Yascha Mounk is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a senior advisor at Protect Democracy. A frequent contributor to the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Die Zeit, he is the host of Slate’s The Good Fight Podcast.
A terrific book. The insight at its heart—that we live in an ‘age
of responsibility,’ and that the conception of responsibility now
at work in much public rhetoric and policy is both punitive and
ill-conceived—is very important and should be widely heeded.
*Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the
Anthropocene*
Yascha Mounk traces the faltering legitimacy of the welfare state
to the narrow notion of personal responsibility that
politicians—and many philosophers—have come to embrace. In a
compelling challenge to conservatives and liberals alike, this
important book prompts us to reconsider the role of luck and choice
in debates about welfare, and to rethink our mutual
responsibilities as citizens.
*Michael J. Sandel, author of What Money Can't Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets*
[A] smart and engaging book…Does it make sense, [Mounk] wonders, to
focus so much on whether a sick poor person is responsible for not
having acquired health insurance? Given that studies suggest public
health and economic growth would benefit if he (and others like
him) had coverage, shouldn’t we consider providing it regardless of
whether he ‘deserves’ it? Or do we so value holding people
accountable that we are willing to jeopardize our own welfare for a
proper comeuppance? …Mounk contends [that] too many advocates
unwittingly accept the punitive framework of accountability and,
following its logic, end up patronizing those they want to
help.
*New York Times Book Review*
[An] important new book…Over the course of the past half century,
Mounk points out, political officials of both major parties have
turned repeatedly to the core value of personal responsibility,
calling on it to redefine the purposes and design of government as
well as pushing the state to play an ever more disciplinary role in
relation to its most vulnerable citizens. They have been motivated,
Mounk suggests, not merely by a political agenda, but by a fantasy
of the just social order—a vision in which each individual person
cares for herself and the government acts to ensure that citizens
receive only the public support their efforts merit. The dream, as
Mounk reveals, is a narrow and crabbed one. Placed under his
precise and dispassionate analysis, it shows itself to be
conceptually dubious and empirically unworkable. But the fantasy
has attracted plenty of influential adherents. Indeed, among the
most troubling of Mounk’s arguments is the claim that the liberal
defenders of the welfare state no less than its conservative
antagonists have signed on to the dream of personal responsibility.
No surprise, then, that a thin theory of individual agency has come
to dominate our ideas about freedom and that an impoverished
language of citizenship has crowded out alternative visions of
democratic society…He mounts a compelling case, that political
rhetoric in the United States—and to a lesser, but still
significant degree in other industrialized democracies—has shifted
over the last half century toward a markedly punitive vision of
social welfare. This trend has coincided with policy
transformations that have served to discipline individual citizens
by demanding that they bear the costs of their own behavior and the
risks of a hazardous world. The age of responsibility, in this
view, is not only the period that brought us workfare and
conditional unemployment benefits—and, one might add, mass
incarceration…Where ideas of the public good or of shared
responsibility once prevailed, private interest is now the
presumptive guide.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Impressive, frequently charming…It seems aimed to appeal well
beyond the philosophical community, with hopes of motivating a
thoughtful and concerned readership to revamp the way our
conception of ‘personal responsibility’ functions in political and
social life. The book employs a fair amount of extant philosophical
work to provoke a change in our public discourse and practices,
while also performing some creative philosophical work that might
be of interest to disciplinary philosophers. It is overall an
erudite and enjoyably readable book…Mounk’s book is a laudable and
fruitful achievement.
*Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews*
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