in the Social Citizenship Literature

The subject of social citizenship is also important to investigate because, with the exception of a few scholars, there has been little critical and innovative thinking on social rights.24 The concept of social citizenship is underresearched and undertheorized in political science and its radical potential is rarely acknowledged. The idea itself has been marginalized in the social policy literature. In part to overcome these difficulties, the concept is frequently called “social citizenship” as well as the more usual term “social rights” to signify that it is a broader phenomenon historically than what most accounts understand it to be. In other words, social citizenship comprises social rights but is not limited to them. The underlying point is that the form of social citizenship in liberal discourse, namely, “social rights” as understood in the plural is – like liberal society itself – atomistic, making social rights merely ameliorative and not very liberating. Seeing social right in a broader context is not the usual way of approaching it.

Overwhelmingly in Canada, and elsewhere, what has been written on social rights is from the

24 It is not surprising that so little has been written on social rights in Canada considering the amount of confusion that exists on the question of the growth of citizenship rights in general in capitalist economies. T.H. Marshall himself referred to the relationship between citizenship and social class as an “area of vast ignorance,” and many scholars have pointed to the underdeveloped nature of theories of social policy and the welfare state – a problem that is not confined to Canada. “Throughout the postwar period until the mid-1970s,” Maurice Roche writes, “it is significant the degree to which dominant paradigm assumptions about social citizenship and the welfare state remained assumptions. They tended to be taken for granted, barely reflected on or theorized – even by leading social policy theorists … Even by the late 1970s, Furniss and Tilton were still able to claim: ‘To date no coherent and persuasive case for the welfare state exists. Its appeal is pretheoretical.’ ” See Maurice Roche, Rethinking Citizenship: Welfare, Ideology and Change in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 38.

13 liberal, evolutionary point of view.25 This is a paradigm that tends to see social rights as discrete

“advances” in the field of social policy. This is social policy in the form of “major legislative landmarks” as John Goldthorpe has put it.26 The literature examined in this study shows no clear highway of evolution related to rights, no obvious progression in stages from privileges for a few to participation by many. The story is more complex than Darwinian models or liberal paradigms can express.

1.4 Problems with the liberal paradigm

The problem with this liberal paradigm is that, unlike more conflictive approaches, it doesn’t sufficiently understand that social rights are also “victories,” that is, a product of popular struggle. Of course, conflictive approaches raise questions which take the analysis out of the liberal paradigm. However, this is necessary: social rights cannot be understood solely as discrete “advances” and not also as “victories.” In other words, the state is necessary for the achievement of social rights, but so is democracy or “the people.” Social rights must be examined as part of the larger political and economic framework in which they exist. When examined in this way, it is evident that, even in the kinds of regimes where social rights are prominent and where social reform is considered to be important – for example, in western liberal democracies – political rights are limited – let alone social rights – which are even more

25 See, for example, Dennis Guest, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver: The University of British Columbia Press, 1997); Ronald Manzer, Public Policies and Political Development in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Richard Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario 1791-1893: A Study of Public Welfare Administration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); Frank Strain and Derek Hum, “Canadian Federalism and the Welfare State: Shifting Responsibilities and Sharing Costs” in Jacqueline S. Ismael, ed., The Canadian Welfare State: Evolution and Transition (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1987), 349-371.

26 John H. Goldthorpe, “The Development of Social Policy in England, 1800-1914: Notes on a sociological approach to a problem in historical explanation,” Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology Vol. 4, 1962, 43.

14 limited. 27

Dennis Guest’s work in Canada is an example of the liberal evolutionary model of social rights. Guest documents the evolution of Canadian social welfare from a residual “market oriented” concept in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to an institutional,

“solidaristic,” rights-based concept in the post-war welfare state of the twentieth century.28

Historically, Guest finds an ongoing “tension” between these two concepts, a tension which is particularly strong in the contemporary period.

The tension is due to a resurgence of residual social welfare ideas and policies in the form of neoliberalism and what this dissertation calls the enclosure of the commons.29 Nevertheless, the only remedy to the diminishment of the welfare state will be some form of global social citizenship – perhaps disassociating the nation-state and legal citizenship from social citizenship

– as is already the case, to some degree, in many countries.30 This would be a system of “abstract

27 Framed, as it is, by capitalism and a set of property relations.

28 The terms “residual” and “institutional” were originally developed by Harold L. Wilensky and Charles N. Lebeaux, in their Industrial Society and Social Welfare (New York, 1958) and were used also by Richard Titmus in his well-known book, Essays on the Welfare State (London, 1963).

29 This resurgence in Canada is a result of four main factors. The first is Canada’s history of social policy development which is generally thought to be incomplete by European standards, that is, more residual than institutional, as well as “late” in its initial development.29 The second is Canada's closer relations with the United States – a country more residual than Canada – in a North American “free” trade political economy. The third is the globalization and internationalization of capitalist production. The fourth is the capitalist class struggle “from above” which is now made easier by the alleged inevitable march of globalization. In taking advantage of what is not only an empirical fact, but increasingly also a political strategy, neoliberal forces have been able to orchestrate the view that “there is no alternative” to their economic and political programs. As a result, social rights are at risk. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward pointed out in 1997, “they have been put at risk by the political mobilization of some human actors against other human actors.”

30 Indeed, many are saying that social and economic citizenship, at least in Europe, is fast becoming a postnational citizenship. See Enrio Pugliese, “Italy Between Emigration and Immigration and the Problems of Citizenship” in David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook, eds., Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 106-121. See also Bryan S. Turner, “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship” in idem, ed., Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993). Turner says that as a result of globalization, citizenship must “be extracted from its location in the nation-state.” (15). And once “social rights are not fused with nationality but considered as universal human rights, a new line of thinking opens up,” writes Harry Coenen and Peter Leisink. For example, they propose the very interesting idea that “universal social security rights” could replace “economic aid” to underdeveloped countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece “[w]ithin the context of the

15 universal social rights,” or as Derek Heater puts it, “world social citizenship.”31 A global social citizenship would comprise generic, universal, basic social rights “for the whole of humanity.”

In this understanding, states and regions would be considered legitimate only if basic social rights are satisfied. States, regions, and municipalities would be responsible for their distribution and implementation. This arrangement,32 if it were to succeed, would be predicated on a new consensus of social harmony and co-operation. It would be informed by a new consciousness: the paradigm of “the commons” largely derived from the ecology and environmental movements. Social rights, situated within this higher consciousness, would be modified in ways that differ from their industrial characteristics. This transformation would occur both within and between countries and their regional trading blocs – with all that this implies, both nationally and internationally.33 This is, of course, a tall order.

Although the liberal paradigm is important, it nevertheless obscures the analysis of the nature and function of social rights historically. Some of the strongest criticisms of the liberal paradigm come from feminism, for example, which argues, inter alia, that social citizenship

European Community.” See Harry Coenen and Peter Leisink, Work and Citizenship in the New Europe (Aldershot Hants, England: Edward Elgar, 1993), 24.

31 Derek Heater, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics and Education (London and New York: Longman, 1990), 272-279.

32 There is a history of thinking about rights in this way in the twentieth century. As Andrew Linklater points out: “Developments such as the Nuremberg Convention challenged traditional conceptions of citizenship by defining rights and duties inherent in an imagined moral community which transcends the boundaries of sovereign states. A nascent form of global citizenship was enshrined in the Nuremberg Convention, although imperfect since the victorious powers retained their discretion over decisions about whom to bring before international courts of law. See his “Citizenship and Sovereignty in the Post-Westphalian European State” in Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Kohler, eds., Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 127.

33 It will also entail the management of the “risk society” and the “communities of danger” that contemporary theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, point to in the postindustrial world where risk threatens everyone, even those who, up until now, have been precluded due to their privilege and class position. According to Beck, the democracy of risk translates into a novel popular political power. See his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (originally published in German, 1986 ) (London: Sage, 1992), 36

16 serves males and females differently.34 Even in Guest’s critical and informative 1997 edition of

The Emergence of Social Security in Canada, there is a sense that the evolutionary telos will continue its evolution within the liberal paradigm. Guest states in his introduction to the new edition that if he were to rewrite the book now, besides examining the question of the redistribution of social services, income and wealth, he would also look at the question of the redistribution of power, and he would be more sensitive to the issues of race and gender. This new endeavour would raise a fundamental question for Guest: would he be able to remain within the liberal paradigm if writing the history of social welfare in Canada from the point of view of power, race and gender?

As evident from the discussion so far, the approach to social rights in this dissertation is generated out of absences in the social rights literature itself. Seeing social rights in a broader, deeper way is stimulated by two factors in particular. The first is the current deficiencies and failure of social rights as documented in welfare state criticism and scholarship that has led to the propagation of new normative work on rights and the welfare state. In pointing out the defects of social rights as they stand currently – for example, their passivity and top-down, authoritarian, often arbitrary structure – it also advocates new thinking on rights in general. As Michel

Foucault said in 1983, there is “considerable work to be done in renewing the conceptual categories that dominate the way we approach all these problems of guarantees and security. We are still bound up with an outlook that was formed between 1920 and 1940, mainly under the

34 See Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation” in idem., Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 144- 160; Birte Siim, “Towards a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State” in Kathleen B. Jones and Anna G. Jonasdottir, eds., The Political Interests of Gender: Developing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face (London: Sage, 1988), 160-186.

17 influence of Beveridge, a man who was born over a hundred years ago.”35 The new work that has been produced calls for something more substantial and more participatory than what liberal social rights offer. Thus, the first factor, the failure of social citizenship in the liberal paradigm is redeemable to some extent: perhaps something can be done about the problems with social rights as they are currently configured within capitalist societies. That is to say, despite the fact that the nation-state has been diminished by globalization and the highly relative, fragmented, and privileged cultural framework that the First World understands as postmodernism.36

The second factor, more intractable because it is hidden, is the realization, as noted earlier, that liberal ideology has obscured social citizenship to the point that even its origins are undocumented in much of the coverage it receives in the popular culture and curiously in the academic literature as well. The emphasis on public policy in mainstream social science is often divorced from the larger questions of' political conflict over distributive justice. As Hugh Heclo pointed out in 1995, “Social policy has become grounded in policy analysis and particular interests. It is a game played by politicians, group spokesmen, and technocrats, not moral leaders.”37 Thus, the social question appears disembodied, almost completely severed from its roots: a whole radical tradition with impeccable ancestry ends up, in the hands of liberalism, blandly called “social rights.” This second factor is caused by the depoliticizing of social rights

35 Michel Foucault, “A Finite Security System Confronting an Infinite Demand,” published originally in Securite sociale: l’enjeu (Paris: Syros, 1983), reprinted in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), trans. Alan Sheridan, 166.

36 Some argue that the postmodernist politics of identity undermine both left-wing activism and the welfare state by undercutting the sense of a cohesive national community. See, for example, Alan Wolfe and Jytte Klausen, “Identity Politics and the Welfare State” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., The Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 231-255; See also, Keith Banting, “Social Citizenship and the Multicultural Welfare State” in Alan C. Cairns, ed., Citizenship, Diversity, and Pluralism: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 108-136.

37 Hugh Heclo, “The Social Question” in Katherine McFate, Roger Lawson and William Julius Wilson eds., Poverty, Inequality and the Future of Social Policy (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1995), 665-691.

18 as a result of the discourses and practices of liberalism. By narrowing the scope of social rights, and obscuring their origins, liberalism weakens radical critiques of industrial capitalism and the struggle for alternatives in solidarity and fraternity.

Since liberalism is unable to accommodate the social world because its point of reference is always the individual, it tends to avoid the social realm altogether.38 As one scholar states, to accept liberalism “is to treat all social goals as in some sense reducible to the goals of individuals.”39 Clearly this will not do. Carol Gould is absolutely right when she says that western societies fail to take the importance of social cooperation for “full human freedom” seriously.40 Moreover, “one of our needs is community itself.”41 The reification of the individual as a unit of analysis is also problematic because it is asocial and ahistorical and thus the analysis is deeply partial. The market assumptions about the nature of the individual and society that underlie individualist thinking also make it an inappropriate framework for understanding social citizenship. A model of human society which sees competition and self-interest as the most basic attribute of the human being, including the idea of “winners” and “losers,” is what C. B.

Macpherson meant by possessive individualism in liberal thought.42 The whole concept of social

38 Not all liberal theorists ignore the social realm: there have been liberal attempts to recognize its importance, for example, Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and Ethics in the Public Domain), but as Frazer and Lacey point out in 1993, “The political importance of the social and cultural, and the importance of other-regarding values which the recognition of the primacy of the social might suggest, are just beginning to appear on the liberal agenda.” They add, reinforcing the position of this dissertation: “But our argument would suggest that the very conceptual framework of liberal theory will hamper its development of these insights.” See Frazer and Lacey, op.cit. 68.

39 Barry Hindess, Freedom, Equality, and the Market: Arguments on Social Policy (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987).

40 See Carol C. Gould, Rethinking democracy: Freedom and social cooperation in politics, economy and society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Carol Gould, like David Held, suggests that a right to participate should be connected to basic rights.

41 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 65.

42 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

19 citizenship contradicts this notion of “economic man” and liberalism’s claim about the self- sufficiency of individuals.43 In this sense, individual civil rights and collective social rights are in conflict.

1.5 Two Forms of Liberalism

The antagonistic relationship between civil and social rights structures the politics of whole societies in the Western world, giving rise to opposing political ideologies and divergent views on the role of the state. In fact, it can be said that an individual’s position on this one particular issue – where social right should stand in relation to civil right – is an indicator of their political views on other issues. Further, this conflict was played out as much in the nineteenth century as it has been in the twentieth. In the nineteenth century, the libertarian views of Herbert

Spencer44 and Robert Malthus conflicted with the progressive new liberal and socialist views of the idealists and Fabians. In the twentieth century, the neoliberal ideology of F.A. Hayek and

Milton Freedman also positioned itself against the ideas of welfarism and democratic socialism.

T.H. Marshall diagnosed this conflict in his lectures on social class and social citizenship and it is certainly prevalent in the world today. Patricia Hewitt summarizes the problem as follows:

On one side, the neoliberals – the champions, in Marshall’s terms, of civil rights – who argue that Europe can only survive in the modern global economy by slashing its social costs, deregulating its labour markets and dismantling its welfare institutions. On the other, social and Christian democrats alike who believe that an extension of social rights must go hand-in-hand with the expansion of the market, if economic efficiency as well as social justice is to be realized.45

43 Oren M. Levin-Waldman, Reconceiving Liberalism: Dilemmas of Contemporary Liberal Public Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 98.

44 See, for example, Herbert Spencer, “Over-Legislation” in Idem., Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), 229-282.

45 Patricia Hewitt, op. cit. 251.

Thus the problematic nature of individualism in all its manifestations is the most important issue that must be addressed in any reformulation of social right. “In seeing citizenship as an attribute of the individual, classical liberalism has required persons to become individuals,” writes one scholar.46 Indeed, as pointed out by a group of radical economists in Britain, the state in “requiring persons to become individuals” denies the social basis of citizenship. The state, according to John Holloway and others, “is constantly trying to reduce [people] to abstract individual citizens.” Therefore, “we must struggle against that.” 47

1.6 Definition and Content of Social Rights

Social rights have been conceptualised both narrowly and broadly in the political science literature, but, as noted above, not as broadly and deeply as this dissertation thinks they should be. Locke, in the seventeenth century, held that men have a right to self-preservation: to the things they need for their subsistence.48 Locke’s doctrine of charity meant that, over and above property rights, there is a “deeper and more powerful” general right to subsistence. This was because “the raison d’etre of property is human sustenance.”49 Accordingly, Locke believed that

“everyone must have meat, drink, clothing and firing.” Adam Smith, in the eighteenth century, had a conception of social rights which sounds very modern: “by necessaries I understand, not

46 Suad Joseph, “The Public/Private – The Imagined Boundary in the Imagined Nation/State/Community: The Lebanese case,” Feminist Review, No. 57, Autumn, 1997, 86. Emphasis is added.

47 London Edinburgh Weekend Group (Jeanette, Donald Mackenzie, John Holloway, Cynthia Cockburn, Kathy Polanshek, Nicola Murray, Neil McInnes and John MacDonald), In and Against the State (London: Pluto Press, 1980), 58.

48 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1698) in Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 311.

49Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 216.

21 only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without.”50 Of course, Smith is not alone in seeing public provision bound up with membership in the community.51 Rousseau similarly maintained that human beings have a natural right to the means of their subsistence, and that the needs of the community should take precedence over the rights of property.52 The same argument was made by William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss in the twentieth century.

Although the terms social right and social rights were used frequently in the nineteenth century, for example, by Chartists, socialists, labour leaders, journalists, and so on, they were never as explicitly defined as they were in the twentieth century, largely as a result of the work of T. H. Marshall. Further, though solutions were sought for the social question, the policy field was weak because the historical situation was more fluid than it is today.53 So solutions were still at a formative stage: private charity, philanthropy, agricultural colonies, mutual aid societies, cooperatives, the extended family, churches, jails, pubs, workhouses, even slavery were all used

50 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937), 821.

51 Although Smith has been hailed as the epitome of laissez-faire, this is not quite accurate. As Norbert Waszek points out, Smith ascribed a “cultural purpose” to the state. “It is here that Smith shows his acute awareness of the social and human costs of the progress of commercial society,” writes Waszek. “Smith held the government responsible for providing solutions to these problems. One such measure was through "moderate attempts toward progressive taxation.” Another was in the realm of education: Smith "suggested the universal introduction of obligatory schooling.” See Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s account of ‘Civil Society’ (Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 194-195. Emphasis in the original.

52 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Dent Dutton, 1973), 178-181.

53 Jacques Donzelot has said that this “social economy” “constituted a relatively weak discipline … It never succeeded in designating its object, concepts and methods with any rigour.” See his, “The promotion of the social,” Economy and Society, Vol. 17, Nos. 3, August 1988, 397.

22 in one way or another to provide social justice. 54 Nonetheless, it is still possible to discern what the idea of social citizenship might have looked like in the nineteenth century. The literature suggests that the demand for social rights then would have entailed a far more radical reconstruction of society than what was achieved in the liberal statist reforms of the twentieth century. “Older ideas of equality,” might have led, as Asa Briggs notes, “not to state intervention in the market, but to the elimination of the market altogether, at least as a force influencing human relationships.”55 And this seems to have been the case historically, if what E.

P. Thompson notes below, was a widely held view:

‘The Trade Unions will not only strike for less work, and more wages,’ wrote ‘A Member of the Builders Union’, but they will ultimately ABOLISH WAGES, become their own masters, and work for each other; labour and capital will no longer be separate but they will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of the workmen and workwomen.56

In 1965, John Porter, in Canada defined social rights as “the claims on the social system of all members of society to a basic standard of living and to equal opportunities for education, health and so forth.”57 As mentioned earlier, T.H. Marshall, in 1949, defined social rights more fully to also include “the right to share to the full in the social heritage” of the polity, and “the right to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”58

54 Reflecting this fluidity, Canadian socialist Phillips Thompson also emphasized, over a hundred years ago, the importance of setting principles and goals first, and worrying about institutional arrangements later: “Though it is impossible even to outline the final form which social institutions based upon the principle of a just return to each for his labor will assume, it is within the power of each and every man to aid in rough-hewing the material for the edifice, assured that in leaving the ultimate result to the shaping of the future he will be building better than he knows.” See The Politics of Labor (1887) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 142.

55 Asa Briggs, “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective, “European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 2, nos. 2, 1961, 231-232.

56 Quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1965), 829-830.

57 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 370.

58 T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class” (1950) in Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London: Heinemann, 1963), 74.

Anthony M. Rees, in 1995, referred to social citizenship as “access to, and utilisation of, the bundle of public services conventionally held to make up the modern welfare state.” He added:

“This is less a definition than an indication of where a definition might he sought.”59 Rees thinks that other attempts in the contemporary literature, which, like Beveridge and Marshall before them, delineate “inclusion” as the defining characteristic of social citizenship “accurately reflects the hopes invested in the concept, but it begs too many questions to be built in to a definition at the outset of the discussion.”60 Rees wants a narrower definition than that.

Of course, it is obvious just how broad the concept of social citizenship is analytically, and just how much history, political theory, policy analysis, social work, public administration, and political economy, even geography, fall within its domain. Furthermore, as many point out, citizenship is a main focus of political philosophy. So, normatively, the concept is very broad.

Indeed, despite the American hostility to social rights,61 one author proposed a U.S. declaration of social rights, in 1943, that went so far as to include not only the citizen’s right to rest and recreation, but also to his or her “right to adventure.”62 In Britain, R. H. Tawney similarly went beyond the usual boundaries by saying that every citizen has the right not only to “grow to their full stature,” but also, “since liberty should not be too austere – to have their fling when they feel

59 A. M. Rees, “The Promise of Social Citizenship,” Policy and Politics, Vol.23, No. 4, 1995, 314.

60 Ibid.

61 This hostility was not universal in the US. Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress in 1944, for example, “to explore the means for implementing an Economic Bill of Rights which included the rights to: a useful and remunerative job; earn enough money to provide for adequate food, clothing and recreation; a decent home; medical care; adequate protection in old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; and a good education.” Joseph Wronka, Human Rights and Social Policy in the 21st Century (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1998), 90.

62 United States National Resources Board, quoted in Charles E. Merriam, “The Content of an International Bill of Rights,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 243, January, 1946.

24 like it.”63 What precisely Tawney meant by this phrase is not entirely clear; nevertheless, it shows a wider conception of rights than is usual. To be sure, the statement made in 1992, that the

“political and moral complexity of social citizenship has not been adequately appreciated,” is correct.64 Social policy is much more complex than people think. As one welfare scholar points out, “social welfare policy can be effectively understood as a hybrid, like everything else in the real world. Its hybridity comes from its being situated between culture and political economy.”

In a sense, then, he adds, social policy is asked to perform contradictory functions: “Social policies provide material assistance to people but are intended to reproduce cultural norms.”65

As far as social rights defined as inclusion is concerned, the problem is whether they can or cannot accomplish this goal. Regardless of whether they can or not, Hugh Heclo seems to be saying something important when he talks about the “social” aspect of social citizenship: the project of keeping fundamentally divisive societies “sound and whole.”66 This, he thinks, “goes to the heart of the social question that prompted so much argument and policy development over the last one hundred or so years.” In probing deeper, Heclo finds “a general idea,” “a middle ground between self-interested exchange and selfless altruism,” “a moral vision of mutual concern.” For citizens, it is “what they realize they have in common.” It is a place where

63 R. H. Tawney, “Social Democracy in Britain” in idem, The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature, edited by Rita Hinden (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1966), 167. Quoted also in R.G. Runciman, “Why social inequalities are generated by social rights” in Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship Today: The contemporary relevance of T. H. Marshall (London: UCL Press, 1996), 55.

64 Maurice Roche, Rethinking Citizenship: Welfare, Ideology and Change in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 245.

65 Sanford F. Schram, After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 2.

66 All quotations in this paragraph are from Hugh Heclo, “The Social Question,” Chapter 22 in Poverty, Inequality and the Future of Social Policy, Katherine MacFate et.al., eds. (Russell Sage Foundation, 1995) 665-691. Heclo’s phrase “sound and whole” comes from American Progressive, Herbert Croley, The Promise of American life (New York: Macmillan, 1909). The specific reference is as follows: “In its deepest aspect … the social problem is the problem of preventing [fundamental] divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter – of keeping such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole.”

“theology, ethics and economics meet.”67 Heclo says that social reformers wanted to include everyone “because at the end of the day, that was the morally right thing for a society to try to be.”

Heclo’s desire to frame the debate over social rights in the larger context of a moral community rather than the narrow, seemingly apolitical, and technocratic context of policy analysis is surely right. He is also right in seeing social rights as indispensable to “those institutions that create integration and discourage alienation,” as the economist Kenneth

Boulding put it.68 To be sure, “having access to rights will create a feeling of belonging.”69

Indeed, “it is an objective of social policy to build the identity of a person around some community with which he is associated.”70

1.7 The Struggle for Public Life

When social rights are seen from a broader perspective, many of the threads in this dissertation come together. First, there is the idea that social rights are not new; second, there is the notion that they are interrelated and interdependent with other rights; third, there is the idea that liberalism continues to obscure social rights thinking; and fourth, the point that, historically, the tradition of political economy writing was much broader. Perhaps all may be recaptured in the newly reemerging commons paradigm, which bears some resemblance to “the loss of the

67 Heclo’s phrase “where theology, economics and ethics meet” comes from Richard T. Ely, The Social Law of Service (New York: Eastin and Mains, 1896).

68 Kenneth Boulding, “The Boundaries of Social Policy” (1967); reprinted in W. D. Birrell, P. A. R. Hillyard, A. S. Murie and D. J. D. Roche, eds., Social Administration: Readings in Applied Social Science (Harmondsworth, England: Penquin, 1973), 193.

69 Jane Jenson and Susan D. Phillips, Regime Shift: New Citizenship Practices in Canada,” International Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 14, Fall 1996, 114.

70 Kenneth Boulding, “The Boundaries of Social Policy,” 192.

26 commons” discussed in the next chapter on Great Britain, but today it is also much broader with a much wider application.

There is definitely a need for a paradigm shift, if only to recognize the profundity of these absences. Moreover, as in the discourses of property and labour, the commons is where social rights are located. Indeed people speak of a “social commons,” meaning “public provisions for welfare, health, education and so on.”71 Yet, outside of the commons literature, not much is written on social citizenship that explicitly – or even implicitly – links it to commoners or commoning. Current literature still focuses on responses to neoliberalism’s idea of the “active citizen,” Foucault’s governmentality studies, and the much vaunted “individualization” literature, which has its place, but is also problematic (for the same reasons neoliberalism is problematic).

Of course, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and other thinkers surveyed in this dissertation, do not follow this Foucaultian path. Hardt and Negri, like John McMurtry, link social policy directly to what they simply call: “the common.” They do so for good reason. As noted above, for centuries, all political philosophers have talked about the commons using the language of

“the good.” Indeed, the commons are deeply connected to ideas on what it means to be human: for some, the concept is synonymous with “nature.”72 And to be sure, the origins of social rights are found in places where human beings naturally gather: the polis, the city, the commonwealth, the republic, the state, the economy, the country.

1.8 Thick and Thin: Participation as Social Rights

Any conception of social citizenship must include a conception of fraternity. In other

71 Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Commonism,” Turbulence 1 June 2007 (http”//turbulence.org.uk/turbulence- 1/commonism/), 3.

72 Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth: “nature is just another word for the common.” 171.

27 words, the “we” in social rights is important, but, at least up until now, it is in the struggle for rights where the agency and fraternity occurs, since “once they have been achieved they are passively and privately enjoyed.”73 This point may be true, but citizenship rights must still be defended and safeguarded, so there is always some active power and fraternity in all citizenship rights, including social rights. 74 Thus the traditional liberal interpretation of social rights as passive, private, powerless, and merely ameliorative has never been entirely correct: collectively, social rights do constitute a form of power vis a vis capitalism: this is their whole point. This also means that, collectively, social rights – even residual social rights – embody at least some degree of fraternity.

Yet this fact is not appreciated by many social scientists and even social rights advocates including T.H. Marshall himself. Fraternity is left out of the equation. However, as subsequent chapters will show, it did historically find expression in institutions and practices which included not only liberal principles of civil and legal rights, but also social obligations. Of course, if fraternity is required in liberal society, but is not acknowledged as such, then profound questions about the alleged self-sufficiency of liberalism are raised. The right to belong, to participate, and be heard, the right to speak and be listened to, is what this dissertation thinks social rights should also include. This is social rights in the “thick” sense since it requires a dialogic approach to public decision making, and under its rubric there is a much wider content to the makeup of social citizenship. This idea is also expressed by Winton Higgens and Gaby Ramia:

73 Colin Crouch, “Citizenship and Community in British Political Debate” in Colin Crouch and Anthony Heath, eds., Social Research and Social Reform: Essays in Honour of A. H. Halsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 86.

74 For example, groups such as “Friends of Medicare” and the “Alliance of Seniors to Protect Canada’s Social Programs.” “The Friends of Medicare meet every other Thursday at Trinity St. Paul’s United Church on Bloor St. W. to hold a free discussion about progress and frustrations and to map strategy for the future,” reports the Toronto Star, “Saving medicare, from the grassroots up,” August 25, 2001. “We do believe when people come together, they have the possibility of bringing about change,” said one group participant.

Social citizenship and its supportive community are constantly generated in ongoing, open dialogue, which ideally occurs in all settings in which people co-operate and interact – in national and local assemblies, in interest organizations and at the workplace. Topics, participants and modes of expression in this dialogue are in no way limited. In the process individuals and groups learn more about each other, possibly generate empathy across lines of irreducible difference, and so enlarge their sense of their own political and social agendas. There is no end point in this process, and it certainly ought not to end in a consensus, or in an ‘integrated’ community where difference and contention have no place.75

In the above quotation, it is the emphasis on an on-going relationship in social citizenship that is important, as well as the insistence on maintaining a diversity of voices. On the first point, the on-going relationship, a central insight into one of the main differences between liberal

“civil” rights and social-democratic “social” rights has been drawn. The difference between the civil rights of classical liberalism and the social rights of the post-war welfare state can arguably be seen in exactly these terms. In new liberalism, individuals “are locked into relationships with each other, often for considerable periods of time. Their needs are to resolve their disputes, to repair the relationship, and to renew the conversation.” Whereas, “the adversary system seeks instead to truncate relationships; there are winners and losers.”76

This dialogic aspect to social rights, while traditional in some ways – for example important for relieving material distress and managing the life cycle – is able to transcend the usual categories and distinctions in liberalism. So it includes both the private and public realms in its theorizing – as it should – and also the concept of difference: the idea of “embedded” individuals who are situated in various contexts (class, gender, age, race, disability, ethnicity, geography, nation, and so on). Thus, it attempts to overcome the overly inclusive, vacuous, supposedly universal, liberal conceptions of equality and justice which merely “fake the

75 Winton Higgins and Gaby Ramia, “Social Citizenship” in Wayne Hudson and John Kane, eds., Rethinking Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142.

76 Joel F. Handler, “Dependent People, the State, and the Modern/Postmodern Search for the Dialogic Community,” UCLA Law Review, Vol. 35, Nos. 6, August 1988. 1021. Emphasis added.

29 universalist project.” 77

This participatory dimension of citizenship is indeed a requirement, though it may appear to some as a throw-back to the past. In a post-national, globalizing world, if social citizenship is to be achieved, despite some twentieth-century political theorists who have commented on the desirability of political non-participation,78 citizens must be involved. As many point out, autonomy and popular participation require a critical theory of welfare because dependence on policy experts can only go so far: “A group must still identify and defend its needs and settle on a political strategy to demand the resources needed.” 79 Fundamentally, the right to belong and be heard rests on a civic republican or communitarian understanding of politics where participation in the political community contributes to individual self-development, as well as to the collective good. However, this is a progressive republicanism best encapsulated by the label “liberal communitarianism.”80 In this sense, diversity and conflict are not stifled in the name of sameness and community. In other words, there is room for both the democratic and the liberal aspects of modern citizenship. In this conception, democratic citizenship itself becomes a right.

77 Higgins and Ramia, 141. The full reference is as follows: “It is only among the imaginary, disembedded and disembodied denizens of liberal theory – who are all the same and thereby enjoy equal starting points (for instance in Rawls 1972) – that liberalism delivers equality and justice. It signally fails embodied individuals whose very forms of embodiment (as women, say) carry social connotations of subordination and exclusion (Pateman, 1988). Liberal notions of equality and justice thus fake the universalist project. They were designed only for interaction between well-to-do men in their ‘public’ (economic and political) roles – men who depended for their private needs on women’s unpaid domestic care.”

78 The classic study on the desirability of non-participation is Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). An equally classic account is J. A. Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943). Carole Pateman discusses this tradition in her Participation and Democratic Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

79 Patrick Kearns, “Need and Welfare: ‘Thin’ and ‘Thick’ Approaches” in Andrew F. Johnson, Stephen McBride and Patrick J. Smith, eds., Continuities and Discontinuities: The Political Economy of Social Welfare and Labour Market Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 44-61.

80 See John Gray, Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), Chapter Two, “After Social Democracy, 11-50.

Political participation is a basic need and autonomy is threatened when the opportunity for it is stifled. 81 The work of the idealist philosopher T. H. Green said that: “everyone should be secured by society in the power of getting and keeping the means of realizing a will.”82 To the extent that social rights encourage the “getting and keeping the means of realizing a will,” social rights are the most fundamental rights there can be. The social rights to participate and belong are now so threatened in the West that there is a permanent underclass – in the United States, the

U.K. and Canada – of underfed, underhoused, undereducated, and underemployed men, women, and children living and growing up outside the social contract who do not participate, do not belong, and are not heard. Moreover, this is in the wealthy “developed” world. “Can we speak of equality of opportunity or of voice if status or class differences are [so] deeply entrenched?” asks one observer. 83 As Richard Rorty stated in 1989, in large measure, liberal capitalist nations have essentially failed at “extending the us” which was a big part of the Enlightenment project.84

By allowing ever-increasing groups of citizens to be excluded from society, the welfare state has lost its citizenship base. The category “citizenship” itself is problematic insofar as it excludes some people – migrant workers, for example – from the full range of social and political entitlements. There is talk of a “two-thirds” society in the Western world, with fully one third of the population excluded from a decent life, as well as a “two-thirds” international

81 Fach and Procacci, 37, stress the depth of this problem: “There is,” they write, “no way out of the fragile existence of the ‘thin man,’ living in a ‘thin’ society ‘which lacks genuine moral consensus’ (MacIntyre) or genuine social sympathy. ‘Thinness’ is a theoretical predicament from which even Rawls has been unable to rescue liberalism.”

82 T.H. Green (Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation) quoted in John Allett, New Liberalism: The Political Economy of J. A. Hobson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 190.

83 Philip Resnick, “Isonomia, Isogoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy at the Global Level,” Praxis International 12, No. 1, April.1992, 35-49; 43.

84 Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony and solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 196.

31 power structure, where “much of the world's population is not needed by the global economy.”85

This underclass is a result of the gap between social rights theory and social rights practice, as well as a shift in the developed world from an industrial world order to a post-industrial political economy, marked by economic growth, but also long-term structural unemployment which at the present moment has gotten even worse leading to widespread precarious employment.

One of the closest conceptions of what this dissertation means by social rights is found in the work of David Held. In his Political Theory and the Modern State, he states the case for treating participation in the polity as an entitlement instead of merely a good thing as in liberalism. 86

A democracy would be fully worth its name if citizens had the actual power to be active as citizens; that is to say, if citizens were able to enjoy a bundle of rights which allowed them to command democratic participation and to treat it as an entitlement. Such a bundle of rights ... should be seen as entailed by ... the very notion of democratic rule itself. If one chooses democracy, one must choose to operationalize a structural system of empowering rights and obligations, for such a system constitutes the interrelated space in which the principle of autonomy can be pursued - and enacted.87

Held speaks elsewhere of “the provision of a rightful share in the process of government.” In using the words “entitlement” and “provision,” and the phrase “rightful share,” Held is employing the language and discourse of social rights. In appropriating the language of social entitlement, Held’s position is similar to C. B. Macpherson’s reformulation of property rights to include “the right not to be excluded” and the “right to participation in a satisfying set of social

85 Robert W. Cox, “Critical Political Economy” in Bjorn Hettne, ed., International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1995), 41.

86 David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 95 cites Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter one.

87 David Held, The Political Theory of the Modern State, 182-183. Held’s idea of autonomy requires that citizens have the right (but not the obligation) to participate. Held makes it clear that this conception is different from both liberal rights and traditional redistributive welfare rights in that these participation rights “should be seen as entailed by, and integral to, the very notion of democratic rule itself. It is a way of specifying economic conditions for the possibility of effective democratic participation. If one chooses democracy, one must choose to operationalize a radical system of rights.” Emphasis in the original.

32 relations.”88 By mixing these traditional negative rights categories with their more positive counterparts, and by revealing that property, properly perceived, is actually a social right, entailing a much wider conception than in the prevailing liberal view, Macpherson shows that rights are interrelated, indivisible, and interchangeable, as some philosophers of Human Rights have always maintained.

In fact, how citizenship rights are viewed depends on the political and cultural framework in which they are situated. Such an approach links history and empiricism with philosophy. Social and economic rights must be seen as components of democracy. For example, in substantive theory, “a political system has to achieve a set of [social] ends or outcomes to be considered democratic.” 89 It must be “constituted so that social and economic rights are integral parts of the democratic process.”90 This idea is very different from traditional political science where economic justice is considered to be exterior to democracy, and where community is considered to be outside or an “add on” to the economy. In these liberal conceptions, social rights hold only a marginal place, and political, economic, and social rights are seen as separate realms altogether. By contrast, in this more developed understanding, social rights themselves are included in the very definition of democracy and the close link between social and political rights merge these two realms into one – as they were historically – and as they should be.

C.B. Macpherson also speaks about “a right to a kind of society,” that is, “a set of power relations” which are “essential to a fully human life.” This kind of broad construction goes far beyond material values. There are a number of implications that flow from Macpherson’s idea.

88 C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 139.

89 Ibid, 297. Emphasis added.

90 Ibid.

First, if social citizenship is about the right to a kind of society, then it is not just about “keeping people afloat in hard times” – it is truly about establishing something more than a mere safety net. Second, a right to a kind of society, and particular set of power relations essential to a fully human life, closely resembles what was referred to earlier as a thick theory of human need.91 A true redistribution of material and nonmaterial values that means something positive in the life of the citizen-recipient can only be attained through benefits and meaningful work that are context- sensitive. This means addressing particular needs and situations in the lives of embedded and embodied individuals. Further, the framework of redistribution must be open to critical analysis and feedback from the recipients themselves. Indeed, as the literature affirms: “The rights of communities to determine their own needs are now forcefully asserted in a considerable literature.”92 This dialogic aspect of rights may in turn lead to a democratization of the welfare state.93

The idea of a right to a certain kind of culture, and the corresponding duty requiring the state or political community to provide it, is evident in the historical and contemporary literature

91 Nancy Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture” in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 205-231.

92 Ian Culpitt, Welfare and Citizenship: Beyond the Crisis of the Welfare State? (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 5. Calling this “a new welfare paradigm,” Culpitt cites Gough, 1979; Parry et al., 1980; Weale, 1978; Plant et al., 1980; Watson, 1980; Soper, 1981; Withorn, 1984; and Beresford and Croft, 1986, as contributors to this new understanding.

93 Leo Panitch, citing Michael Mendelson, described some time ago what this democratization of social policy might look like. Social participation, “would include productive work and if that could not be done through standard macroeconomic policies, then it might have to be achieved through ‘redistribution of work and guaranteed meaningful jobs.’” Second, “social programs would aim to reinforce and create power for their participants rather than establish or reinforce their dependence.” Third, ‘social programs will assist those with a common interest to come together to help each other meet their needs and assert their role within society, so as to change the society around them.’” According to Panitch, “social policy can be revived only by its explicit association with social participation, empowerment and mobilization – or, in a word, with democratization of the state.” See his “Changing Gears: Democratizing the Welfare State” in Andrew F. Johnson, Stephen McBride, and Patrick J. Smith eds., Continuities and Discontinuities: The Political Economy of Social Welfare and Labour Market Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 37 and 39.

34 on social rights. It is an important claim in the thought of the new liberalism of the nineteenth century. Indeed, “it was one of the duties of the state to ensure the conditions under which the realization of the moral capacity of man became a possibility.”94 Nineteenth century working people in Britain felt that they had a right to a kind of society. For the Chartists, this was a society in which property rights were located in working class membership, and its attendant political and legal relationships, rather than in property rights per se. 95

On the issue of unemployment in today’s literature, there is reference to "the right to create an institutional environment” where “as many people as possible are enabled to meet their needs through gainful and worthwhile work.”96 And taking a “perfectionist view of the state,”97 one author has also argued for an entitlement to "culture in the broadest sense, as a constituent of equal well-being.”98 Similarly, in discussing the impasse in progressive thinking caused by neoliberalism some respond that there must to be an effort made at building institutional and cultural worlds that are more supportive of the kind of society that social citizenship entails. These would be powers that can break through the hopelessness in the assertion that “there is no alternative.” In terms common to all these examples, is the idea that citizens have the right to a

94 John Allett, New Liberalism: “The Political Economy of J. A. Hobson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 189.

95 Margaret R. Somers, “The ‘misteries’ of property: Relationality, rural-industrialization, and community in Chartist narratives of political rights” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Emphasis added.

96 David Copp, “The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living: Justice, Autonomy, and the Basic Needs,” Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 9, Nos. 1, 1992, 231-261.

97 As in Steven Wall’s conception of perfectionism, defined as “the general thesis that political authorities should take an active role in creating and maintaining social conditions that best enable their subjects to lead valuable and worthwhile lives.” See his Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.

98 Christine Sypnowich, “The Culture of Citizenship,” Politics and Society, Vol.28, Nos.4, December 2000, 531.

“decent” society: “a society in which institutions do not humiliate people unnecessarily.”99 As

Michael Walzer states, “we wish to be each other’s neighbour and keeper, in contact with each other in a common homeland.” Indeed, rights are “a way of society constructing itself.”100

This review of the literature shows welfare in its thick form. In Canada, social rights obviously constitute moral reform because they are so deeply internalized. “The basic legitimacy of the welfare state is not an issue for the Canadian public.” 101 Social rights in

Canada are not mere mechanical statist tinkering. Being deeply internalized, the sharp contradiction between the Canadian reality of a liberal welfare state and yet the profound

Canadian belief in social equalization and social programs, is then not so puzzling. The

Canadian social rights regime is, in reality, only somewhat better than that of the United States.

Despite this contradiction, Canada, in many ways, does seem to fit the idea of social justice “as faithfulness to shared meanings,” and not just in the twentieth century. In terms of social policy, the cultural foundations for social rights and social justice were evident early on in Canadian, and even pre-Canadian, development. Indeed, in some ways, Canadians are heavily invested in their social welfare vision. Esping-Andersen’s and Walter Korpi’s 1989 observation on

Scandinavia that, “the principles of the welfare state are pushed further into civil society than is internationally common,”102 seems appropriate to Canada as well, despite its residual character.103

99 Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, trans., Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Margalit discusses many social institutions in society such as welfare bureaucracies and the ways in which they can be organized so as to foster human decency.

100 Pamela Johnston Conover, Ivor M. Crewe, and Donald D. Searing, “The Nature of Citizenship in the United States and Great Britain: Empirical Comments on Theoretical Themes,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 53, Nos.3, August 1991, 812.

101 Keith Banting, The Welfare State and Canadian Federalism, Second edition (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1987), 185.

102 Quoted in Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 151.

To be sure, Canadians “own” their social rights and this is a good thing.104 This conception of social right is truly social, and constitutes true citizenship. Social rights can thus be justified on this other basis, different from the also valid, but partial, liberal interpretation of social rights understood solely in terms of enhancing individual citizens’ agency and autonomy by keeping them afloat in hard times. Indeed, the alternative vision entails moving away from the individualist model of the welfare state to a more communitarian one.

It is a substantive concept of democratic community rather than a residual one that provides the justification for social welfare. The assumption here is not only that all classes benefit from a society based on social rights, but also that all citizens need a sense of community for their self-development. In this sense, even “the well-to-do,” as one author puts it, “might be given an opportunity of establishing a society based on social justice.”105 Social rights, in other words, can also be defended in terms of what they do for the community. And not just morally or culturally – that is, in terms of justice and identity – but also practically, in terms of what social assistance does for the economy by allowing low income earners to spend. In a very deep sense, then, as far as social rights are concerned, the interests of the private and public realms come together since, as one author observes, “not to be so obligated is not to take our own self--

103 Richard Gwyn reports that the ideology of neo-conservatism in Canada is actually un-Canadian: “at some basic level, Canadian neo-cons aren’t really Canadians. And they know it. Know that at best a great many of them are only temporary Canadians, or American wannabes, having fun before heading off where the bucks are biggest.” See “Neo-conservatives are not really Canadian,” Toronto Star, August 29, 2001.

104 It is significant that T. H. Marshall is willing to label civil, but not social, rights in terms of ownership. Civil rights, he says, “are internalised in the early stages of socialisation. They thus become part of the individual’s personality, a pervasive element in his daily life, an intrinsic component of his culture, the foundation of his capacity to act socially and the creator of the environmental conditions which make social action possible in a democratic civilisation.” See his The Right to Welfare and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1981), 141.

105 Ellen Arsenault, “Social Progress in Eastern Canada: The Antigonish Movement,” Fundamental and Adult Education, Vol. iv, Nos. 4, October 1952, 30.

37 interest seriously.”106

1.9 Social Citizenship as Interdependence

Why think about social rights in these ways when political rights already cover this territory? Besides the obvious problem with political rights, such as their failure to remedy in any significant way the inequalities in society,107 and the obvious problem with social rights, such as their transformation into heavy-handed state bureaucratisation and colonization, appropriately called, in some cases, diswelfare, the answer has to be sought in the more unified sense of society itself which does not naturally correspond to all the divisions in liberalism. As the Chartist leader Ernest Jones said in the mid-nineteenth century, “Distinctions have been drawn between divine right, natural right, social right, political right, and conventional right. I believe all the rights of man to be founded on one – the right to live – but how is man to live?”108

The most fundamental values which democrats are concerned with do not fall strictly within either the social or political categories: in fact, they depend on, and transcend, both realms. This is what David Held means when he speaks of the principle of autonomy as constituting an interrelated space. Joseph Raz is another theorist with a similar approach to rights. Raz’s approach undermines the liberal distinction that sharply divides civil and political rights from social and economic rights. Like Jones, Raz grounds rights in human well-being:

“once an interest is vital to well-being, a right exists.”109

Certainly, there are historical examples of political participation that do not fit neatly into

106 Richard Pratte, The Civic Imperative: Examining the Need for Civic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1988), 103.

107 For a discussion of some studies examining this problem, see Gary Teeple, “The Impact of Social Democracy and the Welfare State on Social Inequality,” Chapter Three in his Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform: Into the Twenty-first Century (Aurora, Ontario: Garamond Press, 2000).

108 Ernest Jones, Notes to the People (1851-1852) (London: The Merlin Press, 1967), Vol. 1, 390.

109 Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

38 either the formal political or economic realm. For example, there were the “people out of doors” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were considered to have a right to voice an opinion, but had no formal political rights in the usual sense of the term. They became a

“recognized-quasi-official part of the political system.”110 The same can be said for womens’ forays into social science and the public realm in the nineteenth century. The most promising approach to social rights would mean taking this interdependence between rights seriously. And indeed, there does appear to be such an understanding in history. For example, in the United

Nations International Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 the thinking was that:

The basic right is the right to life - the right to the fullest and finest development of the potentialities of the human personality, in the framework of the common good. This is the root right from which all others stem. Civil rights, political rights, social and economic rights are implements designed to make effective the foundation right of them all - the human personality with its insistent claim for life expression and expansion, for recognition for the innate dignity of man, for the realization for the possibilities of man and of his unique position in the natural, social, and moral order. Without the understanding and recognition of this basic right the other so-called rights lose their meaning.111

There are a number of important points to notice here. First, rights are derived from one essential human right, but a human right not in a transcendent or God-given sense as in the eighteenth-century natural right, but rather in the sense of history and sociology, and the fundamental nature of human beings themselves. Second, interdependence is “the central fact of political life,” as Jennifer Nedelsky has phrased it.112 Interdependence means the fulfilment of

Hannah Arendt’s idea of the right to have rights. The interdependence argument means that the realization of political and civil rights depends on the prior fulfilment of social and economic

110 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 298-299.

111 Quoted in an article by Philip Alston, “The Right to Development at the International Level,” found in Third World Attitudes Towards International Law: an Introduction, by Frederick E. Snyder and Surakiart Sathirathai, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1987), 812. Available online at http://books.google.ca/books?id=sXrjNCYzIPMC&dq

112 Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 273.

39 rights. As one commentator notes: “The social state came into being in order to ensure that freedom is truly guaranteed to everyone and is not just an empty word to many, especially those who possess nothing. We can only dispense with the social state if we are prepared to give up taking the concept of true freedom seriously.” In other words, he continues, “if the state wishes to take seriously political and civil rights, then it must recognize and respect social rights.” 113

Third, all rights including “negative” civil rights exist within the framework of a common good. 114 This means that rights do not exist “outside” society. On the contrary, they are deeply embedded in history and community and it is through their relationships in a particular society that people have rights. This is a Rousseauean, neoKantian, and new liberal position: one that affirms the human obligation to treat others as ends-in-themselves. Furthermore, even liberal negative rights serve collective purposes and depend on a public culture for their realization.

Historically, as Thomas Horne points out, from the very beginning, property rights and civil society were considered legitimate only if they included a welfare right. In this sense, “a subsistence right is part of a property right, rather than a separate right that limits property from without. That is, historically, property rights were not recognized as legitimate if they did not carry this limitation.”115 This idea has profound implications for the ways in which rights are conceived. In fact, the fluidity of boundaries between rights is one of the reasons for the justification of social rights in the first place. 116 It is also a reason why the concept of social rights can be extended into new areas. To be sure, these ideas on using liberal forms for radical

113 Randall A. Hansen, op. cit. 37.

114 Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

115 Thomas Horne, “Welfare Rights as Property Rights” in Donald J. Moon, ed., Responsibility, Rights and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1988), 108.

116 See Desmond S. King and Jeremy Waldron, “Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 18, 1988, 415-443.

40 purposes draw attention to a number of suggestive new developments in the very old realm of citizenship.

Since social and economic rights depend on the prior realization of civil and political rights, social rights require that those entitled to them know what their rights are before they can claim them. In other words, the social right to participate is implicit in the argument for social rights. Indeed, in some respects, the right to participate underlies the whole concept of the welfare state, though, as brought out by feminists, it was a right to participate in a typically masculine definition of the welfare state. The interrelationship between the political and social dimensions of citizenship is thus significant. Yet it is neglected in liberal evolutionary accounts of the development of rights because it is assumed that one set of rights develops after another set of rights, and that these dimensions of human freedom are somehow classifiable, definable, and amenable to periodization, when, in fact, a great deal depends on the actual circumstances surrounding these rights and their implementation or non-implementation. So, on one level, the descriptive surface level, and from a very narrow standpoint, the periodization makes sense.

However, it makes sense only partially because exclusions based on gender and race do not fit this pattern, and further, social rights claims, far from being a twentieth-century phenomenon, have a very long history, as this dissertation repeatedly points out. Indeed, Margaret Somers notes that there were a “surprising number” of individuals who had citizenship rights – civil, political and social – in the medieval towns and cities, and in reference to Marshall’s schema,

“long before their ‘proper’ structural cause” which, in Marshall’s theory, was the development of industrial capitalism.

On another level, one that focuses on motives, outcomes and the political environment surrounding public reforms, the periodization in terms of a telos or progress is even more problematic. Historically, in many cases, the workers or “the people” were actually against

41 many public social reforms made on their behalf. And in terms of gender and race, this telos makes no sense whatsoever. In some countries – for example, in Latin America, and many former communist countries – it is political rights – not social rights – which are deemed most significant since they are seen as a vehicle of a more thoroughgoing social transformation. Thus, the idea that social rights exist at a “higher” level of development is called into question.

If the relationship between the social and political is probed, it is suspected that the answer may be even deeper than what those who have tackled the question have come up with.

Desmond King and Jeremy Waldron document the relationship of interdependence between the two realms, explaining that throughout Western politics and political theory, beginning with the

Greeks, it was assumed that political life was predicated, and indeed, made possible, on the basis of a social or material base. This premise forms a large part of the normative argument for social rights and is heavily implicated in the dominant paradigm. Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant sum up this idea as follows: “Such a supply of the means of living will allow room for the consideration of the ends of living.” 117 To be sure, the civil, political and social realms are closely linked empirically and normatively. When civil rights are weakened as they are by neoliberal policies – legislation that curtails the right to strike and the conditions around collective bargaining, for example – there is an obvious impact on social rights.

1.10 Hugh Heclo’s Two Welfare Traditions

It is evident that a distinction Hugh Heclo makes between the competing traditions of

“welfare as self-sufficiency” and “welfare as mutual dependence” in many ways captures the difference between the two kinds of right in liberalism: what a later chapter calls the Two- Tier

117 Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

42 distinction. This is the dominant classical liberal tradition hostile to social rights and the subordinate “new liberal” tradition supportive of social rights. It also explains the difference between Canada and the United States in the realm of social policy. The first tradition is “a conception of wellbeing that is supremely individualistic, for it has to do with the capacity of an individual to go his own way, to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, to be unbeholden, unentangled, able to make it on its own.” The second is comprised of a “social or group-oriented rationality” and is based on “enduring group attachments” that reflect “values intrinsic to the community” rather than an “individualistic economic rationality.”118 The first tradition corresponds to the minimal, negative nightwatchman state that a substantial number of American citizens welcome, and in Canada fear; while the second corresponds to the more substantial, positive state that many Americans fear and Canadians welcome.119 As noted above, in many ways, these rights mimic the two forms of rights in old and new liberalism.

Heclo is acutely aware that both welfare traditions are indigenous to the United States and cannot be easily dismissed. As he says, in the U.S., “each expresses a legitimate and deeply- held set of values, neither of which we are willing to abandon.” 120 According to Heclo, these two conceptions of welfare constitute a “permanent dualism” in the U.S. landscape. “Americans as a people were born imprinted with the polarity between welfare as self-sufficiency and welfare as mutual dependence.”121 Of course, the same could be said for many other liberal democracies, including those of Canada and Britain.

118 Hugh Heclo, “General Welfare and Two American Political Traditions,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 2, 1986, 182.

119 Reinforced by Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944.

120 Heclo, “Two American Traditions,” 187.

121 Ibid, 185. Emphasis in the original.

Indeed, there are those who staunchly hold on to the classical liberal view of negative liberty in Canada, the US. and Britain as well as those who insist on the socialist/new liberal idea of positive liberty. To be sure, the two-part structure of civil and social rights has been in place in

North America since well before Confederation. There are many reasons offered in the literature to justify a hierarchy of rights. First, there is the intellectual reason: the idea that economic and social rights are so different from civil and political rights that they are incompatible; and should not be considered rights at all. 122 This argument comes from both the left and right, and is usually part of a larger political project.

1.11 Civil and Social Rights: Real Problems of Incompatibility?

Some philosophers, such as Maurice Cranston, agree that civil and political rights are

Human Rights, but are unwilling to place socio-economic rights in that category.123 Other philosophers hold that welfare rights should be understood as Human Rights. The justification for seeing social rights in a subordinate role is that they are not “universal rights” in the same way as the Rights of Man. Social and economic rights are merely the rights of citizens. As D. D.

Raphael explains:

One has the rights of liberty simply as a member of the human race, and they are rights which link every man with every other man. One has political, economic and social rights as a member of a particular civil society, and these rights link each man with all the other members of his society.124

J. M. Barbalet calls social rights “conditional opportunities” for this very reason. Since social rights are never universal, they are “conditional upon an administrative and professional

122 David Beetham, “What Future for Economic and Social Rights?” Political Studies, Vol.43, 1995, Special Issue: Politics and Human Rights, 41.

123In the “classic” defense of civil and political rights as human rights, social rights may or may not be a good thing, but they certainly are not rights.

124 D. D. Raphael, “Human Rights, Old and New” in idem, ed., Political Theory and The Rights Of Man,66. (London: Macmillan, 1967).

44 infrastructure, and ultimately upon a fiscal basis.”125 Another theorist thinks that “social citizenship cannot create an inalienable right to support from the state community.”126 She believes that social citizenship is merely “a suggestive metaphor”127 used to mobilize political support for the welfare state. These are some of the rationales, then, for why social rights are not constitutionalized in Western societies: why they are at risk in less prosperous times. This is also why social rights are considered to be “fragile achievements.”128 Social rights may enable citizenship but, according to Barbalet, by their very nature, social rights cannot be citizenship:

“Social rights may be required for the practice of citizenship in so far as they enable such participation. But this is precisely to say that as a means of facilitating citizenship they cannot be said to constitute it.”129

There are indeed real problems of compatibility between these types of rights. If there were not, social rights would hold no power. There must be tension between these rights because one is granted at the expense of the other. Bryan Turner notes that “the growth of social citizenship has been typically the outcome of violence or threats of violence.”130 Needless to say, violence and threats of violence do not come about if only one side has power. The incompatibilities between civil and social rights are legion. One kind of right is “a private gain,”

125 J. M. Barbalet, Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Inequality (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), 67.

126 Jytte Klausen, “Social Rights Advocacy and State Building: T. H. Marshall in the Hands of Social Reformers,” World Politics Vol. 47, January 1995, 245.

127 Ibid.

128 David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 69.

129 Barbalet, 67. See also Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

130 Bryan Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Citizenship.”

45 the other, “a public duty;”131 one is permanent, legally binding, and entrenched in constitutions,132 the other is not;133 one is a “legal” right, the other merely a “moral” right;134 one is highly predictable and forms the permanent rules by which the state governs, the other is temporary and local; one is individualistic, the other collective; one is based on private decision making, the other on public decision making;135 one is claimed against other people, the other is claimed against the state;136 one relies on economic power resources, the other on political power resources;137 one is nomocratic, simply reflecting society, the other is teleocractic, actually changing society.138

However, these differences between civil and social rights are exaggerated in important ways and the distinction turns out to be not nearly as illuminating as it might initially appear.

First, if the interaction between civil and social rights is understood as a dialectical relationship, or if there is an overlap in these boundaries, then distinctions are less clear. Second, once the analysis examines concrete rights in actual practice, that is to say, once the context of these rights is taken into consideration, many of these abstractions as outlined above turn out to be false. For

Henry Shue, conceptualizing rights as either negative or positive is a false dichotomy since

131 T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 120.

132 There are some states, however, where justiciable social rights are constitutionalized, such as in Finland, and in India also to some extent where some social rights “generate considerable jurisprudence.” See Hunt, op. cit., xviii.

133 Alan Cairns and Cynthia Williams, “Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada: An Overview” in idem, eds., Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada (Toronto,: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

134 Noberto Bobbio, The Age of Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 56.

135 Walter Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).

136 Richard A. Epstein, “The Problem of Forfeiture in the Welfare State” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., The Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 256-257.

137 Ibid.

138 George Armstrong Kelly, “Who Needs a Theory of Citizenship?” Daedalus 108, nos. 4, 1979, 21-36.

the fulfillment of every right involves essential positive elements and essential negative elements, irrespective of which International Covenant the right happens to have been assigned to. Rights cannot be understood without understanding what it means to fulfill them. The actual fulfillment of so-called negative rights essentially includes the building of sound institutions and the mobilization of powerful forces. The fulfillment of so-called positive rights essentially includes the avoidance of deprivations. 139

A variant of this argument comes from those unsatisfied with a conflation of rights, but who do not necessarily see social rights as subordinate. This argument is more valid and, as the chapter on the U.K. suggests, seems to fit with T.H. Marshall’s analysis. Then there are those scholars like Thomas Janoski, who are positive on social rights, but complain that most rights theorists “lump disparate rights together.” 140 According to Janoski, these thinkers “fail to see the

“complex differentiation of rights.” On the contrary, they “take citizenship rights as a hodgepodge of disparate concepts.”141

The distance between the two conceptions of rights in the United States, however, is more extreme. This dualism helps explain Heclo’s other comments, namely, “the love-hate relationship” that Americans have with their welfare state, which he describes as “highly developed” (some might question this characterization) yet “filled with self-loathing.”142 Heclo, in keeping with the tradition of American individualism (or perhaps simply under its spell like so many of his fellow Americans) tellingly does not frame mutual dependence in the United States in statist terms. He speaks instead of “enduring group attachments,” “social or group-oriented rationality,” and “group-oriented passions.” The state may be behind these sentiments, and

139 Henry Shue, “Rights in the Light of Duties” in Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean , eds., Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Applications (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath and Company, 1979), 70-71. Emphasis in the original.

140 Janoski, 29 and 45. Relying approvingly on Wesley Hofield’s classic categorization of rights into liberties, claims, powers, and immunities, which has much independent validity, Janoski includes T. H. Marshall, Reinhard Bendix, Bryan Turner, Anthony Giddens and Ramesh Mishra in the list of those he criticizes for fudging rights boundaries.

141 Ibid., 5.

142 Ibid, 182.

Heclo says as much, by referring to “state and local governments,” “the welfare state,”

“redistribution,” “social insurance,” “social security,” and so on. Nevertheless, in his analysis, the state remains in the background.

Why is this observation of Heclo’s on welfare as self-sufficiency and welfare as mutual dependence so central to this discussion of social citizenship and to the forms of right in the liberal tradition? First, this distinction is fundamental to human life.143 However, it also goes to the heart of the dilemma that this dissertation is concerned with: the distinction itself obscures social rights-friendly thinking evident in both Canada and the United States. So this distinction which is based on diametrically opposed ontologies and epistemologies, but also rooted in biology, genetics, and anthropology, must be fully acknowledged, considered, given due weight, but then, ultimately – and even reluctantly – be put aside in favour of one part of the duality over the other. This is because it is ultimately more true to say “that the give-and-take mechanism” is the most fundamental one. 144 Indeed, all the evidence, from time immemorial, points to “welfare as mutual dependence” as the stronger of the two pronouncements.

To be sure, when the evidence is weighed, it does seem that the bottom floors of civil and political rights were are not an adequate foundation for the development of social and economic rights, although their sustainability in a residual sense was never in doubt.145 The evidence shows

143 Even in the animal kingdom, as Frans de Waal’s work on chimpanzee politics reveals, “The two basic rules are ‘one good turn deserves another’ and “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’” Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 207.

144 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Routledge, 2003).

145 This is with the exception of the United States. The Clinton Administration and a largely Republican Congress passed the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) which ended the long-standing program “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) and implemented other drastic measures. In its place, stands new legislation called “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” (TANF). The new legislation created a two-year time limit on recipients collecting welfare, and a five-year lifetime limit on social assistance. Although TANF has reduced the number of people collecting welfare (between 1994 and 2001, welfare caseloads were reduced 62%), it is hardly the success that its promoters suggest. It “brought an end to, or reversed,” Walter I. Trattner writes, “six decades of federal social policy – that of guaranteeing at least a minimum level of financial assistance, or some sort of safety net, to the nation’s destitute and dependent citizens, especially its young

48 that a political culture supportive of civil and political rights is not prepared to also support social and economic rights under conditions of economic instability and restraint. It is all the more remarkable, then, that two world leaders in a time of war and crisis in August 1941 could see beyond defense as the state’s primary objective and embrace also “freedom from fear and want” in The Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration signed by Churchill and Roosevelt.146 It is instructive to examine the alignment between Atlantic Charter rights, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and

Marshall’s three elements of social citizenship. A pattern of faltering commitment to social rights under economic and political pressure occurs in Canada but this break in commitment is somewhat less obvious than in other countries. Although the pattern of welfare state cutbacks may be similar to those of other countries, in a very palpable sense, the idea of social rights still resonates with Canadians. Thus the distinction between a welfare society and a welfare state is more muted in Canada, especially since social rights in Canada are considered to be part of the national identity.

Indeed, a welfare society is the internalization of the values of the welfare state in the citizenry at large. As William Robson, the “esteemed patriarch of the London School of

Economics,”147 said in 1976: “Unless people generally reflect the policies and assumptions of the welfare state in their attitudes and actions, it is impossible to fulfill the objectives of the welfare

people.” See Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social America (New York:199),397Moreover theMovingIdeasPolicyNetwork(http;//www.movingideas.org/issuesindepth/welfare.html) reporting on research by the U.S. Children’s Defense Fund, stated that, “in 2001, there were more female-headed families with children without work and without any welfare income in an average week than in the 26 years for which data are available.” Emphasis is added. The national program for social assistance, that is, an American “safety net,” thus came to an end.

146 The phrase ‘freedom from want and fear’ is the sixth of eight ‘common principles’ stated in the Atlantic Charter. Found online: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp. Along with Speech and Worship, Want and Fear are among the Four Freedoms, affirmed by President Roosevelt in his January 1941 State of the Union Address.

147 Archibugi, “Beyond the Welfare State,” 235.

49 state.”148 As Chapter Two illustrates, all these components were present to varying degrees in

Britain: “strong civil associations, a strong sense of solidarity, a strong sense of communal obligation, a strong sense of duty to others – these are the building blocks of social capital and, one would expect, of a welfare society based on social citizenship.”149

148 William A. Robson, Welfare State and Welfare Society: Illusion and Reality (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 7. He writes: “The welfare state is what Parliament has decreed and the Government does. The welfare society is what people do, feel and think about matters which bear on the general welfare. Failure to understand the difference is the cause of much conflict, friction and frustration, for there is often a yawning gulf between public policy and social attitudes.” A similar definition can be found in A. Robertson, “Welfare State and Welfare Society,” Social Policy and Administration, 22, nos. 3, 222-34: “a welfare state is a legal state in which entitlements to a range of goods is guaranteed by statutory rights.” A welfare society, on the other hand, is “a social system in which welfare assumptions are an organic part of everyday life.” Quoted in John J. Rodger, From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society: The Changing Context of Social Policy in a Postmodern Era (London: Macmillan, 2000), 8. Another use of the term, “welfare society” is found in comparative public policy research. Linda Weiss, for example, characterizes Japan as a welfare society where distributional issues are dealt with more through employment, and other public policies that support incomes, than through social security expenditures. She says of the state’s role: “Its overall efforts directed to subsidization of the rice farmers, to financial and infrastructural support for small business, to employment maintenance programmes in times of acute crisis, and in particular to the institutionalized measures for sunset industries are all far more indicative of the Japanese state’s ‘distributive’ effort than the provision of social security payments per se.” See Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press), 162. Finally, these conceptions of a welfare society can be distinguished from the more right-wing normative view that welfare should be dealt with solely by society with little state interference. For example, in Charles Murray, Losing Ground and Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement.

149 John J. Rodger, From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society: The Changing Context of Social Policy in a Postmodern Era (London: Macmillan, 2000), 54.

Chapter Two – United Kingdom: Loss of the Commons

One way to gain insight into the social citizenship tradition is to look at what liberalism has done to social rights’ original impulse in the United Kingdom and to see how liberal theory and practice have been able to obscure and diminish social rights’ power. In reviewing the literature, it cannot be said that social citizenship was merely a sporadic and arbitrary occurrence: far from it, at least in the ‘mother country.’ T. H. Marshall speaks of medieval social rights “rooted in membership of the village community, the town and the guild.”150 In writing about elements of citizenship, as outlined in Chapter One, he uses the image of “three strands [of rights] ... wound into a single thread” in ancient and feudal times. Before distinctions arose with the growth of the national state, civil, political and social rights were part of the same “amalgam” of rights available to free members of a local community.151 He notes that social rights were later shut down and reverted, with the Poor Law Reform of 1834, to mere charity: a charity that robbed the people of their political and civil citizenship by internment in workhouses. But despite all this he still speaks of social citizenship in developmental and optimistic terms. What Marshall might say about recent reversals in social citizenship evident today in the form of workfare,152 in the demise of universality and the “targeting” of social security and social services to the poor and marginalized can only be imagined. Instead of an evolutionist smooth teleology in discussing these changes in social citizenship, it would seem more appropriate for Marshall to speak of a

150 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, (1944, 1957, 2001) 75. As Asa Briggs points out, confirming this view, “the ‘welfare state’ was the true historic state. Laissez faire was an aberration, ‘an acute outbreak of individualism, unchecked by the old restraints.’” See his “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” 236.

151 T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 74.

152 Workfare is a vivid example of a two-tier distinction in liberalism: the taking of a truly authentic social right, that is, the right to work and the dignity and nobility of labour, and turning it into its caricature in the form of workfare, which is demeaning and hardly new.

51 tenuous series of demoralizing steps forwards and backwards.

2.1. Communal Roots of Social Rights – 1300s to 1700s

A good place to look for innovation in terms of social rights is in history itself. To be sure, social rights have existed for centuries, and the idea and practice of social rights goes back to the ancient classical and Biblical traditions.153 Indeed, social rights were always understood as part of “the commons,” a concept that is re-emerging in important work today. As Michael

Walzer has said of the social realm: “The sphere itself is as old as the oldest human community.”154 A “sort of system of social security is to be found in the Old Testament laws about leaving harvest gleanings for the poor, the periodic cancellation of debts, and so forth,” notes another writer.155 There have been many forms of poor relief over the centuries: the monasteries, the feudal mode of production, the medieval guilds, the medieval hospital, the church parish, slavery, the male bread-winner model.156 Indeed, by the High Middle Ages, one expert writes, “a highly developed and effective system of poor relief had been established.” He adds: “Because the church was a public institution and the tithe a compulsory tax, it could be argued that the system as regulated by the church was the prototype of the one that arose under the famous English Poor Law of 1601.”157 Long before Marx, the Poor Laws in Britain

“included ‘unemployment benefits’ and the recognition of structural unemployment. Historian

153 Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 34-35.

154 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 65.

155 D. D. Raphael, “Human Rights, Old and New” in D. D. Raphael, ed., Political Theory and The Rights of Man (London: Macmillan, 1967), 63.

156 Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 4 -5. This relief was not charity or mercy but an act of justice according to Trattner.

157 Ibid, 5. Emphasis in the original.

Paul Slack comments that there were cities in England – he cites Bristol – that had “well- developed welfare facilities by the 1570s.”158

Neal Wood dates the modern emergence of the fusing of economics and politics into a primitive ‘political economy’ in England in the early sixteenth century.159 At this time, what emerged was an economic conception of the state in response to “grievous social and economic ills.” The early Tudors fused politics and economics: “their stance of moral protest and their call for reform also places them among the first of the moderns to conceive of legislation as a powerful, positive instrument for enlightened social change.”160 According to Wood, this discourse on labour was formulated “perhaps for the first time” in the writings of Sir Thomas

More. In the emergent capitalism of the period, the Tudors focused on the poor and the havoc caused by inflation, enclosure, scarcity, social dislocation, and unemployment. More’s Utopia, published in 1516, claimed that “labor required for goods and services contributing to the well- being of the community was useful, that concerned solely with the production of frivolous commodities and unnecessary luxury was useless.”161 This distinction between useful and useless labour was a constant theme in working class literature and it shared the moral overtones of the distinction between producers and non-producers. This kind of citizenship would be a kind of countermovement, or counterculture, something similar to what has been called the “proletarian public sphere,” or what E. P. Thompson calls a “moral economy,” or what the contemporary literature calls “the commons.”

158 Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 40.

159 Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 2.

160 Ibid, 3.

161 Sir Thomas More referenced in Ibid, 102.

So-called “country ideas” originated in England, and were later adapted to North

America: it was an ideology of opposition: against monopoly, placemen, banks, paper money, corruption, wealth, and luxury.162 J.G.A. Pocock locates the ideology in “a multitude of writings in the half-century that follows 1675.”163 The “fountainhead” of this vision, according to Pocock, was James Harrington (1611-1677) whose major work, Oceana appeared in 1656, and whom

Judith Shklar has labeled “one of the three patron saints of republicanism.” 164 Long before

Marx, Harrington believed that the form a government takes in a society depends on the nature of the property relations within it. Following from this assertion, his normative view was that in a

Commonwealth there should be a wide diffusion of property, which is to say, a wide diffusion of power. Harrington, fearing the power of the state and concentrated interests, believed that property should be redistributed by adhering to certain laws limiting the ownership of land.165

As a variant of the radical Whig political philosophy, such views of property and power were made explicit in the early eighteenth-century in England by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig.166

162 These country ideas are clearly evident in the Canadian figure of William Lyon Mackenzie and the other Reformers in the Canadas of the 1830s.

163 J.G.A. Pocock, English Political Ideologies, 565. “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, vol. 22, 1965, 565. J.G.A. Pocock draws attention to the Platonic aspects of Harrington’s work in his Introduction to idem, ed. The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (1656) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xxii –xxiv. Harrington is viewed as the “fountainhead” of classical republicanism (Pocock) and “the greatest of our Commonwealthmen” (F.W. Maitland). See respectively Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 22, serial 3, 1965; and Judith N. Shklar, “Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington”, The American Political Science Review, vol. 53, no. 3, Sept. 1959, 663.

164 The phrase is from Judith N. Shklar, “Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 53 no. 3, September, 1959, 687. The other two patron saints are Algernon Sidney and John Locke.

165 Mentioned by many scholars, it is C.B. Macpherson who gives this idea its most thorough treatment.

166 For a discussion, see David L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage: From the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters

It was Harrington who first saw a shift in the power relations in British society which forced a change in the state: “land, while remaining the basis of political power, had floated from its moorings, and had given birth, as it shifted and disintegrated, to a new form of State.” 167 It was a shift that paralleled the transfer of power from King to Parliament, and the rise of the gentry and the yeomanry. Land was on the move, in other words, and the arguments behind its special status started to lose their legitimacy: there was a transformation of property from

“property for use” to “property for power.” Paradoxically, power became both more democratic and more concentrated: it ended up in the hands of an industrializing and landowning political and economic elite, but its nature was changing, largely as a result of the economy itself.

This chaotic pattern is acknowledged to some extent by Marshall. For example, he states that at different times social right moved towards a system of social security such as the

“substantial body of social rights” in Speenhamland between 1795 and 1834, representing, he says, the last remnants of the old “patterned” society.168 According to another source, there were over twenty-five different legislative acts recorded in Britain, in 1764, on the question of providing subsistence for the poor and employment for the able-bodied unemployed.169 Of course these statements do not imply that the poor laws in England were necessarily adequate at this time, only that they were in place. As Marx pointed out long ago, “what modern state does

167 Tawney, 211.

168 In the village of Speen, Berkshire, magistrates devised a method of giving relief to the working poor, based on the price of bread and the number of children in a family. The Speenhamland social rights were heavily criticized by Karl Polanyi who looked at the actual distribution and administration of these rights and concluded that the Speenhamland system of aid-in-wages actually benefited the employers and local squires rather than the employees since “the main effect of the allowance system was to depress wages below the subsistence level.” See Polanyi, op. cit., 99.

169 Richard Burn, The History of the Poor Laws with Observations (1764) cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Memories of Class: The pre-history and after-life of class (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 6.

55 not feed its paupers in some form or other?”170 “Many other welfare policies could be included, from the assizes of bread to regulation of working hours.”171

Recent work on the early modern period in Britain shows that political and civil rights were themselves actually “public” rights, that is, not simply the individualistic “natural rights” of the classical liberal tradition. Margaret Somers speaks of the necessary link that existed in the early modem world between substantive justice – or social rights in terms of the regulation of markets, apprenticeship rights,172 limits on working hours, and so on – and participatory rights embedded in membership in guilds. This solidarity in the early modern guilds included

"guaranteed citizenship, livelihood, employment, mutual aid, religious life, social organizations – indeed an entire cradle-to-grave culture.”173

These participatory rights in the guilds were actually a form of a collective property based on membership. According to Somers, this fusion of the social and political is also evident in peasant families and in the rural-industrial villages: “From the 14th through the 19th centuries, these labouring families also linked the independence and cohesion of their communities to the participatory rights and distributive ideals of English citizenship long before their “proper” capitalist cause.”174 The phrase “participatory rights and distributive ideals” is highlighted here to emphasize the point that political and social rights had an earlier incarnation. Speaking of

170 Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 68.

171 Margaret R. Somers, “Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship” in Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in the World Polity and National Policy (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 179.

172 “The property acquired during an apprenticeship was in fact the property of social membership; the exercise of apprenticeship rights was thus predicated on the practice and maintenance of institutionalized social relations.” See Margaret R. Somers, “The “misteries” of property: Relationality, rural-industrialization, and community in Chartist narratives of political rights” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 74.

173 Margaret R. Somers, “Rights, Relationality, and Membership,” 187.

174 Somers, “Rights, Relationality, and Membership,” 167.

“autonomy in membership,” and “liberty in embeddedness,” Somers documents these medieval practices, which, from the fourteenth century on, granted citizenship and its benefits, or “the freedom” as it was called, to those admitted to a guild or “mistery.” In this sense, the guild was a quasi-public branch of government, and apprenticeship in a guild meant “that participatory rights were unequivocally understood to be linked to regulative and redistributive issues.”175

Of course, even Marshall wrote about such earlier versions of social rights as broader in scope than their twentieth- century counterparts. This makes it much harder to categorize rights and duties than Marshall apparently thought since, among other things, there is a great deal of overlap between all forms of right, even in industrial society. In other words, far from the antagonism or trade-off between liberty and community which characterize classical liberal thought, and which traditional liberals always want to balance, these historical examples reveal a successful fusion.176

2.2 The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour

As is well known, the right to the whole produce of labour has its origins in John Locke’s labour theory of value. But beyond this, there is actually little known of this theory and its journey as it traveled from England to America and other countries. Based on a pre-capitalist economic and political experience and advocated by Ricardian socialists long before Marx, was the labourer’s right to the whole produce of labour. This right to the fruits of labour’s exertion is a recurring theme in this dissertation because it insists on the primacy of one of the most important

175 Somers, “The “misteries” of property,” op.cit. Quotations in this paragraph are from this article.

176 In terms of the quest for social citizenship, these historical practices may offer examples of an alternative framework. “The historical model is not so much the Greek city state but that unsung, relatively untheorized medieval legacy of guilds” writes Colin Crouch. He elaborates: these were “communities which expected active participation from many of their members in delegated self-regulation.” See his “Citizenship and Community in British Political Debate” in Colin Crouch and Anthony Heath eds., Social Research and Social Reform: Essays in Honour of A. H. Halsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

57 institutions of social right historically: labour and property, which are foundational pillars of the social citizenship tradition. The right to the whole produce of labour is a requirement for a just society for many radical liberals, many early socialists, labour journalists, trade unionists, craft and skilled artisans, and labourers themselves. The Tory socialist, Richard Oastler, expressed this sentiment in 1835 as follows: “every man born in England has a natural right to live well in

England. It is a law of nature and a law of God that the husband – man that laboureth must be the first partaker of the fruit.”177 This is a right which forms the backbone of Anglo-American political economy. As one author puts it: it is “a history which has yet to be written.”178 This may be the case because, like many complex ideas, it is contradictory and points in more than one direction. Some see the quest for it as a turning backward, a nostalgia for what was at one time a total world of the pre-industrial era. This view is generally conservative, but nevertheless an individualistic “social version of the right to the whole produce of labour.”179 Others see it as completely individualistic, almost entirely economic, and founded on a self-interest that borders

177 Oastler quoted in Noel Thompson, The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class 1775- 1850, (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 289.

178 It is an understatement to say that for an idea which “was destined to cause repercussions in political theory for a century and a half, and finally to be absorbed by Karl Marx,” this needs rectifying. “Little did Locke realise,” writes C.H. Driver, “what an unexploded bomb he was dropping into the Arcadian pastures of eighteenth century thought.” See C. H. Driver, “John Locke” in J. F. C. Hearnshaw, ed., The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age A. D. 1650-1750 (London: George G. Harrap and Company, 1928), 91. As Richard Schlatter notes on Locke: “Before 1690 no one understood that a man has a natural right to property created by his labour; after 1690 the idea came to be an axiom of social science.” See his Private Property: The History of an Idea (1951) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1973), 156.

179 Zygmunt Bauman, Memories of class: The pre-history and after-life of class (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 13: “What has been articulated as the demand of the right to the whole product was, indeed, a call to restore the old order. Not that in past history the producers ever enjoyed and consumed the totality of their output without sharing it with the dominant and idle, or weak and impoverished; but the old order, when confronted with the factory system, did appear to place the producer in a position of control over the whole of his product and its later destination.” It was only later according to Bauman that the “social” version of the right to the whole product of labour, reflecting the growing market discourse and ethos of the times, gradually receded into a narrow “economic” version stressing self-interest.

58 on anarchism.180 This is a possessive individualist conception of the whole produce of labour.

There is a third version of the right to a share in the whole produce that is evident in Britain, in idealist, progressive and new liberal political discourse and that forms the core of the thinking behind the welfare state. For the English Chartists, reviewed in the following pages, property was not conceived as a thing but rather as a relationship.

2.3 Social Citizenship in Action – early 1800s to 1850s

Historians distinguish between the British “old” radicals or “Tory radicals,” such as

Thomas Carlyle and William Cobbett, thinkers that located social rights in the “moral economy” and “paternalistic old society” of pre-industrial England (these are the “old” social rights which

T.H. Marshall refers to); and the “new” radicals such as the Chartists, and the early Ricardian socialists, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: men like William

Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin and John Francis Bray, thinkers that conceived social rights in terms of the right to the whole produce of labour.181 As Margaret Somers emphasizes:

“for the Chartist – indeed for nineteenth century working people in general – a people without social relationality and public membership was a people without property.”182 In other words, the people themselves perceived social rights in a broader sense: as enhancing their capacity for political right and participation and for ensuring equality and freedom. Somers is convinced that

180 Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour: The Origin and Development of the Theory of Labour’s Claim to the Whole Product of Industry (1899) (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962). According to Menger, this self-interested economic version is so self-interested that it borders on anarchism. Gregory Claeys similarly argues that this claim “each exclusively enjoying the produce of his own industry and intellect” falls outside the socialist tradition: it “was a radical liberal, but not a socialist ideal.” See his Citizens and saints: Politics and anti-politics in early British socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 217-218.

181 See Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (1911), reprinted in 1972 (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1972).

182 Somers, “The “misteries” of property,” 67. Emphasis in the original.

59 early nineteenth century working people fought for social rights in regulative and redistributive laws “in the name of liberty and independence,” not “as a deferent lower class seeking paternalism and protection.”183

In the sociology and political science literature, social rights are not closely connected to political rights and to democracy. T.H. Marshall, for example, talks only of their “considerable overlap” but leaves the analysis there.184 Historically, however, the connection between social and political rights is evident as far back as the period of agitation by the Levellers and subsequently, in struggles for rights, the whole nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the British

Chartist movement,185 political rights were perceived historically as social rights, or at least as including social rights. The following frequently quoted 1848 passage from the Tory Chartist

Reverend Rayner Stephens in the Manchester Guardian makes the point clearly: here is an attempt to extend political rights into the realm of the economy and social right. From the workers’ nineteenth century perspective, these two realms were not as differentiated as they appear today:

‘This question of universal suffrage’, declared Rayner Stephens at the first great Lancashire Chartist meeting, ‘is a-knife-and-fork question, a bread and cheese question ….If any man ask what I mean by universal suffrage, I mean to say that every working man in the land has a right to a good coat on his back, a good hat on his head, a good roof for the shelter of his household, a good dinner upon his table, no more work than will keep him in health while at it, and as much wages as will keep him in the enjoyment of plenty, and all the blessings of life that reasonable men could desire. 186

183 Ibid.

184 Marshall, op.cit., 81.

185 As industrial production moved north in Britain, Chartism found leaders and supporters, especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Weavers working outside of factories, whose skills were threatened by mechanical production were drawn to Chartist goals and actions. As a mass movement, Chartism grew during the depressions of 1837-39, 1841- 42 and 1847-48.

186 Quoted in Donald Read, “Chartism in Manchester” in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1965), 34.

The disenfranchised workers did not see a distinction between political rights and social rights, or the right to vote, the right to a decent life, and the right to a share in the proceeds from the economy in which they laboured. This connection between the social and political realms was confirmed by E.P. Thompson: “in the context of the Owenite and Chartists years, the claim for the vote implied also further claims: a new way of reaching out by the working people for social control over their conditions of work and labour.”187 British Chartism has been defined as both a

“nascent” proletarian public sphere188 and also a moral economy,189 and certainly it was also an example of a ‘commons.’ Indeed, as a cultural force, Chartism educated working people with libraries, benefit clubs and political discussion groups. Some ‘moral force’ Chartists, such as

William Lovett, advocated gradual reform and cooperation with moderate groups. Others who were ‘physical force’ Chartists, such as Engel’s friend, Julian Harney, pushed for radical political actions against factory owners and authorities. As for woman’s rights, The Chartist Elizabeth

Neeson questioned why a constitution allowed a woman to inherit the throne but denied working women political rights. Indeed, Chartism is important to consider since there were fierce attacks in the press and in Parliament from free trade forces, among other factors, which brought an end to Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist Co-operative Land Plan.190 While mass arrests, imprisonment and deportations of Chartist leaders succeeded in suppressing the movement by 1851, Chartist ideals survived to inspire the next generations of urban workers.191

187 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), 828

188 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993). See Miriam Hansen’s Foreword, xxxi.

189 John K.Walton, Chartism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), especially Ch. 5, “Chartism in Perspective,” 74-79.

190 Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, Palo Alto, CA Stanford University, Press, 1999, p. 225.

191 See the First Chartist Petition, 1837, as Appendix One in this dissertation.

Thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined their modern theories of right based on reason with older traditions since their recourse to ancient rights in the political culture was an effective mobilizing force.192 For nineteenth-century thinkers, land and labour were “natural” in the sense that they were based on people’s “ancient” rights; that is to say, rights which require no further argument to justify them, beyond this designation. Ancient rights – based on nature, scripture, or history, or on all three – did not require the added justification of reason.

That good reasons can be given for these rights, independent of their sacred place in popular history and customs, while important, was not necessary. Historically, it was only later that theories of rights were isolated from political and economic lived experience and promulgated through education and philosophy. The relevant distinction from the perspective of the people then, was a distinction between nature and society, and it was well understood in the political thought at the time. The Irish Chartist, Thomas Devyr wrote in Our Natural Rights (1836) and in

The Odd Book (1882) about “nature’s economy” versus “political economy.” He said that the fact that ‘nature’s plenty’ did not exist for all meant that there was “something wrong” in the relationship between labour and land. 193 And it was these early Chartist socialists who saw this dysfunctional relationship more clearly than others. Ernest Jones, for example, was unequivocal in his belief that land was a social right: “The first and fundamental source of wealth, is the

LAND, and labour applied to it. Connected with this is the first and fundamental guarantee of

192 For a discussion, see Max Beer, A History of British Socialism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), vol. I, 291-292. In the Chartist period, the strategy of regaining lost rights through insurrection and violence was associated with Feargus O’Connor and the “Physical Force Party,” while the strategy for furthering Chartist goals through moral reasoning, education and philosophy was the “Moral Force Party,” whose representative was William Lovett.

193 Thomas Devyr in Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839-1900 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1971).

SOCIAL RIGHT, THE NATIONALISATION OF THE LAND.”194 The Chartists, therefore, pre- figuring communist ideology and practice, argued for ownership of land by the state.

From the point of view of the early socialists, “Universal Suffrage was absolutely necessary in order to make it possible for the people to alter the rights of property according to the wishes of the majority.”195 Indeed, typical of the times, Ernest Jones said: “What do we want political power for, except to grant free access to all the means of labour, land and machinery?”

“The concern everywhere,” writes Asa Briggs, “was for what the Charter would do or rather enable Chartists to do if they gained the Six Points.”196 This important connection between the social and political realms was also the basis of the more moderate Fabianism. Sidney Webb wrote that “collectivism is the obverse of democracy.” The worker “will not forever be satisfied with exercising the vote over such matters as the appointment of the Ambassador to Paris, or even of the position of the franchise.” Webb states, “He will more and more seek to convert his political democracy into what one may roughly term an industrial democracy, so that he may obtain some kind of control as a voter over the conditions under which he lives.”197

Indeed, there was much activity in the nineteenth century on behalf of social rights. The social right to work, for example, was debated “endlessly” in the 1830s and 1840s in France.198

“The droit au travail, the right to work,” Marx wrote, is “the first clumsy formula wherein the

194 Ernest Jones, in Thompson, The Real Rights of Man, op.cit.

195 Max Beer, A History of British Socialism Vol II. (1919) (London: Unwin Brothers, 1953), 10.

196 Asa Briggs, Chartism (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 43.

197 Cited in J. Roy Hay, The Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms 1906-1914 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 14 and Christopher Pierson, Beyond the Welfare State? The New Political Economy of Welfare (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 25.

198 Jacques Droz, Europe Between Revolutions 1815-1848 (London: Fontana Press, 1967).

63 revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat are summarized.”199 Of course, as Engels points out, this “right to work” in Marx meant something altogether different from its usual interpretation in industrial society: that is to say, Marx went well beyond the “right to work” conceived simply in terms of distributive justice:

The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class and, therefore, the abolition of wage labor as well as of capital and of their mutual relationships. Behind the “right to work” stood the June insurrection.200

In fact, men died in 1848 for the right to work, so how can it be said anywhere that social right is new, a concept just emerging? Here the right to work did not mean the right to mere subsistence: “The ‘right to work’ is, in reality,” von Stein writes in 1850, “the right to demand raw material to work with.”201 He concludes: “This is the only possible meaning that the right to work can have in industrial society.” It was a demand “by which the state should use all its funds to provide for the laborer the capital which he lacks.”202 In France, the provisional government at the time committed itself to providing this right in the form of Louis Blanc’s “public workshops.”203 The popular struggles in this period were over the definition of this social right.

Was a right to work the right to a productive life, with all this entails, or was it merely the right not to starve?

Much of the ideology behind the justification for working class demands was the radical argument about the priority of labour and the labour theory of value: the social right to the whole

199 Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France (1848-1850) (New York: International Publishers, 1964). 200 Engels, “Introduction” in Ibid. ,68. 201 Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850 (1850), trans. and ed., Kaethe Mengelberg (Totowa, New Jersey: The Bedminster Press, 1964), 419-420.

202 Ibid,422.

203 For a discussion of the “ateliers nationaux” and the provisional government, see Ibid.

64 produce of labour. This right, “one of the most fundamental socialist ideas,”204 commanded a large audience and had many supporters. Indeed, a whole industry was built up agitating for it, not only in Britain, but also in the United States and Canada. Speaking of John Francis Bray, and quoting from the Leeds Times, in 1837, one historian writes: “Bray also, like O’Brien and Jones, regarded universal suffrage and its concomitants, ‘not as an end, but as the means – as one step towards such organic changes as will ultimately enable the producer of wealth to receive and retain the full reward of his exertions.’”205 Of course, it depends on the definition of social right; some might say that the “right to work” is different from other types of social right such as social assistance, unemployment insurance, pensions, disability, etc. These radical claims for civil, social and political rights were indeed steeped in a very old literature and popular understanding.

In this sense, then, there is continuity in a radical tradition which fought for what is commonly understood as a modern social right, with roots deeply planted in earlier times.

2.4 Social Citizenship in Political Theory and Practice – 1850s to 1920s

As a result of the emergence of industrialism, the practices and discourses of labour and property shifted, and like all historical transformations, they moved in two directions. Cast in heavily moral terms, socialist and idealist discourses all documented, and by their own words contributed to, a popular struggle that raged over the nineteenth century.206 The more sympathetic understanding of human society among New Liberals in Britain was impossible without an accompanying change in the property regime. The antagonism was between “true”

204 Anton Menger, op.cit.,

205 Ray Boston, 8.

206 It is not a surprise that highly moral language is characteristic of these discourses since the root of the word property is “proper.” See Ross Zucker, pg 39.

65 property rights versus “artificial” ones; 207 “property for use” versus “property for power;” 208

“property versus improperty; ” 209 an “earned” versus an “unearned” increment;210 a “natural economy” versus a “political economy;”211 “power-with” versus “power-over;” 212 “cooperation” versus “competition;”213 “use-value” versus “exchange-value,”214 and so on. These kinds of oppositions were also captured in the ambiguity in the word “work” since it can mean either “joy” or “toil” – an observation not lost on the workers themselves.215

Reform liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain included thinkers such as the economist John A. Hobson (1858-1940) and the journalist and political thinker Leonard T. Hobhouse (1864-1929). Although Hobhouse and Hobson themselves disclaimed the idealist label since they held highly critical views of idealist philosophy as it related to political action (for example on such topics as support for war) 216 – their emphasis on the organic nature of society put them, in the minds of many, in the idealist category. Indeed, they were labeled idealists because central to the idealist creed is the idea of the state as a moral

207 Arthur J. Taylor, Laissez Faire and State Intervention (London: Macmillan, 1972).

208 L.T. Hobhouse, “The Historical Evolution of Property, In Fact And In Idea” in Charles Gore, ed., Property, Its Duties and Rights: Historically, Philosophically and Religiously Regarded (London: Macmillan, 1915), 3-31. See especially 20-23. See also Thorstein Veblen, …

209 John A. Hobson, Property and Improperty (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937), 11.

210 J. S. Mill, Collected Works, John M. Robson, Bruce L. Kinzer, eds., 1988, 425. Available online at books.google.com/books?isbn=0802026931

211 Thomas Ainge Devyer, quoted in Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, op.cit..

212 Follett, “Power” (1925) in Henry C. Metcalf and L Urwick, eds., The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett (New York: Harper, 1942), 99.

214 Marx, 1885, originally given as a lecture at the Hampstead Liberal Club in January, 1884.

215 The Industrial Banner, March 4, 1921.

216 L.T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Criticism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918).

66 community.217 In Scotland, for example, “the 1890s saw the emergence of a fully fledged public health system and the further extension of voluntary hospital movement.”218 Contrasting views are evident among late nineteenth-century social reformers such as Bernard Bosanquet, Arnold

Toynbee, and Samuel Smiles, who stressed independence over dependence on the state.

Recognizing that it was up to the individual to reform him or herself and not rely solely on the state, this movement stressed private philanthropy and self-reliance.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the terms public knowledge and public information increasingly came into use in the U.K. and elsewhere. This terminology “indicated a widespread and growing desire within British society to push out into the public sphere kinds of social and economic information that had previously been considered closed or private.”219 Individualism was redefined to reflect “not on the abstract individual, but on the individual in community, in associations, in society.”220 In order to lessen class differences and promote class unity, the quest was to extend the category of the producing classes so that all would become workers.

As a result of social research, “the public” became increasingly mobilized on behalf of social issues establishing claims either for or against state intervention. In the process, a new pamphlet literature was produced and politicians and bureaucrats were lobbied on behalf of particular causes.221 In providing policy advice to governments, social investigators were thus

217 Adam B. Ulam, Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism (New York: Octagon Books, 1964), Chapter two.

218 Ian Levitt, Poverty and Welfare in Scotland 1890-1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 83.

219 Ibid, 17.

220 The phrase is from Ibid, 34.

221 Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, “Social investigation, social knowledge, and the state: an introduction” in idem, eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18.

67 major catalysts in bringing about social citizenship and the emergence of “the social” as a particular site of policy activity. As a result, novel thinking about government and the public and a new paradigm for public policy developed. The collectivist framework not only encouraged the growth of government, but also challenged the status quo.

The results from these early efforts confirm the apprehensions about capitalism first made in the 1830s in the UK. This agitation was followed by British utopian thinkers such as

Robert Owen and William MacLure in their American experiments in New Lanark and New

Harmony.222 In the U.K., historical records show that all sorts of societies sprang up in the mid-

1800s. In London England, there was the “Society for Promoting Industrial Villages” and the

“Liberty and Property Defence League,” both designed to re-house “the industrial classes,” or the abject poor: “out-cast London” from the city slums into the countryside. Appealing to

“public-spirited landowners,” the idea was to relocate individuals from “terribly overcrowded dwellings” into decent housing in villages where capital would be induced to contribute.223

Indeed, social investigations into living and working conditions were the subject of many novels, sermons, surveys, political and social philosophies, trade union movements, political parties, and official inquiries undertaken by the state itself.

Social citizenship is affected by the extent to which the working classes, women, and various minorities are incorporated into society, become engaged with public issues, and gain the right to vote. The SSA or the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in the

222 See David Harris, Socialist Origins in the United States: American Forerunners of Marx, 1817-1832 (Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum & Comp., MCMLXVI).

223 See Rev. Henry Solly, Industrial Villages: A Remedy for Crowded Towns & Deserted Fields (London: Messrs. Sonnenschrin & Co., 1884). For an opposite account, emphasizing “Self-Help” as opposed to “State-Help,” and resisting “overlegislation and socialism,” especially if it required landowners to pay a share, even though they would earn “exoribitant returns on their investment” see Edward Stanley Robertson, The State & The Slums (London, England: Liberty and Property Defence League, 1884).

U.K. acknowledged the needs of urban working classes, and in 1856 “functioned as an outdoor parliament.” Lenore Coltheart speaks of how, in 1862, it made its presence known in the House of Commons: “the legislative fortress was taken by storm and in rushed the stream of Social

Science.” “The SSA was a training ground for investigative studies of many kinds...” There is thus a history of social science acting as an oppositional voice to government and to the market and opposing (as well as supporting) industrialism. Apparently, women, in particular, according to Coltheart, were “caught up with social science” and involved with “thousands of people attending discussions in the meeting rooms, or at grand dinner parties in private houses, or at the public soirees, or listening to sermons.”224 And indeed, social investigations and social science were actually effective in this respect. Of settlement houses, which can be classified as resulting from this type of social research and investigation, one study suggests that “The settlement represented reform without institutions.”225 Finally, as a result of Charles Booth’s investigation, the Old Age Pension Act of 1908 in England was passed and became law. Given that it had taken thirty years of debate before it was eventually successful, this was a significant achievement.

Booth disliked the ideology of laissez–faire in the nineteenth century, which was conditional and moralistic and removed people’s civil and political rights upon receipt of welfare. His Old Age

Pensions Act would not deprive anyone of their civil rights.226 The democratic state thus became an actor in the policy and political process. The goal was to eliminate privilege by assisting the disadvantaged.

224 Lenore Coltheart, “Being Civil and Social: The proper study of womankind” in Moira Gatens and Alison Mackinnon eds., Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 138.

225 Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 148.

226 Robert Pearson and Geraint Williams, Political Thought and Public Policy in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Lonman, 1984), 164. These authors discuss Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, and his Poverty Maps of London, available online: http://booth.lse.ac.uk/

History reveals that social research into social problems was well established on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1830s. Even before that, “one of the earliest attempts at social science,” which provided “the statistical foundation of the socialist movement” in the U.K. was

Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, published in 1814. Here Colquhoun outlined his “celebrated table,” as Menger describes it.

Colquhoun himself called it a “Map of Civil Society.” Colquhoun chronicled the incomes, population figures, statistics on commerce, agriculture, manufacturing, shopkeeping, and so on for each class in “the Community of Great Britain and Ireland in the year 1812.”

Like modern social science, Colquhoun’s data were read in different ways and for different purposes. Socialists found it particularly useful: John Gray, for example, made it “the central topic and object-lesson” of his book, Lecture on Human Happiness, published in 1825.

Gray’s utmost concern was muckraking: to show the great division between the productive and unproductive classes. Like all Ricardian socialists, Gray felt that “every unproductive member of society is a DIRECT TAX upon the productive classes. Every unproductive member of society is also an USELESS member of society, unless he gives an EQUIVALENT for that which he consumes.”

L.P. Jacks, in a series of lectures on citizenship at the University of Glasgow in the winter of 1926-27, spoke of the devastating impact on the individual worker in the loss of labour’s

“right to skill.” According to Jacks, the Labour party in England, while initially promising in its role as the “champion of the political and economic ‘rights of labour,’ ” had nevertheless “been strangely silent about the first of all labour’s rights – the right to skill.” Jacks is saying that the machine and mass production in the Industrial Age were the causes of the greatest ‘wrong’ that could ever be directed against labour: “a greater calamity has never fallen on the human race.”

For labour it meant the “deprivation of their birthright.”227 Still relevant today, labour everywhere is acutely aware of the loss of their historic and ‘natural’ rights. To be sure, a redefinition of the categories of labour and work in Great Britain raised a number of questions.

The deeper concept of social citizenship is always in danger of being enclosed.

In accord with T. H. Marshall, Michael Mann draws a distinction between “ideological- social citizenship,” which he sees as a product of the nineteenth century, and “economic-social citizenship,” a product, he says, of the twentieth century. What he means by ideological-social citizenship is “rights to an education, allowing for cultural participation and occupational attainment.” “Through the long nineteenth century,” Mann writes, “ideological-social citizenship was attained by all middle-classes, but economic-social citizenship remained minimal.” 228 However, as Anthony Rees points out, “the trouble with this is that it makes too jagged a tear in the unity of social citizenship.” Furthermore, Rees says, the phrase ‘allowing for occupational attainment,’ “included under ‘ideological-social citizenship’, sounds quite economic.” 229 So these distinctions were also blurred.

Such distinctions were important to new liberals, socialists and idealists as well. William

Morris and T.H Green categorized labour in this way in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, it surfaces in the work of R.H. Tawney, among others. In T.H. Green’s philosophy, it surfaces in a religious mode. Green drew a distinction “between the man who works for himself alone, and the man who works ‘as from the God that worketh in him.’ ” This is a conception of work which, in

227 See L.P. Jacks, Constructive Citizenship (New York: Double Day, Doran & Company, 1928), 112-13. The book is based on the Stevenson Lectures Jacks delivered at the University of Glasgow. Emphasis is in the original.

228 Michael Mann, “Ruling class strategies and citizenship,” Sociology: the Journal of the British Sociological Association 21 339-54. See also: Michael Mann, “The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms and results,” European Journal of Sociology, vol. xxv, 1984, 185-212.

229 Anthony M. Rees, “T. H. Marshall and the progress of citizenship” in Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship Today: The contemporary relevance of T.H. Marshall (London: UCL Press, 1996), 12-13. It seems quite obvious how interrelated all these aspects of social citizenship are.

71 serving others, complements Green’s political theory on citizenship: in Green’s words, it entails

“living for the brethren.” As Plant and Vincent point out, for Green, “until each individually had reincarnated him [Christ] in himself, his daily work and citizenship, perfection and the common rational good would not be realized.”230

There is no doubt that over time a narrowing took place in the concepts that came to be known as social citizenship. In the words of one observer, there was “a radical flattening of perspective and shrinkage of imaginative range” in the twentieth century as compared to the nineteenth.231 This narrowing was largely a result of the development of industrial capitalism and the influence of liberalism. “With the beginning of the 20th century, the concept of the social economy lost ground. The split between economy, politics and social grew with [the development of] autonomy for each of these three spheres.”232 As documented a number of times, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, producers’ rights to the whole produce of labour became the much more limited right to merely sell their labour in the capitalist marketplace, often for subsistence wages. As a consequence, the dignity and independence of the working classes were undermined as citizen-producers lost their autonomy and decision-making rights.

2.5 Making liberal rights ‘natural’ and social rights ‘charity’

It is remarkable that the powerful language of natural right has been claimed by the classical

230 See Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 16. In the twenty-first century, similar vocabulary can be found in Richard Sennet’s, The Culture of Late Capitalism and Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land (New York: The Penquin Press, 2010).

231 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 24.

232 Eric Shragge and Jean-Marc Fontan, eds.,Social Economy International Debates and Perspectives (Montreal/New York/London: Black Rose Books, 2000),4.

72 liberal tradition and has been given so much legitimacy. Especially when it is noted, as Jeremy

Waldron does, that the rights “that did have some claim to be described as ‘universal’ or

‘human’: the experience and satisfaction of bodily need; participation in productive activity; involvement in the life processes of others; reproduction and so on” 233 – in other words, social rights – were not claimed as natural. Liberalism appropriates the language of natural right in order to legitimize the highly artificial activity of deciding what constitutes, and what does not constitute, the label “right.” 234 For example, even if it is said that social rights have a long history as charity, but not as right, this is only partially true, and only to a limited extent, because in earlier centuries social provision was seen as inherently a right, at least in cultural and moral terms. As Thomas Horne explains, historically, there was a close relationship between private property, or civil right, and the “right of necessity,” or social rights. In the “contract that created civil society,” he writes, commenting on William Cobbett’s argument in The Poor Man’s Friend,

“people would have agreed to obey the laws of civil society only if they were guaranteed the right to be supported if they became destitute.”235 In this sense, property is relational, as in the following 1829 comment: “The right of the poor to support, and the right of the rich to engross and accumulate, are relative and reciprocal privileges, the former being the condition in which the latter is enjoyed.”236 Thus, Cobbett could argue in the 1830s that any alteration in the poor

233 Jeremy Waldron, ed., Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 158.

234 As Durkheim said, “Those who believe in [the] theory of natural right think they can make a final distinction between what is and what is not a right. However, a closer study will show that in reality the dividing line they think they can draw is certainly not definite and depends entirely on the state of public opinion.” See Anthony Giddens, ed., Durkheim on Politics and the State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 196.

235 Thomas Horne, “Welfare Rights as Property Rights” in J. Donald Moon, ed., Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1988), 126.

236 Quoted in Ibid, 126. This statement is from the writings of the political economist Samuel Read who wrote An Enquiry into the Natural Grounds of Right to Vendible Property or Wealth (1829).

73 law was an illegitimate infraction against “the historic rights of the poor.” In other words, charity itself was seen as a right.

Arguments to recognize these claims as rights went back at least as far as the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man (1792) speaks of social assistance as something that should be granted “not as a matter of grace and favour, but of right.”237 Here Paine advocated not only subsistence, but also funds to cover pensions, education, funeral expenses, mothers’ allowances, allowances for the newly married, and employment for “the casual poor.” Finally, as

E. P. Thompson points out, “concealed within the seemingly “nostalgic” notion of the “historic rights of the poor,” which, in different ways, was voiced by Cobbett, Oastler, and Carlyle, there were also new claims maturing, for the community to succour the needy and the helpless, not out of charity, but as of right.” 238 Indeed, speaking of the Ricardian socialist, John Francis Bray, one author states: “The new society is to form one vast insurance company for the bearing of all losses from fire, shipwreck, or other disasters. Society is to provide for impotence and old age, not as charity but as a “right” well earned by labor.”239 As Bray wrote critically in Labour’s

Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1839):

Our whole social fabric is one vast Babel of interests, in which true charity, and morality, and brotherly love, have no existence. The hand of every man is more or less raised against every other man – the interest of every class is opposed to the interest of every other class – and all other interests are in opposition and hostility to the interest of the working man. This unnatural state of things was originally induced, and is now maintained, by man’s ignorance of, or inattention to, First Principles … as promulgated in the great book of Nature …240

The only sense in which rights can be thought of as natural, then, is culturally and historically since they originate in culture: They exist in the mores, customs, myths, taboos,

237 Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 628.

238 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1965), 760.

239 Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (1911) (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972), 98-99. Emphasis added.

240 J.F. Bray, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy; Or, The Age of Might and the Age of Right (Leeds: David Green, Briggate, 1839), 28. Emphasis added.

74 rituals, proverbs of everyday society, and are handed down by important figures in the community such as medicine men, chiefs, and so on. These rights are antecedent to laws, but not to civilization. They are “a product of civilization” and constitute “rules of the game” which are

“current now and here.” As part of the mores, rights are often “inchoate, unsettled, partial and limited” and therefore “vague and in need of further study and completion by courts and legislators.”241 The liberal victory in this linguistic struggle was accomplished by insisting on the existence of timeless, abstract, natural and universal ‘Rights of Man, ’as distinct from rights granted to citizens of particular states. While natural rights were initially empowering for individuals in their attempt to assert themselves against the state and limit its arbitrary powers, this concept later served to conceal and bolster inequalities in civil society.

As a recurring theme, this dissertation reveals that almost everything written about social rights has been obscured historically. Observations on the hidden ground of the commons partially explains why social rights lack some conceptual and political power. One reason for this lack of power is that social rights, ensconced in a discourse of liberalism, have become associated with women, weakness, dependence, vulnerability, disability, and “devalued labour” as opposed to “valued work.” An interesting footnote to this is that, as the commons themselves became devalued historically, as a result of British Enclosure legislation of various kinds, so too did women: “The devaluation of woman’s work and the degradation of her body relate directly to the enclosures of open fields, the loss of the commons, and the depopulation of villages.”242 In

241 William Graham Sumner, Earth Hunger and Other Essays (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1980), 7-83. This collection of Sumner’s essays was first published, posthumously, in 1913 by Yale University Press.

242 Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 65.

75 other words, social citizenship, which represents nothing less than the universal aspects of being human, became increasingly discounted in the Anglo-American world.

As a result, the working class perspective which is itself sceptical of the notion of social welfare as a right is reinforced by the deeply conservative view which sees social welfare as illegitimate unless delivered as charity. As many claim, the working class position “rested on the disproportion between what it contributed to the society and what it received. Workers, it was presumed labored harder than the upper class.”243 Thus, “If workers received economic guarantees from the society, that was only recompense for the burdens they bore.”244 The hegemony of the liberal natural rights tradition was now maintained in the writing of history itself.

2.6 Concepts of Rights in T.H. Marshall

In his discussion of the differences between civil and social right, Marshall sees civil rights “as a form of power itself,” whereas social rights “are not designed for the exercise of power at all.”245 On one level this is true for those living in extreme poverty. Social policy is designed to address this helplessness by empowering individuals that suffer from poverty.

However, if the welfare state mainly serves the middle-class, the alleviation for those who are truly poor is unlikely.246 In this sense, Marshall’s concept of powerlessness applies. Marshall himself describes social rights as passive and powerless. Social rights have the potential to be powerful for the citizenry only if they can truly create more equitable relationships in society. If,

243 Lawrence M. Mead, “Citizenship and Social Policy: T. H. Marshall and Poverty” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., The Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 197-230, 203.

244 Ibid.

245 Marshall, The Right To Welfare, 41 and 42, respectively.

246 Scott, Poverty and Wealth. Emphasis is in the original.

76 for example, social rights could be seen as a ‘political technique,’ a ‘form of knowledge,’ and an

‘ethos of government,’ then social rights might have a great deal of power since they would actually construct subjects and many aspects of their environment. As Janine Brodie points out,

“social policy embeds deeply, although almost invisibly, in the daily lives of women and men and in popular culture, shaping shared understandings of collective responsibility, social solidarity, and individuality.”247

In an important sense, then, social rights describe what takes place at the societal level, but Marshall, for the most part, analyzes social rights at the individual level. Of course, much of what Marshall had to say about social rights as passive and powerless does correspond to the social and political reality he investigates and hence are collective or social in this sense. This is especially the case when he examined social assistance or means-tested general welfare.

The direct opposite of social rights, according to Marshall, are civil rights, which mainly “refer to the individual as actor, rather than as consumer.” For Marshall, the capacity to act equals power and the incapacity to act equals a lack of power. According to Marshall, civil rights are so fundamental, so necessary, and so sacred, that he speaks of them in terms of “ownership.” Civil rights “give external expression to principles which are internalized in the early stages of socialisation. They thus become part of the individual’s personality, a pervasive element in his daily life, an intrinsic component of his culture, the foundation of his capacity to act socially and the creator of the environmental conditions which makes social action possible in a democratic civilization.” By contrast, there is so little power in social rights, according to Marshall, that

“there is little that consumers can do except to imitate Oliver Twist and ‘ask for more.’ ”248

247 Brodie, “Globalization, In/Security, and the Paradoxes of the Social,” 53.

248 Marshall, “Reflections on Power,” Sociology, vol. 3, nos. 2, May 1969. Reprinted in idem, The Right To Welfare and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1981), 141-142.

However, as this dissertation, on a number of levels, makes clear, the “owning” of social rights is as important as the “owning” of civil rights. In moving from charity to entitlement, is not the ownership of social rights the whole point of the welfare state? So the division of rights and the dichotomy between rights, evident in even Marshall, is problematic. Like so many other thinkers, the implication in his statements is that civil rights are more important than social rights. Moreover, Marshall even made distinctions between social rights: implying that some social rights are more legitimate than other social rights. Marshall saw rights to education and health care, for example, as being more bona fide social rights than those to social security and welfare since they more obviously serve the whole community.249 “The right to education is a genuine social right of citizenship,” he writes, “because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future adult.”250

Clearly, the liberal T. H. Marshall exists alongside the social-democratic Marshall.

According to Martin Powell, the “hidden history of social citizenship” that runs throughout

Marshall’s work reveals “a more limited, conservative notion of citizenship” than is portrayed in most accounts.251 In other words, what Marshall actually said about social citizenship may have been misinterpreted and problematically extended by his numerous commentators over the years.

There seems to be some truth to this argument. Nevertheless, in connecting the welfare state to citizenship, Marshall came closer to the Scandinavian understanding of the State as an elevated or even idealized version of community – as “home” – than is evident in the liberal paradigm.

The more inflated view of Marshall’s idea of social citizenship is thus not groundless. It is made possible by the ambiguity in Marshall’s own conceptualisation and by the radical potential and

249 Marshall, The Right to Welfare and other essays, 90-92.

250 Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 84. Emphasis added.

251 Martin Powell, “The Hidden History of Social Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies, 6, nos. 3, 2002, 234.

78 elasticity of the concept of social citizenship. The following chart outlines several, broad conceptions of social rights found in the work of T.H. Marshall:

Figure 2 Concepts of Social Rights in T.H. Marshall

Civil + Political Rights Social Rights Social Citizenship

Liberal paradigm New Liberalism Social Democracy

Minimalist view of rights Widened view of rights Maximalist view

Legal, civil rights as a Moral “public duty” a Fusion of civil + social rights “private gain” Handed out to those in need as Upheld by the state charity or welfare to Synthesis of state + society to ameliorate inequalities ensure equal social worth

Access to political resources Access to “a modicum of Full access to political, social economic welfare and + economic resources as security” b “social heritage” c

Individual citizen as owner of Trade unions to help workers Society as organic whole, all civil rights become ‘industrial citizens’ parts working together in community

Creative, active, empowered Passive, powerless recipients Participatory interactions citizens of welfare benefits throughout society

Independence Dependence Interdependence

a T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 120. b Marshall as discussed by Martin Powell, “The Hidden History of Social Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies, 6, nos. 3, 2002, 234. c T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 74.

What can be said about these aspects of Marshall’s analysis? First, the examples of education and health, are not so much a matter of “asking for more” as he puts it, but are more a question of demanding equality and universality. Second, to speak of “more” the way Marshall does only makes sense within the residual understanding of right. To be sure, the idea of a

“modicum” of social security is deeply internalised within the welfare population itself. In this

79 sense, Marshall’s comment about the “ownership” of civil but not social rights is accurate: social welfare is a handout, not an entitlement. As several research studies point out, single mothers on assistance frequently deny their own needs in order to adequately provide for their children. This is a result of maternal instinct but also social pressure: “the perceived non-ownership of social wages in a capitalist society” as one researcher puts it.252 He elaborates: “The money from

Mother’s Allowance is not felt to belong to the recipient, who feels guilty about taking it and only spends it in particular ways [that is, to support her children].”253 Another book on

Aboriginal welfare in Canada which speaks critically of those who think in Marshall’s terms of a

“modicum,” is entitled Enough to Keep Them Alive.254

The danger in Marshall’s characterization of social citizenship is that it is detached from the other rights of citizenship and from democracy. Had Marshall analysed the effects and potential effects of modern social rights on political life more completely, his interpretation of social security might have gone beyond mere amelioration. As it stands now, Marshall’s understanding of social citizenship does very little for the poor. It hardly needs to be said that, as a way of life, extreme poverty precludes the kind of political participation central to the idea of citizenship. For the very poor in market society, those most dependent on the state – in other words, the underclass – it cannot be said that Marshall’s characterization of social right will lead to a strong sense of community membership or citizenship. The challenges and contradictions evident in Marshall’s thinking mirror the perceptions of many who wrote and fought for rights and respect in British society during the 1800s.

252 Patrick Burman, Poverty’s Bonds: Power and Agency in the Social Relations of Welfare (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1996), 182.

253 Ibid.

254 Hugh Shewell, Enough to Keep Them Alive: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)

2.7 Social Rights and Social Tensions in British Writing

As documented in the literature, Sir William Beveridge was quite radical in his initial

1942 policy recommendations to the Advisory Panel on Home Affairs in the British government.

Beveridge believed that his goal of full employment could only be achieved if, in “making up our minds to becoming a community,” as Albert Weale points out, “profit as a guide to production disappears permanently over a large part of the whole field of economic activity.”

According to Beveridge’s biographer, Jose Harris, Beveridge at this time was more a state socialist than a Keynesian: “state action to prevent unemployment could not be divorced from state control of industry, housing, transport, and the use of land.” Hardly surprising is Harris’s next statement: “Beveridge’s paper was discussed by the Advisory Panel on 15 July, and met with a very nervous response from some of the other members.”255

Given the historical precedents surveyed in this chapter, it seems astounding that people think of social rights as “new.” But indeed liberalism has portrayed them in this way no doubt to fit with the idea of an inevitable telos or progress in social development. It is not only the teleology but also the periodization and classification of rights that is problematic in Marshall.

These factors also contribute to the idea that social rights are “new.” The social and factory legislation in the nineteenth century, Marshall says, constitute social rights: “the factory code had become one of the pillars in the edifice of social rights.”256 But does Marshall say enough about the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847? After all, they are described in the literature as the beginnings of the replacement of one moral economy by another. If these too are social rights, why is social citizenship confined to the twentieth century? And, if the Factory Acts are social

255 See Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) and Albert Weale, “William Beveridge: The Patriarch as Planner,” Political Studies, Vol. Xxvii, no.2, 1979.

256 Marshall, 84.

81 rights, what about industrial citizenship and trade union rights which were made legal in 1825 by the repeal of the Combination Acts? Why are these civil rights, according to Marshall, and not social rights? But nowhere does Marshall himself acknowledge this distinction: what Marshall leaves out of his analysis is precisely this nineteenth century conception of social rights: rights originating in labour and property rather than tradition. Thus, although Marshall acknowledges the “old” pre-industrial social rights based on tradition and hierarchy and the “new” social rights in the twentieth century based on the status of citizenship, he misses completely the intervening time period of the nineteenth century.

Some see the Marshall/Beveridge paradigm of social right as “ambisexual” because it shows the “female” ethic of care and is concerned with the welfare of social groups – for example, the nuclear family – rather than simply individuals as in the “male” paradigm.257 But, upon closer and more critical reflection, it is evident that Marshall’s conception is still essentially the paradigm of the universal, abstract, autonomous, androcentric, public self, reflecting the classical liberal worldview. As far as social citizenship is concerned, Marshall simply accepts this liberal point of view reflected in his liberal understanding of social rights. Part of the problem with Marshall’s account, then, comes from his general theory of citizenship. As many have pointed out, citizenship cannot be defined in this way: it must be conceived within a particular society. It cannot exist outside community, as it does in the liberal conception. It cannot be theorized “in a static and empty social space.” 258 Upon reflection, it is evident that the

“civilization” which Marshall refers to as everyone wanting a share in, does not actually exist.

Despite Marshall’s historical focus, the self in his theory is not really in and of this world, since,

257 Claudia Moscovici, Gender and Citizenship: The Dialectics of Subject-Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 14.

258 Judith Shklar, op.cit. 9.

82 if it were, Marshall would have been forced to account, far more than he does, for the stark realities of class, race, and gender inequality which seriously undermine his concept of social citizenship.

In sum, Marshall was right: liberal rights are not enough to secure both individual autonomy and equal social worth, but he neglects to add that liberal social rights for the most part are not either. As Fred Twine points out, though Marshall made some general distinctions in his later work, Marshall failed “to specify the level, form and content of social rights.”259

Despite Marshall’s understanding of social citizenship and social class as “at war” in the twentieth century, he seems oblivious to this contradiction in his own work. It appears that the early Marshall wanted to ameliorate the war; but the later Marshall moved away from it. Yet

Marshall was aware that social citizenship and social policy are not the same thing and that in the context of the welfare state in a market economy, there appears to be some confusion on the issue. “The holistic idea of the welfare state,” Marshall writes, “became quickly associated, or even identified, with that particular, limited sphere of public affairs that we call social policy.

The part did duty for the whole and claimed for itself the authority, and the autonomy to which the whole would have been entitled. And that is where the hyphen came in.”260 Here, with the possible exception of national health insurance, social policy is understood as a residual category: largely ameliorating the harmful effects of the market and the economic policies that govern it.

By not venturing beyond the parameters of the market, the Two-Tier distinction in

Marshall’s thought is firmly in place and any redistribution is minimal. The idea of social rights,

259 Fred Twine, Citizenship and Social Rights: The Interdependence of Self and Society (London: Sage, 1994), 106.

260 T.H. Marshall, “Afterthought on ‘Value Problems of Welfare-Capitalism’: The ‘Hyphenated Society’ ” in idem, The Right To Welfare and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1981), 129. Emphasis added.

83 suggested by a more maximalist reading of Marshall, disappears from view. Given Marshall’s own framework – that of welfare-capitalism – the claims he makes on behalf of social citizenship are exaggerated and unlikely to be realized. However, his understanding of what social citizenship can do, and what it may mean, within the constraints of a market economy may be a problem inherent to liberalism.

There are other problems. For example, is it actually the case that citizens feel “a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession” as Marshall says they do? He was referring to Britain in 1950, a time that came after a World War against Fascism, and a time highly responsive to ideas of solidarity in the name of national community. But even with this consideration in mind, the statement is optimistic: Has

“civilization” not always been fragmented, variable, and dependent on the culture in which it exists? Is it accurate to say of social citizenship “that there is a general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilized life” as Marshall phrases it? As a result of the welfare state, it is true, of course, as Marshall says, that there has, to some extent, been “an equalization between the more and the less fortunate at all levels – between the healthy and the sick, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the active, the bachelor and the father of a large family,.”261

However, it is also true that actual enrichment depends on a citizen’s place in the social hierarchy and on what gender and race they are, and what kind of class background they come from. The objectives of the welfare state, though helpful, are thus limited and have mainly benefited the middle-class.262 Furthermore, as a result of British imperialism and colonialism,

261 Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” (1950) in his Sociology at the Crossroads (London: Heinemann, 1963), 107.

262 For the argument on the middle-class benefiting disproportionately from the welfare state, see Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982); and for a review of this literature, see Martin Powell, “The Strategy of Equality Revisited,” Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 24, Nos. 2, April, 1995, and Julian Le Grand, “The Strategy of Equality Revisited: A Reply,” Ibid, 187-191. See also Norman Barry, Welfare (Milton

84 racial categories became central to the “white” working class in Britain. Here racial ideas flowed from the colony to the mother country. Alastair Bonnett writes that “the influence of the colour- coded language of hierarchy used in settler and colonial societies provided an alluring formula to articulate Britain’s own social divisions.”263 As a consequence, late nineteenth century British imperialist and nationalist ideas penetrated the working class.264

Social cohesiveness in political communities is frequently understood in racial terms.

“The use of the public education, social benefit, health and housing systems by non-whites appears deeply resented by many white Britons.”265 The white working classes in Britain see the welfare state as theirs, not to be shared with anyone who is portrayed as a threat. One survey found that “overwhelmingly the attitude expressed was that access to council dwellings should be limited to ‘our own people’ that it was part of the benefits of the Welfare State that should not be shared.”266 Although this strong identification with the welfare state is an example of the

‘ownership’ of social rights, which is a necessary component of social citizenship, it is a negative ownership since it includes one segment of the population but excludes others.

So the social rights of citizens, such as the right to work, interpreted by T.H. Marshall conservatively to mean simply “the right to follow the occupation of one’s choice, in the place of one’s choice” was never quite accurate. 267 Because actually the point of the right to work as it

Keynes: Open University Press, 1990). As Powell notes, one writer calls the welfare state “outdoor relief for the middle classes.”

263 Alastair Bonnett, “How the Working Class Became White: the Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized Capitalism,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vo. 11, No. 3, September 1998, 319.

264 Ibid, 316-340.

265 Alastair Bonnett, op. cit. 331.

266 Rose E. at al. Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (Oxford: Open University Press, 1969) quoted in Ibid.

267 T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 77.

85 was understood historically by workers was that it would “confer … on every citizen the right not to seek work, but to find it.”268 To be sure, this second right to work demand went way beyond Marshall’s interpretation. Historian Michael Hanagan explains that after the 1884

Reform Bill further enfranchised male workingmen in Great Britain (which opened up possibilities for social reform), the demand for a right to work also surfaced in a new way: with a novel language, “a new discursive field,” that linked the new demands with the old populist republican ideas of Thomas Paine and others. “The strength of the ‘right to work’ demand,”

Hanagan says, “was that it stretched across several categories of right, building on older conceptions of right connecting them to newer conceptions.” 269 This statement expresses the sense that these radical claims indeed appeared in a very old literature and popular understanding. In this sense, then, there is continuity in a radical tradition which fought for what is commonly understood as a modern social right, dating as far back as the eighteenth century.

In all of Marshall’s work there is much evidence of his preference for compromise. So, for example, he speaks of class abatement as the aim of social rights, yet he is aware “of the difficulties that arise when one tries to combine the principles of social equality and the price system.”270 Marshall believed that the conflict between the principles of equality and inequality

“springs from the very roots of our social order” and that attempts to resolve it are “a newfangled application of the old maxim divide et impera – play one off against the other to keep the peace.”

Revealing this pluralist liberal position, Marshall approvingly notes that “apparent inconsistencies are in fact a source of stability, achieved through a compromise which is not

268 Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 15.

269 Michael Hanagan, Recasting Citizenship, 76.

270 T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 104.

86 dictated by logic.”271 This kind of “conceptual equilibrium” is a hallmark of the liberal paradigm.272 To be sure, as Rees says of Marshall, he “seems to have lost faith in the concept [of social citizenship] in the end. It merely takes its place among a plurality of often competing values and organising principles.”273

Despite the criticism of Marshall’s evolutionary account of citizenship, he did understand the origin and development of modern social right to be at least partly a result of industrial conflict. As one scholar points out, Marshall saw “the genesis of modern social citizenship not in a normative desire for sustainable community, but in factual schism.”274

Indeed, social citizenship for Marshall was not so much “a matter of state and constitutional theory,” Michelle Everson writes, but “more a concrete product of law and the market place.” 275

In Marshall’s work, social rights were never conceived abstractly or theoretically, as existing outside society. This was both good and bad: good, because it drew the analysis into history and actual struggles for social right; bad because it never attempted to “normativise” industrial citizenship. Indeed, the ambiguity between history and theory in Marshall’s approach is an example of his tendency to blur the boundaries between the normative and empirical realms.276

271 Ibid, 127.

272 The phrase is from Candace Johnson Redden, “Health Care as Citizenship Development: Examining Social Rights and Entitlement,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 35, No.1, March 2002, 103-125.

273 A.M. Rees, “The Other T.H. Marshall,” Journal of Social Policy, vol. 24, no. 3, 1995, 360.

274 Michelle Everson, “‘Subjects’, or ‘Citizens of Erewhon’? Law and Non-Law in the Development of a ‘British Citizenship,’” Citizenship Studies, vol.7, no.1, 2003, 80. As Everson notes, the unstable nature of industrial citizenship in Britain, and elsewhere, and the ad hoc methods to address it, made “build[ing] a clear and enduring constitutional commitment to a community-forging concept of social citizenship” unlikely.

275 Ibid, 59.

276 Gerard Delanty makes a similar point in his book Citizenship in a global age: Society, culture, politics (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000), 17.

2.8 New Liberal Views of Rights within Society

Civil society, as British academic Mervyn Frost says, is without geographic boundaries, and does not require a sovereign state because it is a practice that takes place outside the state.277

First Generation Rights are created from within civil society and are “conceptually distinct” in theory and in practice from “citizenship rights” which Frost locates in “democratic and democratizing states.” This distinction is what allows Frost to speak of “civil society rights” and

“rights practice in civil society” as a phenomenon separate from the sovereign state. Civil society entails “a certain kind of politics – a politics prior to the polis, a politics before the state.”278

Frost’s treatment of civil society shows how social the Rights of Man really are “and what they mean in practice, what profound changes they bring to social life.”279 Claude Lefort holds a similar view of rights. He says that “freedom of opinion is [also] a freedom of relationships” as well as being a “freedom of communication.”280 Indeed, “it is man’s right, one of his most precious rights, to step out of himself and to make contact with others, through speech, writing and thought.”281 Speech here is a type of Commons: “it has no definite frontiers, and no authority can claim to control it or to decide what can and cannot be thought, what can and cannot be said.”282 According to Lefort, speech and thought “belong to no one.”283 Today

277 Frost, Constituting Human Rights, 89.

278 Ibid., 85.

279 Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights” (1981) in idem, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, edited by John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986), 248.

280 Ibid., 250.

281 Ibid.

282 Lefort, “Human Rights and the Welfare State” (1984) in idem, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 33.

283 Ibid.

88 there is the tendency in perspectives which emphasize “reflexivity” to listen to the poor and dispossessed themselves. In the UK, John Clarke has interviewed “citizen-consumers” to find out their views on neo-liberal “reforms.” He found that citizens much prefer the label “patient” in the

NHS over that of “stakeholder” or “customer.”284 In short, the collectivist response to the hardships of competitive capitalism has brought forth concerted efforts to restore community and re-establish civic health. Much of the reasoning for such efforts is based on social knowledge.

Like Lefort, Frost focuses on the right to associate and communicate. Civil society creates a “politics based on discussion, conversation, dialogue, negotiation, diplomacy, and so on.”285 This is a recurrent theme in this dissertation, as Chapter One documents. Like many contemporary writers, Frost includes social rights in his description of what constitutes legitimate debate in civil society. For example, he includes a “discussion about the regulation of child labour internationally,” and even a discussion about the Two-Tier Distinction itself, since what constitutes “the list of human rights” is a subject for deliberation. Indeed, in the practice of civil society, institutions themselves, such as the state, and the community of states, “are subject to critical scrutiny,” and hence membership in civil society is not just instrumental, as it is in liberalism, but rather “is fundamental to our ethical well-being.”286

284 John Clarke, Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy (London: Sage, 2004), 120. This approach is also evident in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World which documents the inequality, unemployment, underemployment, and social exclusion in late twentieth-century France.

285 Frost, Constituting Human Rights, 89.

286 Ibid., In Frost’s account, however, it is only these First Generation Rights that are properly human rights since they transcend national borders. Social and economic rights, on the other hand, are merely citizenship rights, confined to the democratic or democratizing state. Since Frost limits social rights to the domestic state, his position is essentially the same as Cranston’s “classic” criticism of social rights quoted earlier. Indeed, Frost explicitly states: “It is only after we have constituted ourselves as citizens within the global practice of democratic and democratizing states that we may sensibly start talking of redistributive rights.” So here is the familiar distinction, once again, between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Citizens. This dichotomy is important because it has serious implications for global social rights since it prohibits any attempt to elevate economic and social rights to the level of a universal reality. So despite everything positive Frost contributes to social right, in the end, he seems to offer the more conventional view.

For Frost, social rights enjoy a privileged status in a manner completely different from what they do, or more accurately do not do, in the Anglo-American dominant tradition. In Frost’s account, social rights belong to sovereign states: “It is as holders of citizenship rights that we can decide to grant to ourselves a further set of rights, the so-called positive rights (sometimes referred to as welfare rights), through the legal systems of our respective states.”287 It is in the democratic state that community and fraternity are embedded, and the isolation, anomie, alienation, and inequality of civil society are resolved.288 Frost, criticizing the liberal Rights of

Man states: “we know that our fellow citizens have a responsibility towards us that extends beyond such bare negative liberties.”289 Social rights thus exist at a higher level than civil and political rights. Indeed, Frost’s idealism is apparent when he speaks of the “ethical shortcomings” of civil society being “overcome” by the “ethical advances” of citizenship in democratic states.

So the idea of a hierarchy between civil and social right, as it has been outlined up until now, is reversed in Frost’s account. Unlike those who support the Two-Tier distinction, Frost speaks of the relationship between civil right and social right as one where civil society, or the economy, is in the less developed position vis a vis social citizenship. Needless to say, Frost’s conception of rights and citizenship is not compatible with the liberal position. The apex for liberals is civil society: the realm of competition and self-interest. For Hegelians, on the other hand, the apex is the state: the realm of “highest right” and “highest duty.”290 Frost believes that citizens are aware of this subordination and actually approve of it. Speaking of the institutions in

287 Ibid., 128.

288 Although First Generation Rights are a realm of equality insofar as they apply equally to all, civil society is not equal according to Frost in the sense that in using their civil society rights “over a period of time, a pattern of holdings will emerge which is likely to be hugely unequal.” See Ibid., 112.

289 Ibid., 110.

290 G. W.F. Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, quoted in ibid. Emphasis in the original.

90 society, he says: “with hindsight we can see how one social institution came to supplement and improve upon the ethical standings created in subordinate institutions.”291

Frost posits a developmental telos between civil and social right in the sense that negative rights provide the foundation for positive rights: “the rights of citizens which are enjoyed within democratic states are not in conflict with the rights of civilians, but are dependent on them.”292

Social rights are not different from civil and political rights because they grow out of them. So the Two-Tier distinction is subtle in Frost because he goes some distance in justifying social rights and does not devalue them. On the contrary, for Frost, social rights are part of the practice that builds fraternity, so he finds it a corrective to the problems caused by civil right. Both kinds of rights are thus essential: “For us to be constituted as free individuals we need to be constituted as participants in both these practices.”293 However, though Frost attempts to reconcile state sovereignty with human rights by including both in his list of settled norms, the fact that he “takes the international system as given” implies that that there is an inherent bias in his work in support of the status quo. Hence real progress towards social citizenship in his framework is blocked.

The untroubled relationship between civil and social right found in his work is problematic if there is no way to criticize or “take account of the claims that challenge the existing order.”294 In other words, regardless of Frost’s position, he fails to adequately acknowledge that some rights trump other rights. 295 A more radical theory of social rights would address the inequalities within and between nations, and would insist that basic rights – for

291 Ibid., 104.

292 Frost, Constituting Human Rights, 130. Emphasis in the original.

293 Frost, “Mervyn Frost replies to Peter Sutch’s “Human Rights as settled norms …” 478. Emphasis in the original.

294 Sutch, “Global civil society and international ethics: Mervyn Frost’s restatement of constitutive theory,” Review of International Studies, vol. 26, nos. 3, July 2000, 488.

295 See Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 70, who makes the same point.

91 example, the right to subsistence, or the right to development – also be included. In Frost’s language, these are settled norms. If this could be accomplished, then economic and social rights would properly be acknowledged as Human Rights, thus coming closer to a universal morality or a thin cosmopolitan social citizenship that transcends all states.

By going beyond the conventional liberal wisdom, namely, the opposition between self and state, the positive influences of T. H. Marshall’s analysis become evident. While based on a

“thin” idea of welfare as ‘objective, universal and abstract,’ by emphasizing the concept of community, however partial, Marshall’s interpretation of social citizenship at least had the potential to also include a “thick” idea of welfare. Moreover, since countries do vary on social welfare values and since some countries are better than others at combining community and the market, Marshall’s interpretation of social citizenship cannot be easily discounted.296 As a result of Marshall’s pioneering work, if nothing else, the question of the extent to which citizenship can serve as a base for social justice is brought to the forefront.297 This chapter has examined historical struggles in political thinking and social action in Great Britain, as grounds for supporting a maximalist reading of Marshall’s famous categories of rights. In the New World concepts of rights will be reformed and transformed once more, as versions of liberalism dominate political discourse and policy decision-making within the United States of America.

296 See, for example, Morten Blekesaune and Jill Quadagno, “Public Attitudes toward Welfare State Policies: A Comparative Analysis of 24 Nations,” European Sociological Review, vol. 19, nos. 5, December 2003.

297 Yet, the conflict between liberal and social democratic conceptions of right may be exaggerated. The original source of both types of right is the same: the Enlightenment project and the French Revolution. Furthermore, both types of right are derived from “reason.” And finally, as both Marxist and liberal critiques of the welfare state emphasize, welfarism has always served capitalism well. The welfare state liberated the individual from traditional constraints and modified the effects of the market, but, by doing so, as Fred Siegel argues, “the welfare state has in effect stolen the individualist clothes of its critics.” See his “Dependent Individualism,” Dissent, Fall 1988, 437.

Chapter Three – United States: Producerism, Philanthropy and the Private

Welfare State

The concepts of social citizenship defined by T.H. Marshall did not make much headway in the U.S. since the demands of the white male working class were absorbed early into the liberal regime in the United States. The result was that socialism became less of a force. Central to this American chapter is an examination of the Two-Tier Distinction in liberalism: a distinction that sees social rights as secondary to political and civil rights. The historical backdrop is classical liberalism, while the contemporary backdrop is neoliberalism. The preference given to civil rights is what R.H Tawney called “the ultimate reality” since “they [are] not subordinate to other aspects of society, but other aspects of society [are] subordinated to them.”298 Of course, a big part of the welfare state, and the social reform project which supported it, was to try and bring these opposite forces together despite some formidable obstacles.

Sporadic attempts have been made to do more than this such as the important work of U.S.

American legal scholar William Forbath who discovered in American history a “largely forgotten,” social rights tradition with “positive rights to work,” “a minimum social provision,” and “a measure of economic democracy” around the time of the U.S. Reconstruction

Amendments. The tradition Forbath uncovers is a “bolder vision,” one containing a more

“complex” view of social rights, which delves deeper into the American heritage than most

298 Tawney quoted in Ibid, 226.

93 accounts of social citizenship.299

3.1. Producerism

As a moral economy, and a way of life, producerist republicanism was overwhelmingly the ideology of early North America, while idealism or New Liberalism, also a moral economy, and a way of life, was simply one ideology among many in a later North America. In the U.S. and Canada the literature reveals at least seven diverse meanings of republicanism historically.

There was producerist republicanism (which in the New World was probably the closest to the classical republicanism of Aristotle and others); labour republicanism; socialist republicanism; liberal republicanism; statist republicanism; libertarian republicanism; and hybrid republicanisms of several of the above. To complicate matters further, the discourses of idealism and republicanism themselves overlap, and share important qualities, making them difficult to disentangle. Perhaps this is why some have suggested that far from the usual interpretation of republicanism in the arena of modern political thought – with republicanism at the margins and liberalism at the center – republicanism may be conceived as a body of thought that actually encompasses liberalism. In other words, liberalism may be part of, or on the margins of, republicanism more than republicanism is part of, or on the margins of, liberalism. From this perspective, the conventional view of republicanism as occupying only the margins of liberalism appears one-dimensional and shallow. Locating North American liberalism within the republican tradition rather than outside it, moreover, suggests that the barriers between political discourses are ambiguous and flexible, an observation that the chapters in this dissertation certainly affirms.

Regardless of the above, republicanism- in particular, producerism- is so deeply bound up with

299 See William E. Forbath, “Caste, Class, and Equal Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review, Vol.98, No. 1, October, 1999, 1-75.

94 theories of wealth distribution and social justice in early North America, including early nineteenth century Canada, that it must be examined here. The wide variety of thinking on social rights that has come to be associated with different versions of republicanism is of interest here because it continues to engender solutions to the social question in contemporary political debate.300

Among the producerists in North America the focus on land was a crucial element in the thought of the American radical, Henry George301 as well as many British and Irish Chartists who emigrated to the United States in the 1840s. Although mainly a movement against the institution of slavery, the “Free Soil Movement” also agitated for the “equal right to land” and

“land for the landless” as a solution to social injustice.302 In America, the British Chartist,

Thomas Ainge Devyr agitated for land reform and “eventually made free homes on the public domain a right of the actual settler instead of an act of charity to the poor.”303 This demand for land, especially by The Knights of Labor, 304 however, fell short of complete fulfilment. The

300 See, for example, Daniel Raventos and David Casassas, “Republicanism and Basic Income: The Articulation of the Public Sphere From the Repoliticization of the Private Sphere” in Guy Standing, ed., Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 229-251. See also Akhir Reed Amar, “Forty Acres and A Mule: A Republican Theory of Minimal Entitlements,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Winter 1990, Vol. 13, Issue 1, 37-43; and Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Indeed, some versions of republicanism may be the best framework for social citizenship, even perhaps for Canada.

301 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: Random House, 1879).

302 See Ray Boston, British Chartists in America 1839-1900 (New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971), 54: “a new group, calling itself the National Reform Association, issued a manifesto insisting that the only remedy for social injustice was a land policy that gave the worker an alternative to wage labour. Here was O’Connorism on American soil.” According to Philip Resnick, the demand for an “equal division of the land,” known as isomoiria to the Greeks, goes back to the time of ancient Athens. See his article, “Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria and Democracy at the Global Level,” Praxis International Vol. 12, No. 1, April 1992.

303Ibid., 55.

304 The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 in Canada was authorized by John A. Macdonald.The preamble to the Canadian Constitution of the Knights of Labor in 1883 reads: “That the public lands, the heritage of the people, be reserved for actual settlers; not another acre for railroads or spectators; and that all lands now held for speculative

Homestead Act of 1862 in the U.S. was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, but was a watered- down version of its original intention. Nevertheless, campaigns such as this reveal that discussions on “the social question” in this historical period were far more fundamental than they are today. At this juncture, there was still hope that change was possible. The working class movement envisioned an alternative political economy, one which would have altered the political and economic social structure if it was adopted. This alternative political economy is evident in both the language of labour and the language of land.305 Indeed, from the very beginning of human society, labour and land have been closely linked with social citizenship.306

Social citizenship in the United States is located in the producerist paradigm, but, for the most part, is absent, or so weak and diminished as to be practically absent, in the liberal paradigm. Classical liberalism is therefore not a sufficient framework for understanding social citizenship in the United States. It is civil society that has taken on the burden of solidarity and care in the United States: hence the development of the American “private” welfare state. 307 To be sure, the producerist paradigm embodies ideas on social rights that do not correspond to the claims of liberalism. Since the producerist form of government as a whole is an answer to the social question, looking for social citizenship solely in the conventional, twentieth-century sense of social rights understood as individual entitlements obscures whatever communal conceptions of social citizenship can be found in the producerist paradigm, despite its eventual demise into

purposes be taxed to their full value.” See Douglas Ross Kennedy, The Knights of Labor in Canada (London: The University of Western Ontario, 1956), 15.

305 The phrases “the language of labour” and “the language of the land,” are from James Vernon, Politics and the People: A study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

306 So it is no surprise that the emerging paradigm in the twenty-first century also highlights changing labour and property conditions as part of a centrepiece of a new understanding.

307 See Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000) for a discussion of the private welfare state in the U.S. See also Michael K. Brown, Race, Money and the American Welfare State (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. Chapter Four, “Bargaining for Social Rights: Unions and the Reemergence of Welfare Capitalism.”

96 liberalism. In other words, in its desire for the Cooperative Commonwealth, producerism had a collectivist dimension as much as an individualist one. Producerism was thus one answer to the social question. Producerist values were a source of resistance to industrial capitalism throughout the nineteenth century. As J.A. Pocock points out, “the language of the commonwealth” appeared as “the language of protest” against a corrupt Old Whig oligarchy.308 It was the

Commonwealthmen which Americans most identified with: those who fought against power and for liberty.309 As both a pre- and anti-capitalist approach to the world, the independence of the workingman and the right to the whole produce of labour opposed the whole system of “wage- slavery.” Freedom for workingmen meant ownership of productive property, not merely the right to sell their labour through “liberty of contract.” Their independence, their “free labor,” in antebellum America was the basis of their producerism. In some sense, then, it was even more ambitious in its objectives than the statist legislation of the Progressive Era.310

North American Progressives believed that the industrial conditions in the factories and workplaces of the period – “the inferno of poverty beneath our civilization,” as Edward Bellamy put it in 1894 –were completely unacceptable. 311 In this sense, movements for reform in the U.S. bore similarities to reform movements in England. In emphasizing the organic nature of society, both progressivism and producerism raised questions about classical liberal ideas of “rugged individualism.” Like their counterparts abroad, both discourses advocated alternative political visions based on mutuality and interdependence. These thinkers privileged the community and

308 J.G.A. Pocock, “English Political Ideologies,” op.cit.

309 See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959).

310 This is noted by labour historian Eric Foner.

311 Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote ‘Looking Backward’”(1894) in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! (Kansas City, 1937), 217.

97 the state over the individual.312 Like all political ideologies, the discourses of producerism and progressivism were heavily influenced by the historical contexts in which they were embedded.

So, for instance, there is a great deal of idealism present in American thought. But for many reasons, idealism in the United States is located more in civil society and less in the state since most Americans do not perceive their state or government in a social sense.

3.2 Producerism: Looking Backwards

Edward Bellamy was one of the first figures in North America to call into question the producerist paradigm and the right to the whole produce of labour, replacing it with the right to a share in the fruits of society’s labour. It was Bellamy who first saw that the already established right to consume the fruits of someone else’s labour – an arrangement for dependent women, children, and those incapable of looking after themselves – could be applied to all citizens, productive or not.313 Bellamy thus attempted to break with the residual idea of public welfare by transforming it from charity to right. He went beyond the deserving/undeserving distinction where only the weak and defenceless could be supported in a polity. In this sense, North

American social citizenship found its nineteenth-century philosopher in the person of Edward

Bellamy. The basis for this larger view is well summed up in Looking Backward, Edward

Bellamy’s famous utopian novel, published in 1888: “There is no such thing in a civilized

312 As Chapter Two of this study points out, there were nineteenth and twentieth-century Canadian thinkers more akin to the new liberalism of Hobhouse and Hobson. Barry Ferguson argues this case on behalf of a group of Canadian political economists at the turn of the twentieth century: individuals such as Adam Shortt, Oscar Skelton, Clifford Clark, and William Mackintosh, all from Queen’s University.

313 See Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 56-61.

98 society as self-support, Leete told West.”314 Although the content of early American thought in the United States was in many ways individualistic, it was, and is today, a culture of individualism. As one contemporary scholar notes, “individualism is not solely an atomistic concept; on the contrary, it is “a cultural phenomenon, a shared way of relating.”315

Elaborating further on this point, Leon Samson declares that in the United States

“everybody is an individualist” not just members of the bourgeoisie as in Europe. This potential levelling makes American society a culture of “collective individualism.”316 Indeed, according to labour historian, Leon Fink, the American labour movement in this period was intent on supporting the individual’s “right to rise” and establishing “a social and moral framework for individual achievement.”317 From that time forward, the prevailing American view is that liberty and property have to be earned. However, as far as the development of the welfare state and social citizenship is concerned, Bellamy’s ideas were a step in the right direction. As is well known, Bellamy expressed his most famous views through science fiction. His Looking

Backward sold two-hundred and ten thousand copies by December 1889.318 Yet, he was profoundly committed politically and published The New Nation out of Boston up until 1894,

314 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887, 82.

315 Zhenghuan Zhou, Liberal Rights and Political Culture: Envisioning Democracy in China (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 102. This book, ostensibly about China, has a wealth of information on liberalism and political culture as well as some very interesting discussions.

316 Leon Samson, “Americanism as Surrogate Socialism” in John H.M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1974), 428.

317 Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 12.

318 John Hope Franklin, “Edward Bellamy and Nationalism,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, Dec., 1938, 754.

99 and The Nationalist, the official organ of his utopian socialist ideology.319 It was also clear that

Bellamy was also one of the first progressive social scientists in the New World.

So American values started to shift away from individualism towards collectivism at the end of the nineteenth century. Theodore Lowi cites three factors that came together in this historical period, two of which fit the category of social science: first, there was the language of

“interdependence,” which itself depended on a number of developments such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch’s germ theory of disease which did not assign blame for illness to any one individual. This interdependence also became the dominant understanding of social science.

This was so much the case that The American Economic Association was founded on “the rejection of laissez-faire.” As a result of this medical discovery, then, people came to see that individuals could not be blamed for economic dependency, and that it was “the system,” not a lack of morality, that caused economic distress. Lowi writes: “the systems idea or some rudimentary version of it became the organizing assumption of the newly emerging social sciences.”320 Underlying these value changes were other structures that supported the idea of the welfare state such as the development of the regulatory policy process. According to Lowi, “the transformation from private to public responsibility, and from blame ethics to no-fault ethics, is as much alive in the regulatory laws as in the welfare laws.” 321 Thus the regulation of industry to

319 The Toronto Nationalist Club met at the YWCA and published its proceedings in The New Nation in February 21, 1891. The goal of Nationalism was “democratic fraternal legislation, where the people would, in “becoming the government and obtaining their rights through it,” act accordingly. The New Nation, February 21, 1891, 66.

320 Theodore J. Lowi, “The Welfare State: Ethical Foundations and Constitutional Remedies,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 101, no.2, 1986, 208-209. He summed up this value change as one “from autonomy to interdependence, from absolutes to relativity, from concreteness to abstraction, from discrete units to continua, from symmetry to reciprocity, from liability to probability, from simple causation to ‘vortex causation’ and thence to systems.” 213-214.

321 Ibid, 213.

100 improve living conditions was the second factor that promoted the change towards a collectivist framework.

3.3 Progressivism and New Liberalism in the United States

Of course, saying that civil society is more important than the state does not mean that there were no New Liberals in the U.S. There were indeed many New Liberals in twentieth- century America, such as the economists John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely, social gospel leaders such as Walter Rauschenbusch, and Supreme Court justices such as Louis Brandeis.322

Many have compared these North American thinkers to Fabian thinkers in Britain, and have described the American literature as championing a “collective capitalism” or “democratic statism.” It is significant then that all variants of New Liberalism and idealism in the U.S. have producerist roots. Historian James Huston’s comment that republicanism in the U.S. has

“permeated all of American society” has a particular resonance here. He perhaps should have added that it has permeated all other political ideologies as well.

The producerist tradition is still important to social citizenship. By its very nature, it lends itself to ideas of distributive justice. In the U.S., Harrington was a powerful influence on

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of The Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president, and James Madison (1751-1836) the “Father of the Constitution,” and author of

Federalist 10, and the nation’s fourth president. Despite Jefferson’s acceptance of slavery, he was a strong defender of the independent producer. He argued, like Madison, for a more equitable distribution of property, as well as for a system of progressive taxation. These aspects of these founding American thinkers have led Cass Sunstein to say that their ideas amount to

322 Dorothy Ross, “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s,” Perspectives in American History, Vol. 11, 1977.

101 early conceptions of social and economic rights in the U.S.323 There is some truth to Sunstein’s comments at a theoretical level, since in producerism, there is the requirement for a just society through a wide dispersal of property, but it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that these were social rights. Especially since, as historian James Huston points out, “The entire discourse on the distribution of wealth in the United States was verbal not numerical.” The American understanding of wealth, he continues, was based on “descriptions and impressions” and was

“anecdotal, not quantitative.” 324 In other words, there were enormous inequalities of wealth in antebellum America, but the inequalities were overshadowed by the constant utopianism of U.S. political thought. Moreover, social citizenship can be hidden in policies and institutions not normally thought of as “social policy.” For example, a “hidden welfare state” may be revealed, such as in the U.S. and, to the untrained eye, popular struggles will go underground.325

3.4 Community Roots in American Society

In the United States, while everyone is an individual, each belongs as a member in a community. American individualism was always something more than simple self-sufficiency.

Readers get a sense of this more embodied idea of individualism in Victoria C. Hattam’s Labor

Visions and State Power, published in 1993. Hattam understands the republicanism of the antebellum period in the U.S. as very different from the republicanism of the postbellum period.

In particular, by historicizing the concept of class and putting the discussion of nineteenth century labour into the context of “the most significant distinction in North America, as

323 See, for example, Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, 138-140.

324 James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 213.

325 On the hidden welfare state in the U.S., see Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Also Marie The Shadow Welfare State. In a significant sense, all policies are social policies, as earlier chapters point out.

102 elsewhere,” namely, “that great distinction,” as H.S. Foxwell put it, between “producers” and

“non-producers,” or in Judith Shklar’s memorable words, the “do-somethings” versus the “do- nothings,”326 Hattam writes about the “very different conception of class that prevailed before the Civil War.” In this time period, the distinction was “not yet between capital and labour, or workers and employers.”327 As she notes, “The producerist paradigm of the early nineteenth century was not fraught by class conflict: artisans, farmers, and manufacturers worked for themselves, but by doing so they also worked for the common good. In the antebellum period, economic growth served the whole community.” 328

Economic growth was thus an objective that all workingmen shared in the early nineteenth century, but the political discourse of independent producerism changed with the advent of industrialism. In the post-bellum period, the larger notion of “the republic” was no longer paramount since the public dimension to economic development changed radically.329 In the era of the large corporation, the emergence of wage-labour, the growth of factories, and the development of monopoly capitalism, the concern became the “wealth of one group – the manufacturers – rather than the wealth of society as a whole.” Hattam explains the shift as follows:

In the antebellum era, ‘the economic interests of particular employers were rarely mentioned.’ After the Civil War, however, there was a ‘dramatic change in the language and categories used to describe

326 Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 75.

327 Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 93.

328 Ibid.

329 In an extremely interesting contemporary account, the nation, or it could be said “republic,” is once again tied to economic growth. Sacrifice to the common good and national dignity and pride is linked to economic productivity. See Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), Chapters One and Two. Originally published in 2001. As she says: “The general good, and specifically the prestige, of the nation is the ultimate value that justifies, and renders both ethical and rational, the unending striving for ever-increasing wealth.” 96

103

economic and social relations.’ In the post-war cases, ‘judges and prosecution attorneys no longer stressed the public dimension of economic benefits and harms.’ The private rights and injuries of employers came to be of paramount concern; the public good would be advanced derivatively by protection of private rights.330

Hattam states further that the producerist paradigm was “strongly influenced” by Country ideas.331 Originating in England, and adapted to North America by Jacksonian democrats, and the ‘Equal Rights’ and ‘Free Labour’ political movements of the 1830s, it was an ideology of opposition: against monopoly, placemen, banks, paper money, corruption, wealth, and luxury.332

On both the left and the right of the political spectrum, this ideology was rampant in the early nineteenth-century and eventually surfaced in the North American labour movement. Although this may seem to be simple anti-statism, the historical situation was much more complex. It is true that producerism permeated all of American society. However, it was neither uniform nor one-dimensional, and it did not completely describe the American experience. This is one of the reasons why understanding the varieties of producerism is important to understanding social citizenship. As one historian points out, in the agrarian, pre-industrial economy of the Northern part of the United States, up until about 1830, “the basic unit was a family not a man.” The

‘agricultural family’ in the colonial period was a lineal one where “rights and duties stretched across generations.” These cross-generational values “inhibited individualism.” They provided, within the framework of the extended family, social welfare: “a safety net” for all family

330 Hattam, op. cit.,

331 Ibid, 19.

332 See, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger on Jacksonian ideology. He states that the Whigs slowly won the battle “by posing as the champion of all property against the mob.” The propertyless workers were included with small property holders in the Democratic party. See his The Age of Jackson (1945) (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), 311-312.

104 members. 333 At the same time, British and American utopian thinkers such as Robert Owen and

William MacLure set up their American experiments in New Lanark and New Harmony.334

The fact of community in the nineteenth century was also reflected in the settlement- house movement.335 There were activist social reformers and philanthropists in the U.S., like their counterparts at Toynbee Hall in London, who inhabited city neighbourhoods “to live and work among the poor.” “From their bases in the slums, settlement workers provided social and educational services of many kinds.”336 Probably the most famous settlement reformer was Jane

Addams of Hull-House in Chicago. Writing of these individuals in the Progressive Era, scholars note: “Hundreds of young men and women followed their example.” Indeed, “By 1910, there were some 400 settlement houses in cities across the country.” Essentially these progressives achieved social justice through good works, moral suasion, and education. “They usually began by organizing a voluntary association. Next they investigated a problem, gathered mountains of data about it, and finally, analyzed the problem according to the precepts of one of the new social sciences.” Eventually, “a significant number of programs begun in the settlements became permanent governmental functions.”337

333 James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. XXXV, No.1, January 1978, especially pages 25-32.

334 See David Harris, Socialist Origins in the United States: American Forerunners of Marx, 1817-1832 (Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum & Comp., MCMLXVI).

335 For a discussion of the Settlement-House Movement in Canada see Ethel (Dodds) Parker, “The Origins and Early History of the Presbyterian Settlement Houses” in Richard Allen, ed., The Social Gospel in Canada (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1975), 86-121.

336 Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormik, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 73.

337 Ibid, 73 and 70 respectively.

105

As William Forbath notes, popular movements clamoured to capture producerist ideas and discourses to further their specific cause. And as has been widely documented, producerist values inspired the development of “Democratic Statism” or “Progressivism” in the late nineteenth century, and survived the assault meted out by industrial capitalism. So there is a lasting legacy to this work in the U.S., which is evident today. It is producerist values – self- sufficiency, independence, the dignity of labour, equality of property, the importance of civic virtue, the avoidance of luxury etc. – which set the foundation for various versions of the

“Cooperative Commonwealth,” the Knights of Labor, certain elements of the AFL, North

American Fabianism, Populism, as well as the Social Gospel movements. This was a particular

American response to the same kinds of pressures affecting all countries in this time period.

Indeed, Forbath locates the American social citizenship tradition in popular responses to the

American Supreme Court. These were decisions which had a negative impact on social legislation. Where there is no socialist party in a country, and where there is only business unionism as in the United States, a certain understanding of economic and social rights becomes institutionalized in that country while another is marginalized. As a result, American social citizenship “smacks of welfare programs for the ‘poor’ and ‘minorities,’ not public policies for the broad swath of working Americans.”338

Specifically the social citizenship tradition was rooted in the Reconstruction

Amendments that followed the American Civil War: “the last of the great bourgeois revolutions” according to Barrington Moore. 339 It was at this time that the language of substantive equality first appeared in the U.S. Constitution. It did so by way of the equal citizenship principle in the

338 William E. Forbath, “The Presence of the Past: Voluntarism, Producerism, and the Fate of Economic Democracy,” Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 19, Number 1, Winter 1994, 214.

339 William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review, Nos. 4-6, 1985, 780.

106

Fourteenth Amendment. It is important to acknowledge that this tradition existed at all. As noted above, thinking on social citizenship is absent or obscured in many traditional accounts in the

U.S. The second answer is that this social citizenship tradition – albeit a largely “oppositional” one – was much more radical in its aspirations than the social visions that prevailed in most twentieth-century welfare states.

As another example of community in America, Carol B. Stack has written an account of how poor black families in the U.S. co-operate through kinship networks. Stack describes the communal arrangements of these poor black families, many of whom were on public assistance

(AFDC), and how they are misrepresented by white middle and upper-class “mainstream values.” For example: “People in The Flats have acquired a remarkably accurate assessment of the social order in American society. For example, they can realistically appraise the futility of hoarding a small cash reserve such as life insurance benefits or a temporary increase in cash available to a kin network by means of the employment of a network member. Such short-lived gains are quickly redistributed among members of a kin network. Kinsmen, inclined to share their luck, provide a model of cooperative behavior for others in the community. What is seen by some interpreters as disinterest in delayed rewards is actually a rational evaluation of need.”340

As Alvin Schorr testified before a congressional inquiry, the poor have a network of economic relationships among themselves where redistribution between themselves takes place. 341

As idealists, producerists, communitarians, socialists, and feminists point out, there is no such thing as an autonomous self, separate from, and isolated from the community. Although

340 Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). p. 128. Also see Robert Pruger, “Social Policy: Unilateral Transfer or Reciprocal Exchange, Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 2, Nos. 4, 289-302, p. 296: “Those who live in poverty rely on the norms of reciprocity for their survival.”

341 See for example, Alvin Schorr and Dr. James Comer, Common Decency: Domestic Policies after Reagan (Yale University Press, 1988).

107 liberalism has set up an opposition between the state and the individual, liberalism is predicated on the concept of a deep mutuality between these two spheres. Indeed, the state and the individual are profoundly interrelated. As Claus Offe notes, individuals owe their very existence as individuals to the state: “everything that we mean by ‘the individual,’ its subjectivity and dignity, can exist and unfold only to the extent that the State safeguards the rights on which it depends.” 342 So the state not only requires persons to become individuals, it actually creates individuals in the first place, with “legal rights and physical protection of their life and property.”

It therefore follows that all rights are in a much wider sense social rights.343

The above comments not only reflect the enormity of the task ahead for social reform in the U.S., but they also show the extent to which liberalism has stifled alternative social visions.

Although there is truth to liberal ideas, individualism has never, and will never, completely capture the American experience. To be sure, even if the meaning of liberalism as a doctrine could be agreed upon – which, of course, it cannot – liberalism is not the only fragment beneath the surface in the U.S. The whole point of this dissertation is to show that there is a deep communal outlook in Anglo-American politics, though at times it is hidden from view. As noted above, Forbath found “buried links” between the social citizenship tradition in the U.S. and interpretations of the American Constitution. He describes the Fourteenth Amendment as offering protection for “discrete and insular minorities,” and hence social rights. 344

Obviously these comments are very significant. Indeed, Leon Samson has discovered an

“unconscious” socialism in American politics. He cites phrases in everyday American language

342 Claus Offe, “The Separation of Form and Content in Liberal Democratic Politics,” Studies in Political Economy, Nos. 3, Spring 1980, 5

343 Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights, 1999, 48.

344 Forbath, “Caste, Class and Equal Citizenship.”

108 such as “the right to work” and “the war on poverty” to prove his point: phrases, he says, which contradict the U.S. economic reality. He concludes his analysis with the idea that the American citizen is an “unconscious socialist” whereas “consciously, the American is a lone-wolf individualist.”345 If the U.S. already has, or thinks it has, social citizenship, if only at an unconscious level, then there is no need to worry about the country’s lack of it. As a result of this way of thinking, ideas on the rugged individual in North America have reached mythical heights.

3.5 Failure of Community in American Society

During the nineteenth century, a schism opened up between a more libertarian possessive-individualist version of the right to the whole produce of labour and a more communitarian socialist and republican version. The thinking behind this second version was well expressed in the late nineteenth century by Washington Gladden, a leader of the Social

Gospel movement in the U.S., who said: “no man who lives in society has an exclusive right to the fruit of his own labor. Some part of that is due, by law and by equity, to the commonwealth.”346 Furthermore, property, according to Gladden, had an otherworldly quality about it: property is “fellowship with men” and “communion with God” through the material world. Both versions of the right to the whole produce of labour had important consequences for the development and quality of social citizenship in North America. In keeping with the individualism of the first version of the right, as well as the “legacy of repression and broken promises” on the part of the state, especially the judiciary, the American Federation of Labor, under the direction of Samuel Gompers, came to accept the political system as it was, rejecting

345 Leon Samson, “Americanism as Surrogate Socialism” in John H. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974), 434.

346 Washington Gladden, Tools and the Man: Property and Industry under the Christian Law (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893), 100. Henry George made similar comments.

109 statist solutions to labour’s problems in favor of business unionism or voluntarism. As a result,

American social policies and the “private” welfare state were in large measure created by the actions of American labour itself.347

Thus American labour decided to work within the individualistic system. “The cornerstone of this philosophy is self-centred and self-reliant trade unionism.” 348 It is through their unions that Americans gained social rights.349 To be sure, the right to as much of the produce as possible is still important to North American society. In many ways, it forms the very foundation of the U.S. political system. The whole country is built around it. “The difference between an aristocratic and a republican society was that only in the latter did the laborer receive the fruits of his labor,” writes historian James Huston.350 And since liberty itself was seen to depend on the right to labour’s product, this right was not seen as just a narrow economic issue: these claims had obvious radical implications. Property meant economic and political power, and any conception of its place in society was simultaneously a theory of social or distributive justice. In the classical liberal understanding, property as “past labour” is conceived as a natural right.351

347 Marie Gottschalk examines the reasons why this happened in the U.S. in her The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000).

348 Patrick Kerans et al., Welfare and Worker Participation, 72.

349 This does not mean, however, that labour in the U.S. never fought for social legislation. As Voss and Fantasia discuss, throughout WWII and the postwar period, unions pushed for social legislation in 1943 and 1945 that would create national health insurance, and they “strongly supported the Full Employment Bill of 1945 which would have established a right to employment for all Americans.” See Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labour Movement (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004), 54.

350 Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 189.

351 For that reason, even the Jacobins in France, like the bourgeois liberals before them, enshrined property in their 1793 Constitution.351 Of course, for the Jacobins, property was only a natural right if it was connected to labour; hence their disdain for the aristocracy.

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William Forbath has done an admirable job in showing what social right was up against in the U.S. For example, his discussion of “Jim Crow” and “Southern Dixiecrats” reveals how race sabotaged a robust social citizenship from developing. Forbath emphasizes how “the tangled knot of race and class” in the United States that “lies unexamined at the heart of this history,” is nonetheless responsible for the discrepancy between the constitutional ideals or “mandate” of the twentieth century – for example, the New Deal – and its actual results and legacy. Ultimately, it was race that derailed many aspects of social reform in the U.S. So here is an instance of how other institutions and structures in the political system can impact – in this case severely – the development of social citizenship.352

Furthermore, Forbath describes the famous dissenting opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes in the seminal 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court case which reflects this more positive development. It was because of Holmes that Lochner was a turning point in the development of social rights thinking in the U.S., and through extension, everywhere else even though the decision, by a vote of 5-4, “gave sharp teeth to economic due process” by invalidating a statute that restricted work in bakeries to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week.353 And even though it upheld “liberty of contract,” a phrase Karen Orren describes as “the quintessential legal tenet – the central cultural metaphor – of the period,” 354 “the holy of holies,” according to another,355 Holmes disagreed with the majority decision. Rather than upholding property rights, his interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment rejected individualism. Holmes felt strongly

352 Ibid, 7. See also Forbath, “Constitutional Welfare Rights,” especially, “The Solid South and the Fracturing of Social Citizenship,” 1835-1838.

353 James W. Ely, Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights, second edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 102.

354 Karen Orren, “Organized Labor and Modern Liberalism” in Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, eds., Studies in American Political Development, Vol. 2 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 320.

355 Robert G. McCloskey, The American Supreme Court, 153, quoted in Ibid.

111 that it did not, and should not, protect the wealth of a privileged minority. The economic theory that the majority of these Justices held, he thought, did not match the sentiments of the larger

American population.

According to Theodore Lowi, this dissenting opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in

Lochner v. New York reflected changes in the structure of capitalism itself. The development of the modern corporation, transformed property relations “by subdividing more and more property into larger and larger numbers of smaller and smaller units.” The corporation thus “broke up” property and the nature of ownership changed. This process was further accomplished by the separation of ownership from management. As a result, it was “no longer possible to speak of ownership in absolute terms.” “With the corporation, the property atom was split into thousands and thousands of parts.”356 Indeed, it was capitalism itself that reduced property to a

“continuum.” The idea of property as “thingness” was gradually replaced with the modern idea of property as a “bundle of rights.” In the process of this “disintegration of property,” the whole category lost importance. 357 Furthermore, the newer conception, developed by “legal realists,” had the consequence of producing thinkers who were “on the whole supporters of the regulatory and welfare state.” The capitalist economy required the “formulation of its emergent system of economic entitlements in something like the bundle of rights form.” Thus this transformation in the meaning of property, reflecting a transition between two modes of production.

As another example of the failure, yet the importance, of community, in March of 1881,

The Atlantic Monthly published Henry Demarest Lloyd’s sixteen page indictment of Standard Oil

– “The Story of a Great Monopoly” – described as “the best single analysis of the dubious ethics

356 Lowi, op.cit., 210.

357 Thomas C. Grey, “The Disintegration of Property” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Property: Nomos XXII (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 81-82.

112 of a new breed of industrial monopolists.” 358 It was later expanded into a book in 1894: Wealth

Against Commonwealth. In contrast to the critical and “raw” social science of the antebellum period, social science in the postbellum period was more constructive, stressing class harmony, merging almost completely with idealism. It still had a muckraking component to it, but it was directed towards positive ends. The rationale behind collecting information about communities was practical and empirical. As Henry Demarest Lloyd said one hundred years ago, “The first step to a remedy is that the people care. If they know, they will care.” 359 Social science was therefore an integral part of the idealist and Progressive movements. According to one writer, in

America, “progressives invested near mystical power in empirical data.” 360 An example of this faith in social facts occurred in the American courtroom pioneered by Supreme Court Justice

Louis Brandeis. The “Brandeis brief,” as it was called, assembled “nonlegal materials such as medical information, health data, factory inspection reports, and economic statistics [which] were presented to judges in order to justify legislative regulation of working conditions.”361 The aim of this socially conscious jurisprudence was to “encourage judges to avoid relying solely on legal precedent in reviewing legislation and to prevent the mechanical application of the liberty of contract doctrine.”362

Once it was clear that industrialism was not going to disappear, and once states started looking into the effects of it – mass poverty, dislocation, “sweated” work conditions, child labour

– the severity of the issues became known. In the developed capitalist economy, “the market

358John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 132.

359 Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth, 535-536.

360 Franklin Foer, “The Joy of Federalism,” The New York Times Book Review, March 6, 2005, 12.

361 This quoted phrase and the next one are from Ely, The Guardian of Every Other Right, 104. 362 Ibid.

113 knew no sectional or sectoral bounds and appeared increasingly coextensive with society itself.”

But this was highly unnatural. The categories of land, labour, and capital became associated with insiders and outsiders. In the process, power and influence shifted from the realm of production, to the realm of exchange, and normative concepts of rights shifted as well, increasingly defined in market terms. So it was very clear how both streams of social science – Self-Help and State-

Help – were a necessity.

With all signs pointing to the primacy of liberal individualism in America, it may seem disconcerting to mention the words of Franklin Roosevelt from his State of the Union address of

1941. (See Appendix One) Facing the crisis of world war, an immediate need to increase

American aid to Britain, and with legislators and populace deeply divided into isolationist and interventionist camps, the President’s task was daunting. The most compelling part of the speech profiles “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The first two freedoms qualify as civil rights in T.H. Marshall’s terms, while freedom from want and fear may be considered social rights. How Roosevelt

“translated” these freedoms is highly significant, revealing some of the limitations and ironies of thinking about rights in America.

... we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - -anywhere in the world. 363

363 Found online at: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=70&page=transcript

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Roosevelt’s message may be read on several levels: as a call to arms for his nation, as a policy message in tune with much New Deal legislation, as a sermon inspiring hope and faith, and as an eloquent expression of American liberal idealism elevated to a world-wide stage. These formulations were to have far-reaching effects for American foreign policy, for the foundations of the United Nations, and for ongoing American military interventions around the world. In contrast to the global sense of “anywhere” and “everywhere” in this declaration, conceptions of social rights in other countries are best read in context, deeply rooted in geographic place, in historic time, in local communities and in social policies.

3.6 The Two Tier Distinction

A growing problem is that liberals of the classical, libertarian, and neo-liberal types proclaim that there exists – and should exist – a hierarchy of rights in society with some rights, that is, civil and political rights – what one author calls the “bedrock rights”364 – taking precedence over other rights, that is, social, economic, and cultural rights. The fact that these rights are themselves separated by the United Nations in response to pressure from the United

States reveals, in itself, a hierarchy of rights. So the hierarchy is held in place. It is held in place despite claims that, in other parts of the world, for example, “in the minds of Third World leaders, economic, social and cultural rights are by far the most important.”365

Indeed, two of the international documents comprising the “Three Generations” of rights – namely, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, in 1966, and the

364 Peter Baldwin, “Beveridge in the Longue Duree” in John Hills, John Ditch, and Howard Glennerster eds., Beveridge and Social Security: An International Retrospective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 51.

365 Donald P. Kommers and Gilburt D. Loescher, “Introduction” to “Human Rights: Conflicting Ideologies” in idem., eds., Human Rights and American Foreign Policy( Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 80- 84, p. 81.

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Declaration on the Right to Development, in 1986 were not ratified by the United States. The hostility to social right in the United States domestically is also evident in its treatment of states internationally. One blatant example is the U.S. treatment one of its ex-dependencies, Puerto

Rico. The United States Senate and Congress struck out an important section of the Puerto Rican

Constitution that called for specific social and economic rights along the lines of those embodied in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This intervention by the U.S. occurred despite the fact that the Constitution was ratified by the Puerto Rican people in 1952 when

Puerto Rico became an “autonomous” Commonwealth. As Pedro Munoz Amato states, in the

United States, “After several members of both houses repeatedly criticized it as contrary to

American ideals of government, and even as “socialistic” and “communistic,” the Congress excepted section 20 when passing the resolution for approval of the Commonwealth

Constitution.”366 Needless to say, in overriding “the will of the Puerto Rican electorate,” the U.

S. was overriding Puerto Rico’s political and cultural rights in addition to their proposed social and economic rights.

This discussion is complicated by the notorious problems in defining liberalism. Given the wide latitude of its contents, reflected in the very division between “old” and “new,” and the ease with which classical liberalism has been able to reassert itself today against whatever progress new liberalism may have made over the last century, it is even difficult to say what liberalism is or is not. Indeed, the resurgence of market liberalism suggests that there are flaws in the doctrine of new liberalism as it has been conceived and/or applied. Even in new liberalism, the social is undermined by the societies in which it developed. Despite being deeply social, and despite the moral theory of the state, and the moral theory of man, when it came to being applied, the new

366 Quoted in Carl J. Friedrich, Puerto Rico, Middle Road to Freedom (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1959), 13.

116 liberalism was inevitably compromised by its accommodation to capitalism. Yet the fact that there is this division in the first place also reveals the extent to which liberalism has at least grappled with its problems. It also shows liberalism’s potential to become a genuinely democratic political theory if it can somehow square these two positions. The chart that follows offers a visual comparison of the Two Tiers or two realms in which rights have been envisioned and defined by various American writers. The numbers refer to pages and sources cited within this chapter of the dissertation.

Figure 3 The Two-Tier Distinction of Rights in American Writings

Civil + Political Rights Economic + Social Rights Page

Individual rights, private realm Collective rights, public good, 92 social realm

Producerism, Republicanism as Idealism, Utopian Socialism, 93 versions of Liberalism Progressivism

Self-sufficiency, private Extended agricultural family, 106-110 property, liberty of contract kinship networks, a share in fruits of labour + property

Self-conscious image of rugged, Largely unconscious socialist 110 ‘lone-wolf individualism’ vision of community

Negative freedom from limits, Self-reliant families, trade 111-113 regulations – fear of growing unions, volunteer groups willing State interference to work for the common good

Fear of the social realm, the Social activism to advance rights 121-124 masses, with ‘tentacles’ that for groups marginalized by race, devour and destroy freedom class, gender, ethnicity, etc.

Economic independence + Interdependence to extend 126 Philanthropy democratic citizenship

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There are many reasons offered in the literature to justify this Two Tier distinction. First, there is the intellectual reason: the idea that economic and social rights are so different from civil and political rights that they are incompatible; and should not be considered rights at all. 367 This argument comes from both the left and right, and is usually part of a larger political project. A variant of this argument comes from those not happy with a conflation of rights, but who do not necessarily see social rights as subordinate. This argument is more valid and, as other chapters argue, seems to fit with T.H. Marshall’s analysis. Then there are those scholars like Thomas

Janoski, who are positive on social rights, but complain that most rights theorists “lump disparate rights together.” 368 According to Janoski, these thinkers “fail to see the “complex differentiation of rights.” On the contrary, they “take citizenship rights as a hodgepodge of disparate concepts.”369

The Two Tier distinction clearly rests on power relations. Critiques based on gender can be put into this category: feminists blame the power of patriarchy for the subordination of social rights. From this perspective, the public/private dichotomy and other liberal distinctions naturalize what are actually social constructions. Indeed, the Two Tier distinction reflects liberalism’s failure to recognize vulnerability. Why, for example, is there a “Womens’ Rights as Human

Rights” movement? or a “Social Rights as Human Rights” movement? or a “Development Rights as Human Rights” movement? Why are women, basic needs, and equal opportunity, left out of the Social Contract?

367 David Beetham, “What Future for Economic and Social Rights?” Political Studies, Vol.43, 1995, Special Issue: Politics and Human Rights, 41.

368 Janoski, 29 and 45. Relying approvingly on Wesley Hofield’s classic categorization of rights into liberties, claims, powers, and immunities, which has much independent validity, Janoski includes T. H. Marshall, Reinhard Bendix, Bryan Turner, Anthony Giddens and Ramesh Mishra in the list of those he criticizes for fudging rights boundaries.

369 Ibid., 5.

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3.7 The Abjection of the Social: A Big Problem for Liberalism

In The Attack of the Blob, Hanna Pitkin explores the social realm in Hannah Arendt’s political thought noting the extreme animus surrounding Arendt’s use of the concept of the social.

Pitkin compares the social in Arendt’s conception to The Blob, a 1958 alien invasion film. Pitkin uses this metaphor to capture Arendt’s central point about the powerlessness and vulnerability of the people, yet the inevitability, restlessness, power, and even agency of the social realm itself still comes through. (This is one reason why important contemporary theorists such as Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri find the concept of the poor and the multitude so promising). As Pitkin points out, for Arendt, “the social is not merely ‘beyond willful human decisions and purposes’ but is itself alive, eating and growing.”370 Pitkin compiles the verbs Arendt uses to describe what this social realm does: it is “said to ‘absorb,’ ‘embrace,’ and ‘devour’ people, … to ‘emerge,’

‘rise,’ ‘grow,’ … to ‘enter,’ ‘intrude’ on, and ‘conquer,’ … to ‘constitute’ and ‘control,’

‘transform’ and ‘pervert;’ to ‘impose,’… ‘demand,’ … ‘exclude’ or ‘refuse to admit’… and to

‘try to cheat’ people.”371

A corollary to the emergence of the social realm, then, for Arendt, is the rise of “human behavior” in place of the more exalted realm of “human action” – her most cherished category.

Behavior is similar to labour because it maintains the relentless repetition of the life process, and is thus of little value – whereas work or action consists of the immortal deeds that distinguish men from each other and from other species. Two-Tier thinking is so deeply ensconced in Arendt’s

370 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15.

371 Ibid, 4.

119 thinking that it stamps her entire body of work. It is only the vita activa that holds any value.

Society, by contrast, is a realm of “mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else.”372

Arendt is important to analyze because she is not alone in conceiving the social as a realm that destroys human freedom.373 It is the basis of conservative neo-liberal politics and typifies statements over the growth of bureaucracy or, as Arendt put it, “the rule of nobody.” So it fits into both historical and contemporary thinking. It is true that the fear of the powerful state is the explicit and implicit basis of American politics. Even in 2001, a legal scholar sympathetic to social citizenship in the U.S. could say: “it looks as though a social-citizenship right has tentacles reaching in a hundred directions, into the deepest redoubts of the common law and the most basic choices of political economy a modern society can make.”374 Indeed, Arendt criticizes this form of rule where the nation acts as “one super-human family” that is set up for “collective housekeeping.” 375 Arendt speaks of “society’s victory in the modern age.”376 However: victory over what? And for whom? By discrediting the idea of the social, and the interdependence it seeks to foster, Arendt’s position is perfectly compatible with neoliberal attacks on the state today. The abjection of the social is the basis of conservatism in the modern age, evident in both nineteenth century authors such as Herbert Spencer, and twentieth century authors such as

Friedrich Hayek.377 This ultra-liberal project is an attempt to turn back the clock on the growth of

372 Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 46. Emphasis added.

373 However, Arendt’s views on the “decline” of the public realm in modernity could just as easily be portrayed in opposite achievement-oriented terms, for example, as an “expansion” of the public realm, constituted by a growth in social justice, and a growth in moral development.

374 Frank Michelman, “Democracy-Based Resistance to a Constitutional Right of Social Citizenship: a Comment on Forbath,” Fordham Law Review, vol. 69, 2001, 1896.

375 Arendt, The Human Condition, 28-29.

376 Ibid, 45.

377 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944). See also Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

120 the social, because it is also the growth of the political, and the growth of the political is to be avoided at all costs. Increased politicization brings into the open important human issues that deserve public debate – if not the development and implementation of public policies. Needless to say, this kind of expansion of the public realm, framed negatively as the growth of “big government,” does not auger well with the individualist project of freeing capital from all constraints.

Indeed, Arendt rejects the very idea that people have natural rights “by virtue of being born.” However, the separation of the social and the political which liberalism is founded on is a false distinction. It is false because those excluded from the realm of politics cannot be excluded from life or the state itself. Moreover, as one feminist notes, these excluded bodies are necessary to the polity. “No state can function without women, or without workers.” 378 Of course, this is the essence of Marx’s critique of liberal rights and citizenship. “Who is the ‘man’ who is different from the ‘citizen’?” he asks critically. For Marx, the Rights of Man are clearly the rights of the bourgeoisie: “egoistic man, man separated from other men and the community.” 379

Despite Arendt’s negative comments on the social, she has raised something very real. In the modern age, nature does enter the public realm and politics does turn into a form of biopolitics, or the greek zoe, the word for “simple natural life.” According to Giorgio Agamben,

“the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought.” Agamben thinks, and this dissertation supports his idea, that this

378 Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 23.

379 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Jeremy Waldron, ed., Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 145.

121 development is under-acknowledged. “If politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity.” 380

It hardly needs to be said, then, that no one has failed more in this regard than Arendt herself, unless ignoring and devaluing the social is seen as reckoning with it.

As Mary O’Brien has said, the abjection of the social means that “the political space is strangely empty of politics.” 381 So this is not just a theoretical argument. If the social is understood in such narrow terms in Arendt and others, what does it say about democracy? If the public realm excludes so much, and so many, what does it say about the privileged few that are included? Could not excluding others eventually lead to the kind of totalitarianism that Arendt herself was fleeing by leaving Nazi Germany?

So, another rarely mentioned, but very important reason for the Two-Tier distinction in the social policy literature is the cultural response to the “rise of the social.” This dimension taps into a profound historical fear, well summarized by Alexis de Tocqueville, that state aid “will devour the well-being of generations to come.” 382 Indeed, in the nineteenth-century, this fear was part of a prominent discourse on the “dangerous psychological and moral condition of the pauperized classes.” Particularly in France, paupers, along with the working classes, “blurred into an image of menacing hordes” who ‘made one tremble for the whole order of society,’ as de Sismondi put it in 1834.383 For its critics, “the rise of the social” is a damaging indictment against social rights: one that resonates deeply in some sectors of modern society. Whether called “incorporation,”

380 Giorgio Agamben, op. cit. 4.

381 Indeed in Arendt’s understanding, “it is never quite clear what these men of antiquity “who are to spend their ‘whole life’ in the public sphere are actually doing there.” See Mary O’Brien, The politics of reproduction (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 103.

382 Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Cheryl B. Welch, “Liberalism and Social Rights” in idem and Murray Milgate, eds., Critical Issues in Social Thought (San Diego and London: Academic Press, 1989), 177.

383 Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi (1834), quoted in Ibid.

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“integration,” “co-option,” or less sinisterly, “inclusion,” this critique of the social is widely apparent in the literature. In its contemporary version, the state is seen as a vertically structured, centralized power structure that rules through associations and the institutions of society.384

For example, FDR called for extensive social policies, including a living wage, in his second “Economic Bill of Rights” in the early 1940s. Despite the fact that there is nothing inherently equality-enhancing in either social policy or liberal social rights, a re-evaluation of the relationship between them can help identify the conditions under which they have come together in ways “favourable to equality-enhancing, rights-based policy development.”385 Indeed, the market must be understood as a social institution. In the Jacksonian era, “one worked for oneself and for the community simultaneously.” In other words, there was a civic dimension to the idea of work.386 This vision has been lost, but perhaps it can be recovered. According to Siltanen, “If we see the ‘market’ as a proposed set of social relationships, then it is open to claims about the social, and claims about social citizenship.” She adds: “This implies that responsibility for the delivery of social citizenship is broader than a state-individual relationship.”387

Viewing the market in these social terms has historical precedence. This was Polanyi’s point in The Great Transformation. As Chapter Two points out, in the social citizenship

384 Anton C. Zijderveld, “Civil Society, Pillarization, and the Welfare State” in Robert W. Hefner, ed., Democratic Civility: The History and Cross-Cultural Possibility of a Modern Political Ideal (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 153-171.

385 Siltanen, 404. Emphasis in the original.

386 Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, 72.

387 Siltanen, 407. Sounding very much like the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ populist and progressive literature, Siltanen underlines the importance of seeing social citizenship as a societal issue: “This is not to let governments, at any level, off the hook. It is to insist that our claims for a decent life are as relevant in our relationships with employers, banks, insurance companies, retailers, service providers, family members and neighbours, for example, as they are in our relationships with national, provincial and municipal governments.” Once more, there is a parallel historically. Speaking of the wage earner, Father John Ryan, a Catholic priest, said in 1906 that “the obligation of providing him with the material means of living decently rests in a general way upon all his fellow men.” See John A. Ryan, A Living Wage, 325. The first emphasis is in the original; the second is added.

123 tradition, there was indeed a social understanding of wage-labour and the place of employment in society. John A. Ryan summarized this idea as follows: “the wage paying function is a social one, delegated by society to the employer. Society or the community, owes its labor members a

Living Wage in return for their social services as workers, but it has transferred the obligation to a special agency.”388 By “special agency,” Ryan meant the entire industrial system, which includes the employer who “accepts the task of social paymaster, and is morally bound to discharge it in accordance with the dictates of reason and justice.”389

This idea of earning enough is obviously not new and historically there has always been agitation for a living wage.390 Many more quality of life arguments can be found for social citizenship, some of which have appeared in the past. What consumed the labour movement and socialists over a century ago, namely, shorter working hours – the ten, then nine, then eight hour day – is still relevant to workers now. This would be the right to work less hours/days/weeks. It is a right for more leisure time. In policy terms, William Forbath thinks there are arguments to be made for “legislated four-week vacations, for paid parental leaves, for abolishing mandatory overtime, and for renewal of the old but long-ignored discussion of the merits of the 30-hour

388 John A. Ryan, A Living Wage, 240. Emphasis added.

389 Ibid.

390 The agitation for the right to a living wage has a long history. Some contend that it was achieved in the English village of Speenhamland, between 1795 and 1834 where an attempt to provide “a living family wage” was established “tying the income of the laborer to the price of bread and to family size.” See, for example, Massimo Paci, “Long waves in the development of welfare systems” in Charles S. Maier ed., Changing boundaries of the political (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 187. It received general support from the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, in particular, the papal encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, in 1891. See Ibid. A forceful recent statement in the United States on the need for constitutional protection of the right to a living wage (defined as sufficient to support a family) in the form of a formal constitutional amendment, can be found in William P. Quigley, Ending Poverty as We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), especially chapter 10, “A Constitutional Amendment,” 93-99. Kenneth L. Karst, in 1989, also argues for a constitutional right to end inner city unemployment in the United States in his Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). These arguments go beyond more traditional ones that simply call for constitutional rights to minimum welfare entitlements. See, for example, Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 138-140. For a discussion of FDR’s social policies, see William E. Forbath, “Caste, Class, and Equal Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review, Vol.98, No. 1, October, 1999, 1-75.

124 week or even the 4-day week – arguments revolving around family, community, citizenship, and work sharing as a way of coping with unemployment and diminishing numbers of decent jobs.”391

Much was written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about “the right to childhood.” Child labour laws were passed and enforced, although the terms of them varied between industries and locales, and some were more effective than others. Some were “wholly inadequate,” according to Florence Kelly, an American childcare advocate in the progressive era.392 Today there is an implicit right to fatherhood in many contemporary accounts. Already there is legislation in the U.S. aimed at addressing the problem of “chronic fatherlessness” in

American society, particularly in low-income public housing projects. The Clinton administration put forward this type of policy.

David Blankenhorn in Fatherless America, states that public housing projects, and modern society in the U.S. generally – either created by government or created with government complicity – deny many children the experience of being fathered. This lack of fathering hurts children, but it also hurts the larger community.393 Congress thus passed the “Personal

Responsibility, Work, and Marriage Promotion Act” under the Bush administration. “The act expanded work requirements, increased childcare funding, and appropriated 1.8 billion for programs encouraging marriage.” 394 To be sure, Blankenhorn has identified an important

391 Forbath, “The Presence of the Past: Voluntarism, Producerism, and the Fate of Economic Democracy,” Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 19, Nos. 1, Winter 1994, 212.

392 Florence Kelley, Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 29. First published 1905.

393 David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995). A recent Globe and Mail editorial referring to the high number of aboriginal children in state care similarly speaks of “The right to have parents.” December 10, 2010, F8.

394 See “Welfare Reform and Poverty,” http://www.movingideas.org/issuesindepth/welfare.html.

125 contemporary problem. Yet these issues, as always, are contested. Feminists, for example, see these housing programs, which encourage marriage and discourage single-motherhood, as regressive and patriarchal offering mere “pseudo-solutions” to the plight of the urban poor.395

The fact that the debate is occurring, however, is positive. Of course, in the United States, there is always a racial dimension to this story, and it must be addressed if real reform is to be realized.

There are still other quality of life policies that can be seen as social rights: for example, the right to pay equity, or equal pay for equal work, and the right to equal opportunity, or affirmative action. These are reforms that occur within the employment relationship and thus enter the domain of the “private” as well as the public sphere. For many conservatives, this means unwarranted state intervention. But work in all societies is an obligation. Indeed, for

Lawrence Mead, being a good citizen in the United States means holding down a job.396 For progressives, these policies are necessary to secure more equitable power relations between individuals in society. Like other social rights, these policies can be conceived in both individual and collective terms. Although citizens are encouraged to think of them in individualist terms, these are rights in a stronger sense than the liberal social rights of the welfare state. Pay equity and affirmative action move beyond notions of legal justice, which is an individualist discourse, to conceptions of historical justice, a collectivist discourse.397

The history of liberal welfare states shows that social policies do not alter the underlying social relations at any profound level; nor do they address the complex reasons behind poverty,

395 Lisa A. Crooms, “Families, Fatherlessness, and Women’s Human Rights: An Analysis of the Clinton Administration’s Public Housing Policy as a Violation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” Journal of Family Law, vol. 36, 1997-98.

396 Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Free Press, 1986). Emphasis added.

397 This point is brought out in Bhikhu Parekh’s work on affirmative action. The term “historical justice” is derived from his essay, “A Case for Positive Discrimination” in Gurpreet Mahajan, ed., Democracy, Difference and Social Justice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 385.

126 patriarchy, and racism. From the point of view of those who suffer long-term, multi-generational exclusion – whose whole social worlds betray any attempt at advancement – the social policies of the welfare state may not be very helpful. To be sure, as one person points out, Marshall’s

“equality of status does not buy many loaves of bread, or care for many children.”402

The implications of these omissions in Marshall’s paradigm are very significant when applied to the United States or any other white settler society. Historically the welfare state has always had this racial dimension. The American welfare state is notorious in this respect. When

Franklin Roosevelt brought forth Old Age Security and Unemployment Insurance, he did not include African Americans in the Southern states. One scholar writes: “At the time of the New

Deal, the Southern states had a veto power in the Congress, and this allowed them to make sure that both UI and Social Security were responsive to local political interests determined to control local labor markets and not disturb existing race relations.”403 The Southern states insisted that agricultural workers were not covered by old age security benefits. “Even though Blacks lived in these communities for more than two centuries, they were not part of the community. There were no concepts of inclusiveness between out-of-work whites and Blacks or aged whites and Blacks.

Blacks were excluded from both UI and Social Security.”404

To be sure, “social Security was for the deserving white worker, and remained relatively small until after World War II when most of the poor aged were finally blanketed in.”405 Much of the debate on social policy in the United States and in Canada turns on disputes over jurisdiction:

402 Colin Hay quoted in Powell, “The Hidden History of Social Citizenship.” The quote is from Hay’s Re-stating Social and Political Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 73.

403 Joel Handler, “The Moral Construction of Social Citizenship and the Crises of the Welfare State,” Paper presented at the conference: “Rethinking Citizenship: Critical Perspectives for the 21st Century,” University of Leeds, June 29-30, 1999, 31.

404 Ibid, 30. Emphasis in the original.

405 Ibid, 26.

127 aid to the “undeserving” poor was located at the local and state level, while aid to the

“deserving” poor was located at the federal, national level. This was a way of managing conflict in the U.S. and is evident in the 1996 welfare reforms of the Clinton administration. Joel Handler writes: “the most recent welfare reform did not ‘end welfare’; rather, it was a massive delegation to the states in the form of block grants. President Clinton got rid of a major political headache.

At the same time, the states wanted to regulate ‘welfare’ as they sought fit.” 406 As Reinhard

Bendix pointed out long ago, social rights constitute an unmediated direct relationship between the state and citizenry as part of “the civic incorporation of the lower classes.”407

Thus, both those against the Two-Tier distinction, and those for it, have much to say about social citizenship. This war has been conducted through established debates in the scholarly literature: within feminism, communitarianism, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, and so on, including West-East408 / North-South debates.409 Both sides are fortified by their respective traditions in political theory – so that taking on one view of rights, is tantamount to taking on that particular tradition as well. Since society itself is heavily politicized on this issue, it is important to look at how this question is framed. As David Held puts it:

The key source of contemporary power – private ownership of the means of production … is arbitrarily treated as if it were not a proper subject of politics. The economy is, as a result, regarded as non-political, in

406 Ibid, 31.

407 Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order (1964) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 89-126, p. 107.

408 For example, in the debate over “Asian Values.” See Claude E. Welch, Jr., and Virginia A. Leary, eds., Asian Perspectives on Human Rights (Boulder, Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1990); Edward Friedman; Anthony Woodiwiss, Globalisation, Human Rights and Labour Law in Pacific Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region (Canberra, Australia: Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific Studies, 1991).

409 In Latin America and Africa, there is a collectivist rights category in the human rights literature which describes Africa and other Third World countries. See C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1965) and J. R. Vincent, “The Idea of Rights in International Ethics” in Terry Nardin and David Mapel eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992), 266.

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that the massive division between those who own and control the means of production, and those who must live by wage-labour, is conceived as the outcome of free private contracts, and not a matter for the state410

Although the public/private dichotomy is blurred with the growth of the state in the twentieth century,411 and although this dichotomy never captured the situation of women in the post-war welfare state, since their political and social realms have always been more integrated,412 the Two Tier distinction continues to hold sway. This is especially true in the United States where the social sources of poverty in class and race are not acknowledged, and thus social solutions are ignored. The Two Tier distinction continues to prevail despite the fact that, if it were ever valid, a doubtful proposition – it is clearly outdated now.

3.8 Liberalism: Singular, Prominent, Dominant

The notion that some political thinking obscures other political thinking is certainly the case in North America. An observation made by Louis Hartz on the nature of politics in

American society stated that some of the most important things in the political thought of a country occur beneath the surface.413 In all countries, the political culture frames, limits, and filters ideas on social rights by, among other things, outlining the acceptable parameters of debate in a number of ways. For example, the first version of the right to the whole produce of labour, the “backbone” of the early political economy, which stresses the individual over the

410 David Held, “Inequalities of Power, Problems of Democracy,” in David Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 50.

411 So blurred, in fact, that some have said the distinction is anachronistic. See Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), xiii. “If this is so,” they ask, “can a category of early modern political philosophy have any continuing relevance to the contemporary world?”

412 Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1997), 170. Lister speaks of the fushion between social and political citizenship, for example, “Through user involvement [in welfare provision], the politics of needs interpretation can be opened up in a more democratic way to embrace the relatively powerless and to challenge the exclusive power of experts who define needs.” Lister also gives examples where “the interplay between social and political citizenship” and the “public/private divide” are breached.

413 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 266.

129 community, is more American. To be sure, according to one historian, “by the time of the

American Revolution, the public atmosphere in North America was saturated with the phrase the fruits of labor.” This popular phrase “was endlessly reiterated and was the single most used phrase in the popular economic lexicon.” 414 Since it is true that important data are located beneath the surface, any meaningful analysis of political life must go down to the struggles at this level. A famous example of this submerged dynamic can be found in Hartz’s own work on new societies is his “fragment theory” of liberalism. According to this theory, liberalism travelled from Europe to the United States, and, at the time of the American founding, brought with it the political conflict of seventeenth-century England. 415 Hartz maintains that this bourgeois fragment governed American political culture for over three hundred years.

What Hartz meant by “the liberal tradition in America” is best explained as a type of

“boundary condition,” that is, “a complex interweave of political thought and behaviour that keeps American political development within clearly liberal channels.” 416 These factors are enduring features in American society, revealing “liberal rules” and “stable criteria” which, operating silently, are “taken for granted rather than critically examined.” Americans evaluate their political universe according to these criteria. In this way, Hartz is able to explain why

American culture is the way it is without going into a more specific analysis. Hartz’s interpretation is “a study of the unconscious mind of America,” scholar Marvin Meyers declares.

414 Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 186.

415 Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1964), 4.

416 J. David Greenstone, “Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the Liberal Bipolarity,” Studies in American Political Development, vol.1 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1986).

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“The substance of American political thought … lies in the unarticulated premises of the society and culture.”417

How is this relevant to social citizenship? The ideology of liberalism clouds the analysis of the discourses that contain social rights-friendly thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further, given that liberalism operates not only at the subterranean level of the fragment, but also at a central and explicit level in North American political theory, the result is a misreading of political reality. As H. G. Wells said in 1906, Americans do not “see” their state since they rarely view politics from the point of view of the collectivity.418 It is true that the fear of the powerful state is both the implicit and explicit basis of American politics.

From the above comments, it is evident how certain cultural thinking can block social citizenship from developing. Although there is objective truth to the account of the origins of the redistributive state, described logically as a process whereby “different ecological niches delivered their surpluses to a central storehouse which eventually became a permanent state,” 419 there must be more to it than this. Indeed, the American thinker, Simon Patten, in 1907, seems closer to the mark when he argues that solidarity and social welfare comes from pain and suffering: “Terror and suffering developed solidarity long before men were intellectually able to conceive the economic values of cooperation.”420 Thus, in Patten’s view, solidarity is a result of the biological imperative to survive. Bernard Mandeville, in 1729, also saw this strong

417 Marvin Meyers, “Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Appraisal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol..5, no.3, 1963, 264. Emphasis in original.

418 H.G. Wells, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1906), 213. The citizen, Wells writes, “has no perception that his business activities, his private employments are constituents in a larger collective process; that they affect other people and the world for ever, and cannot, as he imagines, begin and end with him.”

419 Michael Mann, op. cit.

420 Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 34.

131 connection. He observed: “that every Body [that] is obliged to eat and drink is the Cement of civil Society.”421 Indeed, like other species, human beings come to the aid of one another.

The ambivalence Americans feel towards their state is legendary. According to one author, there was little concern about the national state “at least not enough to write about it seriously.”

422 In more colourful language, another historian, examining the early nineteenth century in the

U.S., describes the American federal government as “minuscule, a midget institution in a giant land.”423 And even more disparagingly, H.G. Wells observed, in 1906, that the American state was “the feeblest, least accessible and most inefficient central government of any civilized nation in the world west of Russia.”424 This idea of the small or negative state in the U.S. is the basis of much academic work on American politics. 425 In fact, Americans are so bothered by state intervention that even a Constitutional guarantee of a guaranteed income sits better in their minds than state or government legislation.426

421 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private vices, public benefits. 1795, 514. Available online at books.google.com/books?id=17J1AAAMAAJ

422 James Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of Collectivism in America, 1880-1940 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 14.

423 John M. Murrin quoted in Gordon T. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1986). The full reference is John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, Or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776- 1816)” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 425.

424 H.G. Wells quoted in Howell John Harris, “Industrial democracy and liberal capitalism” 1890-1925,”in idem and Nelson Lichtenstein, eds., Industrial democracy in America (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993), 49.

425 Yet how small is the U.S state really with its Military-Industrial-Pharmaceutical-Prison Complex?

426 Raventos and Casassas, “Republicanism and Basic Income,”249. note 16. Revealing their anti-state bias they write: “The republican aim is to ensure that specific policies that provide citizens with specific needs do so in terms of basic rights and not at the discretion of a government or group of government employees. The aim, then, is to avoid the establishment of other forms of domination whereby government institutions respond to citizen’s needs.” Nonetheless, how a constitutional guarantee can be seen as the opposite of state intervention is puzzling.

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Chapter Four – Canada: The Organic Community

In Canada, Jane Jenson writes that “commitment to a just and equitable society has been a central part of Canadians’ identity for the past half century.”427 In fact, the idea of social citizenship is contemporary Canada’s main political myth428 in the sense that it captures for

Canadians what they are together in their imagination, and how they differ from others, mainly

Americans. “So, where once Canada was linked from sea to sea chiefly by its railways, we are now linked by common values that are expressed most clearly in our institutions of social policy,” said the Ontario government in 1991.429 “Social Policy is a key aspect of Canadians’ self-image as a ‘kinder, gentler’ society within North America,” according to the C. D. Howe

Institute in 1992.430 Canadians are “a sharing people,” declares Jacques Monet.431 Indeed,

“Canadians in general were more ‘other-directed’ than Americans, and less ‘self-directed’ observes W. Peter Archibald.432 As one author explains, political myths “tell us, at least in part,

427 Jane Jenson, “Fated to Live in Interesting Times: Canada’s Changing Citizenship Regimes,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34 (1997), 642.

428 Myth in the sense of Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1944) and The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1946); B. Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York: Norton, 1926) and other cultural anthropologists: that is to say, not myth as simple falsehood. For a discussion of the “Myths of Social Rights,” see Maurice Roche, Rethinking Citizenship: Welfare, Ideology and Change in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 223-229.

429 Ontario Government, A Canadian Social Charter: Making Our Shared Values Stronger (Toronto: Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs, 1991), 1.

430 Lars Osberg and Shelley Phipp, “A Social Charter for Canada” in A Social Charter for Canada? Perspectives on the Constitutional Entrenchment of Social Rights (Toronto: C. D. Howe Institute, 1992), 2.

431 Jacques Monet, ‘Maintaining a Constitution Worthy of such a Country’: Reflections on Values in Canadian Society,’ The Nash Lecture, 1982, Campion College, University of Regina (Regina: Campion College Press, 1982), 11.

432 W. Peter Archibald, Social Psychology as Political Economy (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1978), 231. And French Canadians are more “other-directed” than English Canadians, 205.

134 who we are and where is here.”433 There is good reason for this powerful Canadian myth, however, because there is a deep cultural perception of equality in Canada, even if, at times, the contemporary and historical reality fails to do full justice to the ideal. 434 As Leslie Armour has said, “the demand for at least a minimal sense of collective responsibility was deeply built into

Canadians’ culture.”435

4.1 The Roots of Social Citizenship in Canada

To be sure, there is an indigenous Canadian political tradition which, in specific thinkers and embedded in quite different political ideologies, is concerned with the whole community and its members, or social citizenship in a deep sense. In many political thinkers and in the early labour, feminist, and social movements (such as the Antigonish movement) not to mention the history of aboriginal people, there were certainly alternative political economies, encompassing moral ideas of society and the state, articulated in various time periods in the Canadian past.

This view has not been sufficiently explored in Canadian history, and the relative absence of historical work on class and nation in Canadian history are relevant to this neglect. The diagram below shows social rights growing from communities with shared values and concerns.

433 Barry Cooper, “Did George Grant’s Canada Ever Exist?” in Yusuf K. Umar, ed., George Grant and the Future of Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1992), 154.

434 This failure to do full justice to the ideal is not always perceived. In a recent article, Canada is described as “a country with one of the most expansive and generous welfare states in the world.” Of course, the concept of the welfare state is a relative one, and since these authors are writing from an American vantage point, Canada may indeed appear to have a generous and expansive welfare state. See Alan Wolfe and Jytte Klausen, “Identity Politics and the Welfare State” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., The Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 234.

435 Leslie Armour, The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (Ottawa: Steel Rail Publishing, 1981), 108.

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Figure 4 Communal Expressions of Social Rights in Canadian Writings

Schooling Public funding ages 6 to 16 or 18, provincial Ministry, school boards, parent councils

Associations Social Benefits religious, cultural, as Public Property linguistic Health Care, occupational, pensions, welfare, labour unions, farm allowances, tax cooperatives credits

Communal Foundations for Social Rights & Citizenship

Corporations Founding Company of New Nations France, Hudson’s Quebecois, Bay Co., Land Acadians, Loyalists, Companies, credit European Settlers unions

First Nations tribes, bands, culture of resource sharing, ‘common bowl,’ band councils

While every schematic is partial and possibly misleading, movements toward the modern welfare state in Canada were laid on foundations that developed much earlier. In Canada, research on the fur trade and aboriginal trappers shows that, as far as native people were concerned, there were considerable social rights provided by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the nineteenth century. These rights included credit, food, housing, and gratuities: “the former to

136 able-bodied adult males; the latter to widows, orphans, the aged, and the infirm.”436 These social arrangements were actually early social policies since, at this historical juncture, the Hudson’s

Bay Company shared a substantial degree of sovereignty with the government of Canada.437

These policies kept native people afloat in lean times, and kept the fur trade and company profits going in times of overhunting and resource shortages. As Arthur J. Ray notes, “When the Indians faced privation, usually in the winter, they turned to the company for relief, which was always provided.” Thus, this author concludes, “it is clear that the modern welfare society of the north is not a post-World War II phenomenon. It is deeply rooted in the fur trade.”438

Indeed, the moral economy of the pre-capitalist mode of production reveals aboriginal and

European-Canadian resource sharing practices: “Residents, Aboriginal or not, knew as a matter of faith that a needy household could have access without the permission of ‘private owners’ to such means of production as fishing grounds, cultivable fields, and animal runs. They presumed access, as well (because any skilled family could make them), to tools such as nets and snares necessary to harvest fish, crops and animals.”439 Similarly, Cecilia Benoit describes research on pre-contact and pre-capitalist Canadian society, in particular, the Montagnais of the Quebec-

Labrador peninsula, who provided social security for each other as a result of their flexible social organization, and the absence of an economic surplus in their hunting and gathering political

436 Arthur J. Ray, “Periodic Shortages, Native Welfare, and the Hudson’s Bay Company 1670-1930” in Shepard Krech III, ed., The Native Subarctic Fur Trade: Native Social and Economic Adaptations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), 16.

437 As S. D. Clarke notes: “The early trading companies of New France, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, received extensive perogatives of government, and even such semi-monopolistic enterprises as land colonization companies were endowed with a measure of political sovereignty.” See The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 5.

438 Arthur J. Ray, op. cit.

439Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 26.

137 economy. The nomadic lifestyle led to widespread sharing: “these early societies provided an extensive safety net, in many respects analogous to the role played by comprehensive welfare states in capitalist societies of the late twentieth century.”440 In these examples, social rights are embedded deep within the culture, the economy, and the tacit “government” of the people.

Furthermore, this shared consciousness in aboriginal communities continues to this day.

John Ralston Saul discusses the “community walk in-freezer” in Nunavik “stocked with food caught during the caribou migration and char run.” He explains that “one section of the freezer is reserved for older people. When anyone in the community is short of meat or fish, they drop by and take something. There is no paperwork for givers or receivers, no thank you’s, no sense of guilt. This is not charity.”441 In Canada, John Ralston Saul links the aboriginal understanding of life to the idea of the common bowl.442 The phrase, “that they would all “Eat from a Common

Bowl,” Saul states, meant that “relationships were about looking after one another.”443

Moreover, as a result of both natural and manmade disasters, “the common good” is now recognized as “the central concern of our time.” 444 Still, the commons is not an easy term to define. As The Ecologist points out, although “it provides sustenance, security and independence,” it “does not produce commodities.” Further, “it is neither private nor public, neither commercial nor communist, neither a business, nor the state.” 445 Moreover, the laws

440 Cecilia M. Benoit, Women, Work and Social Rights: Canada in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 2000), 34.

441 Saul, A Fair Country, 59.

442 Ibid, 304.

443 Ibid, 69.

444 Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009), 3.

445 The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993) 7-8.

138 which support it are not codified because the reality behind the laws is too complex to be written down.

What John Ralston Saul calls “orality” is essential to social citizenship in Canada. There is not “a natural unity of people, place, culture and state.”446 It is the contention of this study that

Canada comes closer to realizing a more complex understanding of liberalism in its welfare state than traditional accounts of liberalism – including “New Liberalism” – would ever think imaginable, and this is due largely to the unique, open-ended, anti-foundational, flexible nature of the nation which aids fraternity and complements the paradigm of the commons. It is important for a country to become aware of the nature of its own welfare state. Though there is always path dependency, there is also a certain element of open-endedness. Indeed, as Saul remarks, “our single tier health-care system,” which reflects a balance between community and individualism, “somehow … emerged from our long experience here.”447 It is important to look at these anti-foundations to discover why.

Although all societies are malintegrated and discontinuous to some extent, Canada seems more so. In some accounts, Canada is said to be a “new country,”448 in other accounts, one of the “oldest.” This is what Saul has to say on the idea of Canada as a “new” country: “New? It is more than four centuries since the Aboriginals, Francophones and Anglophones began their

446 Ibid, 148.

447 John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008), 60.

448 For example, Both Harold Innis and A. W. Mackintosh speak of Canada as a “new” country. Mackintosh’s submission to the 1939 Rowell-Sirois Report, The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1964), originally published in 1939, begins with the statement: “There are certain generalizations concerning the development of new countries which must be borne in mind in interpreting the economic history of Canada.” Similarly, Innis in “The Teaching of Economic History in Canada” in his Essays in Canadian Economic History perceived the lack of economic theory applicable to new countries as “the most serious obstacle to effective work in Canadian economics and economic history.” 10-11 This last statement, as far as it goes, is true: Canada did indeed need an indigenous economic theory, but this does not mean that Canada should be categorized as a “new” country.

139 complex intercourse in this place. We are the second - or third-oldest continuous democracy in the world – 152 years without civil war or coup d’etat.”449 Some conceive the Canadian nation, or more accurately, multination,450 as an artificial construction;451 others see it as an organic evolution, a link to the “old world.”452 Some see the nation as a conflict between geography and history; 453 others see the nation’s geography and history in cooperative terms.454 Canada is said to be purely a political nation, but also solely an economic nation.455 Of course, there is truth to both interpretations since Canadians have always defined the political in economic terms. 456

“The whole existence and history of Canada has been a denial of laissez-faire,” wrote Clare

449 John Ralston Saul, “The Inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture” (given in March, 2000) in Rudyard Griffiths, ed., The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures Volume 1: A Dialogue on Democracy in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 2002), 4.

450 As Will Kymlicka points out, “Since Canada contains more than one nation, it is not a nation-state but a multination state.” See his “Three Forms of Group-Differentiated Citizenship in Canada” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 154.

451 Ward and Carty, “Canada as Political Community” in idem, eds., National Politics and Community in Canada (Vancouver, University of British Columbia, 1986).

452 John Conway, “What is Canada?” The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1964). As Conway explains, “Canada has not returned to an older view of man, politics, and society. She has never left it.” Both “founding fragments,” Conway writes, that is, both the loyalists and the French Canadians, “had in common an acceptance of Europe rather than a revolution from it.” See also Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 270.

453 Famously, Andre Siegfried, in his book The Race Question in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978). Originally published in 1906.

454 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 393. Originally published in 1930; Donald Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Originally published in 1937.

455 Stanley B. Ryerson, Unequal Union: Roots of Crisis in the Canadas, 1815-1873, second edition, (Toronto: Progress Books, 1973); R. T. Naylor, The Rise and Fall of the Third Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence” in Gary Teeple, ed., Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

456 Donald Smiley defines economic nationalism as follows: “Economic nationalism is the subordination of economic structures and processes to political considerations.” See his “The Federal Dimension of Canadian Economic Nationalism,” Dalhousie Law Journal 1 (October 1974), 551.

140

Pentland. 457 Also, as is well known, the state built the infrastructure of the country: the canals, the railway, the political parties, the National Policy. The state was, and is, also necessary to stand up to American capital: “Canada can face the United States, U.S. TNCs and financial interests investing in Canada, the U.S. market, and U.S. cultural influence only as a state.”458

Indeed the state in Canada reveals ambiguities in a number of dichotomies such as private/public, base/superstructure, accumulation/legitimation, economic/political, and so on. In all these oppositions the state occupies an indeterminate position. The traditional lines drawn between state and society in European countries and in the newly revolutionized American states were never discernable in Canada. Reg Whitaker characterizes the merger of these oppositions in Canada as “private profit at public expense.” In Canada, he has said, “it is manifestly impossible to separate the accumulation and legitimation functions into two insulated spheres.”

Indeed, as he notes, accumulation was legitimation in Canada. 459

Canadians are also alienated from their own citizenship: “Canada did not make itself – it was made by others.”460 Except for the political and economic elites, most Canadians took little part in nation building. The agreement in 1867 was between provinces, an artificial event, to unite into one Dominion, lacking “even as much legitimacy as the former colonies had

457 H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada 1650-1860 (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981), 160.

458 Szymon Chodak, The New State: Etatization of Western Societies (Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989), 214.

459 Reg Whitaker, “Images of the State in Canada” in Leo Panitch, ed., The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 43. This kind of political thinking also occurred in the U.S. in the last decades of the nineteenth century. “The public good cannot be served apart from business interests, for business interests are the public good and in serving business the state is serving society.” See Vernon Louis Parrington: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America 1860-1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930), 21.

460 D.I. Davies and Kathleen Herman, eds., Social Space: Canadian Perspectives (Toronto: new press, 1971), vii.

141 enjoyed.”461 And to even ask the question of whether Canadians can become a sovereign people reveals the dilemma of a colonial mentality. 462

However, in failing to sense the continuity between the old Canada and modern Canada, authors who write about the country as if it began in 1867 diminish the significance of the political struggles that took place before that date. Some commentators write as if no nation existed prior to Confederation. But of course there was a nation. Even the National Policy

“predated the creation of the national government.”463 It was also a nation in other senses: in the aboriginal and Inuit sense, in the colonial sense, and in the experience of all its inhabitants.

Nations are not the result of parliamentary debate.464 There is a certain loss of history, then, in all senses.

The fight over public education, arguably the most basic social right there is, since it offers something as fundamental as “access to the means of employment,”465 occurred as early as the 1830s in Canada, but this gets lost if Canadians think of their nation as beginning in 1867.

As Bruce Curtis points out, in pre-Confederation Canada, it was not merely a struggle over education, but also over the nature of the colonial state: “All the fundamental questions concerning educational organization – who needed to be taught, who could educate them, what they needed to know, how they should learn it, who should pay for it – these and other questions

461 Edwin R. Black and Alan C. Cairns, “A Different Perspective on Canadian Federalism” in J. Peter Meekison, ed., Canadian Federalism: Myth or Reality (Toronto: Methuen, 1968), 83.

462 Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

463 Vernon C. Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 281.

464 R. T. Naylor, Canada in the European Age 1453-1919 (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1987), 550.

465 Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836-1871 (London, Ontario: The Althouse Press, 1988), 12.

142 were answered only by answering at the same time questions concerning the state: who would rule, how, of what would rule consist, how would it be financed.”466

Canadians are largely unaware of their own history and commons. However, as Saul notes, “we desperately search for our roots in Europe when they are staring us in the face.” It is no surprise, then, that Canadians search for indigenous political material as an essential source of political theory. In the 1990s alone, there were many attempts at recovery. 467 Which ones are the most relevant to social rights? Certainly Samuel LaSelva’s The Moral Foundations of

Federalism, and Saul’s edited The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures are important, along with

Ajzenstat’s and Smith’s edited Canada’s Origins. All such works attempt to recapture the public vision of Canadians in the pre-Confederation era. These works examine what the terms nation and democracy meant in the aftermath of the failure of the rebellions in 1837. Much of this writing argues that the civic republicanism of the radicals and Reformers were an important influence in Canadian political life.

According to Ajzenstat and Smith, radical opposition to liberalism came from the political Left in Canada, as much as from the conservative Right. In this Rousseauean discourse, civic virtue meant adherence to the values of community, democracy, equality, and the public good. Commerce, privilege, selfishness, individualism, and ambition were all rejected in favour of public virtue.468 As Saul says, in Canada, “welfare describes the well-being of the individual

466 Curtis, “Preconditions of the Canadian State,”op.cit.

467 Everything from William D. Gairdner’s republishing of the Confederation proceedings in Canada’s Founding Debates; to Samuel LaSelva’s recovery of The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism (which not only locates “kinship” and “fraternity” within Canadian federalism, but also conceives it less as an institutional relationship among governments than “as a way of life.”) to John Ralston Saul et al.’s rediscovery of the influence of the more moderate reformers in Canada’s pre-history in The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures; to Christopher Moore’s retelling of Confederation in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal; and finally, to Janet Ajzenstat and Peter Smith’s Canada’s Origins, as well as John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country.

468 Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, “Liberal-Republicanism: The Revisionist Picture of Canada’s Founding” in idem., eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995), 1-18.

143 within a society.” 469 These authors suggest that the democratic culture of early Canadians “put in place the foundations of modern Canada.” Like LaSelva, they explicitly challenge the instrumentalist idea that “political expediency and self-interest defined Canada’s journey from colonial oligarchy to democratic community.”470 In probing the meaning of democracy for the reformers, Saul quotes “the words ‘Forget your business and attend to the public one’ ” which, he notes, captured the temper of the times. 471 Moreover, the Canadian oral democratic tradition has meant that meanings are never clear and this is linked to fraternity and social citizenship in

Canada because of the idea, mentioned above, so obvious, yet neglected, that the foundations of

Canada are not to be found at Confederation, but much earlier. Like Ajzenstat and Smith, as well as a number of other writers,472 Saul recovers much of this pre-history.

So, for example, LaSelva recovers the beliefs of George-Etienne Cartier. LaSelva credits

Cartier with developing a Canadian theory of federalism built on “multiple identities” and a

“political nationality” that is “held together by an intricate and novel form of fraternity.”473

LaSelva understands this fraternity as the economic arrangements between governments in

Canada in the form of federal equalization programs. And, of course, this is where much of the fraternity and social citizenship in Canada resides. This “moral imperative” in Canada is woven into the very fabric of Canadian society. Many Canadian thinkers are in this tradition, which

Ajzenstat and Smith base their argument on the similar work done in the U.S. and Britain by Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock.

469 Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, 115. Emphasis of the term “welfare” is Saul’s; emphasis of the phrase “within a society” is added.

470 Rudyard Griffiths, “Introduction” in idem ed., The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures.

471 The quotation, Saul says, is from the Republic of Dubrovnik.

472 For example, Gordon Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986); William Ormsby, The Emergence of the Federal Concept in Canada, 1839-1845 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).

473 LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism; Paradoxes, Achievements, and Tragedies of Nationhood (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), xii.

144 scholar A. B. McKillop labels “a mode of thought.” In describing Canadian society, he speaks of a moral imperative and its extension into the realm of the polity. “Moral government,” and

“moral science” and “moral laws” [were] widely prevalent in North America in the middle of the nineteenth century.” 474 Indeed, this view is clear in the thinking of the nineteenth-century

Canadian idealist John Watson of Queens University in Kingston. He wrote: “A nation is not an aggregate of isolated individuals, but a spiritual union based upon the universal nature of man.”475 Watson wrote: “We may, if we please, call rights “natural,” so long as we do not suppose them to belong to man in his isolation.”476

A man has rights which are recognized by society, but they are not made right by legislation, as Bentham held, but are essential because they are essential to the development of the common good. The possession of rights and their recognition by society are not two different things, but the same thing; for, as the individual claims rights in virtue of his being an organ of the common good, so the State recognizes his rights on the ground that they are required for the realisation of the highest good of all. 477

To be sure, a virtuous definition of the state as a moral community was reiterated in every issue of Hamilton’s The Templar Quarterly in late nineteenth-century Upper Canada. “Applied

Christianity will purify politics, destroy monopolies, wipe out class privileges, and establish the

Brotherhood of Man.” Social reform meant that “an injury to one is the concern of all.” The paper promised “equal rights to all and special privileges to none.” Like socialists, republicans, progressives, and populists, these idealists called for a system of co-operation over competition:

474 A. B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 30.

475 John Watson, “German Philosophy and Politics,” Queen’s Quarterly, vol.xxii, Nos.4, April, May, June, 1915, 335. Curiously, Canada has not always been portrayed this way historically. For example, in an influential 1950 article on the origins of the welfare state in Canada, Elisabeth Wallace wrote: “Canadians showed little sympathy with the German tendency to personify and idealize the state … confusion of thought would be avoided, they held, by conceiving the state as simply the citizens in their organized capacity, and not as an entity with rights and duties of its own much less a soul.” See Elisabeth Wallace, “The Origin of the Social Welfare State in Canada,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 16, 1950, 391 As Chapter One points out, Kenneth Bryden also thought this way, seeing only Manchester Liberalism in nineteenth-century Canada, despite much evidence to the contrary.

476 Watson, op.cit.

477 John Watson, The State in Peace and War (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1919), 222.

145 one that would break negative patterns caused by industry. An 1895 issue of the newspaper states: “In the hands of a few are invested a monopoly of the land, a monopoly of transportation, a monopoly of currency, a monopoly of trade, a monopoly of even debauching the people with drink.” 478

4.2 Land, Labour and Rights in Canada

The geography of Canada has been both bad and good for social rights. Its vastness has meant that even the party system in Canada cannot mobilize citizens along class lines. On the other hand, Canada’s geography has led to the kind of “Red Toryism” admired by George Grant, producing, as John Ralston Saul says, “an early egalitarianism” and cooperation.479 This geographical explanation, in addition to accounts of Canada’s Old World Toryism, New World

Loyalism, and left civic republicanism, helps explain Canada’s organic, compassionate and fraternal society.480 Geography also raises questions about whether history had the upper hand in

Canada’s twentieth century.481 Political issues that in other countries warrant a class analysis are formulated in geographical terms in Canada. As Ronald Manzer says: On education policy, “the problem of justice in provision of education was seen primarily in terms of territorial rather than class differences – young people in rural areas ought to have the same educational opportunities

478 The Templar Quarterly, May, 1895, 2.

479 Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, 132-138.

480 See Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins, op. cit.

481 For a discussion see Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper, “The Spaces that Difference Makes: Some notes on the geographical margins of the new cultural politics” in Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (London and New York, 1993), 199.

146 as young people in urban areas.”482 This tendency to think in spatial terms can also be seen in

Canada’s conception of sovereignty. Maurice Careless famously noted that in Canada, there were only limited identities: “particular societies of people living under a sovereign crown.”483

This materialism is reinforced by the early political economy literature in Canada which is conducted as if there were no people living in Canada at all. 484 The story here is that Canada is not really about human beings. Canada is about fear, survival, and the export of staples: fish, fur, timber, gold and wheat. It is about the cod fisheries and the fur trade and “the alchemy of fur and wheat.”485 It is about a cold, harsh climate and a sparsely populated population. Early social welfare agencies in Canada were seasonal for this very reason.486 If political ideas are missing in Canada, or if they are subdued, it is largely a result of these material forces. Harold

Innis, one of Canada’s greatest thinkers, produced uniquely Canadian economic, political, and

482 Ronald Manzer, Public Schools and Political Ideas: Canadian Educational Policy in Historical Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 133.

483 J.M.S. Careless, Union of the Canadas, (1967), quoted in Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J M S Careless, by David Keane, J.M.S Careless, Colin Read (Hamilton, ON: Dundurn Press, 1990), 41.

484 Arthur Lower, Canadian Forum (July, 1947). As Drache points out, Innis ignored race, gender and the historical actors themselves. See Daniel Drache, “Celebrating Innis,” 1. “His history, as history, was dehumanized,” writes Carl Berger. See Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing: 1900-1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 98. After Innis, it was left to other scholars to fill in the “faceless” and “anonymous” exploiters. R. T. Naylor, Stanley Ryerson, and Wallace Clement, among others, took up the challenge. See Drache, “Rediscovering Canadian Political Economy” in idem., and Wallace Clement, eds., A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1978), 36. Abraham Rotstein notes, that for Innis, it was the Staples themselves that became the protagonists that “came alive within the diverse panorama which he evoked.” See Abraham Rotstein, “Innis: The Alchemy of Fur and Wheat,” Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (Winter 1977). Interestingly, the same sort of observation is made of Creighton’s river. As one scholar points out, “none of the merchants in Creighton’s study matched the river in terms of personality: ‘The river ‘knew its landscape.’ It ‘groped’ and ‘grasped,’ it ‘commanded,’ and ‘aggressively it entrenched’ itself. Or it ‘idled along, unhurried, controlled, maneuvering its vast bulk with a practiced dexterity.’ Always, it ‘cared not whether it was valued or neglected.’ This was a river with attitude.” Christopher Moore, “A River with Attitude: The Empire of the St. Lawrence, Donald Creighton, and the History of Canada,” in his introduction to a new edition of Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), x. Originally published in 1937.

485 Abraham Rotstein, “Innis: The Alchemy of Fur and Wheat,” Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (1977), 6-31.

486 Judith Fingard, “The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815-1860,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1974), 65-94.

147 social theories based on geography and political economy. 487 The best known idea from Innis is

“the Staples Thesis,” said to be “Canada’s original contribution to modern economic thought.”488

As Innis emphasized, it is the foreign models applied to Canada that are problematic, not Canada itself. How is this relevant to social citizenship? The answer is that Innis developed an economic theory specific to Canada which explains social as well as economic development.

Indeed, For Innis, each staple had its own logic and gave rise to its own institutions. Much work still needs to be done examining the types of social citizenship that developed as a result of each staple.

Innis also had valuable things to say about Canada’s place in the world, and the problematic aspects of exporting staples as a strategy for economic development. Staple-led growth, he said, led to dependency preventing Canada from becoming an autonomous, fully developed industrial economy. In The Cod Fisheries, Innis speaks of how the “fishocracy,” or the mercantile commercial interests, in an effort to maintain a monopoly, discouraged agriculture, shipbuilding and other industry in Newfoundland. This, in turn, delayed the development of responsible government and other “free institutions” in the colony, including the realization of the public good.489 Like many Canadians, Innis wrote about Canada as a country at the margins of Empire which meant that he, like the others, was able to produce a more

487 See, for example, Robert E. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Thinkers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Babe discovers “enduring values” and a particular dialectical cast to the Canadian mind in the thinkers he studied: Graham Spry (1900-1983); Harold Adam Innis (1894-1952); John Grierson (1892-1992); Dallas W. Smythe (1907-1998); C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987); Irene Spry (1907-1998); George Grant (1918-1988); Gertrude Joch Robinson (1927- ); Northrop Frye (1912-1991); and Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

488 Daniel Drache, “Celebrating Innis: The Man, the Legacy, and Our Future” in idem., ed., Staples, Markets and Cultural Change: Selected Essays Harold A. Innis (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), xxi.

489 Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954), 384-391. Originally published in 1940.

148 dialectical, power sensitive and critical analysis. Innis deepened the study of Canadian politics by emphasizing the material base that shaped Canada.

Most Canadians were too busy clearing the land and simply surviving to philosophize. In this sense, the whole country remained at the first stage of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs: those necessary for survival. 490 Even today, despite Canada’s wealth, the country seems close to this end of the hierarchy. Canadians are always occupied with pragmatic concerns. Thus the theme of survival runs throughout Canadian literature, history, politics, and economics.491 And it is not just physical survival, but also cultural and linguistic survival: as expressed by the Quebecois and the First Nations. From a political point of view, it is also the country’s survival in a landscape dominated by the United States. So the question in Canada, as

Northrop Frye put it, was never: who are we? But rather: where is here?492 Geography raises these issues of place, what one scholar calls a “here-feeling” in comparison to a “we-feeling.” 493

However, in Canada, there is much overlap in these categories since a sense of “we-feeling” arises from a “shared here-feeling,” explaining the strength of Canada’s regional identities and varied provincial and territorial social citizenships.

In a significant sense, all policies are social policies, as pointed out elsewhere. In Canada, the National Policy of 1879 enhanced the wealth of the industrial sector, but also the power of domestic labour resulting in the maintenance of high wages. So the tariff was in some sense a social policy, albeit one that benefited Central Canada over the regions, manufacturers and

490 Ronald Manzer applies Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs to Canadian politics and policy. See his Public Policies and Political Development in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 3-19.

491 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972).

492 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 220.

493 Daniel Deudney, “Ground Identity: Nature, Place, and Space in Nationalism” in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996), 130.

149 industrialists over farmers, and the employed over the unemployed. Despite workers’ concerns over immigration, and the importation of foreign labour, which were for workers the negative aspects of the National Policy, it was generally thought that, in addition to giving higher wages, the tariff benefited labour. As one labour newspaper, the Trades Journal, put it in 1883, “more work for our workingmen has been and is being realized.”494 This feeling toward the National

Policy changed, however, as it became clearer to labour that the tariff was protecting capital and manufacturing more than it was workmen. Yet some of this development had a positive side: The

Palladium “conceded that the tariff did not benefit workingmen, only capitalists. But it argued that the protective tariff did set a precedent for government intervention in economic affairs. This precedent could be used to facilitate the introduction of labor legislation and of government ownership or regulation of monopolies.”495 Indeed, the National Policy is but one example of

Canada’s long tradition of finding surrogates for class conflict. Most scholarship on the National

Policy in Canada does seem to explain many aspects of Canadian politics. As Donald Smiley observes, “the national policy was crucial in perpetuating a Canadian value system diverging from that dominant in the U.S.”496

On the one hand, geography has weakened class conflict, resulting in a lack of creative politics. Canada's party system, which historically absorbed radical political ideas and assimilated them to the policies of the two main parties, was so successful in its brokerage function that Jane Jenson speaks of the Canadian version of the Fordist welfare state as “a

494 See the Trades Journal, May 30, 1883, quoted in F.W. Watt, “The National Policy, the Workingman, and Proletarian Ideas in Victorian Canada, Canadian Historical Review 40 (1959), 9.

495 See Palladium of Labor, September 22, 1883, quoted in John David Bell, The Social and Political Thought of the Labor Advocate,” M.A. thesis, Queen’s University, 1975, 14.

496 See Donald V. Smiley, “Canada and the Quest for a National Policy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 8 (1978), 44.

150 hegemonic paradigm without class content.” Indeed, partyism as an obstacle to class consciousness and struggle is well documented historically in Canada. The Canadian labour journalist Phillips Thompson in 1887 said that “The hold which party associations and traditions have obtained over the masses of the American people is the greatest obstacle to any present advance. ... The politicians have been able to use labor because working men have put party first.

When they put labor first and let party interests look out for themselves they can make the politicians their obsequious servants.” 497 Also, party ideology is weakened by geography: “The important difference produced by [the North American] environment is that a party in Canada inevitably has lacked the cohesiveness which it was possible to attain in the closely knit island of

Britain. Here, great distances, divergent economic and sectional interests, combined with the problem of reconciling two main language and cultural groups, resulted in parties becoming of necessity more loosely-knit organizations.” And, lastly, “Deep-lying differences of opinion in public affairs tended to be settled within each party rather than between parties.”498

4.3 Social Citizenship in Action in Canada

In the mid to late-nineteenth century, a broad cultural shift started to occur which stressed service towards others and the satisfying of the needs of the community over those of individuals. In many quarters, though certainly not in all,499 self-realization for the good of the

497 Phillips Thompson, The Politics of Labor, 102.

498 See M. Janine Brodie and Jane Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada (Toronto: Methuen, 1980).

499 Canadian thinker Stephen Leacock wrote in 1909-1910 of “the creed and cult of self-development” which “arrogates to itself the title of New Thought, but contains in reality nothing but the Old Selfishness.” Leacock dismissed “this particular outlook [where] the goal of morality is found in fully developing one’s self” as being “the epitome of self-centredness masquerading as moral conduct.” See his “The Devil and the Deep Sea: A Discussion of

151 community became the highest goal.500 As Leon Samson explains, this was a shift from the

Kingdom of Nature, to the Kingdom of History, a change he describes as a situation “where individuals pursue their own private interest” to “where all combine to solve a common problem.” 501 Of course, this dissertation has discussed many caveats to the whole notion that there ever was a self-interested individualism in North American producerist societies. Indeed, according to H. Clare Pentland, in the Canadas, as early as 1830, there was “a new, sentimental humanitarianism” which became a “powerful and even engulfing movement in the 1840s” and

“largely an accomplished fact in the 1850s.”502

From the point of view of social rights, positive changes in the ideological realm were complemented by positive changes in the economic realm. According to Clare H. Pentland,

Canada had its own Keynes, but in the nineteenth-century: in the figure of Isaac Buchanan who was an advocate of “full employment” in the 1830s-1870s. 503 From the perspective of this more expansive set of values, then, and with the help of the development of social science and forward-thinking economics, commonplace assumptions were held up to the light and discredited. The historic distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor started to lose

Modern Morality” in his Social Criticism: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays, ed., Alan Bowker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 46.

500 There is a large literature on this transformation. See David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Chapter eleven, “The End of the Golden Age,” 204-221; Isaac M. Rubinow, Social Insurance, with Special Reference to American Conditions (New York: Henry Holt, 1913); David M. Tucker, The Decline of Thrift in America: Our Cultural Shift From Saving to Spending (New York: Praeger, 1991).

501 Leon Samson, The New Humanism (New York: Washburn, 1930), 59.

502 H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada 1650-1860 (Toronto: James Lorimer &Company, 1981), 180.

503 Ibid, 171 -172

152 vibrancy, increasingly seen as derogatory and inaccurate, even though it will always remain in the shadows, as evidenced by its return, even today.504

The social vision of William Lyon Mackenzie is located in the political culture of the period more than in the realm of the state or constitution. Mackenzie, like the Jacksonian democrats in the United States to whom he has been compared, is part of the local “Country” tradition, as well as a “popular political economy” tradition, which showed a deep distrust of the state and bureaucracy, what he called, in the language of the period: “Lawcraft,” “Landcraft,”

“Bankcraft,” “Priestcraft,” and “Kingcraft.” Mackenzie’s “ideal society was one which secured for every man the greatest possible quantity of the product of his own labour, and denied existence to any privileged, political, religious, or economic interests, who might steal from him.”505 Mackenzie went so far as to argue for social rights in housing. Under the heading

“Inalienable Homesteads for the Humble,” his newspaper demanded: “Free Homesteads, and

Furniture Exemptions, to a just amount, so that in pressing upon poverty and misery there may be a humane limit set, as there is now in many really free countries.” 506 Indeed, in Canada, it was claimed in 1848 that farmers “are the ‘first class,’ in the noblest and best sense. The

Merchants, Mechanics, Priests, Lawyers, Artists, Literati, etc. etc. are all non-producers – mere hangers-on, dependents of the husbandman. He can do without them, they cannot live without him.”507

504 Abraham Epstein, The Challenge of the Aged (New York: Vanguard Press, 1928), 47, 83-87,149-205.

505 Lillian F. Gates, “The Decided Policy of William Lyon Mackenzie, The Canadian Historical Review, vol. XL, 186.

506 Toronto Weekly Message (December 31, 1859)

507 Agriculturist and Canadian Journal, 1848, 50.

153

The claims made on behalf of the “right to the whole produce of labour” were explosive in their impact in North America. This was a right that, Anton Menger, in 1886, called “one of the most fundamental socialist ideas.”508 But it was never a purely socialist right. In the U.S. and Canada, it was also found in civic republican, idealist, and liberal discourses. Even a Tory newspaper, The Ontario Workman, which opened its first issue with the slogan: “man first, property afterwards,” called for the rightful product of labour. The working men of Ontario insisted that the British Imperial state operated against their interest. In fact, they felt that the state acted in direct opposition to the above slogan, as in a letter to the editor in 1872: “The line of action that has been taken by the rich and ruling classes everywhere is, ‘property first and man afterwards,’ or, more properly speaking, ‘man nowhere.’ ” 509 The letter further states:

Our aristocracies, our money-ocracies say, No, you shall not enjoy the full fruits of your labor, you shall only have a margin, just as much as we in our wisdom … shall allow you; the balance of the value of your labor we – the aristocrats and money-grubbers – will have to ourselves. We, the employers of labor, are your masters, you are our servants, and we have the right to dictate to you the terms upon which you shall labor and live or exist… all the laws of England are framed on this very basis. The commercial laws, the banking laws, the marine laws, the trade laws, in fact the entire code, civil and criminal, have been made with the view of carrying out the doctrine or dogma of “property first and man afterwards.” Man is systematically robbed—robbed by Act of Parliamen (sic).510

The same phrases appear in William Lyon Mackenzie’s writings. Back in May 1838, he stated that “labour was the source of all wealth” in his newspaper, The Constitution. Those who were not engaged productively were “hangers-on,” “placeman,” “parasites,” “wealthy idlers” and so on. They lived off the backs of those who did engage in labour. Socialist editor and activist,

Phillips Thompson, was also against government jobs, even though working class representation in state intervention would have benefited the working classes. He was an anomaly in this

508 Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, trans. M.E. Tanner, (1886) (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962), “ Preface to the First German Edition,” cxiv.

509 The Ontario Workman: A Weekly Paper, Devoted to The Interests of the Working Classes. A Paper For The Tradesman: Mechanic: Workingman: Labourer. May 23, 1872.

510 Ibid. Emphasis added.

154 respect: For a socialist to be wary of government assistance shows the strength of this individualist rendering of the right, which indeed formed the core of the Commonwealth ideology of the “country” tradition. So, despite the tendency to see this right as universally socialist, there were many versions of it. Not surprisingly a schism opened up over the nineteenth century between a more libertarian possessive-individualist version of the right and a more communitarian socialist and republican version.

In Canada, investigative journalism, characteristic of early social science, was central to the work of Gustavus Myers (History of Canadian Wealth, 1914), Robert Gourlay, and William

Lyon Mackenzie in Canada. Gourlay’s 1822 Statistical Account of Upper Canada, “challenged the whole power structure of Upper Canada,” Allan Blakey writes. “Therefore the power structure moved to crush him.”511 Indeed, as leader of the Upper Canadian Rebellion in 1837, all of William Lyon Mackenzie’s utterances were directed against oligarchy and corruption.

What did the right to the whole produce of labour mean in the Canadian context? The

1889 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital posed this very question. In asking what the proportionate part obtained by labour in Canada should be, one Knight of Labor, a journalist, responded: “One hundred per cent.”512 The main way social justice could be assured, Wright told the Commission, would be in abolishing monopolies. Especially land and transportation monopolies, he said, to name but two. North American working classes in the nineteenth century, like their European counterparts, were intent on abolishing “the placemen,

511 Allan Blakey, “Robert Gourlay: Fanatic or Constructive Reformer?” Horizons: The Marxist Quarterly, Autumn 1968, no. 27, 26.

512 A.W. Wright to The Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889, in Greg Kealey, ed., Canada Investigates Industrialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 66. Wright felt that profit sharing “would have the effect of giving the workingmen a larger share of the profits of their labor.”

155 the parasites, the jobbers,” and restore “to the direct producer his proper position.”513 Indeed, part of the rationale for strong property rights in Upper Canada prior to Confederation was the scarcity of land in Canada – not because the country was without it – but because of the corrupt oligarchy and land companies.

In Canada, in 1873, Henry Harvey Stuart declared that “a man’s income, if rightfully obtained is the sum of his earnings and he has the right to the unmolested possession of the full product of his toil.”514 This right, slightly modified, was also demanded in agitation for direct legislation in the Canadian prairies in 1911. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, farm associations talked about “two great ideals” of political democracy and economic democracy: “the right of every man to [a] voice and vote in the government under which he lives; [and] the right of every man to an equal share in the wealth of the state according to his skill and ability.” 515 The phrase also appears in more recent writings. In a 2001 review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and

Dimed, and Jill Andresky Fraser’s White-Collar Sweatshop, the author explains how the poor, though “indispensable agents of an industrial economy,” are still not given their due. The article states that “the poor are not so much cast aside as denied the fruits of their labour.” 516 In upholding the right to the whole produce of labour, republicanism attempted to ensure equality.

513 John Breuilly, Labour and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Comparative History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 103.

514 H.H. Stuart, “Municipal Taxation”in a pamphlet based on a discussion by members of the nineteenth annual convention of the Maritime Board of Trade, 20 August 1913, reprinted from the Union Advocate, 3 September 1913, Alii. Quoted in an article by James Chapman, Henry Harvey Stuart (1873-1952), available online: http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/11409/12159, 93.

515 The Grain Growers’ Guide, Jan. 25, 1911, 28, quoted in W. L Morton, “Direct Legislation and the Origins of the Progressive Movement,” The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. XXV, nos. 3, September, 1944, 283.

516 Corey Robin, “Denied the Fruits of their Labors,” Dissent, Fall 2001, 135. The full reference for Barbara Ehrenreich is: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America (Metropolitan Books, 2001) and Jill Andresky Fraser: White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (W.W. Norton, 2001).

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As James Huston explains, “only by toiling was one justified in possessing property.” Here the pervasiveness of the producerist tradition is highlighted in both the U.S. and Canada.

However, as the discussion on idealism above has shown, alongside this individualist perspective on the importance of the right to the whole produce of labour which was widespread throughout Canada, there was simultaneously a Tory conception of property throughout English and French Canada. In both cases, some private property was understood as necessarily modified for use by, and for, the public good. In French Canada, for example, this socialized conception developed as a result of Catholic papal teaching. In Catholicism, like Toryism, the social uses of private property for the collectivity are stressed.517 So, in Canada, community has never been very far away from individualism.

A sense of community is also evident in the Canadian labour movement. True, normally labour movements are collectivist enterprises – this is their very raison d’etre – but for particular historical reasons, the labour movement in the U.S. is highly individualistic. Since Canada follows in U.S. footsteps, it is significant that the “narrow” and “intolerant” attitudes of the craft unions in the U.S., and the AFL which grew out of them, differed from those in Canada, as Clare

Pentland explains. In the U.S., “the crafts shared with other important elements of American society that belief in the survival of the fittest, and [the] ruthless pursuit of self-interest in total disregard of others, that became especially prominent in the period of the Civil War.” But unlike the AFL, he continues, Canadian unionists “almost always showed a strong preference for labour unity and the accommodations required to maintain it.”518 So, it seems that, in a number of ways,

517 Gregory Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism: Political thought in the Thirties and Forties (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1980), 76.

518 H. C. Pentland, “The Canadian Industrial Relations System: Some Formative Factors,” Labour/Le Travailleur, 1979.

157 and for a number of reasons, the second version of the right to the whole produce of labour, stressing the community over the individual, is more Canadian and more European.519

Was there a moral economy in Canada? The answer is yes, since social citizenship can mean mere entitlement or it can mean something larger. Even within the category of mere entitlement there exists more than one level: namely, the discrepancy between the reality of what a society actually has accomplished in terms of social rights, and what that society – or more likely, a portion of it – would like to accomplish in the realm of social justice.520 Social rights can either perform purely integrative functions, mitigating against the worst excesses of a competitive, market-driven economy and political system, or they can be truly transformative and revolutionary. The social right to education, for example, can integrate and socialize individuals, or it can de-socialize and politicize them. It does this by teaching individuals about the real conditions of their oppression. As R. H. Tawney said in 1964: “all serious education movements are social movements.”521

519 See Will Hutton, The World We’re In (London: Little, Brown, 2002), especially chapter 8, “Europe Works,” 237- 256, and chapter 10, “The Idea of Europe,” 286-312. See also Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004). Moreover, this distinction was perceived as such in the mid-nineteenth century United States. As one author points out, American editorialists “sensed that European socialism denied the labor theory of property/value. It stopped individuals from acquiring as much property as their labor might allow.” See Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 294.

520 The difference is a qualitative one, as noted by Leo Panitch and Donald Schwartz: “Thus, the right to education was always compromised by the hierarchy in education which rationed quality education and left access to it heavily dependent on class background, and by the content and pedagogical methods employed which reflected and reproduced the class- and gender-dominated society that it was embedded in. … Unemployment insurance … merely compensated those afflicted, and even then only partially so that the compulsion to remain in the labour market hardly abated. For those unable to work there were social benefits, but the conditions governing access to them, the methods by which they were administered, and the requirement that they not impede the labour market ensured not just that benefits would remain mean but that those requiring them would pay a heavy price in terms of independence and self-respect.” See their essay, “The Case for Socialist Democracy” in Simon Rosenblum and Peter Findlay, eds., Debating Canada’s Future: Views From the Left (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1991), 37.

521 R. H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).

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Another nineteenth-century Canadian thinker, Egerton Ryerson, saw the Canadian state in a similar fashion. “The state is a symbol of union, not of isolation.” Ryerson believed that “there is no such thing among men as independence, except in the conception of pride and ignorance.”

On the role of citizens, he said: “each is to live for the good of each and all.” On interdependence, he wrote: “Even the rich cannot say to the poor, ‘we are independent of you,’ any more than can ‘the eye say to the hand I have no need of thee.’ ”522 Ryerson envisioned the creation of a terrain of universality and classlessness in Canadian society, and education for all was the means for providing it. Common schooling meant placing the “poor man on a level with the rich man.” Direct contact between different classes at school would create harmony, mutual respect and social peace. All members of Canadian society were to be provided with a common moral property. Distributed in state institutions, through its appropriation, all members of society would share a common national heritage and a common relation to the state. 523

It is clear that struggles over property and the distribution of wealth were evident in the

1840s in Upper Canada. Egerton Ryerson’s visionary project was to bring about more equality for Canadians via basic education rights, but it was “denounced as communistic, and an invasion of the rights of property,” according to J. George Hodgins, his biographer.524 Hodgins describes how the creation of public education eventually prevailed as a result of the efforts of Egerton

Ryerson: For twenty-one years, “the question of free-schools versus rate-bill schools (fees &c.) was discussed every January in from 3,000 to 5,000 school sections, until free schools became

522 Adolphus Egerton Ryerson, “Obligations of Educated Men,” An Address Delivered before the Senate and Students at Victoria College, May 2, 1848 by the Chief Superintendent of Schools for Upper Canada. Published in The Journal of Education for Upper Canada, Volume 1, Toronto, June 1848, Vol. 1 No. 6, 163. Available online at http://books.google.ca/books?id=xfUBAAAAYAAJ&vq=163

523 Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836-1871 (London, Ontario, Canada: The Althouse Press, 1988), 111. 524J. George Hodgins, ed., Egerton Ryerson, The Story of My Life (Toronto: William Briggs, 1883), xiii.

159 voluntarily the rule, and rate-bills the exception.”525 This is the struggle for democracy at work.

And it shows why the politics of this period is characterized as “turbulent” in the British North

American colonies.526 Indeed, from all accounts, the official Colonial leadership, or the Family

Compact, were ruthless and unscrupulous individuals (at least up until the establishment of

“responsible government” by moderates Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine) while Ryerson’s exercise was bottom-up and democratic.

In Canada, it was corrupt land speculators and the Family Compact that created the proletariat. Landless labourers in Canada were relatively easy to produce compared to what had to happen in the U.K. In Great Britain, legislative reform in the form of Enclosure Acts were needed to create the underclass. In Canada, the best Crown lands were taken by 1840 and sold to land companies which kept them unsettled. Hence, as Gary Teeple states, they were settlement companies in name only: in reality, they were “landjobbers.” Teeple also speaks of the “vast unemployment” and “impoverishment of the landless class of labourers in British North America before 1825.” There were a “great number of people able to work, yet without jobs.”527 Indeed, the Land Act of 1841 created a labour supply, while church and government administrators

“gorged themselves on land.” A “landed aristocracy” controlled the land. It was the “sole prerogative of the governor and lieutenant governors.” “Land abuse” and “land monopoly” prevented the growth of industry. The result: “an oppressed, enslaved, and insulted people.” 528

525 Ibid, xiii.

526 Gordon T. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986).

527 Gary Teeple, Land, labour and capital in pre-Confederation Canada” in idem ed., Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 52.

528 Ibid, 44-66.

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The Antigonish adult education movement in the 1920s and 1930s in eastern Nova Scotia is a good example of a moral economy and an alternative form of social citizenship. It was built on the recognition of a Maritime reality of a “dysfunctional” political and economic system: one that stressed conflict and was oppressive, rather than consensual and integrative. 529 Although anchored in a much different political and economic framework from that of the dominant postwar paradigm – something very close to the Beveridgean paradigm, if his ideals are pushed to their logical conclusion – was made possible in this Maritime community of workers and citizens. Founded on moral reform, the movement sought to secure an “improvement in the quality of human beings themselves.” In the words of Father Moses Coady, one of the movement’s founders: “This is the answer that contains all other answers.” The Adult Education

Movement, which generated the Antigonish workers’ co-operatives, study clubs, credit unions, and the university’s “people’s school,” was “a way of tackling poverty and injustice.” The movement was a way to improve the social, economic and political life of the citizenry: “Our great objective has always been a complete and satisfactory life for the people.” Indeed, Father

Coady spoke of the proletarianization of the people: their apathy, powerlessness, gradual loss of their livelihood, and their need for economic democracy. He spoke of the need to connect education not to assimilation, but to the material conditions of people’s everyday life: “a living wage, debt, medical care, housing and grinding poverty.”530 In other words, he spoke of education as enabling and empowering citizens in constituting their social citizenship.531

529 There was also an attempt to create a “socialist” adult education movement in Saskatchewan between the years 1946 to 1953. For a discussion see David Smith, “Adult Education in a Socialist Society – A Provincial Structure” in idem, First Person Plural: A Community Development Approach to Social Change, edited by Ted Jackson (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), 24-32.

530 M. M. Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny: The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education Through Economic Cooperation (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1939).

531 A similar kind of notion was developed in the Canadian prairies in the ideas of the cooperative movement. The political economist W. A. Mackintosh saw the prairie self-help and cooperative movement as introducing “a solid

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4.4 The Culture of Rights in Canada: Residual to Institutional, Public to Private

In charting the evolution of social citizenship in Canada, Candace Johnson Redden sees two kinds of property rights in Canada: one conducive to social rights, the other not so. She thinks that “the general trend, for approximately the past 600 years, has been toward property- based individual rights (dominium).” However, there also is “an inalienable collective dimension” to social policy in Canada: in particular, its healthcare policy. This collective dimension “has its roots in non-possessive, non-property-based rights, a conception that is in tension with current individualistic rights claiming.”532 Redden discovers two periods of social rights development: the first is from 1940-1982 and corresponds to the historical meaning of right as ius, that is, a non-liberal or collective conception of right not defined by property in a narrow sense. The second period is from 1982-present and “has been toward property-based individual rights (dominium).”

For Redden, sounding very much like Heclo, and others surveyed elsewhere in these pages, social rights are human rights only in a “weaker” sense: as part of particular societies.

Unlike human rights in the “strong” sense, social rights don’t exist “prior to governments or political communities.” Redden notes that these rights reflect “a normative evaluation of what ought to be done.” They involve “doing the right thing.” Here, she thinks, “twentieth-century social rights seem to be an anomaly in that the original normative meaning of right (ius) is manifest in their conception.” According to Redden, until 1980, there was an equilibrium democratic ethic into Canadian life.” As Barry Ferguson notes: “For Mackintosh, greater individual satisfaction, increased commercial efficiency, and remarkable social harmony were the results of the economic revolution triggered by the western Canadian cooperative system.” See his Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O. D. Skelton, W. C. Clark, and W. A. Mackintosh, 1890-1925 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1993), 206-207.

532 Candace Johnson Redden, “Health Care as Citizenship Development,” 109.

162 between these two kinds of right in Canada: reflecting social policy as both a collective and individual entitlement. All this changed, she says, with the advent of the Charter of Rights and

Freedoms. In the Charter, “the possessive (property rights) rights of individuals take precedence over other, non-liberal, conceptions of right.”533 This dissertation disputes this point. It argues that ius forms the very nature of Canada; and cannot be confined to forty years in the twentieth century. Moreover, the Charter is not as individualistic as Redden believes. 534 However, this study agrees with Redden’s overall assessment that today there is an “irreversible fusion of ius with dominium.”

In Canada, unlike the U.S., there is little speculation about what everything means. The overwhelming emphasis is on pragmatic solutions accomplished through elite accommodation.

As one scholar puts it, “Canada works well in practice though poorly in theory.”535 True, even the B.N.A. Act of 1867 – the “founding document” in Canadian politics – lacks political theory, lacks “words.” As John Conway explains, “Implicitly, the act said that all fundamental questions about man as a political animal and about society as a political organism had been answered; if new questions should arise, they would be resolved at the source and not in one of the tributaries.” On political theory, he adds: “our culture, as evidenced by the British North

America Act, implies that in Canada there is no need for any.” 536 In this sense, Frank Underhill’s

1946 comment about the poverty of political theory in Canada, the “seeming incapacity for ideas” is true.537 Robert Fulford also speaks about Canada as “a society [which] refuses to

533 Ibid, 120.

534 See Samuel LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism.

535 Thomas M. J. Bateman, “Religious Freedom, Civic Space, and the Law: The Emerging Debate Between Thin and Deep Liberalism,” paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association ( May 2002).

536 John Conway, “Politics, Culture, and the Writing of Constitutions” in Harvey L. Dyck and Peter Krosby, eds., Empire and Nations: Essays in Honour of Frederic H. Soward (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 8-9.

163 recognize and articulate the meanings that citizenship holds for its citizens.”538 Indeed, according to Fulford, Mackenzie-King “was a success because he did not articulate what he and Canada were doing.”539

There are many examples in the literature that put forward this idea of the lack of ideas in

Canada. Paradoxically, Canadians seem clear about this idea. Canadians are in the habit of thinking about the political world in a sort of “mental haze” according to an editorial in The

Canadian Forum in 1944.540 In apparent agreement, the historian, S.F. Wise, writes that “no connected history of formal thought in Canada is possible.”541 Fulford, likewise, states that

“Canadian history is little more than a series of picturesque and unconnected anecdotes.”542 This tendency towards incoherence in Canada is also reflected in the social sciences. Sociologist

Arthur K. Davis, spoke about “the difficulty, the scarcity, and (we might add) the relative barreness [sic] of efforts by Anglo-Canadian sociologists to see Canadian society as a whole.”543

537 F. H. Underhill, “Some Reflections on the Liberal Tradition in Canada” in Carl Berger, ed., Approaches to Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 32.

538 Robert Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion: The Changing Nature of Canadian Citizenship” in William Kaplan, ed., Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 104.

539 Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 111. Emphasis is in the original.

540 Canadian Forum, “Twenty-five Years of Mr. Mackenzie King” 24 (September 1944), 126.

541 S. F. Wise, “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History” in J. M. Bumsted, ed., Canadian History Before Confederation, 249.

542 Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” op.cit. 116.

543 Arthur K. Davis, “Canadian Society and History as Hinterland Versus Metropolis” in Michael Horn and Ronald Sabourin, eds., Studies in Canadian Social History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 455. Originally published in 1971. Richard Nutbrown criticizes the Canadian political science literature for providing only glimpses and partial accounts of the Canadian polity. Nutbrown cites the titles of work in Canadian politics as evidence of this claim: “Thus we have had ‘images of Confederation’ (Underhill, 1964), ‘images of the state’ (Whitaker, 1977), ‘visions of Canada’ (Simeon, 1988), ‘competing constitutional visions’ (Swinton and Rogerso, 1984), and so forth.” See Richard Nutbrown, “State Images and the Writing of Canadian Political Science” in Alain G. Gagnon and James Bickerton, eds., Canadian Politics: An Introduction to the Discipline (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1990), 71.

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Social rights, as an essential part of modern Canadian identity and nationhood, have been understood – along with other aspects of Canadian society such as public enterprise – by sociologist Myrna Kostash as constituting “public property.”544 Social programs are part of the

Canadian public culture, its history, and its labour. Applying the labour theory of value to the entire country, Kostash asserts that since Canadians have built this public culture collectively and, therefore, being their own labour, and their own past – “this is our past - where we’ve been and what we’ve done there” – Canadians have entitlement, or a “right” to it: “Canadians have built this culture over the course of shared historical experience and citizens may even say they are entitled to it.” Kostash continues: “Just as they are entitled to unions for having labored and to housing for having need of shelter.” Here social rights are derived from history and labour itself, and, as Alan Cairns notes, “identities rooted in history that are attached to rights have a special saliency.”545

On a moral level, then, Canadians have entitlement to the culture and practice of social rights as a whole, which is to say, to the kind of society that is conducive to their development, as well as entitlement to individual social rights per se. Being “public” in this sense is one reason why social rights should not be seen as existing in the “private” realm. In other words,

Canadians have a right to their social rights over and above the liberal individualist interpretation of social rights as a safety net, precisely because social rights are part of their collective identity and their community. As part of the Canadian cultural “frame,” these values reveal, as Kostash

544 Myrna Kostash, “Fighting for our Public Culture,” Toronto Star, November 30, 1993. Actually the welfare state and social provision have long been understood as public property, or at least as workingmen’s property, as outlined by Walter Rauschenbusch.: “Social insurance against industrial accident, occupational disease, and old age would act as a property right, and would save workingmen from dropping into the bottomless pit of poverty and from the constant fear of it.” See his Christianizing the Social Order (New York: The Macmillan co., 1919), 348.

545 Alan C. Cairns, “Empire, Globalization, and the Rise and Fall of Diversity” in Alan Cairns et al, eds., Citizenship, Diversity, and Pluralism: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1999), 46.

165 states, “that we wish to be each other’s neighbour and keeper, in contact with each other in a common homeland.”547 Indeed, as one British participant in an empirical study on the rights of citizenship, including social citizenship, declared, rights are “a way of society constructing itself.”548 This is welfare in its “thick” form: in Canada, social rights obviously constitute Peter

Clarkes’s “moral reform” because they are so deeply internalized.

The explanation in the literature for the atheoretical character of Canadian political culture is the notion that Canada has borrowed ideas from elsewhere: principally from its ex-colonizers,

France and Britain, and its neo-colonizer, the United States. Part of the incoherence of the

Canadian identity is that Canadians do not pay attention to who they were in their past. So they have difficulty figuring out who they are in their present since, as H. G. Gadamer points out,

“historical consciousness is a mode of self-consciousness.”549 Indeed, according to Fulford,

“Newcomers to Canada find themselves in a curiously pastless country where the oldest writers anyone quotes were living ten years ago and the political parties seem rarely even to mention traditions that stretch back farther than the 1960s.”550 Saul makes a similar observation on the debates over the 1995 Quebec referendum: “our future was debated and decided as if we had no past.”551 But Canadians, of course, do have a very profound past, as do all nations.

Insofar as deeper conceptions of social right depend on a self-conscious citizenship for their realization, it might appear that their lack of identity would pose a real problem for social

547 Kotash, op.cit.

548 Pamela Johnston Conover, Ivor M. Crewe, and Donald D. Searing, “The Nature of Citizenship in the United States and Great Britain: Empirical Comments on Theoretical Themes,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 53, Nos.3, August 1991, 812.

549 H. G. Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 121. Emphasis in the original.

550 Robert Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 116.

551 Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Viking, 1997), 11.

166 citizenship in Canada. Yet, as many Canadian political philosophers point out, “the most lively debates on citizenship are in fact Canadian debates.” Many Americans and Europeans are of this opinion as well. Indeed, “some of whom even refer to a ‘Canadian School’ of political philosophy.”552 Canadian political theory is less abstract than in other nations since the very existence of the political community in Canada is threatened due to a “more or less permanent constitutional crisis.” 553 Despite the seriousness of Canada’s problems with national unity, this message is a positive one. Canadian political thought is more connected to the citizenry, to the actual reality of people’s lives: where and how they live, and what they think about.

Though there is something disturbing about a country not able to define its most basic identities, this aspect to Canada, in other ways, is a strength. In always rethinking its foundations,

Canada is arguably more open and tolerant than other countries. This attribute is important for democracy and social justice. Canadians have no metaphysics of politics, Conway writes, and

“our history has not conditioned us to vest any one political doctrine with universality.”554 So although the country may be in disarray, this hybrid conception of rights and politics in Canada, or this “incomplete nation,” is more positive than negative: Canada’s inarticulate native space is an asset. As Hershel Hardin perceptively points out, “Canadians do not assert their nationalism by looking for it, as the historian claims. They assert it by not finding it.”555

However, since citizenship must be conceived within a society, it is unsatisfactory to leave it completely unframed as Martin Lipset, Richard Gwyn, Gad Horowitz, and others who

552 Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman, “Introduction” in idem., eds., Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1.

553 Ibid., 2-3.

554 John Conway, “What is Canada?”

555 Herschel Hardin, A Nation Unaware: The Canadian Economic Culture (Vancouver: J.J. Douglas Ltd, 1974), 26.

167 uncritically accept the idea of absence and silence in Canada do. One of the tasks of political theory is to explore what this social space in Canada – even though vague and inarticulated – might look like. In other words, speaking of absence in Canadian history and politics is not the end point of the analysis, summing up what is not there, but rather the starting point. Canadians need to investigate ways to think about the absence in Canada.556 As Dennis Lee states, in reflecting on his own experience in approaching Canada, “perhaps – and here was the breakthrough – perhaps our job was not to fake a space of our own and write it up, but rather to find words for our space-lessness. Perhaps that was home.”557 Moreover, if there really is a

‘Canadian School’ of political philosophy, admired around the world, then “finding words for our spacelessness” is exactly what these political theorists in Canada are doing and breaking new ground as a result.

4.5 Narrow Routes to the Welfare State in Canada

A review of the literature reveals that the welfare state was built on the following values inherent in the concept of equality: besides inclusiveness, accessibility and equity (Ismael), community (Titmuss), democracy (Deakin), duty (Peter Smith), mutual support and caring and social security (Beveridge, Marsh, Banting), social justice (J. M. Bumsted), dignity, and a moral

556 As is quite evident, and as previous chapters have pointed out, a disembodied sense of social right is characteristic of liberal thought. As John O'Neill puts it, “the political subject of liberal theory is disembodied, dispassionate, defamilied, and degendered as a precondition for exercising the political virtues of generalization and impartiality that would otherwise be contaminated by the particularities and affections of an embodied subject whose social bonds both delimit and enable political conduct.” See his The Missing Child in Liberal Theory: Toward a Covenant Theory of Family, Community, Welfare, and the Civic State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 41.

557 Dennis Lee, 163: He writes: “This dawned on me gradually. Instead of pushing against the grain of an external, uncharged language, perhaps we should finally come to writing with that grain.” An example of finding words for this spacelessness that Lee speaks about, other than recent Canadian political theory, might be Jane Jenson's concept of “permeable fordism.”

168 consensus. In an interesting trinity, Erik Allardt sees the welfare state consisting of three components: being (identity), having (security), and loving (solidarity).

Barry Ferguson emphasizes a lacuna in Canadian history and political science when it comes to social reform. In his case, it is the political narrative in Canada which ignores the

Canadian version of the New Liberalism prevalent in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth, which he finds in the work of four Canadian political economists from Queen’s: W. A. Mackintosh, Adam Shortt, Clifford Clark and Oscar Skelton.

Ferguson argues that C. B. Macpherson’s model of developmental liberalism does indeed find a place in Canada. This new democratic liberalism had a clear view of a common good and the value of community in the form of a positive welfare state. Full employment, for example, “was justified by tenets of social and political rights rather than purely economic efficiency” but this view has been under-acknowledged in Canadian history and political science:

Remarkably, Canadian historians and political scientists have virtually ignored the possibility that there was any Canadian participation in the democratic as opposed to the liberal version of liberal-democratic thought. If the ideas of Queen's political economists can be reintegrated into Canadian intellectual and political history, then the refusal to consider the other stream of liberal democratic thought in Canada will no longer be viable. 558

Ferguson blames the use of traditional “liberal, conservative, and social democrat” categories in

Canadian history and political theory for obscuring the more subtle New Liberal dimension.

“These categories obscure rather than clarify.” Citing various authors, he explains that social rights have either been claimed by the socialist or the conservative traditions, but not by a reformist liberal tradition.

From a different perspective, Jane Jenson, in Canada, presents a similarly disembodied treatment of social right historically in the Canadian version of the Fordist and Keynesian postwar welfare state. In analyzing the unique political and economic aspects of the Canadian

558 Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O. D. Skelton, W.C. Clark, and W. A. Mackintosh, 1890-1925 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 238 and 240.

169 welfare state, with its emphasis on the specifically Canadian features of Fordism, such as the crisis in Canadian federal-provincial relations and disputes over jurisdiction in the 1930s brought on by the Great Depression, Jenson minimizes the political aspects to the Canadian Fordist compromise between capital and labour, and thus contributes to the myth of classlessness and the lack of ideology in Canada.

Indeed, by insisting that the Canadian paradigm was solely a result of social policy from above, worked out by intra-bureaucratic consultation and a discourse of national identities and the institutions of federalism563 rather than class, the question of the origins and history of social right is obscured. Admittedly, the Fordist welfare state in Canada was “state-centric” and was built using a discourse of nation-building; also, it was justified on the basis of economic policy rather than class and distributive justice.564 However, this does not mean that the political aspects of it were absent in the political culture, as Jenson herself acknowledges:

It was through political struggle that the new arrangements were given form and legitimated, whether via organized compromises between capital and labor or via more private collective deals which managed conflict in particular workplaces or industrial sectors. Moreover, macro-economic manipulations plus state revenues and expenditures altered the general market framework with which private industry operated. In these ways, politics was essential to the whole set of relations. 565

563 The way politics has been organized in Canada is along federal-provincial lines, and social policy is deeply enmeshed within its structure. So, Jenson is right to the extent that federalism does cause a depoliticization in Canada, and political issues are hidden to some extent. As Keith Banting notes, it is the provincial premiers in Canada, rather than the organized left, who often take on leadership roles in matters of social policy. “[I]n Canada,” he writes, “the most important and effective opponents of retrenchment in the federal Unemployment Insurance program are provincial premiers, not the leaders of organized labour.” Furthermore, federal cabinets reflect all regions in Canada, including the poorer ones, thus, “The federal dimension precludes a neat polarization of the politics of social policy along the axis of class alone.” See his “Neoconservatism in an Open Economy: The Social Role of the Canadian State,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 13, Nos. 2, 1992, 154. This is the same argument that was made by John Porter in The Vertical Mosaic in 1965. It is also the same argument on the party system by Janine Brodie and Jane Jenson in Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada (Toronto: Methuen, 1980).

564 David A. Wolfe, “The Rise and Demise of the Keynesian Era in Canada: Economic Policy, 1930-1982,” in Michael S. Cross and Gregory S. Kealey, Modern Canada: 1930s-1980s (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), 46-78

565 Jane Jenson, “ ‘Different’ but not ‘exceptional’: Canada’s Permeable Fordism,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 26 (1), 1989

170

Only in the short perspective can it be said, as Jenson does, that: “The Marsh Report had practically no indigenous political roots or connections in Canada, although it was clearly the result of much academic work on the subject.”566 To be sure, the Marsh Report was the result of much academic work, but this intellectual political work came from somewhere, and it resonated with the Canadian people, so it must have had some sort of a contemporary and historical base in

Canada.567 It simply makes no sense to speak of a “political compromise” between capital and labour, in whatever political form – in this case, Fordist politics through federalism – if distributive and class issues are absent altogether.

It is clear that state intervention was understood “not in the name of some collective whole but for the sake of the potential of the individual on whose behalf the intervention was taking place.”568 Doug Owram sees this paradigm as introducing “a new variety of liberalism into

Canadian political thought.” To some extent, this new paradigm replaced both idealism and the

Social Gospel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, R.M. MacIver changed the parameters of this debate by publishing The Modern State in 1926. This book viewed the role of the state from the perspective of the social scientist. In MacIver’s understanding, the state and society were not metaphysical entities, as they had been in the idealist and religious thought of the previous age. For MacIver, “neither could, in themselves, become the ‘end’ of public policy.”569 Rather, public policy was understood instrumentally. As

566 Ibid., 82.

567 Watts, “The Forgotten Ideological Ancestry” See also Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms: From Consent to Coercion Revisited (Toronto: Garamound Press, 1988), 19

568 Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 116-117.

569 Ibid, 117.

171

Owram notes, “there was … only one possible reason for the state to exist – the service of its individual citizens.”570

This new way of thinking informed policy debates in the Keynesian era, and was what

Arthur Lower, C. E. Silcox and other Conservative thinkers of the period criticized. For Silcox,

Mackenzie-King’s 1944 Family Allowances Act was “both ill-advised and unconstitutional.” In heavily moral tones, Silcox speaks of the Family Allowance Act as providing for “the imprudent, the inefficient, the careless and the maleducated.”571 The new state, in his account, far from encouraging “socialized” individualism, enabled “selfish” individualism.572 As such, the Act constituted “a radical departure from public policy” in the Canadian past.

There was also a narrowing in the way political discourse was used. For example, a narrowing occurred in the social ideology of the CCF. As the labour historian, Ian McKay, explains, the radical leaders of the CCF, as a result of their own discourse, were turned into

“national figures” rather than staying “mere leftists.”573 He goes on to say that this tendency

“marginalized an older language of class struggle and emphasized a new language of national management and consolidation.”574 As McKay points out, the nationalist discourse in Canadian

570 Ibid, 118.

571 Claris Edwin Silcox, “Are Family Allowances Unconstitutional?” Saturday Night, October 7, 1944, 11. Given this vituperation, it is hard to believe that Silcox was at one time Secretary of the Social Service Council of Canada as well as being a Church leader.

572 Nancy Christie, “‘Look out for Leviathan’: The Search for a Conservative Modernist Consensus” in idem and Michael Gauvreau eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940-1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2003), 63-94.

573 Ian McKay, “For a New Kind of History: A Reconnaissance of 100 Years of Canadian Socialism,” Labour/Le Travail, 46, Fall, 2000, 96.

574 Ibid, 98.

172 socialism “was in the very title: Make This Your Canada.” Here, “‘nation’ more than ‘class’ is the key to its architecture.”575

Narrowing is also evident in the neo-liberal interpretation of “the social” in Canada. As

Siltanen points out, neo-liberalism confines the social to “social programs.” Rather than seeing the social as multidimensional, as a realm that implicates all policy areas, including the market, it is tightly circumscribed. This distinguishes it from the Keynesian paradigm. As the 1945 White

Paper on Employment and Income spelled out, the Keynesian welfare state in Canada had ambitious objectives. By manipulating fiscal policy, it was felt that “the state should not only succor the unemployed, but that it should cure unemployment; that it should strive to eradicate the disease, as well as assisting its victims.”576 This policy of full employment was attempted through encouragement of aggregate demand and, as such, “represented a revolutionary of extension of the economic role of the state.” 577

As far as social policy retrenchment is concerned, 1995 was the “the watershed year.” In this year alone, the Canada Assistance Plan and Established Program Financing were replaced by the Canada Health and Social Transfer. Unemployment Insurance was replaced by Employment

Insurance. Old Age Pensions became means-tested, and the Department of Health and Welfare was dismantled.578 These developments confirm the idea that social citizenship has enjoyed an elevated status not consistent with the reality in Canada. “Even in 1991, before the UI program was slashed,” one author writes, “Canada ranked sixteenth out of nineteen OECD countries in

575 Ibid, 104.

576 H. Scott Gordon, “A Twenty Year Perspective: Some Reflections on the Keynesian Revolution in Canada” in S. F. Kaliski, ed., Canadian Economic Policy Since the War: A series of six public lectures in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the “White Paper” on Employment and Income of 1945 (Ottawa: The Canadian Trade Committee, 1965), 25.

577 Ibid, 26.

578 White, “Social Policy and Solidarity,” 61.

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‘generosity,’” adding that: “the program now ranks with Japan’s as the stingiest of any OECD country, with 46 percent of the unemployed eligible for benefits, below that of the U.S.”579

These comments are confirmed by Harold Wilensky’s study of Rich Democracies. On childcare,

Canada still ranks below the United States, since Canada has “virtually no public day care and little or no attention to [childcare] policy.”580

Nevertheless, social legislation as public property remains a lasting legacy of the welfare state in Canada. To some extent, the twentieth century welfare state redefined property.

Elements of the welfare state were perhaps more consciously assembled than earlier conceptions of public property that had existed. So the relationship between property and labour changed, but perhaps not as extensively as Castel says. As this dissertation points out, there are many examples in history of social property. So it is perhaps not as “profoundly innovative” as he would like individuals to believe. It is perhaps not “one of the most decisive achievements of the modernity to which it is indebted.” 581 True, “social security arises from a kind of transfer of property through the mediation of labor and under the aegis of the state.” 582 However, this was also the aim and practice well before the welfare state even existed.

579 Murray Dobbin, The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen: Canada and Democracy in the Age of Globalization (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2003), 230.

580 Harold L. Wilensky, Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and Performance (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 213 and 277 respectively. Emphases added.

581 Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question. Translated and edited by Richard Boyd. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003), xxiii. This is the English version of Castel’s Metamorphoses de la question social, originally published in 1995, 248.

582 Ibid, 274. Emphasis in original.

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4.6 Cracks in the Welfare Face of Canada

Although the liberal paradigm is important in that it provides a partial explanation of the development of social rights in Canada, and elsewhere, it is, on the whole, an obstacle to the study of social right since the liberal paradigm presents overwhelmingly one version of social citizenship to the detriment of possible alternative conceptions. More importantly, it obscures the analysis of the nature and function of social rights historically. There are many social citizenships in Canada. Certainly various provincial social citizenships affect the quality of life across the country. Daycare and fertility treatments in Quebec and pharmacare in Manitoba are examples of uniquely provincial social programs that make a difference to those affected. Inside a neoliberal universe, however, the biggest caveat, by far, is that government commitment to social spending in Canada has shown a downhill slide in recent years. This slide has been so profound that, in addition to the collapse of the middle class, Armine Yalnizyan has concluded that Canada is falling back into a “neo-gilded age” returning to the inequality of the 1920s.583

What is most disturbing are comments in the social policy literature, voiced but not necessarily embraced, that, as a result of globalization and world-wide economic restraint, the U.S. welfare state has moved from “laggard to vanguard.”584 The fact that a law-abiding American citizen would actually rob a bank to secure health care in jail should give pause to all concerning the

583 Armine Yalnizyan, The Rise of Canada’s Richest 1% (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), December 2010. There is evidence, however, that Canada has a higher rate of mobility and more opportunities for the poorest children than does the U.S. whereas in the U.S., as Barrie McKenna puts it, “inequality is inherited, much like hair and eye colour.” See “The American dream lives on – in Canada,” Globe and Mail, January 16, 2012, B1.

584 For a discussion see John Clarke, Changing Welfare Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy (London: Sage, 2004), 100-105.

175 condition of the U.S. welfare state and its vanguard status.585 Also, somewhat troublesome, is the new “individualization literature” which encourages “living a life of one’s own.” Associated with Ulrich Beck and “the risk society,” it is a politics of late modernity where a “new definition of the political” in a post-class, post-status world is prevalent and involves accepting that individuals must “manage” their own fate. It goes like this: It’s “your own life – your own failure.” 586 What this may mean for social rights, the common good, the reformist project, the commons in general, and so on, seems problematic to the extreme, though defenders will say that this literature is simply being realistic.

The residual character of social right in Canada, however, should not be seen as a surprise.

What is a surprise is the depth of the cultural myth that proclaims Canada to be more of a welfare state than it actually is, which leads to questioning the validity of the liberal residualist model as applied to Canada. Indeed, Canada’s welfare state is not a “pure” liberal type. The Canadian welfare state developed out of a discourse on the political left as well as the Tory right.587

Nevertheless, concerning the first factor, the history of social development in Canada, Esping-

Andersen's comparative research on political economy regimes reveals that, on many

585 “U.S. Man Robs Bank to Get Health Care: Asks for Just One Dollar,” National Post, June 23, 2011, A2. The first paragraph in this news piece reads as follows: “A U.S. man suffering from arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome and ruptured spinal discs robbed a bank for one dollar so he could get free health care in prison.”

586 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, 24.

587 There is a huge literature on this subject. See Louis Hartz, ed., The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964); Gad Horowitz, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1966, Vol. 32, No.2, 143-171; Seymour Martin Lipset, “Historical traditions and national characteristics: a comparative analysis of Canada and the United States,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 1986, 113-155; Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995); Bruce Smardon, “The Federal Welfare State and the Politics of Retrenchment in Canada” Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 26, No.2, Summer 1991, 122-141; and, finally, Antonia Maioni, “The Canadian Welfare State at Century’s End,” International Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 16, Fall 1997.

176 dimensions, Canada is historically a “liberal” welfare state where “social rights are contained.”588

And, concerning the second factor, the North American free trade economy, “the United States,” as Dennis Guest puts it, is “the ‘welfare state laggard’ among advanced industrialized nations,” adding: “and, many would say, has the dysfunctional society to prove it.”589 The third factor, globalization, invites serious work on the question of social rights not only within countries but also between countries. Finally, attempts at global social citizenship, such as social rights and workers’ rights tied to trade deals, or the creation of international social charters, may be undermined by the fourth factor, the powerful anti-welfare and anti-worker ideology of economic neoliberalism and globalization.

4.7 Liberalism in Canada: Complex, Compromised, Social Democratic

One assumption among Canadian scholars is that social policy is not inherently progressive. This is why clarity between concepts and an analysis of their context is so important. The lack of clarity, however, is evident in a number of Canadian authors. Some speak uncritically of social citizenship, when they should perhaps, in this context, be speaking only of social policy as occurring in the Canadian past.590 To be sure, social citizenship conjures up ideas of popular struggle, class compromise, and social justice, ideas which are not necessarily associated with the term social policy. Yet, social solidarity is one by-product of the

588 Gosta Esping-Andersen, “The Three Political Economies of the Welfare State,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 26, no. 1, 1989, 10-36. See also David Wolfe, “The State in Comparative Perspective” in ibid, 95-126.

589 Dennis Guest, op cit., vix.

590 See, for example, Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin, “New Routes to Social Cohesion?” and Janine Brodie, “Citizenship and Solidarity: Reflections on the Canadian Way,” Citizenship Studies, v. 6 Nos. 4, 2002, 377-394.

177 development of a welfare state. In Canada, as Janine Brodie points out, “a new-found social solidarity and attachment to a particular vision of Canadian society was constructed out of the turbulence of the Great Depression and the Second World War.”591 In this sense, she says, social policies are “simultaneously ‘individualizing and collectivizing’ as well as both a governing strategy and a cultural form.”592 Indeed, in the postwar paradigm, there was the unanimous sense that the collectivity would and should bear the responsibility for individual autonomy and well- being.

Some have suggested, however, that Canada’s social citizenship in the postwar welfare state was never an objective of social policy. Janet Siltanen states: “the Canadian welfare state would seem to have been spectacularly unsuccessful in realizing any alleged commitments to the social rights of citizenship.”593 In questioning the link between social policy and social citizenship, Siltanen raises the possibility that, in Canada, there may not be a sharp decline from

“a golden age” of social citizenship, as there is in other countries, because Canada historically never experienced a golden age. Citing the haphazard development of social rights in Canada – a fact widely acknowledged in the literature – she maintains that in Canada’s past, social policies have not been defined in terms of social rights and social citizenship. In fact, she notes that Allan

Moscovitch’s 1991 analysis of social rights in Canada “concludes that only family allowances came close to Marshall’s criteria.”594

591 Brodie, “Citizenship and Solidarity: Reflections on the Canadian Way,” Citizenship Studies, 6 (2002), 378.

592 Ibid.

593 Siltanen, 399.

594 Allan Moscovitch, “Citizenship, Social Rights, and Canadian Social Welfare,” Canadian Review of Social Policy, 28, Fall 1991, 28-44.

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Notwithstanding Esping-Andersen’s comparative approach, and his admonishment to study the histories of welfare states in order to explain their variability, Siltanen thinks Esping-

Andersen “tends to essentialize the presence of social rights and de-historicize the place of the social rights of citizenship in the development of welfare regimes within individual nations.”595

Her argument is that in defining social citizenship as de-commodification, and in generalizing it across nations, other factors relevant to social policy may be overlooked such as their non- development in some sectors in Canada. In its place, Siltanen wants a careful analysis of the nature of social citizenship within a particular country: a “context-specific” account of social rights and social policy. In probing the Canadian context, she finds that, by almost all accounts,

Canadian social policies were not conceived at the level of principle, but rather as state-driven and opportunistic attempts to push forward other agendas such as nation-building and federalism.596

What can be said of these arguments? First, it is difficult to sort out causal distinctions since they are so closely entwined: nation-building, political identity, and social rights all overlap. Hence “opportunistic” may not be the right word to use to describe Canadian social development. The determinants of social policy are hard to sort out: one scholar notes of the

United States: “Politics, policies, political change, and political support all go hand in hand.”597

It is hard to know which one factor is more dominant; moreover, does it matter? Nonetheless,

Siltanen’s comments support what others have said about Canadian social policy. Canadian social policy does seem to be geared towards furthering nationhood and economic policy, but

595 Siltanen, “Paradise Paved?” 404.

596 Certainly electoral success is a factor here as well.

597 Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 186.

179 only at a superficial level, so it can be said that specific programmatic and/or theoretical goals were not a priority. “The story of a ‘Keynesianism welfare state’ emerging out of the depression and war experiences has often been told and can easily be exaggerated.” In Canada, “reluctant, ad hoc, and decentralized, state regulation did not suddenly become avowed, systematic and centralized.”598

It was bureaucratic Keynesianism, not social and political Keynesianism, that prevailed in Canada.599 “The report prepared in Canada that drew inspiration from the Beveridge Report

(the 1943 Report on Social Security for Canada by Leonard Marsh) was never presented to

Parliament, nor were its recommendations ever adopted.”600 Furthermore, constitutional developments in Canada, such as The Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, and the

Charlottetown Accord in 1992, failed to entrench social rights claims. For these reasons,

Siltanen insists that, to understand social policy, the trajectories of social rights and social legislation must be analyzed separately. Despite the difficulty of determining causal factors in welfare state development, it seems true that the only effective way to evaluate policy outcomes is according to specific criteria. The emphasis on outcomes gives the distinction between social right and social policy some real substance. Despite the fact that there is nothing inherently

598 Alain Noel, Gerard Boismenu and Lizette Jalbert, “The Political Foundations of State Regulations in Canada” in Jane Jenson, Rianne Mahon and Manfred Bienefeld, eds., Production, Space, Identity: Political Economy Faces the 21st Century (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1993), 176.

599 David A. Wolfe, “The Rise and Demise of the Keynesian Era in Canada: Economic Policy, 1930-1982” in Michael S. Cross and Gregory S. Kealey eds., Modern Canada: 1930s-1980s, Readings in the Social History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984); Neil Bradford, “The Policy Influence of Economic Ideas: Interests, Institutions and Innovation in Canada” in Mike Burke, Colin Moorers and John Shields eds., Restructuring and Resistance: Canadian Public Policy in an Age of Global Capitalism (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2000), 50- 79.

600 Siltanen, “Paradise Paved?” 401. Canada may not have debated Marsh’s blueprint for the Canadian welfare state in parliament, but interestingly, “Canada may be the only country that undertook such policies after a debate explicitly informed by Keynes’s writings,” according to Bradley W. Bateman, “The end of Keynes and philosophy?” in Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara, eds., The Philosophy of Keynes’s Economics: Probability, uncertainty and convention (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 83.

180 equality-enhancing in either social policy or liberal social rights, a re-evaluation of the relationship between them can help identify the conditions under which they have come together in ways “favourable to equality-enhancing, rights-based policy development.”601 Siltanen’s argument rests on the idea that social citizenship does not “automatically” exist at the “highest” level of rights development. She replaces it with the more modest claim that sometimes social right and social policy come together in beneficial ways.

Siltanen’s comments on social citizenship in Canada are a sign that some critical thinking about this term is going on. Indeed, her work is important for its understanding of the limitations of the postwar paradigm since she punctures some widely held myths. She explains that “the market does not represent the absence of the social. Rather, market claims promote a particular vision of the social.”602 Thus the form the social takes is always open to contestation and debate.

In other words, the social is politicized and is broader than the social programs of the welfare state. In recognizing this fact, a fundamental objection to the separation of the economic and political realms in contemporary governance is raised “which consider[s] the primary distribution of resources as off-limits.”603 “Social citizenship rights must move beyond redistribution and challenge primary distribution.”604 Siltanen’s analysis parallels other studies of welfare in Canada. Pointing to conflicting interpretations of the Canadian welfare state, and taking particular aim at the comparative political economy literature, Gregg M. Olsen suggests that Canada is actually misclassified as a liberal welfare state. In other words, there may be nothing, or much, wrong with the welfare state in Canada, but the theories that categorize it do

601 Siltanen, 404. Emphasis is in the original.

602 Siltanen, 408. Emphasis added in both cases.

603 Ibid, 407. Emphasis in original.

604 Ibid.

181 not adequately capture it. For example, Olsen claims that Canada is liberal on “family policy,” but social democratic on “health care;” yet this is not reflected in Esping-Andersen’s interpretation of Canada as a “liberal welfare state.”

As a result of Olsen’s analysis, the polarity between the two interpretations of the welfare state in Canada – some individuals see it as generous, others see it as parsimonious – is more understandable. Olsen’s thinking also explains the contradiction between the view of the welfare state expressed by the majority of the population in Canada which is highly favourable and the view expressed by policy experts which is much more measured. According to Olsen, by ignoring how policy is delivered in Canada, and by failing to include the social services and administrative aspect of the welfare state such as health care, education, and housing in the criteria for evaluation, Esping-Andersen’s comparative “welfare worlds” approach is less accurate than it could be.605

There are many discontinuities in Canada that are important to social citizenship. The disjunction between a collaborative federal government and liberal individualism is a case in point. Federalism protects communities and promotes regional equality, and mutual aid between provinces, whereas liberalism protects individuals.606 Even though this dichotomy is a false one, since individual rights also serve social ends, these concepts still describe the liberal/ conservative opposition which is said to be the master narrative in Canada.607 This is the dialectic between a pluralist, individualist, “free-enterprise culture” and a collectivist, communitarian

605 Gregg M. Olsen, “Locating the Canadian welfare state: Family policy and health care in Canada, Sweden, and the United States, Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 19, nos. 1, Winter 1994, 1-20. See also Carolyn Tuohy, “Social Policy: Two Worlds” in Michael M. Atkinson, ed., Governing Canada: Institutions and Public Policy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 275-305.

606 Donald G. Lenihan, Gordon Robertson, and Roger Tasse, Canada: Reclaiming the Middle Ground (Montreal: The Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1994), 35.

607 Robin Mathews, Canadian Identity: Major Forces Shaping the Life of a People (Ottawa: Steel Rail Publishing, 1988), 6.

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“public-enterprise culture.”608 In reality, of course, both are implicated in each other. Thus

Robert Vipond speaks about “two visions of Canada produced, bound inextricably together, and held in tension by our history.”609

Pierre Trudeau’s pan-Canadian vision based on individual rights doesn’t square with the

Canadian experience – even his Canadian experience. Indeed, community is evident in his cherished Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: the most liberal document the country has.

There is the much discussed section 33, or notwithstanding clause, for example, which gives legislatures in Canada the legal authority to override individual rights for a renewable period of up to five years. To be sure, though much of the language in The Charter is liberal, the Canadian experience is otherwise. So, as a result of pressure from the provinces, even individual rights must be interpreted in a framework of membership and belonging.610

Indeed, the Charter “reflects continuity and change in Canada’s political tradition.” “It is

‘congealed politics’ (geronnene Politik),” according to Martin Thunert, “since its content is an expression of the political conflicts which determined its making.”611 As noted above, this means not only that the interests of the federal government in the form of individual rights are realized, but also that the autonomy of the provinces and the British parliamentary system is safeguarded.

The provinces and the national parliament were protected in sections 1 and 33, and the collective rights of native people, women, multicultural groups, and so on, were protected in section 15.

608 The terms are from Herschel Hardin, A Nation Unaware (Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1974) and are analyzed by Ian Angus in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 116.

609 Robert C. Vipond, “The Provincial Rights Movement: Tensions Between Liberty and Community in Legal Liberalism” in Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995), 256.

610 Samuel V. La Selva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, op. cit.76.

611 Martin Thunert, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Political Tradition of Canada: A Changing Concept of Political Community?” Canadian Issues 12 (1990), 58.

183

By upholding group rights, or the rights of minorities and the rights of Parliament, as well as the provinces, rights talk in Canada assumes the existence of communities. It is only after, that it proclaims the place of individual rights. The Charter, then, because of its ambiguity goes some distance in protecting both liberty and community.

Despite some positive aspects, according to legal experts, from a social citizenship perspective, The Charter does not go far enough. As Joel Bakan and David Schniderman point out, the exclusion of social rights from the constitution itself – even if they are of dubious value

– is “tantamount to the exclusion of poor and disempowered people themselves; and this, in turn, denies them effective citizenship.”612 Leaving aside the question of the merits or demerits of social rights, the lack of a solid legal framework that would put them in place sends a definite message to the citizenry. In this sense, as one observer points out, The Charter reflects “an individualistic turn in Canadian rights culture.” Accordingly, “it represents a departure from, and therefore an indirect attack on the normative conception of right that defines social rights. ‘What ought to be done (by society, for society)?’ is replaced with ‘What constitutes an illegal infringement on the moral space of an individual?’”613 So what was constitutionalized in Canada in terms of social rights was only their vulnerability and fragility. As Christine Sypnowich says,

The Charter “gives legal expression to the weakened status of the welfare state in Canada.”614

612 Joel Bakan and David Schneiderman, “Introduction” in Ibid., 8. See also David Wolfe, “Social policy issues absent in constitutional debate,” Perception (Nov-Dec 1980), 13-15. For criticism of social rights, see Joel Bakan, “What's Wrong with Social Rights?” in idem. and David Schneiderman, eds., Social Justice and the Constitution: Perspectives on a Social Union for Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992), 85-99.

613 Candace Johnson Redden, “Health Care as Citizenship Development: Examining Social Rights and Entitlement,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 35 (March 2002), 120.

614 Christine Sypnowich, “Constitutional Change and the Malaise of the Canadian Welfare State,” paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association (Spring 1984).

184

This dissertation on social citizenship answers questions raised at the beginning of this study. How do Canadians fare generally vis-a-vis social citizenship? History shows that the backdrop in Canada and the U.S. against which attempts at social citizenship developed, show some similarities. Both societies moved from competitive to monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century and witnessed antagonism and conflict over this form of capitalism. Both societies used the strike and unions to force collective bargaining. Much of the thinking on social rights in both countries stems from religion. In many ways, social legislation was ad hoc, and developed arbitrarily in both countries. Race was a factor in both countries, though less so in

Canada.

This thesis has assessed the validity of T. H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship rights and has alluded to Karl Polanyi’s framework as these apply to Canada. The results reveal that Canada affirms much of Marshall’s typology, but also raises questions about it. In Canada, civil and political rights did indeed come first: before social reform, social regulation, social science, and social spending. In other words, civil and political rights were central to the development of social rights.615 Securing these civil and political rights meant confronting the Family Compact and fighting corruption – over land and other kinds of monopolies. It also meant doing away with oppressive laws forbidding political and civil association, trade union activity, and the removal of corrupt practices such as plural voting. 616 It meant instituting the secret ballot and getting rid of patronage in the Liberal and Tory party machines so that civil service reform could

615 Ann Shola Orloff, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940 (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 240-268.

616 As Norman Ward points out, the 1885 suffrage was based on property, but “involved, as a corollary, plural voting.” The unequal franchise meant not only that non-residents who held property could vote – unlike tenants, occupants, and wage-earning voters where a strict adherence to residence was required – but also that landowners who held property in several constituencies had extra votes in those other constituencies. See Norman Ward, The Canadian House of Commons Representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 220-221.

185 finally be realized, and social science could develop. It also meant making citizenship safe for the wealthy by educating the masses before extending the franchise to enable the enlarged electorate to take part in society.

The relationship between rights is important because they are never one dimensional.

They never move in just one direction. Once workers in the Canadas of the mid-nineteenth century began to secure stable employment and settle down into family life (stable employment being a social as well as a civil right), they behaved more like citizens, even asking probing critical political questions, as Clare Pentland notes: “As a stable resident and family man, the worker took on some characteristics of a citizen. Eventually he might think to ask why the town authorities were always drawn from among the rich, why they had legislated in their own interest, and why justice was administered so unequally as between rich and poor.” 617 In

Canada, the political and social dimensions of right developed simultaneously. In other words, though political and civil rights led to the development of social rights, it is equally true that citizenship is always “social before it is civil and political.” 618

Canada has the right infrastructure for the kind of social citizenship that the twenty-first century requires. The parliamentary system itself consists of collaboration, consultation, cooperation, coalition, community.619 Canadian federalism practices “constant negotiation” which encourages a balance between individuals and communities. Federal arrangements have also maintained a rough parity across provincial borders with respect to social programs and health care. In this sense, Canada has indeed provided fraternity. Moreover, the country is founded on

617 Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada 1650-1850 (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981), 186.

618 Engin F. Isin, “Conclusion: The Socius of Citizenship” in idem, ed., Recasting the Social in Citizenship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2008), 281-286.

619 Constance MacRae-Buchanan, “The Coalition Frame of Mind in National Politics,” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law, Vol.4, No. 3, December 2010, 463-478.

186 aboriginality and diversity. As John Ralston Saul points out, there is the Metis circle, and the

Cree sense of Justice meaning “talking.” One way to deepen the Canadian understanding of itself, then, is to delve more deeply into the aboriginal heritage that Canada sits on. This is the

“metis mindset” of “continuous equilibrium, shared interests and shared welfare” as Saul describes it, which forms the basis of the country. To further support this idea, Jennifer Nedelsky and Craig Scott advocated seeing social rights “as sites of dialogue,” which they define as

“metaphorical forums in which members of society converse about different claims regarding basic values and relationships” According to them, “The metaphor of dialogue offers an understanding of rights which emphasizes their dynamic as opposed to static nature.” .620 If implemented, this one significant change could, on its own, reformulate the relationship between civil and social rights, something which is called for in the social rights literature. This Canadian way of thinking about the need for ongoing negotiations, caused in part by the geopolitics of being on the margins of a great power, plus the diversity of many waves of immigrants, has made Canada a particularly enlightened country, or, in McMurtry’s terms, a “civil commons within.” In other words, Canadians are good at thinking publically: regardless of sphere.

620 Jennifer Nedelsky and Craig Scott, “Constitutional Dialogue” in Joel Bakan and David Schneiderman eds., Social Justice and the Constitution: Perspectives on a Social Union for Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992), 59-83. See also Patricia Hewitt, “Social justice in a global economy? in Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship Today: The contemporary relevance of T. H. Marshall (London: UCL Press, 1996), 250.

187

Chapter Five: Whither Social Rights?

The writings discussed in this dissertation hold in tension the inspirational concept of “social rights” while giving voice to the concerns of those from the margins who actively worked for attention from, and inclusion within, the liberal democratic state. The comments in this thesis are meant to draw the reader’s mind to signposts for the future as well as reflections on the past. If one image were to remain it would be that of covering and uncovering: since the whole question of social citizenship has been obscured historically, it is important for thinking on social rights to be more fully opened up and discussed. First, as this dissertation has shown, it is very clear that a narrowing took place in the concepts that came to be known as social citizenship. There was indeed a “radical flattening of perspective and shrinkage of imaginative range” in the twentieth century as compared to the nineteenth.621 And this narrowing was a result of the development of industrial capitalism and the influence of liberalism. As documented a number of times in the pages above, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, producers’ rights to the whole produce of labour became the much more limited right to merely sell their work in the capitalist marketplace, often for subsistence wages. As a consequence, the dignity and independence of the working classes was undermined as citizen-producers lost their autonomy and decision-making rights.

5.1 Voices of Liberalism in Three Lands

A number of observations regarding the ideas put forward in this dissertation can be made.

Chief among them is the view that social rights must be understood from a broader, deeper perspective if they are to be achieved in any sort of meaningful and liberating way. This is both

621 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 24.

188 an analytical and normative problem. First, analytically, access to this broader, deeper understanding comes from examining more carefully the origins, roots, and writings on social citizenship in the Anglo-American tradition. This is not an easy task because of the pervasive effects of liberalism which continues to obscure social citizenship today. Liberalism has been both a hero and a villain to social citizenship: hero, because without it, modern social rights could not exist; villain, because it obscures the extent of social citizenship in all communities, and clouds the analysis. Liberalism was at one time a radical discourse and could be again, if it could harness its whole history. The emerging paradigm of social citizenship requires thinking through new ideas and rethinking conventional ones. As mentioned earlier, no longer is unlimited economic growth an answer for solving social problems. In fact, the growth of social rights must closely align with, and even replace, economic growth as the goal of national policy.

This exploration of Anglo-American thought has shown how much of the political discourse in the U.S. and Britain made its way into Canada, leaving lasting intellectual legacies.

The three main narratives of chapters 2, 3 and 4 – British, American and Canadian – recount the ways in which social questions have been interpreted historically. Liberalism plays an important role in these accounts since liberalism was necessary for the birth of modern social citizenship – despite its role in obscuring and undermining it. Given that the social is both a very old realm and an emerging one, it is surprising how ill-equipped liberal ideology was and is to accommodate it. Yet this negative aspect to liberalism changed substantially with the advent of

New Liberalism in the late nineteenth century. It was this particular discourse that was so rich in yielding insights into the varieties of social thinking of the time period, and it was this discourse that changed citizens’ minds about such things as social justice, labour, charity, property, and social rights. This dissertation has been careful, though, to refrain from using the label “new liberalism” too frequently, choosing instead to refer to it as philosophical idealism, a discourse

189 which came in a number of varieties. The reason for this is to avoid confusion with classical liberalism, though, as mentioned above, ironically, classical liberalism was equally necessary for the development of modern social citizenship.

The politics of citizenship in all democratic countries revolves around several sets of contrasting and closely related ideas: liberalism and idealism provide the ideological foundations. Tensions invariably arise between individualism and community-based socialism; meanwhile, the economic motives of capitalism both confront and align with the national interests of statism. As this dissertation reveals, all political philosophies have idealist threads running through them. Social citizenship, as a theoretical construct and as a guide for public policy, represents nothing less than the universal aspects of being human. Yet, there are harsh, historical realities in every country that continue to curtail the advance of social rights. The

British, for example, must manage the influx of migrants, refugees and other asylum seekers from regions once subject to imperial rule. The United States must finance, administer and control the highest documented prison population in the world.622 Canada must work with hundreds of First Nations to accommodate demands for land, status, higher education, economic opportunities and social services. T.H. Marshall probably came closest to giving an accurate account of the development of social citizenship in Western nations and he was aware of their rich and long history. Yet, even in his work, social rights were not adequately appreciated. What follows is a graphic representation of some ideological variations uncovered in this dissertation.

These are big ideas, but, as shown throughout this study, they warrant attention. It is very hard to separate out the strands of thinking in the actual discourses, and of course, there are no pure ideologies, but it is possible to chart key points of convergence and divergence between them.

622 The U.S. accounts for five percent of the world’s population and twenty-three percent of the world’s prisoners. Holleman, Hannah, et.al. “The Penal State in an Age of Crisis,” Monthly Review, Vol. 61, No. 2, June 2009, available online: http://monthlyreview.org/2009/06/01/the-penal-state-in-an-age-of-crisis.

190

Figure 5 Ideological Variations in Anglo-American Thought

Ideology Britain United States Canada Trends

Civil, Political Civil, Political Civil, Political Feminist, Rights for Subjects Rights for Citizens Rights for Citizens Womanist, LGBT Liberalism in a Constitutional in a Republic, in a Constitutional Rights, Biosphere Monarchy Monarchy Rights Republicanism

Idealism Utopian Socialism, American Social Gospel, Reclaiming the Fabians Idealism, Multiculturalism Commons Patriotism

Sovereign Atomistic Individualism in Human Individualism in Individualism / Distinct Capabilities Individualism Community Philanthropy Community Approach

Labour Party, Progressivism, Social Democratic Rise of the Trade Unions, Trade Unions, Party, Trade Precariat; Occupy Socialism Unions, Social Movements Social Welfare Welfare Benefits Welfare State State

Crown Producerism / Crown Global Capital Corporations / Multinational Corporations / Transfers/ Capitalism Monopoly Corporations Branch Plants Transnational Capitalism Corporations

Imperial, Post- Federal, Military, Federal, Resource- Transnational, Industrial, Welfare Post-Industrial, based, Welfare Multinational, Statism State Penal State State Subnational Governance

Spectres / Compensation: Intrusion: Over- Assimilation: Rise of the Rest / reaching arms of Eclipse of the Fear-filled Floods of post- the State – tax Loss of identity as West … Figures of colonial migrants grabs, hand-outs, minorities are Speech entitled to rights, restraints on the swallowed by The Commons benefits ‘invisible hand’ larger entities

191

Part of rehabilitating social rights involves seriously examining a wide array of writings, such as those presented in these pages. The political thinking in republicanism, idealism, populism, progressivism, corporatism, and constitutionalism have all played roles in achieving some semblance of social citizenship in Britain, Canada and in the United States. Republican and idealist resistance to industrial capitalism comprised an anti-monopoly and anti-corporation agitation that had important things to say about the nature of society and the individuals which comprise it. Indeed, as shown throughout this study, the development of modern social citizenship requires nothing less than economic and social transformations. For example, the emerging “network society” encourages social community and is building new, collaborative ways of working and making decisions. Indeed, according to scholar Yochai Benkler, “the networked information economy” empowers individuals to collaborate with others in ways that would have never happened before. Contrasting the collaborative network economy to the old industrial economy, he says: “Very few individuals living in the industrial information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new Library of Alexandria of global reach or to start an encyclopedia.”623 It is a paradox, that, in this endeavour, liberalism has been useful: neoliberalism is erasing borders and turning established categories upside down, which may enhance the chances of a more progressive politics. John Clarke discusses the “blurring, dissolving and revising” of boundaries between the public and private realms that are occurring in the neoliberal paradigm.624 Although the agendas that drive economic and social rationality are so obviously different, and although capital still subordinates the social, neoliberal “reforms” could be good for social rights. This is because progressive thinkers have always found the

623 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks – How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (,2006). See also www.Benkler.org.

624 John Clarke, Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy (London: Sage, 2004), 120.

192 boundaries in liberalism, as they have existed hitherto, problematic to the extreme. As Foucault has stated, governments can use the power of the state to foster life. Governments do this “for the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health and so on.” 625 Using government this way helps overcome the bipartite structure of social rights in liberalism by going beyond the narrow residual sense to formulate social rights, indeed social citizenship, as something larger and more meaningful.

5.2 Eight Stand Points

In order for the kind of substantive social citizenship in a post-liberal welfare state to occur, a number of normative conditions are necessary. First, social rights must be understood as “core” rights – the right to development, to a calling, to a decent standard of living, to work productively. As this dissertation repeatedly emphasizes, these are the true natural rights. It is social rights which are the “bedrock” rights, not state-made civil and political rights. So a complete reversal of the Two-Tier distinction is necessary. Of course, rights are psychological as well as physiological, again a fact appreciated historically. Plato spoke of realizing true forms out of the shadows. The American socialist, Thomas Skidmore, spoke of “the right to rise.” J.S.

Mill talked about “the right to self- development.” L. P. Jacks emphasized “the right to skill.”626

This thinking can be extended to “the right to pay taxes” and “the right to contribute to the common good.”627 Though this may stretch individualism in a more communal direction than some are comfortable with; for most people, it is the price to pay to live in civil society.

625 Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault, 1954-1984., ed., Fred Rabinow and Nicholas Rose, quoted in Kim Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 34.

626 See discussion of Jacks in Chapter 2, Section 2.4.

627 Arthur Lyon Dahl, The Eco-Principle: Ecology and Economics in Symbiosis (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996).

193

Second, social citizenship requires a certain measure and quality of democracy, a certain development of rights and rights discourse, and a certain expansion and greening of the concept to include spiritual and ecological concerns. This, in itself, requires radical new thinking.

Furthermore, though rights are enshrined formally in declarations and constitutions, they are located in culture, history and praxis. As is evident in the contemporary world, seeing social right in a broader perspective means not focusing solely on levels of social expenditure as the most important indicator of social citizenship in a polity. 628 Moreover, social citizenship can be hidden in policies and institutions not normally thought of as “social policy.” For example, a

“hidden welfare state” may be revealed, such as in the United States and, to the untrained eye, popular struggles will go underground.

As earlier discussions points out, for a number of reasons, especially well suited to this broad approach to social citizenship is the concept of the commons because it is an arena which transcends private and public realms. From this perspective, what is common is the source of rights and duties in the first place. Indeed, individual rights are a Western construct, but the commons is a Universal one.

Third, besides basic social and physical needs, citizens also have political and civic needs, themselves foundational to social rights, which include freedom from domination and tyranny, but also freedom from shame and indignity. The fear of “losing face” with a job loss, or downgrade, or being put on the welfare rolls, or going bankrupt, has got to be an indication, all

628 Stefan Dupre has called tax policies “enormously potent instruments for the achievement of economic and social objectives.” See his essay, “Section 106A and Federal-Provincial Fiscal Relations” in Michael D. Behiels, ed., The Meech Lake Primer: Conflicting Views of the 1987 Constitutional Accord (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1989), 280. On the importance of political institutions, see Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts, “It’s the Institutions, Stupid! Why Comprehensive National Health Insurance Always Fails in America,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1995), 329-372.

194 on its own, that there is such a thing as “society” contra to a famous neoliberal statement made by a former British prime minister in the past century – since shame is a social emotion.

Fourth, a unity of rights is required because it bridges the divide between the public and private, brings rights and community together, and protects difference and diversity. In doing so, it protects the commons. As the discussion on feminism reveals, respect for difference is required for equality. In today’s world, however, neoliberalism removes difference. This is the thesis of Thomas Friedman’s positive book, Hot Flat and Crowded, where he thinks prosperity will result from spreading a “global” point of view across the world. His view is not without its supporters.630 But, as David Harvey points out, flat, or the “erasure of geographical and anthropological difference” means “leaving other parts of the world living to and struggling to find a place.”631 Of course, Friedman thinks the opposite: that economic reform or extending the flattening process will allow everyone to benefit.

Fifth, social citizenship requires some form of deliberative democracy, with an emphasis on “process freedoms.” In other words, it requires public reasoning on matters of social concern and active participation in debates on social policy: a modus vivendi. This way of thinking moves away from the notion of social welfare as charity, which is merely ameliorative, and away from the idea of privilege, which is exclusionary, to the idea of right, which is Universal.

Internationally, it moves individuals away from an emphasis on economic development in favour of a concern for Human and Social Development. This is a move from social rights to Human

Rights. Thus, rethinking these concepts involves changing the decision-making process. It means asking within any collectivity: which communities need help? And within a national community: what sort of group or collective rights are necessary because of structural inequalities? The

630 See, for example, Anand Giridharadas, India Calling (New York: Times Books, 2011).

631 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, op. cit. 61.

195 focus can then be on the collective rights of aboriginals, or the poor, or women, or the disabled, and so on. Often these collective rights will conflict with the old way of interpreting rights. How can they not? In all three countries, it will mean deeper forays into intergovernmental and subnational structures that pertain to social rights. As Thomas Janoski reminds his readers, it is always community – more than anything else – that is needed to offset atomized arrangements in modern sub-divisions, high rises, office cubicles, subways, highways, and across economic divides. The way forward, he says, is through “participation rights.”632

Sixth, social rights must include individual rights to well being, autonomy, and basic capabilities as well as the satisfaction of human needs. Every citizen needs a chance to participate effectively in the community. This is what Canadian economist Roy Vogt means by

“citizen property” and “citizen rights.” These are rights, he says, “sought by private citizens for public purposes.”633 Historically these rights are couched in the language of being useful.

According to Vogt, there is an urgent need for the recovery of workers’ rights and “decision making rights,” something that was present in all societies before the advent of industrial capitalism. Similarly, British political thinker, Paul Barry Clarke speaks of “the citizen self.” Its embodiment would involve the development of selfhood, requiring “care of self, care of others, care of the world.” 634 In America, Alan Gewirth also speaks of a “reasonable self” which he explains is a self that is “aware of its own agency needs and rights,” and “personal responsibility

632 Janoski asks: “What is the way back to the reasonable creation of these connections in an increasingly bureaucratized and suburban society where people in different offices, on the freeway, and in far-off subdivisions can reconnect, especially to people in depressed areas with fewer material resources and social capital? It is through participation at work and in the community, from the small group level, to the organizational level, to the national level. Participation rights are a way to carry societies toward reconnection.” 232-233.

633 Roy Vogt, Whose Property? The Deepening Conflict between Private Property and Democracy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 110-111.

634 The phrase is from Paul Barry Clarke, Deep Citizenship (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 118.

196 for their fulfillment, but also takes due account of the agency needs of other persons, respecting their rights as well as one’s own.” He says further that these obligations and rights are

“embodied not only in individual actions but in social and political institutions, thereby constituting a “community of rights.”635

Seventh, social citizenship must be faithful to culturally specific sensitivities. As this dissertation shows, for various historical reasons, none of these countries are particularly good at this. However, with some notable and tragic exceptions, there is a history of a shared sense of community, rights, and even justice, in all three countries which entails what James Tully, a noted expert in the field, sees as necessary: the conventions of “continuity,” “negotiation” and

“consent” in constitutional arrangements. He acknowledges, however, that at times, these principles have been overshadowed by conflict and impasses, of one kind or another, due to the politics of the day.636

Eighth, a meaningful social citizenship requires a re-evaluation of the ideas on work and labour to fit the twenty-first century. Indeed, one of the most important pillars of social right – labour and property – retains its central place in shaping social citizenship in the new postindustrial mode of production. As this dissertation has shown, the labour theory of value is a continuous thread throughout the centuries, and even appears in Beveridge’s and Marsh’s understanding of the postwar welfare state; and it will continue to be important. But it needs a re-definition. As the International Labour Organization points out, to some extent, labour as a

635 Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996),

636 See James Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined” and the editor’s introduction in Curtis Cook, ed., Constitutional Predicament: Canada after the Referendum of 1992 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 18-20 and 149-198.

197 concept must be left behind, and a new model of work put in place.637 Central to this new perspective, among other things, is the idea that caregiving is real work, and must be valued as such. The current tendency is to continue to see caregiving as “not working.” Society must remember that caregiving was, at one time, held in high esteem. In the nineteenth century, women’s associations, settlement houses, communal kitchens, communal child care facilities, and so on, all “emphasized care and responsibility for others” which was “the last major challenge to the liberal ideology of atomistic individualism in America.”638 However, there is the danger that this discourse of “separate spheres” will move backwards in a neo-conservative direction. So it is important to re-define this vision carefully. It is the idea that there has been a significant loss of history regarding the value of care which must be re-captured today.

5.3 The Feminist Critique

If traditional citizenship is problematic for feminism, so is social citizenship. First, from a feminist perspective, the neglect of the social and the neglect of women are related. The social realm, necessary for the production and reproduction of society, has been given short shrift in the

Anglo-American tradition. Indeed, the welfare state is deeply gendered; however, this gendering does not rule out some of the liberating potential of liberalism for feminism since some of its core concepts are also goals for feminists.

It is the inattention to the social in Anglo-American thought that has much to do with the gendered structure of liberal political thought and practice. First, there is the absence of women in traditional political theory: both as subjects studied, and as authors. Thus there is the failure to

637 See Guy Standing, Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice (London: International Labour Organization, 1999).

638 Alan Wolfe, op.cit.

198 adequately theorize the social realm from a female point of view. For example, scholarship on the welfare state, which should be the very embodiment of the social, “simply does not use gender as a category of analysis.”639 As is well known theorists such as Esping-Andersen only belatedly ventured into feminist analysis.640 This is obviously a good, if late, development since understandings of the welfare state are impoverished without feminist interpretations of it,641 but social welfare is not the only literature that has managed to avoid questions of gender. Civil society and social capital are also genderless: Gender is simply used as a residual category for everything that is not officially political or officially economic.642 Moreover, there are other types of citizenship, germane to social citizenship, such as ecological and environmental citizenship that are similarly ghettoized. Relegating voluntary associations to civil society – that is, to the social realm – means that political and economic issues, as they pertain to women, and other marginalized groups are depoliticized.643 Since these discourses themselves sound progressive,

639 Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State” in idem, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 10.

640 Gosta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially chapter 4: “The Household Economy,” 47-72. Esping-Andersen acknowledges this omission in his own work: “The lack of systematic attention to households is painfully evident in my own Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. It starts out by defining welfare regimes as the interaction of state, market, and family and subsequently pays hardly any notice to the latter.” p. 47.

641 Gillian Pascall, Social Policy: A New Feminist Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.

642 Iris Marion Young, for example, argues that civil society, that is, “the activities of voluntary associational life,” should be conceived as separate from both the state and the economy. Young cites Cohen and Arato, 1992; Habermas, 1996; Walzer, 1995; and Nielsen, 1995 as also viewing civil society this way. See her “State, civil society, and social justice” in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, eds., Democracy’s Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 141-162. Jeffrey C. Alexander also sees civil society as distinguished from both political and economic life. He also thinks that civil society must be considered separate from “religious life.” See his “The Binary Discourse of Civil Society” in idem and Steven Seidman, eds., The New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 193-201. Of course, these accounts differ from the Marxist one which sees civil society almost totally in economic terms.

643 Lenore Coltheart, “Being Civil and Social: The proper study of womankind” in Moira Gatens and Alison MacKinnon, eds., Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

199 international organizations, such as The World Bank, make pronouncements on “civil society” but generally use the discourse to maintain their own legitimacy.644

Second, the individualist ontology and the liberal theory of freedom as “freedom from” is problematic because it only captures male experience in Western, industrialized, developed countries. As Auguste Comte noted, the working-class, as a result of their subordinate economic position and crowded living conditions, are always well acquainted with the social realm since they have no choice but to live communally.645 The same reciprocity can be found in certain minorities today, especially poor women in developing countries, and single welfare mothers in the United States. It is worth noting that with the economic climate of today the extended family is making something of a comeback in North America as elsewhere. What this means for social citizenship can only be imagined at this point; it may or may not be a good thing.

The opposition between “self” and “others,” reflects this male perspective since women by nature and circumstance are more connected to other people in their role as care-givers. Thus, by its very nature, the androcentric viewpoint downplays multiple aspects of the social. What is most problematic is the denial of “feminine” characteristics in men. A more accurate way to view the civil/social split would be to see it as constituting separate aspects within individuals themselves: states of consciousness that co-exist within each individual.646

Indeed, the antagonism between the civil and social is internal as well as external because it takes place in the private realm as well as in the public realm. Balancing these opposing attributes forms the core ethical problem for modernity: “the idea of civil society stands or falls

644 Ibid., esp. 144-148.

645 Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans. J.H. Bridges (New York: Robert Speller and Sons, 1957).

646 Emile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Condition” in R. Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Adam Seligman refers to this as Durkheim’s concept of homo duplex. See Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 119.

200 with their reconciliation.”647 It is a core problem because all political ideologies must consider how liberty and equality can be reconciled. What is disturbing, then, is that the main contemporary discourse which challenges liberalism on these points, namely, American communitarianism in its various forms, does not adequately address feminist concerns and therefore presents an unsatisfactory answer to the problem of the social.

Third, the neglect of women’s actual experience reveals a much more complex relationship between the private and public realms than the discourse of liberalism has ever been able to capture. In the U.S. before the American Revolution,648 politics was understood as embodying civic virtue and a masculine, political public realm – described by one author as: the realm of “energy, effectiveness, virtuosity,”649 and by another, as: “communal and selfless.”650 It was later transformed into the feminine, non-political, private realm. That is to say, the attributes found in “daring soldiers and inspired orators” gave way to a more instrumental view of men stressing private self-interest and competition; ideas which came to dominate the male public realm, and were installed in the American Constitution.651

To this day, these ideas hold sway. Economic independence in North America is still the acknowledged basis of democratic citizenship. The opposition between wealth and virtue characteristic of the early producerist ethos was only overcome by making wealth itself a virtue.

“The slippage of civics from a political to a social activity” depoliticized the whole idea of the

647 Ibid, 118.

648 See Ibid; Ruth H. Bloch (note 76); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly, Vol. 44, Nos. 2, June 1992, 192-215.

649 Bloch, 43.

650 Coltheart, (note 123), 145.

651 Bloch, 43 and 53-55.

201 common good and thus the social realm was diminished. 652 This transformation, one feminist suggests, “sharpened the social boundaries between the sexes in ways that continue to deny power to all classes of women.” 653

To some extent, however, women’s domesticity was public as a result of women serving their country by raising virtuous sons. Women thus inculcated public virtue in men.654 The involvement of women in politics, including philanthropy and other reform activities, was carried out from within the private domestic realm and therefore was inherently restricted.655 In other words, men and women might have been equal in the social realm, though this seems unlikely, but they were not equal in the political or economic realms. This inequality was to eventually change through women gaining the franchise and their more explicit forays into the public realm.

But in keeping with power’s tendency to relocate to new settings as a means of maintaining hegemony, men were able to retain their dominance. As one American feminist points out, “Men granted women the vote when the importance of the male culture of politics and the meaning of the vote changed.” 656 Women’s “suffrage was adopted just at the time when the influence of parties and electoral politics on public policy was declining.”657

652 Coltheart, 146.

653 Bloch, 58.

654 Ibid, 46-47, and Zagarri. This is Kerber’s notion of “republican motherhood.”

655 Regarding the public/private dichotomy Seyla Benhabib speaks of the salons in Arendt’s writing as embodying a blend of public and private, and as a precursor to associational types of structures in civil society. And Dena Goodman analyzing Habermas says that “the authentic public sphere articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm” while “the new culture of private life … was constitutive of Habermas’s new public sphere.”

656Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920” in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 75.

657 Ibid.

202

Fourth, the failure, until quite recently,658 to take women’s rights seriously in Human

Rights debates diminishes the social realm, and reinforces the Two-Tier distinction. This inability to take women’s lives seriously reveals the extent of the ambivalence towards women in Anglo-

American culture. For example, virtually all feminists argue that the rights in the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights are patriarchal in that Human Rights “are actually men’s rights.”659

And since Human Rights are part of liberalism, they are subject to the same kinds of criticisms as liberalism. The abstract, ahistorical, individualist, rationalist, and universal character of these rights mask not only human dependency – a fact for both males and females – but also domination: the “grave human rights abuses suffered by women.”660

One of feminism’s main criticisms of liberalism is that even though women are included in the polity and rights declarations by virtue of liberalism’s Universalism, it is a dysfunctional inclusion. Though women participate in politics and civil society by voting, joining political parties, forming associations, and so on, and although they are of service to others in the family and the state, they are still not equal. Hence, many Second-Wave feminists think that in order to liberate women, it is not enough to provide state benefits to all citizens passively and universally.

Instead, public policies must be targeted specifically to women in ways defined important by women. This effort is the essence of the push behind the “women’s rights as Human Rights”

658 The 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna declared that “it is no longer enough that existing human rights mechanisms merely be extended to women: women’s rights must be understood as human rights.” This quotation is from Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, “Introduction” in idem, eds., Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 3.

659 Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and feminism after the fall of socialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 113.

660 Donna Sullivan, “The Public/Private Distinction in International Human Rights Law” in Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, eds., Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

203 movement,661 since, in its demands for redress and gender equality, it speaks a language of difference.

Fifth, there is the problem with the concept of social citizenship itself as it is applies to contemporary society. The concern here is that social citizenship does not change any of the structures in society, but only ameliorates the worst aspects of them. This means for feminism, as it does for other progressive movements, that the idea of social rights in their current form is inadequate. There is not enough emphasis on the social in social citizenship. It is precisely the individualism in liberal rights legislation, its ontology, and the assumptions behind it, that are problematic. 662 This is because ardent feminists view all structures, institutions, practices, theories, understandings, cultures as gendered where women are placed in subordinate positions to men.663 This is not to say, however, that the idea of abstract, universal rights is necessarily problematic. Claude Lefort argues that the abstract “empty” nature of human rights is what keeps them democratic. “Their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation.”664 For Lefort, rights are deeply democratic. “The singular thing about the freedoms proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century,” he writes, “is that they are in effect indissociable from the birth of the democratic debate. Indeed, they generate it.”665 Since Human Rights cannot be defined in any determinate way, they remain open, in particular, to the construction of new rights. Lefort’s

661 For a discussion, see Elisabeth Friedman, “Women’s Human Rights: The Emergence of a Movement” in Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper eds., Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 18-35; and Brooke A. Ackerly and Susan Moller Okin, “Women’s Rights as human rights” in Democracy’s Edge, 1999.

662 Yet this individualism was created from the same source as was solidarity: both are products of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the creation of the modern state. Both are based on “reason.”.

663 In the feminist literature, citizenship, natural law, international law, human rights, the state, the class structure, the body, civil society, social capital, and postmodernism are all said to be gendered. Postmodernism is considered gendered because it fails to refer to gender.

664 Lefort quoted in Renata Salecl, op.cit.

665 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 39.

204 point is well illustrated by the success of the “Women’s Rights as Human Rights” movement at the 1993 UN conference in Vienna.666

Feminists see citizenship rights obscuring gender differences. Citizenship glosses over differences in power relations between men and women. Thus feminist literature speaks about

“the silencing of women and of the body in the political process.”667 Women are indeed silenced in their lack of political participation in policy making at the highest levels, their disproportionate share in family responsibilities, though this is changing, the gendered nature of the laws in the private realm, and the failure, at times, to uphold the civil rights of women.

In other words, rights may be abstract and universal, or “thin,” but citizenship is particular and concrete or “thick.” This does not mean that thin rights are insubstantial, only that they must be seen in terms of their context. As one scholar says: “citizenship is not a notion that can be discussed intelligibly in a static and empty social space.” 668 Citizenship cannot exist outside history and community. So in liberalism, “one might say that context is not all” as one American feminist writes. “It is nothing, for liberalism conceives of the needs and capacities of individuals

666 On the other hand, this movement also encountered a setback in 1995 at the UN conference in Beijing. According to feminists, the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” was not included in the Beijing “Platform for Action” in order to appease those states worried about the development of new rights. Thus, “the Platform distinguishes between human rights of women (which are universal) and women’s rights (which are not).” Moreover, there are inherent weaknesses to this whole approach, as pointed out by Dianne Otto. First, in thinking that, in terms of policy-making, women need only copy men as participants in the realm of decision-making. Otto maintains that this will not transform the policy-making structure along feminist lines. Second, the new discourse of the Beijing conference privileges civil and political rights over social and economic ones. Here once again there is the significant problem of neo-liberalism: namely, the belief that somehow “the obligation of states to guarantee certain economic and social rights is made redundant by the more ‘efficient’ processes of free market forces.” See Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, The boundaries of international law: A feminist analysis (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 248. And see Dianne Otto, “A post-Beijing reflection on the limitations and potential of human rights discourse for women” in K. Askin and D. Koenig, eds., Women and International Human Rights Law (New York: Transnational Publishers, 1995).

667 Alison Assiter, “Bodies and Dualism” in Kathryn Ellis and Hartley Dean, eds., Social Policy and the Body: Transitions in Corporeal Discourse (London: Macmillan, 2000), 67.

668 Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 9.

205 as being independent of any immediate social or political condition.”669 By contrast, however,

“women enter public space as embodied individuals.”670

Starting from the concrete means taking women’s difference and unequal access to power as a fundamental starting point. Indeed, for feminism: “context is all.” On a policy level, it means asking: Who benefits from social legislation? Who gains from citizenship rights?

Feminism has no choice but to ask such questions. It must fill in the opaqueness and animosity concealed by mainstream metaphysics. However, as Eleanor Rathbone argued in 1940, “the family wage system did not, and could not ensure that the needs of a worker’s family would be met at all times as they varied over the family life cycle.” It was thus hard to break the pattern: even though the male breadwinner framework was even supported by the labour movement, as noted above, it didn’t always work. 671

“The ‘who’ of this model is particularised rather than universal, differentiated along the terms of gender, sexuality, class and race.”672 So, by contrast, a feminist reworking of human rights takes into account universality and difference with the result being a much more fluid approach to rights than traditional male interpretations. 673 For example, Lister speaks of the public-private distinction, both historically and culturally, “as a shifting political construction, under constant renegotiation.” Far from a rigid distinction between the public and private realms,

669 Mary G. Dietz, “Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship,” Daedalus, Vol. 116, Nos. 4, Fall 1987, 2.

670 Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1997), 71.

671 Hilary Land, “The Family Wage,” Feminist Review. Also see Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “The Family Wage,” Capital and Class, Nos. 11, 1980; and Laura Balbo, “The Servicing Work of Women and the Capitalist State,” Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 3, 251-270.

672 Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 42.

673 Lister’s “differentiated universalism.” See Ruth Lister, “Citizenship: Towards a feminist synthesis,” Feminist Review, Nos. 57, Autumn 1997, 28-48. See also Young’s “special” and “universal” rights recognizing “group- specific needs”; Eisentein’s conception of a rights model that substitutes a woman of colour “as an alternative … to that of the white male” etc.

206 in her account, these realms define and “take meaning from each other.” 674 Although classical liberals might agree that these realms define each other, they would not approve of its constant renegotiation. However, it is precisely an interactive approach which accommodates movement, development, and change: “Such a metaphysic would allow for identities that contain others within them, and for a more fluid boundary between men and women.” 675 Needless to say, a more fluid boundary between men and women would help citizens move beyond Two-Tier thinking.

5.4 The Work of Social Citizens

Thus, labour is still an agent of transformation. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

“labour’s value is ‘beyond measure.’”676 It “provides the ontological basis for global democracy, for the birth to presence of the multitude.” With global information networks, “labour is transnational.” It is “increasingly hybrid and mobile” and “collaborative far beyond what humans have hitherto imagined and is now the “basis for a global communism.”677 Indeed, in the future, basic needs almost certainly will be met through a social wage or a guaranteed right to work: that is to say, some sort of guaranteed livelihood. Instituting a social wage will continue the positive work of the welfare state by extending de-commodification and removing any remaining prejudices. While on its own, a social wage may not be enough, it will go a long way to support

674 Ibid, 42.

675 Alison, Assiter, “Bodies and Dualism” in Kathryn Ellis and Hartley Dean, eds., Social Policy and the Body: Transitions in Corporeal Discourse (London: Macmillan, 2000), 75.

676 Paul A. Passavant, “Postmodern Republicanism” in idem and Jodi Dean, eds., Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 10.

677 Hardt and Negri, op. cit. 11.

207 what is needed. It has already been tried in Brazil and South Africa. Indeed, it is a matter of moral right that some degree of socio-economic independence for each individual is provided.678

Social equity will entail designing political institutions in such a way that they will provide for care in addition to other primary goods that social justice in the twenty-first century requires. These entitlements are the ones outlined in Martha Nussbaums’s various lists 679 and in

John McMurtry’s work. Echoing the kinds of predictions made in that chapter, Guy Standing has said that “one imagines a future in which each citizen has a voucher card, with so many points for care, so many for education, so many for basic health, so many for training, and so on.”680 Although it cannot be known with certainty which direction this kind of development will take, a recent Toronto Star article examines the possibility that debit cards will replace welfare cheques, which may not only shrink costs, but also reduce stigma.681

All this is what Roy Vogt meant by “citizenship work.” Indeed, democracy has historically been seen by many as a form of work. It is perhaps time now to narrow the term further and call it “social citizenship work.” To be sure, “democracy should be understood as the creation of social citizenship,” writes Jean Grugel, “not merely as the introduction of formally democratic institutions.”682 One of the most promising avenues for social research that supports the above endeavors is the “social determinants of health” literature. Closely related to

“capabilities equality” thinking, the social determinants of health refer to “the economic and social conditions that shape the health of individuals, communities, and jurisdictions as a whole.”

678 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 158.

679 For Martha C. Nussbaum’s List of Central Human Capabilities, see Appendix Three.

680 Guy Standing, Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 266.

681 “Debit cards to replace welfare cheques,” Toronto Star, August 9, 2011, GT1-2.

682 Jean Grugel, Conclusion to Democracy without Borders, 159. Emphasis added.

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The difference between these two approaches, however, is that the social determinants literature calls for reducing inequities by building social and political movements to carry out its goals.

However, as earlier discussions illustrate, this practical emphasis is missing to some extent in the capabilities literature. As Dennis Raphael, the leading Canadian scholar in the social determinants of health field, has said, depending on the perspective – by which he means whether the actor sees a pluralist universe or a materialist one – this entails either convincing policy makers to implement changes, as in a pluralist framework, or forcing policy actors to make changes, as in a materialist one.683

In these frameworks, the focus shifts to the conditions necessary for living a life that is worth living – “one that a citizen can truly value.” 684 Thus, the task is one of analyzing the conditions that will provide substantive freedoms or capabilities as well as providing primary social goods. In these paradigms, as in McMurtry’s “universal access to life goods,” “life values,” and “the life-economy” framework, the need is to build the structures and processes that support the civil commons. These suggestions point to a paradigm which could be called “the commons at work and play.” This would be a paradigm sensitive to the historical theme of recreation, as well as the historical theme of work, but also to the injustices of child labour and unjust work-related practices in developing countries which offer no recreation, and very little wages and benefits to those involved. 685In other words, this approach to social citizenship would

683 Dennis Raphael, “Reducing Social and Health Inequalities Requires Building Social and Political Movements,” Humanity & Society, vol. 33 (1 & 2), February/May, 2009, 160-161. It is Raphael who italicizes the words “forcing” and “convincing” in his article. There is a large literature on this topic. See Dennis Raphael, Poverty and Policy in Canada: Implications for Health and Quality of Life (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2007) also: www.who.int/social_determinants/en and www.unnaturalcauses.org.

684 For a discussion of Rawls and Sen in this context see Hilary Graham, Unequal Lives: Health and Socioeconomic Inequalities (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2007), 3-18.

685 The free market turns out to be freedom for TNCs to invade and occupy other countries and enslave their people to work for them, freedom to retain the Two Thirds World countries as sources of cheap raw materials, dumps for

209 help restore to the flattening process some of the concreteness that is lacking in neoliberal global discourse. It would also honour those involved in the labour process in Third World countries, however grim their work may be.

To be sure, a redefinition of the categories of labour and work in the West will raise a number of questions. Moreover, as Guy Standing points out, if some of these suggestions can be followed, it will restore to labour the “use value” that capitalism has taken from it. For example, if caregiving is given its rightful place, a more equal social citizenship is a possibility. Of course, labour, as such, will still be done in every society, but its parameters will change. Social labour will take on new objectives. Social growth, rather than economic growth, and social wealth rather than private wealth, will be the goals. In what Hardt and Negri call the biopolitical economy, a new mode of production is developing. To be sure, the idealist, producerist, and labour ideas discussed in these pages are worth considering in this new light.

Giving weight to the concept of social citizenship, and honouring it the way it should be honoured – not just because social rights are a product of human labour, but also because the public realm is essential to humanity – will thus entail everything from reconfiguring social rights, if they do not work, to at least living up to expectations of them, if they do. And it is important that people are open to the idea that some social rights may not be working. The deeper concept of social right is always in danger of being enclosed. As the discussion on the welfare state reveals, the enclosure of social right in the postwar years is a result of the mixed success of the social policies of that time period. There were some fundamental flaws in the

Beveridge/Marshall paradigm. “When rights are derived solely from a theory of social debt, they toxic wastes and, most important, recipients of their destructive hyperconsumptive culture which binds the whole system together and allows it to proceed unquestioned. The rights to life, security, freedom, sovereignty, food, health, employment and several others are all subordinate to the West’s “economic” rights. See Winin Pereira, Inhuman Rights: The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse (Mapusa, Goa, India: The Other India Press, 1997), 66.

210 are passive, based on dependency (and were recognized and formulated in a predemocratic age); the beneficiary is inferior.”686 For this reason, the discussion on the welfare state suggests that the broader deeper way will likely require divorcing the concept of social citizenship from the practice of social rights and theorizing about them separately.

5.5 Precarious Forms of Employment

Regarding the welfare state, then, clearly things are not working out the way they were envisioned by the Fathers. The discontent is palpable: witness the rioting in England,

Philadelphia, and even Israel.687 Still, North Americans, to some extent, are missing out on the fascinating new development in Europe: the mobilization of the “precariat.” This new collective actor, a mass of diverse and disaffected people, constitutes the new enclosure. It is a social movement which speaks for the unemployed, the young, the old, the mid-life, the casual intermittent employee, “net/ temp/flex workers,” students, migrants, and so on. These people have made vulnerability a political issue in Europe. The existence of the precariat, residing alongside great affluence in the West, are examples par excellence of Two-Tier social structures: in industry, government, the corporation, the university. Precarious labour is something that people looking for real work seem to just put up with now – almost with a sense of resignation.

It is the new normal. Yet they still protest. And the people who are in favor of it, if there are any, are likely those who most benefit from it: employers. Like all class issues, however, it can be also regarded as an unwelcome development even by those who most benefit from it.

686 Pierre Rosanvallon, The New Social Question, 88.

687 “Social-justice protestors grab Netanyahu’s attention,” The Globe and Mail, Saturday August 13, 2011, A16.

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Indeed, thirty-five to forty per cent of all jobs in Canada are now in this precarious category, which is at least a third of all jobs, many “genderized and racialized.”688 Toronto Star columnist, Thomas Walkom, notes: “Students of history will recognize this world. It is industrializing England during the 19th century or parts of Latin America during the 20th.” He adds: it is the world of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Che Guevara.

“Amazingly and tragically,” he states, “it is also Canada in the 21st century.” 689

The reason North America remains exceptional on matters of social welfare may be because vulnerability is naturalized on this continent. The frontier, the harsh conditions, the

American Dream, and so on, are all contributing factors: adversity is normal, something to be overcome.690 So, the culprit is the nature of social development in North America itself, the path dependency of stymied labour unions, ugly strikes, nasty court decisions, and stunted social development. Interestingly, one possible example of the American precariat pinpointed in the literature today – albeit tentatively, experimentally, and even unconsciously for those involved – is “The Tea Party Movement.”691

Yet, according to some, there is tremendous potential for the precariat as a political and social movement. Though people may reasonably ask how realistic it is to expect that “a multitude” can be made out of the “flexible, mobile and precarious labour” of today, and moreover, how realistic it is that a multitude could have the potential to “reappropriate money”

688 Cy Gonick, “Precarious Labour” in Canadian Dimension, “The Rise of Precarious Labour,” May/June 2011, 24- 25. See also Leah Vosko. Temporary Work: The Gendererd Nature of a Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ).

689 Thomas Walkom, “A new world of work, an old way of working,” Toronto Star, July 30, 2011, A6.

690 Mika LaVaque-Manty, “Finding Theoretical Concepts in the Real World: The Case of the Precariat,” in Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn, New Waves in Political Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 114.

691 Lisa Disch, “Tea Party Movement: The American Precariat”? Paper presented to The Centre for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements, University of California at Berkeley, October 2010.

212 and put it towards “fair trade and equal exchanges,” it must still be acknowledged that this is indeed a popular struggle, and, as such, continues revolutionary activity. Hardt and Negri are right to point out that capital is increasingly having difficulty today in incorporating and exploiting labour. There is certainly a social component to precarious labour as well as a popular consciousness. There is indeed understandable resistance against this new model of labour in the neoliberal universe because, as Hardt and Negri point out, “capital is casting labor out, expelling it, cutting ties of stability, welfare and support.”692

We must do more than merely touch on these concerns. Removing the poor and dispossessed out of the welfare ghetto means mobilizing “the commonality of the poor.”693 The poor in the commons is one example of biopolitical power that is truly social because the paradigm itself moves people away from the narrow economic, self-interested concerns of the old class struggles. The old social bodies, like trade unions, are drying up, because the people are missing. Nevertheless, “the poor constantly express an enormous power of life and production.” If conventional approaches could be put aside, it is possible that Hardt and Negri are right. Indeed, the poor may be victims, but they are possibly powerful victims, as well as agents of change. John Holloway’s metaphor for politics is “the scream,” Hardt’s and Negri’s, by contrast, is “the knowing laugh,” which, they say, “accompanies our realistic critique of the dominant powers.” This is because they see hope in the concept of the commons: “The rulers, destroyers, and corrupters are not as strong as they think, and we are more powerful than they will ever know.” 694 Their argument is that in the biopolitical economy, labour and property have

692 Hardt and Negri, Chapter 5.2, “What Remains of Capitalism,” in Commonwealth, especially 292- 295.

693 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 135-137.

694 Source for all three quotations: Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 382.

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changed so much that now “productive forces are becoming ever more autonomous in their

production of common goods, such as ideas, codes, affects, images, and the like. Capital still

manages to expropriate the common that is produced, and ruling powers continue to exert their

control, but we laugh with the recognition of what their weakness portends for our future.”695

5.6 The Need for New Paradigms

This dissertation has shown that some paradigms are better at social citizenship than

others. What do these discourses offer social rights in the end? Producerism lacks universality,

liberalism lacks fraternity, and idealism lacks materiality. In their separate ways, these

frameworks all fail to grapple fully with inequality, class, and power. The discourse of idealism,

for example, is problematic precisely because of its idealism – that is, its universalizing, abstract,

ungrounded nature, which argues conflict out of existence. Yet idealism also has many useful

properties, the most important being the conception that society as an organic whole has rights

and must be defended. This idea entails not just the notion of “live and let live,” but also, as the

American Progressive, Herbert Croly, said almost one hundred years ago, “live-and-help-

live.”696

From the chapters of this dissertation, it should be evident that in both the broad and

narrow sense there is much normative content in the concept of social rights even though there

are liberal thinkers educated in Britain such as Joao Carlos Espada who think that there is no

concept of social justice in social citizenship:

both Neo-Liberalism and Socialism share a misleading assumption about social rights: they both perceive them as being an expression, or a component, of a general criterion of distribution or social justice. On the contrary, and according to the view presented here - which, if it deserves any label, could simply be called Liberal - social rights should not be associated with any overall theory of justice whatever. They should be

695 Ibid, 382.

696 Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), 426-430.

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perceived as giving rise to a common floor below which nobody needs fear to fall, but above which social inequalities may flourish.697

Espada, and others who share his ideological position, including T. H. Marshall himself – hence the idea that there are two T. H. Marshalls – are the exception, although there is something profoundly disturbing about this inability to give social rights their due, something that needs to be investigated. Indeed, it is obvious that there is a concept of social justice in social rights.698 If there were not, the debate over the welfare state would be less heated, less prone to ideological attack and justification, as well as less prone to political restructuring. In conjunction with liberalism’s inability to portray social rights in their full and complete sense, then, what is striking about Espada’s analysis is his attempt to deny social rights even their most basic attribute: that of social justice. So alongside the contemporary memory lapse of social right's origins and history, is the idea that even the raison d'etre of social rights is absent in liberal literature such as Espada’s. Thus the concept of social rights is emptied of all content: it has no origins, no history, and no conception of social justice.

Espada is right, however, but not for the reasons he gives, for clearly the builders of the welfare state and the historical edifice it developed from called for something more progressive than what Espada prescribes. Espada is right because there is much evidence to support the idea that the normative claims and values of what was a new state form, the welfare state, have not been honoured. Indeed, there is this enormous, rich, normative capital of ideas, concepts, traditions, actual historical struggles, concrete sub-cultures, and whole communities, which have

697 Joao Carlos Espada, Social Citizenship Rights: A Critique of F. A. Hayek and Raymond Plant (London: Macmillan, 1996), 3.

698 This does not mean, however, that the welfare state was a success. Many writers speak of the failure of Keynesian policies and, in the end, the failure of social democracy in the post-war era. As John Keane pointed out over a decade ago, “Precisely because of the controversy and the political and social conflict it has unwittingly generated, [the welfare state] must be seen as a highly unstable formation in transition, a crisis-ridden complex of relations of power whose future shape remains at this point undecided,” 20.

215 been lost to the modern, passive, depoliticized, narrow liberal view of social rights as entitlement and bare subsistence, 699 “allowing people,” as Joel Bakan says, “to live in poverty rather than die from it.”700

Any conception of society based on civic virtue links back to republican values found in

Beveridge and Titmuss and in personalist-communitarian theory today, such the writings of

Emmanuel Mournier, Jacques Maritain, and Roberto Unger.701 Such views have evolved into current concerns for “connectivity,” “facebook,” and the “network society.” This thinking combines rights with community. The idea of freedom always sparks and sustains popular struggles. And the Commons is a free paradigm in more ways than one. Indeed, Hardt and

Negri define the “standpoint of the common” as: “free access, free use, free expression, free interaction – that stands against private control, that is, the control exerted by private property, its legal structures, and its market forces.”702 Furthermore, though capital doesn’t like it, it is dependent on the Commons for its life-affirming benefits. And social science is obligated to investigate matters of general, popular concern and citizens need to be involved: the question of what goes on in the public realm is far too important to be left to “experts.” So it is fortunate that the obligation to move the debate out of neoliberalism and away from the language of economics is already well underway.

699 As pointed out in Chapter Two, even Beveridge was more radical in his initial 1942 policy recommendations to the Advisory Panel on Home Affairs in the British government. See Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

700 Joel Bakan, Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

701 Virginia A. Leary, “Postliberal Strands in Western Human Rights Theory: Personalist-Communitarian Perspectives” in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im, ed., Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

702 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 282

216

As this dissertation reveals, producerism is able to support social rights only in a “weak” sense – that is to say, if traditional criteria are employed as a guide, and if the comparison is to idealism or socialism which support social rights in a “strong” sense. However, republicanism or producerism, like all discourses, can change. And there are some reasons why it would. For one thing, producerism advocates a type of social welfare that is more than mere passive social assistance. Some say that it takes more seriously than other approaches “what was

“contemplated in ancient philosophy and neglected after its decline, that the individual creates him- or herself.”703 One of its more promising aspects, then, is this emphasis on “growth, activity, learning, and mutuality: its picture of the Self as something that is shaped through constant interaction with other selves in a common and testing endeavor.” 704

Arguably, republicanism, as a certain brand of American political philosophy, takes on human issues like self-alienation. Yet the political theory behind much American thinking is polyarchy which sounds good in theory and is a positive goal. However, as American voters know all too well, the State is easily captured by powerful interests which can cancel out the polyarchy part. Still, the state is still something that citizens can turn to, though it is certainly not the only, nor even the most effective, political arena open to them. So the state is necessary, yet problematic. Indeed, the state must be made to do as much as it can possibly be made to do.

With the shift into a global economy, what “we have failed to grasp is that, in the late twentieth century, the state is now an intermediary institution as well,” writes Tony Judt. 705 He continues:

“There is something intuitively and distressingly callous about leaving certain sorts of goods,

703Daniel Raventos and David Casassas, “Republicanism and Basic Income: The Articulation of the Public Sphere From the Repoliticization of the Private Sphere” in Guy Standing ed., Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 248.

704 David Marquand, The New Reckoning: Capitalism, States and Citizens (London: Polity Press, 1997).

705 Tony Judt, “The Social Question Redivivus” Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997, 109.

217 services, and life chances to the winds of fate.”706 Exactly, Judt is right: Social citizenship is serious business.

Though civic republicanism is ill-equipped to deal with mass society, it does attempt to address issues people really care about. Unlike the welfare state, which only skims the surface, it does try to create a sense of community. And while it is true that social citizenship fits well with liberalism, it does so only if the society at issue is content with the status quo. Members of

Parliament are public servants engaged in public service. They are responsible to the citizenry because they are its political representatives in the House of Commons. Citizens need to set high standards for their MPs, and hold them accountable, as they did in the British and Canadian past, and self-actualization must be reconceived in terms more favourable to community. An ego- transcending, other-regarding, and ecological form of self-actualization should be the highest expression of selfhood, and it should be the standard for social citizenship. This is why, for

Polanyi, it was “society not the market or the state that held the key to the protection of human life and welfare.” 707 Indeed, the most important social right is the right to be fully human which means “the right to engage and participate in one’s own life, the right to development and growth of the human potential.” 708 Social development such as this can only be accomplished through community empowerment requiring Polanyi’s concept of Lebensweg: “the day to day ethical task

706 Ibid, 109.

707 Gregory Baum, Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).

708 Armine Yalnizyan, What’s Left? The New Democratic Party in Renewal, 50. The full text is: “the central social right – the right to engage and participate in one’s own life, the right to development and growth of the human potential – was thus eclipsed by a derivative right, the right to access learning opportunities in the labour market.”

218 of living.”709 In this discussion, it means facing the Commons, and each other. After all, who else is there?

It is not about poverty. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show in The Spirit Level, it is about inequality. Thus, states should not concern themselves with a “War on Poverty,” but rather with creating the conditions for more equality. Like so much in this dissertation, this is a historical theme. Richard Titmuss, Townsend, even T.H. Marshall, all showed that it is deprivation, or relative poverty, not absolute poverty that is the problem. This is why the nineteenth-century American social reformer, Frances Wright, believed in establishing a

“national character of belief in social equality.”710 Besides norm work and education, the design of social institutions is therefore equally important. As Wilkinson and Pickett point out, there are many ways to get to this enlightened State.711

Though much has been said about self-actualization and making life worth living, there should also be movement away from the romantic idea of “self-development.” Self-realization in liberal thinking from John Stuart Mill to C.B. Macpherson provides only half the answer.

Further, it can be carried to an extreme and turn into something else. As these enlightened liberal thinkers were fully aware, it is powerful structures that stand in the way. Thus, Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri remind their readers of “the spectre of the commons” which “comes face-to-face with the family, the nation, the corporation.”712 Indeed, in this one

709 Gregory Baum, Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics, 22.

710 Frances Wright quoted in Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York: Bobbs:- Merrill, 1954).

711 As Richard Wilkinson said at The Age of Unequal, his talk given to: MASS LBP and the Wellesley Institute, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Metcalf Foundation on December 10, 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Japan and Sweden both have high levels of equality, but whereas Sweden accomplishes this through an expanded welfare state, high levels of taxation, and redistribution, Japan does it through a smaller welfare state with less income differentials.

712 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, op.cit.,159-164.

219 conceptualization, Hardt and Negri pinpoint three main areas of continuing injustice: gender, race, and work issues.

5.7 Life in the New Commons

One of the striking things about the new literature, which was briefly mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, is the frequent use of the prefix “life” as in “life-world”

(Habermas), “life-centered” (Korten), “life-provision,” “life-security,” “life-ground,” “life- fabric,” “life-enabling,” “life-interest,” “life-good,” “life-protective,” “life-organization,” “life- requirements,” “life-means,” “life-sensible” (McMurtry), “life-realisation,” “life environment,”

“life politics,” “life-chances” (Therborn), “life-emancipatory movements” (Bamyeh), “life projects” (Higgins and Ramia), “life assets,” “life quality” (Novick), “life values,” “lifestyle pact[s]” (Giddens), etc. It is not hard to explain why this concern is so prevalent. As David

Korten points out, “global financial markets and global corporations are programmed to destroy life – the lives of working people, the life of community, and the living wealth of the planet,” and all this “to make money for the already wealthy.”713 In Canada, the language of life and death appears in historical work such as in the writings of socialist Phillips Thompson in the late nineteenth century. Pope John Paul II spoke of the “Culture of Life versus the Culture of Death” in the twentieth century. And, finally, though certainly not exhaustively, in 1919, Walter

Rauschenbusch’s Christianizing the Social Order compared “Profit Versus Life.”714

713 David C. Korten, “What to Do When Corporations Rule the World: An interview with David C. Korten,” Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Summer 2001, 49. Emphasis is added.

714 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: The Macmillan Company), 242-251.

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So obviously this concern for life is both a very old theme as well as being a relatively new one. On the newer front, the slogan for the Green Party is a “politics of life,”715 and the fight for the Commons is understood as a “global movement for a living democracy.”716 Capitalism is now seen as “making life over in favor of death, both at the level of everyday life and by business as usual.”717 Michel Foucault spoke of “fostering life” or “disallowing it.” American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum’s approach is also based on “life politics.” The fact that so many thinkers end up at the same destination must mean something.718

Reflecting the depth and profundity of the civil commons concept, and doing justice to the

“civil” or moral component of it, McMurtry speaks of these commons “as a way of seeing and judging,”719 comprising, he says, “the civil commons within.” Such responses cross class, culture, race, and gender barriers. “If people observe or know of the destruction or can explain it, they rebel from within as if there was an acquired structure of thought which put them “in common” with the lost life, and the life that remains. This is the civil commons within.”720

Indeed, this degree of internalization “is the hallmark of the civil commons in its maturest forms.”721

715David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From deep ecology to social justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.

716 Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, second edition. (Bloomfield, Connecticut and San Francisco, California: Kumarian and Berrett-Koehler, 2001), 5. Emphasis is added.

717 Teresa Brennan, “From socialists to localists” in Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell, and Richard Westra, eds., New Socialisms: Futures beyond globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 252.

718 Indeed, a very recent work has this expectation in the very title: David Kishik, The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford: Stanford university Press, 2012).

719McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 214. Emphasis is in the original.

720 Ibid, 214. Emphasis is in the original.

721 Ibid, 213. This idea is similar to Karl Polanyi’s notion of the “civil conscience.” The civil conscience is one part of the “double movement” which Polanyi called the Great Transformation. Like McMurtry, and closely linked to a certain view of freedom, what Polanyi meant by this is society’s desire to protect itself against the ravages of the

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The civil commons is thus linked to the emergence of civil society and to an ethical awareness of self-responsibility and co-responsibility. This is the citizens’ conscience, or the civil conscience, what Karl Polanyi called “das burgerliche Gewissen.” 722 The civil conscience has always been present – in feudalism, guilds, communities, churches, villages, estates, relations between master and slave, employer and employee, husband and wife, corporations, unions, extended families, and so on. The civil conscience is linked to a unity of rights, to civil and political rights, as much as to social rights, and even to the emergence of the market itself in bringing these rights together. This is what the editor of a work on social citizenship means when he says that, as “social relations stretch across boundaries – as they do in intense ways in our age – they respatialize the content and the extent of social rights.”723

Why is McMurtry’s analysis so important to social rights? One answer is that he offers practical solutions. Seeing the civil commons as a result of a long-evolving “life-protective” system, he thinks it is amenable to quite specific measurement. “Far from … being a rather foggy matter… [it] “is identifiable to a reasonably exact degree of achievement.”724

When society reaches a certain level of civil commons development, the whole community provides [the] means of life in the form of social assistance, universal health care, old-age pensions and on through the entire developed infrastructure of socially constituted means to protect and enable the lives of all of society’s members, their environmental life-host, and also fellow creatures of every type. These mark the level of civilization of the society in question.725

As is evident, McMurtry’s conception of the commons is every bit as evolutionist as T.H.

Marshall’s, yet there are differences. For example, McMurtry does not distinguish social rights unregulated market. For a discussion, see Gregory Baum, Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).

722 Baum, 23-26.

723 Engin F. Isin, “Conclusion: The Socius of Citizenship” in idem ed., Recasting the Social in Citizenship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 283.

724 Ibid, 211.

725 Ibid, 215.

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from political and civil rights. Thus he is able to avoid the kind of Two-Tier thinking still

evident in Marshall’s work. Indeed, McMurtry’s conceptual unity is evident in his definition of

the civil commons. Comparing the concept of the civil commons to similar terms such as the

welfare state whose meaning is often obscure, or worse, not accurate, McMurtry writes:

The civil commons, in contrast, is precise and long-tested in its meaning and is what any legitimate state or government properly serves and supports. But there is much more to the civil commons than we yet recognize. It is an open conversation in a public place, a neighbourhood network of mutual life assistance, a health-care visit, an educational classroom, a public gallery or library, an information broadcast or common knowledge, an old-age or disability pension, a park, a democratic election, a city playing area, a path in the wilderness, a community day care, a mass transit system, a home for the homeless: All these unpriced public goods are life-means of the civil commons.726

McMurtry’s conception finds common ground, then, in an amalgamation of rights. For example, “an open conversation in a public place” is an individual civil right to free speech and the freedom to associate, but is also the collective political right to hear alternative opinions. “A democratic election” is an individual political right to participate in the political process, and also the collective right to choose political leaders and policy directions, “A health-care visit,” “a neighbourhood network of mutual life assistance,” “an educational classroom,” “an old-age or disability pension,” “a community daycare,” “a home for the homeless” are all individual social rights, but are also collective social rights to a safe and “civil” society and to a caring community.

Furthermore, “a public gallery or library” and “an information broadcast” are cultural rights, while

“a park,” “a city playing area,” “a path in the wilderness” constitute leisure rights, as well as environmental rights. This extended definition of social citizenship also includes spiritual rights to nature, animals, plants, and all living beings.

These categories are not important; what is important is the idea that, in transcending the

usual divisions, McMurtry’s formula provides formidable new criteria for policy evaluation and

the proper role of government. In today’s vocabulary, this is called “evidence based public

726 Ibid, 376

223 policy.” 727

Whatever is required for the civil commons to serve life is a legitimate function for public financing and support, whether by government or other organization acting for the community as a whole. But this commitment has an austere converse. Whatever is not necessary to fulfil a common life-interest is not a legitimate function of government, nor of any community-financed body. Thus, all subsidies and tax-benefits of any kind to for-profit corporations, or bureaucratic regulatory apparatuses which do not protect or enable the life of society’s members are ruled out by this criterion of selection.728

To be sure, public policies evaluated in this manner would increase the potential for human development. McMurtry’s argument reveals that the power of which he speaks comes from freedom through limitation. The purpose of rights is to protect and enhance human agency and to lift the human condition. And it does this through the idea of limitation, which, as earlier pages of this dissertation note, is what makes Canada not only different from the U.S., but also more in line with the notion of the civil commons as outlined by McMurtry. Deep communal values were brought to this country, or were already here, by Highland Scots, the French, the

American loyalists, aboriginals, Social Gospellers, and so on. These ideas of “moral government” or a “moral imperative,” were found in the philosophy of the Scottish

Enlightenment and deeply penetrated the Anglo-American tradition. In sum, the commons, as

Peter Barnes notes, is “a vehicle for a much more equal society.” Certainly an idea or conception of property that includes the right not to be excluded strengthens equality. Indeed, since society is under siege today, no less than everything that can be done, must be done, to enhance its self-protection.729 As this dissertation has shown, for a limited time, social rights in the nation-state fulfilled that role, despite – or perhaps because of – the capitalist economy.

727 David Eaves and Taylor Owen, “Progressivism’s End,” Literary Review of Canada, Vol. 16, No. 7, September 2008, 3-5.

728 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 218. Emphases are in the original.

729 See Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Seige (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

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In order to make the commons a safe place to work and play, there must be a re-configuration of these deep and penetrating blocks of unfreedom. The way forward, as always, is through culture, education, and political work.

5.7 Deeper, Broader, Richer

This dissertation has probed the question of what precisely is social about “social rights.”

As pointed out, T.H. Marshall thought that education and healthcare were bona fide social rights, but he wasn’t sure about the nature of the other kinds of social rights. Though it is true that property has public origins and public consequences, and is a type of social right, the kind of property enshrined in the welfare state comes nowhere near what it needs to if it is to affect distributional issues in the economy. Thus public property in the welfare state may not be “the new property” that Charles Reich thought it was. Subsistence property in welfare rights is not the same thing as the social rights of the welfare state.

Chapters Two, Three and Four finally put to rest many of the concerns of classical liberalism raised in Chapter One. It is not until the analysis goes back to foundational issues – to the foundations of social rights in labour and property, and out of these practices, political discourses and social science – that many of the false claims about social rights can be shunted to the margins where they belong. However, the complexity of social life is always appreciated.

But the fact that appearance is also part of reality does not mean that it should be given equal weight. As this dissertation argues, there is a deeper logic at work. If all the variables are considered, even admitting the existence, at a phenomenological level, of the polarity of the two traditions of self-sufficiency and mutual dependence, and even if it is agreed that some sort of balance between the two in every society is required, the Hobbesian point of view, which is the basis of classical liberalism and the Two-Tier distinction between rights, is simply not an

225 accurate reflection of human society. This does not mean that Heclo’s “permanent dualism” can be dismissed, if only because it so obviously exists. It simply means that the weight that he and others give to one side of this dualism over the other can and should be questioned.

It is not simply a matter of redefining the social or reimagining social rights. It is a matter of understanding the true nature of the social. As Rousseau was the first to point out, Hobbes was completely wrong in his basic assumptions. If anything is unrealistic and idealistic it is neoliberalism. For one thing, neo-liberalism conjures up “a return to a history that never existed, that is, to a time when the market was free of the state and civic encumbrance.” 730 For another, the abstract individual is divorced from such specifics such as her or his place in the social hierarchy, their geographical location, and the generation into which they were born. As

Charlene Spretnak notes, the modern world consists of an “ideological flight from body, nature, and place.”731 Despite concerns mentioned above, about technocratic governance in the form of a global meta-regulation that tends to favour economic over social rationality, it may not be so much a matter of reversing this trend, as stopping it in its tracks, listening to nature and history, and returning to a more balanced approach.

With the collapse of reform liberalism in democratic countries everywhere, achieving this state of grace is a daunting task. But ultimately this is what is required: governments of various nations, including the British, the American and the Canadian, in consultation with people directly involved with social issues, must work together to create the conditions necessary for the establishment of a meaningful social citizenship, as indeed they attempted to do in the past. This

730 John O’Neill, The Missing Child in Liberal Theory. Full reference to be provided.

731 Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature and Place in a Hypermodern World (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1997), 223. Despite its elegance theoretically, perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this disembedding is the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” in A Theory of Justice, but it applies to many other theorists as well. By way of contrast, at least New Liberals and Fabians were willing “to start in the middle,” as pointed out above.

226 is both an individual responsibility and a government responsibility. It is, as always, and above all else, a moral question.

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Appendix One

Text of the first Chartist petition, 1839

Unto the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament assembled, the Petition of the undersigned, their suffering countrymen, HUMBLY SHEWETH,

"That we, your petitioners, dwell in a land where merchants are noted for enterprise, whose manufacturers are very skilful, and whose workmen are proverbial for their industry.

"The land itself is goodly, the soil rich, and the temperature wholesome; it is abundantly furnished with the materials of commerce and trade; it has numerous and convenient harbours; in facility of internal communication it exceeds all others.

For three-and-twenty years we have enjoyed a profound peace. Yet with all these elements of national prosperity, and with every disposition and capacity to take advantage of them, we find ourselves overwhelmed with public and private suffering.

"We are bowed down under a load of taxes; which, notwithstanding, fall greatly short of the wants of our rulers; our traders are trembling on the verge of bankruptcy; our workmen are starving; capital brings no profit and labour no remuneration; the home of the artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker is full; the workhouse is crowded and the manufactory is deserted.

"We have looked upon every side, we have searched diligently in order to find out the causes of a distress so sore and so long continued. We can discover none, in nature, or in providence.

"Heaven has dealt graciously by the people; but the foolishness of our rulers has made the goodness of God of none effect. The energies of a mighty kingdom have been wasted in building up the power of selfish and ignorant men, and its resources squandered for their aggrandisement.

"The good of a party has been advanced to the sacrifice of the good of the nation; the few have governed for the interest of the few, while the interest of the many has been neglected, or insolently and tyrannously trampled upon.

"It was the fond expectation of the people that a remedy for the greater part, if not for the whole, of their grievances, would be found in the Reform Act of 1832.

"They were taught to regard that Act as a wise means to a worthy end; as the machinery of an improved legislation, when the will of the masses would be at length potential. They have been bitterly and basely deceived. The fruit which looked so fair to the eye has turned to dust and ashes when gathered.

"The Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another, and left the people as helpless as before.

"Our slavery has been exchanged for an apprenticeship to liberty, which has aggravated the painful feeling of our social degradation, by adding to it the sickening of still deferred hope.

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"We come before your Honourable House to tell you, with all humility, that this state of things must not be permitted to continue; that it cannot long continue without very seriously endangering the stability of the throne and the peace of the kingdom; and that if by God's help and all lawful and constitutional appliances an end can be put to it, we are fully resolved that it shall speedily come to an end.

"We tell your Honourable House that the capital of the master must no longer be deprived of its due reward; that the laws which make food dear, and those which, by making money scarce, make labour cheap, must be abolished; that taxation must be made to fall on property, not on industry; that the good of the many, as it is the only legitimate end, so must it be the sole study of the Government.

"As a preliminary essential to these and other requisite changes; as means by which alone the interests of the people can be effectually vindicated and secured, we demand that those interests be confided to the keeping of the people.

"When the State calls for defenders, when it calls for money, no consideration of poverty or ignorance can be pleaded, in refusal or delay of the call. Required, as we are universally, to support and obey the laws, nature and reason entitle us to demand that in the making of the laws, the universal voice shall be implicitly listened to. We perform the duties of freemen; we must have the privileges of freemen. Therefore, we demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret."

Note: The first petition was signed by 1,280,958 people, making it the single biggest petition ever seen at that time.

Source: Place MSS., 27,820, f. 374. [July 1838]. Cited in British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789-1875 edited by GDH Cole and AW Filson (Macmillan, 1951).

Available online: http://www.chartists.net/Chartist-petitions.htm#first

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Appendix Two

The Four Freedoms Speech Delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt

State of the Union, Address to the 77th Congress, January 1941

Selected excerpts:

The Nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America. Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect. Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are: Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding straight of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations. Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples :

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care. We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of

230 the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - -anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception – the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands, heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

Found online at: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=70&page=transcript

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Appendix Three

The Social Rights Index

Martha C. Nussbaum’s List of Central Human Capabilities

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. 2. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter. 3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. 4. Senses, Imagination, and thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, to think, and reason – and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice: religious, literary, musical and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain. 5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.) 6. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.) 7. Affiliation:

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. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.)

. Having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of nondiscrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature. 9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities. 10. Control over one’s environment: . Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.

. Material. Being able to hold property (both land and moveable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers. 732

732 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen and social justice” in Alexander Kaufman, ed., Capabilities Equality: Basic issues and problems (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 52-53.

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Appendix Four

Selected Highlights from the History of Social Rights

Early Codes of Law associated with such names as Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Draco, Solon and Manu outline standards of conduct for fairly homogenous groups within limited territorial jurisdictions. Many world religions uphold human rights in their requirements to treat fellow humans beings with dignity and to provide for each other's needs as the basis for virtue, social cohesion and harmony. 733 from 600s BCE Greek city-states conferred political rights (and duties) upon free male citizens. 27 BCE to 476 Roman Empire develops natural law; rights of citizens and persons freed from slavery.

476 to 1500s Roman Catholic Church throughout Christian Europe serves as the dominant religious, cultural and social institution. Social services of all sorts are offered by parishes, monasteries and convents, including hospices, apothecaries, infirmaries, food, shelter and care for infants, orphans, widows, disabled persons.

1215 Britain's King John is forced by his lords to sign the Magna Carta acknowledging that free men are entitled to judgment by their peers and that even a sovereign is not above the law.

1536 – 1540 Dissolution of the Monasteries. Population growth (3.5 million in England, Scotland and Wales in 1520 growing to 8 million by 1650) led to food price inflation, and population migration to the towns and social unrest.734 1597 Poor Law Act – Every parish was to appoint overseers of the poor to find work for the unemployed and set up parish-houses for poor people who could not support themselves. This remained in force until 1834 and is usually known as the Elizabethan Poor Law. 1628 British Petition of Rights is adopted. This constitutional document outlines specific liberties of the subject that the king is prohibited from infringing.

1689 English philosopher John Locke sets forth the notion of natural rights and defines them as the rights to "life, liberty and property."

1689 The Bill of Rights is adopted in England. It establishes the rights of the representatives of the people (the "House of Commons") to limit the king's actions and even remove him from power if he should act against their interests. The Bill sets guarantees against unjust taxation and cruel and unusual punishment and for the right to religious toleration.

1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes his philosophical tract The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right. In it Rousseau argues that government must heed the general will of society, and that the needs of society as a whole come before the specific needs of the individual.

733 Dates, details on human rights history available online: http://www.udhr.org/history/timeline.htm 734 Dates, details on agricultural history available online: http://www.guarlford.org.uk/remember_timeline.htm

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1723 Poaching becomes a capital offence. Poaching disturbances in Windsor Forest and Park led to clashes between 'blacks' (gangs of bandits and poachers who blackened their faces) hoping to maintain common rights and wardens and gamekeepers. The government issued the Black Act to handle the situation. This made various poaching misdemeanours into capital crimes.

1760 – 1830 The Enclosures Acts transformed open fields, commons and much of the waste land into a pattern of enclosed fields. When land was enclosed, it was allocated to owners of large landholdings, which deprived small livestock farmers of pasture lands and plots for their own family needs.

1787 Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed by 12 men, the majority of them Quakers. The two non-Quakers, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, devoted their lives to the cause of abolishing slavery. These men provided MP William Wilberforce with material to assist his parliamentary efforts to abolish the slave trade. They wrote books and pamphlets and produced prints and posters to publicise the cause.

1792 – 1794 Radical artisans form the London Corresponding Society. The spirit of 'liberty, equality and fraternity' that stemmed from the French Revolution of 1789 had inspired the establishment of radical societies in Britain. In January 1792, the 'London Corresponding Society', the most prominent of these organisations, was formed under the leadership of Thomas Hardy, a Scottish shoemaker. The LCS debated the need for parliamentary reform. It advocated universal male suffrage, a secret ballot and annual parliaments. The government banned the LCS in 1794. 1795 – 1834 The Speenhamland System. In the village of Speen, Berkshire, magistrates devised a method of giving relief to the working poor, based on the price of bread and the number of children in a family. The income of labourers was supplemented to subsistence level by the parish.735 1799 – 1800 Trade unions are outlawed. William Pitt the Younger's government passed two acts making it illegal for working men to form combinations in which their political rights were discussed. They were among several repressive measures designed to stifle any catalysts for a French-style revolution in Britain. The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824 and 1825.

735 Details available online: http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/poorlaw/speen.htm

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10 March 1801 Britain holds its first census. The census was introduced to help the government understand the demographic layout of the country and better utilise the population in times of war. A census of England and Wales, and a separate one of Scotland, has been taken ever since on a ten-yearly basis, with the exception of 1941. In the 1801 census, information was collected on a parish basis and there were no details on individual households. It was not until the 1841 census that more detailed information was requested. 1804 The Corn Laws, intended to protect landowners by imposing a duty on imported grain, had the effect of keeping the price of bread at artificially high levels. Manufacturers objected to having to pay high wages so that their employees could eat, and workers themselves, were resentful of this subsidy to farmers.

25 March 1807 Britain abolishes the slave trade, ending more than 200 years of slave trading.

1811 – 1812 Luddite protesters attack industrial machinery in protest against unemployment. During two years of high unemployment, textile workers known as Luddites (named after their mythical leader 'Ned Ludd') sabotaged machinery in the woollen, cotton and hosiery industries in Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. The government infiltrated the protesters with spies and sent 12,000 troops to Yorkshire in 1812 to stop further industrial violence. 16 August 1819. Eleven die at the Peterloo massacre in Manchester. A huge crowd of people gathered at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, to hear radical orators speak on the subject of parliamentary reform and high food prices. The local yeomanry were ordered to arrest the speakers, but panicked and charged the crowd. Eleven people died and hundreds were injured. The massacre became known as 'Peterloo' - an ironic inversion of the British military triumph at Waterloo.

1833 Great Britain passes Abolition Act, ending slavery in the British Empire. 1833 Factory Act restricts work hours for women and children. The Tory peer and reformer Anthony Ashley Cooper promoted the bill, which restricted the hours of work by women and children in textile mills. Under the terms of the act, mill owners were required to show that children up to age 13 received two hours of schooling, six days per week.

1834 The Poor Law Amendment Act sometimes abbreviated to PLAA was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Earl Grey that reformed the country's poverty relief system. While called an Amendment Act it completely replaced earlier legislation based on England's Poor Law of 1601. With reference to this earlier Act the 1834 Act is also known as the New Poor Law. March 1834 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' are sentenced to transportation for trade union activities. Six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle set up a 'friendly society' to campaign for better pay and working conditions. They were put on trial and sent to penal colonies in Australia, but were granted pardons in 1836 following a public outcry. The so-called 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' are credited with helping to launch the trade union movement. 1835 Municipal Corporations Bill creates town councils. This legislation gave 178 boroughs the right to have their own town council. All ratepayers were thereafter entitled to vote in borough council elections. The new councils gradually took control of local services such as education, housing and street lighting.

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1836 London Working Men's Association founded by Henry Hetherington, William Lovett, James Watson and other radicals.

1837 Charter demands set out at Crown and Anchor public house (28 February). William Lovett, working on behalf of the London Working Men's Association, is the principal author. Feargus O'Connor launches the Northern Star newspaper in Leeds (November).

1838 Great Northern Union founded in Leeds (April). People's Charter launched in London and National Petition launched in Birmingham (May). Mass meeting on Glasgow Green hears of the People's Charter for the first time (21 May); copies have not been printed in time. Tens of thousands attend Chartist rallies in Birmingham (August), Manchester (September) and elsewhere.

1839 First Chartist petition of more than 1,280,000 names presented to Parliament (7 May). A debate on the motion that the petitioners be heard in the House of Commons (12 July) is rejected by 235 votes to 46. Anti-Corn Law League founded (May). Great meeting of Scottish delegates in Glasgow (14-16 August) forms central committee to co-ordinate activities in Scotland. Three thousand Chartists march on Newport, Wales (November). Soldiers fire on the crowd, killing at least 20 and injuring 50 more. 736

1840 John Frost and other leaders of the Newport uprising are tried for high treason and sentenced to be hanged and their bodies quartered. Abortive uprisings in support of the Newport Chartists across the West Riding and North East of England. Government backtracks on Newport death sentences and says they will instead be transported to Australia. Feargus O'Connor is sentenced to 18 months in prison for publishing seditious libels.

1842 Chartist convention held in London. Second Chartist petition of more than 3,250,000 names presented to Parliament (4 May). It is rejected by the House of Commons by 287 votes to 47.

General strike (otherwise known as the Plug Plot riots) breaks out across Lancashire, Staffordshire and in other areas of Northern England and Scotland. 1843 Feargus O'Connor and 58 others tried for incitement to strike and riot at Lancaster Assizes. None of those found guilty is ever sentenced.

1845 Chartist convention held in London (April). Formation of Chartist Land Co-operative Society (later National Land Company). Society of Fraternal Democrats founded.

1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws.

1850 George Julian Harney launches short-lived Red Republican newspaper. It publishes the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto before ceasing publication and relaunching as the Friend of the People.

736 Chartist history available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/chartist_01.shtml

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1883 The Cooperative Women’s Guild is founded by Alice Acland and Mary Lawrenson. Its aim was to spread the knowledge of the benefits of cooperation and improve the conditions of women with the slogan "cooperation in poor neighbourhoods".737

1898 The Reverend Francis Herbert Stead (1857-1928) initiated the campaign that won the Old Age Pension. Meeting held on issue of pensions at Browning Hall in London.

1899 National Pensions Committee (UK) was formed. This was linked to National Committee of Organised Labour. F.H. Stead called for a national campaign for a universal non-contributory old age pension at age 65. The Newcastle meeting was attended by 37 delegates from Trade Unions, 29 Co- ops, 3 Trades Councils and Visitors. Unanimous demand was for a Universal and non contributory pension to be funded out of general taxation.738

1902 A delegation of women’s textile workers from Northern England present a 37,000 signatory petition to Parliament demanding votes for women.

1908 Lloyd George introduced the Old Age Pensions Act. The Act provided for a non-contributory old age pension for persons over the age of 70. It was enacted in January 1909 and paid to half a million who were eligible

1919 The International Labour Organization (ILO) is established to advocate human rights represented in labor law, encompassing concerns such as employment discrimination, forced labor, and worker safety.

1921 Unemployment benefits (UK) are extended to include allowances for wives.

1933 In a 100-day special session in Washington, Congress passes President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "New Deal," guaranteeing social and economic measures for workers.

1935 The National Spinsters' Pensions Association was established by women textile workers in Bradford to demand contributory pensions at 55. Annie Marienne Marsland (1899-1989) was their Treasurer from 1935 to 1945. By 1938 the organisation had 125,000 members in 97 branches and produced a monthly journal entitled 'The Spinster'. They also collected 1 million signatures for a petition for their aims and were successful in lobbying for a parliamentary commission for pensions of unmarried women. This reported in 1939 and as a result the age for unmarried women's eligibility for a state pension was reduced to 60 in 1940.

1941 US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) gives his famous "Four Freedoms" speech in which he claims that postwar peace must be rooted in the recognition of "the Freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of religion, freedom from want, and the freedom from fear." 1941 Signed by Great Britain and the United States, the Atlantic Charter creates a blueprint for the postwar peace and the basis of the mutual recognition of the rights of all nations.

1942 Sir William Beveridge publishes his "Social Insurance and Allied Services" report with state welfare proposals.

737 Dates, details on women’s rights history available online: www.lse.ac.uk 738 Dates, details of pension history available online: www.bbc.co.uk

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1946 National Insurance Act (UK) – introduced contributory State pension for all. Initially Pensions were £1.30 a week for a single person and £2.10 for a married couple. Paid from age 65 for men and 60 for women, effective from 1948. In July, Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan formally launched the NHS. For the first time, health care became free to all.

1948 UN General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the primary international articulation of the fundamental and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, and the first comprehensive agreement among nations as to the specific rights and freedoms of all human beings. European Social Charter defines economic and social rights for member States of the Council of Europe.

1975 Social Security Pensions Act (UK) - set up the State Earnings related Pension Scheme (Serps). Introduced in 1978, the scheme replaced graduated Pensions. Rules for contracting out were also introduced, whereby workers with adequate private provision can give up all or part of the benefits of Serps. In return they pay lower National Insurance contributions.

1977 United States signs the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

1980 Social Security Act (UK) – Link between state pension increases and average earnings broken by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. If the link with earnings had not been broken, a basic state pension for a single pensioner would be worth about £30 a week more.

1984 During the Miners’ Strike (UK), wives of picketing miners organise themselves into a powerful women’s group. At first, they supply the picketers with food and other supplies, but it soon becomes clear they want to be involved in the strike in their own right and not just be regarded as providing welfare support in the background. Women’s support groups form in every mining village and a working class women’s movement develops. Their organisation gives the women the means to participate in a common struggle with the men – a class struggle against their class enemies. The movement eventually becomes national with conferences and an elected leadership. It leaves a legacy of a common class struggle against sexism, women’s oppression and against capitalism itself. 739

1985 United Nations established Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

739 Details available online: www.fifthinternational.org

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