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Description
Government protection against systemic harm to human well-being is stymied by the liberal idea that power is most legitimately wielded by autonomous individuals taking personal responsibility for their substantive well-being. Instead, a robust vision of democracy and socioeconomic justice requires grounding legitimate power in institutional responsibility, replacing the formal individual actor of liberal theory with the universally embodied, embedded human subject developed in Martha Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory. This chapter connects the message of personal responsibility in neoliberal US welfare reform policies to rationales defending the government’s failure to alleviate systemic human harm in the 2008 financial crisis and the accelerating climate crisis. For each of these issues, public authorities restrained their power for institutional change by presenting widespread human harm as a problem best addressed by neutrally mediating individualized decisions about substantive priorities. Yet without actively structuring political economic power in favor of distinctly human subjects, government will appear more responsible the more it yields power to institutional structures that undermine the substantive conditions necessary for effective human agency and value.
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Publication Date
9-23-2025
Publisher
Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN
9781803921181
First Page
16
Last Page
36
Edition
2
Disciplines
Law | Law and Politics | Political Economy
Required Text
This is a draft chapter / article. The final version is available in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy edited by John D. Haskell, published in 2025, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803921198.00010 The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher, and is for private use only.
Recommended Citation
, Beyond Personal Responsibility: Government Support for the Substantive Human Condition in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy (John D. Haskell, ed., Edward Elgar Publishing 2d ed. 2025).
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