Social Capital, Social Identities: From Ownership to Belonging 9783110292930, 9783110292800

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Social Capital, Social Identities

Social Capital, Social Identities From Ownership to Belonging

Edited by Dieter Thomä, Christoph Henning and Hans Bernhard Schmid

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-3-11-029280-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-029293-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Dieter Thomä, Christoph Henning, and Hans Bernhard Schmid Introduction 1 Dieter Thomä Varieties of Belonging: Between Appropriation and Familiarization Mike Savage Cultural Capital and Elective Belonging: A British Case Study

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Martin Endress Structures of Belonging, Types of Social Capital, and Modes of Trust Partha Dasgupta Trust and Cooperation among Economic Agents Stephen Darwall Respect, Concern, and Membership

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55

75

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Hans Bernhard Schmid Social Capital and Self-Alienation An Augustinian Look at the Dark Heart of Community

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Michaela Rehm Cement of Society? Why Civil Religion is unfit to create Social Bonds Hans G. Kippenberg The Social Capital of Religious Communities in the Age of Globalization Franz Schultheis Social Capital and Power: A Sociological Point of View 151 The Two Faces of Social Capital Martin Diewald & Joerg Luedicke Modernity, Welfare State, and Inequality Individual and Societal Preconditions of Social Capital

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123

135

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Table of Contents

Christoph Henning Social Capital, Public Goods, or the Common Good? Equality as a Hidden Agenda in Current Debates Notes on Contributors

225

Index of Persons

229

Index of Subjects

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Dieter Thomä, Christoph Henning, and Hans Bernhard Schmid

Introduction

The term “social capital” brings together two seemingly incompatible terms. Human sociability is combined with economic capital. An internal feature of human behavior is paired with an external resource. In this respect, the term “social capital” is comparable to paradoxical terms like “friendly stone” or “human machine”.¹ The latter, the human machine, aptly serves as an example for a semantic synthesis of opposites that cuts both ways. On the one hand, if this term is used to describe a machine, the machine appears humanized; on the other hand, if it is used to describe a person, the person appears technicized. We can transfer this dual effect to the term “social capital”: On the one hand, capital itself appears more social (socialized), when combined with sociability – there is a warm glow to it. On the other hand, the social, thus conceived, is reduced to a mere economic function. These linguistic effects are quite powerful both in theory and practice. Social capital may be acknowledged as another form of capital apart from economic capital, or as another form of sociability in addition to common social relations. In this collection, these cross-purposes are analyzed and assessed from different interdisciplinary angles. The papers collected in this volume take the tensions contained and concealed in the term “social capital” seriously. The disciplines committed to this task and represented in this volume are economics, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies. The title “Social Capital, Social Identities” hints at the fact that personal identity transcends an individualistic framework, in which social relations are viewed through the lens of individual interests and benefits only. If identity is “social” from the outset, the independent stance of individuals maximizing their utility and increasing their capital is shattered. The subtitle of this collection “From Ownership to Belonging” opens up a dynamic perspective and suggests that we are well advised to overcome a narrow understanding of social capital based on individual entitlements and ambitions. While revising the notion of social capital, we are prompted to undertake a rapprochement between social capital and the vocabulary of sociability developed in social theory and philosophy at large. This vocabulary includes concepts like belonging, reciprocity, embeddedness, membership, fellow-feeling, attachment, trust, cooperation, the ce-

 In his paper, Hans Bernhard Schmid stresses the paradox of social capital – and presses: “Social capital brings evil into the world.”

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ment of society, collective intentionality, social bonds, public goods, and the common good. Current research focuses on an economic or quasi-economic understanding of social capital and seeks to expand this notion to an economized view of social relations in general. Economic theory has discovered social relations as an economic resource and has “capitalized” on this discovery by studying these relations with economic methods. At the same time, sociologists have criticized this endeavor as an undue economization of social relations, underway both in theory and in practice. The other transformative direction of the term “social capital” however, namely the “socialization” of capital as a resource, has received relatively little attention. This collection of papers aims to adjust this one-sided approach by exploring the linguistic potential of the ambivalent construct “social capital” in a more balanced manner. Yes, social relations often do have an economic function, or at least they may be put to such profitable use. But we have reason to suspect that a socialized view of capital has the potential to move beyond the image of a homo oeconomicus maximizing his self-interest and caught in his own “hedonic calculus”. The old formula of “economic imperialism” may thus be replaced by a renewed attempt to assert the “embeddedness” (Karl Polanyi) of economic behavior and to coordinate research on social capital conducted by economics, other social sciences, and the humanities.² In the light of this interplay, economic language turns out to be not purely economic, and economic terms like “capital” or “cooperation” are open to re-interpretation. In this collection, several authors undertake such fine-grained rereadings of economic terms. The sociologist Martin Endress investigates a wide array of different forms of trust, of which “reflexive trust as a strategic resource for action” (Endress) is but one. By highlighting the fact that “belonging to” a community is at odds with economic prerogatives, Endress shifts from strategic cooperation to the requirements associated with a “culture of belonging.” Similarly, the economist Sir Partha Dasgupta describes “various social environments in which cooperation is possible,” with market interaction being only one of them. He analyzes the complex requirements for securing and enhancing longterm commitments and sustainable cooperation by discussing, among others, trust, mutual affection, and reputation. From a philosophical point of view, Dieter Thomä delineates the economic and non-economic forms of sociability by going back to the notions of ownership and belonging implied in the theory of social capital, Stoicism, and moral sentimentalism: A network of social rela-

 For another account of the humanities’ transformative effects on economics, see Nussbaum (2010).

Introduction

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tions may, to a certain extent, belong to a certain individual, yet it makes equal sense to turn the tables and state that an individual belongs to a community. Like Endress, Thomä argues that a social and cultural realm cannot be “owned” like a tangible thing. The critique of the “social capitalist” as social “moron” takes center stage in the paper by philosopher Hans Bernhard Schmid. He argues that the shortcomings of an individualized reading of social capital are to be compensated by a reappraisal of “collective identity” as a core feature of the “normative ideal of democracy”. A similar distinction is drawn by philosopher Stephen Darwall who claims that the individual’s respect for another person is to be superseded by experiences of “fellow membership”. According to Darwall, the paramount form of this membership is citizenship. These considerations are complemented and expanded in the paper by sociologist Mike Savage. By taking an empirical turn, Savage scrutinizes the different social circumstances linked to strategic cooperation, elective affinities, and long-term attachments among humans. Social embeddedness is shown to be a fragile realization of communal life, which depends on various economic and cultural factors and is ridden by social distinction. Is the ability to familiarize with a social and cultural space or to “put down roots” (Savage) equally accessible to all members of a given society? The answer to this question again uncovers the ambivalence of the term “social capital”. Perhaps this term carries the promise of a resource available to individuals notwithstanding their economic circumstances. Everybody is entitled to be a shareholder of this particular sort of capital. Given its accessibility, the distribution of social capital appears to be more egalitarian than the highly unequal distribution of monetary wealth and income. Even in traditional villages and low-income neighborhoods – or maybe especially there – everybody knows everybody else, so that everybody′s social capital would seem to be very high, whereas the highly flexible “economic hitman” travelling around the clock may not have any real friends at all (for more on this notion, see Schmid’s paper). This pure, independent image of social capital is tainted by the fact that the very idea of capital comes with an appeal to convertibility. There are unique channels for acquiring social capital, but the whole point of reading social relations as instances of social capital consists in the fact that there could be transfers from social to economic capital and vice-versa. Social networks are expected to create benefits beyond the intrinsic value of sociability itself. The logic of social capital is not fundamentally different from the logic of economic capital. Local embeddedness may compensate economic shortcomings, but it is questionable whether they can counteract economic inequalities. Several papers in this volume, especially the contribution by sociologist Franz Schultheis, tackle

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these issues of convertibility, compensation, and complementarity. The “exchange rate” of social capital into other forms of capital (economic or cultural capital, in Bourdieu’s terms), may be very low, the costs for the “transformation” of capital (Schultheis) need to be considered. Knowing everybody in a poor village may be an advantage, say, in terms of access to childcare. (It takes a village to raise a child, as the proverb has it). Yet in this very village, a woman may be forced to “pay” for this use of social capital by being excluded from the workplace and renouncing the right to have access to economic capital herself. In this case, social capital functions as a consolation, not as a means for empowerment. As social capital is not totally under a person’s control or to her disposal, being well-known in a community bears its own risks. If a person decided to marry someone from another cultural background or to openly live in ways perceived as uncustomary, a collapse of her social capital might follow. These repercussions could be more severe if a person were held in high esteem in her community. A collapse of this kind is staged in Ang Lee’s movie Brokeback Mountain from 2005 (based on a short story about a homosexual cowboy by Annie Proulx). Finally, certain types of social capital may turn out to be a burden or a liability in financial terms. When it comes to getting a job (Granovetter 1974) or obtaining a financial loan at an attractive rate, firm social bonds of the wrong kind may backfire. Having “roots” in a village may have no effect at all, whereas knowing the right people in the right places – mainly distant places outside of one’s village – may be quite beneficial. Economic inequalities are thus not only reflected in the distribution of social capital, they may be exacerbated and consolidated by the peculiar distribution and stratification of social capital. Several papers in this volume explore the hidden links between social capital and inequality. Schultheis analyzes the effects of power relations on the accessibility of social capital by using social classes and family relations as examples. The sociologists Martin Diewald and Joerg Luedicke discuss empirical findings showing that “the hope that the availability of social capital is a substitute for unequally distributed other resources is misleading: The positive effects of education and, in a more particular way, of income on the availability of social capital are evident.” Moreover, they find that whereas high levels of social inequality have a negative effect on social capital, a decommodifying welfare state does not have such effect, contrary to what many researchers expected. The relation between the welfare state and social capital is also examined in Hans G. Kippenberg’s and Christoph Henning’s papers. Kippenberg shows how a particularly uncanny “growth” of social capital as a private good was preceded by the retrenchment of the welfare state: the growth of private religious groups taking over former state functions. Following Kippenberg, this institutional transformation “involves the danger of closed and powerful militant brother-

Introduction

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hoods.” Religion may work as a “bonding” social capital (Robert Putnam) that glues together smaller groups based on a comprehensive theory of the good (John Rawls). The very functioning of this group identity prevents it from generating a form of “bridging” social capital. Michaela Rehm discusses the limits of such a framing of social identities in a different setting, namely with regard to the binding power of civil religion in the modern state. She states that civil religion is to be regarded as an unqualified resource, a “weak tie” not befitting an integration into a pluralistic society. Henning makes a similar point on a more abstract, general level. He suggests that social capital should be understood as a remnant of a lost entity, namely a social sphere dedicated to the “common good” and securing the provision of public goods. Transforming public goods into privately appropriated social capital may lead to an increase in social inequality and to a tragedy of the commons, e. g. to a decline of generalized trust in political institutions. This discussion connects to Albert Hirschman’s analysis of the “shifting involvements” between private interest and public action. The above-mentioned ambivalence of the term “social capital” unfolds in a paradoxical development in which the formation and rise of social capital is concomitant with its reduction and impairment. Its ubiquity is undermined by the reservations limiting its use and scope – reservations that can not only lead to the deterioration of social capital, but also to its use for “exploitation” (Dasgupta) and exclusion. This phenomenon can be studied empirically and conceptually, as shown by Dasgupta and Schmid in their papers. So much for social capital as a “dark matter” (Dasgupta) or as the “dark heart of community” (Schmid). But the interdisciplinary re-reading of social capital is not a brainchild of an “age of suspicion” and is not limited to criticism. Conceptual clarifications and the assessment of empirical data give ground for a positive outlook. Undermining “any naïve idea of ‘good’ and ‘caring’ institutions” (Endress) goes hand in hand with working towards a proper understanding of what a “good and just society” (Darwall) would look like. The rise of social capital in economics and social theory can be read as a (biased? half-hearted? heavy-handed?) attempt to overcome the rift between the individual and the state, between interests and institutions. It focuses on how individuals contribute to the social fabric and how their identity, as social identity, relies on it. We need “a sense of common purpose” (Darwall) or a “cooperative-mindedness” which functions as a “capacity to pool our forces and act together” (Schmid). Being aware of the factors fostering this attitude is instrumental for making it more prevalent. Several authors in this volume (Diewald/Luedicke, Endress, Henning, Savage, and Schultheis) agree that less social inequality is a precondition for this attitude. Benevolence towards others is not enough: We also need to respect the “authority” of each

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individual (Darwall calls this “second-person respect”), for it is individual “beliefs” (Dasgupta) and individual “knowledge” (Endress) that decide over the path social capital and social identities will take in the future.

Acknowledgments We thank the Research Committee of the University of St. Gallen, the University’s Research Unit “Cultures, Institutions, Markets” (KIM), and the International Students’ Committee (ISC), organizers of the St. Gallen Symposium, for the generous financial and organizational support in the preparation of this volume. Carolyn Kelly, Barbara Jungclaus, Till Wagner and Susanne Burri have played a significant role in editing and preparing the texts for publication. Earlier versions of most of the papers included in this volume were presented at the occasion of a workshop on social capital held at the University of St. Gallen in 2009.

Literature Granovetter, M. (1974): Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2010): Not for Profit: Why Democracy needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schmid, H. B. (2009): Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science. Dordrecht: Springer.

Dieter Thomä

Varieties of Belonging: Between Appropriation and Familiarization 1 Social capital and belonging: a conceptual conundrum The term “belonging” allows for arranging and re-arranging its assigned subjects and objects in fairly different ways. Questions like ‘Does that belong to you?’ or ‘Do you belong to him?’ are examples of such varieties. They serve as a blueprint for an ambiguity which many theorists addressing the concept of social capital have found puzzling or cumbersome. The following two findings may illustrate this ambiguity. On the one hand social capital describes a setting in which a person is part of (or belongs to) a network. On the other hand, social capital is described as a resource that is at the disposal of a person (or figures among her belongings). Inevitably, the question of ownership comes into play in this case: If there is capital, you expect a capitalist to be around. Yet subjects and objects in social relations involving belonging are anything but fixed. Maintaining property claims in this area turns out to be more difficult than in the case of other forms of capital that are more tangible. In this article I will try to shed some light on the ambiguity of social capital by going back to the varieties of belonging or to the different meanings of the phrase of ‘x belongs to y’. Let me begin with some preliminary remarks on the semantics of ‘belonging to.’ If something belongs to a person, it is available to her, she disposes of it, she is in possession or in command of it. Some kind of ownership is involved here, yet it seems to be of a special kind. Let me point out two things. First: To say that something belongs to someone seems to express a form of ownership that comes with fewer legal constrictions than others. Thus John Locke distinguishes between a first state, in which a thing was in “the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children,” and a second state, in which man’s “labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature […] and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.”¹ Locke thus draws a dis-

 “Man, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had […] in himself the great foundation of property” – “His labour hath taken it out of the

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tinction between informal belongings that come to you naturally and formal property. Second: Belonging seems to entail a practical dimension or some kind of active involvement that exceeds the standard conditions for property in general. Directedness or intentionality are part of the language game of belonging. This becomes evident when we think of the link between belonging and longing. You aim at something, you reach out to something in order to finally get what suits you. The English ‘longing’ is related to the German word ‘langen,’ which we know from the phrase ‘er langte nach dem Glas’ (‘he reached for the glass’). Talking about my belongings is different from talking about my stocks. We usually have them with us, they are within reach or, as Heidegger would put it, “ready-to-hand”. The request “Please take all your belongings with you!” betrays the fact that this is where you usually want them to be. Belonging in a broader sense is based on the correspondence between an intention and its object. In some instances it rather expresses the incidence of fitting than a relation of ownership. If you state that a certain object, like a piece of furniture, just ‘belongs there,’ you mean to say that it is in the right place. I will get back to that later, as it will force me to question the contention that has guided me so far: namely that belonging implies some kind of ownership. Let me first further investigate the finding that belonging seems to imply some kind of practical relation. This finding can be corroborated when we switch to the German equivalent of ‘belonging,’ namely to ‘gehören.’ In the case of ‘gehören’ the practical relation is not defined by the intentional link between a state of longing and a state in which the thing you are after is at your disposition or belongs to you. The word hiding in ‘gehören’ is ‘hören’ (‘hearing’, ‘listening’). The semantics of ‘gehören’ do not lead back to an intentional act directed at an object (as in belonging), but to an interaction between x, who speaks, talks, gives orders and y, who is supposed to hear, to listen, to obey. Here the notion of ownership leads back to the authority to command. ‘Gehören’ can relate to all kinds of persons and things that are under my sway, that comply with my demands. It literally leads back to a relation between humans, yet as the interaction involved is asymmetrical, it is possible to extend it or to equate it to a relation between a person and a thing: someone is in charge, and like a person obeying orders, a thing is subject to dispositions. That is why not only children belong or ‘gehören’ to their parents, but cars belong or ‘gehö-

hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.” Cf. Locke 1988, 298, 289 (II. 40; II. 29); cf. II. 26, 28, 120.

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ren’ to their owners and are expected to readily ‘respond’ at full throttle. Both ‘belonging’ and ‘gehören’ refer to asymmetrical relations between persons or between a person and a thing. Now what happens if I am not in the position of counting my belongings but if I happen to belong to y, or z? As somebody belonging to something or to somebody else, I am certainly not in the position of being the owner or proprietor, but rather in the position of being owned. This does not strike me as a particularly comfortable position, even though I can relate to Gilbert Bécaud’s song “Je t’appartiens” which expresses a strong feeling of belonging in the sense of depending on a person and being devoted to her. (“De tout mon être/ Tu es le seul maître/ Je dois me soumettre/ Je t’appartiens.” – “Of all my being/ You are the sole master/ I must surrender/ I belong to you.”) According to Bécaud’s testimony, belonging implies a strong notion of ownership or command. Human relations are thus transformed into a power game, albeit an exciting or seductive one. Yet we also know of forms of belonging that are more symmetrical – and we are inclined to embrace them. Let us take a closer look at them. If we say that children belong to their parents, we refer by now to the closeness of this relationship rather than to the legal privileges of the parents. (There is no need to remind you of the fact that this was different in the 18th century and remains so in some parts of the world today. The struggle against the property rights of the father over his children and of the husband over his spouse has been long and arduous.) If I belong to a family or to a group, I am not necessarily subject to the orders or intentions issued by the head of the family or the leader of the pack, nor am I to follow the rules set by an anonymous code. How the duties linked to my membership are defined very much depends on the type of collective I belong to. Oftentimes this belonging comes without proprietor, without a strong notion of ownership. We register a major alteration in the language game of belonging here. According to my first account of belonging, the person to whom something ‘belongs’ typically is human and what belongs to him typically is a thing or a thing-like, objectified person. The image that comes to mind now, in this second version of the language game of belonging, is altogether different. Those who belong to x typically are humans, and they belong to other humans or to manmade institutions or abstract entities (like a group, a law firm, a club, a nation). If, in the first version of the language game of belonging, the intentional stance is clearly on the side of the one longing for something and appropriating it, in this new setting it is no longer clear where to look for such intentionality. So it goes two ways: I can make something belong to me by an act of appropriation, or I can belong to something. In the latter case this affiliation is either involuntary (you cannot pick your parents yourself) or it is based on your choice

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of becoming a member, of making yourself belong to something. Yet even in this second case you have to rely on some kind of welcoming gesture or go through some kind of protocol in order to be accepted. Belonging in this second sense comes close to membership or association. Let me illustrate this with a small anecdote that may be elucidating in this regard. When I joined the Getty Research Institute in 2002, I learnt that it was inappropriate and politically incorrect to speak of those accompanying the fellows as their spouses or their family. This did not come as a surprise. Some of the persons concerned were not married, there were gay couples, etc. So there was the need for a different kind of wording. Those who belonged to the fellows were officially called “associates.” I must confess that I found that slightly odd, yet I did not have a compelling alternative to offer. To be sure, this expression aptly rendered the fact that those accompanying the fellows had joined them by consent, voluntarily. It would, however, be jumping to conclusions if I said that belonging could be transformed into association without any semantic loss or alteration. Belonging still seems to be slightly more demanding and less self-determined than association. I was describing the turning of the tables that takes place between version one and version two of the language game of belonging. The intentional stance can be maintained to a certain extent when we switch from those who have belongings to those who belong to something. We can think of associates, members, partners and the like who act based on the intention to belong to somebody or something. Yet the retention or reappropriation of the intentional stance is not complete. If you belong to something you are not fully in charge, you cannot possibly be in possession of what you belong to. The intentional stance can be redefined, relocated, adopted, but you cannot claim to be endowed with property rights when in the position of belonging to something or somebody. Social capital is not my main focus in this paper, but since social capital is about benefitting from belonging to social networks, my discussion of belonging should have some bearing on the discussion of social capital as well. What would it look like? We are used to the idea that capital comes with an owner. It is hard to think of it as something unappropriated. This is not only true of economic capital, but of social capital as well. One way of meeting this requirement is to conceptualize social capital as something ‘stored’ in networks for individuals. Thus they are to be recognized as its owners. As a matter of fact, this is what has been argued by James Coleman (1988, S98) and other theorists of social capital who frame it in an individualistic setting. Robert Putnam and others settle for a form of social capital that is collectively generated and exploited (Putnam 1995, 67); they do not clearly attribute it to a proprietor. This prevents them from making strong

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claims on ownership. The price they pay is that their concept of social capital tends to be vague and that the link between social capital and other forms of capital, first and foremost economic assets, becomes rather weak. Yet arguing for a more individualistic reading of social capital is also tricky. In light of the previous discussion on belonging, attributing social capital to an individual owner appears to be self-defeating. It does not make a lot of sense to say that you own what you belong to, that belonging to a group could coalesce with being in possession of the relations constitutive for this group. Thus we are confronted with a conundrum: Either we stick to an individualistic reading of capital ownership and have a hard time coping with the fact that we do not have full power over the networks we make use of, or we settle for a more collective notion of social capital and run the risk of employing a less than rigid notion of capital. There are two obvious ways out of this calamity, two ways that may allow social capital theory to make use of the idea of belonging within its conceptual framework. Both strategies need to return from version two of the language game of belonging (I belong to a group, etc.) to version one of the language game of belonging (something belongs to me, etc.). It remains to be seen whether these ways are viable. According to the first of these strategies, I would have to insist on the fact that I do not belong to a group but that this group belongs to me. In this case the capital generated and stored within this group evidently belongs to me as well. A mobster may be in this position, but we know from Mario Puzo’s and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” that such a privileged position isn’t carved in stone. In a world of fierce competition and distrust such a position appears to be extremely unstable. According to the second of these strategies I would have to settle for some kind of collective ownership. I would not only belong to a group, but would also climb the ladder and think of myself as being a shareholder owning parts of the stock of this group or “credit slips” (Coleman 1988, S103). By upholding these property rights I would be entitled to use the capital stored and provided by this group. But it is hard to imagine how this second-order ownership is to be conceptualized and formally implemented. Let me pause for a moment. I started my considerations with the still indisputable claim that the discourse on social capital entails a reference to belonging. It was also taken for granted that the concept of social capital cannot do without some reference to the second version of the language game of belonging that features persons belonging to a group or to other persons. Yet I have run into problems when figuring out how the notion of property that seems to be part and parcel of any notion of capital coalesces with these findings. The situation gets

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fuzzier and fuzzier the more we talk about persons belonging to other persons or to a group, the more belonging is regarded as a feature of human interaction, the more the intentional asymmetry between longing or being in command on the one hand, and belonging on the other hand is revoked. This brings me to the conclusion that I must leave social capital theory aside for a moment and scrutinize belonging as it transcends ownership. Instead of being restricted by an analogy that turns out to be rather complicated I will seek to gain some conceptual elbow-room by analyzing belonging in its broadest possible sense (2.). Hopefully this will bring me into a position to cast some new light on social capital, on its shortcomings and its potential (3.)

2 Oikeiosis in Stoicism, Locke, and Smith Take the saying ‘There is a lid for every pot.’ Or imagine people fitting together or belonging together like pieces of a puzzle or, as they say, like ‘birds of a feather.’ We could also think of the two fitting pieces or fragments made of bone or pottery called symbola in ancient Greece, which enabled people to reconnect with trustworthy affiliates and confirm relationships. In the Symposium, Plato let Aristophanes take up this notion of symbols in his fabulous story of the sphereshaped pre-human beings that provide him with an allegory of love. Zeus felt threatened by these powerful sphere-shaped beings, so he cut them in half which made them look desperately for their beloved complement, for the proper half to whom they truly belonged. Again, these halves were called symbola in Greek, for the very reason that they were parts of a larger whole and fit perfectly to one another. When one of these handicapped halves was lucky enough to find its true ‘other,’ it enjoyed – I quote from the Symposium – “friendship, familiarity, and love” (Plato, Symposium 192c). I expect to learn more about the structure of this kind of belonging by turning to the most general term in Plato’s triad: to “familiarity” or, in Greek, oikeiòtes. This transfers us into a whole new semantic setting in which we find the household or oikos, the dwelling in a house or oikein, and things that are oikeioi, i. e. equipment that belongs to us. We also learn about persons who are oikeioi, i. e. our kin, people to whom we are related or (!) can relate to. Last but not least, we practice oikeiosis, that is, we are involved in a process of appropriation or familiarization with ourselves and with the world. I will focus on the last of the terms assembled here: oikeiosis. As this term is highly ambiguous in itself, it will allow me to compare and further analyze the varieties of belonging in general, be they property-oriented or not. Particular attention will be paid to forms of belonging that transcend ownership.

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Oikeiosis literally means a process in which something or somebody comes to belong to you (or to your house). Translating this concept, the meaning of which has been shaped by Stoic philosophy, is notoriously difficult. It is usually rendered by one of the two terms that I have already used: “appropriation” or “familiarization.”² These variants make it abundantly clear why a discussion of oikeiosis can contribute to a debate on belonging. The difference between a form of belonging which entails strong property rights and a form of belonging which equals affiliation is mirrored in the two modes of oikeiosis: appropriation on the one hand, familiarization on the other. This ambiguity is framed by a larger set of questions that circle around the concept of a person and her position in the social realm. Those two modes of belonging, one focusing on being in command and another focusing on relations of association or bonding, hint at a fundamental divide in modern theories of the person and her sociability. I will discuss this divide, this great divergence in a nutshell by turning to the reception of Stoic oikeiosis in early modern philosophy or, to be precise, in John Locke and Adam Smith. We will meet a champion of appropriation (Locke) and an advocate of familiarization (Smith). For the readers of C. B. Macpherson’s Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), it will not come as a surprise that Locke, in my setting, takes on the role of defending appropriation. In fact it should also not be surprising to relate Locke’s position to Stoicism. A premise shared by virtually all early modern philosophers is the fact that a person’s main concern is self-preservation. This is Stoic heritage: self-preservation figures prominently in the Stoics’ account of the individual. Diogenes Laertius sums up this position as following: “An animal’s first impulse […] is to selfpreservation, because nature from the outset endears [oikeiouses] it to itself […] ‘The dearest thing [proton oikeion] to every animal is its own constitution and its consciousness thereof’ […]. We are forced then to conclude that nature, in constituting the animal, made it near and dear to itself [oikeiothai pro eauto]; for so it comes to repel all that is injurious and give free access to all that is serviceable or akin to it [ta oikeia].”³ The task of caring for what is your own is virtually all over the place in this quote. Julia Annas (1993, 263) summarizes this view by

 Annas 1993, 262, argues in favor of using “familiarization.” Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 350, prefer “appropriation”. It should be mentioned that even though Long and Sedley choose appropriation, they are aware of the distinctive features of oikeiosis that transcend property; cf. op. cit., Vol. I, 350 – 352.  Diogenes Laertius 1931, bk. VII, 85 (with a quote from Chrysippus); cf. Martin 2009, 5. Cf. – for a comparison of different translations – Annas 1993, 263; Brennan 2005, 155; Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 346 (57 A).

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stating: “It is natural for us, right from the start, to have a concern with ourselves.” This concern is not limited to the attempt at securing resources. Such an attempt would presuppose a person already firmly established, a person having achieved, as it were, a position high in the saddle. Stoic self-care typically does not take this achievement as given but raises the question of how to “become who you are.”⁴ Self-preservation is enshrined in a process of self-constitution, it is based on an exploration of what matters to you. A person is not something given, but emerges from a process in which she gains a deeper, more elaborate understanding of who she really is. The Stoic emphasis on the individual is instrumental in setting off early modern individualism. A quote by Cicero summarizing the Stoic position anticipates what John Locke has to say: “A living creature feels an attachment to itself, and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection for its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution” (Cato, as quoted by Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, III.16). The concern with oneself comprises the practical task to preserve oneself and the emotional stance in which one embraces or feels affection for oneself (sibi conciliari et commendari ad se conservandum). As a matter of fact, Locke picks up this line of thought in his own theory of self-preservation. Central to this theory is a twofold strategy aiming at the appropriation of resources on the one hand and at some kind of selfappropriation on the other. In his account of the “appropriation”⁵ of goods or resources, Locke seeks to foster the rights of a person to dispose of “things which tend to preserve” her (to pick up Cicero’s phrase again). “It is plausible to assume that the Lockean theory of labor has been constructed in the tradition of the Stoic theorem of self-preservation in the natural living world” (Brandt 2001– 2002, 79). It is safe to say, however, that Locke is much more precise and outspoken than the Stoics regarding the link between appropriation and property. Locke presents a unified view of the physical and the legal aspects of appropriation.  Cf. the creative re-reading of Pindar in Nietzsche 1974, 219 (§ 270): “You shall become the person you are.”  Cf. Locke 1988, 289 (II. 29): “His labour hath taken it out of the hands of Nature, where it was common, and belong’d equally to all her Children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.” Cf. op. cit., 285 – 6 (II. 25): “Whether we consider natural Reason, which tells us, that Men, being once born, have a right to their Preservation, and consequently to Meat and Drink, and such other things, as Nature affords for their Subsistence: Or Revelation, which gives us an account of those Grants God made of the World to Adam, and to Noah, and his Sons, ‘tis very clear, that God […] has given the Earth to the Children of Men, given it to Mankind in common.” Locke’s reference to Stoicism becomes abundantly clear in his reference to “natural Reason.”

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As he focuses on the appropriation of nature we may be inclined to think that the Stoic idea of self-appropriation as a process of becoming who you are does not really matter to him. Locke’s account of self-preservation seems to presuppose that a person’s actions are based on self-interest, i. e. that she already has a clear-cut picture of what she wants and who she is. Yet even though Locke has promoted the idea of an isolated, “punctual self” (Taylor 1989, 161), he does not take the self as something given. In his Essay concerning human understanding, he also talks about the task of constituting oneself as a person. Thus next to the appropriation of things, Locke also talks about self-appropriation: “[A] person […] is a forensick term appropriating actions and their merit […]. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions.” (Locke 1979, bk. II., ch. 27, § 26) Locke is obviously aware of all kinds of processes (of concern, imputation, etc.) that are involved in the task of self-constitution or self-appropriation. Central to these processes is the challenge to attribute past and present experiences, actions and attitudes to oneself. Part of this task is the option to exclude or not to consider any such qualifications. Guided by her “concern for happiness” a person may reject certain features that are deemed detrimental to her being happy. “Therefore,” Locke continues,” whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in, than if they had never been done.” (ibid., my italics) In this last quotation Locke’s indebtedness to Stoicism is indeed striking.⁶ His talk of reconciliation and appropriation echoes the ambiguity of “familiarization” and “appropriation” in oikeiosis and directly refers to the Latin pairing of sibi conciliari et commendari. Charitable readers will also be willing to link back Locke’s notion of happiness to Stoic considerations of the “good life.” Seneca states: “First of all, the living being is adapted to [connects to, relates to] itself [sibi ipsum conciliatur animal] […]. I seek pleasure; for whom? For myself. I am therefore looking out for [taking care of] myself [mei curam ago]. […] Since I gauge all my actions with reference to my own welfare, I am looking out for [taking care of] myself before all else.”⁷

 Cf. Sorabji 2006, 107: “Locke uses some distinctively Stoic terms in describing the acknowledgment of past actions as one’s own. His talk of our reconciling and appropriating certain past actions reminds us of the Stoic talk of oikeiôsis, which is often translated as ‘appropriation’ and of the Latin equivalent, conciliatio, which is used in Seneca’s account of the theory of appropriation.”  Seneca 1925, 405, 407 (Ep. 121, 16). I have altered the English translation in order to make clear that conciliari goes beyond adaptation and to stress the prominent role of cura ; cf. op. cit., 404,

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Locke does not just rehash Stoicism but presents a revised conception of self-appropriation. The main alteration is announced in a somewhat oblique manner in the passage just quoted from the Essay. The attempt to build a personality is depicted by Locke as a selection process in which incidents conducive to oneself are adopted or integrated, whereas others are rejected or excluded as if they had never occurred to the person concerned or as if “they had never been done.” All incidents need to pass a test that proves whether a person can “reconcile” (with) them or “appropriate” them (see above). Reconciliation with oneself is very much in line with the Stoic template, but this term looks strangely out of place in Locke’s argument: namely that a person shall feel free to incorporate or appropriate what she finds useful. Reconciliation inevitably implies some kind of arrangement with things that are given, which you can neither change nor annihilate. However vaguely, the Stoics acknowledge this precondition in the requirement of living according to “nature” or in appealing to the “constitution”⁸ of the individual. This task just does not figure in the process of self-appropriation envisaged by Locke. His deviation from Stoicism becomes evident in his not having any further systematic use for reconciliation. Locke instead encourages the person to shape or create her identity.⁹ He reads a 406: “Primum sibi ipsum conciliatur animal […]. Voluptatem peto, cui? Mihi. Ergo mei curam ago. […] Si omnia propter curam mei facio, ante omnia est mei cura.” The German translation does justice to these connotations; cf. Seneca 1995, Vol. 4, 808 – 9: “Zunächst ist mit sich selbst jedes Lebewesen vertraut […]. Genuß suche ich, für wen? Für mich; also trage ich Sorge für mich. […] Wenn ich alles aus Sorge um mich tue, steht die Sorge für mich vor allem.” For the link between Locke and Seneca cf. also Brandt 2001– 2002, 80. As Brandt is mainly interested in the connection between care and consciousness, he does not scrutinize the difference between Locke and the Stoics regarding appropriation.  Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 346 (57 A); Diogenes Laertius 1931, bk. VII, 85 (see note 3 above). Cf. also Seneca 1925, Vol. 3, 404 (Ep. 121, 15): “Constitutioni suae conciliatur”. Thus pleasure cannot be the primary criterion for a person to identify with something. The same point is made in Forschner 1995, 147: “Das, worauf die protè hormè zeitlich und sachlich vorgängig zielt, ist nicht die Lust (hedonè), sondern das eigene Sein, dessen Wahrung und Entfaltung. Lust und Schmerz sind Begleiterscheinungen (epigennémata), die sich einstellen, wenn das Lebewesen in naturgemäßem Zustand und naturgemäßer Tätigkeit das ihm Eigene und Zuträglich erreicht bzw. realisiert oder in dieser seiner naturgemäßen Verfassung beeinträchtigt wird.”  Sorabji’s position (2006, 108) strikes me as all too cautious when he states that Locke “seems to be allowing, whether he wants to or not, that one has a hand in creating one’s self.” Whereas Sorabij seeks to protect Locke from falling prey to the temptations of self-creation, Jonathan Glover (1988, 110) is eager to embrace them: “Our individuality is not something just given to us, but is, in part, something we ourselves create. The way we think of ourselves, and of our past, has a special role in this self-creation.” – For a rebuttal of the praise of self-creation and choice cf. Charles Taylor 1976, 299: “And it is this kind of responsibility for oneself, I would maintain, not that of radical choice, but the responsibility for radical evaluation implicit in the nature of a

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person’s relation to the world and to herself along the lines of appropriation and self-appropriation. His possessive individualism also makes him think of a person’s relations to others as contracts in which individual property claims are recognized and protected by way of mutual agreement. Let me further illustrate this account of social relations by briefly turning to an example not given by Locke himself: the theory of marriage put forward by Immanuel Kant. It is safe to say that marriage typically invites a person to think of the relation to her spouse as a form of belonging which entails togetherness, dependency or even devotion. Yet in order to maintain self-governance and strong property rights in marital relations, marriage needs to be construed as a contract that allows two persons to mutually make use of each other. Kant states that marriage as a “sexual community” is to be based on the “reciprocal possession of persons […] actualized through the reciprocal use of their sexual attributes.”¹⁰ According to Kant, the “use […] of the sexual organs” of the other is to be regarded as legitimate only “under one condition,” namely “that, while one Person is acquired by the other as if [she were] a thing, this other [Person] in turn reciprocally acquires the first. For in that way the Person regains himself (or herself) and once more reestablishes his (or her) Personhood.”¹¹ If a person is instrumentalized in social relations at all, she must have agreed on getting involved in that manner beforehand. Her agreement depends on the expectation that she herself benefits from this involvement in the light of her own autonomous pursuits. It is a small step from this account of marriage to an account of social capital that is in tune with Locke’s and Kant’s concern with individual self-appropriation. Under the strong requirement of defending property rights, social capital has to be conceived as a domain that is under the control of individuals. It is part of a framework that ideally consists of complete contracts meticulously regulating the input and output of all parties concerned. This requirement runs

strong evaluator, which is essential to our notion of a person.” (Taylor’s attack on the prevalence of “choice” is mainly directed against the view proposed by Sartre in “Being and Nothingness” and others writings.)  Kant 1999, p. 91 (§ 27).  Kant 1999, 88 (§ 25). The first insertion is mine, the second is from John Ladd, the editor of Kant’s “Metaphysical Elements of Justice.” Cf. Kant 1930, 167: p. 167: “If I yield myself completely to another and obtain the person of the other in return, I win myself back. I have given myself up as the property of another, but in turn I take that other as my property, and so win myself back again in winning the person whose property I have become. In this way the two persons become a unity of will.” Cf. Korsgaard 1996, 195; Langton 1997, 130. For the controversy on Kant’s views of marriage and of sexuality cf., among others, Herman 1993; Annas 1984, 15 – 31.

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against the promise often associated with social capital: that it stands for a willingness to cooperate beyond formal regulations. Where does the discussion of Locke leave us? It was my intention to show how his selective reading of oikeiosis leads to a specific notion of the person, to a somewhat choosy version of self-appropriation and to an appropriative use of social relations. Under these premises it does not come as a surprise that belonging, in a Lockean perspective, is biased towards individual property rights. According to my earlier more general claim that the varieties of belonging hint at a great divide in the theories of the person and her sociability we can see Locke as a representative for a strain of thought that is at odds with embeddedness and makes it difficult to admit involvement and commitment. It figures in an early chapter of the history of individualism and its discontents. If Locke’s reading of oikeiosis is one-sided, we are well advised to consider another reading of oikeiosis that may be equally one-sided, yet tilts in a different direction. The key for such an alternative reading is already in our hands. As mentioned above, oikeiosis oscillates between “appropriation” and “familiarization.” Now what can we make of familiarization? “Familiarization” aptly renders a quality of belonging that is experienced when relating to people who respond or correspond to the way one is. Therefore, your concern with yourself naturally extends to a concern with others whom you regard as your kin, as being of the same kind, or as a complement or completion of your own life. According to this line of thought, the difference between selfpreservation and the concern for others virtually vanishes. They count as two versions of the same token: familiarization.¹² This gives way to a reading of oikeiosis that is not so much concerned with securing resources for one’s own self-preservation but with discovering affinities and affiliations. The Stoics themselves pursued this strategy and moved step by step from individual self-concern to familiarization with relatives, with “fellowcitizens” and eventually with the “whole human race.”¹³ The idea of “mutual at It is controversial whether there are two different kinds of oikeiosis or whether its variants belong to a conclusive process; for the former view cf. Annas 1993, 265, 275; for the latter view cf. Brennan 2005, 158. I cannot discuss that here.  Hierocles, as quoted in Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 349 (57 G); cf. Brennan 2005, 157; Annas 1993, 267. – Zeno says: “We ought not to dwell [oikomen] in cities or in districts, dividing ourselves up into local systems of justice, but instead come to think of all human beings as fellow citizens of the same district, making a single life in this single cosmos, like a herd that pastures together and is ruled in common by a common law.” Cf. Zeno, as quoted by Plutarch, in Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 429 (67 A). – The Stoic extension of familiarity is in line with recent research on human cooperation showing that reciprocity and belonging are not confined to kinship; cf. for a critique of kinship theory Fehr/Fischbacher/Gächter 2002, 1– 25.

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traction between men” is the basis for the much-celebrated Stoic cosmopolitanism. “The mere fact that someone is a man makes it incumbent on another man not to regard him as alien” (Cicero, De finibus III. 62– 68, cf. Long and Sedley 1987, Vol. I, 348 [57 F]). The “alien” or allotrios figures as the exact opposite to the fellow belonging to the same oikos, an oikos that has grown more and more inclusive and eventually becomes a kosmos. According to Tad Brennan the Stoics discovered a generalized “oikeion-feeling.” “People have an ability to see others as akin to them, as part of ‘me and mine’, and to feel a powerful sympathy on that basis.” (2005, 162) The very wording chosen by Brennan makes it impossible to not think of an early modern admirer of Stoicism, Adam Smith. His discussion of fellow-feeling and sympathy is to be regarded as a reading of oikeiosis favoring familiarization. Like John Locke, Smith follows the Stoics in stating that every living being is “by nature recommended to its own care” and “endeavour[s] to preserve” itself. (These are Smith’s own words.) The “self-love of man,” Smith says, “embraced, if I may say so, his body and all its different members, his mind and all its different faculties and powers, and desired the preservation and maintenance of them all.”¹⁴ These “passions belonging to self-preservation” are juxtaposed with the “passions […] which regard the society.”¹⁵ Yet self-preservation and sociability do not belong to separate spheres. To the extent that sociability contributes to being a person, the social passions are part and parcel of the process of self-preservation or self-care. Interaction is not confined to relations ruled by exchange and competition, but comprises a “correspondence of […] sentiments” that binds people together and should be set apart, according to Smith, “from any […] self-interested consideration.” (Smith 2002, 17 [I.II.1]) With “sympathy” and “fellow-feeling” (2002, 12– 13 [I. I.3 – 5]) Smith picks up (and transforms) the Stoic legacy. He also indulges in the Stoic discovery of the “citizen[s] of the world.”¹⁶ Cosmopolitanism is the last building block in an edifice of social relations that is grounded on the ability and inclination to familiarize with others. Even though Smith himself does not  Smith 2002, 321– 322 (VII. II. 1. 15 – 16). Cf. Smith 2002, 248 (VI. I. 1): “The preservation and healthful state of the body seem to be the objects which Nature first recommends to the care of every individual.” Cf. Waszek 1984, 603.  This is a popular distinction drawn by Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried Herder, and many others. Here I quote Edmund Burke 1990 (sec. IX, XI, XII, XVIII). Hutcheson talks about a “Division of our Desires” into “Selfish” and “Publick or Benevolent Desires;” cf. Hutcheson 2002, 22.  Smith 2002, 162 (III. III. 11): “Man, according to the Stoics, ought to regard himself, not as something separated and detached, but as a citizen of the world, a member of the vast commonwealth of nature.”

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speak of familiarization, it is safe to say that this term epitomizes his reading of oikeiosis in the same manner as appropriation epitomizes Locke’s account. Familiarity extends way beyond the realm of the family. One becomes familiar with all kinds of people. One comes to realize that another person is of a certain kind or has particular features. This epistemic approach coincides with a practical turn: you feel attracted by a person, appreciate her, embrace her. This familiarity is not confined to the fact of homology or complementarity between the persons concerned. It creates a new social setting, requires the affirmation of some kind of togetherness, of clinging together, of sharing a destiny, of taking part in a joint endeavor. A person embracing and affirming the experience of familiarity does not stay the same. Becoming familiar with others is accompanied by a process of self-transformation, by becoming a slightly different version of oneself. Becoming who one is, in this case, means adopting a self-understanding comprising sociability: one is part of or belongs to a larger unity. Not only does one share features with others, but the very experience of sharing is recognized as a central property of one’s identity as a person. If this sharing is one of your qualities, the concern for others is, to a certain extent, self-concern, and the loss of others is, to a certain extent, self-loss. This explains why a farewell is said to be a “small death.” It should have become clear by now why Smith plays a central role in the great divide of modern readings of a person’s sociability. As mentioned earlier I see him taking sides with familiarization rather than with appropriation. His account helps us rethink sociability along the lines of a person’s identification with others. Sympathetic identification makes me “in some measure the same person with him” (Smith 2002, 12; cf. Darwall 1999, 160). This is crucial for sociality in general. What happens to the concept of social capital in this new setting? It would be futile to look for strong property claims in a setting in which appropriation has been replaced by familiarization. Specifying and calculating the pay-off or individual benefit of sociable self-transformation is impossible. Yet it is telling that the experience of sharing is described as being enriching. This wording is not just a helpless metaphorical gesture. Belonging together, belonging to a group is also a form of self-enhancement. I do not mean to say that by way of this enrichment familiarization becomes a spin-off of social capital. But it is worth noting that these two models have something in common: the claim of growth. In Smith, sympathy and fellow-feeling are primarily linked to situations where people are, as it were, ‘locked’ together. They are seized or overwhelmed by the same experience and appreciate the fact that they share it. In a broader perspective we also consider experiences of togetherness in which basic consent

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or commitment accompany the cultivation and appreciation of differences.¹⁷ Along these lines we could say that attention to others “must have some edge to it,”¹⁸ else it is worthless. This awareness of differences corresponds to the fact that social capital is not only about building trust, but also about creating access to and growing familiar with other people’s capabilities that may well differ from one’s own. Such access, which is to be regarded as a kind of growth in its own right, is granted to those who belong together and embrace familiarization.

3 The Afterlife of Social Capital Locke’s and Smith’s different readings of Stoicism mark a bifurcation between different notions of the “proper.” This bifurcation is reflected in the double meaning of property that oscillates between property as ownership and property as an attribute of your identity as a person and of a ‘fitting’ context. If anywhere, social capital is expected to fit where ownership is enforced, that is, on Locke’s side. Yet we should be careful with any such assumptions. Capital may well be a property, but it has particular properties. Instead of subsuming social capital as an asset accessible to appropriation, I must take a step back and make good an omission that has occurred earlier: the fact that I started my discussion without saying anything about the concept of ‘capital’ itself. It is safe to say that capital is somehow related to belonging. But this does not mean that the potential of the concept of social capital – if it has any – lies in the area that is ruled by appropriation in the sense of Locke or his followers. We first need to have a closer look at the different features of capital and lay out their implications. A brief definition of capital can be summed up in five points. (1) It consists of some kind of resource that is valuable and usable. (2) This resource is invested in order to enable a process that involves a practice or a cluster of joint practices. (3) The capital is withdrawn or extracted from this process with a gain when it comes to an end. (This is usually called return on investment.) – Whereas these three points concern the metabolism or the ‘flow’ of capital, the other

 Jacques Derrida strictly distinguishes between friendship and familiarity or oikeiotès. He even claims that true friendship must abandon any allusion to familiarity which engenders homogeneity and conformism; cf. Derrida 1997, 154– 169. I would claim that people cannot appreciate their being different without having some common ground. Derrida’s stylized version of pure difference strikes me as lopsided.  Cf. Emerson 1983, 262– 3: “Your goodness must have some edge to it, – else it is none.”

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two points refer to the objects and subjects that are involved in this process. (4) As capital is a resource, the objective quality, the state and shape of this resource matters, esp. as it is available in different forms (economic, human, cultural, social, etc.). This plurality comes with the condition that exchangeability or commutability between different sorts of capital is operative. (5) Talking about a resource does not make a lot of sense without a person using and employing it. A person is formally entitled to such use if she is a capital owner or, to put it simply, a capitalist. Which of these features of capital pose particular problems when it comes to social capital? It has been my suspicion from the outset that it is difficult to uphold ownership claims in this case. Interestingly, Locke’s analysis of appropriation does not circumvent these difficulties, but makes them only more obvious. He seeks to make sure that persons are formally entitled to processes of appropriation. Yet these entitlements are at odds with the building of social capital that typically comes without any such formalities. Integrating social capital in a Lockean framework seems a futile task. Pushing for appropriation does not go along well with the particular form of capital that is called ‘social.’ When applying the general definition of capital to ‘social capital,’ point (5) of this definition has to be revoked or at least mitigated. Point (4) turns out to raise complications as well: the claim that the different forms of capital are exchangeable or tradable. Three problems come to mind. – First, it is obvious that the exchangeability of different forms of capital is often limited. You may be able to trade social or cultural capital for economic capital, but this does not work the other way around to the same extent. While this point has been widely discussed, a second point has been mostly overlooked. The exchangeability of an object simply means that you can trade it for something else. Inevitably this means that at the end of this exchange process you have less of x and more of y. If you have bought diamonds or an impressionist painting, you have less money than before. This is supposedly different when it comes to social capital. You do not expect to experience a thinning out of your network when you use it for cutting a deal. There are transfers, but they function somewhat differently than in the economy. Third, the whole idea of exchangeability runs against the intuition that belonging is a good in itself or that it represents an intrinsic value. It would not hurt to say that something that you find valuable has an impact on other aspects of your life (like a happy marriage that makes you a more cheerful employee), you could even use some economic language here and call this a by-product, but these interrelations do not mean that you instrumentalize one sphere for the sake of another. The rewards that you expect are not “disjunctive” (to use a term coined by Harry Frankfurt; 1999, 164). You really care whether you do this or that.

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Given the serious problems in extending the concept of capital to a wide range of human activities, it is startling that the notion of social capital has served as an inspiration for so many different theorists. Many commentators have vividly described the discrepancy between the popularity and plausibility of this term: “The social capital boom reflected a heightened awareness in policy and academic circles of real people’s values, (rather than the empirically implausible utility functions of Homo economicus), of how people interact in their daily lives, in families, neighbourhoods, and work groups, not just as buyers, sellers, and citizens, and of the bankruptcy of the ideologically charged planning-versusmarkets debate. Perhaps social capital, like Voltaire’s God, would have to have been invented had it not existed. It may even be a good idea. A good term it is not.” (Bowles and Gintis 2002, F420) According to a widespread explanation, the “social capital boom” is driven by interests rather than by sound research. This explanation builds on findings from the history of ‘human capital’ where two sets of such interests have been identified. One of them could be called the humanization of the economy, the other the economization of human life (cf. Thomä 2006). The first strategy claims that by embracing the notion of human capital we give credit to the human factor in economic processes, appreciate the contribution of employees, and value their potential. The second strategy is part of a process of economization or of “economic imperialism” and is guided by the idea of subjecting individuals to an economic logic altogether. These two readings clearly reverberate in the debate on social capital. Accordingly we could say that this concept either makes us recognize the importance of social relations in their own right, or that it helps subject them to the economic logic. I am hesitant when it comes to reducing social capital theory to an interestguided endeavor. This reluctance does not make me defend strong claims of exchangeability and ownership in social relations; here I take the side of the critics of social capital. My reluctance is rather fueled by other features of capital highlighted in the short definition above: those features that describe the metabolism of capital. They grasp the availability of resources, their immersion or investment in practices, and the possible outcome of such a process. My hunch is that the attempt to describe the phenomenon of belonging, of being part of a social context or network could benefit from making use of such metabolism. I will explore the potential of this idea by comparing social capital theory to other accounts that aim at describing social relations and social cohesion. I choose two such accounts that have the advantage of not being hampered by untenable claims of ownership and exchangeability from the outset. This qualifies them to be contenders for social capital theory.

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The first account is based on the notion of “embeddedness.” I cannot expand upon the history of this concept here (Dale 2011); it is usually traced back to Karl Polanyi who discussed the embeddedness of economic systems in social relations in his seminal work The Great Transformation (1944, 272). Since then it has been used by a diverse group of authors including the communitarians Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 205) and Michael Sandel (1982, 93), the sociologist Mark Granovetter (1985), and ‘Third Way’-theorist Anthony Giddens (1990, 21– 28). It is now often used in a more general way and alludes to the idea of individuals being embedded in the social realm in general – or of their being disembedded. Embeddedness has also become a complement to the concept of social capital in management studies (Uzzi 1996; Walter, Lechner and Kellermanns 2007; Lewis and Chamlee-Wright 2008; Ng and Feldman 2010). Theories of embeddedness obviously address a similar set of questions as social capital theory, but they are based on much more modest (or ‘thinner’) presuppositions and are thus less exposed to criticism. Before expanding on this comparison, I want to mention a second account that aims at describing the phenomenon of belonging without making any strong ownership claims. This account is based on the notion of “strong reciprocity” (cf., e. g., Gintis 2000; Fehr/Fischbacher/Gächter 2002; Bowles and Gintis 2011). As opposed to “strong altruism,” “strong reciprocity” goes beyond “unconditional kindness” and is concerned with a functioning social fabric. Empirical research has found evidence for such behavior. It finds human beings committed to a common cause or to the common good without a (more or less) hidden agenda set by (more or less enlightened) self-interest. Even though some of the ‘founding fathers’ of strong reciprocity cautiously relate this concept to social capital (Bowles and Gintis 2002), the differences are striking. Whereas social capital cannot help but to be haunted by property claims and by the quest for individual benefits, strong reciprocity declines such claims. To be sure, strong reciprocators would not mind benefitting from a functioning social fabric; rather the opposite. But such a self-centered expectation is not the driving force behind what they are doing. Broadly speaking, embeddedness and strong reciprocity are contenders to social capital. It would of course require a careful analysis of the various strains and the respective scope of these three theories if I wanted to thoroughly assess their cogency. I just want to hint at one point that makes me think that social capital theory does not just play the role of a whipping boy in this discourse. The question that I would like to raise is simply how these three accounts conceive change in the social realm or in social networks. My tentative answer to this question is: The embedded self and the strong reciprocator are basically unconcerned with change, and this is why social capital is back in play – in spite

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of the fact that subjective ownership and objective exchangeability are unsustainable. The social realm as envisaged by theorists of embeddedness cannot help but to take on a static or stationary character. The embedded self is sheltered, bolstered and carried along by a social context. Its relation to the social fabric is primarily marked by dependency or passivity. When talking about embeddedness one inevitably pictures a person lying in a bed. Communitarian theorists rightly claim that the very fact of their being embedded enables subjects to act, but this agency is derivative. You have to take as given where you are embedded in. In a different vein, the strong reciprocator also endorses a stationary view of the social. Such a person actively maintains the social fabric, acts responsibly, enforces rules, and punishes defectors. The very idea of reciprocity presupposes a balance, equality or mutuality of expectations and demands between and among the persons concerned. Strong reciprocators act on the basis of convictions that they enforce and eventually expect to be shared by each and everybody. Whereas embeddedness presupposes something given that grants stability, reciprocity turns stability into something that is to be achieved. Advocates of the embedded subject and of strong reciprocity carry out an important task: they act as operators of stability. They are not concerned (and are not supposed to be concerned) with transition or mobilization. This leads to the question of how to conceptualize such change and development. It seems to me that the metabolism of capital provides us with one possible description of this process. Social capital is suggestive not just for its deplorably ideological capacity of blending individualism and sociability. It is suggestive for good reasons. The metabolism of social capital can be described as follows: (a) I take the initiative or undertake an initial effort to get involved; (b) I am actively participating in a social process driven by synergy or energy (Aristotle’s energeia); (c) I emerge from this process somewhat transformed and call this process fruitful or rewarding when I have been able to connect to other people, to build relationships, and to adopt my self-image in the light of these new experiences. It is not mandatory to describe sociable self-transformation by going back to social capital theory. But it is commendable to consider it a tool for describing and shaping such a process. Social capital enables us to grasp its dynamics. This feature plays a central role in a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson that can be read as a plea for social capital avant la lettre and may serve its purpose just because it is all too lofty. I close by quoting this passage which basically describes the superiority of “the soul’s economy” over the “merchant’s economy” (Emerson 1983, 991, 994– 996, 1010):

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“He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times. […] The world is his tool-chest, and he is successful, or his education is carried on just so far, as is the marriage of his faculties with nature, or, the degree in which he takes up things into himself. […] To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. […] The reader of Humboldt’s ‘Cosmos’ follows the marches of a man whose eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated, and who is using these to add to the stock. […] The rich take up something more of the world into man’s life. […] Is not then the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be […]. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization. […] Well, the man must be capitalist.”

Literature Annas, J. (1984): “Personal Love and Kantian Ethics in Effi Briest”. In: Philosophy and Literature 8, p. 15 – 31. Annas, J. (1993): The morality of happiness. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (2002): “Social Capital and Community Governance”. In: Economic Journal 112: F419-F436. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (2011): A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. Brandt, R. (2001 – 2002): “Self-consciousness and self-care: On the tradition of oikeiosis in the modern age”. In: Grotiana 22/23, p. 73 – 92. Brennan, T. (2005): The Stoic Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Burke, E. (1990): Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford UP. Coleman, J. S. (1988): “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital”. In: American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement), S95-S120. Darwall, S. (1999): “Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith”. In: Philosophy and Public Affairs 28, p. 139 – 164. Derrida, J. (1997): The Politics of Friendship. New York: Verso. Diogenes L. (1931): Lives of Eminent Philosophers (ed. R.D. Hicks). Cambridge [MA]: Loeb. Emerson, R. W. (1983): Essays & Lectures. New York: Library of America. Fehr, E., U. Fischbacher & S. Gächter (2002): “Strong Reciprocity, Human Cooperation, and the Enforcement of Social Norms”. In: Human Nature 13, p. 1 – 25. Forschner, M. (1995): Die stoische Ethik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Frankfurt, H. G. (1999): Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Giddens, A. (1990): The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP. Gintis, H. (2000): “Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality”. Iin: Journal of Theoretical Biology 206, p. 169 – 179. Glover, J. (1988): I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London: Penguin. Granovetter, M (1985): “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”. In: American Journal of Sociology 91, p. 481 – 510.

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Herman, B. (1993): “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant On Sex and Marriage?” In: Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.): A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder: Westview Press, p. 49 – 68. Hutcheson, F. (2002): An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections, with illustrations on the moral sense [1728]. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Kant, I. (1930): Lectures on Ethics. London: Methuen 1930. Kant, I. (1999): Metaphysical Elements of Justice [1797]. Indianapolis: Hackett. Korsgaard, C. M. (1996): Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Langton, R. (1997): “Love and Solipsism”. In: Roger E. Lamb (ed.): Love Analyzed. Boulder: Westview Press, p. 123 – 152. Lewis, P. & Chamlee-Wright, E. (2008): “Social embeddedness, social capital and the market process”. In: Review of Austrian Economics 21, p. 107 – 118. Locke, J (1979): An Essay concerning Human Understanding [1690] (ed. P. H. Nidditch), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1988): Two Treatises of Government [1689] (ed. P. Laslett). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Long, A. A. & Sedley, D. N. (1987): The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981): After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. MacPherson, C. B. (1962:) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Martin, W. (2009): “Stoic Self-Consciousness”. Online: http://philpapers.org/rec/MARSS-2, accessed on July, 5, 2011. Ng, T. W.H. & Feldman, D. C. (2010): “The Effects of Organizational Embeddedness on Development of Social Capital and Human Capital”. In: Journal of Applied Psychology 95, p. 696 – 712. Nietzsche, F. (1974): The Gay Science [1882 – 1887] (ed. W. Kaufmann). New York: Random House. Polanyi, K. (1944): The Great Transformation. New York and Toronto: Rinehart. Putnam, R. D. (1995): “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. In: Journal of Democracy 6/1, p. 65 – 78. Sandel, M. (1982): Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Seneca, L. A. (1925): Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, Vol. 3. London/New York: Heinemann/Putnam. Seneca, L. A. (1995): Philosophische Schriften. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, Vol. 4. Smith, A. (2002): The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] (ed. K. Haakonsen). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sorabji, R. (2006): Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Oxford: Oxford UP. Taylor, C. (1976): “Responsibility for Self”. In: Amélie O. Rorty (ed.): The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 281 – 299. Taylor, C. (1989): Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Thomä, D. (2006): “Die Theorie des Humankapitals zwischen Kultur und Ökonomie”. In: Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik 7, p. 301 – 318.

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Uzzi, B. (1996): “The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect”. In: American Sociological Review, 61, p. 674 – 698. Waszek, N. (1984): “Two Concepts of Morality: A Distinction of Adam Smith’s Ethics and its Stoic Origin”. In: Journal of the History of Ideas 45, p. 591 – 606.

Mike Savage

Cultural Capital and Elective Belonging: A British Case Study They are there, and not just there, but are attached because they see the place as the chance to practice a principle. (Raffel 2006)

Introduction Long ago Georg Simmel understood modernity as a zone of structured contingency, the domain of the stranger who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’. In the viscous networks of contemporary capitalism the politics of belonging takes on ever more intense significance. Reterritorialisation, the etching of activity into the landscape, the formation of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘striated space’, becomes a necessary part of moral claim making. The processes by which social groups cohere, identify themselves, and take positions is, fundamentally, a territorial one, driven by complex processes of sorting and sifting, differentiation, and stratification (Burrows and Gane 2006). There has been much recent interest in the processes of urban segregation and boundary making, including research on gentrification (e. g. Atkinson 2007; Butler and Robson 2003), gated communities (Low 2003, Kirby et al 2006), and ghettoization (e. g. Wacquant 2008, Blokland and Savage 2008), which have all insisted on the profound role of territorial differentiation which lies at the heart of contemporary urban change. This paper is a further contribution to this recent work on the ‘spatialization of class’, the way that ‘shapes on the ground’ become loaded with social and cultural significance (Savage et al 2005; Burrows and Parker 2006). I seek to demonstrate how issues of residential mobility and the attachment to place are not just matters which might interest planners, urban geographers or sociologists, but are profoundly important for understanding the meaning of contemporary inequality, especially its cultural and symbolic aspects, as people jostle with each other in their search for homes and territory. I pursue this theme through examining the narratives which different sorts of people articulate in talking about their attachment to their residential locale. Building on arguments first developed in Globalisation and Belonging (Savage et al. 2005) I assess the scope of what Gaynor Bagnall, Brian Longhurst and I called ‘elective belonging’, the way that middle class people claimed moral rights over

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place through their capacity to move to, and put down roots, in a specific place which was not just functionally important to them but which also mattered symbolically. Although this argument has affinities with research which examines the relationship between housing, identity, place and lifestyle (e.g Aero 2006, Easthope 2004), I claim that this perspective is better able to elaborate the political stakes involved. Elective belonging pitches choice against history, as the migrant consumer rubs up against dwellers with historical attachments to place. In this encounter, numerous oppositions can be found: between mobile incomers and stable locals; between those exercising ‘choice’ and those fixed in place; the agent and the object, all of these embedded in the mobilization of present against past. Here, I show how this politics of ‘elective belonging’ needs to be contrasted with alternative narratives for claiming local affiliation, which I term here nostalgia and dwelling. Whereas our study in Globalisation and Belonging (Savage et al. 2005) was deliberately skewed towards a middle class sample and hence was predisposed to uncover ‘elective belonging’, I am here able to report on nationally representative findings from the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project¹ (see generally, Bennett et al 2009). And, precisely because the CCSE project collected comprehensive data on people’s cultural taste and participation, we are able to relate how far narratives of local attachment are associated with other aspects of their cultural taste. I begin in the first section by contrasting, two narratives of belonging, nostalgia and elective belonging, bringing out their key differences and moral associations. In the second section of the paper I introduce the CCSE project and briefly report on its findings regarding the significance of cultural divisions in contemporary Britain. The final, and most important part of the paper then uses qualitative data from the CCSE project to reveal how the CCSE allows us to reveal a further narrative, one which – following the anthropologist Tim Ingold, we call ‘dwelling’, where accounts ruminate on ‘homing practices’ located in territories where individuals are ‘born and bred’. I also discuss the significance of narratives of ‘fantasy’, which focus on desires for future location as a

 ESRC funded project award no R000239801. The team comprised Tony Bennett (Principal Applicant), Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde (Co-Applicants), David Wright and Modesto Gayo-Cal (Research Fellows). The applicants were jointly responsible for the design of the national survey and the focus groups and household interviews that generated the quantitative and qualitative data for the project. Elizabeth Silva, assisted by David Wright, coordinated the analyses of the qualitative data from the focus groups and household interviews. Mike Savage and Alan Warde, assisted by Modesto Gayo-Cal, co-ordinated the analyses of the quantitative data produced by the survey. Tony Bennett was responsible for the overall direction and coordination of the project. The full results have been reported at length in Bennett et al. 2009.

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crucial way of encapsulating the differences between these three narratives of attachment. By exploring how individuals who articulate these different narratives are positioned on our cultural map, I show how they are embody systematic cultural inequalities and cannot simply be read as private or idiosyncratic attitudes. In my conclusion I pull out the implications.

1 Two Narratives of Contemporary Belonging In the 182 qualitative interviews which I conducted with Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst in Greater Manchester between 1999 and 2001, it seemed that two main narratives of belonging to place, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘elective belonging’ competed with each other. In the former, one’s place of residence appears to have lost its magic. In the latter, by contrast, one’s residential area embodies magical qualities and is articulated into an enchanted landscape. The idea of nostalgia resonates with much influential thinking about the loss of social cohesion and the decline of community (for examples, Putnam 2000, and the discussion in Blokland and Savage 2008). It is an account of how one’s place has moved symbolically and culturally away from the values and forms of social interaction prized by residents in earlier times. Here are two examples from elderly residents of Cheadle, a 1930 s suburb of modest 3 bedroom semi-detached houses located near Stockport in Greater Manchester.² Yes, it’s lost the “villagey” feel. We still call it the village, Cheadle village, but anybody that’s moved in here (more than) fifteen years ago call it the village. Everybody knew everybody…. because my parents come from a two up two down environment, it was still neighbors over the fence. The lady who unfortunately has now died, but moved away and retired, I used to call her aunty. I could wander into her house, my mum and her always had a cup of tea at 11 o’clock in the morning, it was the old values and that’s how I was brought up. That’s changed, everybody keeps themselves to themselves now. In my teenage years I used to go drinking in Cheadle, I would never drink in Cheadle now. (C13). I don’t know, my roots are here, I love the village, I find it very sad now that all the shops are closing down, the shops I knew as a child, as a young woman, all my life. Is that a recent thing? Well it’s happened over a period of years, because we had a cinema, we had everything here in Cheadle, but people like me and the girls and young men I went to school with who are now my age, we all went to the pictures, we did things together, and we had

 There is a longer account of Cheadle as a working class locale in Savage (2005).

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what we called the Milk Bar, where we went for dinner say on Sunday afternoons, a congregation of all of us, we’d meet at Bailey’s Milk Bar and it was lovely.

This kind of nostalgia is not to be taken at face value. It takes its reference to the past not literally, but as a means of staking a contemporary claim. Thus, Talja Blokland (2003), in her study of a working class neighborhood in Rotterdam, has skillfully explored how nostalgia surfaces in conversations between socially similar neighbors, as a means of creating contemporary social boundaries: it defines a group of ‘us’ who remember, opposed to the recently arrived who can’t, because they weren’t there. This kind of ‘boundary work’ creates divisions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and allow the relatively under-privileged to counter the moral claims of the newly arrived. Reading nostalgia in these terms, even fragmented ‘communities’ can nonetheless represent themselves as being cohesive and unified. Nostalgia becomes a means of making connections. This nostalgic view was however, a minority view, amongst our interviewees. We were struck by the dominance of an aesthetic and ethical relationship to place which we termed ‘elective belonging’. This invoked the joys, delights and passions for landscape³. Far from lamenting the loss of community, most people we interviewed waxed lyrical about where they lived. Having moved to a place with which they had few, if any, prior connections, for a variety of pragmatic and symbolic reasons, they came to be highly vested in it. They were clear that they did not live in some kind of faceless suburb, nondescript town or generic village, but in a particular place with its own identity, meaning and ‘aura’, with which it was immensely important for them to claim affiliation. Yet the historical traditions of the place in which they lived was not as important to them as the way that they could claim that the place belonged to them through their conscious choice to move, settle in, and domesticate it. This was a landscape construed as a destination on a personal map, a landmark on their own personal journey. It is predominantly an aesthetic and ethical rendering of the landscape. It is aesthetic insofar as it was important to claim beauty, and ethical insofar as it involved making a statement that one has ‘put down roots’, and thereby chosen to affiliate one’s own identity with a specific location. What is going on here? This evocation of an enchanted landscape is a sign that individuals are able to appreciate particular places because of the richness  Our account of this orientation to community is fully elaborated in Savage et al. 2005, and the account here is inevitably compressed. This book also contains an account of how our concept of elective belonging relates to other perspectives on local identity developed by post-war anthropologists, sociologists and geographers.

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of their own geographical repertoire. The ability to value places is dependent on having a wide enough set of reference points to allow comparison and evaluation. Such values depend on personal, intimate contact, yet also the deployment of an abstract geography premised on experiences of travel and more generally what Arjun Appadurai (1996) calls the mobility of the imagination, or the ‘flow of scapes’. Hence, a strange oscillation between belonging and not-belonging, where deeply felt love of place can go hand in hand with a sense of the fragility by which one is connected to it. By standing alongside, rather than inside, any particular location, judgment can more easily be passed, yet also more readily revoked. The landscape is one which is also defined by physical, rather than social markers. Visual, and other sensory perceptions are crucial, whereas the values, attitudes and interests of other local residents seem less important, unless they intrude. Elective belongers try to ‘bracket out’ those who live in the place. This can be rendered humbly as recognition that others living in the location have their own values which may well differ from theirs. Or it can lead to a sense that making a choice of where to live is of vital importance for the modern individual in locating their stake in the world. In these cases, we can detect a motif to place and community living which is that of Simmel’s stranger, someone who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’. These ‘strangers’ are united in their wide ranging cultural geography, the recognition that they can chose to live in one amongst other places, and that this choice is highly telling and evocative for them. And, like the stranger, they never fully feel they belong, even whilst making their strident claims to place (for an elaboration and exemplification of this point from the London suburbs, see Watt 2009). These two forms of nostalgic and elective belonging invoke change and mobility. Both provide a story about belonging to a certain place. They also seem to be defined in relation to each other, two opposing ways of situating people around contested stakes of place. But it could be argued that our Globalisation and Belonging study (Savage et al. 2005), whose sample was biased to the affluent middle class, overstates the importance of symbolic attachment to place and fails to recognize the significance of other modes of spatial attachment. Hauge’s (2007) study of housing identity in Norway, for instance, suggests that only 40 % of Trondheim residents invested their home with personal identity. Similarly, Slater’s (2006) influential contribution to studies of gentrification emphasizes the need not just to focus on the values of middle class incomers. In what follows I want to respond to this important critique by drawing on interviews derived from a nationally representative sample of the UK population which allows me to explore the scale and relative importance of ‘elective belonging’. I need to begin by introducing the significance of Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking

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on the relationship between social inequality and physical space to explain the thinking behind the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study.

2 A Bourdieusian interlude: Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Between 2002 and 2006 I was involved in a research project, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion which examined the nature and extent of cultural divisions within the UK. Our concern was to assess whether we could still delineate distinctive forms of ‘elite’ high, legitimate culture which stood in opposition to popular culture (as famously argued by Bourdieu 1985), or whether these divisions have broken down in the face of the neo- liberal, post-modern, commercialization of cultural forms (as variously suggested by writers such as Harvey 1987, Lash and Urry 1994, Peterson and Kern 1996). We conducted a national survey of 1564 respondents, 25 focus groups, and 44 qualitative interviews examining people’s cultural interests the area of visual arts, music, reading, television and film viewing, and sport and leisure. This comprised the most extensive study of people’s cultural tastes and interests ever conducted in the UK. We used this method to permit a systematic mapping of cultural taste, participation and knowledge in Britain using both survey and qualitative evidence (see Bennett et al 2009). In conducting this project we engaged extensively with the theoretical arguments of Pierre Bourdieu, whose social theory offers a distinctive way of addressing the relationship between territory and inequality through the use of descriptive field analysis. Although Bourdieu’s work is a significant reference point in housing studies, this usually focuses on his concept of habitus (e.g Easthope 2004), or cultural capital and distinction (e. g. Aero 2006; Bridge 2006; GramHansen and Bech-Danielson 2004)⁴. Field analysis, however, is a means of taking up Deleuze’s challenge to think ‘diagramatically’ as a means of teasing out forms of intensity and their localizations, and recognizing the stakes involved in contests over space and position. Using his preferred sporting metaphors, Bourdieu sees social life as organized around different ‘fields’ in which players struggle for position and advantage. This metaphor of sport is very important for Bourdieu: it explains why he does not think there are ‘neutral’ positions within

 The main exceptions here are in the work of Chris Allen (e. g. 2008) and Paul Watt (2009), whose work has affinities with the arguments developed in this paper.

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a field⁵, and that it is inevitable that all players are required to contest against others – even from hopeless situations. It also emphasizes that ‘players’ are located on a landscape. We are inextricably ‘thrown’ into a landscape from which one has no choice but to battle for position. Bourdieu’s emphasis on social space and his concept of the field is wedded to the use of Geometric Data Analysis (Rouanet and Le Roux 2005). Developed by the French mathematician Benzecri in the 1960 s, correspondence analysis seeks to render social position as a series of co-ordinates in Euclidian space, and through this means to portray maps of ‘social space’⁶. Such maps can be composed in several dimensions, and can be used to reveal social relations not in terms of deep structuring properties, or in terms of reified variables (see for our use of this method, Bennett et al, 2009 and Le Roux et al 2008). The ordering of these maps need to be explored inductively, through trying to make sense of the spatial distribution of the variables according to their position, rather than through imputing the power of ‘master’ variables. The correspondence analysis we conducted on our survey data is reported in Figures 1 and 2, on the basis of associations from 168 different variables covering taste and participation (doing, or abstaining, from certain activities) are in black, variables for taste (liking or disliking certain cultural genres) are in red. Readers interested in the construction of this map should consult our other publications (especially Le Roux et al 2008, Bennett et al 2009). Here we simply note that there are no socio-demographic variables used to define this space: the focus is entirely on the ordering of these cultural practices in their own terms. We can therefore read Figures 1 and 2 as maps which need to be read inductively.⁷ Figure 1 locates those variables which contribute to variance on the first, most important, horizontal axis. We can see that on the right hand side are a series of black variables with labels ‘1’ or ‘2’ after them, meaning that these activities are done frequently (2) or occasionally (1) (going to rock concerts, cinema, museums and art galleries, opera, orchestral concerts, stately homes, and eating out). There are also a few red variables with + signs, meaning that certain tastes

 Cf. ‘it is not so easy to describe the “pure” gaze without also describing the naïve gaze which it defines itself and vice versa: and that there is no neutral, impartial, ‘pure’ description of either of these opposing visions’ (Bourdieu 1985, 32)  One can thus trace Bourdieu’s increasing deployment of the concept of field in his later work to his interest in correspondence analysis which originated in the 1970 s. See Rouanet and Le Roux 2005.  Of course, like any map, this is a specific kind of construction which depends on the operationalization of variables, etc. (for details of which see Bennett et al. 2009). Although this is a descriptive method, we do not claim that this is a ‘neutral’ description of an exterior reality.

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Axis 2

1.0

Rock Concert2

Heavy Metal+ Rock+ Heavy Metal= Cin2

0.5

ClassicM– World=

Orch0 Stately Homes0 NoBk Musical0 Theater0 paintings0 Museum0 Biog– ArtGallery0 Tvw>5h 0 Tv+soap Disengagement Jazz– Mod Litt– Tvd>5h WdoDu– S+social Eat+FishChips no Sport Rock Concert0 Cin0 F+western Eat Out0

–0.5

pub0

Rock Concert1

Cin1 Eat Out2 Jazz= Mod Litt= Axis 1 (0.1641) Tvd3 Museum2 Stately Homes2 Opera1 Theater2 Musical2 Bk>24 Art Gallery2

Museum1

Rock-

Eat+French ClassicM+

–1.0

Orch2 F+drama

–0.8

–0.4

0

0.4

Opera2

0.8

Figure 1

are liked (heavy metal, rock music, impressionist art, modern literature, biographies, classical music, French restaurants, drama films). In addition, there are variables for watching little television, and owning many books. The left hand side of Figure 1 is largely a mirror image, with the same variables listed but with 0 after them (they are not done), or – (they are disliked). There are only a few positive references, here, notably a liking for fish and chips, liking television soap operas, social sports, Westerns, and watching lots of TV. This prime axis hence differentiates a culturally engaged group of people who are predisposed to numerous activities and tastes, and an apparently disengaged group on the left. Our cultural map does not therefore primarily distinguish ‘high’ from ‘popular’ culture, as in Bourdieu’s model.

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Cultural Capital and Elective Belonging: A British Case Study

Axis 2 (0.1188) Emergent

football

NightC2

1.0

Urban+

F+horror Art-landscape Eat-Indian

Art+modern

Tv-art Tv+sport S-club Tv+comedy Eat-French

SciFi=

Eat+Indian S+football

Heavy Metal+ Rock+ Heavy Metal= Cin2 Rock Concert1

World=

CW music-

F+action

Orch0

SciFi+

F+SciFi

pub2

Classic M–

0.5

Rock Concert2

F-musical

NightC1

Urban=

Axis 1

0

Rock Concert0 Cin0

World–

CW music+

–0.5

pub0

Rock-

Eat-Fish Chips Heavy Metal– Art-modern FiSci–

Musical2

F-horror

NightC0

Tv+news

Bk>24

Theater2 Museum2 Stately Homes2 Art Gallery2

S+racquet

Urban–

ClassicM+ F+musical

–1.0

Orch2 F+drama

Established –0.8

–0.4

0

Opera2

0.4

0.8

Figure 2

Figure 2 maps the second most important axis of differentiation, and should be read vertically. It shows a contrast between those at the bottom who like the established, ‘legitimate’ cultural forms of classical music, opera, art galleries and museums, and those at the top like the commercial culture of popular

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music. This has more parallels with Bourdieu’s distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. Superimposing the two axes of Figures 1 and 2 we are able to report a cultural map which reports key the two cultural divides as being between the ‘engaged’ and ‘disengaged’, and the ‘established’ and ‘emergent’ ⁸. A further stage of analysis, discussed in greater detail in Le Roux et al (2008) and Bennett et al (2009) considers what kind of people are located in the geometric space of Figures 1 and 2. Figure 3 shows that the first axis maps fairly neatly onto social class divisions, and axis 2 onto age divisions. Those on the culturally engaged, right hand side of Figure 1 tend to be relatively well paid, well qualified, professionals, and those on the left hand side tend to be less well paid, less well qualified, routine and manual workers. Those on the top of Figure 2 tend to be younger, and at the bottom, older people. We thus can see how our cultural map turns out also to be socially discriminating, with class and age as the two fundamental dividing principles. The role of class as a fundamental feature of cultural differentiation is hence clearly revealed. We discuss the interpretation of these findings more fully elsewhere (Bennett et al 2009; Le Roux et al 2008). For my purposes here, the question is how far is this cultural map also a spatial map? Is there a relationship between people’s class related cultural taste and participation, as depicted in Figure 1, and their accounts of spatial attachment and identification? Bourdieu himself is hesitant about how he sees the overlap between geographical and social space. There are frustrating formulations. ‘Social space tends to be translated, with more or less distortion, into physical space[…]. The space is defined by the more or less close correspondence between a certain order of coexistence’ (Bourdieu 2000, 134– 5, my italics).

These sorts of qualifiers do not provide a satisfactory means of understanding how such ‘distortions’ happen, or what exactly, then, the relationship between social and physical space is actually supposed to be. Motifs recur, the most important of which is the way that the physical separation between Paris and the provinces is an aspect of the operation of cultural capital (with a pun on ‘capital’) itself (see Bourdieu 1985, 124; 1999, 125). It does seem, however, in ways I elaborate elsewhere (Savage 2009), that Bourdieu becomes increasingly interested in the overlaps between social and physical space in the last decade of his life, leading to an interest in urban issues

 It is important to emphasize that these maps have been developed on the basis of the specific questions we used in the correspondence analysis, and is hence constructed according to our theoretical concerns. These are discussed at greater length in Bennett et al. 2009.

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which surfaces in his later writing, notably The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), which is a study of how the housing market works, and in his phenomenological Pascalian Meditations (2001). In this later work Bourdieu models social space more directly on the properties of physical space and reflects more seriously on the geographical components of his social theory. Just as physical space, according to Strawson, is defined by the reciprocal externality of positions […], the social space is defined by the mutual exclusion, or distinction, of the positions which constitute it….. Social agents, and also the things insofar as they are appropriated by them and therefore constituted as properties, are situated in a place in social space (Bourdieu 2000, 134, italics in the original).

This renewed interest in physical spatiality is clearly articulated in The Weight of the World, As bodies (and biological individuals), and in the same way that things are, human beings are situated in a site (they are not endowed with the ubiquity that would allow them to be in several places at once), and they occupy a place. The site (le lieu) can be defined absolutely as the point in physical space where an agent or a thing is situated, “takes place”, exists: that is to say either as a localization or, from a relational viewpoint, as a position, a rank in an order (Bourdieu 1999, 123).

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This insistence is now part of Bourdieu’s concern to demonstrate that fields matter concretely, that the relational power struggles they illuminate cannot but be marked in the urban landscape itself. This is a different emphasis to the apparently a-spatial structuralism of his earlier conception of field. He now argues that this process of ‘translation’ is also one of ‘naturalization’, in which the conflicts and tensions which his field analysis reveals abstractly are occluded to social agents because of the way they are mundanely marked on physical space.⁹ He now emphasizes that physical space is the concretization of social space. Bourdieu’s thinking here is drawn in part from the interviews collected as part of The Weight of the World, many of which told stories of suffering integrally related to the organization of urban space and people’s accounts of how they are fixed in deprived locations. It thus marks a subtle re-orientation of his thinking about fields which sees him return to his earlier interests in the tension between spatial fixity and mobility amongst French peasants (Bourdieu 2008). In his earlier field analysis, the powerful and the powerless could be detected as occupying different ‘zones’ of social space (as illuminated through his correspondence analyses). Elements of this thinking remain in his later work, for instance in his differentiation between elements of Left Bank and Right bank culture, or his emphasis that in order for high culture can be deemed to exist, it also needs to be physically located – in prestigious art galleries, in capital cities, and so forth which are geographically separated from the spaces of popular culture. Yet he is also aware that seeing fields in these terms, as if the powerful and disadvantaged are two competing rugby teams each with their own formation on a fixed pitch, overstates the ability of the powerless to form as a coherent team at all. Returning to his more fluid conceptions of spatial organization evident in his youthful rural sociology, he now recognizes that ‘the lack of capital intensifies the experience of finitude: it chains one to a place’ (Bourdieu 1999, 127). Anticipating the arguments of Zygmunt Bauman (2000) and Manuel Castells (1996), he identifies the tension between the mobility of the powerful and the fixedness of the disadvantaged who identify their stasis as integrally related to the difficulties of imagining change. In this analysis, the ability to have ‘a place of one’s own’ becomes almost a precondition for social existence (again, a return to the concerns of his earlier rural sociology). Having a place of one’s own is not just concerned with social position but also about having a physical

 He discusses the “naturalization effect” produced by the long term inscription of social realities in the natural world. “Thus historical differences can seem to have arisen from the nature of things (we need only think of the ‘natural frontier’). This is the case, for example, with all the spatial projections of social difference between the sexes (at church, in school, in public, and even at home)” (Bourdieu 1999, 124).

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home. Thus, in his invocations of the problems of living in Jonquil Street, Bourdieu talks about how urban decline is associated with de-industrialization and how this loss of place is itself related to the racism and fragmentation which his respondents’ relate. Throughout this book, Bourdieu deliberately refuses to abstract the nostalgic accounts of his respondents from their physical location. In his cameo introductions to collections of interviews, he deliberately starts by sketching the physical environment from which the accounts were generated: The collection of heterogeneous dwellings, at first designated by bureaucratic officials, ZUP (zone for priority urbanization), then rebaptized Val Saint Martin….is, like the groups that live there, the visible sediment left by successive industrial policies on the old farm lands that extent to the foot of Mount Saint Martin and its Romanesque Church’ (Bourdieu 1999, 6). A dilapidated housing development like so many others in the suburbs of a small town in the north of France (Bourdieu 1999, 60).

It is this concern with how social space is both modeled on spatial exclusion, yet also shapes the urban landscape by differentiating between those with, and those without, the capacity to place themselves which offers us a useful heuristic to use in examining data from the CCSE project. Can we detect these kinds of nostalgic accounts amongst the dispossessed without significant cultural or economic capital?

3 Belonging and Cultural Capital 22 of our qualitative interviews were with respondents who had also filled in our nationally representative survey so that we were able to plot their accounts compared to their survey answers¹⁰. We are thus able to contrast the accounts of the more ‘culturally engaged’ and ‘culturally disengaged’ respondents. These qualitative interviews began by asking about respondents’ reasons for living in their current house, and about how satisfied they felt in their current job, then focused on probing their tastes in the areas of music, reading, cinema, television, eating and sport (in some cases asking them to amplify responses they had given in the survey). The interview then closed by asking them about how they felt about their appearance, and about their home. I have used all parts of the inter-

 The remaining interviews were carried out with partners of survey respondents, or with individuals drawn from atypical groups for which we did not have representatives from our sample survey.

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view, but focused especially on the question at the start about the reasons why they came to live in their current house, and one towards the end asking them to identify their ‘dream home’. Even though this was not a major part of our study, some of our interviews epitomize ‘elective belonging’. Cherie and her partner, Ian, exemplify a form of elective belonging. They ruminate on how they came to live in an historic northern town, emphasizing both contingency and choice. Ian ruminates, How did we come to [historic northern town] then? Jane and I first met in 1984 working up in Fort William in Scotland and we did a season there together, we started going out together and when we left at the end of the year, she went home to the west coast of Scotland and I came back down to Leeds because my mother lives in Leeds. And we decided we wanted to work together again the following season so the three places we’d earmarked that we thought we would like to work was [HNT], Chester or Channel Islands, and [HNT] was the nearest one to Leeds, I hopped on a bus from Leeds one day and came up, did the trawl round the job centers and I got myself a job at a hotel in [HNT] and started in the February 1985 and Cherie came down about the June or something, a few months later wasn’t it.

This is a classic ‘arrival story’, about the contingent circumstances which led people to live in a place with which they had no ‘natural’ connection. Even though Cherie and Ian had no local ‘roots’ in the English north, (he being Welsh, and she Scottish), they both chose to put down roots in [HNT], a town which they now completely, gushingly, identified with. Their work was bound up with the leisure and tourism industries, and they lived in a ‘period’ Georgian flat in a fashionable terrace. In talking about their dream home, they sought to make even stronger claims on their town’s historical features. Cherie: We’d not live in this barn! I would love to have a really, really old house, not out in the countryside, in the town, a town house, a really, really, old, old house you know, about 14th century, that’s what I would like Low ceilings and beams? Cherie: Yes, and all sorts of funny little bits that you walk up to and down to, and that’s what I would love. Do you know [HNT] at all, you know the water tower at […], the river, the old water works, you know where […..] bridge is? …. well there’s a tower there that was actually a water tower and it’s about 15th century and they’ve just announced that they’re turning it into flats and I’m not normally an envious person, but I’d sell my granny to buy one of those flats they’re actually advertising it internationally, it’s gonna’ go for a fortune, it’s gonna’ be really something I think. So that would be not for what they’re doing in terms of all the modern fittings but the history of the building

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Cherie: It’s Grade 1 listed, they’re actually gonna’ have to do it with like the Civic Trust and things so it’s gonna’ be done in keeping, a property like that would be fantastic…… We have a friend that actually rented an apartment, when you go up along the [… road] there’s an opening on the left hand, [HNT] is full of these little hidden properties, you don’t know anything about and it’s a lovely kind of arcade, it’s in towards a lawyer’s office and there’s a wrought iron balustrade and you go down and round it, there’s this fantastic huge Jacobean house building that’s in flats and the back garden overlooks … doesn’t it and when Anne had her apartment, we went to visit, when you went inside it there was an enormous staircase, it was as wide as this whole room with huge stone balustrades that went right up and up and then divided in two, fantastic place it is. To have something like that, I don’t mean the whole house, just a little bit [my italics, MS].

This is a possessive ethic, in which the desire to own encapsulates the past as well as the present landscape into stakes of ownership. This is a strong claim on place, seen as fusion of aesthetic, emotional and instrumental attachment, which strikingly makes no reference to other dwellers. The spatial scale of interest here is remarkably miniaturized. Specific streets and buildings are identified as being of special significance and convey aura. Here, the past is possessed through the process of acquisition, and fantasy and desire can be reconciled with current residence. What kind of person is Cherie? We can locate her in our cultural map, to assess how her survey responses might be associated with this particular clear account of ‘elective belonging’ (see Figure 4). We can see that Cherie is located towards the bottom right of Figure 4, amongst the culturally engaged, somewhat ‘older’ middle classes. This is precisely the association between privileged position and elective belonging which we discussed in Savage (et al. 2005). And indeed, many other individuals on this right hand side of Figure 4 also exhibit similar kind of aesthetic and ethical ‘choice’ in their place of residence, even if less elaborated than for Cherie and Ian. James, a university lecturer from a Welsh city, located on the right hand side of the first axis, talks about his identity as an ‘urban’ person: ‘I do love having a corner shop in the High Street and the cinema and all these things’. James and his doctor wife, Susan, were doing up their Edwardian house, with immaculate attention to detail, with each room having its own ambience: ‘I think that’s an interesting thing, say you go into one room and you get a certain atmosphere and, you know? So, I think it’s important to have artworks around’. Susan went on to note that If money wasn’t, I, I can’t, I can’t think of a place any, I suppose I would get a house like this but if it wasn’t on a main road. That’s one thing that I’d like but apart from that, I don’t think Yes, I’d like it with a quite road for the kids but yes, I mean, we’re really happy here. We had a much smaller house before and we just, I think, bit by bit we’d just like to dec-

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Although living in a different kind of area to Ian and Cherie (a gentrified inner city rather than an historic town), James and Susan have a similar way of relating to their urban environment. Other examples are drawn from those who chose to live in the countryside. Jenny, having been brought up in Glasgow, had moved out to rural Scotland, because ‘it was quite a nice place to bring up the kids and we decided to have a family. And we’ve more or less been here ever since’. Maria, a semi invalided teacher, dreams of a larger, more expansive house, though in the same semi-rural location that she now lives in. Interestingly, this vision goes alongside her sense of escape from a northern inner city, where she had been brought up in an area of working class terraced housing. Seren, a middle aged social worker, originally from England, ‘lives in Wales

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out of choice’. Janet, a middle aged hostel warden, originally from Scotland, now lives in North West England and would not move again. When asked about her dream house, she reported that ‘Actually I think I’ve got what I want. I’ve got a house with character… I suppose if you could plonk it somewhere in the middle of the country it would be nice’. Her husband had a similar view but for him a move of 100 meters off the busy main road would be enough to constitute a rural retreat. Sally-Ann, an elderly ‘doctor’s wife’ had lived in her current suburban house for 49 years. Like Maria, she had been brought up nearby, but had moved out to the countryside because ‘we just wanted our own space’. These accounts offer a partial corrective to those who emphasize middle class withdrawal and disengagement from place (Atkinson 2006; Ellison and Burrows 2006; Atkinson and Blandy 2007). To be sure, there is a sense in these accounts of withdrawal from communal social life, yet there is also a keen and enthusiastic claiming of moral ownership of specific places. And, it is those who are ‘culturally engaged’ according to our cultural map who also evince a sense of investment in place which links aesthetic and ethical values and an emphasis on ‘choice’. None of the individuals above refer to historic or accidental reasons for living where they do, and none of them currently live where they were brought up. The culturally engaged middle classes are highly vested in their place of residence, which they claim to have actively ‘chosen’, and which conveys great symbolic meaning, and a sense of their own selfworth, their identity, and a proclamation of who they are. In contrast to the kinds of account that Bourdieu presents in The Weight of the World, nostalgic refrains are rare amongst those we interviewed, but there is one striking exception, Robert, from Scotland. However, rather than being on the left hand side of Figure 4, where one might expect if Bourdieu’s own evocation of nostalgia as the voice of the dispossessed were to be true, he is actually in the middle of our cultural map. He was unusual in the intensity of his attachment to his home town. The interviewer notes that He kept mementoes of [Scottish coal mining town] in an old bureau, and showed me a poem about a mining disaster of 1939. “I love [SCMT]” he proclaimed. And you could see why. His life had been spent there, his family had been part of the history. His pseudonym was borrowed from his grandfather, a footballer for [SCMT] who had gone to play for Bolton Wanderers in England.

The sense that Robert’s biography was historically anchored in [SCMT] comes over very strongly at numerous points in the interview. I was born in local avenue, and I come up from a big family and no one has left in [SCMT]. The only one that ever left was my brother, he was killed in Anzio in 1944, he was killed in

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Anzio beach-head and that was only when, my other brother’s Derek and Alan and Keith was that one that was killed but Arthur and Jack and they were all n the Armed Forces. And then there was Terence and myself who done our national service. But we always loved [SCMT] and a lot of memories and a lot of things …

This is a very different kind of history to that which Jane describes of [SCMT]. It is a family history, one where [SCMT] is seen as a container for the personal relationships, a site of memories, rather than fixed on buildings and sites. Here there is an interesting contrast to Ian and Cherie’s fascination with the minute corners of [HNT]. Robert’s account is interesting for a further reason. He reports a clear dichotomy between [SCMT], his home town, the locus of his daily life, and places outside which represented spaces of power, and spaces of fantasy. The locus of abstract power was Glasgow, on which he spoke in especially hostile tones to its cultural pretensions. when you see them – putting on exhibitions, human dirt, and they put that up and they put anything up, they put – one time there was in Glasgow and it was a pile of bricks, I says ‘what the hell are they talking about?’ Well, I think myself like, we’ve got a big wire horse going into Glasgow, and it costs thousands of pounds but they’d have been better putting a merry go round and letting weans go round and round. They’re talking about, we’ve got two lovely parks, Queen Mary and George here and they’re talking about doing away with them.

When asked about his dream house, Robert had a lot to say. I think it would be a country cottage. I think , because I love animals and I love plants and I think , I’ve seen …… country cottage that you could actually make into your own and – seclusion would be great, just hearing water running and – I think that’s – we could have that, we could have that, but again, you need company. You could have had that some years ago if you had wanted rather than buy this, you could have moved out. Me and Betty was always talking about going to St Andrews and we always liked the area, every year we went for a fortnight but we seen a house in Langlands Road, and it was just near the football pitch. There’s a wee football pitch ……. she thought it would be ideal…… We liked St. Andrew’s, it would have been ideal because I love it, (you can leave) your door and you can walk any road

We see here the spatial separation of ideal, fantasy, location from the day to day town of [SCMT] where Robert actually lived. The difference between Ian and Cherie, and Robert lies not in their balance between abstract and specific spatial referents, but in the extent to which these could be reconciled. For Ian and Cher-

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ie, [HNT] itself figures as an intense space where their desires and actual daily lives can be navigated, whereas for Robert his fantasy space was separated from where he actually lived. But it is not that Robert’s account is simply practical or functional. He is also happy to evoke ideas of abstract space, with respect to certain kinds of leisure activities. He evoked. A drive in the country to lovely seaside, lovely seaside and a good day of, me and my wife used to go. Linlithgow, and we’d make it a day out because we …. big supermarket there so we’d just go there and down the supermarket, there then go off and we used to sit by a loch and we went to Saltcoats it was the same. Visit a country manor’.

Ian and Cherie could lever abstract evocations about ‘history’ onto specific locations. Ian wondered about choosing into live in ‘that little Dutch house up by [….]’. Cherie responded, ‘Yeah, that’s a strange little house isn’t it’, to which Ian tellingly replied, ‘It’s a strange house up there, yeah. Something with history, something with character’. Here notions of history and character, whilst appearing to evoke particularity and specificity actually operate as highly general and abstract terms. Robert, by contrast, loaded his fantasies onto Saint Andrews, a city many miles distant, and which he knew he would never have the opportunity to move to. We might think of Cherie and Robert as fundamentally opposed in their attitudes to place, yet actually our cultural map reveals that they are in not dissimilar social space. Both have the capacity to define the landscape in enchanted terms. Nostalgia is not entirely in opposition to elective belonging. Yet, Figure 4 shows that there is a large group of people on the left hand side who do, however, exhibit different relationships to place. These it turns out, are people living in the midst of a location in which they were born and bred, and who are strongly vested in their current location in which they are irredeemably thrown. This is a different way of experiencing place and belonging to that which the culturally privileged exhibit. Margaret is positioned on the left hand side of Figure 4. She and her husband Frank were living on their family farm, in which they had been born and brought up. They were completely steeped in this enterprise, Frank having built the house in which they now lived. Unlike Ian and Robert, Margaret found it difficult to articulate a view about her ideal home before finally coming up with an uncertain, and rather limited, aspiration. Do you have an ideal, this question about an ideal home. If money wasn’t a problem, if you could have a house anywhere, or an apartment, what would you choose?

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Margaret: Well I would have to think what Frank would think. I’m quite happy here, the only thing is … here’s me trying to tempt you away with all this money Margaret: no, no, we have enough here. No, no I’m quite happy here, the only thing that I would do is I would definitely love the back tarmacked but that’s gonna’ cost a bomb to do that. I would love that tarmacked, I would love the whole house finished, I would because we’ve still got a lot to do until the house is finished. I would love this finished and I would like a pond. A pond! Is the pond in the back garden? Margaret: Yes. Has it got animals Margaret: No, I would just like a pond with like old stone round it, and a bit of greenery round it. There doesn’t have to be anything in it.

Margaret does not identify a spatially dispersed geography of different locations some way from her current residence. Instead, she focuses on her house, in all its practical accomplishments and individuality. And this sense of being thrown into place is a common response from those placed on towards the left hand side of Figure 1. Hilda, for instance, was still living in the Northern Irish town where she had been brought up and could not imagine moving anywhere else. ‘Oh yes I would have to stay here’ she replied to the question about her dream house. Cecilia, living amidst her family in a working class area of a large Welsh city could not imagine moving anywhere, her fantasy being to buy next door’s house and knock it into hers. Molly ruminated on the beauty of her home town, and could not imagine being anywhere else. Unlike Ian and Cherie, these accounts emphasize the given-ness of place, the impossibility of possessing more of it. These are accounts of dwelling in a place which defines the contours of one’s life¹¹. This contrast between those engaged with family, and those oriented towards possessive features of place has surprising overlaps with Coolen’s (2006) correspondence analysis of the meaning of Dutch dwellings, which also reveals a prime distinction between what he terms ‘family’ and ‘furnishings’ orientations, but we are able to develop the political stakes in this distinction. We see that the ‘dwellers’ present themselves in

 Notions of dwelling have been interestingly developed by Tim Ingold and are compatible with the Heidegerrian and phenemonological concerns with place and belonging (for instance developed by Relph 1976 and Tuan 1977). Recent literature, e. g. Aero 2006 and Easthope 2004, wrongly conflates this form of dwelling with Bourdieusian concerns with distinction and lifestyle.

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passive terms, not choosing their location, but literally placed by it: ‘I love it in the summer time’ Molly reports. ‘Beautiful views in the summer time. But really bad in the winter now, you couldn’t get out. Like you couldn’t get out to the shop or anything’. These kinds of account could lend themselves to the appeal of ‘fantasy’ locations. Edie, the wife of Joe who was also placed on the left hand side of Figure 4, was born and bred in a Home Counties village, and she imagined a fantastic locations for her dream house (Majorca), yet – rather like Robert in this respect – this is a desire born of the recognition that it would not and could not happen in reality. Edie: What sort of house I would have, probably still a four bedroom house but bigger downstairs and a big tree house or something in the garden for Timmy and maybe a little pool. But yeah, I don’t have anything elaborate, I just want but if money were no object, maybe a place in Spain, but I don’t know. Just think maybe a nice holiday home somewhere, that’s what I’d like, no big expectations. No, just a pool Edie: Just a pool and a big tree house!

Bourdieu (2005) argues that poor urban residents have a predominantly functional relationship to where they live, but this seems overstated from our evidence. It is not that these respondents who talk about ‘dwelling’ in place did not have an aesthetic attachment to where they lived, but rather that it deployed different kinds of motifs to that of the elective belongers with their concern to command and own space. Margaret’s response is evocative. Margaret: I would just like a pond with like old stone round it, and a bit of greenery round it. There doesn’t have to be anything in it…. I just like the look of water, if you understand what I mean. I think water is actually relaxing, even you know, do you know what I even love too? I remember the time going in the car at night and listening to the rain beating on the tin roof and thinking oh, or just, I’m lying in bed, so cosy listening to the rain, it’s so relaxing, I love that, I just think it’s so relaxing …

In place of the active investment in place displayed by Ian, or James, Margaret’s account is of her enjoyment of passive relaxation listening to the sound of rain on her roof. Rather than a differentiation between aesthetically and ethically oriented middle class elective belongers, and working classes with a functional relationship to dwelling, the contrast is between how the aesthetic and ethical motifs are defined and mobilized, and especially how far they are seen as amenable to active intervention.

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Conclusions In this paper I have argued that there are very different ways of talking about one’s residence, which closely map on to cultural divisions, and in particular, those associated with class and cultural inequalities. In contrast to the literature which portrays advantaged groups as rising above space, as somehow caught up in the ‘space of flows’ detached from any particular location, I have argued that the middle class culturally engaged are actually highly vested in their location. There are important cultural differences between this form of ‘elective belonging’ and what I have called here ‘dwelling’ in place. In view of the current debate about sustainable communities and social cohesion, it is important to be clear about the different kinds of social ethics embedded in these. Although the middle classes may be deeply concerned with their ‘elective belonging’ it is relatively unimportant for them to belong to a socially cohesive neighborhood. What matters more is the sense that they live somewhere appropriate for ‘someone like me’. It is thus allied with a possessive concern over place. By contrast, those who articulate their dwelling give accounts of being thrown into place, in ways which are related to their historical attachments to kin and neighbors, in ways which are really seen as the province of policy intervention. These different forms of belonging convey different political resources. Middle class ‘elective belonging’ is readily able to tap planning issues regarding conservation through the awareness of historical referents, whereas dwelling perspectives operate differently, through concerns with how the house can accommodate family concerns. In a manner analogous to the way that Stephen Ball (2003) talks about how discerning middle class consumers can present themselves as discerning, and hence worthy, parents of school children, we can also see how elective belonging comes to define the very terms by which one can claim legitimate local identification. In this process, history as resource is wrested from the grasp of the ‘born and bred’ and placed in the reflexive grip of the educated middle classes.¹² We can further see that whereas policy concerns are often animated by nostalgic reflections about how to renovate the kinds of social relationships that ‘communities used to be’, this sits uneasily with the accounts presented here. In this paper I have argued that such nostalgic refrains are not as common as might be supposed, and also need to be understood in terms of the ambivalent positions of those who might articulate them. Admittedly, my data here is limited

 Historically, born and bred locals were able to claim moral ascendancy over incomes on the basis of their long term residence. See the discussion in Savage et al 2005.

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and would need to be substantiated more fully, but the case of Robert is instructive. In his case, nostalgia combines elements of elective belonging with those of dwelling. It comprises a sense that one’s destiny is located in one place (dwelling), but with a developed cultural geography and reflective awareness that things could be different and that one’s own residence is not necessarily as you would like it to be. My point, however, is that we need to broaden our understanding of local attachment away from this nostalgic framing which is by no means the dominant way in which people talk about their attachment. To develop this point, it is worth concluding that it is people’s sense of the future which is a telling indicator of their relationship to place, rather than that of the past. We can differentiate between those (middle classes) whose ideal homes are located close to their current residence, and those (mainly working classes) whose ideal homes would be in fantasy locations, alongside those who wish to ‘plonk their existing house somewhere else’. This difference is a telling indicator of whether people have the power and resources to reconcile their future hopes with the current situation.¹³

Literature Aero, R. (2006): “Residential choice from a lifestyle perspective”. In: Housing, Theory, Society 23.2, p. 109 – 130. Allen, C. (2008): Housing Market Renewal and Social Class. London: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996): Modernity at Large. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Atkinson, R. (2006): “Padding the bunker: strategies of middle class disaffiliation and colonization in the city”. In: Urban Studies 43.3, p. 819 – 832. Atkinson, R. & Blandy, S. (2007): “Panic rooms: the rise of defensive homeownership”. In: Housing Studies 22.4, p. 443 – 458. Ball, S. (2003): Class Strategies and the Education Market: the Middle Classes and Social Advantages. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2000): Globalization. Cambridge: Polity. Bennett, T., M. Savage, E.B. Silva, A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal & D. Wright (2009): Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge. Blokland, T., (2003): Urban Bonds, Cambridge, Polity. Blokland, T. and Savage, M. (eds., 2008): Networked Urbanism, Aldershot, Ashgate. Bourdieu, P. (1985): Distinction, London, Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1999): The Weight of the World, Cambridge, Polity. Bourdieu, P. (2001): Pascalian Meditation, Cambridge, Polity. Bourdieu, P. (2005): The Social Structures of the Economy, Cambridge, Polity.

 This paper appeared in Housing, Theory and Society 27. 2. (2010), p. 115 – 135, and is reprinted with frindly permission from Taylor & Francis.

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Bourdieu, P. (2008): The Bachelor’s Ball, Cambridge, Polity. Bridge, G. (2006): “It’s not just a question of taste: gentrification, the neighbourhood and cultural capital”, Environment and Planning A, 38, 1965 – 1978. Burrows, R. and Gane, N. (2006): “Geodemographics, software, and class”, Sociology, 40, 5, 793 – 812. Butler, T., and Robson, G. (2003): London Calling. Aldershot: Ashgate. Castells, M. (1996): The Network Society, Oxford: Blackwells. Coolen, H. (2006): “The meaning of dwellings: an ecological perspective”. In: Housing, Theory and Society 23.4, p. 185 – 201. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987): A Thousand Plateaus. Boston, Mass.: MIT Press. Easthope, H. (2004): “A place called home”. In: Housing, Theory and Society 21, p. 128 – 138. Ellison, N., and Burrows, R. (2006): “New spaces of (dis) engagement? Social politics, urban technologies and the re-zoning of the city”. In: Housing Studies 22. 3, p. 295 – 312. Gram-Hansen, K. and Bech-Danielson, C. (2004): “House, Home and Identity from a Consumption perspective”. In: Housing, Theory and Society 21, p. 17 – 26. Harvey, D. (1987): The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hauge, A and Kolstad, A. (2006): “Dwelling as an expression of identity: a comparative study among residents in high priced and low priced neighbourhoods in Norway”.,In: Housing, Theory, and Society 24.4, p. 272 – 292. Karsten, L. (2003): “Housing as a way of life: towards an understanding of middle class families preference for an urban residential location”. In: Housing Studies 22.1, p. 83 – 97. Kirkby, A., S.L. Harlan, L. Larsen, E. Hackett, B. Bolin, T. Rex and S. Wolf (2004): “Examining the significance of housing enclaves in the Metropolitan United States of America”. In: Housing, Theory and Society 23.1, p. 19 – 33. Lash, S., and Urry, J. (1994): Economies of Signs and Spaces. London: Sage. Le Roux, B, and H. Rouanet (2004): Geometric Data Analysis: from correspondence analysis to structured data analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Le Roux, B., H. Rouanet, M. Savage & A. Warde (2008): “Class and cultural division in the UK’. In: Sociology 42.6, p. 1049 – 1071. Low. S. (2003): Behind the Gates: life, security and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America. New York: Routledge. Raffel, S. (2006): “Parasites, problems, and problem of attachment to place”. In: History of the Human Sciences 19.3, p. 83 – 108. Relph, R., E. (1976): Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Rouanet, H., and B. Le Roux (2005): “The geometric analysis of questionnaires: The lessons of Bourdieu’s La Distinction’. In: Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique 65, p. 5 – 18. Savage, M. (2004): “Habitus and working class community”. In: F. Devine, M. Savage, R. Crompton and J. Scott (eds): Rethinking Class: Cultures, Identities and Lifestyles. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Savage, M., G. Bagnall and B.J. Longhurst (2005): Globalisation and Belonging. London: Sage. Seabrook, J. (1971): City Close Up. London: Penguin. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977): Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wacquant, L. (2008): Urban Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity.

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Watt, P. (2009): “Living in an Oasis: middle class disaffiliation and selective belonging in an English suburb”. In: Environment and Planning A, 41/12, p. 2874 – 2892.

Martin Endress

Structures of Belonging, Types of Social Capital, and Modes of Trust “Society […] is […] something individuals do and suffer. […] Society certainly is not a ‘substance’, nothing concrete, but an event: it is the function of receiving and effecting the fate and development of one individual by the other” – that is the lesson Georg Simmel (1950, 10 f.) gave to sociologists. In line with this fundamental characterization, Simmel advised them to speak “not of society, but of sociation” (Simmel 1950, 10). Therefore, from a sociological point of view, an analysis of the phenomenon of “belonging” and the concept of “social capital” should argue from the perspective of an ongoing dialectic of individualization and sociation. According to the position argued here, the question of social and cultural logic implied in the phenomenon of belonging as well as in an understanding of social capital refers to the fundamental question of the role of trust in social life. While we have to consider human life as a continuous process of balancing between the taken-for-grantedness of everyday-life and the latent uncertainty and doubtfulness of the social world, contemporary societal circumstances seem to eliminate our resources of trust: we seem to face a world of ongoing erosion in its taken-for-grantedness. Our times are said to be times of uncertainty, distrust, and exclusion; therefore, we must seek out the preconditions for the possibility of new modes of belonging by developing a multidimensional analysis of the underlying phenomenon of trust.

1 Concept Formation: Structural Ambivalence of Social Capital and Modes of Belonging I would like to start my reflections concerning the concepts of “social capital” and “belonging” with four general remarks: (1) First, as far as theoretical guidelines are concerned, contemporary sociological discourse about social capital is dominated by the widely known concepts presented by Pierre Bourdieu (1980, 1986), James S. Coleman (1982, 1988, 1990), and Robert D. Putnam (1993a, 1993b, 1995, 2000).¹ Nonetheless,

 Apart from these contributions, Nan Lin had already submitted a corresponding conceptual proposal under the term “social resources” at the beginning of the 1980 s (1982), and has

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aside from some fundamental similarities between their concepts of social capital, these authors differ somewhat in their basic understanding of what social capital is. In short, we can say that for Bourdieu social capital is a relational social resource constituted by the networks and personal contacts of an individual in order to push through his or her interests.² For Coleman social capital has to be viewed as a metaphor for social structures which enable us to accomplish certain individual actions and goal attainments,³ whereas for Putnam social capital stands for a combination of social networks, social trust, and social norms as features of different types of social organization.⁴ Thus, speaking from a methodological point of view, even though these conceptualizations of social capital share an emphasis on relational concepts, it looks, as usual, as if sociologists have too many answers to the question that concerns us. Should social capital be viewed as a relational resource (following

developed it in the meantime (2001). According to Lin, social resources are “accessed through an individual’s social connections” (2001, 21). Noteworthy here, too, is the network analytical contribution of Burt (1992). Nevertheless, in the following I will only refer to Bourdieu, Coleman, and Putnam, because their concepts basically relate to social capital as a relational asset. Lin also demands this approach, but on the one hand only develops a perspective from an individualistic point of view and on the other hand, in my opinion, does not follow through consistently, as he does not reflect upon the relationality that consequentially accompanies the structural ambivalence of social capital (Lin 2001, 26 f.).  Bourdieu defines ‘social capital’ as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition [knowing and acknowledging, M.E.] – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital” (1986, 248).  “Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors – whether persons or corporate actors – within the structure. Like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible. […] Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors. It is not lodged either in the actors themselves or in physical implements of production” (Coleman 1988, S98).  According to Putnam social capital has to be defined as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (1993a: 167). And: “Social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (1995, 67). “Social capital refers to connections among individuals, social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (2000, 19). “The touchstone of social capital is the principle of generalized reciprocity” (2000, 134).

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Bourdieu), as an opportunity structure (following Coleman), or as a form of social embeddedness (following Putnam)? Moreover, what role does trust or social trust plays in this context? And how do these concepts raise the relation between the individual and its social ties, that is, between individualization and sociation, and in which way do they answer the question of how social capital creates structures and forms of sociality? Furthermore, do these conceptualizations share a specific idea of belonging, i. e., do they have a certain type of ‘restorative community’ in common? (2) Before going into more detail, a second remark needs to be made: in talking about the relation between social capital and the idea of belonging, the question arises as to what the term “belonging” stands for in this case. Are there certain findings which allow us to come to a clear differentiation of the concepts of belonging, integration, inclusion, participation, cohesion, or solidarity?⁵ The following remarks are guided by the impression that in contemporary social sciences these terms are used in a highly unspecific way and with different implications depending on diverse theoretical and empirical contexts. From my point of view, in discussions of the forms and structures of belonging, several types are often blended. For current purposes, I would like to differentiate between three types of belonging, i. e., between (a) the ascriptive, (b) the achieved or elected, and (c) the attributed or addressed aspects of how one belongs to someone or something: – (a) belonging to – for example – an ethnic group, that is: being anAfrican American (‘black’), or being a Sinti or Roma (‘gypsy’); – (b) belonging to something – for example – an association or an organization, or a movement or a religious group. Another form of this type would be: belonging together with someone, that is: being Catholic or Muslim, or belonging to a neighborhood, or to a network of terror; – (c) belonging somewhere – for example – to a social area or a milieu (a social environment), that is: being poor or living in the suburbs, in a banlieue, in a ghetto. In each of these cases people potentially can share an idea or sense of belonging to their social surroundings or environment. Admittedly, this might be a preliminary distinction, but it can serve as a guideline for more detailed descriptions of the phenomenon in question.

 Trust, and more precisely social trust, seems to be an integral part of all of these concepts and the ideas of sociality they refer to.

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So, the three types of belonging cited point to different forms of social capital connected with these modes of belonging. In the first case, we deal with a form of primordial belonging, on the basis of shared descent and phenotypical similarity in the broadest sense. This typically endures latently, and in presentday, highly industrialized societies requires complementary indicators in order to have a socially mobilizing effect, thus giving rise to social capital. Such constellations form into particular constellations of social exclusion and ghettoization. Alternatively, the second type of belonging basically deals with constellations of membership, and therefore with more or less formalized types of belonging to socio-cultural groups, movements or associations. These forms of belonging are constituted as optional, as having been chosen to some degree, as for example in electing to join a political association instead of a religious group. At its heart, the resources of social capital which typically arise in accordance with this “belonging” are due to a previous choice, i. e., an executed decision in favor of something. Compared with this, the third form of belonging refers to a socio-structural type of belonging. Basically, this type is imparted by what Bourdieu calls the “habitus”, a specific sense of one’s place, whose character is due to unequal conditions of social descent and socialization. The form of social capital connected to these socio-structural conditions of descent is virtually the result of social “fate”. Birth, choice, and fate – with these terms, the three types of social belonging are trenchantly conceived and contrasted with somewhat analogical forms of social capital. Furthermore, in each of the cases mentioned above, people’s social situations are open to processes of stigmatization – whether they are primordial (a), socio-cultural (b), or socio-structural (c) – and this potentially implies a strong notion of social inequality within a society. I will come back to this aspect later. (3) A third remark concerns the methodological perspective of the phenomena in question: as a sociologist one primarily must point out the ambivalent character of the notion of “social capital”. Comparable to the sociological term “sanctions”, we have to distinguish between positive and negative social capital. In other words: a primary ‘functionality’ of social capital might lead to some secondary, so-called dysfunctional implications or consequences. As Portes (1998, 15) pointed out earlier: “The same strong ties that bring benefits to members of a group commonly enable it to bar others from access”. Thus, a one-dimensional conceptualization of social capital is theoretically as well as empirically unacceptable, and for systematic reasons we are faced with the

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structural ambivalence of the concept of social capital itself (see, for example, Dubet/Lapeyronnie 1992; Wacquant 1998).⁶ In addition, I would argue that the same systematics remain valid for the idea of belonging. Structures of belonging are also necessarily ambivalent, because the other side of belonging to something is typically exclusion from something else, e. g., from other social contexts, groups, or constellations. Therefore, exclusion is the downside of each inclusion, and from multiple inclusion one must also expect multiple exclusion. In other words: Inclusions are typically followed by diverse processes of stigmatization – be they ‘positive’ (belonging to ‘us’) or ‘negative’ (belonging to ‘them’). It was Bourdieu who, in an early statement, noted this ambiguity or structural ambivalence, arguing that “exchange […] through the mutual recognition and the recognition of group membership which it implies, re-produces the group. By the same token, it reaffirms the limits of the group, i.e., the limits beyond which the constitutive exchange […] cannot take place” (Bourdieu 1986, 250). As a result, we are confronted with an ongoing dialectic between chances for individualization and risks of de-individualization or isolation. Therefore, the concepts of ‘social capital’ and of ‘belonging’ have each to be seen as a double-edged sword, since at one and the same time they concern the possibilities of social integration and determine social boundaries. (4) A fourth remark: Contemporary debates about the problem of societal integration are characterized by a shared neglect of reflections concerning social capital and social belonging on the one hand, and (social) trust on the other. Even though at least a few authors have published in both areas (see Coleman 1982, 1988; Dasgupta 1988, 1999), and both areas are concerned with the question of how societies can hold or stay together, in my opinion we are confronted with two mostly isolated and mutually exclusive areas of discourse. For that reason, I will try to concentrate on this problem in the third and fourth part of my paper. With these comments in mind, we can now conclude that while forms of belonging as well as types of social capital are highly rooted in constellations of social inequality and therefore structurally ambivalent, the societal problem with which we are confronted is not the fact that there are boundaries and forms of exclusion in general. More specifically, the problem that has to be analyzed is the historical and power-based specificity of forms of exclusion and disqualification in contemporary societies. This raises the question: Are we confronted with specific forms of social exclusion? Such a historically specific form would be, for example, a type of one-dimensional exclusion, like losing

 Sometimes called the “dark side of social capital” (see Putnam 2000, 350 ff.).

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one’s job in contemporary societies, which increasingly leads to an exclusion from society in general and therefore to the loss of one’s very status as a citizen. Thus, what is currently discussed under the title of multidimensional exclusion should better be addressed as a new type of one-factor exclusion. There is some empirical evidence for such processes taking place (see Bude/Willisch 2006, 2008; Castel/Dörre 2009). According to this concept, such a type of social exclusion quite immediately leads not only to a loss of social capital due to the loss of social belonging and opportunities for participation, but also to a loss of basic trust, social trust, and self-trust. This phenomenon provides an occasion for introducing a differentiation of the term ‘trust’, and for designating the phenomenon itself as a type of “operating trust”.

2 Political Sociology and Structures of Belonging, or: The Multidimensionality of Belonging and Intermediary Structures Because of its structural ambivalence, every discussion about social capital and belonging is political. And asking after structures of belonging⁷ also questions the structures of exclusion in a society. Continuing in this way offers the opportunity to connect our reflections with contemporary social discourse on exclusion and precarious social settings. In his groundbreaking study on the contours of “exclusion” in societies of late modernity, Martin Kronauer (2002) identifies three structures of social exclusion: partial inclusion or total exclusion from the labor market (the workforce), limitation of or exclusion from the immediate social environment, and, finally, limitation of opportunities for participation in certain life forms.⁸ The social situation that potentially follows these processes is characterized by unemployment (concerning the area of societal-materialistic reproduction), social isolation (in respect to the reproduction of one’s social identity), and anti-sociality (in German: A-Sozialität) (facing the reproduction of one’s socio-institutional identity).

 I am using the term ‘structures’ here in a methodological sense, i. e., not in contrast to especially cultural aspects, but in contrast to empirical aspects of social life. Therefore, the term ‘structures’ in this case refers to historically necessary conditions of social life, a so-called sociohistorical a priori.  According to relevant societal expectations of normality, that is, societally acknowledged as well as recognition-awarding social expectations.

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Comparable to Kronauer’s analysis we can now differentiate three structures of societal belonging for our actual purpose, i. e., socio-structural, socio-political, and socio-cultural structures. These constitute a network of primordial, socio-cultural, and socio-structural types of belonging: (i) being integrated in the workforce (to identify oneself and to be identified by others as a ‘worthy’ member of society),⁹ (ii) being integrated in social networks and groups (to have one’s social place and to be told to take it), as well as (iii) being integrated into structures of societal recognition (to be oneself and someone and to be told to be so). In my view, it is essential to the idea of belonging to realize the intertwined character, i. e., the folding or crossing over of these aspects – for the production and reproduction of an individual’s identity as well as for any idea of belonging. The structural conditions of identity formation are linked to structures of belonging as well as to forms of social capital. Consequently, for a sociologist, this raises questions about the structures of reciprocity and the relational logic of the social, of social reality. And in modern societies these structures of reciprocity as well as their relational logic are founded through the institutionalization of civic, political, and social rights (Marshall 1992, 40 f.). Citizenship according to Marshall implies three elements: rights which guarantee individual freedom, rights which guarantee the individual’s participation in political power, and rights which guarantee the economic, civilian, and educational minima constituting one’s personal integrity. With this understanding of citizenship in mind, which should be seen as constitutive for modern western societies, there is empirical evidence that we are currently confronted with its de-institutionalization, with its dispersion or erosion (Bude/Willisch 2006, 14, 31 ff.). At this point an additional remark seems to be necessary: The aforementioned relational approach to the concept of belonging is also due to the underlying fact of the structural ambivalence of institutions, typically referred to as forming the kernel of societal intermediary structures, for example, neighborhood, family, and so on. Forms and structures of belonging are typically descri-

 One might ask at this point if the emphasis on workforce in relation to the conceptualization of ‘generators of acknowledgement’ excludes or at least discriminates against women – with reference to the empirical circumstance that women are still neither equally nor equilibrated integrated into the labor market. According to the above stated opinion, the facts show that it is just the other way round: in contemporary societies the idea of the full membership of citizens (both female and male) is closely linked or interlocked to their integration into the labor market and again essential for further life opportunities. Especially the inclusion of the aspect of workforce into the conceptualization of structures of belonging has a critical function, indicating possible exclusion and (structural) inequality together with their consequences.

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bed as functioning intermediary institutions or structures (see Berger 1976, Berger/Neuhaus 1996) – an approach which gains specific prominence in several contributions within the so-called communitarian movement. But by considering empirical data especially from the western hemisphere, the family can serve as an excellent example for the structural ambivalence I have in mind. This is because the modern type of family as a so-called immediate social environment is an area of protection as well as of high danger with respect to physical and sexual violence. Therefore, any naïve idea of ‘good’ and ‘caring’ institutions is highly questionable. And this also holds true for any analysis focusing on the idea of physical proximity as the precondition for societal integration, belonging, and social capital. As several empirical findings show, divergent interests and different life-styles are not neutralized by physical proximity.¹⁰ People typically gather together because of a shared socio-economic status or similar lifestyles. Therefore, the type of rights which – according to Marshall – guarantee economic, civilian, and educational minima constituting one’s personal integrity enter the center of any question concerning the conditions and possibilities of belonging as well as the production and distribution of social capital.

3 Three Types of Trust and the Concept of ‘Operating Trust’ Social networks, trust, and norms of reciprocity are said to be the basis or the preconditions as well as the elements of social capital.¹¹ Social capital, therefore, can be seen as a multidimensional concept. The mutual relations of its components need to be explored, but for present purposes I will restrict myself to focusing on some essentials concerning the understanding of trust. Different concepts of ‘trust’ play a key role in modern social theory and we are thus confronted with an inflationary use of the concept of trust. But while this concept has become a widely used term especially in political science, psychology, economics, and sociology, research on trust has produced a good deal of conceptual confusion re See, for example, studies on social inequality focusing on different social environments or lifestyles as well as studies of districts (Kronauer/Vogel 2004). Compare this to Banfield who, in his classic study of the mafia (1985), already pointed out the endangerments of too strong a trust.  This reciprocity is meant in the strict sense – and therefore functions as an extension of Bourdieu′s concept of social capital (1986, 248 f.): social capital is based, on the one hand, on belonging to social groups, but on the other hand it also generates this belonging in the first place: we are facing a reciprocal/mutual effect of reinforcement.

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garding the meaning of the term ‘trust’ and its place in social life (Endress 2002, 2004, 2010). Moreover, the term ‘trust’ in our times is widely used in everyday life. Nonetheless, using this term in daily conversations has to be seen more or less as a sign of crisis. Telling others that we will just have to trust them, or asking them whether we can have trust in what they tell us or how they behave, objectively questions the other’s trustworthiness and thus communicates distrust. It is this empirical fact which gives an important hint as to how to analyze the typicality of trust in everyday interactions. Trust serves here as a background resource which remains primarily latent. One might also say: This type of trust is essentially assumed to function as a tacit frame of reference in everyday life. To my mind, sociological analysis must be aware of this central phenomenon. And it is the underlying thesis for my following argumentation that, for an adequate discussion of the phenomenon of trust in sociology as well as for the concept of belonging, one must distinguish systematically between three types of trust. These three types or modes of trust, which need to be differentiated for systematic reasons, are typically mixed together in sociological as well as social scientific debates and subsequently leveled: ‘operating trust’ as a constitutive mode; ‘habitual trust’ as the pragmatically effective fundament of routine and the product of interaction, and finally ‘explicit, thematized, or reflexive trust’ as a cognitive mode and strategic resource of action. In other words: while reflexive trust is thematized per definitionem, and habitual trust might be thematized, or at least could be theoretically thematized, ‘operating trust’ in comparison is introduced basically as pre-thematic, i. e., it cannot be thematized for systematic reasons. This type of operating trust appears to be the central phenomenon in question.¹²

 A sociological reflection of the phenomenon of trust can be founded on two basic phenomena or elements (Endress 2002, 8; 2004; 2008 and 2010). On the one hand, this is the high degree of taken-for-grantedness (‘normalcy’) with which people live their everyday lives and orient themselves in their social environments. Based on this major point of departure in sociological analysis, questions concerning the reasons for this acceptance and validity in further areas of life and action are raised. On this level of constitutional suppositions of taken-forgrantedness, the phenomenon of trust (and familiarity) becomes the centre of sociological research because it is an elementary resource for social actions and relationships and is therefore an object of investigation sui generis. On the other hand it is the presumption of the non-naturalness of this observed seemingly natural phenomenon which is the other departure point, complementary to the first one, for sociological analysis. It is a daily balancing act between unquestioning acceptance, something becoming questionable and things which have already in principle become questionable, which

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On the contrary, the field of the social sciences is widely dominated by approaches using rational choice theories (or game theoretical conceptualizations) and systems theories in order to provide a sociological analysis of the phenomenon of trust.¹³ Both approaches to the study of trust accentuate a concept which can best be called ‘reflexive trust’. Gambetta and especially Coleman as well as Sztompka (1999, 25), following Coleman, understand trust as “a bet about the future contingent actions of others”. The phenomenon of trust is understood here as a type of calculable resource for social interactions, i. e., it is exaggerated as a type of ‘reflexive trust’.¹⁴ Trust in the sense of a cognitive mode, such as reflexive trust, is modulated to correlate the articulation of levels of risk¹⁵ or allegations of distrust. Trust is seen here as risky behavior. Therefore, the type of trust under examination here is restricted to specific social situations and cannot be identified with the

leads to the withdrawal and loss of trust, to distrust, or the dissolution of familiar contexts of action. These phenomena are just as central to sociological analysis, as demonstrated by the aforementioned diagnoses of present-day society. This experience of the (latent) fragility of social reality, which is generally expressed by a (partial) loss of trust or (total) distrust, is a correlate of the constitutive ‘latent fragility’ and the dynamic of change concerning human interpretations of the social world, insofar as in interactions it is always your own worldview as well as the view of yourself which is at stake. The sociological analysis of the phenomenon of trust therefore discusses this by reference to the constitutive, meaning unresolvable, tension between taken-for-grantedness and not-taken-for-grantedness. If one sees trust as a specific mode of relation, thus a concept of relatedness, which can be identified as a consensus in the sociological discussion, then the different modes of this relation which I would like to paraphrase with the terms of reflexive, habitual, and operating trust, must therefore be interpreted consistently inside the realm of this core phenomenon, that is, the unresolvable tension between taken-for-grantedness and not-taken-for-grantedness (Endress 2002, 68 f.; 2010; 2012).  See, for example, the contributions of Luhmann 1968, 1979, 1988; Coleman 1982, 1990; Gambetta 1988; Giddens 1990; Sztompka 1998, 1999.  For instance, according to Gambetta (1988, 217) relations of trust include a “particular level of subjective probability with which an agent assesses that another agent or group of agents will perform a particular action”. And Coleman (1990, 91) holds that under the general heading of trust the usual arrangement is simply an incorporation of risk into the decision of whether or not to engage in the action”. Seeing things in that way Coleman (1990, 99) continues to understand trust as a ‘bet’. He argues that “a rational actor will place trust […] if the ratio of the chance of gain to the chance of loss is greater than the ratio of the amount of the potential loss to the amount of the potential gain” (ibid. 104, see also Luhmann 1988, 98).  At the same time one has to systematically differentiate between the objective riskiness of situations of trust on the one hand, and the subjective awareness of risk on the part of the actors involved on the other. Neither can be derived from the other, nor can it be ascribed to the other, which can also be shown by reference to the current discussion concerning the consciousness of the underclass.

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overall typology of the phenomenon. Conceptualizing the phenomenon in terms of reflexive trust alone implies the one-sided or mutual potential for sanctioning, the one-sided or reciprocal calculation of costs and benefits, and also the potential for an explicitly one-sided or mutual control of the behavior and actions of others involved. From my point of view, this logical reasoning in all respects contradicts the logic of non-questioning trust in the sense of a functioning interactive mode, which precedes corresponding rationalities (pre-reflexive), and carries the necessary competences (meta-reflexive).¹⁶ Operating trust as a mode of trust which carries social actions and relations in the sense of a – necessarily – concomitant resource seems to be a persisting background premise, which is not dispensable.¹⁷ We are confronted with a pragmatically effective mode of trust, that needs to be understood as the basis for any successful outcome of social relationships as well as the basis for the routine grounds for everyday actions and a constitutive mode of trust, indispensable/essential (not empirical, but constitutional) for any action or interaction. Consequently the “reflexive trust”-type cannot be seen as the primary or the central, much less the only, resource for cooperative action, social relationships or institutional arrangements. Not only, but especially, for the purpose of social scientific reflection, it appears to be short-sighted to reduce the phenomenon of trust to the aspect of reflexive trust. Consequently, we have to look for a somewhat more valid sociological conceptualization of ‘trust’ as a social phenomenon, a conceptualization closer in its understanding to that of everyday life. As a starting point we can use Edmund Husserl’s differentiation between ‘operating (fungieren)’ and ‘thematizing (thematisieren)’ as developed especially in his later works (Husserl 1936/54, 111). Husserl shows that, for systematic reasons, we have to differentiate between acting, i. e., the process of action, and the process of reflecting on this action. The crucial point here is the basic anthropological difference between being-a-body (‘Leib sein’) and having-a-body (‘Körper haben’). In respect of this difference, each person on the one hand is their body

 Meta-reflexive in the sense of trust pertaining precisely to these rationalities. This can be compared with respect to the familiarity of all differentiations between familiarity and nonfamiliarity (see Luhmann 1988, 95 f.).  This description as “necessarily concomitant” (in German: notwendig damit einhergehend, begleitet werdend) can be compared with Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception in his “Critique of Pure Reason”. Kant writes: “Das: Ich denke, muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten können” (§ 16, B 132).

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and he or she can on the other hand thematize this body.¹⁸ The same holds according to Husserl with respect to action analysis. As Husserl argues: “We […] [are] always functioning as subjects of acting, but [we are] only occasionally thematically objective” (ibid.).¹⁹ In exactly this sense I differentiate between trust as an unthematic, and pragmatically operative mode on the one hand, which is a resource not at one’s disposal, and trust as a cognitive ascertainment, a cognitively explicit mode, on the other hand – that is between ‘operating trust’ and ‘reflexive trust’. Subsequently, I will argue that for sociological purposes trust primarily has to be understood as ‘operating trust’ (Endress 2002, 68 ff.; 2010; 2012; Endress/Pabst 2013). Thus, it turns out to be inadequate to conceptualize the pragmatically effective mode of operating trust as an advanced or prior concession, because such a strategy eliminates the essential difference between calculated actions and their underlying social conditions.²⁰ But it is not just the fact that there is a primary dimension of trust which exceeds ‘reflexive trust’. In many cases and social situations a person may also not be aware of the risk implied by a certain action, interaction, or economic transaction. In most cases we do not or cannot realize that we are taking a risk. Hence, we have to distinguish the objective risk she or he enters into from her or his subjective knowledge or consciousness about this or any risk being taken. Therefore, the common argument that trust implies taking a risk, avoids the differentiation between the objective and the subjective dimensions involved. When focusing on situations of rationalized choices, the conception of ‘reflexive trust’ shares the same problem. Moreover, what does the argument that trusting somebody has to be essentially conceived as taking a risk really mean? Considering the fact that, generally speaking, taking a risk is constitutive for every

 Both aspects have to be first seen in their socio-cultural and socio-historical variance and second as related to societally legitimized formations of this relation.  The German original reads as follows: “Wir [sind] immerzu fungierend als Akt-Subjekte, aber nur gelegentlich thematisch gegenständlich”.  This crucial difference is also explained by Zucker’s differentiation between background expectations and constitutive expectations: “Constitutive expectations, because of their rule-like character, can be formally stated without major alteration in their exterior and objective quality; however background expectations cannot be explicitly stated without reducing their taken for granted character as ‘something everybody knows’. Hence, whether background expectations are highly institutionalized or not, trust resting on them will tend to be created by informal mechanisms, thereby kept implicit. The very act of making these background expectations explicit, such as by using formal mechanisms, may have the effect of de-institutionalizing them” (Zucker 1986, 103, note 10).

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human action, basically carrying conditions of uncertainty, it becomes clear that this aspect cannot be said to be specific to trust. At this point the question arises as to whether operating trust is just one class of habitual or conventionalized types of behavior and acting. Such an argument would clearly damage the systematic point of the argumentation developed so far. However, the question itself is misleading, because we clearly have to differentiate between operating trust and habitual trust: While the first is the primary or original mode of trust, the latter might be called its secondary mode, which points to the routine grounds for action, primarily remaining implicit. Even though both types can legitimately be called pre-reflexive, habitual trust, as opposed to operating trust, can firstly be the result of a preceding reflexive type of acting. Also, contrary to operating trust, habitual trust is, secondly, taken for granted. Habitual trust can in some way be more or less identified as a type of distinctive confidence. Therefore, a conception of validity is inherent in habitual trust; it refers to the fact that trust is a product of interaction, that it has to stand the test of time, and that trust has to prove itself (see Endress 2001, 185; 2002, 69, 90; Schinkel 2003, 372; Voswinkel 2003, 379).²¹ This underpins the relational quality of trust as mentioned before. Interactions always have a history. Thus, trust has to be viewed as a precondition as well as a consequence of interactions. This is especially the case in permanent or long-lasting interactions or relations. Here the ‘rule of meeting again’ comes into play.²² In order to understand the functioning character of trust in its primary mode, it is most important to view this type of trust as the precondition for habitual trust as well as for reflexive trust. Operating trust is neither an implicit nor an explicit basis for acting, which can be said to be taken for granted (see Endress 2001, 169). That is because it is the constitutive mode of being-related-to-the-(social)-world, to use a term introduced by Merleau-Ponty. Thus, it also has to be seen as the precondition for distrust, because otherwise one would not be able to separate these two modes of relating to others. A similar argument concerns the distinction between familiarity and foreignness, or strangeness, which is itself a familiar one. To sum up the argument so far, we have to distinguish between three commonly intermingled types of trust: operating trust as a pragmatic implicit constitutive mode, habitual trust as a routine ground for acting and a product of inter-

 Situations like meeting a stranger should more or less be called extraordinary and should be viewed as modifications of the structures of trust constitutive for our everyday activities.  Finally, arguing for an understanding of trust as a pragmatically implicit mode does not mean cutting out the question of social control at this point. On the contrary, objective structures of social control are inherent to implicit modes, because they not only determine our expectations but also mold our actions.

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action, and thematic or reflexive trust as a strategic resource for acting. In other words: while reflexive trust is per definitionem thematic, that is, the subject of discussion, habitual trust is potentially the subject of discussion, and operating trust is in principle non-thematic, it is not negotiable. This distinction tries to explicate the structural difference between modes of how we refer to something or somebody. Keeping this difference in mind, it turns out to be short-sighted to reduce the phenomenon of trust to its reflexive dimension for sociological purposes. Finally, this clarification of the concept of trust offers the chance for some further insight into the concept of belonging, because – in my understanding – trust now has to be seen as an element of both the multidimensional concepts of social capital and of belonging.

4 Remarks Concerning the Relation between Trust and Belonging Concerning the concept of trust, we can say that, by applying Husserl’s differentiation between ‘functioning’ (or ‘operating’) and ‘thematizing’, it can be shown that for systematic reasons we have to distinguish between the modes of ‘operating trust’, ‘habitual trust’, and ‘reflexive trust’. While the latter refers to a process of choosing among projects of action on the basis of rational calculation, the former has to be understood as a background assumption which remains constitutively implicit. Thus, in focusing the mode of operating trust we are confronted with a type of implicit or tacit ‘pragmatics’ which is essential especially for social interactions and the routine grounds for action, on the one hand, and a type of fundamental resource which is constitutive, that is, indispensable for acting and interacting itself, on the other. Therefore, reflexive trust can serve neither as the primary, the essential, nor as the only resource for cooperative actions, social interactions and structures of belonging. For the purposes of sociological analysis, we have to include the dimension of pre-reflexive trust in its pragmatically implicit mode as well as in its constitutive mode as the kernel of the phenomenon in question: Trust in both its pre-reflexive, that is, in its tacit as well as in its constitutive form, is the basic resource of social acting and social relations and, therefore, of social belonging. What conclusions can be drawn from this argument in addressing the question of social capital and structures of belonging? In order to give just one brief hint, let me start by referring to an earlier study by Robert Putnam. In 1993 he published a fascinating analysis trying to identify reasons for the socio-econom-

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ic backwardness of southern Italy compared with the northern part of the country. Asking how social trust is produced and what kinds of social trust enhance governmental as well as economic performance (1993a, 15), Putnam’s best known central thesis is that economic under-development is due to a comparably very low level of social capital which he identifies as the reason for the lack of efficiency of political institutions. Southern Italian people encounter each other with a high degree of anxiety and distrust; therefore, public life is characterized by a dramatic lack of social trust. Following Coleman in defining trust as a “feature of social organization, […] that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (1993a, 167), Putnam understands trust as “form” or a “component” or a “special feature” of social capital (1993a, 169 f.). While differentiating personal trust and social trust (1993a, 177), it seems that he understands trust as an individual resource or capacity to trust, on the one hand, and as a certain level of cooperation on the other hand.²³ Thus, the type of personal trust refers to the “intimate familiarity” and presumptions of the other’s trustworthiness (1993a, 171, 243) in contrast to social trust, which refers to “the structure of the situation” (1993a, 243), that is “norms” in general, specifically “the norm of generalized reciprocity” (1993a, 172), as well as “networks of civic engagement” (1993a, 173 f.). Summarizing Putnam’s overall understanding of trust – as mentioned above – its similarities with an enigmatic concept of “embeddedness” are obvious (1993a, 177). In my understanding, Putnam here primarily refers to a type of trust which I call ‘habitual trust’. Structures of reciprocity, as well as political and socio-economic institutions, must to some extent be taken for granted in order for them to function under the pragmatic mode of trust, the tacit or implicit form discussed above.²⁴ Putnam’s attention is on the normative routine grounds of action (see also 2000, 134 ff.). Therefore, his emphasis is on the other’s trustworthiness. It reflects his conception of “thin trust” which “rests implicitly on some background of shared social networks and expectations of reciprocity” (2000, 136). I would like to add that this idea of pre-reflexive trust does not contradict the idea of reflexive politics. Because, just as this idea is grounded in opportunities for critical consciousness as taken-for-granted, so is the functioning of “a culture of distrust” (Putnam 1993a, 15), which is constitutive for democratic politics

 See Putnam 1993, 171, “Trust entails a prediction about the behavior of an independent actor. … Trust lubricates cooperation. The greater the level of trust within a community, the greater [is] the likelihood of cooperation.” It is this later point which here motivates his referring to Bernard Williams’ concept of “thick trust”.  Even though their structural ambivalence continuously needs to be taken into account (see section 2).

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(Sztompka 1999), functionally grounded in the pragmatic mode of trust. In order to understand its ‘nature’ the constitutive type of trust, that is, ‘operating trust’, had been introduced here. Its character as a ‘non-thematic’, pragmatically effective mode of being-related-to-the-social-world, sociologically speaking, seems to be much better addressed in Goffman’s idea of the possibility of “civil inattention” in unfocused interaction (1963, 83 ff.). The function of this mode of civil inattention appears to be to display mutual regard and the absence of threat prior to any idea of cooperation.²⁵

Concluding Remarks The foregoing remarks have centered on the problem of social capital, the idea of belonging and the importance of (social) trust. In general, I have tried to work out some conditions for what might be called the production and reproduction of a culture of belonging. In doing so, special attention has been paid to the phenomenon of trust as a central dimension of the concept of social capital. My argumentation may only be preliminary sketched here. Nonetheless, the outcome of these reflections could lead to some clarifications concerning the concepts of social capital and belonging. I have tried to explore 1) their structural ambivalence, 2) their multidimensionality, 3) trust in its latent or implicit pragmatic mode as an element of both social capital and the idea of belonging, 4) its grounding in the phenomenon of ‘operating trust’, and 5) I have presented an argument for the political implications of the historical and relational character of trust. The idea of belonging points to an interactive, an intersubjective conception – and, comparable to Bourdieu’s understanding of ‘social capital’, I prefer to understand the idea of belonging as a relational resource. That is, I would like to differentiate this understanding from both Coleman’s as well as Putnam’s explanations of it. To my mind, we have to avoid both an individualistic (Coleman) as well as an ontological (Putnam) understanding of the ideas of ‘social capital’ and ‘belonging’. Because both are open to socio-historical interpretations, they have to be seen as historical as well as relational concepts, as structurally am-

 See Goffman (1963, 84): “What seems to be involved is that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design.” For an analysis in the field of security studies see Endress/Rampp 2013.

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bivalent, pointing necessarily to the structure of social inequality and the structure of power differentiation in the society they refer to. Furthermore, the idea of belonging is not a naturalistic concept, but – on a second level – a matter of what an individual knows about his belonging and related social expectations (opportunities and limitations according to one’s social status) such that this ‘knowledge’ becomes a motivational resource for (or restriction on) acting. This again brings us back to the question of social inequality and modes of individualization. For present purposes I have only tried to argue that both the socio-historical as well as the socio-hierarchical dimensions point to the socio-cultural variety of forms of reflexive and habitual trust, a difference which led to the introduction of the type of ‘operating trust’ as the key concept. The distinction of types of trust is far from being either trivial or irrelevant. It involves not only the widely varying circumstances for the development and preservation of trust, but it also explicates the various consequences arising from the differentiation of these types with respect to forms of social cooperation, and finally indicates their (potential) political (democratic-theoretically) implications. This interconnection demonstrates the constitutive relation between structures of belonging, types of social capital, and modes of trust.

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Castel, R./ Dörre, K. (eds,. 2009): Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung. Die soziale Frage am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus. Coleman, J. S. (1982): “Systems of Trust”. In: Angewandte Sozialforschung 10, p. 277 – 299. Coleman, J. S. (1988): “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital”. In: American Journal of Sociology 94, Supplement, S95-S120. Coleman, J. S. (1990): Foundations of Social Theory. Harvard: Belknap Press. Dasgupta, P. (1988): “Trust as a Commodity”. In: Gambetta (ed.) 1988, p. 49 – 72. Dasgupta, P. (1999): “Economic progress and the idea of social capital”. In: P. Dasgupta/I. Serageldin I. (eds.): Social Capital. A Multifaceted Perspective. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, p. 325 ff. Dubet, F./Lapeyronnie, D. (1992): Les quartiers d’Exil. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Endress, M. (2001): “Vertrauen und Vertrautheit. Phänomenologisch-anthropologische Grundlegung”. In: Hartmann, M./Offe C. (eds.): Vertrauen. Die Grundlage des sozialen Zusammenhalts. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus, p. 161 – 203. Endress, M. (2002): Vertrauen. Bielefeld: transcript. Endress, M. (2004): “Foundations of Trust. Introductory Remarks of the Sociology of Trust”. In: H. Schrader (ed.): Trust and Social Transformation. Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Findings from Russia. Münster: LIT, p. 15 – 30. Endress, M. (2008): Fungierendes Vertrauen – Eine prä-reflexive wie meta-reflexive Ressource, http://www.bildungsvertrauen.de/material/endress_nw1.pdf, visited 1. 11. 2013. Endress, M. (2010): “Vertrauen: Soziologische Perspektiven”. In: Maring, M. (ed.): Vertrauen – zwischen sozialem Kitt und der Senkung von Transaktionskosten. Karlsruhe: KIT, p. 91 – 113. Endress, M. (2012): “On the dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar within the life-world”. In: Nasu, H./Waksler, F. (eds.): Interaction and Everyday Life. Phenomenological and Ethnomethodological Essays in Honor of George Psathas. Lanham: Lexington Books, p. 115 – 133. Endress, M./Pabst, A. (2013): “Violence and Shattered Trust: Sociological Considerations”. In: Human Studies. A Journal For Philosophy and The Social Sciences 36, p. 89 – 106. Endress, M./Rampp, B. (2013): “Vertrauen in der Sicherheitsgesellschaft”. In: Sitzungsberichte der Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 116, p. 145 – 160. Gambetta, D. (1988): “Can We Trust Trust?” In: Gambetta (ed.) 1988, p. 213 – 237. Gambetta, D. (ed., 1988): Trust. Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1990): The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, E. (1963): Behavior in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gathering. New York/London: Free Press. Husserl, E. (1936/54): Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Husserliana VI, ed. by Biemel W., Den Haag: Nijhoff. Kant, I. (1781/1787): Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kronauer, M. (2002): Exklusion. Die Gefährdung des Sozialen im hoch entwickelten Kapitalismus. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus. Kronauer, M./Vogel, B. (2004): Erfahrung und Bewältigung von sozialer Ausgrenzung in der Großstadt: Was sind Quartierseffekte, was Lageeffekte? In: Hartmut Häußermann/Kronauer M./Siebel W. (eds.): An den Rändern der Städte. Armut und Ausgrenzung, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 235 – 257.

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Lin, N. (1982): “Social Resources and Instrumental Action”. In: Marsden, P. V./Lin, N. (eds.), Social Structures and Network Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, p. 131 – 145. Lin, N. (2001): Social Capital. A Theory of Social Structure and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Luhmann, N. (1968): Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion von Komplexität. Stuttgart: Enke 31989. Luhmann, N. (1979): Trust and Power. Chichester: John Wiley. Luhmann, N. (1988): “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust. Problems and Alternatives”. In: Gambetta (ed.) 1988, p. 94 – 107 Marshall, T. H. (1992): Bürgerrechte und soziale Klassen. Zur Soziologie des Wohlfahrtsstaats. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus. Portes, A. (1998): “Social Capital. Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology”. In: Annual Review of Sociology 24, p. 1 – 24. Putnam, R. D. (1993a): Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1993b): “The Prosperous Community. Social Capital and Public Life”. In: The American Prospect 4.13, March 21. Putnam, R. D. (1995): “Bowling Alone. America’s declining social capital”. In: Journal of Democracy 6, p. 65 – 78. Putnam, R. D. (2000): Bowling alone. The collapse and revival of American community. New York/London: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. D. (2007): “E Pluribus Unum. Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture”. In: Scandinavian Political Studies 30, p. 137 – 174. Schinkel, A. (2003): “Die Hermetik und Sozialität des Vertrauens”. In: Erwägen – Wissen – Ethik, 14.2, p. 372 – 374. Simmel, G. (1950): The Sociology of Georg Simmel. trl., ed., and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press. SIRC/Social Issue Research Centre (2007): Belonging. Oxford: SIRC. Sztompka, P. (1998): “Trust, Distrust and Two Paradoxes of Democracy”. In: European Journal of Social Theory 1, p. 19 – 32. Sztompka, P. (1999): Trust. A Sociological Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Turner, J. H. (1999): “The Formation of Social Capital”. In: Dasgupta P./Serageldin I. (eds.): Social Capital. A Multifaceted Perspective. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, p. 94 – 146. Voswinkel, S. (2003): “Vertrauen zwischen Normalität und Kontingenz – Vertrauen in Organisationen und Vertrauen in Systeme”. In: Erwägen – Wissen – Ethik 14.2, p. 377 – 379. Wacquant, L. J. D. (1998): “Negative Social Capital: State breakdown and social destitution in America’s urban core”. In: Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 13, p. 25 – 40. Zucker, L.G. (1986): “Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840 – 1920”. In: Research in Organizational Behavior 8, p. 53 – 111.

Partha Dasgupta

Trust and Cooperation among Economic Agents Introduction¹ The units that are subject to selection pressure in evolutionary biology are “strategies” (Maynard Smith 1982; Nowak 2006), which are conditional actions, such as, “Do P if Q occurs”. In contrast, the units in economics select strategies from available menus so as to further their projects and purposes. As agency assumes a central role in the social sciences, economic units are called “agents”, or “parties”. Sometimes, we economists even call them “people”. Robinson Crusoe aside, people don’t live in isolation. So, an agent’s optimum choice depends on the choices made by others. Moreover, as their projects and purposes involve not just the present but the future too, every agent reasons about the likely present and future consequences of their respective choices, while recognizing that all others are engaged in similar reasoning. That is why beliefs, about what others may do and what the consequences of those choices could be, are at the basis of strategy selection. Economic environments are therefore inter-temporal games, in the sense of the theory of games (Binmore and Dasgupta 1986). Notice, we are not pre-judging that agents cooperate so as to improve their lot. Whether they do depends on the ease with which they have access to a cooperative “infrastructure” (e.g., commitment devices that can be used to make promises agents make to one another credible, Section 3). In this paper I study the various social environments in which cooperation is possible. That the basis of cooperation is mutual trust is a banality, the deeper point is that trust in turn is based on beliefs. However, if the trust is not to be “blind”, it has to be based on rational beliefs. In Sections 1– 3 I develop these arguments in a sequence of increasing complexity. In Section 4 we study why cooperation is often very fragile. In Section 5 I show that cooperation among members of a group is not always benign, that it can harbor inequality, even exploitation. In Section 6 I apply the theoretical framework of Sections 3 and 4 to ask why, in contrast to the cooperation that is frequently observed

 Text of lecture delivered at the Royal Society Discussion Meeting on 19/20 January 2009 on The Evolution of Society, in celebration of the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, contributions to which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B (2009), 3301– 3309. Over the years I have gained much from discussions on the subject matter of this paper with Kenneth Arrow, Scott Barrett, Patrick Bateson, Paul Ehrlich, and Robert Hinde.

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among members of local communities over the use of geographically confined natural resources (Dasgupta and Heal 1979; Ostrom 1990; Baland and Platteau 1996) and among people engaged in transactions in well-functioning markets, international cooperation in the management of global public goods (e. g., the atmosphere as a sink for pollutants, the oceans) has proved to be so elusive. Section 7 concludes.

1 Trust Imagine that a group of people have discovered a mutually advantageous course of actions. At the grandest level, it could be that citizens see the benefits of adopting a Constitution for their country. At a more local level, the undertaking could be to share the costs and benefits of maintaining a communal resource (irrigation system, grazing field, coastal fishery); construct a jointly useable asset (drainage channel in a watershed); collaborate in political activity (civic engagement, lobbying); do business when the purchase and delivery of goods can’t be synchronized (credit, insurance, wage labor); enter marriage; create a rotating saving and credit association (as in the institution of iddir in Ethiopia); initiate a reciprocal arrangement (I help you, now that you are in need, with the understanding that you will help me when I am in need); adopt a convention (send one another Christmas cards); create a partnership to produce goods for the market; conduct an instantaneous transaction (purchase something across the counter); and so on. Then there are mutually advantageous courses of action that involve being civil to one another. They range from such forms of civic behavior as not disfiguring public spaces and obeying the law more generally, to respecting the rights of others. Imagine next that the parties have agreed to share the benefits and costs in a certain way. The agreement could involve some members making side-payments to others. Again, at the grandest level the agreement could be a social contract among citizens to observe their Constitution. Or it could be a tacit agreement to be civil to one another, such as respecting the rights of others to be heard, to get on with their lives, and so forth. Here we will be thinking of agreements over transactions in goods and services. There would be situations where the agreement was based on a take-it-or-leave-it offer one party makes another (as when a purchaser accepts the terms and conditions in a supermarket). In other contexts, bargaining may have been involved (as in a Middle-Eastern bazaar). Here we will not ask how agreements have been reached, nor look for principles of equity that might have been invoked during negotiation (but see Section 5). We ask instead: Under what circumstances would the parties who have reached agreement trust one another to keep their word?

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Because one’s word must be credible if it is to be believed, mere promises wouldn’t be enough. (Witness that we caution others, and ourselves too, not to trust people “blindly”.) If the parties are to trust one another to keep their promise, matters must be so arranged that: (1) at every stage of the agreed course of actions, it would be in the interest of each party to plan to keep his or her word if all others were to plan to keep their word; and (2) at every stage of the agreed course of actions, each party would believe that all others would keep their word. If the two conditions are met, a system of beliefs that the agreement will be kept would be self-confirming. Notice that condition (2) on its own wouldn’t do. Beliefs need to be justified. Condition (1) provides the justification. It offers the basis on which everyone could in principle believe that the agreement will be kept. A course of actions, one per party, satisfying condition (1) is called a Nash equilibrium, in honor of the mathematician John Nash (he of the beautiful mind) who proved that it is not a vacuous concept (Nash 1950). By their very definition, Nash equilibria (there can be more than one equilibrium; see below) are self-enforcing, which is why the parties in question would seek to identify them. Notice that condition (1) on its own wouldn’t do either. It could be that it is in each agent’s interest to behave opportunistically if everyone believed that everyone else would behave opportunistically. In that case non-cooperation is also a Nash equilibrium, meaning that a set of mutual beliefs that the agreement will not be kept would also be self-confirming, and so, non-cooperation would be self-enforcing. Stated formally, a Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies, one per agent, such that no agent would have any reason to deviate from his or her course of actions if all other agents were to pursue their courses of actions. As we have just seen, generally speaking societies harbor multiple Nash equilibria (see Maynard Smith 1982; Nowak 2006; and Osborne 2004, for specific examples). Some yield desirable outcomes, others do not. The famous Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game that has a unique Nash equilibrium in which all parties are worse off than they could have been if a suitable cooperative infrastructure had been in place (Section 6). The fundamental problem facing a society is to create institutions where conditions (1) and (2) apply to engagements that protect and promote its members’ interests. Conditions (1) and (2), taken together, require an awful lot of coordination among the parties. In order to probe the question of which Nash equilibrium can be expected to be reached, if a Nash equilibrium is expected to be reached at all, economists study human behavior that are not Nash equilibria. The idea is to model the way people form beliefs about the way the world works, the way people behave, and the way they revise their beliefs on the basis of what they observe. The idea is to track the consequences of those patterns of belief formation so as to

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check whether the model economy moves toward a Nash equilibrium over time, or whether it moves about in some fashion or other but not toward an equilibrium. This research enterprise has yielded a general conclusion: Suppose the economic environment in a certain place harbors multiple Nash equilibria. Which equilibrium should be expected to be approached, if the economy approaches an equilibrium at all, will depend on the beliefs that people held at some point in the past. It also depends on the way people have revised their beliefs on the basis of observations since that past date. This is another way of saying that history matters. Model building, statistical tests on data relating to the models, and historical narratives have to work together synergistically if we are to make progress in understanding our social world. Unfortunately, the study of disequilibrium behavior would lengthen this paper greatly. We shall see though that, fortunately, a study of equilibrium behavior takes us a long way.

2 Credible Promises We began by observing that mutual trust is the basis of cooperation. In view of the multiplicity of Nash equilibria and the possible awfulness of equilibria in those social environments where a cooperative infrastructure is absent, we look for environments in which cooperation is possible. To do that it proves useful to classify the social environments in which the promises people make to one another are credible. Five come to mind (Dasgupta 2005; 2007).

2.1 Mutual Affection Promises would be credible if the parties care about one another sufficiently. Innumerable transactions take place only because the people involved care about one another and rationally believe that they care about one another (each knows that the others know that they care about one another, each knows that the others know that each knows that they care about one another, and so on) and thus trust one another to carry out their obligations. The household best exemplifies institutions based on care and affection. (The corresponding notion in evolutionary biology is “kin selection”; Hamilton 1964.) Because people who cohabit are able to observe and know one another, they can be sanguine that members will not be unduly opportunistic. The problem is that, being few in number, members of a household, as a group, are unable to engage in those enterprises that require large numbers of people of varied talents and locations. That is why mutual affection is not the basis of cooperation in most other contexts.

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2.2 Pro-social Disposition Promises would be credible if it was common knowledge that those making the promises were trustworthy, or that they reciprocated by keeping their promise if others displayed trust in them. The new behavioral economics emphasizes this aspect of human character (see, e. g., Rabin 1993; Fehr and Fischbacher 2002). Nature and nurture play a still little-understood combined role in developing in us a general disposition to reciprocate (Hinde and Groebel 1991; Ehrlich 2000). Our capacity to have such feelings as shame, affection, anger, elation, obligation, benevolence, and jealousy would appear to have emerged under selection pressure. No doubt culture helps to shape preferences, expectations, and thus, behavior, which are known to differ widely across societies. But cultural coordinates enable us to identify the locus of points upon which shame, affection, anger, elation, obligation, benevolence, and jealousy are put to work; they don’t displace the centrality of those capacities in the human make-up. The thought I am pursuing here is that as adults we not only have a disposition for such behavior as paying our dues, helping others at some cost to ourselves, and returning a favor, we also practice such norms as those which prescribe that we punish those who have hurt us intentionally; and even such higher-order-norms as shunning those who break agreements, on occasion frowning on those who socialize with people who have broken agreements; and so forth. Often enough, the disposition to be honest would be toward members of some particular group, not others. This amounts to group loyalty. The underlying group could be one’s neighbors, or clan, or nation. The glue that binds could also be religion or ethnicity (Ehrlich 2000, has an excellent discussion on these matters). By internalizing specific norms, a person enables the springs of his actions to include them. He therefore feels shame or guilt in violating the norm, and this prevents him from doing so, or at the very least it puts a break on him, unless other considerations are found by him to be overriding. In short, his upbringing ensures that he has a disposition to obey the norm, be it moral or social. When he does violate it, neither guilt nor shame would typically be absent, but frequently the act will have been rationalized by him. For such a person, making a promise is a commitment, and it is essential for him that others recognize it to be so (Arrow 1974). Recent work in behavioral economics has re-affirmed among economists that trustworthiness isn’t alien to human nature. The problem is that, as people don’t have their inherent trustworthiness stamped on their forehead, they can’t know in advance whom to trust. In any event, if relative to the gravity of the misdemeanor the pecuniary benefits of opportunistic behavior were high, transgression could be expected. The problem is that one wouldn’t know in advance who would be likely to transgress. Punishment assumes its role as deterrence because of these agency problems. As someone’s trustworthiness isn’t publicly observable, punishment is

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usually tailored to the “crime”. In the next section we study the remaining three contexts in which people are able to trust one another to keep their promises. We will confirm that, by looking into someone’s personal history it becomes possible to tailor punishment not only to the “crime”, but also their past behavior and circumstances.

3 Incentives to Keep Promises The promises the parties have made to one another to keep to their agreement would be credible if they could devise an institution in which keeping promises would be in the interest of each party if everyone else were to keep them. The problem therefore is to devise an institution in which keeping to the agreement is a Nash equilibrium. Recall that a strategy is a sequence of conditional actions. Strategies assume the forms, “I shall choose X if you choose Y”, or “I shall do P if Q occurs”, and so on. If promises are to be credible, it must be in the interest of those making promises to carry them out if and when the relevant occasions arise. Societies everywhere have constructed solutions to the credibility problem, but in different ways. What all solutions have in common, however, is the imposition of collective sanctions on those who intentionally do not comply with agreements. Of course, a credible threat of punishment for misdemeanors would be an effective deterrence only if future costs and benefits aren’t discounted at too high a rate relative to other parameters of the social environment, a matter to which I return presently. Broadly speaking, there are three types of situation where parties to an agreement could expect everyone to keep to their words. (Of course, none may be potent in a particular context, in which case people would find themselves in a hole they cannot easily get out of, and what could have been mutually beneficial agreements will not take place. (The behavior reported in the Mezzogiorno by Banfield 1958, is an illustration of this possibility.) Each gives rise to a set of institutions that capitalize on its particular features. In practice, of course, the types would be expected to shade into one another, but it pays to study them separately. So, in the next three sub-sections I assume that the discount rates agents apply to their future costs and benefits are low relative to other parameters of the social environment.

3.1 External Enforcement It could be that the agreement is translated into an explicit contract and enforced by an established structure of power and authority; that is, an external enforcer.

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By an external enforcer I imagine here, for simplicity, the State. (Depending on the social environment, the “external enforcer” could be the tribal chieftain, the warlord, the priest, or the village elders.) Consider that the rules governing transactions in the formal market-place are embodied in the law. So markets are supported by a legal structure. Firms, for example, are legal entities. Even when you go to a supermarket, your purchases (paid in cash or by card) involve the law, which provides protection for both parties (the grocer, in case the cash is counterfeit or the card is void; the purchaser, in case the product turns out on inspection to be sub-standard). The law is enforced by the coercive power of the State. Transactions involve legal contracts backed by an external enforcer, namely, the State. It is because you and the supermarket owner are confident that the State has the ability and willingness to enforce contracts that you and the owner of the supermarket are willing to transact. What is the basis of that confidence? After all, the State apparatus is run by people, which means a further agency problem. In any event, the contemporary world has shown that there are States and there are States. Simply to invoke an external enforcer for solving the credibility problem won’t do. For why should the parties trust the State to carry out its tasks in an honest and effective manner? A possible answer is that the government worries about its reputation (Section 3.2). So, for example, a free and inquisitive press in a democracy helps to sober the government into believing that incompetence or malfeasance would mean an end to its rule when the time comes for the next election. Because voters know that the government worries, they trust their government to enforce agreements. Even if senior members of the ruling party are getting on in years and don’t much care what happens in the future, younger members would worry that the party’s reputation would suffer if the government were not to behave. The above argument involves a system of interlocking beliefs about one another’s abilities and intentions. Consider that millions of households in many parts of the world trust their government (more or less!) to enforce contracts, because they know that government leaders know that not to enforce contracts efficiently would mean being thrown out of office. In their turn, each side of a contract trusts the other not to renege (again, more or less!), because each knows that the other knows that the government can be trusted to enforce contracts. And so on. Trust is maintained by the threat of punishment (a fine, a jail term, dismissal, or whatever) for anyone who breaks a contract. We are in the realm of equilibrium beliefs, held together by their own bootstraps. Unfortunately, cooperation isn’t the only possible outcome. Non-cooperation can also be held together by its own bootstrap. At a non-cooperative equilibrium the parties don’t trust one another to keep their promises, because the external enforcer cannot be trusted to enforce agreements. To ask whether cooperation or non-

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cooperation would prevail is to ask which system of beliefs is adopted by the parties about one another’s intentions. Social systems harbor multiple equilibria.

3.2 Reputation as Capital Asset Political parties are not the only entities that view reputation as a capital asset. Individuals and firms view it that way too. Consider someone who doesn’t care what his reputation will be after death. Even he would care to build a reputation for honest dealing if by so doing he could cash in that reputation at the time of retirement. Brand names are an instance of such cases. The person owning the brand name no doubt changes over time, but the name itself remains. Consider a firm whose dishonest behavior has been exposed. Suppose too that customers deal only with firms that have an unsullied reputation. On retirement, the owner would find no buyer for the firm. If the owner knew that in advance, she may well wish to maintain the firm’s reputation for honesty. If the owner cared sufficiently about her quality of life after retirement, honesty would be an equilibrium strategy, just as boycotting ill-reputed firms would be a corresponding equilibrium strategy for customers (Kreps 1990). Of course, even in situations where reputation can be accumulated as a capital asset, it may be that agents don’t accumulate reputations for honesty. It cannot be repeated often enough that social systems possess multiple equilibria. The formal analysis of reputation as capital asset is similar to one where the parties expect to face transaction opportunities repeatedly in the future. Let us study those situations.

3.3 Long-term Relationships Suppose the agents expect to face similar transaction opportunities in each period over an indefinite future. Imagine too that the parties can’t depend on the law of contracts because the nearest courts are far from their residence. There may even be no lawyers in sight. In rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, much economic life is shaped outside a formal legal system. But even though no external enforcer may be available, people there do transact. Credit involves saying, “I lend to you now with your promise that you will repay me”; and so on. But why should the parties be sanguine that the agreements won’t turn sour on account of opportunistic behavior? They would be sanguine if agreements were mutually enforced. The basic idea is this: a credible threat by members of a community that stiff sanctions would be

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imposed on anyone who broke an agreement could deter everyone from breaking it. (The corresponding mechanism in evolutionary biology is called “reciprocal altruism”; Trivers 1971.) The problem then is to make the threat credible. The solution to the credibility problem in this case is achieved by recourse to social norms of behavior. By a social norm we mean a rule of behavior, or a strategy, that is followed by members of a community. For a rule of behavior to be a social norm, it must be in the interest of everyone to act in accordance with the rule if all others were to act in accordance with it. Social norms are (Nash) equilibrium rules of behavior. To see how social norms work, imagine that the gain to a party from breaking the agreement unilaterally during a period is less than the discounted value of the losses she would suffer if all other parties were to punish her subsequently. The punishment could involve all others refusing to engage in any transactions with the erring party in the following period, shunning her for suitable numbers of periods, and so on. Call a party “conformist” if she cooperates with parties who are conformists but punishes those who are non-conformists. That sounds circular, but it isn’t, because the social norm we are studying here requires all parties to start the process by keeping their agreement. It would then be possible for any party in any period to determine which party is conformist and which party is not. For example, if ever someone were to break the original agreement, he would be judged to be non-conformist; so, the norm would require all parties to punish the non-conformist. Moreover, the norm would require that punishment be inflicted not only upon those in violation of the original agreement (first-order violation); but also upon those who fail to punish those in violation of the agreement (second-order violation); upon those who fail to punish those who fail to punish those in violation of the agreement (third-order violation); and so on, indefinitely. This infinite chain makes the threat of punishment for errant behavior credible because, if all others were to conform to the norm, it would not be worth any party’s while to violate the norm. Keeping one’s agreement would then be self-enforcing (Mailath and Samuelson 2006). All traditional societies appear to have sanctions in place for first-order violations. Anthropologists and novelists have noted the use of sanctions for secondorder violations. The fact that sanctions against higher-order violations haven’t been documented much may be because they aren’t needed to be built into social norms if it is commonly recognized that people feel a strong emotional urge to punish those who have broken agreements. Anger facilitates cooperation by making the threat of retaliation credible.²

 On a riverboat ride in Australia’s Kakadu National Park some years ago, my wife and I were

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Social norms that are enshrined in the culture of a community depend not only on the character of the agreements themselves, but also on the relative ease with which prospects are expected to arise for opportunistic behavior. Sanctions can range from the punitive and unforgiving (“one strike and you are out!”, known in the literature as the “grim strategy”), which have been observed in places where tempting short-term outside economic opportunities appear from time to time. However, many rural communities (e.g. in the mountains of Nepal) are like enclaves: they live far from established markets. Adopting “grim” would prove counter-productive there. That is why sanctions there have been found to be graduated: the first misdemeanor is met by a small punishment, subsequent ones by stiffer punishments, persistent ones by punishments that are stiffer still (Ostrom 1992). Where information is imperfect, a small penalty for the first misdemeanor would be warning that others were watching, or it could be that others signal their acknowledgement that the misdemeanor could have been an error on the part of the offender and that he should try harder next time. And so on. It can be shown that the scope for cooperation can be increased by tying several agreements (e.g., agreements over the mutual provision of credit, insurance, and labor, respectively), so that the norm has it that violation of any one agreement is met by withdrawal of cooperation in all other engagements (Dasgupta 2007). Interestingly, tied relationships are a common feature of traditional societies. Unfortunately, even when cooperation is a possible equilibrium, non-cooperation is an equilibrium too. To see why, imagine that each party believes that all others will renege on the agreement. It would then be in each one’s interest to renege at once, meaning that there would be no cooperation. Failure to cooperate could be due simply to an unfortunate pair of self-confirming beliefs, nothing else. No doubt it is mutual suspicion that ruins their chance to cooperate, but the suspicions are internally self-consistent. In short, even when people don’t discount future costs and benefits at a high rate and appropriate institutions are in place to enable people to cooperate, it can be that they do not cooperate. Whether they cooperate depends on mutual beliefs, nothing more. I have known this result for many years, but still find it a surprising and disturbing fact about social life.

informed by the guide, a young aborigine, that his tribe traditionally practiced a form of punishment that involved spearing the thigh muscle of the errant party. When I asked him what would happen if the party obliged to spear an errant party were to balk at doing so, the young man’s reply was that he in turn would have been speared. When I asked him what would happen if the person obliged to spear the latter miscreant were to balk, he replied that he too would have been speared! I asked him if the chain he was describing would go on indefinitely. Our guide said he didn’t know what I meant by “indefinitely”, but as far as he knew, there was no end to the chain.

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4 Dark Matter: Breakdown of Cooperation We have so far assumed that the discount rates people apply to their future gains and losses are small. It is, of course, obvious that if the rates were large, cooperation wouldn’t be possible. So we now have in hand a tool to explain how a community where members have been cooperating can skid to a state of affairs where they cease to cooperate. Ecological stress (caused, for example, by high population growth and prolonged droughts) often leads people to fight over land and natural resources (Homer-Dixon 1999; Diamond 2005). More generally, political instability (in the extreme, civil war) would be a reason why people discount the future benefits of cooperation at a high rate, if for no other reason than a heightened fear that their community will not survive in its present shape. For whatever reason, if discount rates were to increase sufficiently relative to the parameters characterizing the social environment, cooperation would cease. Mathematicians call the points at which those switches occur, “bifurcations”, sociologists call them “tipping points”. Social norms work only when people have reasons to value the future benefits of cooperation. Contemporary examples illustrate this. Local institutions have been observed to deteriorate in the unsettled regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Communal management systems that once protected Sahelian forests from unsustainable use were destroyed by governments keen to establish their authority over rural people. But Sahelian officials had no expertise at forestry, nor did they have the resources to observe who took what from the forests. Many were corrupt. Rural communities were unable to switch from communal governance to governance based on the law: the former was destroyed and the latter didn’t really get going. The collective vacuum has had a terrible impact on people whose lives had been built round their forests and woodlands (Dasgupta 2008a). Ominously, there are subtler pathways by which societies can tip from a state of mutual trust to one of mutual distrust. We have seen that when discount rates are low, both cooperation and non-cooperation are equilibrium outcomes. So, a society could tip over from cooperation to non-cooperation simply because of a change in beliefs. The tipping may have nothing to do with any discernable change in circumstances; the entire shift in behavior could be triggered in people’s minds. The switch could occur quickly and unexpectedly, which is why it would be impossible to predict and why it would cause surprise and dismay. People who woke up in the morning as friends would discover at noon that they are at war with one another. Of course, in practice there are usually cues to be found. False rumors and propaganda create pathways by which people’s beliefs can so alter that they tip a society where people trust one another to one where they don’t.

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The reverse can happen too, but it takes a lot longer. Rebuilding a community that was previously racked by civil strife involves building trust. Non-cooperation doesn’t require as much coordination as cooperation does. Not to cooperate usually means to withdraw. To cooperate, people must not only trust one another to do so, they must also coordinate on a social norm that everyone understands. That is why it’s a lot easier to destroy a society than to build it. How does an increase or decrease in cooperation translate into macroeconomic performance? Consider two communities that are identical in all respects, excepting that in one people have coordinated at an equilibrium state of affairs where they trust one another, while people in the other have coordinated at an equilibrium where they don’t trust one another. The difference between the two economies would be reflected in the productivity of their assets, which would be higher in the community where people trust one another than in the one where they don’t. Enjoying greater incomes, individuals in the former economy are able to put aside more of their income to accumulate capital assets, other things being equal. So it would become relatively wealthier. Mutual trust would be interpreted from the statistics as a driver of economic growth, but the statistics wouldn’t reveal how that trust was created and maintained.

5 More Dark Matter: Exploitation in Long-Term Relationships Both theory and empirics tell us that cooperation can harbor inequality (see Dasgupta 2008a, for a review). Unhappily, it can also harbor exploitation, a far worse state of affairs. We began by considering a group of people who have not only discovered a mutually beneficial course of actions, but have also agreed to follow that course. We identified circumstances in which people would be able to enter longterm relationships in which they would trust one another to do what they are required to under the terms of the agreement. In studying long-term relationships, we assumed that all who enter them benefit (although not perhaps equally). I now want to show that long-term relationships can be bad for some members of a cooperative; in that there are circumstances where some people are worse off being part of a long-term relationship than they would have been if a long-term relationship had not been entered into. If that sounds implausible, it may be because in studying cooperation and the benefits that accrue from it, we are used to drawing on the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) game. Indeed, the PD game has been used almost universally to illustrate the problem of collective action people face in producing public goods (e.g. flood barriers)

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or managing common property resources (e. g. local woodlands). However, societal problems involving the production of public goods and the management of common property resources (CPRs) are not reflected in the PD game (Dasgupta and Heal 1979; Dasgupta 2008b). To see why, recall that the PD game, when played once, has two distinguishing features: (1) Every agent has a dominant strategy, that is, a strategy that is best for her no matter what strategies are chosen by the others; and (2) there is a set of strategies, one for each agent, which, if it were chosen, would lead to an outcome that is better for all than the outcome that obtains when each agent plays her dominant strategy. In the absence of a cooperative infrastructure, agents would choose their dominant strategies. So, the dominant strategies constitute the unique Nash equilibrium. Moreover the equilibrium is collectively sub-optimal. That’s the dilemma. Recall from the theory of games that an agent’s min-max payoff is the payoff she can guarantee for herself even if all others were bent on making her life as miserable as possible. The reason we are interested in the concept of min-max payoffs in the present context is that in the PD game agents receive their min-max payoffs when they play their dominant strategies. So, at the unique Nash equilibrium of the PD game, agents’ payoffs are their min-max payoffs. Dasgupta and Heal (1979, Ch. 3) showed that in the absence of a cooperative infrastructure the production of public goods and the management of CPRs involve games in which (the unique) Nash equilibrium is indeed collectively sub-optimal; but the authors also showed that agents’ equilibrium payoffs are not their min-max payoffs. This means that in public-goods games and CPR games there is a gap between the equilibrium payoff of an agent and her min-max payoff: the former exceeds the latter. Now consider a long-term relationship among people engaged in the management of a CPR. Suppose the social norm they use in order to maintain cooperation instructs members to punish non-conformists by pushing them down to their min-max payoffs for a suitable number of periods. Using results from the theory of repeated games (e. g., Mailath and Samuelson 2006; Dasgupta 2000; 2008b) showed that if the agents discount their future payoffs at a low enough rate, such a norm would support outcomes in which the payoffs over time to some agents are less than their respective Nash equilibrium payoffs, but in excess of their min-max payoffs. Those unfortunate agents accept the conditions of the long-term relationship only because not to do so would mean that they are driven down to their min-max payoffs for an extended period of time. Plainly, those agents would have been better off if there had been no long-term relationship. This is the sense in which cooperation can involve exploitation. Thus far, theory. Unearthing exploitation from data will prove to be fiendishly difficult, because they would involve answering a counter factual question: what

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would life have been like for those who are suspected of being exploited had longterm relationships not been entered into? Nevertheless, there are informal grounds for thinking that long-term relationships can give rise to exploitation. Under the caste system in India, for example, “untouchables” in rural areas are frequently barred from drawing water from the village well, whose use is restricted to caste Hindus. And there are many other similar restrictions on “untouchables” besides. To be sure, “untouchables” are members of the village community, but each group has its assigned role. Can one prove that “untouchables” are exploited in village India, in the precise sense in which I am using the term? Probably not, but the theory I am appealing to is suggestive. And that’s a virtue of the theory.

6 International Cooperation Several of the pre-conditions for cooperation would be found to be missing if we consider the prospects of international cooperation in the management of global public goods (e. g., the global climate). In Sections 2– 4 we assumed that the parties have discovered a mutually advantageous course of actions and have reached an agreement over the way the costs and benefits are to be shared. Sadly, that can’t be assumed in the international context. Consider international negotiations over climate change. Nations (by which, of course, I mean national leaders) differ greatly in their assessment of the costs and benefits to them from continuing increases in carbon concentration: some nations are small, while others are large; some are rich, while others are poor; some are in the tropics, others in temperate zones; some are governed by leaders who take science seriously, others are less fortunate; and so on. Side payments would be needed if all nations were to sign a treaty, but the promise of such payments may not be credible. For a treaty to be believable, it must be self-enforcing. Among the possible outcomes of international negotiations over climate change is the “null-treaty”, meaning global non-cooperation, commonly referred to as “business as usual”. Moreover, it can be that the negotiations harbor more than one self-enforcing treaty. Treaties would differ in their efficiency and in the distribution of benefits and burdens among nations. Carraro (2002), Barrett (2003), and Dutta and Radner (2004), among others, have shown that not all countries should be expected to sign a potential treaty on climate change. Some (among them many small countries) would free ride. Among the choices to be made in designing a treaty are adaptation and mitigation measures. The costs and benefits involving the two kinds of investment would be expected to differ among countries. So, economists who study the political economy of climate change face the problem of having to explain which equilibrium would be selected. Factors outside theoret-

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ical models would be particularly relevant here. The power of rich countries could be expected to tilt the selection toward their favor. As the Kyoto Protocol didn’t lay the groundwork for a self-enforcing treaty on climate change (Barrett 2003; Dutta and Radner 2004), it has been a failure. On the other hand, the Montreal Protocol on the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) has been a success. Why? Barrett (2003) has argued that if, relative to the costs of curbing emissions, the perceived benefits are large, it is possible for large numbers of nations to reach agreement. In effect, very little in the way of side-payments needs to be made in order for signatories to enjoy the benefits. This was the case with curbing CFCs. Carbon emissions are a problem of a different order of magnitude. The costs of controlling emissions to any significant degree are huge, while the benefits of controlling them are likely to be diffuse. Unlike radiation arriving through holes in the Ozone layer, global climate change doesn’t kill people in a direct, identifiable, and immediate way. It is easy to go into denial over climate change. Barrett (2008) observes that although in discussions on global climate change it is frequently claimed that adaptation and mitigation are complementary activities, they are more like substitutes. As countries invest more in the former, they suffer less from climate change and find mitigation less attractive. But mitigation is a global public good (“windmills”), whereas adaptation is a national public good (“dikes”). One can imagine a situation where the globally optimal investment policy would have every country invest in windmills, but where under non-cooperation each nation constructs only dikes. Imagine that the ideal international treaty (with appropriate, credible side payments) sustains a high level of participation and requires so many windmills to be built that no one needs to construct dikes. Barrett constructs examples where, nevertheless, the treaties that are signed are ones under which rich countries construct dikes and pollute the atmosphere, leaving poor countries not so much high and dry, as “low and wet”. Such an ominous possibility cannot yet be ruled out.

7 Conclusions In this article I have identified five social environments where cooperation is possible. They range from environments where people care about one another, to those where people are to a greater or lesser extent self-seeking but laws and/or social norms are in place to make cooperation self-enforcing. The bad news is that in all but the social environment where the fact that people care about one another is common knowledge, non-cooperation is also self-enforcing. Societies harbor multiple equilibria. The beliefs people hold about one another and about the

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way behavior translates into social consequences would appear to be central to the possibilities of cooperation. Alarmingly, societies can tip from cooperation to conflict because of a mere change in beliefs. Our analysis showed why it is a lot easier for a society to destroy itself than to re-build. Creating trust is no easy matter. I have also shown that long-term relationships, which can sustain cooperation, have a dark side to them. They can not only sustain inequality among people engaged in cooperation; they can involve exploitation too. We used our findings on the possibilities of cooperation to explain why international cooperation over the use of global public services, such as the ecological services that are provided by the atmosphere and the stratosphere, has proved to be so uneven: the Montreal Protocol over the emission of CFCs was a success, but the Kyoto Protocol over carbon emissions was a failure. The answer would seem to be that the social infrastructures that are necessary for cooperation are all too fragile in the international sphere. Unlike the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol did not form the basis of a self-enforcing treaty. The prospects that humanity will be able to contain carbon concentrations in the atmosphere within reasonable limits are not large.

Literature Arrow, K.J. (1974): The Limits of Organization. New York: W.W. Norton. Baland, J.-M. & Platteau, J.-P. (1996): Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural Communities? Oxford: Clarendon Press. Banfield, E. (1958): The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Chicago: Free Press. Barrett, S. (2003): Environment & Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making. New York: Oxford University Press. Barrett, S. (2008): “Dikes vs. Windmills: Climate Treatise and Adaptation”. Discussion Paper, The Johns Hopkins University. Binmore, K. & Dasgupta, P. (1986): “Game Theory: A Survey”. In K. Binmore and P. Dasgupta (eds.): Economic Environments as Games. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Carraro, C. (2002): “Climate Change Policy: Models, Controversies, and Strategies”. In: T. Tietenberg and H. Folmer (eds.): The International Yearbook of Environmental and Resource Economics 2002/2003. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Dasgupta, P. (2000): “Economic Progress and the Idea of Social Capital”. In P. Dasgupta and I. Serageldin (eds.): Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective. Washington DC: World Bank. Dasgupta, P. (2005): “The Economics of Social Capital”. In: The Economic Record 81 (255: Supplement), 2-S21. Dasgupta, P. (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dasgupta, P. (2008a): “The Role of Nature in Economic Development”. In D. Rodrik/M. Rosenzweig (eds.): Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 5. Amsterdam: North Holland.

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Dasgupta, P. (2008b): “Common Property Resources: Economic Analytics”. In R. Ghate, N.S. Jodha, and P. Mukhopadhyay (eds.): Promise, Trust, and Evolution: Managing the Commons of South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dasgupta, P. & Heal, G. (1979): Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, J. (2005): Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Allen Lane. Dutta, P.K.& Radner, R. (2004): “Self-enforcing Climate Change Treatise”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(14), p. 5174 – 5179. Ehrlich, P.R. (2000): Human Natures: Genes, Culture, and the Human Prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2002): “Why Social Preferences Matter: The Impact of Non-selfish Motives on Competition, Cooperation and Incentives”. In: Economic Journal 112(478), C1-C33. Hamilton, W.D. (1964): “The General Evolution of Social Behavior”. In: Journal of Theoretical Biology 7.1, p 1 – 55. Hinde, R.A. & Groebel, J. (eds., 1991): Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homer-Dixon, T.E. (1999): Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kreps, D. (1990): “Corporate Culture and Economic Theory”. In J.E. Alt and K.A. Shepsle (eds.): Perspectives on Positive Political Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mailath, G. & Samuelson, L. (2006): Repeated Games and Reputation: Long-Run Relationships. New York: Oxford University Press. Maynard Smith, J. (1982): Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nash, J.F. (1950): “Equilibrium points in N-person games”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36.1, p. 48 – 49. Nowak, M.A. (2006): Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. Cambridge, MA: The Belkamps Press. Osborne, M.J. (2004): An Introduction to Game Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990): Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E. (1992): Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco, CA: International Center for Self-Governance Press. Rabin, M. (1993): “Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics”. In: American Economic Review 83.5, p. 1281 – 1302. Trivers, R.L. (1971): “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism”. In: Quarterly Review of Biology, 46.1, p. 35 – 57.

Stephen Darwall

Respect, Concern, and Membership What attitudes and feelings mediate relations between members of a good and just society? Or to put roughly the same question in different terms, what is it to regard oneself and others as members of such a social order? In what follows, I want to consider the differences between different “relating” attitudes, as we might call them, in particular, between mutual concern or benevolence, respect of two different varieties (which I will be calling honor respect and second-personal respect, respectively), and viewing someone as a fellow member or citizen. I want to reflect on the differences between these attitudes and between the different kinds of social order they mediate. As we shall see, attitudes and relations of these various kinds differ fundamentally and can be in tension with one another. But they are by no means mutually exclusive, and this can be a good thing. I have argued in the past that second-personal respect, roughly, seeing ourselves as having an equal dignity and therefore holding ourselves accountable to one another, is the basic relation of a liberal and just moral and political order (Darwall 2006b). But though it might perhaps suffice for just relations between individuals, equal second-personal respect may prove too thin to shape a good or even a fully just society. Individuals might be prepared to hold themselves answerable to one another and treat each other justly while nonetheless lacking a sense of common purpose, even indeed, without sharing the goal of creating and sustaining a social order that fully guarantees equal individual rights. Fully to see themselves as equal members of a just and good society, I shall suggest, even one united to secure individual rights, individuals must see themselves and one another as fellow members or citizens, as having something of significance at stake together. ¹ Before we begin, however, I would like to share some impressions about what seem to me to be salutary changes in Americans’ outlook resulting from the global economic crisis beginning in 2008, a catastrophe, which, it should be said, so many Americans did so much to bring about. In my view, one of the most distressing aspects of American society during the roughly fifteen years of financial bubble, alongside the rising inequality and poor international citizenship of the 2000s, was the depressingly high percentage of graduates of America’s best colleges and universities who turned away from vocations in

 I take ‘citizen’ to be a juridical relation or property and ‘member’ to refer to less formal incorporation into less formally constituted groups.

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teaching and social and public service, as well as from graduate study (including in such perennially attractive fields as law and medicine), to take up highly paid positions on Wall Street. The New York Times reported that before the downturn some forty percent of Harvard graduates “went into the most lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting” (Lohr 2009). Harvard students were not unusual among graduates of elite institutions. With astronomical starting salaries and the promise of more to come, many of our most promising minds found Wall Street’s offers too good to refuse. Things dramatically changed in 2008. With contraction in the financial sector’s share of the overall U.S. economy have come beneficial changes in the way undergraduates are viewing their career options. (It is important to appreciate that during the 2000s, the financial sector’s share of U. S. corporate profits soared to 41 percent, despite the fact that it had accounted for only 21 to 30 percent as recently as the 1990s, and only 16 percent from 1973 to 1985 (Brooks 2009). In other words, before the downturn, the financial sector’s share of overall U.S. profits in the 2000s was three times what it had been only twenty to thirty years ago. Obviously, this will not continue, and the percentage is already declining precipitously.)² Now we don’t yet have figures for the graduating class of 2009, but with the decline of Wall Street (and a presidential election in 2008 that both repudiated the priorities of the previous administration and elected our nation’s first African-American president), there is evidence that social and national service is proving much more attractive to graduates than in the recent past. For example, graduate schools in public policy saw a surge in applications in 2009 – up 82 percent. And apparently, many more students now view working for the government as an attractive option than did even a year ago (Lohr 2009). All of this seems to me to be a very good thing.³ I got a complementary sense while out for a morning run one day last spring. I was struck by what seemed a new public spirit in the interactions I was having and witnessing. Whether requesting and receiving directions or helping one another along their way, people seemed to express more of a sense of shared place and prospect, of regard for one another as fellows, than I was used to until quite recently. The downturn appears to have brought people together in an odd way. It has led us to take stock of our lives and reconnect with what matters most. And it has lessened the sense of competition, which always seemed available to justify or at least rationalize doubtfully ethical and/or prudential economic behavior. It

 This essay was written in 2009. Although the effects of the global downturn are still evident, the financial sector seems now to be in the process of returning to its pre-crash profile.  Again, the scene in 2014 seems very different than it did in 2009.

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has heightened the sense that, whatever happens, we are all in this together. Despite what it is doing to “the wealth of nations,” and the real human hardship it is causing, this consequence of the global economic crisis seems likely to be substantially beneficial. But what is it for people to see themselves as fellows, whether fellow citizens or fellow human beings? I want ultimately to focus on this question, but before doing so, I would like first to discuss and distinguish three other attitudes we can have towards one another that might also be thought to provide bases for social union.

Benevolent Concern Ronald Dworkin famously claimed that a just state treats its citizens “with equal concern and respect” (Dworkin 1977, 272 f.). But concern, at least benevolent concern, and respect are fundamentally different attitudes. One way of bringing this out is to reflect on what is called paternalism. The paradigmatic paternalists, of course, are parents relating to their children. To act paternalistically is to limit someone’s choice or to substitute one’s practical judgment for theirs, most usually because one believes this will be better for them, that it would benefit them more or better advance their well-being or welfare. This is entirely appropriate when the practitioners are parents and the beneficiaries are young children who lack the experience and psychic abilities necessary to lead their own lives. A young child who, left to her own devices, might as soon run into a busy street as along the sidewalk, is appropriately restrained by her parents in her own interest. When, however, a child grows to adulthood, paternalistic treatment is no longer appropriate, not even, indeed, by her parents. If, to use an example I have used for this purpose before, two parents were to insist that their middle-aged daughter eat her broccoli when she visits them for dinner, this would most naturally be seen as a failure of respect, as a failure to recognize and acknowledge that their daughter is now an adult, and so, like them, has the same authority or right to make her own choices and lead her own life that they have to lead theirs (Darwall 2002, 15). Paternalism in the pejorative sense occurs where respect and benevolent concern come apart, when someone acts benevolently (whether it actually benefits the other or not) in ways that are unwelcome and so fail to respect the other and her authority to form her own practical judgments, make her own choices, and lead her own life. Both care or benevolent concern and respect take an individual person as object, but they regard that person in fundamentally different ways. What care

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or benevolent concern has in view about a person is his well-being or welfare. When we care for someone, we want what is best for him in the sense of what will benefit him most or most enhance his well-being or welfare. When we respect someone in the sense involved in foregoing paternalistic treatment out of respect, we recognize the other’s dignity, which we take to include or ground a right to autonomy, an authority autonomously to lead one’s own life and to claim or demand the space to do so (Darwall 2006a). Thus whereas what care or concern makes salient is its object’s well-being or welfare, respect in the sense we are currently concerned with focuses us on its object’s dignity or authority. Precisely for the reason we have just been considering, mutual benevolence cannot be the fundamental attitude that members of a good and just society take toward one another. Or at least, if it is an attitude that binds such a society together, it must be regulated by another, namely, respect for one another as persons with equal dignity, including an equal authority to lead their own lives. This difference, between equal or impartial benevolence, on the one hand, and equal respect, on the other, underlies an important shift in the historical development of utilitarianism and related principles of social choice. In its earliest formulations, for example, by Hutcheson and Leibniz, the greatest happiness principle was grounded in a universal benevolent concern of the sort that God was supposed to have for all of his creatures.⁴ What was to be maximized was something that was in view not from the potential beneficiaries’ own perspectives, but that was salient from the perspective of a being who was wisely benevolently concerned for them all equally. Thus Leibniz spoke of justice as the “charity of the wise.” More recent formulations, however, most prominently in quasieconomic models of public and social choice, give weight not to what seems best from the perspective of someone who cares for someone, but to what seems best from that individual’s own perspective. In maximizing satisfaction of people’s own preferences, whether that would give them better, happier, more flourishing lives or not, the latter formulations give expression not to equal impartial benevolence, but to equal respect. The idea of “consumer sovereignty” resonates with respect rather than benevolence. Sovereignty is an authority to be respected rather than a welfare to be furthered out of benevolent concern. We can link this point more directly to debates about individual and social capital in the following way. An idea that has been historically at the foundation of the notion of individual capital is that individuals own themselves, or at least their own labor. This is certainly one important strain in Locke’s theory of prop-

 On this point, see the chapter on Hutcheson in Darwall 1995.

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erty. If, however, individuals own themselves or their labor, then respect for them as persons must include recognition of this authority and right. The idea of social capital, on the other hand, seems most at home in the discourse of social wealth of the kind made famous by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. And this can seem to be tied to the utilitarian idea of maximizing the general happiness. Nevertheless, as the reflections of the last paragraph show, although utilitarianism had its roots in the idea of universal impartial benevolence, it can also be theorized, and has been increasingly, in terms of universal respect, by focusing not on happiness or welfare, per se, but rather the satisfaction of individuals’ preferences. And thinking of things this way can create a bridge between the ideas of individual and social capital, since the latter can then come to be conceived in a way that also links it to respect of the kind individuals can claim in virtue of self-ownership. One final way of bringing out the difference between benevolence and respect is to reflect on the differences and interrelations between sympathy and empathy. ‘Sympathy’ has been used historically to mean different things, including empathy, but its most natural use nowadays is to express benevolent concern for someone, perhaps in light of some misfortune, harm, or setback. Empathy, by contrast, involves not a perspective on someone, but thinking our way into her perspective and seeing things the way she does—putting ourselves in her shoes and imagining what she feels in her situation as it confronts her. Because it registers the other’s point of view and what she herself values in this way, empathy is associated with respect, as sympathy is with benevolence. Convinced that her daughter’s romantic relationship will prove harmful to her, a caring parent might hope (benevolently) that it does not continue even as empathy-driven respect leads the parent to forbear interfering in a way that might lead to that result.

Second-Personal Respect Respect of the kind we have been talking about is, as I have argued before (Darwall 1977), a form of recognition and therefore different from another attitude we also call “respect”, namely esteem for someone in light of his conduct and character. To see the difference between these two kinds of respect, consider that we tend to believe both that everyone is entitled equally to respect as a person, but also that people deserve more or less respect, depending on how they conduct themselves (as persons). Obviously, we can maintain these two beliefs only if ‘respect’ refers to different things in these different platitudes. And it does. The

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sense in which every person is entitled equally to respect is that each has claim to recognition of his equal dignity and authority to claim or demand certain treatment from others. The sense in which different individuals can deserve more or less respect is that they can deserve more or less esteem for the way they conduct themselves and so exercise their equal authority to lead their own lives. Recognition respect, as I have called it, is a form of recognition for dignity or authority, which shows itself in the way we regulate our conduct toward someone in light of his dignity or authority. Respect of this kind shows itself in how we treat one another. Appraisal respect, by contrast, is a form of esteem; it concerns not how we treat others or even how we are disposed to, but how we feel about them in view of the way they live their lives. In The Second-Person Standpoint, I argue that recognition respect for persons is fundamentally second personal. It is recognition inter alia of a secondpersonal authority that persons have as such to claim and demand certain treatment from one another and to hold others accountable for this treatment. Because making legitimate claims and demands of others and holding them answerable unavoidably involve second-personal address, I call recognition respect of this kind, second-personal respect. We can bring this out more clearly by considering what it is to have a claim right, say, a right to autonomy. If one has a right to lead one’s own life, this means not only that it would be wrong for others to interfere with one’s doing so, for example, by treating one paternalistically. It means that such treatment would also wrong one, that is, that others are not simply obligated simpliciter not so to treat one, but that they are so obligated to one. And this means that one has a distinctive standing or authority that others do not have—what we might call an individual authority—in relation to others’ treatment of one. For example, it means that one has distinctive standing to demand that others not interfere with one’s autonomy, to object, if they do, to allow them to by consent (as when one puts oneself under the care and direction of a doctor), to seek compensation if one’s right is violated (or to choose not to do so), to forgive violations of one’s right (if one can find it in one’s heart to do so), and so on. In my view, the dignity of persons includes an equal basic second-personal authority to make claims and demands of one another and hold ourselves answerable to one another. As Rawls put it, to be a person is to be “a self-originating source of valid claims” (Rawls 1980, 546). And I argue in The Second-Person Standpoint that this fundamental second-personal authority grounds the specific individual authorities to claim certain treatment, for example, non-interference with our autonomy, that are an ineliminable aspect of basic human rights. It follows that recognition respect for persons must include respect for this second-personal authority.

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So far, this claim does not significantly revise the view of recognition respect for persons that I advanced in “Two Kinds of Respect,” in which I first distinguished recognition from appraisal respect. There I argued that we realize (equal) recognition respect for persons in regulating our conduct towards someone by giving adequate weight in practical reasoning to the fact that she is a person. Once we have that second-personal authority is part of the dignity of persons, that part of what it is to be a person is to have the authority to make claims on and demands of one another and hold ourselves accountable to each other, this can simply be slotted into the earlier account of recognition respect: giving appropriate weight to a person’s second-personal authority in our conduct toward her. Nevertheless, I argue in The Second-Person Standpoint that this does not yet adequately capture the full second personality of recognition respect for persons, since it does not fully appreciate that the regard that recognition respect for persons involves is second personal also. Recognition respect for persons as having equal dignity is second-personal respect. It is most fully realized not just in recognition of a sort that a person might realize in the regulation of her own private practical reasoning, but through an essentially public and shareable acknowledgment in intersubjective practical reasoning between persons—as when person addresses a claim or demand to another person, the other acknowledges its legitimacy and takes that as a reason (what I call a second-personal reason) and acts on it. Suppose, to return to my earlier example, that the middle-aged daughter were to object to her parents’ paternalism and to claim the right to make her own dietary choices and that they apologized. Their consequent respect would not simply be recognition of her dignity and right (though it would of course be that), it would be a second-personal acknowledgment. As so also is it more generally when we hold ourselves answerable to one another—we enter into mutually respectful relations with one another that acknowledge one another’s equal basic second-personal authority.

Honor Respect Second-personal respect is not, however, the only kind of recognition respect for persons. There is another, honor respect, although its object is a person in a different sense of ‘person’ than is involved in second-personal respect. Honor respect is a third kind of “relating attitude” that can mediate social order. Whereas a social union constituted by second-personal respect is a society of equals, one regulated by honor respect is necessarily hierarchical. We can appreciate the fundamentally different ways in which honor respect and second-personal respect

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recognize persons by reflecting on a phrase that is sometimes used to signify equality under law, namely, that the law is no “respecter of persons.” Familiar as this phrase may be, it can sound odd to contemporary ears. What can it mean to say that the law does not respect persons? Isn’t the very idea of equal legal dignity that the law respects all persons equally? What this phrase means, of course, is that the law does not respect differences or social distinctions between persons, specifically, that it pays no heed to distinctions of social status that it is the nature of honor respect to constitute. Honor respect is in this sense quite precisely a respecter of persons. It respects, and thereby constructs, the persona in its classic sense of social role or “mask,” the “face” of social selfpresentation. It is possible to occupy any given social status, rank, or role only if the attempt to do so is appropriately recognized or honored by others. Indeed, by recognizing social presentation and status, honor respect actually constitutes these. A given social role or status consists simply in its being appropriately recognized by others, and its existence or one’s ability to occupy it is threatened when others refuse to honor it. Honor respect and respect for equal dignity thus define two opposing conceptions of social and moral order. The most obvious difference between them, of course, is between the hierarchy and equality they respectively recognize and support. No less significant, however, are different forms of relationship they respectively mediate. We treat one another as equals by engaging and relating to each other on equal terms, by holding ourselves answerable to one another, whereas honor respect and contempt manifest themselves in very different forms of treatment—deference or disdain, for example, or by just playing social roles that support or undermine the roles that others attempt to play. This puts mutual accountability at the heart of a society of equals and makes it an anathema to cultures of honor. In the former, holding someone accountable is itself a form of respect for their equal authority as persons. In the latter, it is often most naturally taken as an insult: “You talkin’ to me?” This difference between second-personal and honor respect reveals itself in the “negative” emotions with which they are associated, namely, guilt and shame, respectively. The opposite of honor respect is contempt or disdain. We disdain someone when we refuse to recognize the self-presentation he projects. The natural response to contempt or disdain, at least when it seems warranted, is shame. Shame’s natural expression is hiding, that is, withdrawing our “face” or self-presentation so that, imaginatively, anyway, we can no longer be seen in the (shameful) way it feels we are appropriately regarded when we feel shame. We feel dishonored, as though we cannot occupy the social place or status we had been trying to. Whereas shame is the emotion that responds to transgressions of status, that is, of what it is the function of honor respect to constitute

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or construct, the emotion that responds to transgressions of dignity and authority, which it is the function of second-personal respect to recognize, is guilt.⁵ To feel guilt is to feel as if one has violated a legitimate demand, either by wronging someone or simply by doing wrong. In the first instance it feels as if we have failed to respect or violated a demand backed by an individual’s right and, therefore, we feel distinctively answerable to that person. In the second instance, one feels as though one has violated a demand that comes, in principle, anyway, from any person or member of the moral community. In feeling guilt one blames oneself and in so doing makes a demand of oneself as a representative moral person. And whereas the natural expression of shame is hiding or a revision of one’s self-presentation, guilt most usually expresses itself second-personally, in making amends, holding oneself answerable to others, and taking responsibility. Although honor respect can still be appropriate in a society of equals, if it can be kept to its place, the fundamental mediating attitude of a just social order is second-personal respect. The members of a just society relate, and hold themselves answerable, to one another as, as Rawls put it, “free and equal persons” who are “self-originating sources of valid claims.” Aspects of an order of honor can, however, buttress a more fundamental order of mutual accountability—as when we say “you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” meaning, not just that shame is a fitting response to what one has done, but also that one should feel shame as a way of taking responsibility and holding oneself answerable. But is second-personal respect sufficient to hold together a just social order? There are some reasons to think that it may not be.

Fellow Membership When we treat one another with second-personal respect, we treat each other as individuals who have the authority to lead their own lives but who are nonetheless accountable to others for respecting others’ like authority also.⁶ However ex-

 An important difference between social and moral status is that dignity is not threatened by failures of recognition in the way that honor or status is. Slaves in the antebellum American South were no less persons with an equal moral dignity even if they lacked this social and legal status.  I discuss the role of second-personal respect in social cooperation in Darwall 2006b, 171– 180. I there analyze relevant experimental support in the social science literature, which has tended to try to explain cooperation in self-interested, strategic terms. For a general critique see Anderson 1999, 170 – 200, and Mansbridge1990.

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tensive the rights we can claim from one another may be, whether they are limited as libertarians suppose to so-called negative rights of noninterference, or whether they extend further to positive rights of mutual aid and doing our fair share in supporting institutions necessary to secure individual rights, there is a sense in which respect focuses us on our own conduct, on treating others respectfully (whatever negative or positive action that might require), rather than on others, most obviously, on how things are going for others, but also even on their conduct (or on how others are acting toward them). The point is not that one will think, for example, that one need not act to ensure that others share the benefits of mutually respectful society. The point is that any such action taken out of respect will ultimately be motivated by a concern to act towards others in whatever respect requires rather than out of any positive concern for them, for example, as fellow members, citizens, human beings, or persons. Now there is a trivial, tautologous sense in which once one is part of a social order, no matter what its character (hierarchical or egalitarian), one cannot avoid seeing others as fellow members. But this need involve no concern for someone as a fellow member. Obviously, social superiors may lack such regard for the hoi polloi though simple logic requires them to admit that both are alike in being part of the same social order. However, concern for one another as fellow members does seem essential to a good and just society of equals. The English word ‘fellow’ derives from an Old English word that means someone who has a stake in a joint undertaking (for example, by “laying down money”). To have a concern for someone as a fellow member of a just society in this sense is to be concerned with whether he is able to flourish in the joint undertaking that a just society involves, including with whether he is able to lead his own life in the way he wants to.⁷ In this way, concern for someone for someone as a fellow member is more like the kind of care and concern we have for our friends as opposed to benevolence (Ebels-Duggan 2008, pages in the references). Although we of course want our friends to have happy and beneficial lives, our concern is actually more with supporting them. Respect is built into the kind of concern that friends have for one another in a way that it isn’t with benevolence pure and simple. But so also does friendly concern extend beyond mere respect. It is no doubt unrealistic to suppose that

 Although this is surely not all that fellow membership involves. There is a sense of belonging together tied to a shared sense of place, history, and prospect for which the idea of a shared undertaking is an insufficient model. On this point, see., e. g., Michael Savage’s essay in this volume, “Cultural Capital and Elective Belonging: A British Case Study.” On the role of familiarity and familiarization, see Dieter Thomä, “Varieties of Belonging: Between Appropriation and Familiarization,” also in this volume.

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members of a just society might be friends with one another, but neither would that be particularly desirable. Still we might think of regard for fellow citizens as including a kind of “civic friendship”⁸ or solidarity (see, e. g., Rorty 1989 and Wiggins 2006) that leads us to a concern for one another as fellow members who have much at stake together in the joint undertaking of a just society. As I suggested at the outset, the current moment might be an especially propitious one to reconnect us with this sense. If anything is clear in the current economic crisis, not to mention our shared climatological planetary prospect, we are all in this together.

Literature Anderson, E. (1999): “Beyond Homo Economicus: New Developments in Theories of Social Norms”. In: Philosophy & Public Affairs 29, p. 170 – 200. Brooks, D. (2009): “Greed and Stupidity”. In: The New York Times, April 2. Darwall, S. (1977): “Two Kinds of Respect”. In: Ethics 88, p. 36 – 49. Darwall, S. (1995): The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640 – 1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwall, S. (2002): Welfare and Rational Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Darwall, S. (2006a): “The Value of Autonomy and Autonomy of the Will”. In: Ethics 116, p. 263 – 284. Darwall, S. (2006b): The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dworkin, R. (1977): Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ebels-Duggan, K. (2008): “Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love”. In: Ethics 119, p. 142 – 170. Lohr, S. (2009): “With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?” In: New York Times, April 11. Mansbridge, Jane J. (ed., 1990): Beyond Self-Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rawls, J. (1980): “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory”. In: The Journal of Philosophy 77. Rorty, R. (1989): Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, D. (2006): Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 I owe this phrase to the writings of Sybil Schwartzenbach.

Hans Bernhard Schmid

Social Capital and Self-Alienation An Augustinian Look at the Dark Heart of Community It is useful to have friends, but if the fact that they are useful is the reason why you have them, you’re actually a social moron and don’t have any real friends at all. Basic as this may seem, it is a bit of a problem for social capital theory which is predicated on the assumption that social relations are useful for the purposes of those engaged in those relations, and should be interpreted as such. It is true that using one’s social relations does not necessarily mean selling one’s own grandmother, or cashing in on one’s acquaintances (in that way, “the social” would be used as a good or a resource rather than as capital). Rather, the term “capital” in the label “social capital” is meant in the formal sense of whatever can be used for production without being used up in that process. And production, again in a formal and wide sense of the term, can be seen as any kind of instrumental action: doing something for a purpose that is not the action itself. Yet even if one’s social capital isn’t anything like one’s grandmother’s cash value on the market, there is a conceptual problem with the very idea. The problem exists insofar as it is plausible to assume that in social science, theories have to give intentionalistic explanations, that is, they have to identify the reasons for which individuals act from their own viewpoint, and the basic social notions have to account for those reasons. Insofar as “Social Capital” is the instrumental value of one’s social relations for the attainment of one’s goals, the term social capital cannot be a basic social notion within an intentionalistic approach, because it is inadequate, from the viewpoint of a social agent, to see basic social relations as a means for the attainment of personal goals. If this is true, the term “social capital” does not pick out any significant reason that a socially non-moronic being might have, and is therefore not a useful conceptual tool within an intentionalistic explanation. The very idea of social capital, it seems, rests on a misconception of the nature of basic human social relations. Why do we think our relations with others should not be seen by us as a means to the achievement of our ends? What is it that seems to be so moronic about a person who sees his or her social relations as her capital, and tries to choose her friends according to what she thinks will be most useful to her? The first intuition is purely pragmatic. It is that any such utilitarian attitude towards one’s relations is simply self-defeating, and works only where that motivation is not known to the other party involved. After all, who would want to be friends with such a person? But perhaps this is too restrictive; there might be oth-

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ers who are similarly motivated, and happy with the deal even where the motivation is mutually open between them. Imagine a pair of friends who engage in their friendship because of its instrumental value to their plans, and know of each other that they are so disposed. Those people may be said to be “using” each other, but this is done in the knowledge that the advantage is mutual. Such a relation seems to conform to those definitions of social capital that require social capital to be used to the mutual benefit of all parties involved, and would therefore exclude the case in which the benefit is that of one party only.¹ Yet there is a strong intuition that there is something wrong with – or at least extremely shallow about – this kind of relation between social capitalists. The problem of instrumental conceptions of social relations such as those implied in the very notion of social capital does not vanish as soon as this conception is known to be shared by all parties involved. A deeper conceptual explanation would be to say that such a relation is not a real friendship or any truly significant social relation at all. The question then is: what exactly is it that this relation lacks? The answer, it seems, is traditionally expressed by the idea of others not merely being means, but ends in themselves for each other, and in more modern terms, the issue can be called the lack of basic agency-regardingness of that relation (Rovane 1998). Social relations are agency-regarding insofar as those engaged in them see each other in such a way that they do not aim to undermine or bypass, in any sense, the exertion of each other’s free agency. If A has such agency-regard for B, and if A intends to use his relation to B as a means for his purposes, this seems possible only to the degree to which A has reason to assume that his use of his relation to B expresses B’s own will as much as it does his own. In other words, consensus between them must be assumed concerning the intended goal. The use that is made of the relation has to be what both of them want, and something that both of them want to be achieved by means of the way in which they are interrelated with each other. Any other use that is made of social relations lacks basic agency-regard, and is thus against the basic nature of our social relations. This places tight restrictions on the use of the idea of social capital for the analysis of social relations. Being engaged in meaningful social relations requires the participants to depart from a narrow focus on their own goals, to be able to treat other people’s aims and intentions as equally important as their own within their practical deliberation, and to reason and act from the per-

 “Social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam 1995: 67).

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spective of their mutual concerns. Yet this does not make the notion meaningless, and in fact, it even allows for meaningful friendships among open social capitalists where the idea that each participant’s interest should be promoted by means of their friendship forms the focus of their shared concern. If there is a way to use the idea of social capital within an intentionalistic approach to the social world that respects the basic agency-regarding nature of our relations, the focus must be on how social relations enable people to pursue the shared goals of those thus related. Social capital, in a sense of the term that does not boil down to a shabby notion, is not – or only derivatively – about using social relations for the pursuit of one’s individual goals. Rather, social capital is the human capacity to team up and establish mutual relations of trust that enable all involved, as a means, to achieve what they, together, want. Quite obviously, the capacity to pool our forces and act together greatly extends our agency. If the idea of social capital is sound, the term must refer to whatever enables us to put this capacity to work. This leads to a definition of the term according to which social capital refers to those relations between agents that enable them to act jointly. What are these relations? First of all, they involve mutually open recognition of agency: the participants must be aware that the other is an agent like themselves, and that the other is aware of the fact of the first one’s agency, and so on and so forth. But this is clearly only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for cooperation. If two agents know of each other that they happen to be each other’s favorite food, mutually open recognition of agency does not take them very far towards cooperation. Human cooperative-mindedness involves more. It requires the participants not only to see each other as agents, but as potential cooperators. This attitude involves the normative and affective components that constitute the sense of “us”, the feeling of belonging, the very basic form of friendship that lets us see ourselves, together with the relevant others, as available for joint action, whenever the need arises. As John Searle (1990, 413) mentions, these background abilities are what ancient philosophers referred to when they called man a social animal, and there is an obvious if somewhat superficial link between that way of conceiving of the “social animal” and the idea that man is a “rational animal”. Quite obviously, these background capacities enable us to achieve great things and extend our agency in making joint action possible. Yet they are also valuable in themselves. In fact, the intrinsic value of joint action enabling relations is a feature that seems almost too obvious to notice. We enjoy standing in such relations to each other even where there is no need to act jointly, and it seems that according to most conceptions, standing in such relations to others is essential to a good life. Human beings need friends for a good life, not in an instrumental, but in

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a constitutive sense: having friends is (part of) what a good life is, rather than the means by which something else (the good life) is achieved. So it is difficult not to see those background assumptions and feelings, those basic loyalties and belongings on which an adequate account of social capital should be focused, as a thoroughly positive feature. However, some authors in Social Capital theory have rightly pointed out that the matter might not be as bright and harmless as it looks. There is a reverse side to the human capacity to team up. Every group and social identity includes some people, but at the same time it excludes others. Our capacity to act jointly may be intrinsically and instrumentally valuable to us, but while it excludes others and makes us a potent player on the scene, it may well hamper other people’s chances in life, perpetuate unfair hierarchies, contribute to social exclusion, or bring about some other negative consequences of in-group biases such as those analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu (1980, 1986) or Robert B. Putnam (2000). These are the features on the basis of which it has been rightly claimed in the received literature that social capital has its dark sides, stemming from the fact that every “we” that is meaningful in affective terms is parochial, and leaves others out in the cold. I do not claim that those aspects are irrelevant. But I believe that, compared to the darkness within social capital, which will become apparent below, these external dark aspects are mere side effects. The dark sides of social capital mentioned in the received literature could be lightened up comparatively easily by more social capital (e. g., by making it more “bridging” rather than “bonding”, to use Putnam’s terms). Yet there is no such easy remedy for the darkness that is at the heart of social capital. To put it bluntly, and in a term that is somewhat unusual in the literature, social capital brings evil into the world. There is a tendency inherent in social capital that corrupts our agency in such a way as to invert its teleological structure in the way that is traditionally referred to as “evil”. To see how it does so requires us to take a closer look at the relation between social capital and joint action. In terms closer to social science, social capital leads to a form of self-alienation in which the means by which people can achieve their goals somehow turn against them so that the goals they jointly pursue do not reflect their aims. Social capital corrupts our agency in such a way that what we are doing is not what we want to achieve. The mechanisms by which this occurs fall within the domain of social psychology, but in order to highlight the action-theoretical ramifications of the issue at stake, I shall approach the problem from a more philosophical angle. My key witness is Augustine’s account of sin, or evil in action.

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1 Stolen Pears What follows is the story of an event Augustine describes in the second book of his Confessions. It occurred when he was fifteen years old. At that time, he was temporarily out of school, and he spent his days idling with his friends on the streets of his home town Thagaste. Here is what happened: “There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night – having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was – a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the pigs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves.”

This sounds like an insignificant childish prank, but Augustine spends most of the second book of his Confessions discussing the matter, and with the exception of the death of his beloved mother Monica, there is no single event in Augustine’s entire life to which he devotes similar attention. In order to see why so much emphasis is placed on such a marginal event, it is important to be aware of the fact that this story parallels the Bible, that is, the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, through which man fell from grace and death and suffering came about. When Augustine tells us about his pear theft, his topic is actually the origin of all that is wrong with our lives, and that’s why this receives so much attention. The first question is: what makes this a case of evil action? The point is obviously not in the consequences – the pears were bad anyway, so the neighbor did not suffer a great loss. Neither is Augustine’s point the immorality of the act as such. Of course, stealing is wrong, but Augustine does not waste much time discussing this aspect. What really worries him is neither the consequences nor the fact that the act went against the moral and legal code, but rather a feature concerning the internal structure of the act. Augustine’s focus is on the fact that neither he nor any one of his friends really wanted the pears they stole. The pears were not good ones – “not tempting either for its color or for its flavor”, Augustine says –, and there were better pears readily available to the boys from the orchard owned by Augustine’s parents. This may seem strange; why does Augustine suggest that the act would not have been evil had the kids wanted the pears? We are accustomed to evaluating acts according to consequences, motivations, or conformity to rules, but Augustine suggests that there is another feature to consider. It is the feature in which, according to Augustine, evil resides, and it is in the rational structure of the action. It is decisive for whatever Augustine finds to be evil about the act that there seems to be no way of accounting for

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the goal of the action in terms of the agent’s motivating reasons. The boys did not want the fruit they stole. The act in question has a goal that the agent does not want to achieve, which frustrates the attempt to read reason into the behavior in question. In other words, Augustine’s concern is with some discrepancy between the intended goal and the manifest behavior, or some “impairment of the will”, which in modern literature is often claimed to be an essential feature of alienation (cf. Honneth in Jaeggi 2005). Having achieved the goal of their pear theft, young Augustine and his accomplices did not have any idea what to do with the stolen pears, ending up dumping them out to the pigs. Here is a closer look at what is evil, or sinful, about the pear theft in Augustine’s view. Augustine does mention that the act was wrong, that is, in violation of the Law. It is important to understand what “the Law” means. As given by a benevolent God, the Law, in Augustine’s view, is simply something like a reliable navigating device through life which, even in situations where it is difficult for us to see what we should do in the light of our best interests, always points us towards the truly desirable and that which is worthy of doing. It is important here not to read any Kantian notion into Augustine’s account. There isn’t any fundamental difference, in Augustine’s conception, between what is right and what is good to do, or even between duty and inclination. The role of the Law is simply to help us to see what is truly desirable and what we therefore have reason to do. Observing the Law is not a matter of turning from inclination to duty, but simply the best way not to commit errors of judgment by thinking something to be desirable when it really isn’t. The fact that the pear theft was wrong, in terms of a violation of the Law, however, is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for its being evil. Augustine doesn’t think that the wrongness of the act is in itself particularly interesting, since everybody knows and accepts that stealing is wrong. Augustine’s discussion of the pear theft shows a remarkable disinterest in what most moral philosophers take to be important about evil. He is not interested at all in the case of somebody violating the moral law for the satisfaction of some selfish or other desire. For Augustine, the problem of egoism is utterly uninteresting because such a person simply misidentifies the good; in the terminology I propose to use, such action is bad rather than evil. Action is bad if it is aimed at some good, but in a mistaken way. Action is evil where the orientation towards the good is lost altogether. As already stated, the feature to which Augustine draws our attention is the apparent motivational irrationality of the pear theft, the fact that the boys did not want the pears they stole. Augustine’s concern is with radical practical self-alienation. Had the boys simply transgressed against the Law because of a desire for sweet pears, the story would not have made it to the Confessions. Augustine

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states very clearly that the fruit was not tempting. Thus the act seems to be entirely unmotivated: remember that Augustine states explicitly that the boys knew that the pears they chose to steal were worse than those easily and legally available to them from Augustine’s father’s own garden. So the problem with the boys’ action is not that they had an internal reason for an action that happened to be wrong, or externally irrational. Rather, the problem is that the boys didn’t even desire what they stole. The class of action to which Augustine draws our attention does indeed show an extreme form of the impairment of the will characteristic of self-alienation: there is no way to make sense of the goal of the action in terms of what the agent wants. Such action, in Augustine’s account, is a subclass of wrong action; what distinguishes evil actions from wrong actions that are not evil is that their goals are known by the agent to be not worthwhile pursuing (like the boy’s bad pears). Let me use the triad of the good, the bad and the evil to introduce the concept. Wrong action is bad action insofar as in choosing her goal, the agent misconceives of the good by violating the moral law: here, the agent makes the simple mistake of failing to recognize that there isn’t any true good beyond the Law, as Augustine assumes. Thus there is a sense in which bad acts are failed attempts to realize the good. This is different with evil acts: evil acts are not wrong choices, but choices of the wrong. An evil agent acts in pursuit of what she knows from the outset not to be worthwhile pursuing. While bad action is a deficient mode of pursuing the good, evil action is an inversion of pursuing the good. So evil action is not worse than bad action, as many philosophers think; it is fundamentally different from bad, it is another kind of action. Of course, both kinds of wrong action are rationally deficient, but the deficiency is of another type in each case. The problem of bad action is in the lack of discernment, or error of judgment, or lack of objective reason. The problem of evil action is in the lack of motivation, or the absence of any reason. It is rationally deficient even in purely subjective, motivational terms. This makes it an extreme case of self-alienation. The agent does what he knows is not worthwhile doing. In the famous words Paul uses in the letter to the Romans, he has become “a question to himself”. Before proceeding further, let me address the question: why talk about evil? Why think about action in terms of such a conception? There are good reasons not to accept the idea: conceptual and ethical ones. The obvious conceptual objection is what might be called the paradox of evil action. The Augustinian idea of evil undercuts the rationality that is constitutive of action. Actions need to have some sort of a goal, but for something to be a goal there has to be something that speaks in favor of realizing it, that is, some description under which the state of affairs realized by the action is desirable, or good. Or, in Da-

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vidsonian terms: for a complex of behavior to instantiate an action, there must be some primary reason that rationalizes the behavior. Augustine’s claim seems to be that action is evil to the degree that it cannot be rationalized. How, then, could it be action? The ethical objection is that to claim that there are no reasons for an action is simply to jump from the assumption that the agent’s reasons are not justifying reasons to the conclusion that there are no reasons at all.

2 The Paradox of Evil Action Even a philosopher as skeptical with regard to the demands of morality as Thomas Hobbes claimed, in the Leviathan, that all action is directed towards some good, adding only the point that whatever good there is in action is always only apparent. Agents do have their reasons, even though those reasons might not really be good ones. In modern conceptions, this is usually cast in terms of rationalization and intelligibility: actions are events of which it is possible to make some sense in terms of what the agent wants given his beliefs, or the agent’s primary reasons, which split into the agent’s beliefs and his or her pro-attitudes (Davidson 1963). As every agent has to have some reasons, the objection goes, there simply cannot be such a thing as genuinely evil action in Augustine’s sense, as it is a conceptual truth about goals that they must be aimed at under the description as good, or desirable. So one might think that Augustine’s conception is simply paradoxical, self-defeating, and absurd. It seems to me, however, that the unintelligibility implicit in Augustine’s account of evil has one advantage: it captures rather nicely a feature of the vernacular conception of the term. In everyday language, “evil” often functions as a rationalization of incomprehension. The term “evil” expresses a refusal to reason with the agent, a refusal to understand, and ultimately a declaration of enmity. Thus the concept of evil is a tool in the practice of exclusion: calling an action evil means to disqualify an action in such a way that the agent does not count as “one of us”, that is, one whose explanations might be heard and taken into consideration. The term “evil”, it seems, is part of a very archaic and unenlightened moral vocabulary. If you look around and see the kind of people who have used the concept of “evil”, “evildoers”, “axes of evil” in the recent past, for example in international politics, you might find this worry confirmed. Talk of “evil” is often a mark of narrow-mindedness, of pitting some “we” against an alien enemy, a symptom of an inability to see the world from another person’s point of view and to be open to acknowledging the reasons a person might have. Folk psychology of “evil” takes it one step further. Evil actions are taken to reveal something in the nature of the agent that is alien and indeed inimical to

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us, something beyond the limits of our comprehension, something not to be integrated into our community of communication. Let me approach the same point from another angle. In his Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche analyzed a switch of the moral code from “good versus bad” to “good versus evil”. This involves a radical change in culture. The attitude towards what we take to be merely bad (schlecht) is radically different from the attitude towards what we take to be genuinely evil (böse). Understood as an imperfection, as a deficiency, the bad has to be improved and made better; the evil, by contrast, must be radically turned around, that is, converted, or else be eradicated. This attitude, I believe, is incompatible with an enlightened, hermeneutic or interpretive attitude towards practical conflicts, that is, with the commitment to be prepared to acknowledge other points of view, and to take a cognitively cooperative stance even towards people who are at fault, and of whose actions we disapprove. I take it that both the ethical worry and its action-theoretical twin have a point. The question of whether or not the concept of evil should have any place in our view of action depends on whether or not a hermeneutics of evil, that is, an interpretive approach to the phenomenon is possible. How does Augustine deal with this issue? Here is a passage in which he fully acknowledges the problem: When […] we inquire why a crime was committed, we do not accept the explanation unless it appears that there was the desire to obtain some of those values which we designate inferior, or else a fear of losing them. For truly they are beautiful and comely, though in comparison with the superior and celestial goods they are abject and contemptible. A man has murdered another man – what was his motive? Either he desired his wife or his property or else he would steal to support himself; or else he was afraid of losing something to him; or else, having been injured, he was burning to be revenged. Would a man commit murder without a motive? Who would believe such a thing?

Augustine affirms that for something to be a goal it must be aimed at under the description of the good. So the concept of evil action is a paradox, which leads Augustine to a dilemma: if he does develop a motivational account of the pear theft, he seems to devoid his story of evil: if the boys did have their reasons for stealing the pears, the act is not evil after all, but merely bad. For example: if they were motivated by group pressure, that is by fear of negative sanctioning, the participation is not evil, for freedom from negative sanctions is clearly a good reason (albeit an inferior one). On the other hand, if Augustine insists on the evil nature of his act and refuses to give a motivational explanation, the event does not appear to be an action anymore, since it is impossible to make sense of the behavior.

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Before coming to what I take to be the Augustinian solution to the dilemma, let me briefly sketch out how the problem of interpreting evil is dealt with in modern thought. There are two basic types of hermeneutic account. For the sake of brevity, I will only comment on the latter. It is, I believe, entirely of Augustinian origin. The central idea is to solve the dilemma of understanding evil by loosening the link between intention and motivation, rather than by assuming two separate sets of motivational states: evil agents, the claim goes, choose to act without a motivating reason. This model comes in two flavors. I call the first version the evil resulting from self-loss. Its most famous example was provided by Hannah Arendt, who was very familiar with Augustine, as he had been the topic of her doctoral dissertation. In her interpretation of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she develops the concept of the banality of evil. The basic idea is a deep rift between the agent’s goal, on the one hand, and the character or motivational dispositions of the agent on the other. Arendt’s Eichmann (who is very different from the Eichmann we know from the Sassen protocols) acts intentionally and fully aware of what it is he is doing. But Arendt believes Eichmann to be honest when he said in his final plea before the court that he had not wanted to do what he did. There is a gap, Arendt claims, between the wanting and the intending, and there is no way to trace Eichmann’s acts back to his personal inclinations. Moral psychology has taken similar paths. Most famously, Stanley Milgram has his test subjects electrocute perfectly innocent others much against their own inclinations, and fully aware of what they are doing. Milgram’s test subjects suffer, tremble and sweat while administering the apparently deadly electroshocks, but they continue to do so even though they could easily break off the experiment at any time. Somehow these agents are, to put it in Eichmann’s words, “kept in their dark duties”, often against their own better judgment, and certainly without them having any sadistic inclinations. In his recent book with the telling title “The Lucifer Effect”, moral psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, the author of the Stanford Prison Experiment, analyzes cases in which agents commit intentional acts that are not only plainly unjustifiable by their own lights, but inexplicable to themselves on the motivational level. I call the conception underlying these interpretations the “evil resulting from self-loss”-account, because it is assumed that the link between will and choice is severed by some established authority structure. These people have somehow lost their independence in the determination of their action; they are heteronomous in a way that induces them to commit utterly irresponsible acts. Milgram coined the term “agentic state” for these people’s state of mind: an agentic state

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is a self-conception in which the agent sees the motives of his action as alien to himself. Evil, in these accounts, is ultimately a matter of a particular, social form of weakness of will. I certainly do not wish to downplay the importance of this research, or the ingenuity of some of the received interpretations, but it seems to me that it would be rather a long shot to call those actions strictly unmotivated. After all, Eichmann did appeal to the value of obedience in his final plea in Jerusalem, and he not only explained, but even tried to justify his behavior with that secondary virtue. The justification certainly doesn’t work; but it is not obvious to me why we should we dismiss this as an explanation. Similarly, many of Milgram’s test subjects claimed that they thought they were simply doing their duty. These agents, it seems, thoroughly misconceived of the good, but however skewed their notion was, it still seems possible to explain their action in terms of what seemed to them to be worthwhile pursuing. Thus, in our terminology, these actions are certainly bad – and very bad indeed! – but not strictly evil. For as long as there is a motive – however wrong it may be –, there is no evil. The second flavor of the “choice without reason”-account of evil is conceptually more promising, but it has gone somewhat out of fashion recently, and it seems to be limited to the belles lettres. Let me remind you of the strange heroes of existentialist and proto-existentialist literature, which used to be so popular a couple of decades ago, characters such as Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, Andre Gide’s Lafcadio, and Albert Camus’ étranger. These agents commit their criminal or immoral acts intentionally, but without any plausible straightforward motivational explanation, and even in plain awareness of both the immorality and the lack of any such motivating reason. Existentialism has coined the term “acte gratuit”, “gratuitous action” for this type. The interpretive story told about these agents is not one of weak-willed immersion in authority structures, but rather a form of self-assertion or self-ascertainment. In Stavrogin’s and Lafcadio’s case in particular, these acts are seen as the agent’s way to ascertain his freedom to self-determination; only by committing a crime without a motive can the agent become sure of his own place as the agent behind the act (or so it is suggested). In this view, an act can only be certain to be performed freely if it is neither dictated by social conventions or moral laws, nor merely the effect of internal psychological forces towards which the agent finds himself to be passive. The idea seems to be that only by committing unmotivated immoral actions can we acquire true selfknowledge. Autonomy, one might say, comes from evil. I have to be brief here. This literature should certainly not be ridiculed or denigrated, but I must admit that I think that fictional characters such as Gide’s Lafcadio and Camus’ étranger have not aged particularly well; they seem like

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thought experiments rather than real people: what they are doing looks like the product of a certain way of thinking about action rather than real action; they are theoretical fictions. In particular, it seems difficult to understand why agents should “dis-identify” with their own motivational states to such a degree as to think that in order to act autonomously, one should make sure to do something one does not really want. In brief, we have some interesting ideas about unmotivated wrong action in both the evil resulting from self-loss and the evil resulting from self-ascertainment versions; but the evil from self-loss does not seem to constitute a genuine case of evil at all, and the evil from self-ascertainment does not seem particularly convincing as an action.

3 Augustine’s Solution Let me now turn to what I think is Augustine’s solution to the problem of radical self-alienation. It’s actually a combination of the two. It hinges on a feature of Augustine’s pear theft. Genesis 2 depicts the stealing from the forbidden tree as a succession of individual actions – the snake convincing Eve, Eve passing the apple on to Adam. The New Testament also emphasizes that the action through which evil came into the world was an individual action. First Corinthians, Chap. 5, verses 21– 22 highlights the individual character of Adam’s action by paralleling it to Christ’s lonely decision to take the cross upon him: just as salvation, death came to the world through one man’s individual action. This is fundamentally different in Augustine’s version of the story. He places the utmost emphasis on the fact that the event in question must be seen as a joint action rather than an individual action, or a complex of individual actions. The “jointness” of the pear theft – the fact that it was jointly committed by a plurality of agents – seems to be very important to Augustine, as he repeats it time and again in the text: by myself I would not have done it – I still recall how I felt about this then – I could not have done it alone […] I would not have done it alone. […]. Alone I would not have done it – alone I could not have done it at all. My memory is vivid and plain before you, my God: alone, I could never have committed that theft.

This repetition is obsessive to a degree that it almost corrupts Augustine’s literary style. Thus in his view, this really must mean something essential; the jointness of the pear theft has to be paramount. It cannot be a mere coincidence that

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the first instance in which human agency is corrupted in such a way as to instantiate evil is joint action; rather, jointness must provide the key to an adequate understanding of how action may turn evil. Remember that we’re still trying to solve the paradox of evil action. The paradox leads to the dilemma of understanding evil: if we hold on to the idea that it is unmotivated, it cannot be understandable, and if it isn’t understandable, it cannot be action; if we conceive of it as action, it has to be goal-oriented, if it is goal-oriented, it has to be intended under some description of the good, which means it cannot be evil, but merely bad. Augustine’s solution, as I understand it, hinges on the distinction between joint action and individual participation. In short, the solution is this: the pear theft is both genuinely evil and a proper action, but it isn’t both under the same description. Viewed as a unit, as one collective venture, the pear theft is genuinely evil, but not a proper action, but instead a parody or a corrupted version of an action. Viewed as a complex of individual contributions, the pear theft is constituted by proper action; however it is not outright evil, but rather merely bad. Put in a slogan, the idea is this: bad individual contributions make for evil joint actions (“actions” in inverted commas). The individual participants do have their reasons for participating, but their contributions are bad in such a way that leads to a collective venture which, taken as a unit, is rationally deficient, that is, a corrupted, improper case of joint action. Here is the briefest version of the story, as I read it. The key concept is one of the leading themes of the Confessions, if not of all of Augustine’s work: friendship. Augustine is usually credited with having introduced the notion that the mental is somehow internal to the individual. It is remarkable, though, that he does not conceive of friendship as some external relation, but as a straightforward internal union of souls. Later on in the Confessions, Augustine gives an impressive phenomenological description of that union when he recounts how his whole perception of the world changed when his best friend died. Friendship is, Augustine claims, the sharing of a perspective, of a will, and, in joint action, of a work. Now Augustine clearly sees that this union of souls does not come about automatically; it is something individuals produce and maintain, by seeking their proximity and by participating in joint action such as communication. And they have their reasons for doing so, even though those reasons may occasionally not be good ones. I quote from Augustine: “The bond of human friendship has a sweetness of its own, binding many souls together as one.” So the motivating reason to engage in joint action is the psychological reward of being connected, of being part of a whole, of being attuned to others, and being committed to each other in such a way as to constitute something larger than oneself. To seek and maintain friendship is good, in Augustine’s view,

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where it leads to the City of God, to the constitution of Christ’s body in the church; it is bad, however, if by seeking to satisfy their desire to be a member, the participants fail to recognize and even disregard more important values. This is the case in the pear theft, and I see two types or stages in the development of how this happens. The first type is children’s play getting out of hand; the second is youth gang crime. The first type of joint action is, as it were, accidentally evil, or evil by chance, the second is essentially evil, or evil by nature. In the first type, individuals jointly intend what they know is wrong and undesirable, in the second case, individuals jointly intend what they know is wrong and undesirable for the very reason that it is wrong and undesirable. Imagine first a group of bored children, all driven by the sheer desire to be with each other and to do something together, but having no plan, just like young Augustine and his comrades in the streets of Thagaste. Instead of discussing possible ventures first, they simply start acting and make up their plan as they go along. This is a situation that has not been considered sufficiently in the received literature on joint action. Received theory assumes that the goal comes before the act, and that the participants therefore must know what they are doing in order to start doing it. Just think of Raimo Tuomela’s, Michael Bratman’s, John Searle’s or Margaret Gilbert’s accounts of joint action: each of these authors seems to assume that the participants have to be in some sort of agreement about what they are about to do together in order to act jointly: no joint action without shared goal. But this assumption should now be relaxed somewhat. We are dealing with participants whose idea concerning the joint venture is limited to the sense that whatever they end up doing will be done jointly. The conceptual order of things is now different: first come some individual contributions, and only then the joint goal. Of course, each individual child must have an idea of the whole to which his or her action is a part, but note that if you ask a group of children what exactly it is they are doing together, you might get as many answers as there are children (incidentally, this also happens to be true of philosophers!). So the children simply start out by playing their parts in whatever they happen to think it could be they are doing together. These agents do not really know what they are doing, but they are ready to accept as their joint goal whatever the combination of their contributions amounts to, and do so continually over the course of the events. In other words: the selection of the goal does not come first, but rather last in the logical structure of the cooperation; still, it isn’t a mere aggregate of individual actions, but rather some corrupted form of joint action, as this is the only thing on which the participants unanimously agree: that they are acting together. In this order of things, the selection of the goal is, to a

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large degree, simply a matter of chance, and it might be more easily the case that what they end up doing together is both morally wrong, and impossible to make sense of in terms of the kind of things the participants value. The result of this is sheer immoral nonsense (local news tends to contain rich material). This is the case of accidental evil: the joint action is genuinely evil – that is, both wrong and unmotivated – but somewhat deficient as an action; the individual contributions, by contrast, are not evil, but merely bad, since the children do have their individual motivational agenda, but disregard superior values in favor of participation. Evil, in this fundamental type, lies in a failure to constitute proper joint action. It resides in the individuals’ inability to cooperate in such a way that their joint goal is somehow responsive to their conceptions of what is good and worthwhile doing. These individuals are, in a sense, “lost” in their cooperation, because what they do together, purposefully and knowingly, has come apart from what they value. There is a very straightforward sense in which they did not “want” to do what they ended up doing together, even though they acted intentionally at all times. There is more to the story as we move from children’s pranks to youth gang crimes. Consider now a group of youngsters. Their desire is not simply to participate in any joint venture that might be going on. Rather, they value the specific union they form with the other members of their gang as such, and their aim is to assert their collective identity as a group. Their foremost concern is with a twofold distinction: first, the distinction between themselves, as a unit or group, and outsiders; and second, the distinction between themselves as what they are as parts of a whole, and what they would or could be without their membership. It is important to the members that the right thing for them to do is different from that which is good for anybody else. And similarly, it is important for the team members to assert their own identity as group members by valuing, as a member of the group, things that they do not value as individuals (this is an important part of the explanation as to why people change so much when they become a member of a group that is significant to them, and this may be a reason why many rituals of admission require of the candidates to denounce their preferences by doing something utterly disgusting). Thus their joint actions tend both to be in violation of generally accepted moral standards, and to be directed towards goals that do not make sense in terms of what the members value individually. In spite of the fact that their individual contributive actions are, again, bad rather than evil, the joint action ends up being genuinely evil; only that now, this is not just accidental, but rather an essential feature of the event. Once more, we are faced with immoral nonsense. But now, this immoral nonsense does not just happen by chance, such as in the children’s case, but as a result of a sort of a commitment to immoral nonsense motivated in the desire

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to ascertain a collective identity. The fact that the act is wrong and unmotivated becomes a necessary condition for it to be performed. The unintelligibility, the lack of reason for the action is part of the reason for which it is performed. So there is now a reason behind the joint goal, but the peculiar nature of that reason makes this form, again, rationally deficient, and another corrupted type of joint action. From accidental evil we have now come to essential evil. In conclusion, let me return to the problem of social capital. Remember that the term captures the idea that social relations are instrumental for the attainment of goals, that is, production; however they do not function as resources, but instead emerge from previous cooperation and serve as a catalyst in further cooperation. From Mark Granovetter’s seminal paper on the “strength of weak ties” (1968) to Putnam’s “social capitalism” in his book “Bowling Alone”, the claim is that social relations should be viewed under the aspect of the opportunities which they provide to individuals. In the past decade, research on social capital has become something of a cottage industry. The predominant view on interpersonal relations in this literature is somewhat romantic and strangely cold at the same time. The romantic aspect is that groups and communities, joint initiatives, communitarian ventures tend to be seen as a positive thing; the coldness comes from the fact that “the good” is conceived of in purely individualistic terms: social relations tend to be seen as instruments for the achievement of the goals of the participating individuals. To use a classic example: social capital theory analyzes how individuals profit from cooperation in neighborly relations: if your neighbor is your friend, he may be willing to watch your children while you’re out on some other venture. In spite of the predominant romanticism, some authors have already noted that social capital has its dark sides, including the dangers of “bonding” social capital as analyzed by Robert Putnam, and Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the transmission of social capital usually perpetuates hierarchies. From an Augustinian perspective, I argue that exclusion, exploitation, and domination are not the main danger of social capital. With the tools we have developed in the previous considerations, we can now take a somewhat deeper look at the dark side of social capital: there is an inherent tendency to alienation implicit in human cooperation. Because cooperative relations are intrinsically valuable, such relations make us prone to take part in actions that are geared towards goals which are not our own, thereby alienating our actions from our aims, and our forces from our values. In theological terms, the pleasures of cooperation are the snake that seduces us to evil. Social capital is therefore an intrinsically dangerous thing: it is a means for the pursuit of our goals which may easily turn against us and divert our actions from our values.

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However, the existentialist Marxist conception of social capital which I would like to advocate must go beyond the dialectically underdeveloped contrast between the bright and the dark side of social capital. The claim will be that we need the dark side: alienation in social relations changes our identities, it enables us to think and act as members of teams rather than simply as the individual selves we are. Social identities cannot emerge without alienation; at the same time, thinking and acting in roles, as members of groups, is part and parcel of a fully human life. The task ahead in overcoming alienation and turning from evil to good is to form practical identities in which what is good for us, collectively, is in harmony with what is good for us distributively, that is, a social life in which being “one of us” means being true to ourselves individually. Now why should social capital theory become more Marxist in order to account for this particular dark aspect of social capital? To what extent does the self-alienation analyzed above resemble Marxian alienation? Let me just briefly sketch out the analogy. Marx starts out with the observation that production produces more than is necessary than just to keep production going. The surplus value constitutes capital. It is basically created by the workers, but appropriated by the owners of the means of production, so that the workers basically work themselves into dependency. Something similar is true of social capital; the surplus value of labor resembles the intrinsic value of cooperation-enabling relations. Cooperation-enabling relations are not just means to the achievement of the plural goals they make possible. They tend to acquire intrinsic value. Under some societal conditions, the need for companionship, which is manifested in the emergence of autonomous collective agents, leads people into collectively pursuing goals which, upon consideration, they do not really think worth pursuing, and to contributing to maintaining group structures that drive a wedge between what people want and what they do. This brings us to the final point, the normative consequences. Famously, the vision behind the Marxian theory is that of un-alienated labor, where the workers are not deprived of the surplus value they create. What would a society in which social capital is not alienated from its producers look like? Augustine has a concept for the prevailing mode of interpersonal relations in such a society, which is “good friendship”. Augustine casts good friendship in theological terms, but just as Marx’s theory of alienation gives an ex negativo description of un-alienated work, we can derive a secular vision of social conditions under which social capital is not alienated from the negative case of bad friendship, such as the one between the pear thieves. Conditions under which membership does not alienate the participants from their own goals are conditions under which individuals can at the same time satisfy their need for companionship and unity, and their need

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to be able to make sense of what they are doing collectively in terms of their own individual perspective. These are conditions under which the group goals that individuals jointly pursue are responsive to what their members take to be the right thing to do. I believe that this is also one of the core normative ideals of democracy: making sure that the goals pursued as a society are rooted, in a meaningful way, in the whole of the lives of the participating individuals.

Literature Bourdieu, P. (1980): “Le Capital social: notes provisoires”. In: Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 31, p. 2 – 19. Bourdieu, P. (1986): “The Forms of Capital”. In: Richardson, J. G. (ed.): Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, p. 242 – 58. Davidson, D. (1963): “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. In: The Journal of Philosophy LX (23), p. 685 – 700. Granovetter, M. S. (1968): “The Strength of Weak Ties”. In: American Journal of Sociology 78/6, p. 1360 – 1379. Jaeggi, R. (2005): Entfremdung. Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Putnam, R. B. (1995): “Bowling Alone. America’s Declining Social Capital”. In: Journal of Democracy 6, p. 65 – 78. Putnam, R. D. (2000): Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York/London: Simon & Schuster. Rovane, C. (1998): The Bounds of Agency. An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Searle, J. R. (1990): “Collective Intentions and Actions”. In: Cohen, P., J. Morgan, J. & M.E. Pollack (eds.): Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 401 – 415.

Michaela Rehm

Cement of Society? Why Civil Religion is unfit to create Social Bonds Civil religion, as Durkheim put it, is an “objective social fact”. According to this notion, any nation has a civil religion that can be examined by an observant social scientist. Empirical research might identify, say, Mercedes Benz, the Rhine, sausages and a rather robust way of playing football as elements of the German civil religion. Therefore, we might subsume several kinds of widely shared beliefs that provide a basis for social integration under the term “civil religion”. But what I want to examine in this paper is a stronger notion of civil religion, a notion that really takes the religious sphere into account. It does so by insisting that citizens need a common credo that clearly transcends a shared pride in the national production of victuals: a profession of faith that creates social bonds among the citizens and from each citizen to the state itself. It is about conveying a sense of the exclusive peculiarity of the particular state and its values, of their sacredness even, to the citizens. Furthermore, I’m interested in the normativity of this stronger concept of civil religion. Its advocates diagnose a lack of common values in their respective community and propose civil religion as a remedy that is supposed to deliver a cement of society. It is maintained that communities do not have a choice, they must have a civil religion, otherwise they will fall apart. In my paper I want to discuss whether civil religion in this stronger, normative variant really is a candidate when such a cement of society is needed. I would like to identify the premises upon which this strong notion of civil religion is based – with a little help from Rousseau. I will try to examine civil religion’s historical and systematic conditions to demonstrate the problem that civil religion is supposed to solve and finally discuss the solution.

What are civil religion’s historical conditions? Civil religion is a phenomenon of the Occident. It emerges where a process of pluralization has taken place; homogenous societies do not need civil religion, there is agreement about shared values, about what is sacred to all citizens. For example, this was the case in the antique religions of the polis where the members of the polis were identical with the followers of the cult practiced in that particular society. Pre-Reformation Christianity was also relatively homoge-

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nous, at least in the sense that there was a standard which the majority of the citizens of Catholic states accepted, a standard that was placed in revelation and its interpretation by the Church of Rome. This relative homogeneity was ended by the Reformation: now not only minorities held a dissenting faith; huge parts of the society shook or even superseded Catholicism’s dominance. With the rise of such heterogeneous societies the question of what might keep the different parts together arose. What could take the place of the unifying religion of former times? What might replace the standard that was questioned along with the religious division? After the civil wars of the 16th and 17th century it seemed clear that religion was no longer a means to prevent conflicts, rather it had proved to be their main cause. No wonder it was widely seen as the way out of the misery to ban religion from the public sphere. Religion had therefore lost its former potential to give rise to public conflicts because it had lost its political impact with its exile into the private sphere. What was lost at the same time was the unifying influence religion had shown by the formulation and defense of shared values, by rituals to protect these values and by its motivating force concerning the observation of the moral standard. The fear of society’s losing its moral foundation along with a unifying religion is the starting point for the reflections of those political philosophers who presented concepts of civil religion. Jean-Jacques Rousseau got to the heart of this fear when he wrote that, if the Divinity did not exist, there was no one left but the “(self‐) interested villain” (Rousseau 1969, 602; my translation, M.R.). Civil religion is based on the premise that morality without religion does not exist.

What are civil religion’s systematic conditions? Civil religion is in service to politics, its instrumental character is desired by the citizens. The stability of the state is supposed to be a central purpose which all citizens want to promote; civil religion is judged to be the means with which to realize this purpose. Now it is a respectable position to hold that in the face of a pluralistic society it is a good idea to establish a civil religion that unifies the diverging social forces and ties them to the state. Rousseau, for example, is convinced that every person of goodwill will accept this thought. Several participants in the contemporary debate on civil religion share Rousseau’s conviction. After all it is comprehensible why the concept of civil religion seems attractive in a time that faces the challenges of pluralism and the shortcomings of liberalism even more strongly than in Rousseau’s days. In this situa-

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tion it may be advisable to examine the assumptions upon which the concept of civil religion is based. First: no politics without morals. What is rejected is the liberal idea that the state’s task is limited to the preservation of peace and security with the help of the civil law only. It doesn’t matter if somebody sticks to the law for moral reasons, for example, the application of Kant’s categorical imperative, or if the reason for not murdering one’s rival is simply that the idea of being put behind bars is not that appealing. According to this position, the citizens’ motives are not the state’s business as long as their behavior does not conflict with the civil law. In contrast, an advocate of civil religion will maintain that mere law-abidance will not do. The reason is his concept of the state. In his opinion, a state that is limited to the functions of preservation of peace and security cannot ensure a beneficial social life. What is asked for is the moral citizen who does the right thing and strives for the common good – not out of fear of sanctions or social disadvantage, and not only out of insight into the reasonableness of the law, but because of his emotional bond to his community. Second: no morals without religion. Advocates of civil religion doubt that an individual can be truly moral without faith in a Divinity. To put it more correctly, they will not deny that an agnostic or an atheist is able to act altruistically when it is clear that their investment in the public welfare will pay off for themselves as well. But as soon as their private benefit is not guaranteed, the advocate of civil religion assumes that individuals without faith in a Divinity will opt for a behavior that only serves their own egoistic interests. After all, no extended empirical studies are necessary to realize that moral behavior does not always lead directly to more happiness, a better life etc.¹ It suffices to have a look at everyday life to see that honest and generous persons are often exploited and taken for a ride. In the face of these circumstances the advocates of civil religion put their hopes in religion, namely in faith in life after death, reward of the virtuous, punishment of the depraved, in order to motivate citizens to altruistic behavior even when it is clear that it will not pay off in this world. That is the reason why Rousseau formulates the articles of civil religion as a theistic profession of faith. Third: no particularist morals without civil religion. Advocates of civil religion suppose that politics cannot do without morals, nor morals without religion. But they would not be content if it were possible to make all citizens “religious” somehow. After all, in their opinion the problem is not only the existence of citizens who lack faith in a Divinity. In their eyes, religious citizens are better than atheistic or agnostic citizens (as long as their faith is compatible with the laws of

 For the idea of religion’s necessity for morality see Kant 2003, A 223 – 224, p. 167 f.

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the state). But if the scope of their faith is universalist, this will not necessarily help the state. Such a faith implies a universalist morality stating that all human beings have the same right to claim assistance. In contrast, advocates of civil religion want to promote a particularist morality that motivates individuals to take care of their fellow citizens and of their own community. After all, it is the welfare of their own particular community that is to be fostered with the help of civil religion. And the objective of the particularist morality is patriotism.

What is religious in civil religion? Civil religion is not a denomination. Rousseau as well as other supporters assumes that every citizen can be, say, a Protestant and a follower of civil religion at the same time. There is no question about truth; civil religion is an artificial product and is designed – so to speak – on a drawing-board in accordance with the needs of the respective community. Is it possible to call this concept a religion at all? If religio is understood as a “bond”, as the commitment of individuals to each other, it seems justified to talk about civil “religion” (Kobbert 1914, 571). Problems arise when civil religion is based on a different notion of religion. The Latin term “religio” is used by Cicero next to other terms (like “pietas”) to indicate the obligation to ritual adoration of the Gods. Lactantius attributes “religio” to “religare” (to link) in the sense of a closeness of men with God. Martin Luther uses “religio” as synonymous with “fides” and “cultus” (Wagner 1986, 524). Whenever the term “religion” is not only understood with respect to human interaction but also with regard to the relationship between God and man, it is difficult to use it in the context of civil religion. The characteristic of civil religion is the separation of the metaphysical from the moral part of religion and exactly this separation is the reason why its advocates think that one could be, say, a Protestant, and a follower of civil religion at the same time. Let’s suppose it is possible to be a Protestant follower of civil religion or rather a civil religious Protestant. Whenever a metaphysical question arises, according to the concept of civil religion this person would have to answer it as the Protestant he also is. This kind of question is judged to be politically irrelevant, it is a matter of the private sphere, in contrast to questions concerning the living together of men. In this respect our civil religious Protestant would be referred to civil religion because morality with its relevance for human interaction within the state is seen as a matter of politics. Consequently civil religion as a phenomenon of the public political sphere can only be based on a notion of religion that focuses on morality (Wagner

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1986, Chapter 1, §3). Religion in the broader sense – referring to the relations among men as well as to the relation between men and God – is at the most a premise of civil religion: The civil religious state must ask its citizens to accept the separation of metaphysics and morality that is implicit in civil religion. This is not easy for followers of religious communities that do not teach anything like a doctrine of the two reigns or even reject it explicitly. But also the liberal state, abstinent in matters of religion, wants its citizens to accept that religion must be practiced in the private sphere only. The difference is that the civil religious state claims that it is disinterested in the metaphysical part of religion, this part being judged politically irrelevant. But in contrast to the religiously abstinent state it is dependent on exactly this part. Its indifference concerning questions of metaphysics is, after all, a pretence; effectively the civil religious state is vitally interested in citizens who have these topics on their mind. For the very reason that the state cannot create the orientation to the public good itself and also cannot offer a substitute for faith it must presuppose a theistic profession of faith. Therefore civil religion is not a substitute for another religion, but the beneficiary of a faith it cannot produce itself. For the same reason it is infertile: it cannot reproduce closeness to civil religion itself, but has to rely on citizens who receive their faith somewhere else – in the private sphere – and who import this faith into the public sphere. This seems to be the case with different conceptions of civil religion, whether they date back to the Enlightenment or have been drafted only recently. They all share the feature that they take the citizens’ private faith into politics’ service. What is the purpose of this instrumentalization? Is it (1.) the creation of a bond with the community or (2.) the preservation of liberty? Rousseau as well as other Enlightenment philosophers had rather the first purpose in mind whereas contemporary advocates of civil religion like Hermann Lübbe focus on the second. Hermann Lübbe’s concept is formulated quite cautiously: according to him, every kind of religious orientation that is integrated into our political culture and that can reach a consensus (Lübbe 2004, 316) determines a civil religion. But what function is such a weak conception of civil religion supposed to have at all? What is the benefit of civil religion in these circumstances? Taken as “vinculum societatis civilis” (Pufendorf 1698, 17), a unifying bond, as Pufendorf put it, its purpose is clearer and it seems more plausible that such a stronger conception can really make a difference concerning the citizens’ attitude towards their community. But be it strong or weak: no variants of civil religion do justice to pluralism. They all stand in the way of pluralism because they set out in advance the particular reason a citizen must have to be law-abiding. They dictate the citizens’ motivational sets.

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Can civil religion keep its promises? Again: what reflections form the basis of the conviction that civil religion is needed? There is a skepticism about rationalism that is judged useless for the task of transforming amoralists into citizens who care for the common good. Reason alone does not serve to improve social life, it may even help the amoralist to realize his aims more effectively at the expense of his fellow citizens. There is also a mistrust with regard to moral universalism that is dismissed as a chimera, a pretty idea without any consequence. Whoever claims that every individual is responsible for all human beings just because of his membership of the human race is supporting – according to the advocates of civil religion – those who want a pretext for not looking after people in their close vicinity. Rationalism is opposed by “love of duty”, which is to be created with the help of religion. Universalism is replaced by moral particularism by clearly defining what and who the citizens are responsible for: the state and its citizens. The individual is supposed to have an emotional, religious bond to the state and its fellow citizens; these bonds make the citizens law-abiding and provide for social consensus. Is it really possible to reach the desired loyalty of citizens with the help of an instrumentalized religion? As mentioned earlier, we must distinguish whether this instrumentalization is supposed to serve (1.) the creation of the social bond or (2.) the preservation of liberty. To examine the question as to whether civil religion is really the means to the end in mind, I want to sketch two ideal types of citizens, the religiously indifferent on the one hand, and the practicing Christian on the other. In this thought experiment neither is an extremist, the religiously indifferent is no militant atheist, while the Christian does not strive for a theocracy, but accepts the separation of religion and politics, of church and state. Presumably, neither the Christian nor the religiously indifferent wants the second purpose (civil religion as a means to the preservation of liberty) because the instrument that is supposed to protect liberty – civil religion – instead threatens liberty in their eyes. The religiously indifferent does not want to commit herself to any religious purpose; the Christian is afraid of the idolization of the state (Luther 1950, 4– 10). Hermann Lübbe might counter this by suggesting that ‘God and not a political institution was the addressee of religious responsibility’ and that civil religion was not an instrument to ‘idolize the political system but the guarantor of its liberality’ (Lübbe 2004, 209). Suppose civil religion really is the beneficiary of an already existing faith of individuals, as I have tried to show earlier. Then the Christian might reply to Hermann Lübbe that it is not civil religion that figures

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as a guarantor of liberty, but his personal faith, and that this was even more the case, the lesser the state tried to instrumentalize this faith. Presumably both the Christian and the religiously indifferent hold that freedom of worship and tolerance are protected much better without civil religion. The Christian might say that the desired purpose would be served more effectively if freedom of worship were protected as well as possible, while the religiously indifferent would maintain that investment in education, in the cultivation of responsible, mature citizens was a better guarantor of liberty – and much less controversial. What about the purpose of civil religion named first, the creation of a social bond? Probably the religiously indifferent is loyal to the state precisely because it enables citizens to realize their individual conceptions of a good life. What would civil religion be good for in such a case? Trying to motivate the religiously indifferent to more active civil commitment with the help of civil religion would rather prove to be counterproductive because it would be difficult for her to stay loyal to a state that is not religiously neutral. The Christian would have a similar problem. He would not have any difficulty being a good citizen in a liberal, religiously disinterested state, especially because it guarantees his freedom of worship. But it is conceivable that a Christian would object to a civil religious state because this would mean idolizing the state. And of course he would dislike the instrumentalization of religion in general. He would fight against a propagation of religion because of an expected social advantage. For our exemplary Christian, religion would not be a kind of social superstructure, but the epitome of the bastion of liberty. And most probably he would suffer an allergic reaction if the state tried to use his faith as a useful instrument in the state’s services. But if my thesis were true, this is exactly what the civil religious state would have to do – remember, I claimed civil religion cannot produce the desired effects itself but is only the beneficiary of an already existing faith. Couldn’t the advocate of civil religion be content to maintain with Böckenförde that ‘the liberal, secular state is based on values it cannot itself guarantee’ (Böckenförde 1976, 60; my translation, M.R.)? This could mean welcoming different professions of faith as well as the reasons for the religiously indifferent’s loyalty as guarantors for the state’s liberality and to protect the conditions for their flourishing as much as possible. But the advocate of civil religion goes much further. According to him, you cannot have morality without religion, or good politics without morality. The religion he means does not consist only of the said individual religious convictions that the citizens already possess. They must be transformed politically to motivate the citizens towards commitment to the community. After all, the aim is a collective political morality that implies a conception of the good which all citizens are supposed to share, name-

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ly, the good of that particular community. This particularist morality is expected to come to life and be kept alive with the help of a religion that is common to all citizens, in short, a civil religion. If someone really intends that citizens commit themselves only or at least primarily to matters regarding their own state, civil religion might be useful. But I think this person should have an answer for the following question: does the purpose which civil religion promises to serve justify the risky patriotism and moral particularism with which it is accompanied? After all, even Rousseau as a fan of civil religion admits that the love of one’s own state thus promoted implies partiality and exclusion (Rousseau 1964, 464). Whoever claims he wants committed, mature citizens, no matter whether they look after their sick neighbor or fight for a free Tibet, cannot advocate civil religion just like that: as I said, it implies a focus on the problems of the home community. It is not significant whether this is the home state or a post-national constellation, for example the European Union. What counts is the particularist, exclusive character of the civil religion and of the morality that goes with it. An advocate of civil religion might object that a particularist morality is not necessarily exclusive because we might suppose an order of priority (say, the care for your family comes first, then your city, your state, your continent and so on).² But what is decisive is that the civil religious state does not leave it to the citizens to choose the place of their commitment. It gives a guideline that in the end is illiberal: the obligation to one’s own community and fellow citizens comes first. In a globalized world it is difficult to differentiate between actions which serve the home community and which do not, a prominent example being the protection of the environment. And ultimately it is obvious that, say, a commitment against torture in Sudan may also be useful for the state to which the activist belongs – for example by raising awareness of the topic, thereby leading to greater attentiveness concerning abuse of power in his own state. What is more, it seems generally beneficial for a democracy to have citizens who care for other people’s destiny, who are not idiotes. The state has to accept that with or without civil religion it cannot motivate civil commitment, let alone determine who or what is to profit from this commitment. Whenever it still attempts to do so, its enterprise becomes counterproductive: as I tried to show with the examples of the Christian and the religiously indifferent citizen, a state’s experiments with civil religion just won’t create the desired loyalty and unity, because many citizens will refuse to cooperate under those circumstances. Of course I realize

 Cicero for example presents a hierarchy of people we are obligated to (Cicero 1995 Vol. 1, § 53).

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that advocates of civil religion will claim that liberalism is so full of flaws that my criticism concerning civil religion’s illiberality does not have much weight. But I think even then the problem of civil religion’s lack of efficiency remains: it is disintegrating and exclusive and thereby impedes its own purpose. It is probably widely acknowledged today that pluralism is valuable and has to be protected. Although civil religion claims to respect plurality, effectively it aims at brazing together the different world views as much as possible. That is what Pancasila does – an example of a current civil religion, established in Indonesia, that strives not merely for “cooperation” between the three most important Indonesian social groups, but for a “synthesis of three different ideologies into one spirit” (Darmaputera 1988, 160). And that is what Simon Critchley, a present advocate of civil religion, wants to promote in spite of his personal reservations concerning all things religious: he sides with Emilio Gentile when he says that the political unity of the state has to be transformed into a sacral unity, a process he calls “sacralisation” (Critchley 2008, 13). What is missing these days according to Critchley is a “theory and practice of the common will, understood as the supreme fiction of an irrevocable faith […]. The task of politics consists in the poetic construction of a supreme fiction […]. Such a fiction would be a fiction we all would know to be a fiction and which we would still believe in. […] A catechism of the citizen would be such a supreme fiction, the fiction of an irrevocable faith” (Critchley 2008, 77– 78, my translation, M.R.). What unites the creators of Pancasila with Simon Critchley and other supporters of civil religion is obviously their serious worry that a state may fall apart without a uniting force. But it is doubtful whether this goal can be attained by attempting to create an artificial compromise between diverging opinions. This approach might be compared with a state trying to come to terms with the different languages within its territory by binding its citizens to a new artificial language for public use, say, some kind of Esperanto. The alternative would be to respect plurality, not least by refraining from faking the unity that is yearned for. But of course citizens would have to pay a price for the toleration of their individual ways of life – they would be expected to be aware of their speaking “Protestant” or “Vegetarian” (to give just two examples of “languages” of individual ways of life) and to use a generally accessible language when participating in public debates: for “all their ongoing dissent on questions of world views and religious doctrines, citizens are meant to respect one another as free and equal members of their political community. And on the basis of such civic solidarity, when it comes to contentious political issues citizens owe one another good reasons for their political statements. Rawls speaks in this context of the ‘duty of civility’ and the ‘public use of reason’.

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In a secular state only those political decisions are taken to be legitimate as can be justified, in light of generally accessible reasons, vis-à-vis religious and non-religious citizens, and citizens of different religious confessions alike” (Habermas 2005, 14). That does not imply that citizens of such a state must play hideand-seek concerning their individual convictions: “Certainly, every citizen must know that only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold that divides the informal sphere from parliaments, courts, and administrations. But this recognition need not deter religious citizens from publicly expressing and justifying their convictions by resorting to religious language” (Habermas 2005, 15). Maybe it is after all more useful for civil consensus if the state does not take care of religion at all – on the one hand, by tolerating its various forms, as long as they are in accordance with the positive law, on the other hand, by staying religiously abstinent and by refusing to instrumentalize religion and to melt citizens’ opinions and attitudes together. It can merely guarantee the liberty that is needed to develop civil commitment, and that will be all RIGHT – in the proper sense of the word – with the Christian as well as with the religiously indifferent.

Literature Böckenförde, E.-W. (1976): “Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation”. In: ibid.: Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit. Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Cicero, M. T. (1995): On Duties/De Officiis, ed. by Miriam T. Griffin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge texts in the history of political thought). Critchley, S. (2008): Der Katechismus des Bürgers. Politik, Recht und Religion in, nach, mit und gegen Rousseau, translated by Christian Strauch. Zürich/Berlin: diaphanes. Darmaputera, E. (1988): Pancasila and the search for identity and modernity in indonesian society. A cultural and ethical analysis. Leiden/New York/Copenhagen/Cologne: E. J. Brill. Gentile, E. (2006): Politics as Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (2005): Religion in the public sphere. The Holberg Prize Seminar 2005, Holberg Prize Laureate Juergen Habermas. Bergen: The University of Bergen. Kant, I. (2003): Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Ed. by Brandt, H.D. & Klemme, H.G., Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Kobbert, M. (1914): “Religio”. In: Kroll, W./K. Witte (eds.), Paulys Realencyclopaedie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. 2,1,1. Stuttgart: Metzler, p. 571. Lübbe, H. (1981): “Staat und Zivilreligion. Ein Aspekt politischer Legitimität”. In: Kleger, H./A. Müller (eds.): Religion des Bürgers. Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa. Münster/Hamburg/London: LIT. Lübbe, H. (2004): Religion nach der Aufklärung. München: Fink. Luther, M. (1950): “Grosser Katechismus”. In: Luthers Werke in Auswahl, Vol. 4, Berlin.

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Pufendorf, S. (1698): Of the nature and qualification of religion, in reference to civil society. London: Printed by D. E. for A. Roper. Rousseau, J.-J. (1964): Œuvres complètes, Vol. III: Du contrat social. Écrits politiques, Paris (Éditions de la Pléiade). Rousseau, J.-J. (1969): Œeuvres complètes, Vol. IV: Émile. Éducation – Morale – Botanique, Paris (Éditions de la Pléiade). Wagner, F. (1997): “Religion I-II”. In: Theologische Realenzyklopaedie, Vol. 28, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Wagner, F. (1986): Was ist Religion? Studien zu ihrem Begriff und Thema in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus.

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The Social Capital of Religious Communities in the Age of Globalization Belonging and Believing For years the situation of religion in Europe was conceived of as “believing without belonging”. With regard to the subject of this book, this would imply that in Europe religion has lost its power to establish mutual recognized moral bonds. For that reason, it is worth noting that Grace Davie, author of that formula, has abandoned it. As early as 1994, Grace Davie showed in a study of Great Britain that a low level of church commitment can coexist with a large diffusion of faith convictions; she called this “believing without belonging” (Davie 1994). This observation makes good sense of two discrepancies that can be observed in the religious statistics of almost every European country (Casanova 2009, 206 – 228). The first concerns the numerical relationship between individual religious convictions and the participation of these individuals in church activities. In Sweden, for example, only 6 percent of Christians go to church once a month; but personal religious views (e. g., faith in God, or belief in life after death) are more widespread and are held by more than half the population. At once, however, we see in this case a second discrepancy. Although half of the population tends towards atheism, 70 percent of the Swedes have remained members of their church. Hence, in the case of Sweden, we must take into account the reverse: “belonging without believing.” In a later study in 2006, Grace Davie, while addressing that discrepancy, brought another significant perspective into the picture: de facto, in today’s Europe the churches have become voluntary associations, they are actors in civil society, raise their voice in public disputes and are able to mobilize considerable support for their activities. But the supporters mostly do not translate their approval into an active participation in the life of the local parish. Grace Davie called this “vicarious religion”, a concept that she now prefers (Davie 2006). The forms taken by religious communities in today’s Europe are more diverse than at any time in the past. The synagogue in Judaism, the church in Christianity, or the mosque in Islam were never in fact the only forms in which religious communities took social shape; a fortiori, however, if we investigate today’s forms of religious community we cannot limit our researches to these institutions, since they no longer offer sufficient criteria for measuring the degree of belonging. A great variety of organizations operates in the sphere

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between the state, economic life, and the private realm today. All of these are characterized by a high degree of societal self-organization, and legal forms that regulate their existence. Religious communities, too, profit from this situation, as Gunnar Folke Schuppert writes: “Religious communities are among the actors in the public realm of civil society, provided they perform as competitors and not as established church” (Schuppert 2005, 21). Thanks to these new legal forms, private religiosity can emerge into the public sphere. For many years, sociologists of religion took privatization as the connecting thread in their investigations of religion in modern society, until José Casanova reversed the argument and demonstrated that the supposedly privatized religions are no longer restricted to the private sphere (Casanova 1994). Rather, religions articulate experiences and claims in the public realm of a society that do indeed have their origin in personal experiences and evaluations, but that are also shared by others—and hence are presented in a communal form. Indignation at wars, violations of human rights, protests against the destruction of the environment, etc., bring believers onto the street and into NGOs. Casanova sees this “de-privatization” of religiosity as basic to the civil-societal constitution of religions today. This social form of religion is linked to a new kind of public presence, which is fundamentally different from the traditional state religion. For that reason church involvement in Europe cannot function as a measure for the strength or weakness of religions in the public realm of contemporary Europe (Michalski 2006).

The Social Capital of Private Associations as a Public Concern in the US A similar shift of attention to the social power of religions beyond the local parish has also occurred in the US. Here in particular Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, has taken the lead. His inspiration came from research in Italy. Putnam has examined the efficacy of twenty regional governments in Italy, which had been installed in 1970 and given responsibility for a wide range of public tasks. While studying the results of this reform, he encountered considerable differences. In the north of the country it had been a success, in the south, however, a failure. He found the cause in a differential development which can be traced back to at least the 14th century. In the towns of northern Italy, citizens’ associations actively took matters concerning their town into their own hands. In contrast, the townspeople of the south, dependent upon landlords, expected matters to be dealt with by “them up there” (Putnam

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1993, 130 – 131). Putnam conceived of these differences in terms of transmitted patterns of social relations. In the former case, they were based on principles of reciprocity and trust among the townspeople – in the latter case, on dependency and hierarchy. Putnam conceived of that difference as a case of path dependency. “Where you can get to depends on where you’re coming from, and some destinations you simply cannot get to from here” (Putnam 1993, 179). The civic engagement of the north can be traced back to a longstanding history of civic organizations and constitutes a “social capital” which was crucial to the economic and political success of the newly formed regional governments (Putnam 1993, 163 – 185). Age old differences still had an impact on the success or failure of a political reform in the 20th century. Immediately after publishing his study, Putnam applied its findings to the USA and published his results under the inspiring title: Bowling Alone. Americans have increasingly been bowling alone for the past two decades – a development that brought Putnam to make an alarming prediction for the USA. “American social capital in the form of civic associations has significantly eroded over the last generation” (Putnam 1995, 73). Putnam presented this disturbing finding against the background of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic study of democracy in America. According to the French observer of the early 19th century, American democracy thrived on the readiness of citizens to join all kinds of associations. And Putnam began his article with a preface which made every politician sit up and take notice. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans’ propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. Recently, American social scientists […] have unearthed a wide range of empirical evidence that the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions (and not only in America) are indeed powerfully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement. Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities […]. Social scientists in several fields have recently suggested a common framework for understanding these phenomena, a framework that rests on the concept of social capital. By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital – tools and training that enhance individual productivity – ‘social capital’ refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual ‘benefit’ (Putnam 1995, 65).

The discovery of a new kind of capital created a sensation. Bill Clinton invited Putnam to Camp David for a consultation lasting several days and worked his ideas into two “State of the Union” addresses. Tony Blair received him in London. It appeared almost as if a political scientist had discovered the magic independ-

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ent variable (Nicholas Leman), on which both the success of political action and the well-being of the society depend, and which, moreover, was low-cost (Leman 1996, 22– 26). Putnam perceived a declining social capital in the US – with one notable exception: religious communities.¹ Though in America the statistics of participation in church-activities also indicate a decrease, membership in religious communities are not affected. Since Putnam believed that “religious people are exceptionally active social capitalists”² he prepared the ground for arguments that legislation should be used to put that social capital to work.³

The American Welfare Reform of 1996 The discovery of the social capital of private associations happened at a time, when doubt was being voiced about the efficacy of public spending for social welfare. Marvin Olasky argued in his book, The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), that public welfare establishes dependency, instead of making people independent. The welfare system reproduces the misery it wants to fight (Olasky 1992, 18). One of his typical examples: if an unmarried mother gets a contribution to the rent of her apartment, she is encouraged to stay unmarried, otherwise she will lose it. Big organizations are unable to stimulate people to change their life style. Only communities of dedicated Christians can do so. Ecclesiastical welfare organizations likewise are too big and bear similarities to state agencies. In order to be effective, any assistance must be personal and face-to-face; the needy must look into the eyes of the donor. People in need deserve personal attention, not a pay check from an anonymous authority. For their misery, not society should be blamed, but their own morality (Sider/Rolland Unruh 2001, 267– 296; Prätorius 2003, 173 – 174). Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress found their own views confirmed by Putnam’s diagnosis: the former with their belief in the superiority of self-initiative and the market over legislation, the latter with their belief in the state’s power to pass laws contributing to the common good. Together they

 There is an unresolved tension between Putnam’s thesis of a general decline of associating and his praise for religious communities (Graf 1999, 93 – 130). Putnam sees church-going as decisive and ignores membership in affiliated religious associations.  According to Putnam (2000, 67 f.) religious communities contribute 15 – 20 billion dollars and extensive social activities to welfare in the US.  For an analysis of the link between “Religious Organizations and Social Capital”, distinguishing social network and cultural norms or values (Norris/Inglehart 2004, 180 – 195).

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passed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, with its integration of religious communities into the welfare system, and the obligation placed on unemployed people to accept every kind of work. A time limit was added to existing federal support programs for single mothers, for those who were unfit to work, who were ill, dependent on drugs, or homeless (Kaufmann 2003, 118 – 121). Payments from these programs were limited to sixty months, or five years, over the span of one’s life (Rieger/Leibfried 2001, 205). Welfare offices were to become “Job Placement Centers”, and welfare was to be replaced by “workfare”. When signing the rules into law, President Clinton remarked on August 22, 1996: “This legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.” Section 104 (b) of the new law “allows the States to contract with religious organizations, or to allow religious organizations to accept certificates, vouchers, or other forms of disbursement under any program described in subsection (a) (2), on the same basis as any other nongovernmental provider without impairing the religious character of such organizations, and without diminishing the religious freedom of beneficiaries of assistance funded under such program”.⁴ This legal provision should make it possible for local congregations (Churches, Synagogues, Mosques) to supply services under the federal programs, in case persons in need turned to them rather than to non-religious organizations for assistance. The legislators were interested in including local congregations in the relief systems, as is indicated by the degree of freedom religious communities were given in their participation in the program. For example, they were not obliged to hide their religious commitment and were allowed to choose their employees according religious criteria independent of the prohibition of discrimination (Section 104 f). But on the othe hand they were obliged to help everyone, religious or not, in the same manner as the welfare structures (Section 104 g). Immediately after George W. Bush became President, an office of “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” was established in the White House and it put this legal provision into practice.⁵ Religious charities had already received public dollars since long before 1996. Catholics, Protestants, and the Salvation Army had established charities of their own – “religious affiliated entities” – that became part of the new public

 The law was published with comments by the ‘Center for Public Justice’ 1997. The centre is a Protestant “Think-Tank” that rejected the established welfare system and exerted some influence on the new legislation (Black/Koopman/Ryden 2004, 46 – 48).  For details see Black/Koopman/Ryden 2004, 218 – 222; a good analysis also by Oldopp/Prätorius 2002, 28 – 52; Nagel 2006, 78 – 111.

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welfare system. But the new law also accepted “pervasively sectarian organizations”, which had been previously excluded, but were now permitted to spend public dollars on those entitled under the running programs (Coleman 2003, 239 – 267; Carlson-Thies 2003, 269 – 297). Legal developments had facilitated this inclusion of religious congregations in the public welfare system. The “First Amendment” to the constitution of the US, from 1791, had determined: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Religions should be protected from any inference by the federal state. The provision was restricted to the Congress, and did not refer to the states, where regimes of established churches existed without being challenged by the Supreme Court. Only from the middle of 20th century onward did the Court deal with these cases. In the beginning, attempts prevailed to erect a “wall of separation” between civil authorities and religious bodies; later, the principle changed and the jurisdiction stopped discriminating between religious and secular groups, introducing instead a principle of equal treatment. Religion should not be put at a disadvantage, since it was regarded as a common good that deserved legal protection (Brugger 2001, 187– 188). This legal change was favorable for legislation allowing public authorities to include religious congregations in their fight against welldefined social ills. The cost of transactions was expected to fall, the people in need better served. But a tension remained inherent: church-organizations do not understand themselves as suppliers of state services that people can ask for when they are legally entitled and present vouchers. Christian charity is in essence personal (Ammerman 2002, 150).

The Institutionalization of a Religious Ethics of Solidarity The welfare reform transformed a principle of religious ethics into a legal institution and made it work for a public good. The Christian text fundamental to that ethic derives from the gospel of Matthew (25, 31– 46). But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will tell those on his right hand, ‘Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed

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me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you; or thirsty, and give you a drink? When did we see you as a stranger, and take you in; or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’ The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’ Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’ Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.’ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Those who are saved and those who are condemned in the final judgment hear as criterion for the verdict: What you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me. The brother cannot be defined in terms of belonging to Israel but in terms of needs: anybody who is hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, in prison. To recognize him is the true proof for the faith in Jesus Christ. This parable is regularly evoked in sermons, when ministers address the situation of the destitute and social inequality, and when they emphasize the value of caring.⁶ In accord with that powerful parable, Christian congregations are sensitive to all kinds of social needs. They assist single mothers, serve food, advise people in legal issues, help the homeless to find shelter, arrange visits to the doctor, support the unemployed towards retraining, and engage in many other forms of services to a needy, whether legally entitled or not.⁷ Solidarity with those in need is a Christian value; yet need is not a timeless category; it changes with social conditions and has to be constantly redefined. This explains the broad and open scale of activities that Christian congregations in the US engage in. Most important among them is providing connections. Since one and the same local congregation is unable to cope with all urgent cases, its strength depends on its relations with other relief agencies, private or public. While a local congregation is strong in performing direct immediate assistance, for longer term solu-

 Wuthnow 2004, 66 – 69. Between 11 percent and 15 percent of the American population earn less than ~ $ 9000 annually, the official limit of poverty; 5 percent earn less than half of that amount (177– 181).  A detailed study of these services, based on a national survey, was done by Chaves 2004, 44– 93. Chaves 2004, 213 – 221 uses the “National Congregations Study” as a basic set of data. The same data, together with her own sample, are the basis for Ammerman 2005, 115 – 157 (“Extending the Community: Serving the Needy, Saving Souls”).

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tions charitable organizations and public offices are more qualified.⁸ This model of religious solidarity was not confined to Christian congregations, and it spread to other religious communities in the US. Immigrants belonging to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions emulated the model of the “congregation”. Though differences between these congregations should not be ignored, the social services they offer to their members and also to strangers are similar in the US (Cadge 2008, 344– 374). These services form a major contribution by religious congregations to the social bond in a society. But negative consequences are also imaginable. In the beginning, Putnam assumed that the social capital inherent in these kinds of congregations would automatically serve the well-being of a society. In contrast to that view, Alejandro Portes also pointed out the destructive effects upon civil order that can emanate from networks and their norms. In reaction to this view, Putnam made subtle changes to his concept and differentiated between an outward-looking social capital, building bridges between different people who are unlike one another, and an inward-looking social capital, which only establishes a bond between equals. These closed communities can become a source of tension in a society (Portes/Landolt 1996, 18 – 21; Portes 1998, 1– 12; Putnam 2001, 27– 31).

The Affinity of a Religious Ethics of Solidarity with Modern Society: A Thesis of Max Weber According to Max Weber, there exists an inherent link between the rise of modern society and a religious ethics of solidarity. This argument underlies his project Economy and Society, which analyses the interaction and relationships between the modern economic system and the coexisting social orders of family, household, neighborhood, nation, religion, market, domination and law. He dealt with these orders in this sequence, studying them as types of communal action. What is normally regarded as an autonomous institution, disconnected from the individual, Weber turned into the meaningful actions of individuals. This is something he had already done with the neighborhood. The household, he argues, is self-sufficient; but in times of crisis it depends on its neighbors. Therefore the neighborhood is not only physically proximate, but also a community of interests. “The neighbor is the typical helper in need, and hence

 For a survey of services supplied by four different types of relief organisations (public, secular, faith-based and local congregation) see Wuthnow 2004, 203.

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neighborhood is brotherhood, albeit in an unpathetic, primarily economic sense”. This kind of neighborhood is not restricted to agrarian societies, but exists also in the apartment houses and slums of modern cities. Here too “neighborhood is the typical locus of brotherhood” (Weber MWG 2001, MWG I/22-1, 121– 122; 1978, 361– 363).⁹ That does not mean that the neighbors necessarily maintain brotherly relations. Most often conflicts and enmity dominate their relations. “But the essence of neighborly social action is merely that sober economic brotherhood practiced in case of need” (Weber 2001, MWG I/22-1,125 – 126; 1978, 363). According to Weber, this popular morality was adopted and integrated into the ethics of religious communities. Historically, most religions have known only an occasional association of their adherents. Only a few developed a full-fledged congregational religiosity: Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. When this occurred, the popular ethics of brotherliness changed its character and became the center of a communal religiosity. Congregational […] religion set the co-religionist in the place of the clansman. Whoever does not leave his own father and mother cannot become a follower of Jesus. This is also the general sense and context of Jesus’ remark that he came not to bring peace, but the sword. Out of all this grows the injunction of brotherly love, which is especially characteristic of congregational religion in most cases because it contributes very effectively to the emancipation from political organization. […] The obligation to bring assistance to one’s fellow was derived […] from the neighborhood group (Weber MWG 2001, I/22-2, 372; 1978, 580).

Religious communities cannot be regarded as serving economic or political interests. When becoming part of modern society, they develop an ethics that is not only independent of these new powers, but also antagonistic to them. The roots of this ethics are retaliation against offenders and fraternal assistance to neighbors (Weber 1978, 579 – 580; Weber 2001, MGW I/22-2, 371). The ethics of brotherliness differentiates itself principally from the imperatives for action of the political organization and evolves a dynamic independently of the state. Such congregations faced a major challenge, however, when religion turned to world-rejection as the means to salvation. For, in Weber’s account, the more a religion of salvation developed, and the more its adherents experienced “tensions” with the world and these tensions became systematized, the more an ethic of commitment and responsibility replaced an ethic of compliance with laws. In their turn, these tensions elicited new forms of religiosity. Weber sketched these dynamics of religious communities for the first time in chapter 11 of  See Kippenberg 2005a.

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“Religious Communities”, and later revised and expanded it in the “Intermediate Reflection” (“Zwischenbetrachtung”) of 1915. At the core of his argument is the claim that, with increasing tensions between religious communities and the spheres of economics, politics, sexuality, and art, the believers develop a culture of their own, independent of the constraints of these spheres. If one accepts this reasoning, one can easily understand that American congregations, with their extensive social networks, develop their own visions of the right public order and are involved in wars over what should count as proper culture in the United States (Hunter 1991).

Islamic Community Building In Islam, too, prayer alone does not make a genuine Muslim. Here the basic text is Surah 2:177: It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces to the East and the West; but righteous is he who believeth in God and the Last Day and the angels and the Scripture and the prophets; and giveth wealth, for love of Him, to kinsfolk and to orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask, and to set slaves free; and observeth proper worship and payeth the poor-due (zakat).

Unlike in Christianity, in Islam particular classes of community members have a documented right to be supported by their fellow believers. These are: the poor and needy, those who maintain the alms tax, slaves (for their redemption), those in debt, wayfarers, participants in Jihad (Surah 9:60), and proselytes. ¹⁰ In Islam, justice characterizes an admittedly materially asymmetric, yet socially reciprocal relationship amongst unequals (for this social model see Scott 1977, 21– 39). Wealthy Muslims are obligated to support the cause of justice and the common good (maslaha) of the community, pay the official alms tax (zakat), and support the needy with voluntary gifts (zadaqa) (Ismael/Ismael 1995, 82– 106). Even rulers emerge as benefactors for the needy (Bonner/Ener/ Singer 2008, part III), with systems of state welfare having only very marginally taken their place. Help for the needy remained predominantly a matter for the religious community. Nowadays the Islamic Mission (dawa) includes, even more emphatically than was the case in previous times, the setting up of social institutions (Eickelman/Piscator 1996, 35 – 36). Alongside the powerful and the rich, it is private Islamic organizations that are taking over welfare functions.

 For the actual practice of “Financial Worship” see Benthall/Bellion-Jourdan 2003, 7– 28.

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Some of these welfare organizations have demonstratively proceeded to newly assign the boundaries between the public and private sector and to embrace public functions in their religious activities (Singerman 2004). These activities have been enabled by two institutions. Firstly, private persons are legally permitted to form associations throughout the Middle East. In the 1990s in Egypt, where this situation has been particularly well researched, there were approximately 14,000 private associations (jamaciyya) registered (Sullivan 1994; Sullivan/Abed-Kotob 1999). They are voluntary, small, local, and they operate predominantly in the areas of health and education. The Muslim Brothers have contributed to the founding of numerous organizations without being officially recognized as an organization themselves. These private organizations, which lie between the individual and the state, generate their own public sphere within modern Islamic societies of the Middle East.¹¹ The Islamic endowments (waqf) also operate in this public sphere and constitute a further condition for common welfare. Wealthy Muslims, including the sovereign, are expected to donate from their personal wealth to the Islamic community. By means of waqf, the term for this institution, income from land, rent, business or financial assets will at some point irrevocably benefit Islamic institutions and groups (Cattan 1995, 203 – 222; for the revival in the 20th century see Benthall/Bellion-Jourdan 2003, 29 – 44). The endowment systems in these countries contribute to the existence of their own public realm.¹²

The Associations of the Palestinians Muslim Brothers in the Conflict with Israel The Near-East conflict illustrates how these opportunities have shaped the course of events. In the centre are the Muslim Brothers. When the Gaza Strip passed from Egyptian to Israeli rule in 1967, the new occupying power gave the Muslim Brothers a free hand, since it regarded them as a welcome counterweight to the nationalistic liberation movements. The Muslim Brothers, on the other hand, were convinced that, in view of the decline which Islam had undergone since the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the time for armed struggle

 See for the applicability of the concept of “public sphere” regarding Islamic societies some recent studies: Eickelman/Anderson 22003; Hoexter/Eisenstadt/Levtzion 2002; SalvatoreEikkelman 2004.  One must add the restriction that the terms “public” and “Körperschaft” should be used with care (Hoexter 2002; Hartung 2005, 287– 314).

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against Israeli occupation had not yet come. For years they pursued the idea of building an Islamic order from below. The driving force of the Islamization of Gaza in the 1970s was Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, who had risen to the status of dominant spiritual leader among the Muslim Brothers (Abu-Amr 1997). In 1973, he founded the Islamic Centre (Mujamma’ al-Islami) as a bulwark against unbelief; Israel officially recognized the institution in 1979. The obligation to engage in Jihad, to “strive” for the establishment of an Islamic order, consisted not only in a readiness to carry out warlike acts; of equal importance was doing one’s best to promote justice and the common good (maslaha) of the community; driven by a religious ethics of solidarity, Muslims created social institutions and networks. By the mid-1980s, the Centre had developed into the most powerful institution in Gaza, featuring mosques, libraries, nurseries, businesses, schools, clinics and a university. Only the Intifada finally compelled the Muslim Brothers to revise their stance towards violent militancy. Since they did not want the coordination of the uprising to be left to secular national organizations, they founded a Supreme Command of their own called ‘Hamas’ (literally ‘zeal’), an acronym for ‘Islamic resistance movement’ (harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya).¹³ Years later, in 1991 in the course of the conflict with Israel, Hamas added to its social institutions another facet: its own militia, the al-Qassam brigade. The societal network which the Muslim Brothers had created actively promoted the willingness of those who belonged to it to defend its territory against attacks. At the same time, however, it was precisely this milieu that required a certain flexibility in the struggle against Israel. Unlike the Islamic Jihad, which practiced a martial ethic of conviction, Hamas did not view the struggle exclusively from the perspective of a martial testing of the faith. The social Islam of Hamas had achieved an intensive penetration into civil society, but this success had also given the Islamists new tasks and forced them to accept new rules. Institutionalization in civil society was accompanied by limitations on militancy. We see this attitude in the leaflets of Hamas, which never preached violence only, but always spoke of patience as well (Mishal/Sela 2000, 63). Hamas cannot imagine a genuine peace with Israel, but a truce is now conceivable (Mishal/Sela 2000, 86). This option is indignantly rejected by political authorities in Israel and the USA. However, historical studies show that Islamic states have practiced an international law and that there is a tradition in their relationships with non-Islamic states of making treaties which ensured their security (Lohlker 2006, 33 –

 The story of the rise of Hamas has been told by a couple of recent studies (Baumgarten 2006; Chehab 2007; Croitoru 2007).

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34, 41– 43). Even more significant is the case of the Egyptian Jama’a al-Islamiyya, that in 1997 reversed its strategy of violence and made a truce with the institutions of the Egyptian state which it had previously abhorred (Fazwi/Lübben 2004; Krämer 2005; Al-Hashimi/Goerzig 2011).

Conclusion Since the 1970s, religious associations have been disseminating on a global scale. Besides the local congregations of synagogue, church and mosque, new social forms and new kinds of communication are contributing to this dynamic. As an explanation for this phenomenon, I would like to suggest the transformation of the state as a crucial condition. Substituting the state’s public functions with market relations has affected the structure of modern societies. Services in the fields of education, welfare, medical care, and even security are being turned over to private actors. As the flip side of this trend, religious communities have expanded their activities into these fields, some of them claiming to do so in the name of a general public interest. Based on the religious ethics of solidarity, religious associations are becoming sources of trust, networks and institutions. But their new social power is not always socially productive; it involves the danger of closed and powerful militant brotherhoods (Kippenberg 2011).

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Bonner, M./M. Ener/A. Singer (eds., 2003): Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts. New York: SUNY 2003. Brugger, W. (2001): Einführung in das öffentliche Recht der USA. 2. edition. Munich: C. H. Beck. Cadge, W. (2008): “De Facto Congregationalism and the Religious Organizations of Post-1965 Immigrants to the United States: A Revised Approach”. In: JAAR 76, 344 – 374. Carlson-Thies, S. W. (2003): Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back into American Welfare”. In: H. Heclo/W.M. McClay (eds.): Religion Returns to the Public Square. Faith and Policy in America. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 269 – 297. Casanova, J. (1994): Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Casanova, J. (2009): The Religious Situation in Europe, in: H. Joas/K. Wiegandt (eds.), Secularization and World Religions. Translated by Alex Skinner. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 206 – 228. Cattan, H. (1955): “The Law of Waqf”. In: M. Khadduri/H. Liebesny (eds.): Law in the Middle East Vl..1: Origin and Development of Islamic Law. Washington: Middle East Institute, 203 – 222. Center for Public Justice (ed.): A Guide to Charitable Choice. The Rules of Section 104 of the 1996 Federal Welfare Law Governing State Cooperation with Faith-based Social-Service Providers. Washington: Center for Public Justice 1997. URL: http://www.cpjustice. org/files/CCGuide_0.pdf (last visited 1. 11. 2013). Chaves, Mark (2004): Congregations in America. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Chehab, Z. (2007): Inside Hamas. The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies. London: Tauris. Coleman, J. S., S.J. (2003): “American Catholicism, Catholic Charities, and Welfare Reform”. In: H. Heclo/W. M. McClay (Hg.), Religion Returns to the Public Square. Faith and Policy in America. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, p. 239 – 267. Croitoru, J. (2007): Hamas. Der islamische Kampf um Palästina. München: C.H. Beck. Davie, G. (1994): Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. Davie, G. (2006): “Vicarious Religion: A methodological Challenge”. In: N. Ammerman (ed.): Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 21 – 37. Eickelman, D. F./J. Piscator (1996): Muslim Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eickelman, D. F./J. W. Anderson (eds., 22003): New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Fazwi, I. /I. Lübben (2004): Die ägyptische Jama’a al-Islamiya und die Revision der Gewaltstrategie. Berlin: Deutsches Orient-Institut. Graf, F.-W. (1999): “‘In God we Trust’. Über mögliche Zusammenhänge von Sozialkapital und kapitalistischer Wohlfahrtsökonomie”. In: ibid./Andreas Platthaus/ Stephan Schleissing (eds.), Soziales Kapital in der Bürgergesellschaft. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, p. 93 – 130. Hartung, J.-P. (2005): “Die fromme Stiftung [waqf]. Eine islamische Analogie zur Körperschaft? “ In: Kippenberg/Schuppert 2005, p. 287 – 314. Hoexter, M./S. N. Eisenstadt/N. Levtzion (eds., 2002): The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies. Albany: Suny.

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Hoexter, M.: (2002): “The ‘Waqf’ and the Public Sphere”. In: Hoexter/Eisenstadt/Levtzion (eds., 2002), p. 119 – 138. Hunter, J. D. (1991): Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America. Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics. New York: Basic Books. Ismael, J. S./ T. Y. Ismael (1995): “Cultural Perspectives on Social Welfare in the Emergence of Modern Arab Social Thought”. In: The Muslim Word 85, p. 82 – 106. Kaufmann, F.-X. (2003): Varianten des Wohlfahrtstaates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kippenberg, H. G. (2005a): “Religious Communities and the Path to Disenchantment: The Origins, Sources, and Theoretical Core of the Religion Section”. In: C. Camic/P. S. Gorski/D. M. Trubek (eds.): Max Weber’s Economy and Society. A Critical Companion. Stanford: UP, p. 164 – 182. Kippenberg, H. G./Schuppert, F. (eds., 2005b): Die verrechtlichte Religion: Der Öffentlichkeitsstatus von Religionsgemeinschaften. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Kippenberg, H. G. (2011): Violence as Worship. Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krämer, G. (2005): “Aus Erfahrung lernen? Die islamische Bewegung in Ägypten”. In C. Six/M. Riesebrodt/S. Haas (eds.): Religiöser Fundamentalismus. Vom Kolonialismus zur Globalisierung. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, p. 185 – 200. Leman, N. (1996): “Kicking in Groups”. In: The Atlantic Monthly 277, p. 22 – 26. Lohlker, R. (2006): Islamisches Völkerrecht. Studien am Beispiel Granada, Bremen: Kleio Humanities. Michalski, K. (ed., 2006): Religion in the New Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Mishal, S./A. Sela (2000): The Palestinian Hamas. Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Nagel, A.-K. (2006): “Charitable Choice: The Religious Component of the US-Welfare-Reform. Theoretical and Methodological Reflections on ‚Faith-Based-Organisations’ as social service agencies”. In: Numen 53, p. 78 – 111. Norris, P./R. Inglehart (2004): Sacred and Secular Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olasky, M. (1992): The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington D.C.: Regnery. Oldopp, B./R. Prätorius (2002): ‘Faith Based Initiative’: Ein Neuansatz in der U.S. – Sozialpolitik und seine Hintergründe”. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialreform 48, p. 28 – 52. Portes, A./P. Landolt (1996): The Downside of Social Capital”. In: The American Prospect 26, p. 18 – 21. Portes, A. (1998): “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology”. In: Annual Review of Sociology 24, p. 1 – 24. Prätorius. R. (2003): In God We Trust. Religion und Politik in den USA. München: C.H. Beck. Putnam. R. D. (1993): Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1995): “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. In: Journal of Democracy 6, p. 65 – 78. Putnam, R. D. (2000): Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. (2001): Gesellschaft und Gemeinsinn. Sozialkapital im internationalen Vergleich, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann.

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Rieger, E./S. Leibfried (2001): Grundlagen der Globalisierung. Perspektiven des Wohlfahrtsstaates, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Salvatore, A./D. F. Eickelman (eds., 2004): Public Islam and the Common Good. Leiden: Brill. Schuppert, F. (2005): “Skala der Rechtsformen für Religion: Vom privaten Zirkel zur Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts. Überlegungen zur angemessenen Organisationsform für Religionsgemeinschaften”. In: Kippenberg/Schuppert 2005b, p. 11 – 35. Scott, J. (1977): “Patronage or Exploitation?” In: E. Gellner/J. Waterbury (eds.): Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth, p. 21 – 39. Sider, R. J./H. Rolland Unruh (2001): “Evangelism and Church-State Partnerships”. In: Journal of Church and State 43, p. 267 – 296. Singer, A. (2008): Charity in Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singerman, D. (2004): “The Networked World of Islamist Social Movements”. In: Q. Wiktorowicz (ed.): Islamic Activism. A Social Movement Theory Approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 143 – 163. Sullivan, D. J. (1994): Private Voluntary Organizations in Egypt. Islamic Development, Private Initiative, and State Control. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Sullivan, D. J./S. Abed-Kotob (1999): Islam in Contemporary Egypt. Civil Society vs. The State. Boulder (Color.): Lynne Rienner. Singerman, D. (2004): “The Networked World of Islamist Social Movements”. In: Q. Wiktorowicz (ed.): Islamic Activism. A Social Movement Theory Approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 143 – 163. Weber. M: (1978): Economy and Society. Ed. by G. Roth/C. Wittich, 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M.: (2001): Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Volume 1: Gemeinschaften, ed. by Wolfgang Mommsen together with Michael Meyer. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (=MWG) I/22 – 1. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Weber, M.: (2001): Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Volume 2: Religiöse Gemeinschaften, ed. by Hans G. Kippenberg together with Petra Schilm and Jutta Niemeier. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (=MWG) I/22-2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wuthnow, R. (2004): Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Franz Schultheis

Social Capital and Power: A Sociological Point of View The Two Faces of Social Capital In contemporary political or economic sciences, reference is most generally made to the works of Robert D. Putnam (1992) when dealing with the notion of social capital. His well- known concept of social capital has essentially three components: – social networks – moral obligations and norms – and last but not least social values. In this kind of functionalist perspective on social reality, social capital is looked upon as a central condition of social integration and cohesion, economic success and the well-being of nations. And if countries or regions have successful economic systems and a high level of political integration among their populations, these are seen as the results of a high degree of accumulated social capital. This point of view is shared by many researchers and institutions, but there is an older concept of social capital, developed by Pierre Bourdieu in the late 1970s, which gives this notion quite different theoretical connotations and orientations. His idea of social capital was nourished by his ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria at the end of the 1950s and is deeply rooted in a sociological vision of social and economic relationships as being largely based on power, domination, inequalities and class structures. As in other cases, it seems that the meaning of notions depends on the way of looking at them. For example, if you look at the well-known figure, you might see at one point a sort of cup, symbolizing in a certain way ideas of social integration and inclusion, but at second glance you will perceive two figures in a face-to-face position which could be much more associated with the idea of opposition or conflict. In the case of social capital, one could say that the Putnam paradigm is focused on the sum total, or what we could call by analogy the “gross national product of social capital” as a whole, whereas Bourdieu seeks the organic composition – he wants to know specifically how and by whom these goods and values are produced, and how they are redistributed within society and its different social classes and categories of people. In this paper I will present some of the theoretical and empirical implications of Bourdieu’s approach, which is very relevant in sociology, but often neglected in the economic

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and political sciences, and show its usefulness for understanding contemporary social and economic realities. I shall start with a look at everyday life and common sense ideas of social capital before turning to the academic point of view.

Common sense visions of social capital One often hears the expression that he or she “has connections” or even “good connections”. One “plays” with these connections or makes skillful use of them (“capitalizes” on them). One might say that somebody “knows the right people”, “influential people”, “has a direct line to someone”, can “pull strings”, is part of an “old boys’ network”, “enjoys protection”, “has his/her sponsors” etc. One hears sentences like “X only got that job because of Y” or “A can only afford to do that because B is protecting him” and even in the school playground there is talk of the “big brother” who will take revenge on anyone who hits his younger brother. These are all popular turns of phrase or commonplaces which seem to point to a broad consensus that the social world is acquainted with forces which have a purely relational character, are unequally distributed, and bring advantages. According to so-called common sense, such connections are worth their weight in gold and represent a privilege which, on the one hand, comes as a gift or just falls into one’s lap but, on the other hand, must also be worked for and maintained. We then say that we have to build, cultivate or sustain our connections, not let them fade, and if they have faded we must “revive” them again; we must invest in them and handle them gently. In brief: Everyday thinking sees in the phenomenon targeted by the concept of social capital a good which must be produced and reproduced, which can be accumulated and used with profit: in a nutshell – capital. At the same time anyone with common sense also knows that this good is not distributed in an equal way and is not available to everyone to the same degree. With regard to this resource people are more or less richly endowed and privileged. This inequality in terms of social capital can in turn provide the basis for the production or increase of further inequalities, e. g. regarding access to material goods (income, life chances, quality of life) or immaterial values (prestige, reputation, recognition). We can therefore truly assert that the “common sense of social structure” (Goffman) sees in social capital a central factor determining social reality. Depending on the endowment with money and education one also seems to be endowed with more or less recognized social value (having a well-known name, coming from a good family etc.) and more or less privileged connections, and thanks to these connections one can in turn enjoy advantages over less well-en-

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dowed contemporaries with regard to access to specific scarce goods and life chances. But we also know that such “connections”, if we have them, can also be used purposefully to increase the two other central resources, or at least to optimize their effects.

Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to social capital Let us turn now to Bourdieu’s vision of social capital. First we have to remember that Bourdieu imported the concept of capital into sociological theory in order to enlarge its semantic field to include other important fields such as cultural goods or social relationships. Bourdieu identifies especially three types of capital closely interrelated with the existence of social classes and the unequal distribution of goods and resources of all kinds: economic, cultural and social capital. All three of them represent what Max Weber called “life chances” (Lebenschancen) and we could also call them resources of action and resources for action, in other words social power. Although Bourdieu agrees that economic capital is the most important and powerful resource and that the other types of capital mostly derive from it, he nevertheless tries to avoid reducing the value of cultural and social capital by insisting on the relative autonomy of both, as we will see later on. Let’s see now how Bourdieu (1983, p. 87) defines social capital: Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership of a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word […].The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent […] depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.

By using notions like “capital”, “interest” or “credit” differently and often in a voluntarily paradoxical way, Bourdieu wants to stress the social and symbolical embeddedness of economic facts, as Marcel Mauss did before him in his famous essay “The Gift”, in which he spoke of a gift as a total social fact. Like Marcel Mauss, Bourdieu developed his theory of social capital in the context of traditional societies before transporting it into modernity and to contemporary societies. This means that we are dealing with a double process of exportation and importation: Bourdieu first takes notions that are historically embedded in modern capitalist societies, such as “capital” or “interest”, to pre-modern societies with an anti-economist ethical order in the sense of Max Weber’s idea of frater-

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nal ethics. Then Bourdieu describes and analyses the logic of social exchange and relations in those traditional societies by means of the imported modern concepts. In this manner the signification of these notions changes fundamentally by being interrelated with the principles of honor and the obligation of giftgiving and generosity. At this point we have to ask what theoretical status Bourdieu accords to his notion and why it may seem useful to speak of social capital? Are we dealing with a simple analogy or metaphor or, on the contrary, with a systematically conceived and well-founded theoretical concept? There are at least four different arguments in favor of this kind of enlarged use of the notion of capital. So let us ask: What is the “capital” in social capital? – Social capital can be used in the production of material and symbolic goods of all kinds. – On the other hand, social capital itself has to be produced, in contrast to natural resources like geographical location, water power or minerals. It is accumulated collective work and can be passed on as a legacy from one generation to the other. – Unlike raw materials, social capital is not directly used up in the process of producing goods. But it can be eroded and weakened during the process of producing goods; it has to be reproduced and regenerated by new investments of time and energy (work). – Social capital can be “reconverted” into economic capital, for example by offering access to life chances or job opportunities found with the help of one’s relatives or friends or into cultural capital by paying the costs of prominent universities. So we can say that social capital, like other sorts of capital, is produced by collective work and effort, it can be accumulated and reproduced, it may be inherited by one generation from another, it can be incorporated as a sort of subjective quality of individuals and private property, but it also exists at the same time objectively as an essential part of the structures of the social world. Within the objective structures of the social world, it often seems as if economic capital has the most important impact and role and all other kinds of resources and capital derive from it in a direct way. Bourdieu wouldn’t agree: in his theoretical perspective, each sort of capital has a certain autonomy and cannot simply be a function of another type. So we have to underline the genuine “sociality” of social capital.

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The ambivalent relation between economic and social capital Social capital can be derived from economic capital. The transformation from one form of capital to the other is never purely automatic, but requires “work” and effort. This kind of investment often shows benefits only in the long run. Social capital is not simply and entirely reducible to economic capital. It has its own specificity. Even if economic capital is principally at its root, there are specific rules and norms of behavior regulating its production. A very important specificity of the logic of social capital seems to be that you first have to give without asking an immediate return on your input and that there is always a degree of uncertainty, since a gift potentially may be accepted without being returned. The essential “rule of the social game” is that interactions and exchanges have to be represented as being non-interested, non-utilitarian and non-instrumental. The logic of the gift and the principle of generosity are still present and powerful in modern economic and social life. The economic bases of social capital even have to be masked in order to produce its effects. If the economic implications of social relations are too obvious (for example if one wants to “buy” friendship or to join a club exclusively in order to find new clients) the game does not work. Differences in the distribution of social capital may explain why the same amount of economic capital can yield different degrees of profit and different powers of influence to different agents. Group memberships creating social capital have a “multiplication effect” on the influence of other forms of capital. But even if there are important differences between the two types of capital, the analogies between them are much more important. In his different works, Bourdieu explains that the capacity of individuals to invest in the social networks in which they are involved depends largely on the economic capital they possess, their place in the social hierarchy and the power interrelated with their given social status. As economic capital, social capital is neither a kind of material treasure you conserve in your safe at home nor an amount of money lying dormant in an account at your bank. Individuals always have to work hard with their social capital in order to maintain, to reproduce or to improve it, as Bourdieu underlines when he says: “The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed” (1997, p. 52). In a certain way, Bourdieu’s theory of social capital seems to integrate all kinds of social relationships, including marriage, friendship, membership in clubs and associations, or our virtual e-relationships like MySpace. All kinds of social institutions, organizations and groups represent ac-

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cumulated social capital and at the same time resources for social capital. But this omnipresent character of social capital does not mean that it represents a universal good shared collectively by all members of a given society. On the contrary: social capital represents a resource as unequally distributed in social spaces as other sorts of capital.

Social capital and social space In opposition to Putnam’s functionalist point of view, Bourdieu doesn’t consider social capital globally in relation to a given nation, society or region. He doesn’t ask about the way in which a social relation or interaction will contribute to the cohesion and integration of the whole of society but on the contrary he is interested in the question of the ways and means by which certain groups or categories of people, such as social classes or social milieus, succeed in accumulating different sorts of capital, like social, economic or cultural capital, and may then use these accumulated resources as privileged life chances and as a means of enabling them to protect these privileges. Social capital always exists in a structured social world with fundamental inequalities in the distribution of all goods and resources. The quality of one’s social capital depends largely on one’s place in the social sphere and the possession of economic and cultural capital. For instance, marriage traditionally represents a sort of ideal-typical example of the accumulation of capital and resources by creating an alliance between two families. Bourdieu was very much interested in matrimonial strategies of families in traditional and modern societies and found clear empirical evidence for what sociologists call homogamy. It is evident that Bourdieu’s concept of capital puts the emphasis on conflicts and the power function (social relations that increase the ability of an agent to advance her/his interests) instead of on its function for society as a whole, which doesn’t exist for Bourdieu as a monolithic totality but only as a hierarchically structured space. In his empirical works such as “Social Distinction”, Bourdieu has offered much empirical evidence for this point of view. Bourdieu argues that social capital is a resource connected with concrete group memberships and social networks. “The volume of social capital possessed by a given agent […] depends on the size of the network of connections that he can effectively mobilize” (1983, p. 114). In this way, social capital is a quality produced and reproduced by the totality of the relationships between agents, rather than merely a common “quality” of the group. Membership in groups can be used in efforts to improve social positions in different fields. Voluntary associations such as the Rotary Club or the Lions Club, political parties, secret societies

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such as the Mafia or the Freemasons, think tanks or alumni organizations of universities like this one represent contemporary examples of embodiments of social capital. At the same time it seems evident that social capital has not only a quantitative dimension – more concretely: the number of people you know – but largely depends on the position of these people in the social space and their social, economic and cultural properties. For example, members of a street corner society in the suburbs of Paris or Lyon can have very large networks of friends, but even if these friends can offer protection in conflicts and some solidarity, their resources in economic, cultural and symbolical capital are not really much help if you are looking for job opportunities. On the contrary, having friends like this may pose real handicaps outside the small world in which they are living and could represent a sort of negative social capital or debt. The same thing is true when we look at social situations like marriage. Because, as has been underlined by Bourdieu, matrimonial strategies are very important in the accumulation of social capital by families, he has chosen this picture of a bourgeois marriage in order to symbolize the logic and functioning of social capital. In other regions of social space, marriage in the lower classes may bring together a much more substantial number of people at the same historical moment, but the social capital unified at this moment is much less important and powerful, since it is constituted by people having much fewer material and symbolic resources. There are good reasons to think that social capital is becoming more and more important in contemporary capitalist societies, as has been shown by Luc Boltanski, a former assistant of Bourdieu, and Eve Chiapello in their well-known book “The new spirit of capitalism” (2007) and I would like to conclude my presentation with a rapid look at their analyses of contemporary management discourses and the qualities of human capital they requested, listed in an alphabetical order: – autonomy – charismatic qualities – communicative – creativity – curiosity – disponibility – empathy – employability – flexibility – go-between – good coach – innovative – life-long learning

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mobility networking open-minded project management self-evaluation self-management sociability accumulating social capital social competences spontaneity to have a social “radar” system tolerance

As we can see, an significant number of the qualities and capacities demanded of modern economic elites find their common denominator in the idea of social capital and networking. We can find quite a lot of career toolboxes for future managers (like presentation instruments and coaching) in order to improve their social capital. As Boltanski and Chiapello showed in a rather convincing empirical study (2007), social capital is playing an increasingly central role in modern capitalist society. The two authors even speak of a “connexionniste” society where networking seems to become a key element of market concurrence. Modern economic elites seem to find a good deal of their resources of action and influence and of their power in the construction and functioning of social networks. At the same time, access to social capital becomes itself a source of new social inequalities and differentiations. Social capital is much more attached to its owner than financial capital. In order to make it circulate and work, the owner has to circulate himself and this, as underlined by Boltanski and Chiapello, sets natural limits, especially time limits, on the accumulation of social capital. In a “connexionniste” world, important or great men need small people to secure their presence. Because they cannot be everywhere at once, small people must play the role of “stand- ins” in order to overcome the natural limits on the expansion of social capital and to facilitate the combination of the local and the global. The immobility of the small people, the stand-ins, can be seen as a precondition for the profits of the mobile people, who can move around without loss of local influence. As Boltanski and Chiapello underline, this configuration presents a new type of exploitation in the sense that the stand-ins contribute directly or indirectly to the production and accumulation of the social capital of great people without receiving the acknowledgement and remunerations that this merits.

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An empirical study of the everyday life of the lower classes (classes populaires) in the city of Geneva from 2007 and 2008 provides some insights into the social inequalities regarding access to and use of social capital.

Family: the social capital of the small man In a study on the topic “Les classes populaires aujourd’hui” (Schultheis et al. 2009), a research team addressed the question of the structures of everyday life among the lower social classes in our present-day societies. Many dozens of qualitative interviews concerning daily life were conducted with mothers of such families from the Geneva region. The so-called “migration background” made up 50 percent of those questioned, which reflects the common thesis that immigration adds to an “underclass” in Swiss society. The interviews addressed in random order the many different facets of everyday life – from the care and education of children, through employment, consumption, sport, and housework to social relationships. Here the topic of “social capital” returns repeatedly to the forefront of the discussions in a number of different forms, whether with regard to the relationship with work colleagues, living in the neighborhood, the relationship with institutes such as school and its representatives, or simply with regard to leisure time and sociability. With regard to the above-mentioned thesis it became apparent in most instances during the interviews that the majority of the mothers of these lowerclass families worked as child minders and housekeepers and were employed in small to medium-sized middle-class homes (civil servants, entrepreneurs, freelancers) in Geneva, or else had positions as caretakers in the residential buildings in which their families lived. In all of these cases, this manner of paid employment allowed the mothers questioned to combine their work very well with the care of their own children. Practically all of the women whom they relieved of reproductive tasks in exchange for a modest wage had relatively lucrative jobs and recognized status positions. They maintained a trusting, even familiar relationship with their “ground staff”: the women questioned, most of whom came from Portugal and Brazil, belonged to a certain degree to their extended private sphere and represented an essential resource for their chosen everyday lifestyle and professional career, which went far beyond the purely economic dimension of an exchange of “money” for “services”. Here the child minders and housekeepers held – at least partially – the traditional role of the “governess”, were “confidantes” who were entrusted with the keys of the house and the most valuable possessions (the children). Such a comprehensive

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relationship of trust is actually “priceless”: and therefore that which is paid is only a fraction of the value that is derived from this relationship, namely time, autonomy, mobility and resources, which one can employ and exchange on the market for the purpose of increasing wealth. Thus, economic capital can be transformed to a great degree into social capital, but still requires the sensed or feigned non-economic interest (sympathy, altruism, etc.) on the part of both sides of the “transaction” in order to show its full effect. To put it another way: as well as the exchange of services for money, another idea of the exchange of immaterial goods (trust, loyalty, etc.) must be added in order to extend such “market relationships” to “social relationships” beyond the mere field of business, thus achieving added value. Naturally, this also applies from the point of view of the women questioned, who certainly seemed to see in their activities as child minders or housekeepers more than simply a job and who spoke of a close personal relationship with their employers. However, the initial, apparently reciprocal “social capital” of these relationships of exchange seemed on the one hand to allow professional advancement, a higher income and social recognition, but on the other hand guaranteed only a modest income without opening up any trace of career opportunities. When the mothers of the lower-class families were asked about their everyday lives, it became clear time and again the extent to which their social worlds revolved around the hub of the “family”. Not only did they carry out family activities more or less around the clock and therefore took on here in particular a “totally social role” (in line with Goffmann 1973). They reported almost universally that they spent practically their entire free time in the family circle and that their evenings, weekends, holidays and leisure time were quite simply identical with “family time”. On special days the extended family would then be brought into the relationship network, as far as geographically possible, representing a slightly expanded form of primary social networks. In these testimonies, the family as a central reference point is presented as a social solidarity resource beyond any doubt and is drawn so completely into the centre of the entire lifestyle and sensibility that one could well speak of a form of fateful social force (Weber), of a familialistic world view and manner of existence. As discovered in the study mentioned, the reference to “family” served in many respects as a central structuring principle of everyday life and assumed in the interviews primarily the following four varieties or connotations: – Family as a form of communality, conviviality and lifestyle – Family as an ethical-moral principle for justifying practices – Family as a resource of support, solidarity and help that can be mobilized – Family as a protective space against possible threats from the external world.

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There are parallels here with the versions by Thomä in the same volume, who writes of the special quality of “belonging” to such a primary group: “familiarity is not confined to the fact of homology or complementarity between the persons concerned. It creates a new social setting, requires the affirmation of some kind of togetherness, of clinging together, of sharing a destiny, of taking part in a joint endeavor” (cf. Thomä in this volume). In this view, “social capital” is little more than the “possession” of an individual: it is itself part of this “collective capital” and the member of a group, the belonging to which represents a form of communitization of exceptional quality due to its natural character. One could perhaps also apply Tönnies’ classic distinction between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft) and assume that this type of social capital qua belonging is a continuation of traditional or pre-modern social relationships, i. e. those organized along non-market and ownership-individualistic lines. What we learned from the surveyed mothers of Geneva’s “classes populaires” about themselves and their lifestyles contrasts clearly with the normative expectations of employees, as identified by Boltanski and Chiapello, who are capable and well versed in the market. Spatial mobility, flexibility in reaction to the demands of the labor market, living according to the pattern of short-term projects instead of long-term career plans, the constant expansion of networks and improving social capital, etc: none of this can be reconciled easily with a social habitus that is based on down-to-earth family values. The latter seems, also with regard to the experience of migration, to find a “haven in a heartless world” (Lasch 1977) in the “habitat” of the family, which fosters a sense of security and forms a biographical pivotal point. Contacts with work colleagues play hardly any role, while other forms of sociability outside of the family sphere are practically unknown. This “internal exile” of the privatist lifestyle seems to be exceptionally functional and stabilizing under the conditions of everyday routines. The motif of belonging expressed here is largely removed from a physical space and refers primarily to the social space. Considering the large proportion of migrant families in our sample it is not surprising that the form of “rootedness” to a specific place, termed “nostalgic” by Mike Savage in this volume, plays only a minor role. Rather, one could certainly postulate, in alignment with this motif, that the reference to “family” replaces, to a certain extent, the recourse to one’s “native land” under the conditions of spatial displacement. Wherever the family is, one is at home. Sand gets into the cogs as soon as external powers, often seen to be potentially hostile or unwanted (financial authorities, border police, school, landlords, etc.) announce their claims and demands. In such situations, as was made clear repeatedly in the testimonies collected, one remains in a weak position due to a

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lack of networks or few economic or cultural resources; one does not know where advice and support can be found and one develops a strongly dichotomous picture of one’s own situation in which “we” are confronted by “them”, “the others”, or “the powers that be”. While it was frequently emphasized by the interviewees that they were prepared to do anything for the advancement of their children, at the same time they demonstrated their own powerlessness in dealing personally with the representatives of the relevant institutions and in securing their goodwill. Institutional thresholds are difficult to cross if one has no recourse to go-betweens who can appease or circumvent the gatekeepers. For the career women who employ them, the settled and steadfast nature of the mothers surveyed – who often hold many jobs simultaneously, all of which are characterized by proximity and constant availability – are the essential prerequisites for spatial mobility, the free disposal of time and professional flexibility upon which their career plans are based. As was often mentioned in the interviews, at times enviously, these employers, themselves mothers, do not seem to have any problems in dealing with institutions like the school, its headmaster or teachers and can, in the event of a problem, successfully activate their “contacts” time and again. So we could finish by saying that social capital in the era of the new spirit of capitalism is produced collectively, but the majority of producers play the role of stand-ins at the rear of the stage of society while a minority of great actors at the front of the stage succeeds in transforming an accumulated collective good into a sort of personal quality and private property.

Literature Adler, P. S./Kwon, S-W. (2002): “Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept”. In: Academy of Management Review 27(1), pp. 17 – 40. Boltanski, L./Chiapello, E. (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso (first edition Paris 1999). Bourdieu, P. (1983): “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital”. In: Reinhard Kreckel (ed.): Soziale Ungleichheiten, Soziale Welt, Sonderband 2, Göttingen. Coleman, J. (1988): “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital”. In: American Journal of Sociology 94, pp. 95 – 120. Coleman, J. (1990): Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, E. (1973): Asyle. Über die soziale Situation psychiatrischer Patienten und anderer Insassen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lévesque, M. and White D. (1999): “Le concept de capital social et ses usages”. In: Lien social et Politiques – RIAC 41, pp. 23 – 33. Lin, N. (2001): Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Matiaske, W. (1999): Soziales Kapital in Organisationen. Eine tauschtheoretische Studie. München: Hampp. Lasch, C. (1977): Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York. Basic Books. Mauss, M. (1984): Die Gabe, 2. ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Portes, A. (1998): “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology”. In: Annual Review of Sociology 24, pp. 1 – 24. Putnam, R.. (1993): Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (1995): “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. In: Journal of Democracy 6, pp. 65 – 78. Putnam, R (2000): Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Schultheis, F. (2008): “Symbolische Gewalt – Zur Genese eines Schlüsselkonzepts der bourdieuschen Soziologie”. In: R. Schmidt (ed.): Symbolische Gewalt: Herrschaftsanalyse nach Pierre Bourdieu. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 25 – 44. Schultheis, F. (2008): “Salvation Goods and Domination: Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of the Religious Field”. In: Jörg Stolz (Hg.): Salvation Goods and Religious Markets: Theory and Applications. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 31 – 50. Schultheis, F. (2008): “Pierre Bourdieus Konzeptualisierung von ‘Sozialkapital’”. In: Jahrbuch Ökonomie und Gesellschaft. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, pp. 17 – 42. Schultheis, Franz et al (eds., 2009): Les Classes Populaires aujourd’hui: Portraits de familles, cadres sociologiques. Questions Sociologiques. Paris: L’ Harmattan.

Martin Diewald & Joerg Luedicke

Modernity, Welfare State, and Inequality Individual and Societal Preconditions of Social Capital

Introduction Over the course of recent decades, the quality and structure of informal social relations, and their consequences for individuals and societies, have increasingly attracted the notice of sociologically, politically, and economically oriented scholars, culminating in the development of the concept of “Social Capital”. Social capital can be conceived as the resources embedded in social networks (e. g., Lin et al. 2013). These resources are not a desirable end in themselves but are supposed to “bring about desirable states” (Henning in this volume, p. 216). Whether this happens or not depends on the social contexts in which the accumulation and use of social capital take place. In this article, we further explore individual and collective antecedents and consequences of social capital. We first discuss how the accumulation and the impact of social capital can be explained within a framework of purposive behavior (section 2). Second, we link this microlevel theory to concepts of social networks and social support (section 3). We then examine empirically, for the case of Germany, how individual differences, especially social inequalities, influence the formation and consequences of social capital (section 4). We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to test our theoretical assumptions. Section 5 discusses various societal preconditions for the existence of various types of social capital. In particular, we discuss how individual social capital is related to three major characteristics of modern societies: the degree of modernization, the role of the welfare state, and the degree of distributional inequality. Again, we test our theoretical assumptions empirically, now based on the 2001 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) module on social networks, relying on representative samples from 25 countries.

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1 Why do individuals create and maintain social contacts? If the research question targets interpersonal relations, the first question that needs to be answered is: why do people even create and maintain social relations? This aspect is often regarded as a given and many studies about social capital take the existence of personal relations as a social axiom. However, in order to fully understand the mechanisms by which personal relations are embedded in broader social contexts, we need a theory at the micro-level, i. e. at the level of individuals, with which it is possible to explain the emergence of any single relation between persons as well as the formation of a whole network of relations. The theory we chose is the Theory of Social Production Functions (Lindenberg 1986; Ormel et al. 1999). This theory was not initially developed in the context of social capital research, but some loose applications of the Theory of Social Production Functions (SPF) can be found in the works of Henk Flap and colleagues (e. g., Flap & Voelker 2001) or, more implicitly, in the works of Nan Lin (1999a; 2001). However, it seems worthwhile to apply this theory more systematically to the field of social networks in order to explain a) the emergence of social relations, b) the maintenance (or neglect) of relations, and c) the process by which relations and social networks become social capital. Only in this manner will we be able to fully understand the mechanisms that drive interpersonal relations and, hence, the creation of social capital. SPF theory is basically a combination of psychological and economic perspectives and is based on the assumption that “people produce their own well-being by trying to optimize achievement of universal goals, within the set of resources and constraints they face.” (Ormel, Lindenberg, Steverink, & Verbrugge 1999: 66) Furthermore, the theory assumes that humans are “active agents who rationally choose cost-effective ways to produce well-being, given that the rational considerations of cost-benefit are limited by available information.” (66 f.) As a consequence, SPF assumes a general relationship between universal goals and general (subjective) well-being in the sense that well-being is accomplished to the same degree that universal goals are attained. These universal goals are physical and social well-being and it is a premise of the theory that all humans either explicitly or implicitly strive to attain these goals. The theory then allows for a hierarchical ordering of goals in a way that places the ultimate goals at the top, while more specific goals are subordinated. As can be seen in Figure 1, physical well-being can be gained through the attainment of instrumental goals such as stimulation and comfort which refer to basic physical and mental needs such as arousal, the absence of pain, thirst or hunger, or housing and

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social welfare. Social well-being can be gained by instrumental goals related to status (with regard to the social hierarchy, lifestyle, and so on), behavioral confirmation (as, for example, in processes of social recognition of an individual’s person and/or its behavior), and affection. Table 1: The hierarchy of social production functions (taken from Ormel et al. 1999: 67) Top level Universal goals First-order instrumental goals

Subjective Well-being Physical Well-being Social Well-being Behavioral Stimulation/ Comfort (absence Status (control over Confirmation of physiological Activation (approval for scarce needs; pleasant (optimal “doing the resources) and safe level of right things” environment) arousal)

Activities and endowments (means of production for instrumental goals) (examples) Resources (examples)

Physical and mental activities producing arousal

Absence of pain, fatigue, thirst, hunger, vitality; good housing, appliances, social welfare, security

Occupation, life style, excellence in sports or work

Compliance with external and internal norms

Social skills, Physical and Food, health care, Education, money social class, competence mental unique skills effort

Affection (positive inputs from caring others) Intimate ties, offering emotional support

Spouse, empathy, attractiveness

The advantages of this concept are that, firstly, a direct link between the realization of different kinds of goals on different levels of well-being is made explicit. Secondly, the goals are arranged hierarchically in such a way that a production function always specifies the factors needed to attain a certain goal. Thirdly, it is assumed that instrumental goals can be substituted depending on their relative cost. Finally, it is possible to name necessary resources with regard to goal attainment on different levels. In order to realize a certain goal, individuals are tied (by availability of information, time, and space) to a specific set of actual as well as perceived resources which represent an individual’s means of production. If a certain resource is not available for an individual but perceived as important in order to attain a certain goal, however, the production of that resource can itself become an instrumental goal. The question is now how to adapt SPF theory to the area of social relations? In general, it is possible to add aspects of personal relationships to the “Resour-

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ces” tab in Figure 1 for each of the five first-order instrumental goals: Sociability can be a crucial source of triggering a person’s physical (Segar, Eccles, Richardson 2008) and mental activity (Kawachi & Berkman 2001); financial transfers within families are important for a person’s welfare (Kohli, Kuenemund, & Luedicke 2009); personal networks often play a crucial role in the status attainment process (Granovetter 1973; de Graaf & Flap 1988; Lin 1999b); people in a person’s environment provide social approval and social control (Portes 1998); and personal contacts provide a major source of affection (Diewald 1991; also cf. the chapters on belonging in this volume). In this sense, the social contacts of an individual are regarded as a resource that provides certain means of production for instrumental goals and therefore helps to realize those instrumental goals, which in turn affects this individual’s physical and social well-being and, hence, its overall (subjective) well-being. This is the core of the SPF theory when applied to social networks and it provides us with an answer regarding our initial questions on how to explain the emergence, the persistency, and the capital aspect of social contacts: First, people create relations along the lines of their personal instrumental goals, reflecting the incidence of instrumental goals as well as the relative importance of each goal, since the goals themselves are to a certain degree substitutable. However, if an individual realizes that a certain relationship is needed as a resource for attaining a higher order instrumental goal¹, the creation of that relationship represents an instrumental goal for that individual.² Hence, contacts emerge as a function of instrumental goals. To further specify, this is not only true for the contacts themselves but also for certain aspects of a relationship.³ Second, relations between individuals are maintained to the degree to which they function as a resource in the process of attaining instrumental goals. In reality, relationships often exist beyond their

 Realizing such a need does not mean that the individual has to be aware of it. A person can either explicitly or implicitly realize that a certain relationship might be of help in attaining a certain goal. Even the higher order goal(s) do not need to be represented explicitly in a person’s mind. Moreover, it is not necessary for the higher order goals to already exist by the time a person tries to get hold of the necessary resources; they can remain in a latent form and just be anticipated by a person in order to create options.  Obviously, this assertion is limited to the area of contacts in which some sort of choice is involved. This is not always the case. For example, a child cannot choose his parents or a prisoner usually cannot choose his roommate, and so on.  Of course, the emergence of a relation usually does not only depend on the choice of one person, but rather that of at least two, but for the sake of simplicity we develop the model only from the perspective of one individual. Extending the model with regard to a multi-actor dynamic would not change our basic explanatory model.

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function as a resource, which is mainly due to social norms or strategic matters.⁴ Finally, the SPF theory provides an answer to the question of how social relations become social capital. The term “capital” in its economic usage basically refers to the fact that it represents an agglomerate of resources that can be invested or consumed in order to attain higher order instrumental goals, i. e. financial revenue. If financial resources can no longer be invested for whatever reason, however, they lose the property of being capital. Similarly, social relations between persons develop the character of capital if a person’s contacts provide resources that are helpful to realize instrumental goals and, hence, physical and social well-being. If contacts are not helpful in realizing these goals, they may not be described as social capital. Therefore, the notion of capital becomes “real” as opposed to rather being a metaphor, as people invest (time, effort, and money) in social relations in order to get hold of resources that simplify or enable the realization of certain goals. The realization of these goals then represents the return. In the next section, we will examine some of the major distinctions within the field of social network and social support research, as far as they are relevant to the given context. Moreover, we will link these considerations to the SPF theory outlined.

Social networks and social support: Dimensions of social capital The two major dimensions in research on social support are emotional and instrumental support (Diewald 1991). Emotional support includes the giving and receiving of empathy, feelings of security, love, affection and sympathy, concern and caring, esteem, appreciation and social recognition, or motivation. These forms of support are universally important, regardless of a certain societal context, although they can vary in degree and form with regard to different social conditions. In general, emotional support can have direct as well as indirect effects on different outcomes within a person’s life. For instance, emotional support can have a direct effect on a person’s well-being or her health or it can have an indirect effect in the way that a person is able to better cope with a difficult situation. Emotional support can be given and received by a wide variety of

 People who dismiss others once they realize that this person is no longer of help might create a bad image, with the result that it may potentially hamper their efforts in creating new contacts or maintaining other relations.

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different persons in an individual’s network. This type of support can often be observed in rather close and multiplex relations, i. e. partner, family and close friends, but it is not necessarily limited to certain social domains. It can also be observed in less close and more uniplex relationships, such as loose acquaintances, colleagues at work or even a person’s boss. What is important for us to note is that emotional support in general is a means of production which supports the attainment of instrumental goals of social well-being (as in the case of affection, behavioral confirmation, etc.) as well as physical well-being (as, for example, in the case of a positive relationship between emotional support and health). As far as an individual actor invests in social relations, and these relations provide emotional support and help the actor to realize his higher order instrumental goals, i. e. potentially gain a certain return, this actor accumulates social capital. The second major dimension emphasized in social support research is instrumental support. This form of support comprises the exchange of time, information (or, more generally: knowledge), and money (or physical capital). These could be financial transfers between persons, the exchange of information, the provision of goods, intervention on a person’s behalf, giving advice, and so on. Instrumental support mainly serves purposes of realizing goals of physical and material well-being, but it can also be helpful with regard to social wellbeing. However, in contrast to emotional support, instrumental support depends to a much higher degree on social or societal contexts. Namely, it depends on aspects like the degree of functional differentiating, modernization, general material well-being in a society, or the type of welfare state. Moreover, the overall relation between the public and the private can shape social relations with respect to instrumental support as, for example, in the case of transfers within the family that depend on actions taken by the state (e. g., Kohli 1999). The higher context dependency of this component also has the consequence that relational contents are much more likely to encounter processes of inflation or deflation. For example, relations that were based on the exchange of certain scarce goods in the former German Democratic Republic before 1989 deflated extensively after the wall came down since these goods were no longer scarce (Diewald 1995; Diewald & Luedicke 2006). A third component of social capital is constituted by the phenomenon of interpersonal ⁵ trust. Trust itself is not a “good” that can be assigned with a value, as is more or less the case with the goods or activities that are exchanged in the case of emotional and instrumental support. It is rather a fundament that

 As opposed to, for example, trust in a society’s institutions.

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provides ground for the emergence and maintenance of interpersonal relations in which these goods can then be traded. From an exchange-oriented perspective, any kind of instrumental or social support is linked to the precondition that interactive individuals trust each other.⁶ However, trust itself can be observed in different forms. A major distinction can be drawn between generalized interpersonal trust and specific interpersonal trust (Freitag & Traunmueller 2009). Specific interpersonal trust refers to the kind of trust which is present within existing relationships in a person’s social environment. On the contrary, generalized interpersonal trust refers to people’s attitude towards persons who are not already part of their social network. Generalized trust exists to the extent to which cooperative behavior is possible, even outside of manifest networks. Basically, the concept refers to the ability of anticipating trust within relations in which actors do not yet know of the propensity of the others not to be free riders or even hostile. With regard to transactions, the concept of generalized trust refers to the fact that one party has to make a first move without having any information on the likelihood of their investment yielding a return or not (cf. Coleman 1990). Finally, another important distinction relates to the fact that social capital can be embedded in given and in chosen relationships. Within given relationships, especially in kin relations, the bare fact of existing already provides at least belongingness (see also the contributions referring to belonging in this volume) and the expectation of support if needed: “blood is thicker than water” (Neyer & Lang 2003). Thus, given relationships are especially important for persons who are less endowed with social skills and have fewer resources to establish social networks through their attractiveness as exchange partners. In contrast, non-kin relationships are especially important to ascertain one’s attractiveness, to get to know people outside one’s primary contact circles, and to get access to resources, ideas, and information which are not directly accessible in these primary circles and where they are often redundant. Often, these relationships are rather “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973), which means they are not close and, if at all, only loosely embedded within one’s social network. However, the question now is how the various forms of social support become valued means of production, i. e. social capital, and how these social resources compare to other means of production – given the existence of different kinds of social conditions. We will examine these questions empirically in the

 The idea of trust as being fundamental for any kind of social relationship actually dates back to Georg Simmel (2004 [1900]) who called it “mutual faithfulness”.

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following two sections. We will first take a closer look at the interplay of individual resources (i. e., physical, cultural, and social capital) and we will then widen the scope towards the societal level to see how individual social capital and the interplay between the different forms of capital varies with regard to macro-level indicators such as a nation’s wealth, welfare, and distributional inequality.

Individual preconditions: Social capital and its interplay with other forms of capital The interplay of social capital with other individual resources will be investigated here in two ways: (a) how is the availability of social capital influenced by the availability of other resources, namely financial capital and human capital; and (b) how does the availability of different types of social capital influence subjective well-being, both compared to the other forms of capital as well as in interplay with the latter.

Theoretical background By putting the focus on the interplay of the different forms of capital we stress the importance of stratification within a society for its overall social integration. Accounting for a society’s social structure and the extent of social inequality is important for two reasons. First, the production functions of individuals can vary with regard to a) the overall prevalence of inequality in a given society and b) the individual positioning in the societal hierarchy. Second, resources like education and income are not only crucial for individual status attainment or the accumulation of social prestige; they are also social production functions in themselves. In order to assess social capital it is important to account for substitution processes regarding different kinds of a person’s resources and instrumental goals. That means that the question regarding if and when interpersonal relations become capital is necessarily linked to the entire portfolio of people’s resources. The unequal distribution of material and cultural resources may come into play via unequal resources shaping the unequal availability of various kinds of social capital, including those providing approval and affection. However, following the assumptions of SPF theory, a substitution effect is also plausible: since people who are low in resources rely to a greater extent on the benefits of the social capital that they accumulate in their social networks, they can be expected to invest more in these means of production. However, the underlying

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assumption of an overall market for social relations in which the distribution of individual resources is the main criterion for establishing relations is probably misleading. Sympathy also relies on social similarity. In this case, instead of a spill-over type of interplay between social, human, and social capital, social capital is a substitute for lacking financial and cultural resources. Moreover, since acquiring higher education and earning a lot of money costs effort, these competing claims could constrain the opportunity to accumulate social capital. However, the existing literature rather confirms a spillover effect of high human and financial capital on social capital, though the effects are usually not big (Fischer 1977, Lin 2001).

Empirical findings Compared to the considerable attention on this topic in the theoretical literature, empirical analyses in this field are still rare, especially for Germany. Therefore we analyzed the 2006 pretest of the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP), which comprised 1,012 interviews and included a variety of social capital measures (TNS Infratest 2005): trust within the network as well as generalized trust, close friends as well as the diversity of the network and the share of kin versus non-kin relationships, caring and social control as well as emotional support. Appendix A shows the operationalizations and main results (Tables A1 to A3) stemming from recursive path models with manifest variables including multiple group comparisons to test whether the impact of social capital on well-being is moderated by the availability of human and financial capital (for more details see Diewald & Luedicke 2007; also cf. Diewald, Luedicke, Lang, & Schupp 2006 for descriptive analyses of these data). Human capital in particular proved to be important for the availability of social capital (see Table A1 in Appendix A), and this applies to all types of social capital investigated, except role diversity and network trust. Most prominent and consistent with other studies is the fact that instrumental support is more dependent on education than emotional support, and that non-kin relations play a much bigger role for more highly educated people, which means that they are better able to choose their relations freely. Moreover, trust is less restricted to people whom they know, maybe because they are more confident in managing relations with strangers, which are less controllable than kin relations. Financial capital, on the other hand, is much less important for the availability of social capital than education. Only the number of friends and network trust are significantly shaped by the equivalent income of the household. We interpret this as a confirmation of the hypothesis that financial resources especially help to select

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and maintain “liberated communities” (Wellman 1979), which means that people select their relations according to their preferences. Taken together, the hope that the availability of social capital is a substitute for unequally distributed other resources is misleading: The positive effects of education and, in a more particular way, of income on the availability of social capital are evident. Looking at the impact of social capital on subjective well-being, we find positive, statistically significant effects for most dimensions and they are stronger than the effects of education and income (results not displayed here). Moreover, the positive effect of education on subjective well-being seems to be explained, for the most part, by the positive effect of education on the formation of social capital. Concerning the different dimensions of social capital, emotional as well as instrumental support proves to be less relevant, whereas trust is most important. Though network trust is more important, generalized trust is also relevant. In other words, it does make a difference if trustful personal networks of direct relations are embedded in a wider social environment that are perceived as more or less friendly or otherwise. So far our analyses, like others, have frustrated the hope that the amount of social capital is high if other resources are low, so that there is a substitution of the various kinds of resources. We finally look at the possibility that social capital, if it exists, enhances subjective well-being especially where other resources are low (see Tables A2 and A3 in Appendix A). If this were true, we could speak of a compensatory effect of social capital, conditional on the unequal availability of social capital due to the unequal distribution of other forms of capital. With regard to the level of education, the overall evidence for such a compensation effect is weak, with one notable exception: For people with lower education, network trust proves to be significantly more important for subjective well-being than for other people. In other words, in modern societies education is often said to be the key for life chances. If this crucial resource is missing, the availability of trustful networks may be an important factor in keeping these people in balance. Looking at income differences, we find a higher impact of social capital in the lower half of the equivalent income distribution compared to the upper half. Again, this did not apply to all dimensions of social capital. In this case, however, it is instrumental support in particular which compensates for a lower income, whereas the impact of emotional support and trust does not interfere with income. Moreover, a higher number of close friends is more important for people with lower income than for those with higher income. Obviously, reciprocal relations outside of kin networks are especially important if individual agency is restricted by low material resources. Taken together we did find some compensatory effects of social capital for the absence of other individual resources. This compensation is more or less ho-

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mologous: instrumental support is more important in the case of lower income, trust relations are more important for lower educated people who are less able to cope with societal demands. However, the societal relevance of such compensatory relations is limited by the fact that the same unequal distribution of resources tends to result in a parallel unequal distribution of social capital as well. On no account do people with lower education or income have more social capital available in return.

Societal preconditions: Modernity, welfare state, and inequality So far we have discussed the antecedents and consequences of social capital with regard to individual characteristics and resources. In this section, we discuss and explore the preconditions of social capital at the societal level. There are at least three strains of discussion regarding the relation between society and informal social relations: the degree of modernization, the rising welfare state, and the degree of inequality within a society.

Theoretical background Modernization: Community lost or liberated? Since the beginning of sociology as a scientific discipline, theories about the consequences for informal social relations of functional differentiation, industrialism, or urbanization tended to be rather pessimistic (Fischer 1977; Wellman 1979, Diewald 1991). Expanding states and markets weaken informal relations, because they are less necessary for the supply of goods and services. In so far as mechanisms of social integration are regarded as a by-product of instrumental support, processes of functional differentiation inadvertently hamper these mechanisms. Secondly, the formation of a cultural individualism, which was regarded as an accompanying process of functional differentiation, led to a change from socially oriented attitudes towards more self-oriented attitudes, exacerbating the decline in social integration. More recently, scholars were concerned about globalization and the flexibilization of work, since increasing rates of mobility, flexibility demands, and a declining amenability for life planning would decrease people’s ability to create and maintain stable and meaningful relationships (Sennett 1998; Diewald 2003). In sum, this argumentation leads to the expectation of lower social capital in general, and specifically of a decline of kinship relations and family support.

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In terms of the SPF theory, such pessimism would mean that the necessity of interpersonal closeness, affection, or mutual recognition does not lead to a creation of relationships of this sort. It needs a certain opportunity structure or even enforced sociality⁷ as a precondition for integrative relational contents to develop rather as a by-product. In the context of the SPF theory, however, this is a rather unlikely assumption. The common mistake of this pessimism is, then, that its (rather implicit) theoretical model does not allow for processes of adaptation. More consistent with SPF theory is the “community liberated” expectation: People aim to realize their instrumental goals, but the means to do it are substitutable. In other words, the superiority of markets and states to provide goods and services leads to a change in the investment portfolio with regard to different kinds of relations and the social capital embedded in them. In this view, functional differentiation rather strengthens interpersonal ties, because now these relations can be chosen more freely and are specialized to a much higher degree on social well-being alone. Following this argumentation, we would expect lower levels of instrumental support and higher levels of emotional support in rich countries. In addition, social participation outside the kin system and both generalized and network trust should be stronger there. The welfare state: crowding-in or crowding-out of informal relationships? In more recent years, a similar discussion has emerged focusing especially on the welfare state. The so-called “crowding out” hypothesis assumes that a developed welfare state is taking over support functions which formerly were fulfilled by interpersonal ties, especially by family and kinship (Scheepers, Te Grotenhuis, & Gelissen 2002; van Oorschot & Arts 2005; Kääriäinen & Lehtonen 2006). Hence, with the welfare state taking over more and more responsibilities, family and social networks are weakened, accompanied by an increase in self-orientation, individualism, and social isolation. However, this argumentation again heavily underestimates the ability of people to behave in an adaptive manner. That is why some researchers stressed quite the opposite, that a well-functioning welfare state rather provides the ground for more freely chosen relations or relational contents. Informal ties instead becoming “crowded in” rather than crowded out (Kuenemund & Rein 1999). Social inequality: Accentuation or compensation? Finally, we want to stress the importance of the degree of inequality within a society. Inequality of life chances as well as distributional inequality should in general enhance the importance of social capital in the form of instrumental support. In such countries, there should be more people who are affected by a fear of falling and who ac-

 Like the “Notgemeinschaften” in the former GDR (cf. Diewald 1995).

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tually fall behind a medium standard of living, both of which call for compensation. Thus, the higher the amount of inequality, the more social capital, in the form of instrumental support, should exist in the portfolio of social production functions in order to buffer against risks. In contrast, generalized trust should be lower (Wilson/Pickett 2009). The interplay of individual and societal resources. In addition, societal differences may moderate the importance of individual resources for the creation of social capital (cf. section 3). The higher the level of social inequality and the lower the degree to which market-generated inequalities are decommodified by the welfare state, the more important should individual resources be for life chances in general. This should apply for the creation of social capital as well: in countries with a less extended welfare state and in countries with a high level of inequality, education and financial resources should have a stronger impact especially on the amount of social participation, relations outside the kinship system, and generalized trust.

Empirical Findings In order to address our theoretical and empirical questions we analyzed 25 countries for which we had representative survey data from the year 2001 regarding different aspects of social capital.⁸ The list of countries that we include in our analysis consists of three Scandinavian welfare states (Norway, Denmark, and Finland), five liberal welfare states (Great Britain, Australia, USA, New Zealand, and Canada), four conservative welfare states (West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France), two Mediterranean countries (Italy and Spain), seven post-socialist transition countries (East Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Russia, and Latvia), two countries from South America (Chile and Brazil), and Israel and Japan. We measure the economic wealth of a country with the mean of the gross domestic product per capita in the five years preceding the survey. It ranges from less than $5,000 per year up to around $35,000. Social inequality is measured by a country-specific Gini Index based on household income. It ranges from 0.25 to 0.6. Welfare state expenditures are measured relatively to a country’s wealth as a percentage of the gross domestic product, with a

 Refer to the following link for study descriptions etc.: http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data/ survey-data/issp/modules-study-overview/social-networks/2001. A downloadable version of the generic questionnaire can be obtained from the following link: http://info1.gesis.org/dbksearch/ file.asp?file=ZA3680_bq.pdf. A detailed description of our operationalizations and analyses is given in Appendix B. A more comprehensive version can be found in Lüdicke & Diewald 2007.

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range from 15 % to 34 %. On the basis of our theoretical considerations, we operationalize social capital as a multidimensional construct. We distinguish between five dimensions: instrumental and emotional support, proactive participation in public groups, clubs, or associations, relations within the core family (i. e., parents and/or adult children), and generalized trust. Compared to individual differences at the micro level, country differences at the macro level account for much less of the variance in the availability of different kinds of social capital. The biggest cross-country differences can be observed for participation: With about 18 % of the variability due to country differences, proactive participation is highest. Very low are the differences between countries with regard to emotional and instrumental support where the country differences only account for about 5 % of the variation (see Table 1). In columns two, three, and four of Table 1 we present the percentages of explained variances by a given macro-variable and for each individual-level dependent variable. We can see that a nation’s wealth alone accounts for about 32 % of the between-country differences in trust and for about 37 % of the differences in social participation. It seems that wealth has no or little explanatory power when it comes to differences in instrumental support or family relations. However, it explains 17 % of the variance regarding emotional support. The extent of social inequality and welfare state expenditure seem to have less explanatory power than wealth (between around 10 % and 15 % for trust and emotional support) which, in turn, means that the overall wealth, measured by a country’s gross domestic product, is the strongest factor for differences in social capital. On the basis of the statistical models that we estimate,⁹ we find positive effects on generalized trust for the overall wealth of a nation as well as for the welfare state expenditure, whereas the degree of social inequality has a negative effect: The higher the inequality in a country, the lesser is the extent to which people trust each other. A similar pattern was found for the dimension of social participation for which we find positive effects for wealth and welfare expenditure and again a negative one for inequality, though the inequality effect is not statistically significant. With regard to instrumental support and inner familial relations, however, we do not find any direct effects for the macro-variables. Only for emotional support do we find a positive effect for the welfare state expenditure. Taken together, these results especially confirm the “community liber-

 In these models, we account for a number of known individual social capital determinants (e. g., standard demographics, employment status, income, education) as well as people’s household structure. However, our focus lies on the country-level variables and, therefore, we do not discuss any of these individual-level effects. All estimated coefficients are documented in Tables B1 to B5 in Appendix B.

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Table 2: Variance decomposition and explained variance for five different social capital indicators Variance between countries, Percent Generalized trust . Social participation . Instrumental support . Emotional support . Family relations .

Percentage of explained betweencountry variance with the GDP

Percentage of explained betweencountry variance with the Gini Index

Percentage of explained betweencountry variance with welfare state exp.

.

.

.

.

–

–

.

–

–

. –

. –

. –

ated” hypothesis, and also the “crowding in” hypothesis, but reject the “crowding out” hypothesis. It is confirmed that chosen relations in particular profit from wealth and social security, whereas family and kin relations are at least not weakened. However, these positive tendencies are countered by the extent to which a nation’s wealth is unequally distributed. This neither damages nor strengthens social capital embedded in personal networks, but it vitiates generalized trust. We finally address the question whether the impact of individual resources, i. e. income and education, on the creation of social capital depends on the country-level characteristics by modeling cross-level interaction effects. With regard to generalized trust, we find evidence that the positive effects of income and education, which we observe on the individual level, are stronger in modernized and, thus, richer countries, and in countries with higher welfare expenditures. However, for instrumental support as well as for emotional support, and in addition for the intergenerational contacts, we observe that the importance of individual income decreases with increasing wealth. Taken together, the empirical results do not confirm our assumptions completely, and in the case of generalized trust they even contradict them. But the fact that richer countries weaken the importance of individual resources not only for emotional but also for instrumental support is an additional aspect supporting the “community liberated” hypothesis: Personal relations are less dependent on the necessity to compensate for low income with high instrumental support. Moreover, in richer coun-

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tries and countries with an extended welfare state, not only are generational relationships strengthened instead of weakened, but they are less dependent on education. This may mean that they are less needed as a compensatory reservoir for those who tend to have lower life chances in modern societies. Or, conversely, especially in countries with low economic well-being and a less developed welfare state, that generational relations are prevalent among the less privileged in terms of education. Do some societies support cumulative advantage via a mutually reinforcing accumulation of economic, cultural, and social capital, while others tend to a compensatory relation of social capital to other sorts of capital? The cross-country differences investigated here only provide an unclear answer and, in addition, the strength even of the statistically significant coefficients is rather weak. Nevertheless, in modernized societies informal relations seem to be specialized on emotional support and choice not only for privileged groups but also for those in the lower segments of the structure of inequality. In this sense we could speak of a more universal pattern of “community liberated” within these societies.

Conclusion Social capital is a manifold construct with a variety of dimensions which are not too closely linked to one another but refer to very different goods and processes. All of them play a role in structuring life chances within a society. This was not only demonstrated on a conceptual level but also became apparent empirically with regard to the different preconditions and consequences of the respective social capital dimensions. For a person’s psychological and social well-being, however, emotional support and belonging are most important. To a limited degree, the availability of social capital can compensate for a lack of other resources. However, the availability of social capital itself depends on the availability of these other resources. For this reason, there is no room for overly optimistic hopes with regard to the compensatory role of social capital within the structure of social inequalities. Taken together, the creation of social capital is much more dependent on inter-individual differences than on cross-country varieties. Nevertheless, societal conditions cannot be neglected when attempting to understand the unequal distribution of social capital. We saw that a nation’s wealth and its provision of social welfare explain a sizable amount of the between-country differences with regard to generalized interpersonal trust and participation outside of core networks. However, high levels of social inequality can significantly hamper trust outside one’s own social networks. Overall, these findings primarily suggest

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a picture of “community liberated” and “crowding-in” over “crowding-out” and disintegration scenarios.

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Appendix A Table A1: Determinants of social capital: path coefficientsa for social capital indicators regressed on income and schooling

Intimate Job Caring Conflict Control IQV Close friends % kin General. trust Network trust. Intimate Job Caring Conflict Control IQV Close friends % kin General. trust Network trust