PROPÓSITO

Any governmentality contains a set of assumptions and convictions about the nature of the political subject; a central object of government. The model subject may be explicitly elaborated in the formulation of an art of government or may operate implicitly in its schema. What is clear about the advent of the modern and its liberal ethos of government is that it proceeds on a particular conception of the citizen. As previously discussed (see chapter 2) what marks out the citizen under an ethos of liberal government reason is a dependence on the freedom of the citizen as a resource for government. Liberal government moves beyond a limited field of politics and the State to influence culture; giving a shape to the ethical and perceptual disposition of the citizen. The liberal citizen requires to be formed in such a way as to possess a subjectivity that ensures desired forms of conduct and self-regulation in the open spaces of

the civil and economic. Under an idealised Third Way, the freedom of citizens and their common subjectivity require to be shaped and nurtured in such a way as to marshal the national community’s resources of human capital, health and culture towards the prize of economic success.

Dominant in classical social democracy was a conception of the citizen as communal in orientation and in need of emancipation and protection from the restraints of industrial capitalism. Wrought by the collective experience of the Second World War (Marshall 1985), the citizen of welfare rights came to expect to be able to call on the State for essential services, protection and insurance against the hardships and vagaries of employment and illness. Under the form of governmentality animating the ambitions of the New Right the reform of this citizen came to be understood as essential to its success. The constitution of the citizen became a target for the New Right, motivated by a desire to establish a new identity for the citizen that would harmonise with their wider project of cultural change. This new advanced liberal citizen required to be embossed with a new understanding of the relation between government, State and the

individual. This new post-welfare citizen was to no longer look to the State as a shield from risk, but would take responsibility for managing their own risks and opportunities in the market state. Third Way thinkers would come to point to the destructive tension between the idealised conservative subject (respectful of tradition and authority, patriotic, law abiding, self-reliant, thrifty and hard working) and the individualist consumers of the 1980s, described by Marr (2007:318) as an age of ‘unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism.’

If the New Right’s anthropology had an economic deflection with the revival of homo economicusxx, Third Way’s conception of the subject has a sociological refraction with its concern for the growth of forms of individualism and the reflexivity of late or high modernity. Giddens, perhaps unsurprisingly with his engagement with such sociological questions, provides Third Way with a model of the citizen that can accommodate the social attitudes and values concurrent with the rise in individualism clearly present in contemporary social trends. The ‘progressive individualism’ of Inglehart’s post-materialism thesis posits a citizen seeking self-expression, development and self-actualisation. The social and economic ambitions of Third Way can therefore be realised by governing the

citizen as an active agent primarily responsible for making a success of their own life, the self-actualising citizen of choices, opportunities and self-fulfilment. Arguably, aspects of New Labour’s conception of the citizen align seamlessly with a market state. The New Labour White Paper, Modern Markets: confident consumers (1999), is unambiguous in its re-orientation of the citizen under the conception of consumer sovereignty. The citizen consumer is not merely a recognition of a new social reality by New Labour but is understood as a positively desirable aspect of the character of citizenship and beneficial to business (Peters, 2004).Consumers are to be ‘equipped’, through education programmes, with the skills, knowledge and confidence to obtain a ‘good deal:’

[Government will] Improve consumer education and the usefulness of consumer information. The OFT is developing a consumer education strategy, with better co-ordination between both public and private sector bodies that deliver consumer education programmes. (DTI, 1999)

If the citizen of the high modern period is conceived as acting in a way that is less tied by the constrictions of tradition and living with the consequences of being confronted by a bewildering context of possibilities and risks, third way governmentality is not motivated by the need for a counter thrust in the direction of collectivist ideals and ethics. The ethical architecture of the third way citizen is none the less significant, with both Blair and Giddens insistent that government must act to give a moral shape to society. Social cohesion can be assured by the establishment of a new public morality an ethical

architecture, communitarian in form, which links rights and responsibilities. This form of communitarianism as an intellectual movement developed and surfaced across the 1980s and 1990s, its history is broadly coextensive with the

emergence of Third Way. Ideological communitarianism is closely associated with the work of Amitai Etzioni (1993) who, along with his collaborators, established a network to promote communitarian ideas with the ambition of creating a movement for social change. The core of communitarianism can be understood as a critique and reaction to aspects of liberal theory, in particular liberalism’s emphasis on rights and its conception of the individual as a

disembodied self. Communitarianism contends that rights need to be balanced with responsibilities; furthermore the abstraction of the individual existing in isolation is misleading. The atomised individual ignores the social reality of

individuals embedded in communities and shaped by the culture of such locations.

Without a stable civil society, incorporating norms of trust and social democracy, markets cannot flourish and democracy can be undermined. We need to reconnect these three spheres by means of a new social contract appropriate to an age where globalization and individualism go hand in hand. The new contract stresses both the rights and

responsibilities of citizens. People should not only take from the wider community, but give back to it too. The precept ‘no rights without

responsibilities’ applies to all individuals and groups. (Giddens, 2000:165)

There is a clearly detectible communitarian inflection in the ethical character of the citizen desired within an idealised third way governmentality (Calder 2004). In a meeting arranged by Geoff Mulganxxi, Blair met Amitai Etzioni, much to their mutual satisfaction, during a trip to the US in 1995 (Seldon, 2004:126). The rhetorical communitarian discourse of Blair, ‘the rights we enjoy reflects the duties we owe,’ comes straight out of Etzioni’s (1993:144) The Spirit of Community. Such attempts to govern the ethical disposition of the citizen

looked to produce or shore up solidarity and to ensure the health of civil society. New Labour is clear about the need to give shape to the ethical form of the citizen, to revalorise norms and attitudes to community, and civic virtue.

Giddens is even more ambitious in setting out an ethical disposition required by Third Way. National identity and its relation to the nation state, in conditions of pressing globalisation, generates a range of strains and stress points

concentrated on locations characterised by difference across markers of identity, ethnicity, migration and origins. In this age of ethnic and cultural pluralism complicated by the changeableness of modern culture, Giddens (1998:129) argues for the need for a cosmopolitan nation composed of

cosmopolitan citizens. This form of national identity combines a commitment to a nation state and a capacity to accommodate ethnic and cultural pluralism resting on an ethic of inclusivity and tolerance of difference.