Social Justice Research, VoL 4, No. 3, 1990
B O O K REVIEW Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. By A l a n Wolfe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Review by Jane J. Mansbridge I
In W h o s e Keeper?, Alan Wolfe reminds us that among the academic disciplines, economics has responsibility for the market, political science for the state, and sociology for those social ties not covered by the market and state. He then argues that market relations and state action have increasingly replaced social ties in the modern world. As children become more mobile, for instance, they support their aging parents through the cash nexus, putting them in private nursing homes, or through the state, via social security or general welfare. The network of social ties that Europeans call "civil society" has been depleted. Capitalism, however, which in theory gets supper on the table not through the benevolence of the butcher and baker but through their selfinterest, in fact depends heavily on social ties that have many sources other than self-interest. The state cannot police contracts in sufficient detail to insure effective compliance and the market can produce effective sanctions only when people or firms engage in repeated transactions. Social ties create a fabric of trust and mutual support that makes possible the interdependence of contemporary life. Wolfe argues that sociologists thus have not only a descriptive responsibility for "society" but a normative responsibility as well. They must continually demonstrate the importance of social ties, lest proponents of state and market dominate the intellectual discourse. They must understand, record, and "give voice" to the ways ordinary people create their symbolic worlds. They must actively resist the recent incursions of economic analysis into the sociological realm. ICenter for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, and Deparlmcnl of Political Science, Northwestern University,2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60201. 265 138g5~74(ff~/9tl/OglI(M1265$(}h,[lO/O ,~3 19911PlcKIUlI1Publishing Corporation
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Wolfe is right, t believe, in claiming that the social sciences are often "moral theories in disguise" (p. 188). Since Comte, social science has served some as a form of secular religion and a "theater of moral debate" (p. 4). That function continues today, even when the leading practitioners of a social science have formally abjured any normative claims. When social scientists describe human action as inevitably self-interested, for example, they tend also to register covert approval of self-interest. Wolfe is also right in stressing both the importance of social ties and the responsibility that social scientists, particularly sociologists, have for investigating the creation and function of those ties. In my own field of political science, Anthony Downs and James Buchanan, both economists who made their name in part by creating models of political action based on self-interest, have in the past 5 years begun to recognize publicly the importance of public spirit among citizens and legislators. As readers of Social Justice Research are aware, major frontiers in all the social sciences now involve the study of non-self-interested motivation (Mansbridge, 1990). l am not completely convinced, however, of Wolfe's central claim. "The more modern we become," he writes, "the more likely we are to rely on markets and states for our moral codes. And the more we rely on markets and states, the more the spaces within which relations in civil society flourish break down" (p. 246). First, I am agnostic, rather than convinced, on the weakening over time of the ties of civil society. Wolfe himself points out that because popular sentiment nearly always believes morality to be in decline, "in the absence of any controlled experiments to measure whether honesty and trust have in fact atrophied, such sentiments can and should be dismissed as hopelessly nostalgic" (p. 95). Yet without any such controlled experiments, he himself seems to suggest a decline in morality, proclaiming, for example, a weakening in influence of the "moral stories that give strangers a stake in the actions of others" (p. 96). Being a scrupulous researcher, Wolfe reports not only on many indices of m o d e r n moral and c o m m u n i t y decay but also on indices of improvement. In Scandinavia, where he argues that state authority is driving out social ties, people made more social contacts in t981 than they did in 1968 (p. 145). Although Wolfe suggests darkly that parents are likely to feel "guilt" in taking their children to day care, he also reports that public day care in Sweden has not had any negative effect on children's self-confidence and other measures of psychological health (and it does seem to increase their chances of academic success) (p. 161). He tells us that the elderly prefer independence from their children (p. 164). Finally, he finds a "surprising amount of community" in modern American life, even in the supposedly anomic cities (p. 61).
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It seems reasonable on its face that the market's legitimation of selfinterest should drive out altruism, and that the cash nexus of capitalism should drive out other social ties. Yet no empirical studies have confirmed that altruism has declined since the 15th century, since the 19th century, or even since 1950. As for moral ties, it is true that volunteer fire departments are disappearing (p. 69), farm communities faced stress and lack of trust as the farm boom turned into a bust (pp. 66-67), and Americans are becoming more likely to send their children to non-Catholic private schools (p. 71). But nongeographically based associations may have filled the space of fire departments, farm communities may always have faced stress when banks foreclosed, and Wolfe's own data show that more children were enrolled in private schools in 1965, his earliest date, than in 1983, his most recent data. (The decrease in private school enrollment over time is due to a decrease in Catholic school enrollments. Surprisingly, Wolfe reports, in spite of the data in his table, that "the dropoff in attendance at Catholic schools has been more than met by an increase in attendance at just about every other kind of private school" [p. 71]). If we define a community not geographically but, following Thomas Bender, as "a limited number of people in a somewhat restricted social space or network held together by shared understandings and a sense of obligations" (quoted on p. 61), it is unclear whether the communities to which people belong today "are organized more by the logic of buying and selling than by principles of solidarity" (p. 76). Nor, if we think concretely about past reasons for marrying and having children (including, among both peasants and aristocrats, support in old age and inefficient contraception), is it clear that "marriage and childbearing are shaped increasingly by considerations of self-interest" (p. 76). As for culture, we would have to include rock concerts for world hunger, modern concerns for ecology, and the trend to vegetarian cuisine among children of the professional classes in any analysis of whether culture "understood as symbols and stories that give strangers a stake in what others do" is "thinning out" (p. 18I). ! am not even sure that markets weaken obligations to strangers crosssectionally, as opposed to over time. Hankiss (1990) reports from a survey of 10 European countries that residents of Hungary, the one Communist country in which the survey was taken, were far more likely than the residents of any other country to answer "no" to the question, "Is there anything you would sacrifice yourself for, outside of your family?" (85%, compared to England, the next highest at 60%, and Spain, .+.he lowest at 38%). Actual markets may habituate people to dealing with strangers peacefully (see Hirshman, 1977, on "la douce commerce"), and these peaceful dealings may over time strengthen rather than attenuate a sense of moral obligation. Lane (1981) concludes that "'the evidence seems to
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run against the hypothesis" that "philanthropy and pro-social behavior are less common in market than in traditional societies" (p. 9). Foster (1972), the anthropological specialist on envy, argues that market societies are positive-sum, in contrast to the zero-sum character of most peasant existence, in which a fixed quantity of land means that by and large any gain on my part must be constructed from your toss. Envy, derived from zero-sum thinking in Foster's view, pervades peasant culture. Although Deci (1971) has demonstrated that material incentives can drive out nonmaterial ones in the laboratory, and payment for services can always replace unpaid relations in any given instance, Titmuss (1970/1971) never actually showed in The Gift Relationship that paying people for blood drove down the amount of blood volunteered. Logical as the argument is on its face, I know of no study showing that market relations diminish the general sense of obligation to strangers. As for the state, it is unclear empirically that, in the aggregate, government provision has undercut obligations to strangers. Wolfe's fair-minded reporting from the Swedish welfare system demonstrates change, but not necessarily decline. Nor is his evidence always relevant to obligations to strangers. He reports increases in suicides (in Norway and Denmark; decreases in Sweden), increases in illegal work "off the books," and increases in alcohol consumption and crime (both following almost exactly the rise in disposable income), but also increases in blood donations and in "home visits" sponsored by the Red Cross. His evidence does not support his conclusion that the welfare system has weakened the family's "ability to serve as a source of moral rules" (p. 146) or produced a "weakening of loving" (p. 158). My position on Wolfe's empirical claims is agnostic rather than oppositional, and is based in part on the data that he himself scrupulously accumulates to support both sides of the argument. Moral ties come in many forms, some of which are weakened by introducing state and market forces, and some of which are strengthened by other aspects of the state and market. The rapid transition in Eastern Europe from state to market provides an extraordinary natural experiment for studying some of these connections. But one need not agree with all Wolfe's empirical claims to welcome his interdisciplinary scholarship on these questions, his wealth of insight, and his moral vision, In describing the social construction of moral obligation, for example, he quotes Niklas Lukman as saying, "Anyone who has been around for some time . . . is entangled with his self-presentation in a web of norms which he himself has helped to create, and from which he cannot withdraw without leaving part of himself behind" (p. 216). As Wolfe then points out, the "exit" option associated with the market is less avail-
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able when the ties of civil society are strong, because to exit from the responsibilities of a situation is to exit from the very self that the situation defines. This kind of insight permeates the book, drawing attention both to the deep importance of social ties and to the tacit normative underpinnings of the social sciences. If any major scholars still hold a version of rational choice theory that excludes the critical role of social ties and nonself-interested action, this book should change their minds--even if the conversion of Anthony Downs and James Buchanan has failed so far to do so.
REFERENCES Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of cxlcrnatly mcdimcd rewards on intrin.,dc motivation. Z Pets. Soc. Psychol. 18: 105-115. Foster, G. M. (1972). The anatomy of envy: A sludy in symbolic behavior. C,rr AnlhropoL 13: 165-186. Hankiss, E. (1990). In search of a paradigm. Daedalus 119: 183-214. Hirshman, A. (1977). The Pass'ions aml the Interesls: Political Arguments For Cap#atism Before Its Triumph, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. Lane, R. E. (1981). Markets and politics: The human product. Br J. Polit. Sci. 11: 1-16. Mansbridge, J. J. red.), (1990). Beyond Self Interest, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Titmuss, R. M. (1970/1971). The Gift Relationship, Pantheon, New York.
