Citizenship politics – part 2
I am grateful for the constructive comments on my citizenship politics post, although I fear I’m a long way still from getting the idea more widely discussed. Today and tomorrow I want to explore the idea a bit more, including confronting its most obvious problems.
One issue to work through is whether citizenship politics is an approach to thinking or a set of beliefs. I have tended to present it as the former. Citizenship politics involves exploring together three sets of questions.
First, ‘who are we?’ kinds of questions. This is predominantly the domain of scientific and social scientific thinking. Neuroscience, social psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology all have insights to offer us about what drives human behaviour. There is talk of a new science of human behaviour which, by combining disciplines and calling on powerful new data sets, will fulfil the ambitions of the founding fathers of social science and enable us to predict human behaviour as easily as we can predict the behaviour of chemical compounds. I doubt this. The complexity and reflexivity of human behaviour mean it will never be entirely predictable. But citizenship politics does involve the attempt to base social analysis and policy prescription on a realistic, evidence-based, account of what makes us tick.
Second, ‘who do we need to be?’ kinds of questions. This is the domain of economic thinking (as long as we define ‘economic’ broadly). The question here is what kind of behaviour is necessary from us if we are to achieve the twin goals of increasing human welfare and managing finite resources. I wrote on Friday about how John Kay made a great impression on me by asking some fascinating questions about the relationship between GDP growth and human autonomy (more on this tomorrow).
Third, ‘who should we be?’ kinds of questions. This is the domain of philosophy and ethics: what is the good life well lived?
By asking ‘who do we need to be to create the future we want?’ citizenship politics attempts to bring these three sets of questions together, understanding both that they are conceptually distinct and that a rounded case for any policy strategy should have some way of answering each.
I can think of at least three obvious ripostes to the case I have made so far. The first is that this is completely obvious; all I am doing is making explicit something which is implicit in all political arguments.
The converse criticism is that this is a counsel of perfection; we might aspire to a holistic, multi disciplinary way of thinking that moves debate to a higher level, but in the real world arguments and decisions have to be made on a more partial and tenuous basis.
Finally, it can be argued that arguing for a political case to meet certain analytical and explanatory criteria doesn’t qualify as ‘a politics’ at all. After all, on this basis, a rounded right wing argument might qualify while a limited left wing one wouldn’t and vice versa.
So tomorrow (if I can resist commenting on the Brown ‘bullying’ saga) I will describe what I see as the progressive stance in these three domains; who we are, who we need to be and who we should aspire to be.
I only hope that by then there is still someone out there reading.
Comments
4 Comments on Citizenship politics – part 2
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phil korbel on
Mon, 22nd Feb 2010 3:14 pm
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Will Davies on
Mon, 22nd Feb 2010 6:48 pm
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Brenton Holmes on
Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 9:20 am
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Citizenship politics – part 3 | Matthew Taylor's blog on
Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 10:36 am
keep the flow going Matthew.
Rediscovering the ‘we’ part of the equation is not just important now, but vital in terms of a change of government and the imminent challenge of a changing climate and other resource constraints. Adding a pro-social localism layer to all this just reinforces the old axiom of ‘acting local and thinking global’
A friend commented on John Kay’s seemingly attractive example of food habits in the last post as a different way of looking at growth. The diversity of food supplies has come at a horrendous price in terms of market distortion [Supermarket oligopoly] and pollution… healthier diets and better lifestyles but….
bests,
Phil
On the first ‘who are we?’ point, I think the claim that “citizenship politics does involve the attempt to base social analysis and policy prescription on a realistic, evidence-based, account of what makes us tick” is far from obvious, as it stands. There are various questions I would pose.
Firstly, the social sciences are very far from being a homogeneous body of knowledge, and are themselves divided on what the appropriate relationship between social science and politics should be. Policy authorised by economics is very different from one authorised by sociology, which is different from one authorised by psychology. For example, an anthropologist might well argue that economists have no understanding of citizenship, only models of it. Methodological and ontological disagreements about society and individuals drive political differences.
Secondly, who would possibly credit this idea: “a new science of human behaviour which, by combining disciplines and calling on powerful new data sets, will fulfil the ambitions of the founding fathers of social science and enable us to predict human behaviour as easily as we can predict the behaviour of chemical compounds”. Certainly not Adam Smith, Karl Marx or Max Weber. It sounds far more like a physicist enthusiastically misunderstanding social science than a founding father of social science.
Surely any serious, political defence of social science has to take both of these points into account, and recognise that social science is deeply inter-twined with what it studies, is therefore at least partly an act of construction, and never unambiguously legitimate. There have been political regimes which have treated humans like ‘chemical compounds’ and they have not been pretty (apologies for implicitly breaking Godwin’s law). None of this is to say that social science can’t contribute to civic politics, only that it’s ability to do so is uncertain, internally disputed and in need of constant criticism.
Matthew
Keep the conversation going. This is a deeply important debate for a progressive politics of engagement. There is an enormous literature out there about the practicalities, possibilities (and perils) of citizens’ engagement, deliberative democracy and so on. Sadly, much of it is abstruse, and insufficiently polemical to prompt debate. What we need is someone who can articulate the issues in a way that engages the attention of politicians and our fellow citizens. A book / pamphlet on the matter often galvanises interest by the media – but I appreciate the difficulties you confront in trying to produce such a catalyst. Perhaps the rest of us should turn our minds to how that can be achieved. Consider yourself a burr under our individual saddles.
[...] as Will Davies reminded me in his comment yesterday, the way we present knowledge reflects the angle at which we look at the world. Citizenship [...]
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