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Gordon Brown's Misplaced Smithian Appeal: The Eclipse of Sympathy in Changing British Welfare Norms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

MATTHEW WATSON
MATTHEW WATSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Gordon Brown has eagerly lauded his fellow Kirkcaldy citizen, Adam Smith, as his main policy inspiration. This article tests the rigour of such a claim by matching Brown's promotion of Smithian ‘sympathy’ as the centrepiece of his programme for government with the changes introduced by his Treasury to the British welfare model. In the 1970s, Thomas Wilson showed that the traditions of the post-war British welfare state were compatible with a modified form of Smithian sympathy socialised at the level of the state. New Labour has set about reforming the welfare model with respect to both its underlying institutions and the basic subjectivities of its recipients. I show that Brown's substantive preference for an asset-based system of welfare moves those subjectivities away from the ‘relational self’ of Smithian sympathy and towards a much more ‘autonomous self’. Consequently, I conclude that it is stretching Smith's concept of sympathy too far, even in a modified socialised form, to associate it with New Labour's asset-based system of welfare.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 195 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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