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  • A relational society
  • Michael Rustin (bio)

Human relationships cannot be encompassed within a narrow, market-exchange world view.

Neoliberalism has as one of its basic presuppositions the idea that the human world is composed essentially of individuals, who should as far as possible be free to make their own choices and to advance their own interests, in pursuit of whatever they may deem their happiness to be. To be sure, individuals are expected to avoid interfering with the freedom of others, and systems of moral and legal regulation exist to ensure that such limits and protections are enforced. But these are seen as applying to what are essentially individuals, acting without reference to a wider social context.

In reality, of course, individuals do not pursue their interests in isolation from, or even in negotiated contractual exchanges with, one another; they do so within large and complex economic and governmental systems, which generally have far more influence on their opportunities and chances in life than the personal decisions they make. The capacity to formulate desires and aspirations, and the capabilities to advance them, are substantially shaped by individuals' conditions of birth and family origin, even in those societies which are most open to individuals' own strivings. Livelihoods (the essential means of life, and the grounds for being able to make choices and pursue goals) are usually made available to, or withheld from, people, by decisions taken within organisations of many kinds, such that the individual freedoms which the dominant order proclaims as its first principle are in fact mightily constrained by forces over which no individual has control - although of course some have more power than others.

But - beyond this - my argument is that the very idea of an autonomous, self-seeking individual as the foundational 'atom' of the human world is ill-conceived. [End Page 23] For human beings are essentially social beings - and individual freedom and choice, where they emerge and exist, are the outcome of delicate and precarious social arrangements, not primordial facts of nature.1 And a besetting fault - indeed pathology - of contemporary capitalist societies is that in their relentless advocacy of individual freedom, gratification and possessiveness, they undermine the very social conditions which make its exercise, for most people, possible.2

This essay is primarily concerned with the kinds of relationship with others on which individuals depend for their well-being, through the various phases of their lives. It focuses particularly on the quality of our social institutions - in the spheres, for example, of health, education, work, criminal justice or citizenship - and argues that their quality depends substantially on what qualities of human relationship they facilitate. A final section considers the effects of a narrowly instrumental world view on relationships between humankind and the material world.

Human needs and the welfare state

In the long arguments about what in one discourse is called the welfare state, in another social protection, and in another social rights and entitlements, a crucial demand has been for recognition of the realities of unavoidable and universal human dependency.

Human beings come into the world entirely helpless, and are dependent, for many years, on the care of others. Indeed, they are even dependent on their loving care, since the capacity of persons to develop minds and emotional resources depends on the quality of attention given to them through their infancy and childhood. Throughout their lives, but in particular in their later years, people are vulnerable to illness, and nearly all will experience a period of time when they are as intensely vulnerable and dependent upon the ministrations of others as they were when they were first born.

In complex, educated, industrial societies, our experiences of dependency and need are not confined to those that are, in a basic sense, given to us by our biology. Societies require individuals to achieve learning and development, take up roles and positions within them, and to survive social transitions (for example to and from school, into the world of work, to parenthood, to retirement) and sudden rupture in the pattern of their lives. These are expectations placed on individuals from [End Page 24] their earliest days of life, and where they are not, or cannot, be...

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