What’s the point of responsibility? This seems like an odd question in an age when social inequalities, human rights abuses and climate change make it abundantly clear that we have an inescapable responsibility to others and the environment. And yet our age seems to be defined by an intractable paradox: taking on greater responsibility is ultimately useless in ensuring individual, collective or environmental wellbeing. The reason for this paradox is not that responsibility is pointless, but that the kind of responsibility we are encouraged – and in many instances, forced – to take is one that places the entire burden of systemic problems on us as individuals. For as Ronald Reagan asked in his first Inaugural Address in 1981, ‘if no-one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?’ One need only take a glance at the ever-increasing shelves of self-help books in bookstores to see that Reagan’s question has been effectively answered by the wider populace in the last four decades. Personal responsibility is the order of the day.
The pervasive rhetoric of personal responsibility has transformed the role of government and society in the neoliberal era. Where once the role of government was to safeguard the general happiness of the majority of citizens, albeit to varying degrees, its primary role now is to facilitate the conditions where each citizen can take on more and more individual responsibility, absolving the state from its responsibility towards its citizens. While we might attribute the emergence of the language of personal responsibility to the New Right – a collection of rightwing political groups that emerged across Western democracies in the 1970s and 1980s – it developed more systematically in the politics of Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. In fact, Clinton’s 1996 reform bill that effectively killed off the notion of welfare in the US was infamously titled: ‘The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act’. The aim, Clinton argued, was ‘to achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and responsibility the law of the land’. Clinton’s goal was not to merely encourage personal responsibility as part of his welfare reforms. He legally enforced it by placing time limits on welfare recipients and created a vast surveillance system in collaboration with law enforcement to monitor those who received assistance. Furthermore, he created an inextricable interweaving of work and personal responsibility: in order to work one must possess responsibility, and in order to take responsibility one must work.
