Introduction

The postwar period of the economic history of the capitalist societies of the West is at an end. In the course of the 1970s, it became apparent that the standards of economic performance achieved by these societies over the previous twenty-five years were no longer being maintained and, furthermore, that there was no assurance – and indeed little prospect – of any rapid return to these standards. An observer of Western economies around 1965 might well have concluded that steady and sustained growth, at a high level of capacity utilization and with no more than modest inflation, had in effect become institutionalized. The progressive acceptance of Keynesian economic theory and associated techniques of economic management, together with the growing control exercised by public authorities over the functioning of the economic system, seemed to have inaugurated a new era of capitalism in which stability and dynamism were reconciled and guaranteed. However, ten years later these same economies were for the most part characterized by greatly reduced growth rates and moreover, by a tendency for unemployment and general price levels to rise simultaneously. In other words, it emerged not only that the business cycle was not after all obsolete; but further, and much more disturbing, that recession and inflation could now be complementary rather than alternative expressions of economic disorder. A “discomfort index,” created by summing the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation in seven major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, rose from around 5.5 percentage points for the decade 1959–69 to 17 percentage points for 1974–75.

Dimensions of social protection and welfare

The overwhelming public support for government intervention in the social field and for the welfare state has been gradually but surely weakening. As one official observer has pointed out:

Indeed, both neoliberal and neo-Marxist analyses of the crisis of the welfare state converge. They argue that the spectacular growth of public expenditures in Western countries in the last decades endangers the accumulation process. The burden imposed upon business to finance welfare programs together with the rise in the interest rates resulting from deficit financing induce a scarcity in the supply of capital for productive investment. Albert Hirschmann reminds us that this argument was advanced long ago by Colin Clark, who “alleged that in the nature of the capitalist system a fairly rigid limit was set to the ability to divert factor income for purposes of expanding social services and other public expenditures.”

Science policy in crisis

It is difficult to think of a realm in which the boundaries of the political have been more ambiguous and changing in recent times than that of science and scholarship in the advanced industrial societies of the West. On the face of it, this is rather surprising. The search for truth is constitutionally protected in such societies, and the legitimacy of the quest for knowledge for its own sake, insofar as it is the subject of much thought, is seldom questioned. Formally, science and scholarship have been viewed as realms of private enterprise and activity in the sense that the choice of subjects for investigation has been left to the investigators and the problems of personnel selection and accountability have been left to internal regulation through the mechanisms of co-optation and peer review, both presumably informed by accepted and reasonably rigorous codes of methodology and evidence. Indeed, as Sir Alan Bullock has pointed out, “the core of the enterprise is a methodology and the commitment to it. The real scientists are those who add to knowledge, not their auxiliaries. This is what brought them into the business and this is what still seems to them the sacred duty.” Herein rests the claim for the autonomy of science, its self-legitimation and self-sanctification.

In practical terms, of course, there have been very material constraints on science and scholarship which have necessarily affected their autonomy, just as there is a long and often ghastly record of religious and ideological barriers to the unrestrained pursuit of knowledge.

Over the past three decades in Western Europe, the Catholic church, a bulwark of social and political order, has developed the cracks and fissures of advanced decay. Complex networks of values, beliefs, practices, and organizations built up by the church over centuries are disintegrating. In France where the dimensions of religious change have been the most striking, weekly mass attendance dropped from about one-third of all Catholics in the 1950s to about 15 percent at the end of the seventies. The numbers of those taking confession, communion, and confirmation fell. Ordinations declined from over 600 a year to about 150 between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies. Surveys of the faithful find growing pockets of doubt and resistance to central tenets of doctrine. The subcultural institutions which sheltered the Catholic community from the onslaught of secular culture and from the Republic are in ruin. Catholic Action associations, among the largest mass movements of the postwar period, have become sects with small audiences beyond the immediate participants.

These phenomena appear in all Catholic Western Europe, more advanced in France, the Netherlands, and Germany than in Spain, Italy, or Portugal; but everywhere the trends seem to move in the same directions. There are, to be sure, countertendencies: an upsurge of charismatic religious practice, some revival of monastic recruitment, continued mass support for private – that is, Catholic – schools, the success of new styles of Catholic politics, particularly in the Italian Comunione e Liberazione movement. The dominant fact, however, is the collapse of old patterns of religious practice and of long-established religious institutions.

Europe, originator of the modern state system, has since 1945 been the principal experiment and hope for those who see a means for transforming the old state-centered model of international relations in the receding boundaries of a circumscribed and beleaguered state. In one respect – demotion of the high politics of military competition – those hopes seemed to be fulfilled through the demotion of Europe itself within the international system. The security-dependent civilian states that resulted, however, have recently faced renewed concern from their populations in an environment of deteriorating superpower relations.

In a second and equally important domain, the competition between state and international market, early predictions by the heralds of interdependence and the disciples of European integration can now be seen as overdrawn. Later cries of alarm concerning a mercantilist onslaught were equally exaggerated: The prevailing liberal organization of the international and European political economies persists, even though the activism of the state has grown in meeting the new conditions of international openness. A new and perhaps stable balance may have been struck between the postwar politics of domestic economic stabilization and the demands of international economic interdependence. At the same time, the new boundaries of the political are being subjected to strains by a perceived increase in international insecurity (and concomitant return of the concerns of traditional high politics), by shifts in the international division of labor, and by the growing inefficacy of domestic economic management in conditions of high economic openness.

Political sociologists and political scientists who analyze Western European politics have made it a commonplace since the 1970s to emphasize the fusion of political and nonpolitical spheres of social life. They have seriously questioned the usefulness of the conventional dichotomy of “state” and “civil society.” Processes of fusion are evident not only on the level of global sociopolitical arrangements, but also among citizens as elementary political actors. The delineation between “political” and “private” (in other words, moral or economic concerns and modes of action) is becoming blurred.

This diagnosis is based on at least three phenomena: (1) the rise of “participatory” moods and ideologies, which lead people to exercise the repertoire of existing democratic rights more extensively; (2) the increased use of noninstitutional or nonconventional forms of political participation, such as protest, demonstrations, and unofficial strikes; and (3) political demands and conflicts concerning issues that used to be considered moral (such as abortion) or economic (such as the humanization of work). Not only are the institutional channels of communication between the citizenry and the state used more often and more intensely by a greater number of citizens and for a wider range of issues; in addition, their adequacy as a framework for political communication is being challenged.

We thus see a rather dramatic model of political development in the advanced Western societies: As public policies exert a more direct and visible impact on citizens, citizens in turn try to win a more immediate and inclusive control over political elites by means fre-quently seen as incompatible with maintaining the institutional order of the polity.

Absolute politics and the reflexive power of politics

Behind the idea of politics having boundaries, and of these dilating and contracting, it is not hard to discover, in both individual and collective representations, the image of a state of affairs – and the hope for or terror of it – where no boundaries at all are set around the practice of political commitment and the exercise of political will. Everything social would then be placed sub specie politicae, interpreted through politics and seen as transformable by politics. I will call “absolute politics” the state of affairs reflected in that image. It will be the object of this inquiry. This will therefore deal with the circumstances under which politics can be seen as the type of activity entitled to dictate the rules of conduct for all relevant social activities, while these, in turn, are being evaluated essentially for the political consequences they may bear. Under such circumstances political action can be seen as the only type of action capable of transforming society and therefore the only one through which the life of humanity, or of a nation, can be improved to approximate a given ideal. Political vocation as well as participation in politics are predicated as the highest of possible individual choices. They dictate to a person aims which will prevail over those dictated by his or her own self-interest.

The budget as mirror

The shifting boundaries between the political and the private are reflected in the ratio (hereafter rendered G/Y) of government expenditures to the national income. In this sense the budget can be seen, according to Kurt Heinig, as a mirror of the sociopolitical situation. If taken lightly, this image is illuminating. Upon reflection, it becomes dubious. One might say that the mirror is funny: Important types of government intervention (cruel prosecution under a dictatorship) can be introduced or abolished without government expenditures showing what is happening. Regulatory power in economic affairs is not necessarily proportional to the number of government employees. On the other hand, some substantial increases in public outlays reflect not so much increasing government operations as transfers between citizens, for instance, the prosperous expansion of the grants economy. Another shortcoming of G/Y as a measure of the balance between the activities of governments and governed is that budgets do not reveal the full size of activities on behalf of the authorities, which are often costly. For instance, the labor of the tax-filing, tax-paying citizen is nowhere registered. As shifts between the public and the private domain are occurring in opposite directions it is not certain that their net impact is truly measured by the increase in G/Y. The recent retreat of some European governments on the issues of abortion, homosexuality, and pornography did not lead to a significant decrease in government outlays; but the substantial advance in education, housing, and welfare did lead to strong and sometimes explosive increases.

Politics has no clearly definable boundaries. Virtually any aspect of society is potentially an object of political interest, if only because of its possible symbolic uses. Terrorism, to take an extreme case, observes no boundaries to the political: Any person or object can become a target of exemplary violence through the complex transformations of the terrorist code. To the revolutionary terrorist, everything is political, and politics is everything. At some historical moments, even many petty details of ordinary life – items of clothing, phrases of speech – take on instantly understood political meaning. The sphere of the political expands particularly in periods of upheaval and change. Realities previously accepted as natural and objective facts become objects of political change. Matters formerly considered private and personal become political and public, and decisions once assumed to be technical matters for experts to resolve erupt into political controversy.

Yet this phenomenon – the “politicization” of elements of social life commonly believed to lie beyond politics – testifies that politics generally has an assumed sphere. The boundaries may be inexact and indistinct, but their location and the level of concern about respecting them are nonetheless a significant aspect of a political culture. Although the division of what is political from what is nonpolitical may be entirely conventional, it is a convention that helps to give order to a society by distinguishing how different domains of social life ought to be run.

Introduction: three interpretive scenarios

No matter how natural it is to depict the family as the nucleus of private life, in fact it has long been a concern of public authority. But the nature of this public impact has changed. This chapter proposes a historical typology for the relationship of state and family during the last two centuries. To be sure, this is a history of the conceptual bases of the relationship, for actual practice was far less clear-cut, and carried forward older as well as more recent concepts.

Three scenarios in the history of Western societies are especially relevant. The first is the scenario in which the modern state came into being in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second is the welfare state as it took shape in Britain from the 1940s through the 1960s. The third scenario comprises the present day. Sociologists have advanced and debated several hypotheses to analyze these stages in the history of contemporary society. The terms “modern state” and “welfare state” can be used to summarize the first two phases. The third scenario has no clear designation, but the ideas of pluralism and complexity may provide the best interpretive guidelines for understanding its evolving interaction of state and family. I shall consider all three scenarios briefly in this introduction to set out the main lines of the argument.

For the modern state, the term bonheur public (“welfare” may provide the closest modern equivalent) became an issue of concern in the eighteenth century.

What is the politics of time?

“Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?” Thomas Mann asked sixty years ago in The Magic Mountain. “That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onward’ and so forth – no one in his senses would consider that a narrative.” Is it similarly absurd to inquire into the politics of “time, time itself, as such for its own sake”? Mann, after all, reconsidered. Because time within the story, like time in a dream, ran at a different experiential pace than it did for the author, “it is clear that time, while the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. Therefore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed.” In the same cautious sense, this chapter takes up the question how politics is about time, and how the time presupposed by politics has changed in the course of history.

Politics concerns time in at least two ways. The first is ideological. Politics comprises one of the fundamental means by which all societies resolve and carry out the decisions that order their collective life. A political decision establishes a rule that will be enforced by the state; community officers can legally invoke physical compulsion if necessary.