Beyond Individualism

The Reagan and Bush years have left American with a troublesome dilemma: how to balance budget deficits against social deficits. This book examines how, in a time of economic crisis and constraint, it is possible to meet the demand for spending on the nation's neglected poor, infirm and disadvantaged, old and young. Michael Piore's response is to develop a new social theory that balances individual preferences against the claims and responsibilities of the community. By explaining the role of groups in economic and social life, this theory makes sense of a host of social phenomena and policy issues, from equal employment opportunity, international competitiveness and the decline of organized labour to multicultural education, health insurance and the underclass. Piore traces the difficulties in addressing these issues to the limits of liberal social theory, particularly its distinctions between individuality and community. He offers an alternative view of individuality as emerging through the discussions and debates conducted among a community's members. These discussions, Piore suggests, have turned inward, away from the borderlands where social groups and economic organizations meet - and therein lies the crux of some of America's deepest political and economic problems. His book points beyond the liberal conception of politics as a negotiation among competing interests and of policy-making as technical decision-making. Instead, it prescribes a politics focused on the process of discussion and debate itself, a politics that enlarges the borderlands by broadening the range of people who talk to one another and the range of topics they address.