Patrick Cockburn

This article considers how political actors committed to a moral value like equality can cause havoc with our lives if they choose to apply those values in ways that are temporally absurd or arbitrary. The central claim is that without considering the temporal structures of our political commitments our political theorising will remain indeterminate with respect to social practice. This claim is developed in two steps. First, debates on ‘indeterminacy’ in normative theorising are examined to develop a sceptical argument showing that a lack of temporal reference points can lead to a lack of certainty in the meaning of normative principles. Second, debates on time and social justice are used to illustrate how temporal reference points can link normative principles to the existential time of human lives in meaningful and important ways. To ignore these lessons about the place of temporality in normative reasoning is to ignore the indeterminacy of many of our political commitments and misunderstand the extent of our normative disagreements with others.

The present article is a sympathetic critique of the most prominent contemporary articulations of family abolitionism. It examines whether queer communist family abolitionism is successful in linking an account of reasons for abolition, with an account of the means of abolition, and finally with an account of the ends of abolition in the form of speculation on a possible world without families. Recent work by M.E. O’Brien has developed these connections in ways that have never been done so thoroughly before; but the rejection of states as an institutional form of political power leaves it unclear what forms of equality we could expect in such a world, and why coercive power would be unnecessary there. Family abolition is a utopian political agenda; but that utopianism needs to be constrained by a realist concern with issues of power, resources, and human capacities. This will require confronting trade-offs and imperfections within possible worlds without families. The recognition that there are many paths to a world without families, and many possible such worlds, is the first step towards aligning reasons, means, and ends and confronting the social and political trade-offs that this entails.

This chapter examines how in the last 40 years the concept of ‘dependency’ has been central to critiques the welfare state as an ideal model of social and political organisation. The chapter gives an overview of prominent critiques of ‘welfare dependency,’ particularly in the USA since the 1980s, and examines how feminist political theorists have responded to this rhetoric. The chapter argues that the concept of ‘interdependence,’ which is both implicit and explicit in much of this theory, does not suffice as a new basis for political debate and theory. The feminist lessons need to be reformulated with a focus on political choices between the forms of dependency inherent in different ways of structuring our basic economic institutions and relationships.

In this chapter looks at how property structures our relations of dependence in society. Property today is the great understudied topic in political theories of economic justice. While Rawlsian political theorists have recently rediscovered property through the idea of ‘property-owning democracy,’ the debate has long remained stuck on the issue of distribution (how much everyone gets) and has only just begun to examine ownership as a specific form of power that structures relations of dependence. In this chapter, I return to the work of legal economist, Robert Hale, who expressed more clearly than anyone how property constitutes a power of ‘private government,’ and I discuss why this view of property matters for thinking about dependence as vulnerability to pressure and coercion, especially in a market economy.

In this chapter introduces the example of street papers to illustrate that the ideological association of market participation with economic independence has made a range of economic practices invisible or suspect. Street papers try to carve out a space of economic legitimacy between begging and welfare support, both of which are often viewed as involving illegitimate economic dependence. In order to contextualise this use of the market as a source of economic identity and legitimacy, the chapter explains Karl Polanyi’s view of the economy as a set of interlocking instituted processes and introduces the idea of ‘the empty economy’ to label the practices and institutions that a broad Polanyian view of the economy would include, but which are strategically excluded (or devalued) in public discourse.

This chapter asks: What does money do to our dependencies? This chapter draws on recent scholarship within the humanities on money, asking what kinds of dependence we institute in the various forms of money that interlock (e.g. private bank credit and central bank ‘base’ money) and compete (e.g. local currencies and national currencies) in contemporary societies. It frames the normative stakes of these choices about money using Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s republican vision of a constitution for Corsica as a model for thinking about the relationship between economic power and political power.

This chapter examines a foundational distinction in discussions of economic justice: the distinction between earned income and unearned income. It briefly sketches the conceptual history of the metaphor of ‘parasites’ and goes on to contrast the impersonal dependence involved in unearned income gained through rent extraction, with the very personal form of dependence characteristic of inheritance. It follows Thomas Piketty in suggesting that together these mechanisms produce great social inequality and injustice. However, the chapter also argues that we should not be normatively complacent about the idea of ‘earned income’ and assume that it represents a ‘productive’ economic contribution in contrast to unearned income. We are all far more deeply dependent than such complacency implies.

This chapter introduces the range of poor souls who have been labelled as ‘unproductive people’: from buffoons to housewives. The chapter outlines the ways in which the dichotomy between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour has been used in the history of political economy, including in the works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It was against the backdrop of Marx’s claims about ‘unproductive labour’ that twentieth-century political theorists discussed whether we should retain a distinction between productive and unproductive labour, and if so, what purposes that distinction served. Working through these debates, the chapter gradually focusses in on why the idea of productive labour mattered particularly for feminists, who saw unpaid housework being side-lined in orthodox Marxist political economy.

The Conclusion summarises the central points developed in the book. It argues that only by broadening our view of economic dependence—looking beyond the usual suspects such as welfare recipients—can we begin to compare the economic lives of social actors in the right way. It argues, first, that the politics of dependence is a politics not of ideals but of trade-offs. Second, it positions the book against a theoretical tradition heavily focussed on the discovery of ‘principles’ of justice and overwhelmingly focussed on the relation between states and markets. Third, it argues that parasitism characterises the lives of the many, not the few, and that recognition of this should drive reform while making us cautious in the use of damning labels such as ‘parasite.’

‘Progressive’ accounts of property developed in recent legal scholarship have attempted to shift focus from rights to exclude, often regarded as the ‘core’ of the idea and institution, towards focus on a plurality of human values served by property law. Like Thomas Grey's famous thesis about the ‘disintegration of property’ this raises the question of what might be called ‘property perspectivism’: does property looks different from different points in the social fabric? What is involved in the claim to ‘know property’? To understand the diversity of property arguments within legal scholarship and across the human sciences it is important to trace the implicit knowledge claims that accompany the explicit normative arguments, paying specific attention to the ‘exemplars’ that underpin lines of argument, and the ‘sources of property knowledge’ that are drawn upon. This paper draws on and reworks W. B. Gallie's classic discussion of ‘essentially contested concepts’ in order to show that debates about property are as much about defining analytic starting-points as they are about reaching normative conclusions. After outlining major fault-lines in contemporary legal theorizing about property the analysis focuses in on the work of Gregory Alexander and his critics, and concludes by placing this within the even broader perspective provided by contrasting forms of property scholarship from outside of legal studies.

For several decades, public political discourses on ‘welfare dependency’ have failed to recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four senses of ‘economic dependence’ that can help to clarify what is missing from these discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian philosophical work has examined the problems of dependence on states, in families and in markets, the present approach adds a further dimension to our cultural and political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires a clarification of the ‘varieties of dependence’ that exist in contemporary societies and economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not about escaping dependence entirely.

Debates around the state-firm analogy as a route to justifying workplace democracy tend towards a static view of both state and firm, and position workplace democracy as the objective. We contend, however, that states and firms are connected to one another in ways that should alter the terms of the debate, and that the achievement of workplace democracy raises a new set of political issues about the demos in the democratic firm and ‘worker migration’ at the boundaries of the firm. Our argument thus contains two key steps: First, drawing on an empirical case study of a worker-owned firm, we enrich the state-firm analogy by developing a more dynamic view of both, focussing on the creation of workplace democracies; worker movement in and out of them; the dynamic meanings of ‘citizenship’ within them; and the status of the unemployed in a world of democratic workplaces. We then argue that in moving to a more sociological view of the state, the things we were comparing begin to show their real-world connections to one another. By going beyond the idealised view of states that has distorted the state-firm analogy debates, we arrive at a more robust view of how widespread workplace democracy might reconfigure basic political relationships in society.

The central claim of this book is that the dichotomy between economic dependence and economic independence is completely inadequate for describing the political challenges faced by contemporary capitalist welfare states. The simplistic contrast between markets and states as sources of income renders invisible the relations of dependence established in our basic economic institutions such as the family, property, and money. This book is a work of political theory that attacks narrow conceptions of dependence and identifies distinct senses of dependence that might allow political communities to make clearer decisions about the justice of our economic institutions and practices. Inheritance, for example, is as much a form of dependence as support by a welfare state, but these are never compared in debates about economic justice. This book begins the work of comparing forms of economic dependence, and argues that economic dependence is always an issue of both vulnerability and parasitism. It builds bridges between political theory and social science, and is of relevance to those concerned with social and economic justice in and beyond contemporary capitalist welfare states.

This article introduces the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ to explain how the stories that we encounter in property theory and public rhetoric function to make some actors appear ‘independent’, and thus capable of acquiring property in their own right, while making other actors appear ‘dependent’ and thus incapable of acquiring property. The argument develops the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ out of the work of legal scholar Carol Rose and political theorist Carole Pateman, before using it as a tool for contrasting the canonical property stories of John Locke and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. We argue that the link between property and dependence provides a useful starting point for understanding issues of economic justice that share a common political problem: how do we choose to govern the relation between dependence and independence through the institution of property?

Both courts of law and political theorists have grappled with the problem of giving the concept of ‘need’ a place in our reasoning about the rights and wrongs of property regimes. But in the U.K., legal changes in the last fifteen years have eroded the legal possibilities for striking some compromise between the claims of the needy and the rights of property owners. Against this backdrop this article compares three theoretical accounts of how the fact of human need should impact upon our thinking about property rights: the rights-based arguments of Jeremy Waldron, the radical democratic theory of Lawrence Hamilton and the anarchist commentary of Colin Ward. While ‘theories’ of need have paid much attention to the nature of need ‘itself’, the article argues that this comparison reveals another issue that is just as important: where and how should claims of need be registered in legal and political processes?