The Theory of Social Democracy

Thomas Meyer, Lewis Hinchman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745654614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ascendancy of neo-liberalism in different parts of the world has put social democracy on the defensive. Its adherents lack a clear rationale for their policies. Yet a justification for social democracy is implicit in the United Nations Covenants on Human Rights, ratified by most of the worlds countries. The covenants commit all nations to guarantee that their citizens shall enjoy the traditional formal rights; but they likewise pledge governments to make those rights meaningful in the real world by providing social security and cultural recognition to every person.
This new book provides a systematic defence of social democracy for our contemporary global age. The authors argue that the claims to legitimation implicit in democratic theory can be honored only by social democracy; libertarian democracies are defective in failing to protect their citizens adequately against social, economic, and environmental risks that only collective action can obviate. Ultimately, social democracy provides both a fairer and more stable social order.
But can social democracy survive in a world characterized by pervasive processes of globalization? This book asserts that globalization need not undermine social democracy if it is harnessed by international associations and leavened by principles of cultural respect, toleration, and enlightenment. The structures of social democracy must, in short, be adapted to the exigencies of globalization, as has already occurred in countries with the most successful social-democratic practices.

Part I

Political Theory

1

Social Rights, Risks, and Obligations

1.1 Contradictions in political liberalism

The legacy and aims of political liberalism

Since the Enlightenment the theory of liberal democracy has provided a virtually unchallenged source of legitimation for most regimes, at least in Europe.¹ By the nineteenth century it became apparent that liberalism had the potential to become more democratic both legally and institutionally. Eventually, the only norms capable of legitimizing political authority in modern societies were those derived from liberal political thought: universal human and civil rights; the rule of law; political power checked by constitutions; and popular sovereignty expressed as majority rule.² To be sure, these norms have often been ignored in practice. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few fundamentalist ideologies rooted in identity politics, their claim to universal validity is rarely challenged.³ In the wake of the collapse of its last great historical nemesis,⁴ Marxism-Leninism, the doctrine of political legitimacy implicit in liberalism has swept the field. In the post-metaphysical phase of modernity it has proven to be the only durable foundation of political authority and social order capable of mustering universal consent. Consequently, any modern democratic theory that stakes a claim to universal validity has to remain within its confines.

Even in its earliest form, in the writings of John Locke, political liberalism already offered universal justifications for the notions of a pre-political equal liberty for all and of human rights designed to preserve that freedom. Once the modern state was founded on democratic consent expressed in a social contract, those original notions led to the establishment of equal civil rights. The latter apply to all persons and define the meaning, purpose, and limits of the state’s authority.⁵ The ideas that legitimize the political and social order in the modern world derive from this liberal legacy: the equal dignity and worth of all persons, and the consequent equality of rights they enjoy in all decisions that affect both private and political autonomy.⁶ These rights are “absolute” in the sense that they are not to be balanced against other goods in a utilitarian calculus, i.e., not to be treated as relative to other ends. History justifies us in treating both principles – private and political autonomy, bonded indissolubly together – as the generative ideas of political liberalism. This is the case even though into the twentieth century the chief architects of liberal theory and party policy, hoping to shore up private property rights, struggled to evade the implication that liberalism ought to become more democratic.⁷ Restrictions on political participation such as property qualifications, gender, and educational levels gradually yielded to the evolving inner political logic of liberalism. The principle of equality triumphed over all such restrictions in its concrete forms as equal liberty for all citizens and the equal dignity of all persons. It is thus no longer possible to legitimize authority except by appealing to the norms of equality and their uniquely compelling claim to validity.

Within liberalism conflict has erupted over two cardinal issues that define the theory of social democracy: to what extent does recognition of human and civil rights shape the encompassing structures of society, and what standards must be met to justify the conclusion that these legitimating norms have been actualized in the real world?⁸

The theoretical tradition of political liberalism eventually split into libertarian and social wings, mainly due to differences over the way that the fundamental rights of personal freedom and private property ought to be ranked and balanced, and how the very notion of freedom should be defined.⁹ The answer to the latter question in turn will supply premises for a further argument about the gap between the formal validity and the real-world efficacy of rights. To emphasize the formal validity of such rights implies that one should take legal steps to secure individual freedom by establishing a legal sphere of privacy shielded from the intervention of third parties. By contrast, insisting on their efficacy in the real world means trying to add a dimension of freedom: All citizens should have sufficient control over elementary social and private goods to make their formal-legal freedom meaningful. This is the case only if they can reasonably expect to act in light of their own life plans, assuming these have been autonomously conceived.

The first liberal dilemma: freedom and property

Locke links the rights to freedom and property in a way that makes them appear mutually reinforcing; yet in the end their relationship proves to be ambiguous.¹⁰ He does not limit the notion of property merely to ownership of things. Rather, the term property in his theory embraces three distinct relationships that are to some extent constitutive of freedom: control over one’s own body or person, which implies the general freedom of action meant by private autonomy; liberty of thought and belief, especially in religion; and the right to dispose of one’s own possessions.¹¹ The first two dimensions of Locke’s concept of property involve reflexive relations with only one reference point: the relationship between a single person and him-or herself. Locke rejects the possibility that third parties might have legitimate interests to defend. But the third dimension raises the possibility of multiple reference points. Two or more persons might be involved in a case of legal ownership, since in principle its enjoyment could affect the rights not only of the property-owner, but of others as well.¹² When property is originally acquired prior to the establishment of civil society and government through a social contract, it involves only a binary relationship between the acquiring person and the thing itself, which Locke assumes belongs to no one and is simply “found” in nature, until labor endows it with the status of property. Only later in Locke’s exposition does the ownership of things evolve into a multipolar relationship. Once the state is founded by property-owners, it may lay claims to their property through taxation. Moreover, property may be employed as a means of production, for the full utilization of which the labor of third parties is required. The previous two cases, taken together, suggest that a “mature” property relationship eventually includes four reference points: the owner, the things owned, any number of propertyless fellow-laborers, and the state. Individual property rights may conflict with the rights of the last two, thereby raising a variety of legitimation issues.

Although Locke alludes to all of these dimensions in his theory of property, he does not assign them equal weight or explore their connection to the universal right of equal liberty. Locke cites three reasons why people have a legitimate right to property in things.¹³ First, because individuals own their own bodies, what they acquire is the product of their own free agency. Second, property is an expression of justice in the dealings of free persons with one another, since each of them has acquired property in a lawful manner. Third, once it has been legitimately acquired, property satisfies one condition for the continuing exercise of freedom on the part of persons qua owners. Once one concedes that there was an original condition in which everyone faced an “unowned” nature unmodified by labor, the conclusion seems inescapable that the propertyless misused their freedom of action and so deserved their fate.

Given these premises, the legitimating relationship between freedom and private property is persuasive. For then it really would be a matter of individual choice whether one wished to work for someone else (except in the case of a slave).¹⁴ The question that Locke never systematically poses is: what value does freedom have to someone who must transfer it to another in order to survive? Here it is not a matter of people having forfeited the right to life in an unsuccessful war, as in slavery, but of unmerited want and distress that drive them to desperate choices. In a property-based theory of freedom, voluntary alienation of one’s liberty collides with the principle of an inalienable natural right to freedom, raising the question of how conflicts between rights of equal rank, distributed among different persons, ought to be balanced. This dilemma becomes even more acute once the state has been established. For from that time forward (except on the “frontier”) everybody lives in an environment in which resources are less available to be converted into private property by personal labor, since most have already been appropriated by others.¹⁵

In civil society, in contrast to Locke’s state of nature, one will find propertyless people who must depend on the property of others (e.g., by renting land or working for wages) to survive. Their freedom of choice will be hollow, because it will be dominated by the property-owners’ priorities. As private individuals propertyless people depend on property-owners and are thus unequal to them in that respect. But as citizens of a state they are equal, albeit consigned to a passive civil status by the fiat of early liberal theorists. Thus the use of property entails a threefold relationship. First, property-owners have a connection to the things they own. Second, a relationship arises between the persons of the owner and the non-owner in the productive employment of these things. Third, all parties to the contract collectively manifested their will in defining the relationship between freedom and property and the procedures for adjudicating it.

Locke’s theory of property concedes to the state a limited authority of co-disposition over the property of private persons because it acts in the name of all citizens united by the terms of the original contract. It must at least be authorized to tax private persons (with the consent of parliament), for otherwise it would lack the means to protect basic rights and would therefore be unable to carry out the tasks for which it was allegedly created in the first place. Thus, the grant of an absolute property right, which Locke’s theory as a whole seems to imply as the state’s ultimate end, would conjure up a paradoxical situation. Modern libertarians such as Nozick, Hayek, and Gray, who have radicalized Locke’s historically ambiguous theory of freedom-as-property while remaining indebted to its principles, manifest this self-contradictory tendency.¹⁶ Their minimal state leaves the decisive question unresolved: how minimal is minimal, since that issue must always be decided politically?

Locke, unlike Hobbes, is concerned with more than the sheer physical survival of the citizenry; he wants firm guarantees of their freedom as property-owners. For that reason he cannot resolve the paradox of freedom by conceding to the state a general right over private property as though it were itself a higher-order property-owner entitled to regulate or take property as it saw fit to perform its mandate. Locke’s defense of a nearly absolute conception of property rights does not necessarily follow from the links he forges between freedom and property. Rather, his attitude is a function of the specific historical context in which he wrote, especially the defensive posture suggested to him by his experiences of the confrontations among liberalism, absolutism, and feudalism.¹⁷

The transition to modern libertarianism

Modern libertarians tend to reject Locke’s view that people originally acquire property by extending their right of ownership in their own bodies to the objects in which they have invested their labor. Nevertheless, they insist that a theory of property, based on the right of ownership in one’s own person, must be the sine qua non of freedom.¹⁸ While libertarians do indeed criticize some of the premises of Locke’s conception of freedom, they also uphold his core principles, in spite of the fact that the practice of market capitalism has brought to light the tensions between this understanding of property and a universalistic conception of freedom. The libertarian view seals off Locke’s once fluid conception of property against the implications of this experience with the market, thereby hardening it into an ideology. They interpret only one of the property relations discussed earlier as an expression of freedom – namely, the property-owners’ use of their own possessions – forgetting that the other relations can also enhance freedom. This move effectively sidesteps the issue of how freedoms are actually experienced in the real world, since it now appears that rights and liberties can be fully assured via institutional guarantees provided by the state, and that nothing further needs to be done.

By limiting the scope of its theory of freedom as property to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Political Theory
• Part II: Political Economy
• Part III: The Politics of Globalization
• Part IV: Cultural Foundations
• Part V: Theory and Practice
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References and Bibliography
• Index