The New Social Question
The New Social Question

Author: Pierre Rosanvallon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0691265771

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How social and intellectual changes undermine our justifications for the welfare state The welfare state has come under severe pressure internationally, partly for the well-known reasons of slowing economic growth and declining confidence in the public sector. According to the influential social theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, however, there is also a deeper and less familiar reason for the crisis of the welfare state. He shows here that a fundamental practical and philosophical justification for traditional welfare policies—that all citizens share equal risks—has been undermined by social and intellectual change. If we wish to achieve the goals of social solidarity and civic equality for which the welfare state was founded, Rosanvallon argues, we must radically rethink social programs. Rosanvallon begins by tracing the history of the welfare state and its founding premise that risks, especially the risks of illness and unemployment, are equally distributed and unpredictable. He shows that this idea has become untenable because of economic diversification and advances in statistical and risk analysis. It is truer than ever before—and far more susceptible to analysis—that some individuals will face much greater risks than others because of their jobs and lifestyle choices. Rosanvallon argues that social policies must be more narrowly targeted. And he draws on evidence from around the world, in particular France and the United States, to show that such programs as unemployment insurance and workfare could better reflect individual needs by, for example, making more explicit use of contracts between the providers and receivers of benefits. His arguments have broad implications for welfare programs everywhere and for our understanding of citizenship in modern democracies and economies.

The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century
The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Jan Breman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0520972481

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue above all. The volume includes discussions from every corner of the globe, focusing on American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. The effects of capitalism dominating the world, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis are all evaluated in this carefully curated volume. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.

The Social in Question
The Social in Question

Author: Patrick Joyce

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1134573685

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With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of 'the social' developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into the question by critiques from science studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new framework are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as 'the social'. This book makes a fascinating contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity.

A New Social Question
A New Social Question

Author: Casey Harison

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1443886319

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A New Social Question: Capitalism, Socialism and Utopia brings together a selection of papers presented at the conference on “Capitalism and Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana, in 2014. New Harmony is best known as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was Owen’s legacy that drew scholars from across the Atlantic. Owen’s work and his experiment at New Harmony again have currency as the world looks back on the 2008 economic crisis and as “socialism,” seemingly banished with the failure of experiments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century has returned to the political and economic lexicon. As David Harvey, Thomas Piketty and Joyce Appleby have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession has derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it has also reminded us that we have not reached the “end of history.” Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. This edited, multi-disciplinary volume will appeal to readers in political science, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, communications and cultural studies, and to academic audiences in North America, Britain and elsewhere.

A New Social Question?
A New Social Question?

Author: Ive Marx

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9053569251

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Social scientists, politicians, and economists have recently been taken with the idea that the advanced welfare states of Europe face a “New Social Question.” The core idea is that the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial environment has brought with it a whole new set of social risks, constraints, and trade-offs, which necessitate radical recalibration of social security systems. A New Social Question? analyzes that question in depth, with particular attention to the problem of income protection and the difficulties facing Bismarckian welfare states. It will be necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the future of European social policy.

Family Values
Family Values

Author: Melinda Cooper

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 194213004X

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Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey
New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey

Author: Özlem Belçim Galip

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-12

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3030594009

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This book explores and comparatively assesses how Armenians as minorities have been represented in modern Turkey from the twentieth century through to the present day, with a particular focus on the period since the first electoral victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2002. It examines how social movements led by intellectuals and activists have challenged the Turkish state and called for democratization, and explores key issues related to Armenian identity. Drawing on new social movements theory, this book sheds light on the dynamics of minority identity politics in contemporary Turkey and highlights the importance of political protest.

The Transnationalized Social Question
The Transnationalized Social Question

Author: Thomas Faist

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0199249016

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The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized not only because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states, staying in touch with family and friends, receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social spaces. Also of importance are cross--border recruitment schemes for workers and the cross-border diffusion of norms appealed to in the case of migration--for example, the social right to decent work as a human right. Moreover, migration can become an issue of inclusion or exclusion in fields important to life chances in the emigration, transit, or immigration states--a transnationalization of national states. And, as in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern. In earlier periods class differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over the past decades. Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this book tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.

The Pivotal Generation
The Pivotal Generation

Author: Henry Shue

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0691226245

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"We all recognize that climate change is a supremely important issue of our time, which requires both trans-national and trans-generational collaboration and shared responsibility. What we haven't yet fully appreciated, argues political philosopher Henry Shue, are the ethical considerations surrounding the fact that the next one or two decades will determine whether climate change, which already has led us to dangerous effects, will surge into inescapably disastrous effects. The people alive today thus represent a pivotal generation in human history. For the past two centuries humans have undermined our climate at an increasing rate, in ways that the present generations are the first to fully understand, and the last to be able to reverse. But our responsibility for decisive and immediate action rests on three special features of the relation of our present to the future, that many have failed to realize (1) future generations face dangers greater than ours even if we act robustly, (2) the worsening dangers for future generations are currently without limit, and (3) a less robust effort by us is likely to allow climate change to pass critical tipping points for severely worse and potentially unavoidable future dangers. Shue, a renowned scholar of ethics, politics and international relations who has been studying the ethics of climate change for the last two decades, guides us through what our ethical responsibilities to others are, both across the world but especially over time, and what those commitments require us to do in addressing the climate change crisis, now and forcefully"--