Beyond personal responsibility: government support for the substantive human condition

This chapter connects the message of personal responsibility in three issues: welfare reform, financial system implosion, and climate collapse. These three issues mark key points of public reckoning with government failures to protect against an economy geared to make human well-being more costly and insecure for most. For each issue, public authorities restrained their power for institutional change by presenting widespread harm as a problem best addressed by individualized choices, on the theory that power is most legitimately wielded by autonomous self-reliant actors. Instead, a robust vision of democracy and justice requires grounding legitimate power in institutional responsibility, replacing the formal autonomous individual of liberal theory with the universally embodied, embedded human subject. 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.