Varieties of economic dependence
| Author | Patrick Joseph Luke Cockburn |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211001549 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Varieties of economic
dependence
Patrick Joseph Luke Cockburn
Swansea University, UK
Abstract
For several decades, public political discourses on ‘welfare dependency’ have failed to
recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather
reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four
senses of ‘economic dependence’ that can help to clarify what is missing from these
discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may
economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian
philosophical work has examined the problems of dependence on states, in families
and in markets, the present approach adds a furth er dimension to our cultural and
political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful
to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires
a clarification of the ‘varieties of dependence’ that exist in contemporary societies and
economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and
economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not
about escaping dependence entirely.
Keywords
Capitalism, dependence, economic power, political discourse, welfare state
Introduction
The most common and politically influential discourses on economic dependence
suggest that economic dependence is an exceptional condition that is lived in by a
very specific section of the population. The Centre for Social Justice, the think
Corresponding author:
Patrick Joseph Luke Cockburn, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, James
Callaghan Building, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK.
Email: p.j.l.cockburn@swansea.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211001549
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2023, Vol. 22(2) 195–216
tank that informed the last wave of welfare reforms in the UK in which ‘Universal
Credit’ was introduced, flatly states: ‘If someone is economically dependent it
means that they rely on welfare payments from the state to meet their basic
needs’ (Centre for Social Justice, 2013: 19). This conflation of economic depen-
dence with welfare dependence, which has been a prominent feature of normative
political discourse in capitalist welfare states for several decades, has eroded
our ability to see the varieties of economic dependence that exist in all societies.
There are at least four senses of ‘economic dependence’ that we should be con-
cerned with in debates about economic and social justice, which will be developed
in this article, but the idea of ‘welfare dependency’ has been an effective tool in
narrowing our public concern with dependence to political questions concerning
welfare provision.
In both the United States and the United Kingdom – and no doubt many other
countries around the world – leading politicians have made ‘welfare dependency’ a
prominent topic in policy manifestos and public debate. In the 1990s, US presi-
dential candidate (soon to be president) Bill Clinton argued that he would ‘break
the cycle of welfare dependency’ (Clinton, 1992) and UK Prime Minister Tony
Blair argued that ‘The new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency’
(Blair, 1997). In the 2010s, before becoming president, Donald Trump was calling
welfare dependency ‘morally offensive’ (Trump, 2011: 107), and in the UK, Prime
Minister David Cameron imagined welfare recipients ‘trapped in a fog of depen-
dency’ (Cameron, 2016).
This kind of discourse on ‘welfare dependency’ has a longer history (O’Connor,
2001). While it is a characteristic worry of the New Right – highlighted, for exam-
ple, by Charles Murray in the 1980s – it had also been invoked earlier by conser-
vative Democrats in the US context (e.g. Moynihan, 1965) and even by the
architect of the US welfare state, FD Roosevelt (O’Connor, 2001: 223). Its prom-
inence in the last 40 years owes much to the way in which these decades saw
neoliberal welfare reform coincide with a resurgence in conservative paternalism
(Cooper, 2017). Public political discourses about welfare dependency imply, or
even state, that welfare dependency is a problem about psychology, habits, indi-
vidual will or collective culture that have made some people willing to live off the
hard work of others. In short, the normative implication is that welfare depen-
dence is a kind of economic parasitism.
1
The attack on ‘welfare dependency’ as a subjective, psychological and moral
condition only makes sense if, as these discourses assume, the ‘economic depen-
dence’ of welfare recipients is somehow unique in our societies. As Marion Smiley
(2001: 26–29) has pointed out, it is exactly this slide between the identification of
an ‘objective’ condition of ‘dependence’, on the one hand, and the attribution of a
‘subjective’ trait of ‘dependency’, on the other, that gives these political views their
rhetorical force. That slide depends on the assumption that there really is a section
of society who are uniquely ‘economically dependent’ by virtue of receiving state
support. But making ‘economic dependence’ synonymous with ‘welfare depen-
dence’ is myopic and selective. This has not gone unnoticed by political theorists,
196 European Journal of Political Theory 22(2)
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