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The Many Hands (and Fingers) of the State. Elisabeth Clemens University of Chicago. El Paso, Arkansas 1931. We left Arkansas “relief ready”.
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The Many Hands (and Fingers) of the State Elisabeth Clemens University of Chicago
We should understand the distinction between state and society “not as the boundary between two discrete entities, but as a line drawn internally within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained.” Timothy Mitchell (1991:78) • Three questions follow: • Why do so many voluntary associations cluster at this boundary, at least in the United States? • What determines where the boundary is drawn? • What happens because of this boundary? How does it shape the dynamics of political conflict, change, and development?
What do associations do at the boundary? • “One of the questions frequently asked is why the Government does not do what the Red Cross is doing? The Government is compelled to confine itself to a standardized service, treating all men more or less alike. The Red Cross can go into all the ramifications of the individual case and help the man overcome his peculiar handicaps and obstacles. The Government must stick to the essentials of the job. It has a gigantic and difficult task to accomplish the obvious work, common to the handling of every case of a disabled man. It cannot take infinite pains with every case. What it does for one, it must be prepared to do for all who are eligible whether they need it or not.”
Managing the relationship of the individuality of citizens to the uniformity expected from the Government • A challenge in the case of the army: • Principle of equality within ranks (although often violated) • Preservation of soldier’s private status as breadwinners • Protection of dignity of soldier’s families • Voluntary associations worked at the point of conflict among these individual and collective standings.
Defense of individuality in social support • As the Chairman of the North Lonoke County Chapter explained to the national convention in 1931, • “there was a lack of appreciation on the part of the public as to the necessity of handling Red Cross work upon the individual case system. It was our policy to deal with the individual case and not attempt mass feeding. Shortly after the work started there was a demand on the part of some plantation owners and landlords that whatever relief was afforded to tenants and sharecroppers should be handled through the commissary of the plantation owner or landlords. This, of course, was contrary to the principles of emergency relief and was not countenanced by the Red Cross. Experience has shown the justice of dealing with the individual case.”
Agreement in practice if not politics • In 1936, a former national chairman of the Unemployed Council charged that: • the question of relief was relegated to the private ‘charity’ agencies that operate on the ‘case work’ theory. This theory is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our social system, but that some individuals are ‘somehow’ unable to adjust themselves to our ‘perfect’ social order. This means, also, that unemployment and destitution are the fault of the individual and that, therefore, having no one to blame but himself, he has no right to make demands upon the class that profits from, and the government that maintains, the capitalist system.
What shapes the location of the boundary? • Historically, understood as setting a minimum of public support; principle of “less eligibility” • Georg Simmel explains the sociological rationale: • “A collectivity which comprises the energies or interests of many individuals can only take into account their peculiarities, when there is a structure with a division of labor whose members are assigned different functions. But when it is necessary to perform a united action, whether through a direct organ or a representative organ, the content of this action can only include that minimum of the personal sphere that coincides with everybody else’s.” • Insistence on uniformity.
Implications for associational activity • “over and above” arguments for fund-raising • With introduction of expanded public relief at all levels (federal, state, local), private voluntary associations emphasize “rehabilitative hypothesis” with specific attention to individualized problems that are created by unemployment (stress, domestic violence) or that are required by individuals who fall outside the domain of generality (“the unemployables”). • Momentary stabilization of a division of labor, a boundary within a network of relationships. • Then. . .
“Rolling in the categories” • Social Security Act of 1935 established categories of eligibility for social insurance and aid (inc. aged, unemployed, blind, dependent children). • Most of these required passage of a state enabling act to establish the matching-grant arrangements that supported many of these categories as well as a two-year “accumulation” period. • By 1938, a year which also saw the onset of the “Roosevelt Recession,” social workers (both public and private) began to anticipate what would happen as “the categories” began to be implemented.
New questions of uniformity • After Congress passed on amendment in 1937 that would protect recipient of aid “under the categories” from publicity (e.g. publishing names in newspapers) or the disclosure of personal information, one social worker asked: • “If it is considered desirable to protect from publicity the aged, the blind and children in need of assistance, by what reasoning should such protection be denied persons in need of direct relief? Are they less honest, less sensitive to humiliation? Are their children different from the children of those who “fit” the ADC category? Is the fact that, as the Milwaukee Journal said, they have “adjusted” to “similar blows” any reason for inflicting a new one?”
Required a renegotiation of the boundary • As one social worker observed in 1940 • More than one hundred thousand individuals are now regularly receiving monthly federal old-age and survivors insurance payments. Within this year payments will go to a half million or more retired workers, their wives and children and the survivors of deceased workers. Because these persons are the beneficiaries of a social insurance program, not the recipients of direct public aid, the questions arise: Does the manner in which their benefits are paid differ from the way in which payments are made under an assistance program? Are the fundamental differences between social insurance and public assistance reflected in the administration of the insurance program?
Projects of expanding the domain of generality • One correspondent quoted a novel popular among social workers, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Bonfire • “don’t dare to call this charity, or let anyone think of it as charity. Its name is decency. This would not be a gift to the young people it would benefit. It would be a right they have deserved by being born American. Any American, any Vermonter, any Clifford man ought to be ashamed if any man’s children have less of a chance – a chance, that’s all this is – than his own. • In a stirring call for generality, the opinion piece concludes that “Grandma called it charity. We call it social justice. Isn’t it also the brotherhood of man?”
What does the boundary make happen? • In liberal polities, the activities of these voluntary associations contribute to the management of an ideologically-central boundary between individual particularity and the domain of generality/uniformity held to be appropriate for “State” or “Government” programs. • This takes one form when the principle of minimalism governs the domain of uniformity; private associations complement and extend public benefits (however inadequately and reluctantly). • A quite different dynamic takes hold with the political project of expanding the domain of government social support . . .
The “fingers of the state” • The expansion of the scale of public support – “rolling in the categories” – brings the problem of particularization/individualization into the domain of generality. • “Many Hands” is a metaphor for thinking about a particular French state of the 1980s, which was also the source of the metaphor of nonprofit organizations as the “fingers” of the state. • Socialist turn to autogestion. • Challenges the stability of the “summating concepts” or “illusory general interest” that is linked to processes of legitimation.
Implications for thinking about “state-ness” • Speaks to the implications of two ways of unpacking the stylized coherence of the “Weberian” state • As networks or infrastructures of power (Mann, Balogh) • As combinations of governing arrangements and a cultural element (a state illusion or effect) • This effect is typically linked to a “summating concept” (Nettl) or “illusory common interest” (Engels) • The activity of voluntary associations at the boundaries of the state suggest the importance of holding on to the second of these insights. • State-building as both an organizational and an ideological project. • This double nature, in turn, generates a distinctive dynamic of political conflict, change, and development.
