May I contend that at the heart of our present discontents lies a deep and growing disjunction in the distribution of power and authority, not simply between the citizen and the state, but between the state and legally protected concentrations of wealth and power, namely incorporated and non-incorporated organisations, and then in turn between the citizen and the actions and policies of those same organisations. In short, we are coming from a period when the state has retreated, or been ideologically pushed to retreat, or redefine its role, the citizen’s social opportunity to fully participate or flourish, as many social philosophers would put it, has been diminished, and unaccountable sources of wealth and power have advanced. [...]
To achieve any new departure, we must be very clear of the causes of our present distempers, and so I am very pleased that many of the papers presented here today reflect on and describe some of the manifold sources of the fracturing of the triadic relationship between citizen, state and society: growing inequalities in wealth and income within and between nations and regions, the rise of new forms of work characterised by precarity, and the threat to, or even curtailment of some of the most foundational elements of our systems of social protection.
May I suggest that we must first acknowledge that these changes in our society are not natural phenomena – the result of the inevitable laws of history or economics – they are the result of a distinctive set of policies and a political philosophy which has been pursued over the past forty years to the point that it has become what the French call the pensée unique, the single permitted form of political and economic thought. [...]
Many of the sources of the fractured relationship between citizen and state – increasing inequality in income, power and wealth, the breakdown, in some countries of a positive relationship between productivity and wage growth, the continuing power of over-mighty financial markets in misallocating and distorting investment, the increased precariousness of employment, particularly for young people, and even the reduction in the labour share of the proportion of national income – may be traced to the retreat and transformation of the role of the state in the neoliberal era. As I have outlined I believe that this commenced in the 1970s and still, without perhaps the same self-confidence as before, continues today.
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