Individual and Community

VOX The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhyPublished termly by the club of PeP at the university of york

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The Madness of CrowdsLiberaLisM and The PrioriTy of The individuaLasoCiaL individuaLisMTowards a worLd ParLiaMenTwoMen in india’s GrassrooT PoLiTiCs

IndividualCommunity&

Issue VII - Autumn 2008

ESSAY The Wisdom and madness of CroWds By Rasmus Fonnesbaek Andersen

LiberaLism and The PrioriTy of The individuaL By Professor Colin Bird

Women in india’s Grass-rooT PoLiTiCs By Hiranmayee Mishra

asoCiaL individuaLism in LiberaLism By James Hodgson

miLL on individuaLiTy By Ashley W.J. Wright

The Case for a WorLd ParLiamenT By Luke Smalley

feminism and The eThiCs of Care By Joanna Konings

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Photo credit: sxc.hu, Colorado Lending Service

VOX The STudenT JOurnalOf POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy

The Club of PEP Journal

voxjournal.co.uk

ISSUE VIIauTumn 2008

INDIVIDUAL &

COMMUNITY

“The problem of systematically skewed beliefs and their significance for demo-cratic decision-making is that individual errors do not cancel each other out

but rather accumulate.”

Rasmus Fonnesbaek Andersen on the madness and wisdom of crowds (page 6).

VOX - The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy iSSue Vii - auTumn 2008

� 5

The individuaL and The CommuniTy are TWo sides of The same Coin. The one cannot exist without the other.

each can only be understood with and through the other.

The theme of ‘individual and community’ is rather wide. how-ever, the articles of this voX edition can be grouped into three areas. first, there is political theory. John stuart mill’s view on individuality is discussed as well as the charge that liberal politi-cal philosophy entails a form of ‘asocial individualism’ (p. 22). Professor Colin bird provides a contentious, yet enlightening explication of the terms in which most of the discussion in con-temporary political philosophy takes place (p. 10).secondly, there are texts on public policy, including a proposal for a world parliament (p. 28).Lastly, two articles deal with the particular subject of women, with hiranmayee mishra discussing the role of women in india’s grass-roots politics (p.18).

The next edition will be on the ‘financial Crisis’ and related ar-eas. To find out more about the next edition and when to submit articles, see the back cover of this issue.

it should be noted that the Club of PEP, who publishes voX, will hold elections in the coming spring term. This means that all positions, including those for voX, will be open. if you are interested to get involved (graphic design, marketing, proofing, production) or contribute an article, please email [email protected].

ilaf scheikh elard, editor

ediToriaL

we were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community

with the human race.Cicero

when an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority,

the fact is that he does become inferior.Simone de Beauvoir

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

if you try it, you will be lonely often,

and sometimes frightened. but no price is too high to pay

for the privilege of owning yourself.Friedrich Nietzsche

__________________

VOX is a student journal that serves as a plattform for insight into topics relating toPolitics, economics

and Philosophy (PeP). The essence of VOX

is its interdisciplin-ary approach to each

edition’s issue.

VOX is published trian-nually by the club of PeP at the university of york and distributed on york’s campus as

well as other universities in the uK.__________________

VOX committee:

ilaf Scheikh elard(editor, york)

Paul mertenskötter(Sub-editor, uPenn)magda assanowicz

lila Tennenteuan edwardsluke Smalley

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Contact:[email protected]

VOX The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy

demoCraCy is a Good ThinG. so far, so Good. however, is

democracy instrumentally good be-cause it is a way to uncover the ‘best’ possible decisions through tapping into the knowledge of the many – or, rather than its appropriateness having to be evaluated on the quality of the decisions it makes, is democratic deci-sion-making intrinsically good,?

The concept of ‘the wisdom of crowds’, to use James surowiecki’s neologism, is not concerned with nor-mative evaluations of political equal-ity or the justifiability of democratic decision-making, but rather with the economist’s concept of the ‘best’ deci-sion as the uncovering of efficient so-lutions to given societal problems. The remarkable assertion is that crowds un-

ThE WiSdom And mAdnESS of CroWdS

By Rasmus Fonnesbaek Andersen

6

der certain conditions (which, actually, hold fairly often) are smarter than the smartest individuals composing them. This is due to the so-called ‘miracle of aggregation’ – a variant of the ‘law of large numbers’ employed in statistics. The classic example is the ‘marbles in a jar’ experiment that one performs in elementary mathematics classes. ev-eryone in the class makes an individual guess as to the number of marbles in the jar before these guesses are aver-aged and shown to be more accurate on average than the best individual marble-guessers. other more complex problems are, for instance, the ‘ask the audience’ option in the game show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’, where James Surowiecki finds that the audi-ence was actually right 91 % of the time in the us version of the show between 1998 and 2001.

markets for the prediction of events, say the outcome of a presidential elec-tion, are mentioned by surowiecki as another example of the wisdom of crowds, as they almost always outper-form traditional opinion polls con-cerned with voters’ own preferences. Transforming the problem into one of cognition, ‘who do you think will win the election’, as such, yields more accurate results. The explanation for these kinds of crowd wisdom seems to be that, under a tightly specified set of conditions, which i will return to shortly, erroneous guesses cancel each other out:

each person’s guess, you might say,

has two components: information and error. subtract the error, and you’re left with the information. now, even with the errors canceled out, it’s possible that a group’s judg-ment will be bad. for the group to be smart, there has to be at least some information in the ‘informa-tion’ part of the ‘information mi-nus error’ equation. […] What is striking, though - and what makes a phrase like ‘the wisdom of crowds’ meaningful - is just how much infor-mation a group’s collective verdict so often contains.

surowiecki repeatedly stresses that this model of collective judgment-forma-tion is limited to certain problems, which are of (1) cognition, (2) coordi-nation and (3) cooperation. Cognition problems, which i will focus on, are traditional problems which admit of a true answer, whereas coordination and cooperation problems are framed in terms of coordinating individuals’ ac-tions with everyone else’s, for instance in traffic or as regards to public goods. yet while cooperation problems are free-riding problems in which an ef-ficient solution does not emerge if everyone acts from their own interest, coordination problems can yield an optimal solution.

it is also emphasised that crowds are only smart when the crowd pos-sesses all of the following four charac-teristics: (1) diversity of opinion (each individual has private information and/or slightly different interpretation

�Ilustration on p. 6: Tompkins Square Riot, New York (1874)



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of facts), (2) independence (opinions are formed by individuals in private and do not depend on those around them), (3) decentralization (individu-als can specialize in different areas of the problem at hand) and (�) an appro-priate method of aggregating private judgments into a collective decision. as such, when collective decision-making has gone wrong, as signified by the current financial crisis, it is ei-ther the case that the crowd model has been applied to a problem to which it is not conducive (though surowiecki believes that crowds possess wisdom for almost every problem, if phrased correctly) or that the crowd in question does not satisfy the four conditions of crowd wisdom.

Though one might have expected otherwise given the nature of the subject, surowiecki is peculiarly silent about the applications of his insights into decisions made in representative government or referenda – the arenas in which democracy is usually praised. so can the wisdom of crowds be prop-erly developed into a strong argument for democratic rule? surowiecki’s end-ing sentence in The Wisdom of Crowds hints at his answer:

The decisions that democracies make may not demonstrate the wis-dom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does.

other writers have been more ada-mant in showing that centralized, top-down government decisions are often antithetical to the wisdom that charac-

terizes smart crowds: voters partake in an often simplistic public debate that risks systematically biasing their judg-ments as well as having effectively no chance of swaying the election (lead-ing to what has been termed ‘rational ignorance’ on their part). The crucial problem, however, seems to be the low quality of the aggregation method that results from the often binary choices presented especially as regards refer-enda.

however, a variety of parties and the possibility of choosing individual party candidates over others can com-bine to mitigate this problem in a gen-eral election. furthermore, political decisions will almost always involve several different problems at the same time, primarily a combination of fac-tual judgments (what the policy will ac-complish) and value judgments (what should be accomplished), where value judgments are evidently of a funda-mentally different nature than cogni-tive ones which allow a correct answer. economist bryan Caplan in The Myth of the Rational Voter focuses on the prob-lem of systematically skewed beliefs and its significance for democratic de-cision-making: if beliefs are systemati-cally skewed, then individual errors do not cancel out but rather accumulate. He identifies in particular the fields of economic policy, the anti-foreign, the anti-market, the make-work and pessi-mistic bias, which give rise to policies contrary to the electorate’s interests. Caplan’s answer is to reduce the scope

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of democracy such that politicians may not manipulate certain spheres of economic policy in the same way as they cannot set interest rates or ban free speech in most developed coun-tries.

Can the wisdom of crowds be ap-plied to the political sphere, then? i think the answer is a clear yes, although the theory in itself is hard to market as a convincing argument for democracy as a form of government en général. The primary merit of representative democratic government is a normative one, that of providing an intuitively fair way of settling what society as a whole should aspire to and, as such, balancing competing concerns against one another. most of the factual cognition problems that policy-mak-ing deals with, however, are obvious candidates for both prediction mar-kets and open input contests or wikis, where citizens could submit proposals and modify existing ones to fit a given social goal. many government projects such as the us Columbia shuttle disas-ter in 2003, the question of Wmds in Iraq and the specifics of the early Iraq occupation, seem to exhibit ‘group-think’ in that the groups doing the deciding were anything but diverse, in-dependent and decentralized. if even a fraction of the waste, inefficiency and human cost embodied by these examples could have been eliminated or lessened through the employment of these mechanisms, the higher social welfare resulting from this would be a

strong argument favouring the adop-tion of such policies.

it might also be a good idea to re-discover the instrumental defence of democracy and, following Caplan, reflect upon whether making certain decisions democratically (or allowing them into the scope of democratic government) does indeed serve the purpose of efficient solutions to social problems or not, perhaps especially regarding economic decisions such as trade policy that are prone to unholy alliances between special interests and systematically biased electorates. sur-owiecki’s words about the wisdom of making decisions democratically and the implicitly understood cooperation problem of maintaining public order should not be taken lightly, however, if the perceived loss of democratic sovereignty leads voters to lose faith in and systematically trespass against the public order, that loss would be of a much greater importance than minor gains from a marginally better eco-nomic policy. references:

Caplan, bryan (200�): The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, nJ, usa: Princeton university Press.

surowiecki, James (200�): Wisdom of Crowds. Westminster, md, usa: doubleday Publishing.

_____________________________Rasmus Fonnesbaek Andersen spent one year as a Philosophy, Politics and Econom-ics undergraduate at York before transferring to Copenhagen Business School to read In-ternational Business. He also works for the Copenhagen-based think tank Center for Po-litical Studies (CPOS).

on one vieW, PoLiTiCaL Theo-ries are Like Cars, or mam-

mals, often very different from each other yet having certain basic com-ponents in common. all cars possess wheels and axles, engines, headlights, and a gearbox, despite other differ-ences. distinguishing one model from another is partly a matter of under-standing how these same components are designed differently in (say) volvo suvs, bmW sedans, and ford hatch-backs. similarly, humans, elephants, mice and whales are remarkably di-verse species yet all possess backbones, a system for maintaining warm blood and body temperature, and mecha-nisms for producing milk, configured slightly differently in each case.

many assume that the same holds for political theories. behind the myriad points of difference between ‘conser-vative’, ‘liberal’, ‘marxist’, ‘social dem-ocratic’, ‘fascist’, ‘Green’ and sundry other political theories, some suppose, are certain building blocks common to

all tokens of the type ‘political theory’. Commentators often suggest, for ex-ample, that political theories must in-clude, whether explicitly or implicitly, some ‘theory of human nature’ that conditions their political conclusions. others tell us that all political theories presuppose a ‘principle of political le-gitimacy’ to determine when state pow-er is rightfully exercised. it is similarly tempting to think that every political theory is committed to assumptions about the nature of ethical values, of justice, of rational action, and of the relation between moral principles and the maxims of prudence.

Thinking of political theories in this modular way has certain attractions. it is particularly useful in formulating lectures and textbooks aimed at begin-ners. it promises to bring a certain or-der to the otherwise messy borderlands that lie between various recognized political views. Perhaps most impor-tantly (and tellingly), the modular hy-pothesis permits philosophical analysis

LibErALiSm And ThE ‘PrioriTY of ThE individuAL’

By Professor Colin Bird


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of the theoretical commitments alleg-edly buried within familiar ideological positions like ‘socialism’ or ‘liberalism’ without disturbing the familiar surface appearances refracted by these labels in day-to-day political conversation. under this dispensation, moreover, we are free to indulge in our allegiances to these common views and to flatter ourselves that in doing so we are taking a definite stand on something of deep philosophical importance – whether it be a particular conception of human nature, of political legitimacy, of eth-ics or some other supposedly basic theoretical commitment.

yet this modular approach is also hopelessly simplistic. Political theories

are not only distinguished by the dif-ferent answers they give to the same questions, but also by disagreements about which questions are worth ask-ing and why. some set great store by assumptions about ‘human nature’; others doubt that there is any such thing, or simply bracket the whole is-sue. some think questions about the legitimacy of state power are critical; others think they are beside the point. in other words, political theories are not necessarily simply variants of a single genus: they are often as different as sloths and Jeeps. so there are many reasons to be skeptical of the modu-lar approach, and i now want to focus more closely on one of these.

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With the havoc wreaked last summer improving the credentials of the capital that SWFs have in abundance, their ascendance to the global fore looks set to con-tinue.


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as i just noted, this approach tends to reinforce conventional understand-ings of the range of competing politi-cal positions that agents might adopt. but why should philosophers inquiring into politics feel bound by convention-al expectations about the coherence of and relations among familiar ideologi-cal positions? Doesn’t this reflect an unduly parochial view of our options? The fact that people sort themselves into camps representing liberalism, so-cialism, conservatism, and so forth, is a striking fact about modern political society. but the ways in which these categories channel and inform peo-ples’ political loyalties aren’t necessar-ily unproblematic. Perhaps they only perpetuate confusion. The modular approach tends to discount that possi-bility prematurely by giving these con-

ventional mappings of the ideological landscape the benefit of the doubt. This begs too many questions.

Political theorists should be prepared, not only to explain, but also to question and when necessary correct, these ways of charting the terrain. for example, devoting hectares of text to the merits and demerits of ‘liberalism’ or ‘liberal theory’, in the manner of much recent academic writing, seems a worthwhile activity only if we assume that there is some basically unified conceptual entity called ‘liberalism’ that it makes sense to debate as a package. is there? one way to question this assumption is to focus on a claim on which many self-described ‘liberals’ pride them-selves, and on which their critics often seize. The claim i have in mind again mobilizes the modular hypothesis: it

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asserts that all political theories must assume some view – often described as a ‘social ontology’ – about the rela-tions of ‘priority’ that pertain between individuals and collectivities. it then argues that ‘liberal theories’ rest on a distinctively ‘individualist’ or ‘atomist’ social ontology that insists that ‘the individual’ is ‘prior’ to ‘the commu-nity’, while their rivals are committed to some ‘collectivist’ or ‘holistic’ view that assigns ‘priority’ to social groups and collective interests.

This claim has long been part of lib-eral rhetoric. in the last century, and especially during the cold war, it was pressed into service as a convenient summary of the basic ideological dif-ference between the putatively ‘civi-lized’, open societies of the capitalist West and the ‘totalitarian’, authoritar-ian, ‘evil’, communist east. on this view, Western liberal democracies put ‘the individual’ first, and expect the community to serve individuals’ inter-ests. in contrast, totalitarian tyrannies of various types oppress ‘the individ-ual’ in the name of a collective good that takes priority over the lives and interests of individuals. but it is not just liberals who accept such claims; many critics of liberalism also buy into them. That is why those who wish to reject or question liberalism still often present their complaints in the name of ‘communitarian’ values, or invest in some version of ‘social holism’. by now claims and counter-claims along these lines are so familiar that we rarely

pause to ask whether they make good philosophical sense, or whether these are debates worth having. but i see no reason to think that either is true.1

in suggesting this, i am not trying to let totalitarian regimes, or any other political atrocities, off the hook. The question is not whether such horror-shows have received an unfairly bad press, but whether we adequately cap-ture whatever is objectionable about them by talking about the subordi-nation of ‘the individual’ to the ‘col-lectivity’. or, to put it the other way around, the question is whether we can plausibly attribute such distinctive virtues as liberal democratic societies display to their somehow putting the ‘individual’ ‘prior’ to the collectivity.

To my mind, this way of talking is not so much wrong as vacuous. far from reflecting some profound insight into the theoretical structure of rival political perspectives, it only obscures the important questions behind a fog of academic mystification. I am not suggesting here that complaints about the subordination of the individual

Political theories are not only distinguished by the different answers they give to the same questions, but also by disagree-ments about which questions are worth asking and why.


1�

to society are exactly nonsensical. The problem is rather that agents might reasonably formulate virtually any le-gitimate complaint about their social predicament in these terms. obviously, when agents feel that they are not being treated properly in their society, they will tend, often quite legitimately, to object that the demands of organized social life are being given unreasonable priority over their own claims. but this is a property of the depth-grammar of much political criticism regardless of its sources and targets. There is noth-ing inherently ‘liberal’ about arguments taking this form, and there is no rea-son to suppose that ‘liberal’ social ar-rangements, even when fully realized, are somehow immune from criticism along these lines.

To bring this out, i want to focus on two important and influential ar-guments from the history of political thought, one from Plato and one from marx, both of whom have attracted criticism for putting the ‘collectivity’ before ‘the individual’, and neither of whom could be described as a ‘liber-al’. for the sake of brevity, i’ll have to present these arguments in a rather stylized form.

The first, Platonic, argument starts from the assumption (popularized in recent times by John rawls) that all individuals have a ‘sense of justice’ – that is, a set of moral dispositions that include a desire to act rightly, to coop-erate on reasonable terms with others, and to resent conduct that offends

their understandings of how impor-tant social privileges, responsibilities and entitlements should be allocated. but it then points out that these dispo-sitions are malleable: under different patterns of socialization, agents’ sense of justice can be trained to regard very different social arrangements as an-swering to the requirements of justice, or as exemplifying ‘reasonable’ social cooperation. in democratic political cultures, for example, agents’ sense of what justice requires and ‘reasonable’ cooperation looks like will tend to be organized around some distinctively egalitarian commitments: they will re-gard departures from such principles as ‘equal opportunity for all’, or ‘one person, one vote’, and ‘let each live as they choose, as long as they respect everyone’s right to do the same’ as fun-damentally unjust. in contrast, aristo-cratic, martial, or patriarchal political cultures will educate their citizens’ sense of justice in very different direc-tions.

so far, the argument looks straight-forward and uncontroversial, but at this point Plato asks: into which of these cultures would we ideally want to be socialized? how do we want our sense of justice to be educated? Plato suggests that we can make progress with this question only by thinking se-riously about the psychological effects of educating agents’ sense of justice in different ways.

he then makes a move that is, to modern ears, very jarring: he claims

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that when one does this, one is bound to conclude that the egalitarian under-standings of justice that typically de-velop in democratic political cultures tend to sabotage the psychological health of individuals who internalize them. democratic citizens will, on this view, suffer from characteristic sorts of confusion: they will tend to develop distorted views about their own interests; they will indulge self-defeating fantasies about their own ca-pabilities and ambitions; they will tend to suffer from debilitating indiscipline and (partly as a result) experience unnecessary stress and anxiety. for

Plato, these are all symptoms of psy-chological ill-adjustment, of people not at one with themselves. Plato thus contends that democratic political ar-rangements damage those socialized into them; since he assumes that, ide-ally, justice should enhance rather than scar human lives, he concludes that democratic societies must imperfectly exemplify the virtue of justice.

The second argument is marx’s claim that, under capitalism, individuals are subjected to ‘a power alien to them, … the world market.’2 marx’s point here is that capitalist economic reproduction


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(on the one hand) mobilizes human labour and energy but (on the other) does so in a way that is not subject to anyone’s rational control. using marx’s technical language, the capital-ist system ‘appropriates’ human energy and uses it for its own purposes. but those purposes are entirely unguided by any conception of human inter-ests and indeed emerge in an entirely uncontrolled and arbitrary fashion, or so marx claims. since marx regards modes of economic production (like capitalism) as themselves products of human labour, he regards this circum-stance as one in which ‘our own prod-uct has reared up against us. it seemed to be our property, but in reality we are its property’.3 This precludes a set of arrangements in which the ‘free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’� and instead institutes (something like) the systematic exploitation of each by ev-eryone else.

obviously, both of these arguments are controversial, but my claim here does not require that we accept them. The salient point is that both seem to involve the complaint that certain crucial individual interests are objec-tionably subordinated to the needs of some organized social system. in the case of Plato’s argument, the system in question is the cluster of social and psychological dispositions required to sustain democratic political arrange-ments over time. his claim is that ex-pecting agents to acquire and act on

these dispositions imposes unaccept-able psychological costs on them. We may find this implausible, but my point is that the argument appears to display the same form as the prototypical lib-eral complaint that totalitarian regimes subordinate individual interests to the needs of some social project. This is also true of marx’s argument: wheth-er or not one agrees with marx, his claim is that individuals’ real interests are both ignored and obscured by the imperatives of capitalist self-reproduc-tion.

Given this, one could, at a pinch, read both arguments as asserting the ‘prior-ity’ of the ‘individual’ to a ‘collectiv-ity’ and its needs or interests. but what would one gain from doing so? does packaging the arguments this way tell us anything interesting about them or about how to assess them? some may respond: ‘well, yes, it shows that marx and Plato are closer to contemporary liberalism than their reputation sug-gests in that it turns out that they, too, put the individual before society’. but this is silly, because the targets of these

arguments – democratic norms of equality and free market capitalism – involve institutions and practices that self-described ‘liberals’ usually defend. marx and Plato are not just ‘liberals like us’ simply because they assert certain individual interests against social sys-tems that threaten them. rather, they turn exactly that sort of charge against liberal practices themselves. even as a device for distinguishing ‘liberalism’ from some of its chief rivals (like Pla-tonism and marxism), then, slogans about the ‘priority’ of ‘the individual’ fail dismally.

The substantive issues raised by ar-guments like those of Plato and marx are (broadly) these: what are humans’ basic interests and how might alterna-tive political arrangements advance or retard them? under different historical circumstances and theoretical frame-works, this question will be asked and answered in diverse ways. but trying to segregate the part of any plausible answer that focuses on ‘the individual’ from the part that deals with the ‘col-lectivities’ within which they are im-mersed seems to me neither fruitful nor really possible.

it is not fruitful because the attempt confuses form and substance. it will lead us to fixate on a formal (and largely trivial) feature of the arguments under consideration and to turn away from any substantive issues they may raise. it is not really possible because conceptions of ‘the individual’ and of the collectivities they comprise are in-

separably connected, co-dependent, like the two sides of a sheet of paper: neither one is plausibly ‘prior’ to the other. Pretending otherwise is as self-defeating as using a razor to somehow prise apart the front and back of a sheet of paper only to find that one has succeeded in producing two new sheets of (albeit thinner) paper, each with its own front and back.

one way in which ‘ideological’ forms of consciousness are undesirable is their tendency to fix our attention on relatively trivial, tangential issues while ignoring others that are far more im-portant. Philosophizing about ‘liberal-ism’ and the ‘priority of the individual’ exemplifies just this sort of ideological distraction.

(1) for more on this, see my myth of Liberal individualism (Cambridge, 1999)(2) ed. Tucker, r., The marx-engels reader, (norton, 19�8), p.163(3) ed. mcLellan, d., karl marx: se-lected Writings (oxford, 19��), p.121(�) ibid., p.238

_____________________________Colin Bird is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, USA.

Conceptions of ‘the individual’ and of the collectivities they com-prise are inseparably connected, co-dependent, like the two sides of a sheet of paper: neither one is plausibly ‘prior’ to the other.

india, The LarGesT demoCraCy in The WorLd, is a land of many

paradoxes. in this land of diversities, languages and castes being the most dominating bases of stratification of the society, women are still struggling against the social barriers to prove their equal value in order to make the democracy more participatory.

Women of india made their own contributions in the national move-ment which finally freed India from colonial power on aug 15, 19��. after independence with the introduction of the indian constitution, women theoretically were guaranteed equality. during these early years, the participa-tion of women in electoral activities

WomEn in indiA’S GrASSrooTS PoLiTiCS

By Hiranmayee Mishra


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was not particularly rare, with the still active women leaders involved in the national movement.

unfortunately, the number of women in political spheres of power declined gradually thereafter. in spite of promises from political parties and leaders at different times, women be-came systematically marginalised from the real echelons of power. as india is a culturally diverse country and still continues to feel the strong influence of a feudalistic social order, women have seldom dared to emerge from their own self perceptions to take con-trol at the decision making level. em-powerment of women in politics has come to the top of the agenda of the government due to the constant pres-sure of women’s organisations and women leaders in the legislative bod-ies. Women leaders both in parliament and in state legislatures often break the barriers of party lines in support of women’s issues. This has finally led to the reservation of seats for women as the only possible way to ensure the participation of women in politics at

a defined quota level, which is consid-ered important in a democracy.

Considering the fact that literacy levels and political awareness is alarm-ingly low in amongst rural women and given that restricted mobility is an im-portant barrier for them, the guaran-teeing of some seats as representatives as well as in leadership positions for all categories of indian women belonging to scheduled Castes, scheduled Tribes and General castes in the grass root democratic units known as Panchayats was accepted as the best possible way forward. The grass roots democratic institutions in india have always been in existence as rural local bodies which are known as Panchayati raj institu-tions or Pris. The �3rd amendment act to indian Constitution, 1992 is considered as the most important structural intervention from the state. This important amendment ensures, among many other vital provisions:

i. in all Panchayats, seats would be reserved for scheduled Caste and scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population and one third of the total number of seats will be re-served for women. one third of the seats reserved for scheduled Castes and scheduled Tribes will also be re-served for women.

ii. Offices of Chairpersons of the Panchayats at all levels shall also be reserved in favour of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in pro-portion to their population in the state. One third of the offices of

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As India is a culturally diverse country and still continues to feel the strong influence of a feudalis-tic social order, women have sel-dom dared to emerge from their own self perceptions to take con-trol at the decision making level

made them easy prey in the hands of the local power brokers, as they are un-educated and not sufficiently trained to understand the language of politics. it seems that seats are held for women who rarely dare to raise their voice. however, the outlook across india is not completely gloomy. Though it is rare, i am also coming across women who are not afraid to risk their own personal happiness for their new role. one commendable thing which most appeals to me, is their deep sense of involvement and co-operation in my work which they consider may also show them a new direction in their journey. Given that money, power and the role of money in winning and con-testing elections is an acute problem in india, these rural women, having less access to economic affluence had nev-er hoped for, nor had any chance of coming to political power without this quota system. The women representa-tives have been so far free from the dif-ficulties of corruption charges against them. every day i learn from them and every day i salute these women for their spirit in converting their quanti-tative participation into a qualitative one, as the healthy working of democ-racy remains a major problem.

_____________________________Hiranmayee Mishra is a PhD student at the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York.

VOX - The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy

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the Chairpersons of Panchayats at all levels shall also be reserved for women.reservation of seats in the Pan-

chayats and other local bodies had fi-nally raised about 1 million women to the decision making level, in the very first election of these bodies in 1994 after this historical amendment to the constitution in 1993. This number has been increasing in subsequent years. The phenomenon of docile, submis-sive and uneducated common women of india becoming assertive and artic-ulate leaders in Panchayats and prov-ing their excellence in dealing with the hurdles of power has been an impor-tant research concern. This is seen as one of the most important political developments in independent india. India is the first developing country in the world to have such an amend-ment for guaranteeing women 33% of seats at the grass roots democratic in-stitutions and thereby promising mass participation of women in the decision making level of politics.

Pris operate on three levels and are thus known as a three-tier system. Gram Panchayats or village level bod-ies operate only in villages. Panchayat samitis or block level bodies are in-termediary institutions and Zilla Pari-shads or district level bodies operate at the highest level. I am in my field right now and this comprises of the lowest level Panchayats operating in villages and i want to make one im-portant observation about the Pan-chayats. These women who have come to power as elected representatives depend mostly upon their spouses or other male members of family for ev-ery small decision and their mobility is very restricted as indian social norms are very critical about the indepen-dence of their movements.

along with household activities, ru-ral living is full of hardships in india doubling the burden on women. Their political empowerment does not help to reduce such burdens. in tribal areas where women traditionally enjoy much freedom, political empowerment has

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individual at the expense of the rights of the community, with conceptions of the good life ,which are strongly in-dividual in nature, being tacitly placed first and conceptions of the good life that stress the importance of commu-nal values (such as dedicating oneself to serving the family, the church, or to society-at-large) being undeservedly relegated.

for the liberal this charge is hard to dismiss out of hand. Certainly, the so-cial Contract (a much-used device in liberal political philosophy, which con-ceives of a just society as one which rational individuals who wished to preserve their interests would choose) is susceptible to viewing individuals as forming their ends prior to and inde-pendently of society, or at least con-ceding that individual’s conceptions of what constitutes a good life will not

be informed by society. it seems, we cannot get around the fact that such an approach clearly overlooks the role of the community, even if it is just the family unit a causal force in shaping the views and ethical standards of the in-dividual. for communitarian thinkers, such as alasdair macintyre, even the recent efforts of apparently opposing liberal theories, such as the original

position of John rawls and the lib-ertarian entitlement theory of robert nozick, are guilty of treating society like a group of completely unrelated strangers who have crashed on an un-inhabited island, with pre-established values of what it means to live a good life, and must come together to agree upon rules which will safeguard their individual interests.

does this represent the failure of lib-eral philosophy to treat people as they

23

LiberaLism is The PoLiTiCaL PhiLosoPhy ThaT has shaPed

and continues to shape contemporary societies around the world, not least because of its emphasis on the rights and liberties of the individual. howev-er, even such an attractive and endur-ing philosophy is not without its crit-ics. many political theorists described as belonging to the ‘communitarian school’ of thought accuse the politi-cal theory transmitted by the ‘liberal school’ of being guilty of promoting an unrealistic portrait of the relation-ship between the individual and his or her community. Communitarians ac-cused liberals of focusing excessively on individual values at the expense of those more communal in nature. This objection, known as asocial indi-vidualism, is directed against liberalism since it offers an empirically false claim about the nature of the self, and per-petuates a detrimental conception of society. are these accusations correct and, if so, do they lead to a fatal flaw in the liberal project?

The communitarian criticism of aso-cial individualism comes in two distinct but related parts. The first part of the objection, concerning the nature of the person, is fundamentally a claim about the origins of what we call the ‘individual’. according to the commu-nitarian, one of the deficits in liberal theory lies in that it does not capture the extent to which individuals derive their self-understanding and ideas of a ‘good life’ from the community in which they are living.

The second part of the criticism is based upon the first, and involves the political philosophy, which has been built on this apparently flawed con-cept of the individual seen as almost independent of society for his or her personal and moral development. for the communitarian, liberal theory per-petuates the false view of society as an association for mutual advantage between fully developed individu-als with their own unique ends. This means that in liberal political theory, the onus is placed on the rights of the

ASoCiAL individuALiSm And LibErALiSm

By James Hodgson


22

25

individuaLiTy is, arGuabLy, The mosT essenTiaL ParT of John

stuart mill’s liberal political thought. it is a term that provokes positive as-sociations, much like its close friends ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’. The following article tries to answer the question: To what extent does mill’s view on indi-viduality offer a cohesive, normative option for an individual and a society to abide by? it will be argued that there are practical and realistic elements in mill’s thought, which the enlightened student ought to heed since they have the force to influence the pattern of one’s life.

one of the central questions con-cerns the scope of millian individu-ality. initially, it seems paradoxical to seek a limit to our individuality, when it is clearly of upmost importance. here the liberalism of the american philosopher John rawls offers us just a distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ sphere: the former limiting the scope of action, while the latter granting the person an area in which his or her individuality can flourish.1

rawlsian thought clearly pays homage to that well-known liberal polemic On Liberty.2 in it, mill proposed the harm Principle, which allows to persons to act, to encourage and foster individu-ality, so long as no other individual is harmed. however, the question of what constitutes ‘harm’ is at least con-tentious. in a time where moral relativ-ism spreads the question is even hard-er to answer. Wendy donner – an avid mill scholar – stresses that the notion of harm ‘has led many commentators down a garden trail and into a bog’.3 Certainly there are problems, but not major ones that deserve our attention. in day-to-day life, common sense dic-tates how harm is perceived. swearing in front of an elderly lady, in contrast to in front of ones friends; rugby tack-ling a random person, in contrast to the opposite team are just two exam-ples of how harm is understood.

establishing a boundary of individ-uality has proved reasonably feasible: the freedom to express individual-ity cannot involve harming another. mill, though, continues to narrow the

miLL on individuALiTY: A LibErAL drEAm?

By Ashley W.J. Wright


2�

actually are? if there is to be any reso-lution between these two competing ideas about the relationship between the individual and society, it seems we must ask: are our values formed by the communities into which we are born or, rather, by ourselves? The answer is that it is usually both. it is undeniable that the social matrix plays a role in the formation of certain ends, as is the re-ality that for many human beings the well-lived life means a life lived in and for the community.

however, liberal theorists can legiti-mately reply that while such claims of socialization may be empirically cor-rect, they are inappropriate when con-ceiving of the relationship between in-dividuals and society, as one can easily imagine what a society which placed emphasis on the community first and the individual second would look like - an authoritarian culture deficient in human diversity.

and given the second part of the criticism, does it remain valid to think of the social Contract device as an ap-propriate method of deriving rights

and obligations? With what we know now about the way in which individuals form their ends, which the contractual approach is meant to protect, doesn’t the contract device seem to have things backward? despite these appar-ent flaws, the Social Contract remains a valid method of conceiving of soci-ety because it recognises the fact that, in any human community, there will be a plurality of values; different people will always find worth in different ways of living, from spending all your time in scholarly contemplation to a life of unadulterated hedonism. Perhaps even more importantly, it protects the free-dom of individuals to revise their con-ceptions of what a good life means - to freely change their minds as to what is valuable to them. The danger apparent in the communitarian objection is that it seems to promote a rigid determin-ism. in stressing the importance of the individual being in some sense a para-site on the community for his or her self-understanding and ideas on how to live life, a point which liberalism is often guilty of neglecting, communi-tarian theory often overlooks how such things are not completely fixed pre-so-cially. how we view ourselves and the manner in which we choose to live our lives are not completely decided for us from birth simply by virtue of the community into which we are born._____________________________James Hodgson is a third year undergraduate reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of York.

Even the efforts of Rawls and Nozick are guilty of treating so-ciety like a group of completely unrelated strangers who have crashed on an uninhabited is-land.

2�

influences (if it can be done at all) is somewhat of a methodological night-mare. hence, i doubt there are com-plete answers to these questions. yet, answers to the general spirit and line of argument that mill advances can be delineated. We live in a society that can be highly intolerant, one that of-fers intuitive, insensitive reactions to individuals and society. The narrow-minded man howls at the fat; at the small; at the ugly, and at other such ‘failures’ of body. The wise man sits in his chair, certificates pasted to the wall, pretentiously criticising others for the ‘failures’ of their mind. The teenager berates his classmate who does not drink; who does not smoke; who works hard; who is not witty; who does not go out on a friday night. The university student with his supposedly tolerant attitudes may champion those who exhibit diversity – but what of those who do not? ‘i can tolerate di-versity but not normality’ would be a somewhat ironic adage for the student community.

mill is a philosopher – his work will continue to provoke debate half of

which we have not touched on. What of the hints of paternalism he offers, for example? i would reply that that is all well and good. Philosophical dis-cussion is enjoyable to some and it can stimulate the mind. mill can be under-stood in this context – but he is surely more. shortly after mill’s death, rud-yard kipling offered the advice that ‘if you can dream - and not make dreams your master... yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.’ mill is not a dreamer; he is not an idealist – he of-fers a practical way to live your life. act in accordance to your will; recog-nise and potentially dismiss external influences; do not harm others; and above all accept and respect the diver-sity of the world around you without small-minded pre-conceptions. it may be clichéd, but only then will ‘you be a man, my son!’

bibliography:

(1) rawls, J. Political Liberalism (new york, 1996).

(2) mill, J.s. On Liberty (London, 2000).

(3) donner, W. The Liberal Self (London, 1991), p. 189.(�) Jeremy bentham ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’ Utilitarianism and Other Essays (ed) J.s. mill and J. bentham (London, 1996).

(5) John Gray, Mill on Liberty (London, 1996), p. �5.

_____________________________Ashley W.J. Wright is a third year under-graduate reading at Philosophy and Politics at the University of Durham.


26

boundaries of our actions, when he distinguishes between the quality of pleasures – in stark contrast to Jer-emy bentham’s solely quantitative he-donism.� Qualitative calculations mar a simple assumption that the millian first-order-principle of utilitarianism is purely maximizing. instead, it aims to maximise only certain pleasures – namely higher ones – i.e. those of the intellect and of the mind. such liber-alism enters the realm of ‘perfection-ism’ that sits at odds with the concept of individuality because it purports a predetermined ‘Platonic’ picture of an ideal person. it is sensible to ensure that we ought not to harm others, but what is the need to narrow the scope yet further that individuality ought to lean toward ‘higher pleasures’? Why does individuality of the mind and the intellect outweigh that of the sensual pleasures? if it does, then the millian ‘private sphere’, the protector of our freedom and individuality, has been re-duced to little more than a pinhead.

however, such talk of harm and perfectionism, stimulating they are, is often little more than a venture into the abstract. To delve into a strand of marxist political thought – the phi-losopher has little to offer the ‘real’ world. existentialism under the aus-pices of sartre echoes a similar train of thought: best apply occam’s ra-zor in order to remove metaphysical extravagances, and give an accurate phenomenological ontology, i.e. a true picture of existence. What can millian

liberalism offer the student in need of guidance? i suggest quite a lot.

Critics will no doubt claim that indi-viduals can never truly dislocate them-selves from the society they inhabit. To adopt the terminology of the promi-nent liberal John Gray, quite how can we discover autonomy? – where ‘au-tonomy’ signifies the understanding of our desires, aspirations, and motiva-tions without societal influence.5 Com-munitarian thinkers would answer that there is no ‘i’ independent of society since the ‘i’ is the result of societal in-fluences. When existentialism ‘essence before existence’ seems hard to come by, how exactly do we pin point this ‘essence’, and remove the ‘bad faith’? The marxist offers a ‘real’ and ‘false’ consciousness dichotomy – yet mill no doubt advocates laissez-faire capital-ism. for him, ‘real consciousness’ is more social than economic determin-ism.

Clearly there are philosophical prob-lems with mill’s thought; perfectionism is strongly at odds with individuality; and to untangle the self from external

Such liberalism enters the realm of ‘perfectionism’ that sits at odds with the concept of individuality because it purports a predeter-mined ‘Platonic’ picture of an ideal person.

economic globalisation means na-tional governments must compete with each other to attract business. da-vid held notes that multinational cor-porations can shift their demand for employment from country to country. hence, in order to attract large cor-porations, governments must provide conditions, which favour such busi-nesses – a practice which has pressured some poorer nations to create export Processing Zones (ePZs), which have become notorious for their lack of workers rights and safety regulations. Countries that are in this way ‘business friendly’ attract more investment. This implies that the nation-state is an inef-fective tool for dissuading bad corpo-rate practices.3

While the un is perhaps the clos-est body that is currently most ap-proximating a world parliament, it fails

in its function, namely to adequately represent the world’s people. The five permanent members of the security Council carry the power of veto over any constitutional matter of the un Charter. because these countries hold the veto rights, other nations are un-able to hold them to account; there is no point proposing a piece of legisla-tion that is not in the best interest of the five permanent members, because it will almost certainly be overruled.

Therefore, important global deci-sions made in the un will never be detrimental to the security Council members, which is problematic when wanting to redistribute wealth to poor-er nations by implementing fairer trade regulations, and considering that the five council members are the largest arms dealers on the planet. also, there is the issue of disproportionate repre-

29

aLfred Tennyson WroTe in his WeLL-knoW Work, Lock-

sley hall: ‘Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d, In the parliament of man, the Federation of the world’. The concept of a world parlia-ment, mentioned for the first time by Tennyson, is an idea that many people think is unattainable and perhaps even tyrannical.1 however, the concept of a world parliament is becoming increas-ingly important as globalisation causes an overlapping of communities of fate, as seen in the meltdown of the global markets. arguably, the nation state has become redundant and a new system of global organisation is needed to up-hold the principle of democracy.

The power of corporations in mod-ern society is one reason why we might consider a world parliament. Corpo-rations have benefitted dramatically

from economic globalisation, and ma-jor multinational corporations exert huge political influence. Two examples from many include the 195� rebellion in Guatemala, where rebels, trained and financed by the US government, invaded Guatemala on behalf of unit-ed fruit Company; the elected presi-dent of Guatemala had implemented a major land reform policy that involved united fruit surrendering some of their land for compensation. howev-er, the then us secretary of state was a major stockholder in united fruit Co. a second well-known case is the ‘Cash-for-questions affair’ in the uk, where mPs were bribed in exchange for asking questions at PmQs. Corpo-rate power in politics can also be seen by the number of politicians who have current or previous ties with corpora-tions.2

ThE CASE for A WorLd PArLiAmEnT

In favour of the interest of the global community over narrow interests of individual states.

By Luke Smalley


28

31

ment decreases, because the national interests of a few dominant nations control international institutions. To increase citizen empowerment, global politics must be democratised.

a world parliament transcending national borders is the most logical way of overcoming this democratic deficit, according to Richard Falk and andrew strauss.5 There are many dif-ficulties with establishing such a body, especially as any amendment to the un Charter needs the approval of the security Council. however, a world parliament that begins as an advisory body, such as the model proposed by strauss6, would probably have more luck being established through article 22 of the un Charter. The advantage of such an institution is that it would possess unparalleled moral authority.

This is useful, because history shows us that bodies which possess moral au-thority, such as amnesty internation-al, are very efficient at holding global

powers to account. other examples include the World social forum in 2001, where many corporate and gov-ernment leaders requested to speak�, and the us governments attempt to justify an invasion of iraq by submit-ting itself to the un security Council. bodies with moral authority are excel-lent at holding organisations to ac-count; and a world parliament would be the single best representative of the world’s people, and would therefore possess unprecedented moral author-ity.8

in terms of governance, George monbiot proposes a world parlia-ment constituting 600 members, each of whom would, in theory, represent a constituency of 10 million people. The first advantage of this is that it would encourage people to ignore their ‘national interest’. by creating constituencies that contain roughly 10 million people, we are forced to make constituencies overlap national borders. This forces people to put their national concern behind their constituency concern, and persuades people to understand the political de-sires of people from neighbouring na-tions. This also allows representatives to be released from national interests, and means they are likely to push for more binding international laws that currently nation-states have no seri-ous obligation to follow. as outlined by strauss, representatives in a world parliament would vote along ideologi-cal and constituent interest rather than


30

sentation: the rather small nation of Costa rica has as many representatives in the assembly as China does. finally, un ambassadors are appointed, not elected, and are therefore unaccount-able to the national populations.�

The World Trade organisation (WTo), the organisation responsible for making decisions on world trade, is equally undemocratic. The organi-sation makes many of its decisions in ‘Green room’ negotiations, which is a collaborative discussion between the world’s richest nations. as a result, the rich world continues to protect its economies whilst the poor world is ‘encouraged’ to open its economies. other organisations such as the World

bank and imf are run on the principle of ‘one dollar, one vote’. To pass a res-olution a majority of 85% is required. unfortunately, the us has over 15% of the votes, and can therefore ‘veto’ any amendment. Therefore, these two bodies will never pursue a policy, which benefits poorer nations at the expense of the united states.

as more issues, such as trade, the en-vironmental and world health are taken out of the national sphere and placed in the global sphere, citizen empower-

The concept of a world parlia-ment is becoming increasingly im-portant as globalisation causes an overlapping of communities of fate, as seen in the meltdown of the global markets. Arguably, the nation state has become redun-dant and a new system of global organisation is needed.

To increase citizen empower-ment, global politics must be de-mocratised.

The idea of Care is one WiTh The PoTenTiaL To enhance

communities’ responsiveness to the needs of individuals within them, and individuals’ fulfilment of their moral capacity to care for others. individu-als and communities care in many ways, but always with the same aims, “to reverse misery…to provide sound protection and security from social and economic risks”1, or, in another’s words, for “the maintenance of body, soul and relationships which lies at the base of good human functioning.”2 The following examines the origins of the ‘ethic of care’, and some responsi-bilities of the individual and the com-munity in realizing its potential.

in her 1982 book, in a different voice, Carol Gilligan pointed to em-pirically observable differences be-tween men and women as evidence for a difference in their approach to moral decision-making. Gilligan did not attribute this difference to biol-ogy, but rather the different typical experiences of men and women in the liberal, privileged Western society

from which she drew her sample. de-bates over her message and method-ology raged, but the seed of an idea had been sown. over the years it has grown further afield than the femi-nists’ patch, most recently in the patch of public policy.3 The differences Gil-ligan observed showed women’s moral thinking to incorporate emotions, inti-macy and relationships, giving them an ‘ethic of responsibility’ with very dif-ferent properties to presumable male, deontological morality based on rights and imperatives. The ‘ethic of justice’ determined by deontology applies to individuals. by contrast, the ethic of responsibility is framed in terms of humans’ interdependence, and if it has an imperative, it is to preserve re-lationships; accommodating the needs of self with those of others; balancing cooperation with competition.

Gilligan holds that the ‘ethic of re-sponsibility’ could balance the ‘ethic of justice’, and when added together, the result would be a ‘mature’ morality, the ‘ethic of care’. demands for change in the way that morality is manifest

33

a feminisT PerPeCTive on eThiCs: ThE PoTEnTiAL of CArE

By Joanna Konings


32

national lines, as in the eu; this would reduce global conflict between nation states and in the form of terrorism, as it would not only provide a forum for disgruntled groups to express their opinion, there also would be no nation states to attack or defend against.9

The implementation of a world parliament is difficult and relatively complex, and proposals for how such a body could be introduced include amendments to the un Charter, an international treaty, or the seemingly spontaneous uprising of such a body through the will of the world’s peo-ple. however, what is clear is that the creation of a world parliament is the best way of increasing democracy on a global level. if greater political em-powerment and higher accountability of transnational organisations is what we want, then political power and de-mocracy must shift from obsolete na-tion-states to the global arena.

_____________________________Luke Smalley is a second year undergraduate reading Philosophy and Politics at the Uni-versity of York.

endnotes1. monbiot, George. The age of Consent: harper Perennial; new ed. 200�2. Wall, derek. babylon & beyond: The eco-nomic of anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and radical Green movements: Pluto Press 20053. held, david. democracy and the Global order; from the modern state to cosmopolitan governance: Cambridge 1995�. monbiot. 200� pp. 16-1�5. falk, richard/strauss, andrew. for a Global Peoples’ assembly: international herald Tri-bune 199�6. strauss, andrew. Taking democracy Global: Assessing the Benefits and Challenges of a Global Parliamentary assembly: one World Trust 2005�. flaherty, Jordon. World social forum Goes to africa: The ‘indypendent’ 200� http://www.indypendent.org/200�/02/12/8. Tenbergen, rasmus. Towards a World Parlia-ment: a summary of the debate and a Pro-posal for an electronic World Parliament on the internet organised by Civil society : pre-sented to the first virtual Congress 20069. monbiot. 200� pp. 8�-89

VOX - The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy

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in public administration have skipped over the significant philosophical chal-lenge of making the two ‘ethics’ com-patible. as Williams puts it, “Care is a central concern of human life. it is time we began to change our political and social institutions to reflect this truth.” The ubiquity of care suggests this is a moment for shooting first, and asking meta-ethical questions later.

The myriad of ways that ‘formal’ care is allocated by the market include the employment policies of institu-tions, environmental planning and privatised areas of social services. yet, the poverty of the market mechanism often produces an inadequate approxi-mation of care (made possible by the use of profit as a proxy for customer satisfaction ).� That care requirements can be better served is clear from the experiences in every community of vulnerability, need, and of care being provided in an overly paternalistic, pa-tronizing way. individuals know how they want to be cared for.

as a result, a step towards better care provision from the community at large is for individuals to take the initiative in making their concerns heard. This in turn demands space from the state for these concerns to find their targets and be responded to. in essence, the ethic of care calls for democracy to be driven deeper into the community – but also into our activities as indi-viduals.5

The Citizens advice bureau is an ex-ample of a democratic means to bet-

ter care provision by the community. bureaux are accessible everywhere in britain, and members of the commu-nity in need can visit them to receive free, confidential and impartial infor-mation on any issue. advisors at the bureau listen to individuals’ problems and provide them with information and assistance as necessary to help them decide a course of action. at the same time, the advisors are alert for issues that implicate failures in social policy. if an issue is raised, then they use the evidence they have gathered from their clients to lobby for social policy change. in this way, the small stories of the individual are used as an aid to the whole community, through the principle of care and the mecha-nisms to back up care with real policy action.6

The idea of ‘deeper democracy’ in our individual ethic of care relates to who we include and exclude when we perform our caring activities, both in our jobs and informally amongst our families and friends. individuals’ small stories are key to improving care provi-sion to the community at large, but the process works both ways, and aware-ness is the key to individuals assum-ing new responsibilities of care. The community has a role to play in devel-oping this awareness. as mentioned, individuals might signal the shortfalls in the formal care provision they are receiving, but an understanding of the complexity of our interdependence – and the informal ways we could help

others it has not ever occurred to us to care for – must be brought about through the intervention of the com-munity at large.

‘intervention’ with this aim would involve making opportunities for peo-ple who would not normally meet to do so and find common ground, along the lines of the ‘borrow a person’ ini-tiatives in libraries. The aim is for in-dividuals to learn what affects others’ wellbeing, and progress towards their full capacity to care for others. When challenged to broaden our boundaries of care by the community, each indi-vidual can attain a wealth of awareness about the situation they are facing, and the lives their moral decisions will af-fect. importantly, the state or commu-nity retains a responsibility to preserve the private space each is afforded to care for their own, whatever our caring

relationships, whether or not they are susceptible to expansion or manipula-tion!

The ethic of care has the potential to augment the ways care is currently provided by the market, state and in-formally, and realizing this potential involves responsibilities for the indi-vidual and the community. both must aim for a deepening of the democratic processes that informs who they care for, and how they care. by being open to the small stories of individuals, a system of care that meets the needs of all is a step closer to reality.

bibliography:(1) Williams, f. (2001) ‘in and beyond new La-

bour: towards a new political ethics of care’ Critical social Policy, vol. 21, no. �, p. �6�.

(2) sevenhuijsen, s. (2003) ‘The place of care: the relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social poli-cy’, feminist Theory, vol. �., no. 2., p1�9.

(3) for a selection of different areas of scholarship about the ethic of care, see Larrabee, m. (ed.) 1993, an ethic of Care: feminist and interdisciplinary per-spectives. (new york: routledge).

(�) see, for example, ungerson, C. ‘does ‘Cash for Care Work?’, The edge, esrC Corporate Publica-tions, no. 11 (2000) on the poverty trap in the care labour market, and smith, s. ‘states, markets and an ethic of Care’, Political Geography, vol. 2�., no. 1, Jan., 2005. pp 1-20. for a discussion of care and the market mechanism.

(5) Williams (2001) p. �83.(6) for an example of the power of small stories

see smith (2005) and http://www.citizensadvice.org.

uk/index/campaigns.htm

_____________________________Joanna Konings is a graduate student reading Economics at Birkbeck College, London.

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VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, economics and Philosophy - is calling for the submission of articles for the Spring Term issue 2009.

The next edition will be on the wide theme of the “Finan-cial Crisis” and related areas (see list below).

The article should be between 1000-1200 words. The deadline for submission is 11 January 2009.If you want to write, please let us know by emailing a short outline of your proposed article to [email protected] by 19 December 2008.

you might want to pick an article idea from the following list or suggest your own topic:

finance (derivatives, cdSs, hedge funds etc.),Keynesianism (role of the state in the crisis),international economics/Politics (Brics, esp. asia; sovereign wealth funds; global regulatory system),economic history (Great depression),The Politics of crises,economics, Justice and responsibility, or___________ (your own article idea.)

note: undergraduates, graduates and academics from any degree programme are welcome to contribute.

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