The Active Society as a Paradigm of Social Governance

Abstract

As general social movement or specific types of agency, activity has obtained a prominent place in how society is imagined and solutions to social problems are conceived. Etzioni (1968, vii) introduced The Active Society in his early work to consider ‘the active quality [in how] societies or sub-societies (ethnic groupings, classes) acquire varying degrees of self-control’. The new interest in activity that this chapter examines is radically different, however, as it has emerged against the background not of confident social management but of serious doubts about capacities for social control (Streeck 2013). Today, in public policy design and in reflections on the governance of modern societies, potentials for activity have been identified as a political resource to remedy this loss of control. Among critical sociologists considering the new emphasis, Dean (1995, 569) observes ‘the displacement of the ethos of the welfare state with that of the “active society”.’ Lessenich (2008, 76) argues that in a ‘reinvention of the social’ the welfare state is replaced by the Aktivgesellschaft. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) suggest that a re-conceptualization of social relations in last quarter century has made the capacity for activity a central criterion in the determination of human worth. The role attributed to activity in new conceptions of society and in the definition of social problems corresponds to political regimes of activation that have emerged as a common denominator in international social policy design. Central to this shift is the framing of causal stories about social problems as resulting from various forms of inactivity and the normative evaluation of the active society as the good society.