Two political theorists venture in these texts to address a pressing political problem: Why is the American welfare state so stingy? Yascha Mounk observes that “the conception of responsibility that now prevails is deeply punitive” (p. 5) and attempts to correct it, and George Klosko explores how existing social welfare policies in the United States are justified “in terms of individual rights and other approaches compatible with individualist political cultures . . . thereby hampering the development of universal programs in which benefits are a matter of right” (p. 4).

Klosko’s work is a meticulous account of how public officials justified changes in American welfare policies (security income, disability and poverty protection, and health care provision), seeing Franklin Roosevelt’s support for Social Security as a critical point in this history. Klosko’s main purpose is to explain the ongoing, “path-dependent” (p. 35) weakness of justifications for the welfare state. He views these as growing out of American attachments to Lockean notions of dessert that provide assistance only for those who have earned it (which are “baked into the foundations” [p. 8] of American policy) and a simultaneous downplaying of more communal elements of Locke’s and some other liberal thought. The end result is that “the transformation of American liberalism is incomplete” (p. 248). In making this argument, Klosko provides a detailed account of how American political elites justified the welfare state. He also compares the United States to the UK, where imaginative leaders such as William Beveridge were able to turn the post-war concern for welfare in a more collective direction, as citizens demanded that government address Beveridge’s “‘five giants’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness” (p. 89). While the sense of post-war national unity did not continue in the UK, Klosko observes, nonetheless “the temporary changes in British culture brought about by the war were made more long-lasting by Beveridge’s reforms and the ideals that they expressed” (p. 98).

“FDR’s Original Sin,” as Chapter 6 is entitled, was to leave strong property rights in place in an attempt to justify an expanded welfare state in the United States. As a result, egalitarian arguments never entered this discussion: “Our striking finding in regard to justification of the relevant social welfare programs [for the poor] is an absence of strong egalitarian arguments if programs were publicly justified at all” (p. 249). Indeed, in some cases—the expansion of social security disability programs, for example—Klosko shows that more generous policies were a result of obscure bureaucratic changes rather than any form of public debate or justification. He follows these policies, especially health care, up to the present, providing a useful guide to the shape of policies and how elites thought about them. In the end, then, Klosko carries the brief for a “moderate liberalism” (p. 10) that would not grant such an absolute strength to property rights and that would stress other values, such as equality, as a way to think again about the welfare state.

Klosko’s main claims are powerful, but there are other competing views to consider as well. Klosko emphasizes the policy discussions within the federal government, ignoring the effects that social movements have had on bringing important changes to these policies. Pre-FDR social policies, the fore-runner to WIC, for example, were a result of the expansion of the franchise to women. Others have argued that FDR was fundamentally concerned with preserving American capitalism in shaping the New Deal (see, e.g., Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression” International Organization 38[1]: 41–94, 1984). Others have also discussed the importance of race and gender, which is not prominently discussed here, but these authors’ (e.g., Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, 2013; Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare, 1999; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 2006; Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, 1998) main thesis—that U.S. policies are structurally and systematically shaped to benefit whites over blacks and that one cannot understand U.S. social policy without this as a starting point—is not addressed. Klosko’s contribution is to emphasize the grip of Lockean thought on the United States, but perhaps something deeper than “path dependence” is at work in the maintenance of such strong individualism.

Yascha Mounk has written an ambitious work that aims to change how Americans think about responsibility. He is correct to see this concept as central, and also correct to see current views as problematic. As responsibility has gone from being about duties towards others to an attribute of individuals, i.e., “responsibility as accountability” (p. 30) as Mounk argues, more social policy aims at “responsibility-tracking,” that is, monitoring the proper behavior of recipients, than aims at “responsibility-buffering,” that is, shielding individuals from misfortune (pp. 73–74). Mounk then offers a subtle examination of the logic of luck egalitarianism, pointing out that if people are not responsible for bad luck, then the question of where to locate the boundary of responsibility for one’s own actions becomes difficult to locate (Chapter 3). As a result, he argues that the “left-wing response to the age of responsibility is both surprisingly conservative and astoundingly radical. On the one hand, it accepts the normative premise . . . that people should be held to account for outcomes for which they are responsible. On the other hand, it holds that people are not responsible for most of the outcomes we usually ascribe to them” (p. 131). This problem arises out of treating responsibility as an attribute of individuals rather than of institutions, which makes it “pre-political” or “pre-institutional.” The solution is to situate responsibility back within institutions themselves by creating what he calls a “positive conception of responsibility” (p. 172, Chapter 5). Such a conception allows us to judge others as having made bad choices, but calls upon the welfare state to provide them with a buffering against such bad choices. It “reminds us that our political institutions exist for a reason: In particular, the welfare state is meant to ensure the equal standing of all citizens, to give people assurance that they will continue to have access to the material goods they need to live a life of simple dignity, and to promote positive externalities like public health and economic growth” (p. 188). Mounk hopes to make equality a more robust value, and to end the way in which the nature of personal responsibility shapes social policy to be “punitive.” “So far,” he writes, “the age of responsibility has primarily led to a ratcheting up of economic incentives for people to take responsibility for their lives, without much thought given to whether they have the necessary material, cultural, and educational prerequisites to act on these incentives. A focus on the reforms that would make it easier for people to actually take responsibility could remedy this shortcoming” (p. 202). This is a stong argument: if “people” are committed to “responsibility” then they should also be committed to the conditions under which everyone can fully exercise responsibility, rather than focusing on individuals and judging them. Turning responsibility into a political rather than a personal matter allows a shift back from what he calls responsibility tracking to responsibility buffering.

However, there are also a number of serious problems with Mounk’s argument. In the first place, his solution is not likely to be a solution at all. People who think that responsibility is personal are not likely to be persuaded by Mounk’s argument that, if we only give “them” more of what they need to succeed, then “those people” will act more responsibly, and further, that it is worthwhile for society to take this risk. His institutional responsibility runs into the same brick wall that Klosko has painstakingly revealed to us, the absence of empathy with others in such circumstances. Klosko shows us the problem with what he calls a “basic access” view, i.e., that “all individuals have rights to the resources they need for a decent shot” (p. 255). Although Mounk’s account of a “decent shot” rhetorically rests upon a commitment to the resources to develop responsibility rather than a simpler notion of, say, equal opportunity, his alternative does not answer Klosko’s concern. Instead, Klosko observes that “the problem . . . is correlativity. The rights in question are positive rights; they require that other people furnish the resources in question. And so, on whom do these correlative duties fall? On standard individualist premises, these rights can be satisfied only through redistribution, taking property from Anne to give to Ben. We therefore face the problem of explaining why Anne has these requirements to contribute” (p. 255). The whole logic of responsibility as accountability is to place the blame for failure on individuals’ bad choices. Why would supporters of this view fall for the trick of someone saying to them, “but how can they become responsible if you, through your political institutions, won’t help them to develop the wherewithal to make good choices?” Their answer would remain, “why should I pay for them, regardless of why they are in trouble? Institutions do not change people’s fundamental nature, and they are fundamentally undeserving of my support.”

The second problem with Mounk’s argument has to do with the stylized forms of argument that he uses. Mounk’s arguments are very smart; he is especially telling as a critic of luck egalitarianism. Nevertheless, he sometimes overstates his case to the detriment of the overall argument. He overstates some evidence on which he draws, the novelty of his analysis, and the novelty of his solutions. He provides a very partial reading of what he calls “a changing intellectual consensus in a number of important academic disciplines, including philosophy and the social sciences” (p. 31) to justify his account of responsibility. In philosophy, he follows the turn to “luck egalitarianism” that informs a certain branch of Anglo-American political philosophy. In order to demonstrate that social scientists have adopted this model of social science, he cites two areas of sociology, and those not so completely, criminology and “cultural sociology,” which he reads to be about his account of responsibility. Even if his accounts of these debates are accurate, these corners of disciplines hardly constitute “philosophy and social sciences”; he repeats the claim that he has demonstrated this shift in “the social sciences at large” (p. 37). Even if Mounk could find more evidence for his claim, he ignores the considerable literature in philosophy and social science that does not support his reading. Feminist scholars have been discussing an “ethic of responsibility” (Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings, 1998) and its consequences for a generation. Critics of neoliberalism (e.g., Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 2015) have made deeper and more trenchant critiques of the discourse of personal responsibility. And there is a wide and ongoing discussion about more institutional/political accounts of responsibility; from Stephen Esquith’s concerns with bystanders (The Political Responsibilities of Everyday Bystanders, 2010), to Jade Schiff (Burdens of Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, 2014) to Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo (Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power, 2016), to Iris Young’s formidable account of a “social connection model of responsibility” (Responsibility for Justice, 2011). As another example, while Mounk’s account of the difference between “responsibility-buffering” and “responsibility-tracking” forms of policy is interesting, it is curious that he does not notice that this distinction tracks one between universal entitlements and means-tested benefits that has been at the core of feminist and other critical analyses of social policy since the 1980s (e.g., Barbara Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems, 1986).

Mounk has not really considered the opposing views with much sympathy or depth. His refrain is that “the Left” ignores cultural arguments in order to emphasize structural ones. After quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates on the deeply historical and structural nature of racism, Mounk avers, “But rather than challenging the normative premise that gives rise to a lot of this rhetoric—that is to say, the idea that people’s bad choices in the past undermine their claim to assistance in the present—[the Left] has challenged the idea that good or bad choices are an important causal factor in explaining poverty at all. In other words, it has focused its energies on denying that most people are responsible for their lot in life” (p. 105). Even if the first sentence were true, the second does not follow from it. And the first claim represents a misleading account of “left” positions about the ongoing weight of domination. That “the past” may extend to systems of domination (racism) that go beyond the lifetimes of individual people is not an idea that Mounk entertains. But had he entertained this idea, it might help to explain why his “positive notion of responsibility” (p. 24) to use institutions “in part by providing [people] with the educational and financial preconditions for exercising real agency in their lives” (p. 24)—is insufficient. The institutions themselves (for example, those providing educational and financial preconditions) may be embedded in, and reflect, structures of domination that not only make achieving such “real agency” difficult but that then revert back to the personalized critiques of responsibility that Mounk has identified as the mean-spirited problem in the first place. Mounk’s creative rhetorical fix for the deeply warped senses of responsibility that exist in the United States is worth our consideration, but will not, ultimately, help to transform anything absent a deeper consideration of the sorts of structural, systemic, and historical issues underpinning American welfare policy. He is correct to say that our current conceptions of responsibility are “punitive” (p. 178), but his analysis does not reach down deeply enough to convince supporters of such a view that they should change to his more “positive notion of responsibility” (p. 181), or to show that such a change would address the deeper problems.

My criticisms of both of these books raises an issue about how political theorists might engage with contemporary political debates. Perhaps we need to have a larger, discipline-wide discussion of how best to engage in such discussions. In that sense, both books are valuable for initiating this important conversation.