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Article Excerpt
Christopher Scanlon is a co-editor of Arena Magazine and a researcher at RMIT University's Globalism Institute. He has written on the changing nature of social integration under current conditions of globalisation, focusing specifically on the way that community has been harnessed as a vehicle for social and economic governance. He is currently researching the impact of participation in community arts and cultural activities on physical and mental health.
In a speech to the Sydney Institute in July 2003, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello's thoughts turned to the importance of social trust and tolerance in liberal democratic societies. Costello's comments were prompted by evidence showing a significant decline in people's willingness to participate in voluntary work in everything from churches to political parties to sports clubs since the 1960s. This decline, he suggested, was part of a general weakening of basic bonds of social trust and cooperation in advanced democracies around the world which, he hinted, began with the proliferation of TV in the 1960s. In raising these concerns, Costello spoke of the running down of 'social capital', a phrase that refers to informal networks and relations of trust, cooperation, tolerance, mutual support and reciprocity which, in one way or another, work to bind social actors together (Coleman 1988, S95 and S118).
Costello was not the first policy maker to use the concept of social capital, or to warn of the potentially serious consequences of its decline. Since the mid to late 1990s, social capital has become the buzz-phrase among policymakers and a host of academics around the world. In his 1998 book Civilising Global Capital, Mark Latham had written extensively on social capital in Australia. Before him, Era Cox had expressed concerns about social capital in her 1995 Boyer Lecture (Latham 1998; Cox 1995). Similar debates about social capital have occurred in North America and Europe. Such is the concern with social capital that it has attracted the attention of a host of international organisations, including the World Bank and the OECD (see World Bank Group 2003; OECD 2003). In Australia, the Productivity Commission (2003) is exploring the potential policy benefits of increased social connectedness, while the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2003) is busily trying to work out ways to measure it.
Costello's comments did, however, serve to re-ignite debate around social capital in Australia. In the weeks following his remarks, politicians and commentators jostled to apportion blame of to claim credit for the state of social capital in Australia. In perhaps the most bizarre contribution, Liberal Party member Kevin Donnelly claimed social capital as the preserve of conservatives. In Donnelly's mind, the Liberal Party had secured exclusive rights to trust and cooperation with Robert Menzies's pitch to the "forgotten people' in his 1942 pitch to middle-class voters in opposition to big business and labour. Anyone who wanted to talk about such ethical relations, it seemed, were trespassing on grounds which had been diligently tended over the decades by those who, for the most part fallaciously, regard themselves as the modern day custodians of Menzies' legacy. The 'natural home of social capital--those features of social life, networks, norms and trust that enable people to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives', suggested Donnelly, 'is on the conservative side of politics'. Warming to his theme, he went on to claim that the message of Menzies's forgotten people speech was essentially the same as Margaret Thatcher's denial of society, which--after grumbling that Thatcher is often misquoted--he proceeded to misquote (1): "There is no such thing as society. There is only you and me' (Donnelly 2003).
From one point of view, Donnelly's revisionism is the height of silliness, instructive only as an illustration of the pettiness and vacuity of what passes for 'conservative' thought nowadays. The temptation to dismiss his comments entirely ought, however, to be resisted. In one sense, Donnelly's views express perfectly, if unintentionally, the rotten kernel of social capital: the desire to realise the kinds of social bonds that are impossible in the absence of society, while simultaneously defining away society itself as a sort of category error. In short, social capital is an attempt to have relations of trust, reciprocity, tolerance and mutual obligation without having to bother too much about the deeper cultural mooring points to which those relations are tied, and without which they would be impossible. Social capital is thus an expression of cultural contradiction, an attempt to realise a particular social ethic but in a form that comprehensively undermines the deeper cultural grounds within which that ethic takes root. Such, at any rate, is the general argument of this Blue Book.
To these arguments some qualifications ought to be immediately added. Criticisms of social capital can be easily portrayed as an attack on community itself, thereby perpetuating the Left's, at times, fraught relationship with civil society and community, as if the only legitimate form of collective action is through the state. On the face of it, the notion of social capital seems to give expression to just the kinds of social relationships for which the Left has historically fought, namely a society structured around principles of cooperation, reciprocity and mutual obligation to others. It might therefore seem positively perverse to start arguing against such values, just when they appear to be getting some traction in mainstream policy debates.
At the outset then, it is well to be clear that the criticisms of the notion of social capital raised in this paper do not arise out of a simplistic faith in the superiority of state-backed solutions over those that emerge from community. To put it at its most plain, community organisations, church groups and voluntary organisations are important and ought to be encouraged and strengthened as both a balance and a counter to the state and the market. At the same time, it needs to be made clear that community is not social capital. Rather, social capital is a particular way of thinking about and constituting community, one that reconstitutes community in a form that is seamlessly compatible with the market. In this respect, social capital reflects a broader reframing of social policy itself in ways that largely bypass the social, through the normalisation of the market as the underlying model for social life. In the process, the idea of social policy as a collective enterprise gives way to a thoroughly individualistic approach to society and culture.
The practical consequences of this process are illustrated below in the context of education, health and the operations of charities. These examples are not intended as comprehensive surveys of these areas, but serve as particular illustrations of a more general transformation in social policy. In this respect, the present Blue Book is something of a departure from others in the series, insofar as it is not a detailed overview and analysis of a specific policy area, but a critical analysis of the underlying ideas that inform and frame policy. The broader issue raised by the concern with social capital, then, is social policy itself as a social enterprise, as individuals are left to their own devices while the state withdraws from the provision of social goods.
This is not to suggest, however, that the state has withdrawn entirely. Indeed social capital marks the intrusion of the state into spheres of social life where previously its reach was more restricted. The concern with bonds of cooperation and reciprocity among policy makers suggests a kind of authoritarian administration, wherein the state takes a more active role in the micro-management of many aspects of social life, blurring the boundaries between itself and intermediate institutions such as churches and community groups which previously managed, though to varying degrees and often imperfectly, to sit at some distance form the state.
The uncritical reception of social capital by many in the ALP and some on the centre-Left suggests that this transformation has become so naturalised as to be wholly unremarkable. The lack of substantive critical discussion about social capital is not surprising. For much of its history the Labor Party and the Left more generally have tended to take social bonds of cooperation and reciprocity for granted, as if such social bonds spring fully formed from human nature understood as innate to human being, rather than as socially constituted from the conditions in which one lives and the relations within which one is intertwined. (2) In some respects, social capital seems to depart from this, insofar as its advocates see that such bonds are threatened by a range of cultural factors, from viewing too much television to an overly interventionist state. At the same time, however, they tend to talk about these bonds as if they exist outside of social contexts, so that...
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