The ‘Active Society’: new designs for social policy
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This paper interrogates the idea of the ‘active society’, a design for social policy recently proposed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. First, it compares the active society with an earlier organising principle for public policy, the welfare society. Whereas the welfare society governed populations by dividing them into workers and various categories of non-worker, the active society makes participation in paid employment the norm for most social groups. Second, the paper can be read as a contribution to a genealogy of social policy. For the active society challenges the logic of social security: it stakes the welfare of individuals upon their ability to constantly work on themselves, through practices like lifelong learning, to become or remain employable.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Studies Association at Glasgow University in April 1996. Thanks are due to Paul Taggart, my discussant there, and to Mariana Valverde, Christina Gabriel and an anonymous reviewer for Policy and Politics for their critical remarks. I am grateful to Mitchell Dean for bringing the active society literature to my attention (his article on the subject is cited below).
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