Welfare and Norms:

Rethinking Market and Community

Abstract

　The market is often considered to be spontaneous and self-regulating, and the

welfare system is, by contrast, thought to be normative and not spontaneous.

However, opinions in support of the free market themselves presuppose strong

norms, and the demand for a welfare system is, in fact, spontaneous―occurring

without regulatory intervention. For this reason, the social citizenship of the

welfare state tends to be called into question. Karl Polanyi held that labor, land,

and money cannot be commodities and that the self-regulating market is a fiction.

Polanyi also stated that the welfare state was another myth that supported

the self-regulating market in the 20th century. Labor, land, and money have

been partly de-commodified, but globalization has made the welfare state fluid,

and the hegemony of neoliberalism has divided society. Social inclusion and deliberative

democracy are often proposed as an alternative, but Chantal Mouffe

has shown that agonistic democracy is essential for “the political.” Agonistic democracy

requires a common lifestyle; thus it is necessary to build a new community

that includes foreigners. For example, a neighborhood self-governing

body including various citizens could create an appropriate adversarial relationship

and form a new entity in agonistic democracy. Richard Sennett, as a pragmatist,

insisted that the art of democracy may be given sophistication as the

self-governing practice of common people, and such craftsmanship may be an

alternative to traditional statesmanship or the statecraft of specialists.