Time, Social Justice and UK Welfare Reform*
Tony Fitzpatrick
School of Sociology & Social Policy
University of Nottingham
Nottingham
NG7 2RD
Tony Fitzpatrick is a Reader in the School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Nottingham. He is the author of Freedom and Security (1999), Welfare Theory: an introduction (2001), After the New Social Democracy (2003) and the forthcoming New Theories of Welfare, as well as editor or co-editor of Environmental Issues and Social Welfare (2002) and Environment and Welfare (2002).
Keywords: time, justice, liberalism, social policy, Robert Goodin, Andre Gorz
*Many thanks to the anonymous referees of this article’s first draft, and to Nikolas Rose.
Abstract
While analyses of time have never strayed too far away from those of social justice, and vice versa, this article’s premise is that they have so far failed to converge as directly and coherently as they might. The aim of this article is to facilitate a greater degree of convergence by working within a framework of liberal equality and establishing similarities in the work of the two theorists who have gone farthest in bringing the various debates together. These are Robert Goodin and André Gorz and the article explores the respective strengths and weaknesses of their ideas. A liberal theory of socio-temporal justice is derived from their work and is then used to critique some recent developments in UK welfare reform.
Introduction
Despite the paradox that the wealthier our societies become the more we seem to be experiencing a time squeeze (Schor 1991) political theories have barely gotten to grips with the theoretical and practical problems of time. One effect of this is to leave social and public policies adrift of any convincing account of time and its relation to social justice. The aim of this article is therefore to help rectify that neglect by bringing debates about time and social justice closer together and to provide the outline of a liberal theory of ‘socio-temporal justice’.
The article’s premise is that since almost all social and political theorists of the last thirty years have not allowed questions of time and social justice to converge adequately – a premise illustrated through a succinct analysis of Rawls – we have to start from outside the mainstream literature. That said, I will also assume that a broadly liberal approach to these issues is warranted if we are to develop a theory with the most practical application to current social and policy developments. To this end I will use the work of Robert Goodin and André Gorz as a key resource, explaining why each can be located within a liberal framework and how questions of time and social justice are central to both theorists. The essential question to be addressed is ‘what social background conditions are needed to make the release of more free time socially just?’ and Goodin and Gorz are utilised as a means of answering this.
In brief, while both recommend a shortening of the average working life as the sine qua non of social justice both are more concerned with the quality of the time available to people, even though they disagree on what quality means in this context. The differences between Goodin and Gorz in this respect are therefore identified but I shall argue that there is enough agreement between their respective positions to yield the outlines of a liberal theory of socio-temporal justice that specifies the basic prerequisites that social background conditions have to meet to be regarded as just. This outline is then offered and is employed to critique some recent developments in UK welfare reform in order to consider the theory’s practical usefulness and potential for further development.
No Time for Rawls?
In sketching a liberal theory of socio-temporal justice why not just rely upon the main authorities? Part of the problem is that the last three decades of political philosophy have given relatively little attention to time, perhaps on the assumption that time can simply be ‘read into’ whichever framework of social justice is found to be most convincing. This tendency is illustrated by Rawls. Having spent years and hundreds of pages explaining one of the most influential theories of justice ever it took a short article by Musgrave (1974) to point out that Rawls’s difference principle (the idea that inequalities should be organised so that they are to the benefit of the least well-off) would favour those with a high preference for leisure. By not considering the time people spend in productive and unproductive activity Rawls had advanced a theory of justice that blanketed the ‘least well-off’ with the same characteristics and failed to discriminate between those who were either more or less deserving – we return to this critique below. Yet while Rawls originally pushed time into the margins he did at least come to assimilate it more fully into his thought, which is more than can be said for his intellectual descendents – an assertion I admit would take another article to demonstrate! Therefore, we can gain some idea of political philosophical failings vis-à-vis time by examining Rawls in more detail.
There are two main aspects to the Rawlsian account, one concerned with primary goods and the other with intergenerational justice. Since I have critiqued Rawls’s ideas about intergenerational justice elsewhere (Fitzpatrick, 2003: Ch.7), I will here limit myself to a discussion of primary goods.
This aspect of time emerges for Rawls within the process of reflective equilibrium. Responding to Musgrave’s accusation that the difference principle would permit the idle to claim their maximin share of social resources Rawls (2001: 179), assuming a standard working day of 8 hours, added 16 daily hours of non-working time to his index of primary goods. If someone therefore spends their waking hours, say, surfing off the Malibu beach then s/he gains an extra 8 hours of leisure compared to those who work a standard day. As the surfer has chosen 8 hours of leisure rather than the equivalent income from a standard working day then s/he would be a free rider and so cannot be allowed to claim their maximin share of cooperative resources. The difference principle is therefore a principle of reciprocity (van Parijs, 1995: 96-8; White, 2003: 58).
Rawls seems to have stipulated 16 hours of non-working time to correspond to current social norms, i.e. a division of the day into three 8 hour periods of sleep, work and leisure, which the surfer can they be said to have violated. The assumption is consistent with Rawls’s view that political theory must augment the commonplace – through reflective equilibrium – rather than replacing it. But should this existing standard really be treated as the ideal norm? In the 1960s a great deal of sociological effort was spent on anticipating the benefits and burdens of the anticipated ‘leisure society’ (Dumazedier 1967). The fact that this leisure society failed to arrive in its widely anticipated form may be due to sociological naivety but is more likely due to the social sublimation of productivity increases. In other words, and under the influence of the New Right, we diverted ourselves away from a leisure society into societies of materialist, possessive individualism as a means of transferring increased wealth away from the more socially progressive ends for which it could have been used. By treating the prevailing 8 hour working day as a norm, then, Rawls is internalising into his thought the kind of existing social injustices that the difference principle presumably ought to challenge.
By not challenging them sufficiently Rawls’s hunt for the free rider simply ends once the usual suspect has been found. But what if a wealthy businessman is walking along the beach and stops to admire the surfer’s abilities? Should he offer a fee to the surfer in return for his enjoyment and, if he does not, does this mean that the businessman is now the free rider? But for how long? Can the accusation of free-riding be levelled at the surfer again once the businessman has moved along? And what if a political theorist is passing who decides she can get a journal article out of asking and addressing these questions? Is a fee now owed to the surfer and the businessman on pain of the political theorist becoming a free rider? These increasingly absurd questions illustrate the knots we can tie ourselves up with once we allow our theories of time and socio-temporal justice to be dominated by prevailing norms, values and assumptions regardless of their implications for injustice.
Therefore, we can claim that by being too ready to reify existing norms Rawls has not provided an adequate incorporation of time into his principles of social justice and, while another article would be needed to demonstrate it, I believe this failure to be indicative of the recent history of political theory. In order to allow questions of time to converge with those of social justice then, rather than simply following the normal path of Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian developments in the subject (Kymlicka 2002), we therefore have to look further afield towards those who have offered more critical treatments of time than Rawls et al, even if they do not represent the mainstream theoretical literature on social justice. So for the duration of this article I am going to set those developments to one side and concentrate instead upon the work of those who have arguably gone furthest in cross-referencing debates on time to those on social justice. But before doing so we need to understand why remaining within a liberal frame of reference is nevertheless appropriate.
By ‘liberal’ I here mean ‘liberal equality’, i.e. the view that for individual freedom to be properly realised then social background conditions have to involve the reduction and eventual elimination of systemic disadvantages through an equalization in the ownership and control of diverse economic and social (including cultural) resources – though I am leaving open the question of how much equalisation is necessary. The meaning of liberal in this context can therefore be identified with the traditions of American liberalism and European social democracy. Why is this the most appropriate framework for our analysis? Simply because it is that which corresponds most directly to those ideas which inspired the social reforms that brought developed nations in Europe and North America closer to the ideals of social justice than at any other point in their histories, i.e. from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s. And while the influence of liberalism has waned in recent years it still provides the clearest support for those institutions, like the welfare state, that for all their faults represent the strongest bulwark against the ideologists of inequality and injustice.
We are now in a position to explore the work of two theorists who have gone the furthest in drawing together issues of time and of social justice from within a critical but nevertheless liberal framework. They both offer important contributions to liberalism, as defined above, by epitomizing what are perhaps the two main schools of liberal thought: the individualistic and collectivist.
Goodin and Gorz
Goodin is a liberal individualist whose commentary on political theory has ranged widely over the last 20 years. Individualism constitutes a principal strand of liberal thought, where the freedom and autonomy of the individual self is the yardstick of social reform. In insisting that movements for social justice can no longer to afford to marginalize issues of time, e.g. by failing to conceive of it as a social resource to which individuals should have access according to principles of just distribution, Goodin articulates an important set of ideas standing at the confluence of time, justice and liberalism. For Goodin the meaning of free time is supplied by the individual who experiences it: that is what makes free time autonomous.
Gorz’s background is in existentialist Marxism and libertarian socialism. Running throughout Gorz’s work is the notion that if societies are to be made more just then a collectivist and inter-subjective reappropriation of social resources (including that of time) is going to be necessary. What characterises him as a liberal for our purposes is his view that human potential is being stifled by our productivist societies, that the tools we developed to dominate nature are, in turn, dominating us. So while there are aspects of liberal thought which Gorz certainly rejects (those that are instrumentalist and anti-statist) he is nevertheless content to express this unrealised potential through a vocabulary of rights and self-realisation that is more conducive to a liberal framework (Gorz 1999: 64). His is a collectivist approach since, for Gorz, time is always social time. So if Goodin’s notion of autonomous time is one of individualist ‘freedom from’, Gorz’s notion of social time is much more of a collectivist ‘freedom to’.
I therefore contend that Goodin and Gorz provide a criticalist overview of the issues we need to address while contributing to a liberal framework. In this section I first elaborate upon their basic ideas, offer some criticisms and then begin to suggest how and why their ideas concerning social justice and time might be brought together.
Goodin et al (1999: 225-36) define ‘combined resource autonomy’ as having enough income to meet basic needs and having enough free time to ensure that life involves more than the mere satisfaction of those basic needs. Full autonomy therefore derives from a combination of adequate resources of both income and time. So although those on inadequate incomes may have lots of available time this is not necessarily free time because they do not possess the combination of resources needed to generate proper autonomy, i.e. quality as well as quantity. It is social democratic nations which have come closest to recognising this and so to achieving the much desired ‘work-life balance’, a balance that as we shall see below is essential to a political economy of care. Goodin (2001) has gone on to propose that if they are to move further in this direction then social democracies must become ‘post-productivist’ in that they must embody a stronger recognition of the value of non-employment activities such as care, so that reductions in working-time can be regarded as economically and socially beneficial rather than as another form of financial burden. Goodin therefore lends his support to those who call for more dynamic solutions to the problems of social exclusion, and in this respect policies to encourage households in which employment and caring activities are shared out more equitably are crucial (Goodin et al 2001), but goes on to insist that this requires much more than the usual emphasis upon the formal economy. In short, Goodin’s notion of combined resource autonomy is a liberal theory of justice which insists that just distributions of income and time are essential to individuals’ autonomy.