Rethinking equality: The challenge of equal citizenship

229 Pages·2006·0.914 MB·English

by  Chris Armstrong

Rethinking equality
REAPPRAISING THE POLITICAL
Simon Tormey and Jon Simons . series editors
The times we live in are troubling, and as always theory struggles
to keep pace with events in its efforts to analyse and assess
society, culture and politics. Many of the ‘contemporary’ political
theories emerged and developed in the twentieth century
or earlier, but how well do they work at the start
of the twenty-first century?
Reappraising the Politicalrealigns political theory with its
contemporary context. The series is interdisciplinary in approach,
seeking new inspiration from both traditional sister disciplines, and
from more recent neighbours such as literary theory and cultural
studies. It encompasses an international range, recognising both the
diffusion and adaptation of Western political thought
in the rest of the world, and the impact of global processes
and non-Western ideas on Western politics.
already published
Radical democracy: politics between abundance and lack
Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (eds)
Chris Armstrong
RETHINKING EQUALITY
The challenge of equal citizenship
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Chris Armstrong 2006
The right of Chris Armstrong to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published byManchester University Press
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Distributed exclusively in Canada by
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 6924 6 hardback
EAN 978 0 7190 6924 6
ISBN 0 7190 6925 4 paperback
EAN 978 0 7190 6925 3
EISBN 978 1 8477 9201 3
First published 2006
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Typeset in Minion by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester
Printed in Great Britain
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Contents
Acknowledgements pagevi
Introduction 1
IA CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL EQUALITY
1The troubled life of social citizenship: Rawls on equality 23
2Equality, risk and responsibility: Dworkin on the insurance market 55
3Equality versus social inclusion? 78
IIALTERNATIVES: EQUALITY AND CITIZENSHIP
4Equality and responsibility: towards a more critical union? 97
5Opportunities, outcomes and democratic citizenship: Young and Phillips
on equality 117
6Equalities: recognition, redistribution and citizenship 138
7Equality and citizenship in global perspective 164
Conclusion 189
References 196
Index 218
[ v ]
Acknowledgements
Many people have assisted the birth of this book, whether knowingly or not. I
have benefited greatly from presenting the various chapters of this book at a
number of seminars and conferences, and I would like to extend my thanks to
audiences at Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Wales College,
Newport, the University of Granada, the University of Leeds and the University
of Newcastle, as well as to the members of the Equality Studies Centre at
University College Dublin. I would also like to thank the following people for
reading one or more chapters and for offering invaluable feedback: Sophie
Armstrong, John Baker, Keith Breen, Terrell Carver, Clare Chambers, Vince
Geoghegan, Andrew Mason, Cillian McBride, Susan McManus, Shane O’Neill,
Anne Phillips, Simon Thompson, Simon Tormey and Iris Young. Many of these
people may disagree with many of the things written here, but I have found their
responses stimulating and helpful nonetheless. Finally, I became a parent at the
same time as beginning this project, and spending time with my family has
helped put the work of writing the book into perspective, as well as being a
wonderful time in itself. I would like to dedicate the book, then, to Sophie and
Felix, for all the love, support and encouragement you have given me.
A version of Chapter 2 previously appeared as ‘Equality, Risk and
Responsibility: Dworkin on the Insurance Market’, Economy and Society34(3):
450–472, 2005. Chapter 3 draws extensively on ‘Opportunity, Responsibility
and the Market: Interrogating Liberal Equality’, Economy and Society 32(3):
410–427, 2003. Both are reprinted with kind permission of Taylor and Francis,
www.tandf.co.uk. A version of Chapter 5 is forthcoming in Political Studies
under the title ‘Opportunities, outcomes and democracy: Young and Phillips on
equality’.
[ vi ]
Introduction
EQUALITYstands in an uncertain position at the beginning of the twenty-
first century. Since Rawls’s Theory of Justice(1971) there has been a prolific
philosophical debate on the meaning and demands of equality; and some even
claim this debate has played a key role in reviving the normative ambitions of
political theory. At the same time, though, discourses of equality have come
under sustained assault from at least two directions. On the one hand the ideal
of equality has been challenged from the political ‘right’, particularly as a result
of a resurgent neoliberalism which from the 1970s mounted a serious attack on
the limited equalities achieved within many contemporary welfare states.
Several decades on, the aspiration towards equality threatens to disappear
entirely from the rhetoric of contemporary centre-right or centre-left political
parties, and as a result the most prominent egalitarian theorist working today
has proclaimed equality ‘the endangered species of political ideals’ (Dworkin
2000: 1). On the other hand, the ideal seems to have been steadily supplanted
within what we might call the ‘radical imaginary’ by rival ideals such as inclu-
sion, justice, the politics of difference or the politics of diversity, radical
democracy, recognition or redistribution (see Cooper 2000: 250). Rather than
simply reflecting academic fashion, this dislocation of equality is informed by a
series of challenges to mainstream egalitarian theory emanating from the polit-
ical ‘left’, from feminism, critical race theory and post-structuralism. The
language of equality is criticised within the ‘equality/difference’ debate for being
an inherently assimilationist ideal, implying that equality for women can only
mean an impossible aspiration towards a male norm (see e.g. Flax 1992). Within
the more recent ‘recognition/redistribution’ debate too, the language of equal-
ity seems to be, if not rejected, then at least relegated down the pecking-order of
critical concepts (see e.g. Fraser 1995). And in a related argument mainstream
egalitarian theorists have been condemned for pursuing a narrow and intro-
spected politics of ‘distribution’ at the expense of crucial issues of sexual, racial
or cultural justice (see e.g. Young 1990).
Although these radical critiques often hit the target when aimed at main-
stream theories of equality they do not, in my view, necessitate a rejection of the
language of equality itself (indeed they sometimes betray a concealed commit-
ment to equality themselves: at the same time as given theories of equality are
rejected as restrictive, normalising or foreclosing of political possibilities, the
promise is held out of more radical, inclusive or transgressive conceptions).
Beyond the confines of the academic world, equality remains hugely salient as
an organising concept for the struggle against capitalism, racism, sexism,
[ 1 ]
Introduction
cultural oppression, political marginalisation and against the continuing rise of
neoliberalism and the widening global inequalities that accompany it. The ques-
tion, then, is not whether equality is dead or dying – whatever that might mean
– but whether theorists can supply a vision of equality that takes on board these
critiques, and harnesses some of the critical force of movements for radical
change. In order to address this question I want to differentiate, first, between
two broad approaches to equality. The usual provisos apply: I will not claim that
these exhaust the theoretical possibilities, or that all egalitarian theorists can
neatly be slotted into one or other of these categories. But the distinction is,
nevertheless, worthwhile. The first approach can be called the ‘equality of what?’
approach.
Equality of what?
Taking its lead from Rawls, the liberal debate on equality, largely employing the
tools of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, has endeavoured to discern the
underlying meaning or logic of equality by asking what it means to treat indi-
viduals as equals (see Kymlicka 2002). When conceived as an issue of
distributive justice the central question has been what, if we are interested in
equality, individuals need equal shares of– or, to reflect the terms of the debate
more precisely, what it is that individuals need equal opportunities to obtain.
This produces the hugely influential ‘equality of what?’ debate (Sen 2000), and
putative answers have ranged from welfare (Arneson 1989), to resources
(Dworkin 2000; Rakowski 1991), through intermediate, and somewhat ‘amor-
phous’ conceptions such as ‘advantage’ (Cohen 1989), or ‘capabilities’ (Sen
1992). The ‘equality of what’ debate has been hugely prolific, but in recent years
the dominant position has been occupied by a school of thought known as ‘luck
equality’. Luck equality as a philosophical doctrine claims to capture not just an
important part, but the very essence of what it means to be an egalitarian. On
this view, the aim of equality is to extinguish the influence of brute luck on
distribution, to make the distribution of goods, or happiness, or abilities
responsive to individual effort or ambition alone, and not the arbitrary circum-
stances in which we find ourselves. Crucial to this doctrine is the ‘discovery’ of
the importance of individual responsibility and choice for egalitarian theory – a
discovery which, for Dworkin (2000), means that equality is no longer vulnera-
ble to conventional criticisms from the ‘right’.
Despite its prominence, some persuasive critiques of this model have
emerged in recent years. For one thing, although most of the protagonists agree
on the centrality of responsibility and choice, a definitive answer to the ‘equal-
ity of what’ question has not been forthcoming, and it is increasingly unclear
that the search for one pristine good or principle of distribution could ever
succeed in capturing the egalitarian impulse (as Walzer 1983 suggested early
on). It has been successfully argued that the monomania of the luck egalitarian
[ 2 ]
Introduction
project does violence to other egalitarian commitments, such as a concern for
individuals’ self-respect, or a hostility towards desperate poverty even when this
might be construed as ‘voluntary’ in origin. John Baker (1990) asserts, to the
contrary, that the egalitarian tradition is ‘pluralistic, non-foundational and
mutable’; there is no one ‘stuff’ about which equality is concerned, and the
various commitments of the egalitarian tradition cannot be translated into a
single super-principle. The proponents of this debate may be gradually realising
this themselves, with one prominent figure suggesting that we must be
concerned about a plurality of ‘stuffs’ though not, necessarily, a plurality of
principles (see Cohen 2004).
A second set of problems concerns the exclusions or marginalisations that
attend this way of formulating the pursuit of equality. As has been widely noted,
the ‘equality of what’ debate stands largely disconnected from parallel debates
about democracy and participation (see e.g. Gutmann 1980; Levine 1998). To be
sure egalitarians often argue that a commitment to equality entailsa defence of
formal democracy – but it is not at all clear that the achievement of equality is
seen as an inherently democratic project. A more troubling question is whether
since Rawls liberal egalitarians have significantly circumscribed the proper
bounds of political action and contestation, at the same time as narrowing the
remit of theoretical inquiry. On a related theme, Iris Young’s (1990) critique of
the distributive paradigm of justice certainly suggested that egalitarian theorists
have neglected hugely important issues which do not fit into a ‘distributive
paradigm’, and inadequately theorised those they have discussed – thereby
producing political conclusions that fail to challenge the basic institutional
structure of contemporary societies. It has been suggested that mainstream
accounts of equality ignore or are ill-placed to deal with issues of ‘culture’ (see
Young 1990; Fraser 1995), as well as ‘sex’ or ‘race’. Given the subsequent emer-
gence of what Kymlicka (1998) has called the ‘liberal (multi)culturalist
consensus’, this critique may now appear a little sweeping. But whilst liberal
egalitarian theory has increasingly, albeit slowly connected with issues outside
of a conventionally ‘distributivist’ frame, it is far from clear that it possesses the
theoretical resources to deal with them appropriately. It is worth noting that
although answers to the ‘equality of what?’ question vary considerably, the
framing of the question seems destined to ensure that the approach taken is a
‘possessive individualist’, rather than a relational or institutional one: equality
concerns the things we have, want or succeed in consuming individually, and
not the question of whether we stand together in relations of freedom or subju-
gation. On this theme, it will be argued that the recent focus on issues of choice
and responsibility represents an adoption of, not a challenge to, a broadly
neoliberal sensibility.
The third objection concerns the intellectualism of the literature. Rawls
himself has long been a target of criticism on this point, with Ted Honderich’s
[ 3 ]