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Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare: A Critique of

Martin
a
Patricia Mooney Nickel
a
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington , New Zealand
Published online: 25 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Patricia Mooney Nickel (2009) Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare: A Critique of Martin, New Political
Science, 31:1, 69-86, DOI: 10.1080/07393140802693931

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 New Political Science,
Volume 31, Number 1, March 2009

Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare: A Critique

of Martin

Patricia Mooney Nickel

School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand
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Abstract Social and political theory underwrite the welfare state in their portrayal of the
world and of possibility. Edward J. Martin’s recent attempt to understand welfare policy
through the lens of postmodern theory is therefore an important one and an undertaking
that I appreciate. However, it is specifically because social and political theory are so
influential in the construction of welfare policy that it is equally important that critical
social and political theory are able to stand apart from the sloganeering that inhibits
critical thought. I find that Martin’s neglect of critical theories of the state and welfare,
combined with his conflation of postmodernism, critical theory, and pragmatism, collapses
the distance between critique and ideology. My aim in this brief essay is limited, but
important: I simply want to destabilize Martin’s stabilization of the modern neoliberal
welfare state as the end-point of theorizing about the future of well-being.

Introduction
Social and political theory underwrite the welfare state in their portrayal of the
world and of possibility. Edward J. Martin’s recent attempt1 to understand welfare
policy through the lens of postmodern theory is therefore an important one and an
undertaking that I appreciate. However, it is specifically because social and
political theory are so influential in the construction of welfare policy that it is
equally important that critical social and political theory are able to stand apart
from the sloganeering that inhibits critical thought.2 I find that Martin’s neglect of
critical theories of the state and welfare, combined with his conflation of
postmodernism, critical theory, and pragmatism, collapses the distance between
critique and ideology. My aim in this brief essay is limited, but important: I simply
want to destabilize Martin’s stabilization of the modern neoliberal welfare state as
the end-point of theorizing about the future of well-being. I therefore counter
three points made by Martin in his analysis of liberalism, postmodernism, and
welfare policy. First, I question Martin’s understanding of the relationship
between the state, rights, and modernity. Second, I question the conflation of
affirmative postmodernism and critical theory. Finally, I question the assumption
that “radical pragmatism” for a “postmodern era” offers the possibility of radical
transformation.

1
Edward J. Martin, “Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Welfare Policy,” New Political
Science 29:3 (2007), pp. 333– 347.
2
See Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1989).

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/09/010069-18 q 2009 Caucus for a New Political Science
DOI: 10.1080/07393140802693931
 70 Patricia Mooney Nickel

Rights, the State, and Modernity

My response to Martin is somewhat prescripted by his categorical assumptions, with
which I do not agree. To begin with, Martin’s discussion of welfare policy frames the
United State’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996 (PRWORA) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), as one of the
“most controversial political debates over the past two decades.”3 The PRWORA
may have been debated, but, as critical theorists of the state understand, this was not
a debate about a radical challenge to the foundations of the welfare state’s role in
stabilizing capitalism through the management of labor supply; PRWORA was an
adjustment, not a transformation. This is to say, the debate remained restricted to the
issue of what the capitalist state ought to do in relationship to capital’s demand for
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labor in a “taken-for-granted” social system. As Ralph Miliband put it, these

controversies “even at their most intense, have never . . . [brought] into question the
validity of the ‘free enterprise’ system itself . . . The politics of advanced capitalism
have been about different conceptions of how to run the same economic and social
system, and not about radically different social systems.”4
In the case of Martin’s framing of welfare policy, the economic and social
system is neglected in favor of an overview of liberal theories of rights and their fit
with collective choice theory. It would seem important in a critical analysis of
liberalism and welfare policy to begin with the fact that the 1996 welfare reforms
were advanced by a neoliberal state.5 Neoliberalism is not mentioned anywhere in
Martin’s account of welfare reform. This is a critical omission because the
apparently postmodern language of these reforms, “personal responsibility” and
“temporary,” are the hallmarks of neoliberalism. Within the neoliberal state the
responsibility for social welfare is transferred away from the state in exactly the
same way that Martin recommends that we conceive of postmodern welfare:

A postmodern welfare policy should embrace the notion that: (1) a particular
“duty” is assigned to society to help the poor attain their basic human needs, (2) a
particular “right” is claimed by the poor on society to help them secure their basic
human needs, and (3) the role of government is introduced only to assist welfare
recipients in formulating policies and programs that work in some optimal fashion
to suit their particular needs.6

Martin bases this recommendation, which offers no explanation beyond what

I have quoted here of the substantive policies that would facilitate its adoption, in
an analysis of radical pragmatism, which can be thought of as a euphemism for
accepting our lack of control over global neoliberalism. As the basis for Martin’s
“postmodern welfare policy,” it is necessary to quote this logic at length:

David Stoesz and Howard Karger argue for an American social policy that is rooted
in the postmodern vision of welfare policy constructed by welfare recipients

3
Martin, op. cit., p. 333.
4
Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western System of
Power (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), p. 72.
5
David Harvey, Neoliberalism: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development (New York: Verso), pp. 32– 33.
6
Martin, op. cit., p. 347.
 A Critique of Martin 71

themselves. Such a policy, “radical pragmatism,” would focus on five priorities:

(1) productivity; (2) family; (3) social cohesion; (4) community; and (5) social choice.
Thus Stoesz and Karger assert that in re-establishing the legitimacy of the welfare
state, it is essential to demonstrate: (a) how social programs, such as welfare,
contribute to the nation’s productivity rather than undermine it; (b) how welfare
assistance mitigates tensions that surface in families when they are financially
vulnerable; (c) how welfare promotes social cohesion by standing in solidarity with
those who are most vulnerable in society; (d) how welfare promotes community by
supporting economic, social, and interpersonal relationships with the poor; and
(e) how social choice provides a battery of options for welfare recipients to find
work that will sustain themselves and their families through living-wage jobs.
Stoesz and Karger argue that providing these structures allows for people on
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welfare to provide input and feedback on the programs that directly affect them.
The state plays a minimal role in providing a structure without making welfare
recipients unnecessarily dependent on the state or non-profit institutions.7

Note well that the emphasis here is on productivity, work, choice, and the
stabilization of capitalism. Although framed by Martin as “a radical critique of the
present state of affairs” this program is merely another name for welfare policy in
an era of neoliberalism, in which, as David Harvey pointed out, “each individual
is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being . . .
Individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or
personal failings . . . rather than being attributed to any systemic property.”8
In lieu of an analysis of the neoliberal state, Martin offers an analysis of
“postmodern welfare rights,” which, I will demonstrate, manifest negatively as the
legitimating logic of neoliberal governance. In order to understand why the idea of
the (neoliberal) postmodern welfare state is a distinctly legitimating narrative, it is
first necessary to address Martin’s uncritical explanation of the relationship between
rights, the state, and modernity. This affirmatively-cast relationship, which neglects
both the commodification of well-being9 and the capitalist state’s reconstitution of
the labor force,10 is the foundation upon which he builds his implausible idea of a
postmodern welfare state based in radical pragmatism. Martin’s path from the
supposedly heated 1996 controversy over welfare policy to a postmodern welfare
state begins with the liberal welfare rights debate, which he frames as follows:

One of the fundamental rationales for welfare policy in the United States has been
that individuals who are in sincere need of public assistance possess a “claim” or
“right” to these resources. As such, society has a moral duty and obligation to
ensure the well-being of the poor according to liberal theorists such as Kant, Hume,
Bentham, Mill, and Rawls. This usually means that the poor have a claim or right to
some portion of surplus wealth based on varying rationales.11

Note well that in his framing of rights, although Martin makes a passing reference
to “surplus wealth,” there is no discussion of how this wealth is derived.

7
Martin, op. cit., p. 347.
8
Harvey, Neoliberalism, op. cit., pp. 65 – 66.
9
Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990); Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (London: Hutchinson,
1984).
10
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978), p. 483.
11
Martin, op. cit., p. 334.
 72 Patricia Mooney Nickel

Wealth in late capitalism is derived from labor, which, as I will discuss below, is based
in the commodification of the right to well-being.12 In concert with liberal theories of
justice, Martin frames theories of modern government action and welfare rights
according to public choice theory, which is really a “theory” of why some have more
of a right to well-being than others. In his choice to highlight this explanation of the
state and welfare Martin has already made a political declaration in his exclusion of
critical explanations of rights, the state, and welfare.13 Martin’s discussion of rights,
the state, and modernity can be summarized as follows: there exist liberal theories of
justice, there exist liberal theories of collective action, and there exist liberal criticisms
of liberal theories (aimed at achieving better liberal theory). Martin neglects that it is
the existence of these theories that legitimates welfare policy. The fact that liberal
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theories of rights and action are legitimating theories that function as ideology (or
hegemony or discipline or domination) in late capitalism, a function that I will
address below, is not addressed in Martin’s discussion makes it difficult to determine
how he actually views the function of welfare in relationship to labor rights. This is to
say, Martin makes absolutely no reference to the rights of labor and their relationship
to welfare and provides us with no understanding of what postmodern welfare
rights would mean for labor. The legitimacy of welfare policy varies not with the
legitimacy of rights, as Martin proposes, but with the legitimacy of capital’s
exploitation of labor.14
In order to position Martin’s claim that he has offered us a postmodern welfare
policy in the form of “radical pragmatism” as an alternative to the current liberal
model of welfare rights, we first need to briefly contextualize welfare policy within
modernity. Modernity, like postmodernity, is an ontological claim on the present as
the future.15 The task of uncoupling liberalism and modernity is necessary, and
difficult, because Martin has positioned postmodernity as a critique of liberalism,
not as a critique of modernity or in relationship to the mode of production upon which

12
Esping-Andersen, op. cit.
13
At the very least and by no means an exhaustive list, Martin neglects: Philip Abrams,
“Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988),
pp. 58 – 89; Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis (eds), Paradigm Lost: State Theory
Reconsidered (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Clyde W. Barrow, Critical
Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1993); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2000); Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” 1978, in Graham Burchell, Colin
Gordon, and Peter Miller. The Foucault Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Ernesto R. Gantman, Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing, 2005); Stefano Harney, State Work: Public Administration and Mass
Intellectuality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Ernest Mandel,
Late Capitalism, Joris De Bres, trans. (London: NLB Humanities Press, 1972); Ralph
Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969); Timothy
Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American
Political Science Review 85 (March 1991), pp. 77 – 96; Offe, Contradictions, op. cit.; Nicos
Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” New Left Review 58 (1969), pp. 67 – 78;
Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, Patrick Camiller, trans. (London: NLB, 1978).
14
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978); Offe, ibid; Frances Fox Piven
and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York:
Vintage Books, 1971 and 1993).
15
See Ben Agger, Socio(onto)logy: A Disciplinary Reading (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1989); Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(New York and London: Verso, 2002), pp. 8 – 10.
 A Critique of Martin 73

welfare policy is dependent in its relationship with a tax base negotiated on the terms
of capital investment. Modernity is not exclusive to liberalism, as Jameson explains:

All the viable nation-states in the world today have long been “modern” in every
conceivable sense, from the technological onwards . . . If free-market positions can
be systematically identified with modernity and habitually grasped as representing
what is modern, then the free-market people have won a fundamental victory
which goes way beyond the older ideological victories.16

It is significant, then, that in his positioning of postmodernism “against” liberalism,

Martin has framed modernity as liberalism, liberalism as the market, and
postmodernism-cum-pragmatism as the most radical response. Martin’s discussion
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proceeds not from modernism to postmodernism, but from liberal rights to

postmodernism conflated with pragmatism. Thus, in considering Martin’s
argument, we are not dealing with a shift from modern welfare rights to postmodern
welfare rights, but from liberalism to pragmatism. The difficulty with this position is
that liberalism and pragmatism do not necessarily conflict on the issue of welfare
rights and they certainly do not provide a robust basis for guaranteeing welfare
rights as decommodification because they do not conflict with the false ontology of
the market as the basis for all social behavior. Indeed, Martin’s recommendation for
postmodern welfare as radical pragmatism is specifically a recommendation for a
better functioning market: “a battery of options for welfare recipients to find work
that will sustain themselves and their families through living-wage jobs.”17
Martin tells us very little about the function of liberal theories other than the fact
that liberal theories exist and are debated (albeit, we can infer for Martin, they are
debated only within their own self-referential networks of legitimacy,18 a fact that I am
about to make apparent). Indeed, Martin fails to recognize that “postmodern
theorist” Jean-Francois Lyotard19 himself tacitly affirms the logic of liberalism in
The Postmodern Condition, where he reduces politics to (language) game theory, which
is merely a more nuanced version of public choice theory. Both postmodernism, as it
is uncritically cast by Lyotard, and liberalism conveniently and functionally ignore
structural causes of inequity, particularly as they manifest in the welfare state.
The conceptual limits of Martin’s discussion of liberalism result in a significant
conceptual barrier to understanding the possibility of postmodern well-being
independent of the logic of liberalism or modernism. This barrier stems from his
failure to address any nonliberal explanations of the state, rights, and welfare.
Postmodernism, as Martin understands it, “the here and now,” is not a nonliberal or
critical explanation of the relationship between the state, rights, and welfare. Martin is
unable to distinguish rights from the liberal ontology of equality of opportunity
devoid of the critical issue of stratification; he offers us no ontological basis for
postmodern welfare rights. The “radical pragmatist” and “postmodern” rights that
Martin defends conveniently reinforce neoliberalism in their reduction of well-being
to choice. How Martin moves from postmodern welfare rights to radical pragmatism

16
Ibid.
17
Martin, op. cit., p. 347.
18
See Timothy Luke, “The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of
Research,” New Political Science 21:3 (1999), pp. 345– 363.
19
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
 74 Patricia Mooney Nickel

is unclear given that pragmatism cannot establish a substantive theory of rights, nor is
pragmatism at all postmodern. Pragmatism is merely utilitarian liberalism by
another name. Anthony Matteo explains:

Pragmatists write as if utilitarian analysis—sorting out the prospective positive and

negative consequences of behavior in order to maximize pleasure or happiness for
the greatest number—is all that is required for ethical decision-making . . . They
cannot have it both ways: they cannot consistently defend the objectivity of moral
judgments against subjectivist accounts while continuing to indulge a
nonfoundationalist animus against traditional metaphysics.20

Martin offers no explanation of the welfare state outside of the logic of liberalism.
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Indeed, he fails even to explain the welfare state in relationship to modernity, the
welfare state in relationship to capitalism, or to distinguish liberalism, modernity,
and capitalism from one another. This failure to name the problem may be the case
because Martin has neglected several decades of critical writing about the capitalist
state. There is a significant body of critical explanation of the provision of welfare by
the capitalist state, but perhaps most important given that Martin incorporates into
his essay Frederic Jameson as a “postmodern” theorist, is Ernest Mandel’s
explanation of the welfare state as the stabilization of capitalism. Mandel’s theory of
late capitalism, a period that is, for Jameson, stabilized by the cultural logic of
postmodernism, explains that the state has successfully perpetuated capitalism
through concessions to labor, such as welfare benefits, which assured “the physical
reconstitution of its labor-force where it was endangered by super-exploitation.”21
Not only Mandel, but widely-read authors in the United States, such as Francis Fox
Piven and Richard Cloward, and European theorists, such as Claus Offe and Gøsta
Esping-Andersen, have demonstrated how welfare functions not to liberate, but to
stabilize the exploitation of labor. It is hardly a revolutionary statement by now to say
that the legitimacy of the welfare state varies with the demands for labor; given the
dismantling of the welfare state in both the US and Western Europe in favor of “active
labor market policies,”22 this is stating the obvious. Yet, in his attempt to understand

20
Anthony M. Matteo, “In Defense of Moral Realism,” Telos 106 (1996), pp. 64 – 76.
21
Mandel, op. cit., p. 483. See also Offe, Contradictions, op. cit.
22
In 2008 United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared: “In 1997, this
Government inherited a welfare state weighted heavily towards rewarding and supporting
people who were not actively seeking to improve their situation, whether by looking for
work or by taking part in training . . . In a globalised world, we simply cannot afford the
high price of large numbers of people on benefits . . . We will only create lasting prosperity
by ensuring that the talents of our country are fully employed—and that rights are met with
tough responsibilities that respect taxpayers as well as those claiming benefits,” available
online at http://www.dwp.gov.uk/welfarereform/noonewrittenoff/noonewrittenoff-
complete.pdf. Swedish, Prime Minister Fredrik Reindfeldt declared in a 2008 speech
given at the London School of Economics, “You could argue there has in fact never been any
such thing as a Swedish model. And even if there were aspirations of a modeling kind at
earlier stages—they are hard to apply on the world of today,” available online at http://
www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/10296/a/99193. In Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s
March 14, 2003 plan, Agenda 2010, “stressed that people who are able, but unwilling, to
work in acceptable jobs will face sanctions. He also announced that the eligibility period for
unemployment benefit will be decreased.” (Lothar Funk, March 31), 2003, “Chancellor
proposes Agenda 2010 to revive economy”, available online at http://www.eurofound.
europa.eu/eiro/2003/03/feature/de0303105f.htm.
 A Critique of Martin 75

liberalism and welfare, Martin seems not at all aware that welfare relates to labor,
which is commodified in relation to capitalism.
Even if we shift our analysis from critical theories of the state to Martin’s
preferred conceptual category, liberal theories of rights in relationship to
welfare, Martin has neglected the substantive debate over welfare rights in
relationship with legal rights, which begins at least as early as T. H. Marshall’s
1950 statement on social citizenship as a right to assistance; Marshall, if overly
optimistic about the prospects for benevolent capitalism, at least named the
economic system within which he sought to achieve social rights through state
welfare.23 Discussion of Marshall’s statement on social citizenship and welfare
has not been limited to Europe. In their criticism of Bill Clinton’s assault on
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welfare rights leading up to the reforms of which Martin is critical, Nancy

Fraser and Linda Gordon provided a cogent explanation of the (mis)conception
of civil citizenship, based on the liberal notion of contractual obligation, versus
social citizenship, practiced as an equal right to well being.24 Perhaps the most
widely debated recent statement on welfare rights is Esping-Andersen’s 1990
theory of welfare in relationship to decommodification, which is absent entirely
from Martin’s discussion. In his seminal study, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,
Esping-Andersen, following Claus Offe, argued that we ought to understand
welfare rights as being practiced on a scale from commodification, by which the
achievement of well-being is totally dependent upon selling one’s labor in the
market, to decommodification, by which the ability to achieve well-being
independent of the market is the result of welfare rights.25 Certainly, in its high
level of commodification of well-being, US welfare policy as described by
Martin, reflects Esping-Andersen’s ideal-type liberal welfare regime. However,
Martin cannot appreciate the relationship between social rights, welfare, and
liberal welfare regimes because he neglects the issue of commodification of
labor in relationship to welfare. Esping-Andersen’s empirical understanding of
welfare rights has been extensively criticized, but the relationship between labor
and well-being is critical to understanding welfare rights in relationship to the
market; the market simply does not figure into Martin’s analysis, which is odd
given that welfare exists in direct relationship to the market. In his only mention of
commodification, Martin briefly states that: “Recommodification through the
twin processes of privatizing and deregulating the private sector has occurred in
the Western capitalist societies as well.”26 (Recommodification in relationship to
welfare policy refers to the process by which previously decommodified citizens
are forced into the labor market in order to achieve well-being; or, in other
words, the reduction of welfare benefits in order to stimulate active labor
market policies.) Martin goes on to argue that this recommodification can be
overcome through a “postmodern politics” of difference, a point that I will
return to in my conclusion. Of course this is not true; recommodification can
only be overcome through decommodification. On its own, without any

23
T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1950); T. H. Marshall, The Right to Welfare and
Other Essays (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981).
24
Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract Versus Charity: Why is There No Social
Citizenship in the United States?” Socialist Review 22:3 (1992), pp. 45 – 67.
25
Esping-Andersen, op. cit.
26
Martin, op. cit., p. 345.
 76 Patricia Mooney Nickel

structural critique of global capitalism, a politics of difference makes absolutely

no impact on whether or not one’s right to well-being is dependent upon selling
one’s labor.
The myths of the modern welfare state have been extensively addressed. More
importantly in my view, given the nuances of postmodern theory and the ways in
which it can manifest as support for the very neoliberal policies that Martin
opposes, in his discussion of rights, the state, and modernity, Martin has neglected
the role of ideology in relationship to welfare. Ideology can be understood as any
narrative that falsely portrays the present as natural, permanent and
unchangeable.27 Martin defines modernity as:

an historical period in Western culture, may be viewed intellectually as a school of

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thought based upon Enlightenment principles rooted in the rationality of scientific

methodology. The end product of modernity is human emancipation from
ignorance, thus liberating the human person to achieve her or his rational ends
(capitalism) or collective good (socialism).28

Enlightenment is not a school of thought, but a lived reality.29 Martin fails to

understand that modernity is achieved through ideology and particularly the
dominating ideology of positivist state science practiced as welfare, upon which
postmodern theory has had no impact excepting the provision of the legitimating
narrative of neoliberal governance and its dispersal of domination into
unidentifiable spaces.30 Postmodernism has not had a critical impact on the
rationality of scientific methodology in the practice of the welfare state, which is
more than ever focused on the perfectibility of counting, tracking, performing,
measuring, and predicting.31
The domination of management, efficiency, and performance in welfare practice
was, long before Lyotard’s rejection of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge,
explained by Marcuse as surplus repression, “additional controls arising from the
specific institutions of domination.”32 Surplus repression results from the social
construction/distortion of scarcity in the interest of domination, an extremely
important point for any critical theorist of the welfare state. Marcuse concedes to
Freud that some level of repression of the life instinct is necessary for the survival of
the human race, but recognizes that scarcity is specifically organized and it is not
organized according to need. “Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort
of overcoming it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals—first by
mere violence, subsequently by a more rational use of power . . . The gradual

27
See Agger, Fast Capitalism, op. cit.
28
Martin, op. cit., p. 339.
29
See Agger, Fast Capitalism, op cit.; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic
of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1944/1989); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional
Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
30
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995).
31
See Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in
Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); American
Society for Public Administration, www.aspanet.org; National Association of Schools of
Public Affairs and Administration, www.naspaa.org.
32
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1966), p. 37.
 A Critique of Martin 77

conquest of scarcity was inextricably bound up with and shaped by the interests of
domination.”33
Active labor market policies, the new mode of work imposed by the welfare
state, can therefore hardly be ignored, especially now, when the postmodern
critique of welfare is offered to us as a solution in the form of “radical pragmatism,”
which Martin claims, will focus on “five priorities: (1) productivity; (2) family;
(3) social cohesion; (4) community; and (5) social choice . . . ”34 Neither, therefore,
can we ignore state management of scarcity through welfare policy. Efficiency and
productivity, harnessing, mobilizing, chronicling, maximizing, and counting, the
tools of the welfare state, are terms directly related to scarcity; it is implicit in these
terms that resources are limited, but, in Martin’s analysis, if we are denied resources,
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we merely need to properly understand family, behave better in order to avoid

disturbing social cohesion, and choose better. Indeed, welfare policy, the control of
state resources in relationship to labor, is the production of the logic of scarcity.
My argument is more than simply theoretically ponderous; if Martin genuinely
wants to transform the welfare state, and I believe that he does, he would first have to
recognize that the logic of scarcity is the logic of domination: “no matter how useful
this rationality was for the progress of the whole, it remained the rationality of
domination, and the gradual conquest of scarcity was inextricably bound up with
and shaped in the interest of domination.”35 For Marcuse, the reality principle is not
static, but varies according to a given society and its construction of scarcity through
laws and institutions. Thus, the welfare state is the very site of the manifestation of
the reality principle, aptly termed the “performance principle.”36 As I will
demonstrate in my conclusion, Martin, in his recommendation to cement the performance
principle in welfare policy, does not depart even slightly from domination through the
logic of scarcity—one hallmark of modernity. Indeed, even Lyotard would recognize
the problem of performativity—inputs/outputs—in the modern welfare state.37
Unlike Marcuse and other critical theorists, Martin fails to take account of the
adaptability of modern capitalism or why it persists, which would have been
evident had he not conveniently neglected ideology in relationship to
“postmodern welfare.” The problem becomes more apparent in Martin’s
somewhat unclear identification of Ben Agger and Jameson as divorced from
the tradition of Horkheimer and Habermas, all colleagues of Marcuse’s and all of
whom practice ideology critique, as “postmodernists.” Pace Martin’s account,
while Agger and Jameson, as third generation critical theorists, work extensively
in the milieu of postmodernism and especially postmodernism as ideology,
Horkheimer, Habermas, Agger, and Jameson are not postmodernists in Martin’s
affirmative sense of the word; they represent the first, second, and third
generation of critical theory beginning with the Frankfurt School.38 Critical
theory is decidedly concerned with the deepening of ideology, understanding
that it is ideology, including postmodern ideology, that stabilizes the
commodification of well-being through welfare policy in relationship to demands

33
Ibid., p. 36.
34
Martin, op. cit., p. 346.
35
Marcuse, op. cit., p. 36.
36
Ibid., p. 35.
37
Lyotard, op. cit., pp. 44 – 64.
38
See Ben Agger, The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
 78 Patricia Mooney Nickel

for labor. It is not a problem that Martin might be “wrong.” It is a problem that
Martin dismisses critical theory out of hand. Critical theory matters because
thought matters, especially now when thinking is increasingly collapsing under
the weight of the inevitability of labor subjugated to global capital. There is no
inherent conflict between these functions of the late capitalist state and Martin’s
recommendation for a postmodern welfare state based in “radical pragmatism.”
Indeed, Martin’s recommendation is a form of what Paul Piccone and Timothy
W. Luke, in theorizing the stage beyond what Marcuse identified as one-
dimensional society, called the “age of artificial negativity.” Luke details how late
capitalism became unsustainable as its totalizing rationality inhibited the
adaptability of the state to the needs of monopoly capitalism, thus “the total
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organization of social interaction under the state-corporate regime endangers the

rational capitalistic development that it originally sought to advance, which
necessitates, in turn, the reversal of this totalizing instrumental logic.”39 The
reversal of totalizing instrumental logic in the interest of maintaining global
capitalism would be named “postmodern welfare.”
Critical theory demonstrates how welfare policy is much more than the practice
of welfare rights; it is the practice of knowledge as right, which is simultaneously
the practice of power.40 This is to say, welfare is an epistemological issue in practice
and epistemology, particularly as it is practiced by the welfare state, is a political
issue.41 It is through the official exclusion of unofficial knowledge that power
functions.42 Thus, to ignore the current epistemological practice of welfare policy
based on ontological claims of periodization is to rob us of the chance to know
otherwise and therefore to do otherwise. The evolution of welfare policy is the
evolution of the practice of state knowledge about labor in relation to capitalism.
Martin is thus correct to position welfare policy as enlightenment rationality.
The welfare state and the concept of welfare rights are defining characteristics of
modernity.43 However, it problematic from the outset that Martin’s stated objective
is to analyze the underlying principles in the debate over the legitimacy of welfare
policy in order to rethink welfare rights in what he names a postmodern society.44
The idea of postmodern society characterized by a capitalist welfare state in which
labor is commodified is not only decidedly modern, it is untenable as a liberating
construct for reasons that I will address in the following section.

Critical Theory and Postmodernism

From the false starting point of an uncritical relationship between rights and
liberalism, we are led by Martin to a stunted discussion that describes all utilitarian

39
Timothy W. Luke. Social Theory and Modernity: Critique, Dissent, and Revolution.
(London: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 166.
40
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977,
Colin Gordon, ed. and trans., Leo Marshal, John Mepham, and Kate Sopher, trans.
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Agger, Fast Capitalism, op. cit.; Horkheimer and Adorno,
op. cit.
41
Agger, Socio(onto)logy, op. cit.; Foucault, Ibid.
42
See Michael W. Apple (ed.), The State and the Politics of Knowledge (New York:
Routledge Falmer, 2003).
43
See Claus Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
44
Martin, op. cit., p. 333.
 A Critique of Martin 79

ideas as modern and all nonutilitarian ideas as postmodern. In his treatment

of postmodernism as a pre-given stage beyond liberalism/modernism, Martin fails
to address the relationship between critical theory and postmodern theory, as well as
to understand that there are both critical and affirmative versions of postmodernism.
As with his discussion of welfare rights, Martin’s categorical assumptions are used as
end-points rather than as starting points for thinking beyond the welfare state. This is
to say, we begin with Martin’s false assumption that “Capitalism, on the other hand,
has yet to demonstrate that it can remedy market failures, cyclical downturns,
downward pressure on wages, and the equitable45 treatment of chronic poverty both
on a domestic and international scale . . . Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson argue
that Western capitalism in its globalized modernist form has led to the
‘homogenization’ of cultures, beliefs, and ideologies.”46
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It is important to note that Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson can be

understood as taking very different stances on postmodernism. Jameson’s work on
postmodernism offers a completely different explanation of the US welfare state
under consideration in Martin’s work than Baudrillard’s might. Jameson did not
argue that capitalism has yet to demonstrate that it can remedy itself; quite the
opposite is true. Jameson’s understanding of capitalism is consistent with Mandel’s
and thus he understands postmodernism as indicating the adaptability of capitalism.
Martin proposes that Jameson, as Martin himself does, rejects Marxism in favor of
postmodernism. This is not only false, but it conceals from consideration the fact
that Jameson’s stance on postmodernism offers a wealth of insight into the welfare
state in late capitalism. Jameson specifically acknowledges his debt to Mandel’s
Marxist theory of the welfare state: “Ernest Mandel’s book Late Capitalism changed
all that, and for the first time theorized a third stage of capitalism from a usably
Marxian perspective. This is what made my own thoughts on ‘postmodernism’
possible, which are therefore to be understood as an attempt to theorize the specific
logic of the cultural production of the third stage, and not as yet another
disembodied culture critique or diagnosis of the spirit of the age.”47
Mandel argued that, rather than witnessing the demise of capitalism, we were
witnessing a more adaptable stage of capitalism characterized by hegemony and
state intervention to maintain the conditions necessary for capitalism. Late
capitalism is “not a new epoch of capitalist development. It is merely a further
development of the imperialist, monopoly-capitalist epoch.”48 A key feature of
late capitalism is state intervention; thus the expansion of the state apparatus,
including the welfare state. In late capitalism the state protects and reproduces the
social structure. According to Mandel, the three main functions of the state in late
capitalism are the provision of the general conditions of production, the
repression of threats to the prevailing mode of production from the dominated
classes, and the integration of the dominated classes in order to ensure that they
accept their own exploitation.49 In other words, the state exists to maintain the

45
The reference to remedying the “equitable treatment of poverty” is not an error in
quotation. I doubt that Martin would recommend capitalism remedying equitable
treatment of poverty and suspect that this may be an oversight in the original text.
46
Martin, op. cit., p. 339.
47
Fredric Jameson. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983– 1998
(New York and London: Verso, 1998), p. 35.
48
Mandel, op. cit., p. 10.
49
Mandel, ibid, pp. 474– 475.
 80 Patricia Mooney Nickel

social structure necessary for capitalism, including welfare. Critically, welfare

in this conception is not so much a liberal right, as Martin conceives of it, but
a function of the capitalist state.
Like Jameson, Ben Agger is a critical theorist who wears the postmodern label
somewhat wearily, distinguishing between postmodernism as a utopian category and
postmodernism as the cunning logic of the present. Agger understands
postmodernism to have the potential to be either critical or affirmative. Yet, in
another simplification, Martin states that “Benjamin Agger, influenced by Habermas,
argues that postmodernism, understood as a form of social critique, simply
strengthens and complements Marxism as a continued analysis of the excesses of
capitalism.”50 Agger and Jameson, who were raised on the same western Marxist
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sources, share far more in common than Baudrillard and Jameson in their
understanding of postmodern theory in relationship to capitalism and their
commitment to the project of critical theory. I should clarify that I have little
concern about whether or not Martin has “correctly” interpreted Jamerson, Agger, or
any other theorist; it does not matter whether he is right or wrong, or I am right or
wrong, about Jameson or Agger or any other theorist. To end discourse with a
declaration of expertise is exactly what postmodern ideology and pragmatism desire.
However, words do matter because they are representations of possibility; as Luke
argues, “the disciplinarity of already in use diction will enforce the existing terms
from language’s cognitive contracts.”51 I do have a deep concern about human well-
being and its subjugation to written realities and I am therefore concerned with
Martin’s misrepresentation of Jameson’s and Agger’s positions and the position of
other critical theorists to the extent that it is symptomatic of his misrepresentation of
the possibilities for the radicalization of well-being. Dismissals of critical theory such
as Martin’s are serious in relationship to the practice of welfare because critical theory
offers us important tools for unthinking the inevitability of the present.
Of particular concern is Martin’s subtle labeling of Agger as overly Marxist
when he writes that Agger simply “strengthens and complements Marxism as a
continued analysis of the excesses of capitalism.”52 This reference is presumably
made because Agger finds some insights in early Marx and the common
assumption among people who have not read Marx and who have read bits of
postmodern theory is that anyone who finds Marx to be insightful is automatically
deterministic. Again, this stems from a misunderstanding of postmodernity in
relationship to critical theory. Agger predicts this misunderstanding when he
writes, “I am wary about identifying my version of postmodern critical theory as
postmodernism. To do so invites misunderstandings about the relationship
between postmodernism and critical theory. By now, the identity postmodernist has
acquired an established cultural and political currency. It means that one is post-
Marxist or non-Marxist.”53 It is true that Agger “claims postmodernism for
Marxism,”54 but he does so in order to resist the tendency to trap the possibility of
transformation in postmodern ideology and in order to reassert the political,

50
Martin, op. cit., p. 340.
51
Timothy W. Luke, “Cyborg Enchantments: Commodity Fetishism and Human/
Machine Interactions,” Strategies 13 (2000), p. 41.
52
Martin, op. cit., p. 340.
53
Agger, op. cit., p. 29.
54
Ben Agger, Critical Social Theories: An Introduction (Boulder and Oxford: Westview
Press, 1998).
 A Critique of Martin 81

where the political is understood as the possibility of intervention and alteration.55

Misunderstandings such as Martin’s are directly addressed by Agger and Luke:

We . . . read Marx as having recognized the crisis tendencies of capitalism, without

offering any hard-and-fast guarantees about the imminence of socialism and
communism. This is because revolutionary change requires people actively work
for it, using their consciousness, ingenuity, strategy to overthrow the old order. This
capability of active decision-making and change is what philosophers call agency,
suggesting a human being who is self-creative and proactive and not simply
determined by imagining social forces. Positivism is a version of the social sciences
modeled on the natural sciences, promising cause-and-effect understandings of
social life. Marx breaks with positivism, because he views the person as an agent,
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responsible for her own fate, albeit within limits imposed by history, politics,
economics, family, gender, race. Marxism is not deterministic. People are free to
change their history, affecting social change made possible by a combination of free
will or agency and propitious social and economic circumstances for revolutionary
intervention . . . It resists the metaphysical, as opposed to empirical, conclusion that
people’s lives are simply predetermined by forces that are as implacable as the tides,
space, gravity, space and time.56

Where the neoliberal welfare state is deterministic in its insistence that we have no
choice other than to submit to the laws of global capital, Agger and Luke argue
decidedly on the side of human agency and the ability to make our own futures.
It was not Marx, nor Agger, but the now-global regime of foreign direct investment
which dictates welfare policy by demanding a reduction of welfare, of the tax base,
as a condition for “benevolent commodification,” that is deterministic.
Given Martin’s conflation of critical theory and postmodernism a further point
of clarification is necessary. The Frankfurt School attempted to explain why
capitalism persisted despite its exploitive tendencies. Marx’s original position
against the de-humanizing relationship between capitalism and the commodifica-
tion of labor was taken up by Frankfurt School theorists who, through a deeper
understanding of culture and ideology and of positivism as ideology, attempted to
explain why such commodification persists. Understood through the lens of welfare
policy, why do we continue to tolerate such gross inequity when it is unnecessary?
The third generation of critical social theory, including not only Marxist and
Frankfurt School scholars, but also feminist scholars, cultural studies, cultural
criminology, and, Agger proposes, critical postmodern scholars,57 has achieved an
interdisciplinary critical social theory with enormous transformative possibility.
Martin’s discussion of postmodernism and welfare is problematic because he
fails to distinguish between critical versions of postmodernism such as Jameson’s
and Agger’s and what Agger theorizes as affirmative postmodernism—
postmodern ideology that is ideological by virtue of its depoliticization of that
which is political and therefore alterable.58 Such establishment postmodernism,59

55
Agger, Discourse of Domination, op. cit.
56
Ben Agger and Tim Luke. “Politics in Postmodernity: The Diaspora of Politics and the
Homelessness of Political and Social Theory,” Theoretical Discussions in Political Sociology for
the 21st Century 11 (2002), pp. 168– 169.
57
Agger, Discourse of Domination, op. cit.; Agger, Critical Social Theories, op. cit.
58
Agger, Discourse of Domination, op. cit. pp. 73 – 82.
59
Agger, op. cit., p. 204.
 82 Patricia Mooney Nickel

or New York Times postmodernism, as Agger aptly titles it,60 is characterized by the
rejection of “political discourse as out of date, shabby, irrelevant,” the celebration
of “popular culture unashamedly, failing to make distinctions . . . robbing
postmodernism of the ability to expose and debunk the political codes of culture,”
and the purposeful replacement of “substance with style, installing ironic
detachment as the central value. But neither cynicism nor irony is an appropriate
posture, especially where so much is going wrong. Both accelerate the venality of
politics and the commodification of public discourse.”61
Critically, for Agger, postmodernism cannot describe a period in which
inequity is institutionalized by a positivist welfare state:

There is absolutely nothing “post” about the current modernity, which is

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fundamentally continuous with the capitalism of the mid-nineteenth century in

the sense that capitalism is characterized by private property, sexism, racism, and
the domination of nature.62

Agger’s criticism of postmodernism should not be mistaken for an outright

rejection of the ideal of postmodernity. Not only does Agger recognize that the
insights of postmodernism are important to critical social theory, his is a fully
engaged understanding that attempts to recover the political in postmodernism,
where it is currently system-serving.63 Thus, “we should treat postmodernity as a
utopian category—as something to be achieved—and neither as a method of
periodization (e.g., Harvey 1989) nor of celebration (e.g., Lyotard 1984; Kroker and
Cook 1986).”64 This is not wholly inconsistent with Martin’s supportive reference
to Bauman:

However, Bauman’s retort to [Agger’s] notion is that the formulation of any social
criticism, from Marx to Habermas, has always appealed to Western rational
concepts and universal societal norms and laws. A postmodern critique, on the
other hand, would preserve the emancipation of modernism without appealing to
absolute certitude. In this manner, postmodernism rejects any fabrication of an
absolute system of belief precisely because for Bauman this necessarily translates
into coercive power by “a historical agent waiting in the wings to take over and to
complete the promise of modernity using the levers of the political state.”65

That Martin is careless in his treatment of Agger’s stances on Marxism and

postmodernism is important beyond scholastic concerns about ground that Agger
and Bauman share. It is important because, for Agger, a critical postmodern stance
would allow for “thawing the social facts frozen by positivism into the dialectical
pieces of history that they really are.”66 This stance would be truly transformative
for Martin, who currently only stabilizes the welfare state in “radical

60
Agger, Discourse of Domination, op. cit.
61
Ibid., pp. 77 – 79.
62
Ibid., p. 283.
63
Ibid., p. 291.
64
Ben Agger, Postponing the Postmodern: Sociological Practices, Selves and Theories
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), p. 189.
65
Martin, op. cit., p. 340.
66
Agger, Discourse of Domination, op. cit., p. 292.
 A Critique of Martin 83

pragmatism,” which is a euphemism for neoliberalism, buttressed by the sham of

“participatory governance.”67
Critical theory recognizes in ways that Martin does not that welfare policy
governs labor and value in relationship to well-being. Agger specifically theorizes
the relationship between postmodernism, critical theory, and, importantly,
feminism, opening a space for an understanding of critical theory and
postmodernism in relationship to welfare policy. Excepting a brief and
unexplained reference to “family,”68 feminism is completely absent from Martin’s
analysis; this is a bit shocking given that welfare policy is gendered.69 For Agger,
feminism exposes production’s domination of reproduction. This is a decidedly
radical stance on welfare policy and its emphasis on labor that pays. This hierarchy
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of value is indicative of the stage that Agger has named fast capitalism, which:

reproduces itself through this circuitry between the realms of values and valueless
activity—work and home, public and private, men and women, science and fiction,
practice and theory. The domination of reproduction, degraded into mere intellection,
text, superstructure, reproduces domination by providing a reserve army of labor and
unpaid houseworkers through which a capitalist lifeworld perpetuates itself.70

In the book from which Martin derives his criticism of Agger as a Marxist, Agger
writes, “Therefore we can link the particular oppressions suffered by people simply
because they do not participate in the mainstream—labor, women, people of color,
inanimate nature. Feminism in its best sense is a critique of value’s subordination of
valuelessness.”71 Nonparticipation in the mainstream is precisely what welfare policy
aimed at eliminating. Welfare policy wants to subordinate decommodification
(valueless labor and reproduction) to commodification (valued labor and
production). Thus, for Agger, a feminist postmodern critical theory offers “an
interstitial critical theory that moves back and forth between system and lifeworld
and thus produces a politically relevant philosophy of history, a critical cultural
studies and a politics of sexuality and gender.”72 Agger’s call is for a revaluation of
the valueless; welfare would be unnecessary because well-being would not be
dependent upon commodification of one’s labor on the terms set by global capital.
This would be a critically postmodern stance on welfare rights.

Radical Pragmatism for a Postmodern Era? Beyond Academic Justifications

of Neoliberal Welfare Policy
I believe Martin that he wants to improve well-being and he has done well to bring
together theory and welfare policy at a time when welfare policy, like all policy, is
subjugated to state positivism. However, although he has certainly instigated

67
Eva Sorensen and Jacob Torfing, “Network Goverance and Post Liberal Democracy,”
Administrative Theory and Praxis 27 (June 2005), pp. 197–237.
68
Ibid., pp. 344– 346.
69
See Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Theda Skocpol, Protecting
Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge and
London: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1992).
70
Agger, Fast Capitalism, op. cit., pp. 60 – 61.
71
Agger, op. cit., p. 62.
72
Agger, op. cit., p. 8.
 84 Patricia Mooney Nickel

a dialogue, Martin’s understanding of welfare policy in relationship to the period he

names postmodern capitalism concludes with a recommendation for more
postmodern capitalism, whatever that means. I understand Martin’s subject
alternately as the stabilization of neoliberal capitalism, which does not dismantle the
welfare state so much as make it work better for capitalism. I now want to return
to Martin’s conclusion, where he argues for a postmodern welfare state based in
radical pragmatism:

Consequently, a postmodern welfare policy should embrace the notion that: (1) a
particular “duty” is assigned to society to help the poor attain their basic human
needs, (2) a particular “right” is claimed by the poor on society to help them secure
their basic human needs, and (3) the role of government is introduced only to assist
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welfare recipients in formulating policies and programs that work in some optimal
fashion to suit their particular needs. If implemented, this approach to policy
formulation has the potential to provide for radical revisions to the current TANF
program and welfare policy in the United States.73

Martin has offered what Jameson called “change without its opposite.”74 It is
radically unclear in Martin’s explanation what exactly this approach will oppose,
or even “do,” if implemented. Note well that duties and rights are in quotation
marks with no indication here or anywhere else in the paper of what substantive
meaning they carry, but the late capitalist state’s optimal fashioning of policy is
not in doubt at all. I do not disagree at all with the general notion of rights and
duties, but it is unclear what precisely it is that is postmodern about the
distinctly modern appeal to human rights. How is Martin’s appeal to welfare
rights any different from the World Bank’s appeal to human rights achieved
through the Enlightenment appeal to the perfection of economic growth theory
in concert with optimal state performance of policies and programs? Indeed, the
World Bank and Martin seem to appeal together to the very narrative of
performativity that Lyotard promised us that postmodernity would be
suspicious of. (Lyotard, of course, dismisses the possibility of the appeal to the
grand narratives of rights and duties in a postmodern era.) If nothing else, we
need to know from Martin what “rights” and “duties” are and how they will be
protected from encroachment by this optimal government in an unspecified set
of circumstances.
Martin’s is not the first “postmodern” solution generated by the regime of
academic policy theorists, who are charged with making neoliberalism look like a
radical transformation of our own making. The supposedly “postmodern”
perspective on the practice of the state was asserted by Fox and Miller in 1996 in
their book Postmodern Public Administration.75 Like Martin, Fox and Miller
proposed to break with “founding” logics of liberalism in favor of authentic
discourse. In many ways, Fox and Miller’s aim is similar to Martin’s. They
dispense with liberalism’s logic as a source of legitimacy: “in the end it is not so
much that the Constitution founds the Public Administration, as it is that the

73
Ibid., pp. 346– 347.
74
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983– 1998
(New York and London: Verso, 1998), p. 52.
75
Charles J. Fox and Hugh T. Miller, Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 1996).
 A Critique of Martin 85

Public Administration is not inconsistent with it.”76 In their “radical break,” Fox
and Miller, like Martin, propose an alternative model of public discourse, the
“public energy field,” which is composed of “malleable democratic discursive
social formations.”77 Oddly, like Martin, the objective set forth by Fox and Miller is
to base public administration and policy in the most accurate model possible, that
of discourse theory, within a framework that can “withstand postmodern
conditions.”78 This framework, and the reader who has agreed with me thus far
will want to take a deep breath, is a postmodern public administration where
postmodernism is defined according to Lyotard and public administration
practiced according to Habermas’s warrants for discourse.
Taking into account more recent academic justifications of neoliberalism as
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democratic transformation, Martin’s recommendation varies little from what is

presently being practiced not only in the US, but also in Denmark, New Zealand,
and elsewhere as supposedly “radically democratic network governance,”79
which devolves state responsibility for delivering social policy to nonstate
institutions, often through contracts and negotiation with private industry.
Known variously and nebulously within varying academic disciplines as network
governance, deliberative democracy, and associational democracy, this supposed
transformation of the state fits nearly perfectly with neoliberalism’s emphasis on
nonstate organizations doing more in the interest of the state doing less.80
Although there is certainly reason to be hopeful about the possibility for direct
democracy, celebration is premature until we know more about how such
transformations may legitimate a neoliberal state that favors the market over the
integrity of all else, including rights and democracy.81 As Mark E. Warren has
pointed out, “No doubt our suspicions should be raised by the breadth of the
current consensus about the democratic contributions of associations.”82
Let me make clear in conclusion that I agree with Martin that the welfare state
ought to be radicalized and it ought to be done in a radical rejection of
marginalization and commodification. However, Martin is not radical enough.
Revision of the current TANF program and welfare policy in the United States is
not radical. Elimination of the commodification of well-being is radical.
The “optimal fashioning” of welfare is just the false assumption that we can
precisely calculate humanity—an assumption that functions at the expense of
realizing that need could be eliminated altogether. Radical as a modifier of
pragmatism is no more a utopian vision than is pragmatic; these are words that
describe nothing substantive. Radical can modify poverty as easily as well-being.
Pragmatism can conclude with exploitation as easily as liberation. These are
unimaginative words that lack a vision of transformation. Radical emancipation
is a vision of transformation. Radical feminism is a vision of transformation.

76
Ibid., p. 20.
77
Ibid., p. xv.
78
Ibid., p. 7.
79
Eva Sorenson and Jacob Torfing, “Network Governance and Post Liberal Democracy,”
Administrative Theory and Praxis 27 (2005), pp. 197– 237.
80
Patricia Mooney Nickel, “Network Governance and the New Constitutionalism,”
Administrative Theory and Praxis 29 (2007), pp. 198– 224.
81
Harvey, Neoliberalism, op. cit.
82
Mark E. Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton and London: Princeton
University Press, 2001), p. 9.
 86 Patricia Mooney Nickel

Radical antiracism is a vision of transformation. Radical opposition to environ-

mental degradation is a vision of transformation. Radical transformation of labor
is a vision of transformation. Radical pragmatism is simply radicalism with
nothing to oppose. Radical is only an ideal when accompanied by what I
unabashedly accept as possibilities. The end of racism, sexism, war, poverty,
commodification, and exploitation are all ideals that are within our reach.
There are myriad alternatives within what Russell Jacoby calls iconoclastic
utopianism, or utopian vision without a deterministic blueprint,83 but they must
begin with an honest discussion of where we are. The welfare state has certainly
transformed in the wake of neoliberalism, but there is nothing postmodern about
a capitalist state that subjugates human well-being to the supposed social law of
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postmodern capitalist globalization within which, according to Martin, we can

only achieve “five priorities: (1) productivity; (2) family; (3) social cohesion;
(4) community; and (5) social choice.”84 We certainly can do better than a list that
begins with the modern blight of the reduction of all action to the dominating logic
of productivity. Theorizing beyond welfare must reveal how well-being, labor
(value), reification of poverty, and commodification of social interaction, state-
imposed social insecurity (domination), necessity (the logic of scarcity), and the
marginalization of nonparticipators are not inevitable circumstances. Radical
pragmatism on behalf of postmodern welfare rights as they are constituted by the
neoliberal state is no more than a recommendation for the present subjugation of
labor to capital to be practiced eternally.

83
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
84
Martin, op. cit., p. 346.