Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community Based Welfare System Michele E
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University of Baltimore Law ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship Summer 2005 Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community Based Welfare System Michele E. Gilman University of Baltimore School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/all_fac Part of the Social Welfare Law Commons Recommended Citation Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community Based Welfare System, 66 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 721 (2005) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. POVERTY AND COMMUNITARIANISM: TOWARD A COMMUNITY-BASED WELFARE SYSTEM Michele Estrin Gilman' Table of Contents Introduction .............................................. 723 I. The Communitarian Response to Liberalism . .. 729 A. The Liberalism of John Rawls ........................ 729 B. The Communitarian Position. .. 733 C. The ,Communitarian Influence in Social Welfare. .. 736 1. Reciprocity .................................... 737 2. Incentives to Change Behavior .................... 738 3. Mediating Institutions ........................... 739 4. Community Values and Communitarian Politics ....... 740 D. An Assessment ofTANF ............................. 741 E. The Causes of Poverty ............................... 745 II. The Limits ofCommunitarianism ......................... 750 A. Michael Sandel .................................... 751 1. Sandel's Attack on the Procedural Republic .......... 752 a. The Supreme Court and the Procedural Republic .. 753 b. The Welfare State and the Rise of the Procedural Republic .................................. 755 c. Repairing the Procedural Republic. .. 756 2. A Critical Assessment of Sandel ................... 757 a. Sandel's Communities and,moor Communities .... 757 b. Barriers to Public Participation in Poor Communities ............................... 759 c. The Dangers ofMajoritarianism ................ 760 d. The Welfare State and Rights Discourse ......... 763 e. The Procedural Republic and the Poor ........... 764 • Associate Professor of Law and Director, Civil Advocacy Clinic, University ofBaltimore School of Law. B.A. 1990, Duke University; J.D. 1993, University ofMichigan Law School. I would like to thank Leigh Goodmark, Neil Gilman, Audrey McFarlane, Ngai Pindell, Robert Rubinson, Dana Shoenberg, Jim Kelly, and the participants in workshops at the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education and the Mid Atlantic Clinical Theory Conference for their comments on drafts of this article. 721 722 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LAW REVIEW [Vol. 66:721 f. The Supreme Court and the Morals of the Poor ... '. 765 B. Michael Walzer .................................. " 770 1. Complex Equality . .... 770 2. A Critical Assessment of Complex Equality .......... 772 I C. Amitai Etzioni and Communitarian Politics .............. 778 1. Etzioni and a Return to Values ..................... 778 2. A Critical Assessment of Etzioni ................... 781 m. Poor Communities and Social Capital ...................... 783 A. All Our Kin ....................................... 785 B. Social Networks in the Face of Welfare Reform .......... 787 C. Robert Taylor Homes and the Politics of Poverty .......... 788 D. Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and the Triumph of Community ....................................... 790 E. Lessons Learned from Poor, Urban Communities ......... 793 IV. A Community-Based Welfare System ...................... 795 A. Community Participation. .. 797 B. Barriers to Work ................................... 800 1. Child Care .................................... 801 2. Spatial Mismatch ............................... 806 3. Lack ofJobs ................................... 810 C. Barriers to Self-Sufficiency. .. 811 1. Raising Income . .. 812 2. Educational Opportunity ......................... 814 3. Asset Development ............................. 816 D. Welfare and Morals . .. 817 Conclusion . .. 819 2005] POVERTY AND COMMUNITARIANISM 723 This Article analyzes how communitarian political theory addresses poverty and impacts American social welfare programs. For several decades, communitarian and liberal philosophers have debated over how best to achieve justice through their competing notions of personhood. Whereas liberal theorists stress the values ofindividual autonomy and state neutrality, communitarians assert that people are socially constituted and that liberalism therefore pays too little attention to the value ofcommunity. Yet despite their attempts to articulate a superior form ofjustice, communitarian theorists either ignore or misunderstand issues related to poverty, as this Article explains. Nevertheless, their insights are helpful in thinking about combating inequity. Not only does communitarian theory support collective responsibility for alleviating economic injustice, but it also provides a framework for moving away from individual blame as an explanation for poverty. Current welfare law is based on the idea that individual behavior and choices cause poverty. As a result, welfare recipients are required to work without adequate social and economic supports to enable self sufficiency, and most remain mired in poverty. By contrast, this Article describes an alternative, pragmatic vision for welfare that builds upon the social capital that exists within distressed urban communities as a way to improve individual outcomes. INTRODUCTION In recent years, liberal and communitarian political theorists have battled over whether justice is best achieved through individual autonomy or through collective values. While liberals believe that human dignity is fostered when people select their own ends, communitarians counter that autonomy is a myth given the communal connections that encumber us and make us who we are. These heated intellectual debates have spilled beyond the walls of academia and seeped into the political arena, as communitarians have sought to claim a middle-ground between the political right and left and to temper rights-based rhetoric by offering an alternative based on shared moral values and joint responsibilities. A small, but vocal, political movement of communitarians has published a platform to focus public debates on "the social side of human nature; the responsibilities that must be borne by citizens, individually and collectively, in a regime of rights; [and] the fragile ecology of families and their supporting communities."! Although communitarians claim to articulate 1. See The Responsive Communitarian Platform, at http://www.gwu.edul--<:cpslplatformtext.html. 724 UNIVERSITY OF PIITSBURGH LAW REVIEW [Vol. 66:721 a superior form ofjustice, they have largely overlooked the poor. By contrast, liberalism-as practiced by both those on the political left and right-has long been concerned with whether and how to alleviate poverty and inju~tice.2 Nevertheless, communitarian theory offers helpful insights into thinking about poverty and welfare. Under the current welfare law, enacted in 1996, thousands of families have been pushed off of public assistance and into unemployment or a low-paid workforce that strands them in poverty. ·It is time to think about welfare from a new perspective, and communitarianism provides one way to do that. Rather than making the individual the locus of blame and reform as current welfare law does, a community-based welfare system would seize upon the substantial reserves of social capital that exist within distressed neighborhoods to improve individual outcomes. While we curreritly ask the poor to work in exchange for welfare benefits, we do not reciprocate in tum by providing the needed supports that make work possible, such as child care, education, and transportation. The communitarian conception of individuals as socially constituted holds out hope for a more holistic, and less reproachful, approach to social welfare policies. Our welfare policies have long been marked by a divide between the so-called deserving and undeserving and tailored in line with these moraljudgments. Categories ofpersons deemed deserving-such as the elderly, disabled, and children-receive social insurance with no shame attached. By contrast, undeserving persons, a category that now includes any able-bodied adult, parent or otherwise, receive stingy and stigmatized welfare payments. Currently, to receive welfare payments under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), recipients must work, as well as conform their behavior to prescribed values, and they cannot receive benefits for more than five years in a lifetime.3 The theoretical underpinning The platform is also reprinted in AMITAI ETZIONI, THE SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY: THE REINVENTION OF SOCIETY 251-67 (I993) [hereinafter ETZIONI, SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY]. 2. To clarity, in this context, liberalism refers to our dominant political theory that views state neutrality and individual freedom to pursue one's chosen goals as essential to justice. It does not refer to "liberal" in the jargon of modern day politics, in which the liberal view is the opposite of conservativism, and is defined as favoring a more generous welfare state and greater social equality. Indeed, liberalism in the political theory sense encompasses both mainstream