Elena's questions

We need to discover what civil society means for social policy futures. Does it mean a new and more democratic welfare future based on citizen participation in the shaping and delivery of social services? Or does it envisage the liberalization of welfare in which the state is displaced by a resurgent market? Does this downsizing mean the end of the welfare state? Did it ever exist? Was it a metaphor for a virtuous society based on a welfare compromise? Is virtue being redefined in terms of individual agency in a world where welfare has become once again a matter of personal responsibility? Or can the Zeitgeist of the welfare state be reinvented by a Social Left on the basis of utopian socialist principles? Is Colas contention that the State is the opium of civil society correct?

F. Powell

It’s interesting that Mr. Powell raises this particular questions and not others such as:

Mr. Powell’s premise: We need to discover what civil society means for social policy futures.

Does it mean a new and more democratic future based on citizen participation in the shaping and delivery of social and political, economic, scientific and religious development?

Does it mean that the individual has acquired enough strength and sense of its own self and reach and is now able to act responsibly without the need for an external force to keep us from hurting others?

Does it mean that Right and Left wing individualism pro welfare state is the reflex of a middle class that has gradually become the holder of  authority through its activity in the realm of service and is supporting the status quo against its own realization as human beings for fear of losing the few privileges that they have come to acquire?

Does it mean that conforming to the welfare state in which people are given what they can have instead of having the right to get what they can give will strengthen the tendency we are seeing today towards an automatization of the individual rather than a free spirited society in which culture is not only not separated from science, politics and economy but is at the root of their development?

Does it mean that civil society must continue to be at the service of the economic status quo or that we become conscious of the fact that the economic status quo is acting against civil society in its totality? In other words, that not only are we talking about masses of workers being harmed by the conditions of bare survival as is common in third world nations, comfortable but lifeless survival amongst the workers in first word nations and over-leisure survival amongst the privileged of all nations for whom the status quo is no less decadent?

Does it not mean that what we need to approach is the question that the WORK in people’s lives, what they DO every day, what they do and what they do it for, why, when and where, for whom and at what cost, matters?

Does it not mean that we’ve come to the point where what we need to ask our selves is, where is the human purpose of the human being?