The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (review)

The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects by Barbara Cruikshank. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999, 149 pp., $16.95 paper.

To those who believe democracy to be an unqualified good, the central premise of this book will come as a challenge. Against those who call for citizen participation as a cure for the problems of post-industrial society, Barbara Cruikshank reminds us that the citizen is not "simply a participant in politics" but "an effect and an instrument of political power" (5). In turn, the participatory ideal itself is an exertion of the "will to empower"; a strategy of governance that seems not to be one because it purports merely to bring citizens into their own as agents "in their own interest" (68). Cruikshank's aim is not to expose democracy as a fraud, but to call attention to the "technologies of citizenship," the power that is exercised "in the material, learned, and habitual ways we embody citizenship" (124). Her point is that experiments in radical democracy unthinkingly risk mimicking the very forms of governance they mean to resist wherever they forget that participation is a political project and, hence, a domain of power.

It is a unique feature and strength of this book that Cruikshank writes out of her former work as a welfare activist to bring the "insights of poststructuralism" to bear on democratic theory (124). Implicitly rebutting those who deride poststructuralist theory as an academic affectation, Cruikshank delineates, in accessible and lively prose, the "technologies of citizenship" that are at work in contemporary public policy. This is another strength of the book: she makes her case by addressing theory to practice in three different historical cases. These are the Community Action Programs (CAPs) that were a cornerstone of the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, the self-esteem movement in California, and the war against presumed welfare fraud that constituted the welfare queen as a central figure in public discourse during the Reagan years. Of these, her study of the CAPs is perhaps the most dramatic and persuasive for the way it illustrates a form of power that "was clearly intended to work through, not against, the subjectivity of the poor" (73).

CAPs were established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to advance the War on Poverty by mobilizing the poor as a community to help themselves. Whereas some critics of this period have charged that these programs manipulated the poor, or co-opted their interests, Cruikshank emphasizes that the CAPs served primarily to invent the poor as a unified group. She writes that,

Before government intervention . . . "the poor" were disparate, isolated, and often in conflict with one another; they were Appalachian coal miners, urban single mothers, illiterates, unskilled black migrants from the South, southern fundamentalists, the elderly, "delinquent" youths, and the unemployed. (86)

Although Cruikshank emphasizes the creative aspect of power, one would misread her to think that she is oblivious to the many ways that power works negatively, as violence and coercion. Without denying the significance of overt manifestations of power, Cruikshank aims to call attention to the ways power produces that which it seems only to act upon.

To understand why such an analysis is significant, one need look no further than the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a case that Cruikshank unfortunately stops short of analyzing. An obvious expression of the will to empower in its assumption that government "handouts" had created a "culture of poverty" that only work could cure, this legislation was also a perfect illustration of the violence of categories. Whereas welfare-to-work reform generalized "the poor" as a collective that stood to benefit unilaterally by economic "self-sufficiency," its emergent patterns of success and failure index the differences within that category. That living-wage work has proved elusive to those who are without access to public transportation or cars, to those in rural areas, and to those who...