The Age of Austerity: Contesting the Ethical Basis and Financial Sustainability of Welfare Reform in Europe

Edmiston, Daniel

doi:10.1080/14782804.2014.910179

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As a mirror of immediate, unconditional self-interest (Queiroz, 2016), TINA precludes the possibility of individual liberty under a system of collective deliberation, i.e., a system of ultimate intentional lawmakers (the peoples' sovereign (Locke, 1679(Locke, [1960) or the universal sovereign (Kant, 1797)). For example, neoliberal policies (e.g., fiscal consolidation, cuts to social security, the privatization of public property, the liberalization of collective bargaining, and the shrinking of pensions (Barro 2009;Cochrane 2009)) have caused harmful effects, including poverty and inequality (Ball et al, 2013;Edmiston, 2014;Greer 2014;Stiglitz, 2013), higher rates of suicide (Antonakakis and Collins 2014), state bankruptcy (Teubal, 2004), and state authoritarianism (Brown, 2006(Brown, , 2015Bruff, 2014;Kreuder-Sonnen and Zangl, 2015;Orphanides, 2014;Schmidt and Thatcher, 2014). If individuals are tempted to appeal to intentional political policies when facing these effects, TINA commands that, instead of looking for public solutions issuing from intentional public deliberation, they should only obey the rules of the spontaneous order.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

Queiroz

2017

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper argues that the neoliberal political order relies on a particular concept of publicity-the concept of openness or transparency without a public (a populus or demos), the main content of which is the unconditional maxim "There Is No Alternative" (TINA for short). Its central claim is that the neoliberal conception of publicity without a public, connected as it is to secrecy and unconditional adherence to TINA, precludes the possibility of the "people" as an ultimate intentional sovereign legislator. Although research has revealed the strategic importance of publicity for communicative capitalism, this aspect of neoliberalism has yet to be addressed. As a means of clarifying the neoliberal concept of publicity, this paper will show that neoliberal theory cannot consistently accept the existence of the people as sovereign while maintaining its adherence to TINA. Second, it invokes the Kantian conception of publicity, which involves not merely openness and visibility but also the will of the populus. One of Kant's central insights is that publicity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for fairness at the level of political decision-making. When public (openly accessible) statements are not based on the will of the people, publicity can become a means of illegitimate political domination against sovereign peoples. Building on Kant's insights, this paper will show that publicity without a public, along with its central mantra, TINA, is also, at the practical level, neoliberalism's main means of destroying the legislative sovereignty of the people. Since TINA precludes the possibility of the people as sovereign, analysis of the neoliberal conception of publicity that underlies TINA provides new arguments for the view that neoliberalism is essentially despotic in nature. It also points to the importance of the political category of "the sovereign people", which is all the greater where illiberal and undemocratic political alternatives jockey to fill the vacuum left by a system that, at its ideological core, cannot acknowledge the common good.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

Queiroz

2017

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Austerity and Anti-Austerity: The Political Economy of Refusal in ‘Low-Resistance’ Models of Capitalism

Bailey¹,

Shibata²

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the ‘causal recipes’ sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan’s coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK’s liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity.

show abstract

Modern Monetary Theory and the Changing Role of Tax in Society

Baker¹,

Murphy²

2020

Social Policy and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Tax is traditionally viewed as the main funding mechanism for government spending. Consequently, social policy is often seen as something determined and constrained by tax revenue. Modern Monetary Theory (‘MMT’) presents a reversal of the tax-spend cycle, by identifying a spend-tax cycle. Using the UK as an example, we highlight that one of MMT’s most important, but under-explored, contributions is its potential to re-frame the role of tax from both a macroeconomic and social policy perspective. We use insights on the money removal, or cancellation function of taxes, derived from MMT, to demonstrate how this also creates possibilities for using tax to achieve social objectives such as mitigating income and wealth inequality, increasing access to housing, or funding a Green New Deal. For social policy researchers the challenge arising is to use these insights to re-engineer tax systems and redesign social tax expenditures (STEs) for creative social policy purposes.

show abstract

The Age of Austerity: Contesting the Ethical Basis and Financial Sustainability of Welfare Reform in Europe

Cited by 5 publications

References 32 publications

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

Austerity and Anti-Austerity: The Political Economy of Refusal in ‘Low-Resistance’ Models of Capitalism

Modern Monetary Theory and the Changing Role of Tax in Society

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About