Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates (review)

The debate about the function and future of Social Security stands as one of the most enduring issues under deliberation in political circles and on the public stage in contemporary U.S. public culture. As Robert Asen contends in his outstanding book, Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates, “Americans know Social Security. They likely know it better than any other public policy. Whereas many policies appear distant from Americans’ everyday lives, seemingly addressed only to Washington insiders, Social Security touches ordinary citizens directly” (19). This positions Social Security, Asen argues, as a fertile ground on which questions about “the values citizens want to affirm in their public policies” are advanced and contested, and on which the American public negotiates the very meanings of democracy, citizenship, justice, fairness, and equality that public policies are designed to serve (5).

Approaching the Social Security debates with these concerns in mind marks Invoking the Invisible Hand as an unconventional study of public policy, an exemplary model of criticism that engages the Social Security debates as “a mediation of rhetorical and material forces” (7). On the one hand, public policies pursue material outcomes through the provision and distribution of specific resources for target populations. On the other hand, public policies also generate the ever-evolving meanings of the material resources produced for recipients, constitute the identities of populations served, and articulate the communal values that both motivate and are enacted by particular policies. Though a rhetorical studies audience may find little controversy in a study of Social Security that focuses on the operation of metaphor, representation, and temporality, Asen’s engaging work certainly holds the potential to transform the critical perspective of a majority of public policy scholars and public audiences long accustomed to denigrating rhetoric as an obstacle to be overcome in successful policy enterprises.

The key tension Asen identifies in the privatization debates revolves around the competing metaphors of investment and insurance, rhetorical resources on which policymakers drew to construct divergent images of Social Security as the program’s future was hotly debated in the 1990s. Asen describes the divergent interpretations of what kind of program Social Security is, what outcomes it should produce, and what populations may rightfully claim its provisions—in Asen’s terms, Social Security’s “policy polysemy.” Chapter 1 explores the contours of the founding debates to identify the themes that stand as symbolic resources for later advocates and opponents of privatization: namely, the contestations over eligibility and coverage. As Asen documents, the founding policy debates articulated multiple, contradictory characterizations of how contributory and noncontributory aims could be negotiated, thus setting the stage for metaphors of insurance and investment to emerge in the privatization debates as the main alternatives vying for prominence.

Policymaking in the 1990s operated against the backdrop of a revival of conservative ideologies, and chapter 2 traces the emergence of the privatization debates to the increasingly conservative political environment and the growing promotion of market-based solutions to social problems (66–77). Amid rapid economic and technological change, privatization proponents privileged the metaphor of investment, insisting that “privatization respected individual freedom, choice, and control,” and elevating the importance of empowering “workers to pursue their individual desires and plan their lives as they saw fit” (77). In contrast, the metaphor of “insurance highlighted the importance of community,” which “depended on people coming together to address issues that they could not resolve individually” (87). Given these competing metaphors, the choice between characterizations of Social Security as investment rather than insurance implicates a judgment about citizens’ relationship and responsibility to one another, as well as the value framework through which audiences are encouraged to understand the policy itself.

The constitutive work of public policy rhetorics does not terminate in the construction of the purposes of specific policies. In chapter 3, Asen considers how supporters of investment and insurance also carefully crafted images of the target populations that their visions of Social Security...