Comments on: Cheryl Kernot on social enterprise and the participation society

By: Adrien

Adrien — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:19:33 +0000

Agree about what Adrien?
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There’s some farnarkling about non-Statist solutions to problems. I haven’t seen anyone object to that. They tend to be discussing whether it communitarian or old fashioned associationalism, compliant with the principles of classical liberalism, defiant of the principles of classical liberalism…
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That the moral of Kernot’s story is ‘Just Do It’?
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Yeah but it’s not her story. Her story is all about the Centre for Social Impact. I’m not entirely certain but I’d wager Andrew Mawson’s glad the idea’s being spread around but he and others like him probably didn’t need a research centre’s papers to do it. Contrary to some of the language she’s using this isn’t about public policy. Such policy may support but I reckon these things succeed best if someone’s, as she says, enterprising and the system follows and supports.
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I also think maybe we should be careful about statements to the effect that there’s a return to this or that movement simply because an academic/former politician’s getting into it currently.
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And with whom?
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With anyone that’ll have ya.

By: klaus k

klaus k — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:39:35 +0000

Agree about what Adrien? That the moral of Kernot’s story is ‘Just Do It’?

And with whom?

By: Sally R

Sally R — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:07:52 +0000

Yeah, I agree. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mark – I haven’t stopped thinking (and talking) about it the last couple of days…it keeps returning me in mind to Kim’s thread last month – Corporatism, Rudd style

By: Adrien

Adrien — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:16:30 +0000

Having read Kernot’s essay (thanks Sally I missed that, not much sleep lately) I find what she’s talking about to be very interesting. I’m a little dubious that it’s a revolution in public policy and the phrase ‘social entrepreneur’ irritated me.
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But when you consider it, it fits reasonably well. After all instead of waiting for ‘someone to do something’ this guy just went and did it. The govt got involved in a supporting role, it followed.
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I have reservations about Kernot’s rose-water view of this as some kind of social watershed. But it’s nevertheless brilliant stuff. Forget bureaucratic programmes, lists, categories and due process and simply go in and make it up as you go along. And best of all it really doesn’t matter what the differences between communitarians and liberals. When you read the comments above there’s a sense that ideology is preventing people from acknowledging that they pretty much agree.
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It is a bit odd that the language of the market is taking over something that isn’t really a market however.

By: klaus k

klaus k — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:44:29 +0000

Andrew, I think that some of the distinctions would be clearer if you took a look at some material on the liberal/communitarian debate. The communitarians take issue with several important aspects of liberal political philosophy. Firstly, the notion of the ‘unencumbered self’ – for communitarians, the self is a product of a community and is primarily defined in its terms. You can’t just posit an individual self radically separate from community in the way that liberals tend to. Secondly, the liberal position on state neutrality and the distinction between justice and the good life (ie morality and ethics). For communitarians, the question of what constitutes the good life shouldn’t be out of bounds for politics, or even the state.

I would recommend Will Kymlicka on ‘Community’ from the Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Blackwell) or perhaps Daniel Bell’s book Communitarianism and It’s Critics. In many ways I’m more sympathetic with Rawls’ or Kymlicka’s liberalism than with Bell, Sandel, Alisdair Macintyre or the other communitarians, but I think the critique has some merit. There has been a sort of drift whereby liberals have come to agree with large parts of the critique and reformulate their own positions accordingly – even Rawls did this to some degree; on the other side we can see positions like Mark’s that take up some of the communitarian positions and interests but drop the problematic assumptions in the wake of post-structuralist and other criticisms.

By: Andrew Reynolds

Andrew Reynolds — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:24:56 +0000

Or perhaps it is just people being people – getting on with their lives and not relying on the government to come up with solutions. It’s just called living.

By: Ag

Ag — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:35:07 +0000

BBB wrote: But then what would you call it? Classical liberalism?

Perhaps it’s social(neo-)liberalism. Not necessarily a bad thing, and not unlike the movement toward Social-liberalism that informed Deakin in the 1900s. Kernot’s langauage and her arguments read like Neo-liberalism, with all its critique of being governed too much by the state, given a social twist: social-capital rather than human capital, social enterepreneurship rather than the self as enterprise. I’m part of a few “social enterprises” but these rely on huge donations of time – effectively unpaid labour – and are sometimes just forms of being governed from a distance, by local council and state government.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:46:53 +0000

Thanks so much, Ambigulous!

By: Ambigulous

Ambigulous — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:42:27 +0000

Mark,
your posts and contributions are valued by many of us,
cheers

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:07:02 +0000

Just an apology I haven’t had time to join in the debate very much. Things are really crazy at the moment – 12 hour work days and all that. I will be taking some notes at the event tomorrow night (though may not have a chance to write them up for a bit). I’ll come back and read over the thread when I do.