Austerity, welfare and social citizenship
Austerity, welfare and social citizenship
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紧缩、福利和社会公民
作者：
Daniel Edmiston;Ruth Patrick;K. Garthwaite
本文接受了罗伯特•普罗克托（Robert Proctor）所称的“不可知论”（对无知的研究）的挑战，分析了智库、政策精英和保守派政客目前对英国福利国家的攻击。这种攻击可以追溯到社会正义智库中心的出现，该智库由现任就业和养老金大臣伊恩·邓肯·史密斯于2004年创立。我认为，福利改革的设计者们反复引用一系列熟悉的社会病态（家庭破裂、失业、反社会行为、个人责任、婚外生育、依赖），以制造人们对解决贫困和社会不公的其他方法的无知。贫困的结构性原因在战略上被忽视，而倾向于一个单一的行为解释——“破碎的英国”——在这个解释中，“家庭破裂”已成为“大社会”慈善幻想要解决的核心问题。我的不可知论方法批判性地探讨了（错误）信息和国家权力之间令人不安的关系。
This article takes on the challenge of what Robert Proctor calls “agnotology” (the study of ignorance) to analyse the current assault on the British welfare state by think tanks, policy elites and conservative politicians. The assault is traced back to the emergence of the Centre for Social Justice think tank, founded in 2004 by the current Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan‐Smith. I argue that a familiar litany of social pathologies (family breakdown, worklessness, antisocial behaviour, personal responsibility, out‐of‐wedlock childbirth, dependency) is repeatedly invoked by the architects of welfare reform to manufacture ignorance of alternative ways of addressing poverty and social injustice. Structural causes of poverty have been strategically ignored in favour of a single behavioural explanation—“Broken Britain”—where “family breakdown” has become the central problem to be tackled by the philanthropic fantasy of a “Big Society”. My agnotological approach critically explores the troubling relationship between (mis)information and state power.