The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts 3031351053, 9783031351051

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL POLICY RESEARCH

The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts Michael Rushton

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research

Series Editor

Eleonora Belfiore Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University Loughborough, UK

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research encourages theoretical and empirical contributions which enrich and develop the field of cultural policy studies. Since its emergence in the 1990s in Australia and the United Kingdom and its eventual diffusion in Europe, the academic field of cultural policy studies has expanded globally as the arts and popular culture have been re-positioned by city, regional, and national governments, and international bodies, from the margins to the centre of social and economic development in both rhetoric and practice. The series invites contributions in all of the following: arts policies, the politics of culture, cultural industries policies (the ‘traditional’ arts such as performing and visual arts, crafts), creative industries policies (digital, social media, broadcasting and film, and advertising), urban regeneration and urban cultural policies, regional cultural policies, the politics of cultural and creative labour, the production and consumption of popular culture, arts education policies, cultural heritage and tourism policies, and the history and politics of media and communications policies. The series will reflect current and emerging concerns of the field such as, for example, cultural value, community cultural development, cultural diversity, cultural sustainability, lifestyle culture and eco-culture, planning for the intercultural city, cultural planning, and cultural citizenship.

Michael Rushton

The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts

Michael Rushton O’Neill School of Public/Env. Affairs Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA

ISSN 2730-924X     ISSN 2730-9258 (electronic) New Directions in Cultural Policy Research ISBN 978-3-031-35105-1    ISBN 978-3-031-35106-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Maggie, Paul, and John

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to his own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct. —John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge”

Acknowledgments

This book was formed out of years of teaching the course in Public Policy and the Arts to students at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, and I am grateful to my students for their participation and discussion as we considered and probed the various ideas that are presented here. I also thank participants over the years in the O’Neill School’s Center for Cultural Affairs Workshop where early versions of chapters were presented. My Center colleagues Karen Gahl-Mills and Joanna Woronkowicz each gave careful readings and comments to various chapters, for which I am very grateful. Support from the O’Neill School, and from Indiana University’s Presidential Arts and Humanities Program, enabled me to travel to Ireland and England during 2022 to present various parts of this work. I am very thankful to the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin, the Centre for Cultural Policy and Leadership, and the Centre for Cultural Value, at the University of Leeds, The Institute for Cultural Practices at the University of Manchester, and the Sheffield Methods Institute, and the Cultural Industries Research Network, at the University of Sheffield, for the chance to present, discuss, and be rigorously challenged on these ideas, as well as for their very generous hospitality during my visit. I thank Eleonora Belfiore, the Editor of the Palgrave New Directions in Cultural Policy Research series, for her support of this project, and for two anonymous referees whose suggestions greatly improved the book. Jenny Noble-­ Kuchera supported me in this project from the beginning; no words are adequate for the depths of my gratitude. ix

Praise for The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts “This book is an essential contribution to our field; it offers both a synthesis of the moral foundations of arts funding through different philosophical traditions, and an original outlook and interpretation of the subject matter.” —Jonathan Paquette, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Economic Method 15 3 Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Arts 41 4 Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts 67 5 Communitarianism 93 6 Conservatism115 7 Multiculturalism141 8 Keynes’s Grandchildren169 Index181

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Cleveland Orchestra, of Cleveland, Ohio, is considered one of the finest symphony orchestras in the United States. It was founded in 1918 by Adella Prentiss, and came to world attention under the leadership of George Szell, appointed in 1946 (Horowitz 2005). It has an endowment of over $200 million, more than four times its annual expenses (Cleveland Orchestra 2020), and in 2021 the orchestra received a gift of $50 million from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. The Cleveland Orchestra also receives financial support through the public sector. It received $40 thousand from the (federal government) National Endowment for the Arts for fiscal year 2021, $587 thousand from the (state government) Ohio Arts Council for fiscal year 2021, and since the founding of the local government-based Cuyahoga Arts and Culture in 2007, has received over $1 million every year through the present (National Endowment for the Arts 2021; Ohio Arts Council 2020; Cuyahoga Arts and Culture 2021); the relative size of these figures reflects the highly decentralized nature of direct government support for the arts in the United States. Cleveland, although a century ago one of the wealthier cities in the United States, is now one of its poorest, with over 30 percent of its residents living in poverty; it has never fully adjusted to the decline of the manufacturing sector in the American Midwest, and epitomizes what has

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_1

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come to be called the “rust belt.” The local arts funding body, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (named for the county in which Cleveland is situated) came into existence through a voter referendum in 2006, and was renewed in 2015. Its revenues come from a tax on cigarettes, of 30 cents per pack. There are significant public health benefits to reducing the incidence of smoking, and a tax on cigarettes aids in the effort to get smokers to quit, and to deter young people from starting the habit. But it is also true that cigarette taxes are regressive, which is the term used for a tax that collects a lower proportion of income for higher-income taxpayers than it does for lower-income taxpayers. Cigarette taxes are regressive for two reasons: first, because taxes on consumption in general tend to be regressive, since the rich spend a lower proportion of their income, and save a higher proportion, than the poor do; and second, because cigarettes in particular are consumed at a higher rate by lower-income people (Remler 2004; note that governments which use the profits from state-run lotteries to finance public expenditures on the arts are similarly using a regressive tax, as spending on lotteries is disproportionately by lower-income individuals). How can one justify using taxes to transfer funds to the operating budget of the Cleveland Orchestra? This book examines different ways one could try to answer that question. It will broaden its scope by considering all manner of tax-financed state support not just of prestigious orchestras, but also smaller, community-based arts presenters, state-run arts organizations, individual artists, and arts consumers. But I begin with the case of the Cleveland Orchestra for a reason, that it presents starkly, although not uniquely, the difficulty: individuals, many of them low income, and who will never in their lives attend a concert or listen to a recording from the Cleveland Orchestra, paying more in taxes, and so having less discretionary spending power, to fund a wealthy orchestra and provide a benefit to its generally wealthy patrons. To seriously address what is perhaps the core question of arts policy—why should the state fund the arts?—it will be worth keeping the example of the Cleveland Orchestra in mind.

Why Public Funding for the Arts? In the Anglo-American world, public funding for the arts is generally administered through “arm’s length” arts councils, public sector bodies with a degree of independence from the government departments that oversee them. Arts Council England, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts, for example, have a similar

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basic form (see Upchurch (2016) for the history of these councils). Their prime mover was the economist John Maynard Keynes, the first chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain, who sought a means of providing public funds to support the arts while avoiding what might be the stifling bureaucracy of a government department, although recognizing that ultimately the policies of the arts council would be answerable to the elected legislature. In practice, “arm’s length” means that within the goals and parameters set for the arts council, the council makes its recommendations for funding based upon the judgment of panels of artists, arts administrators, and laypersons, through the directorship of the council, without political interference from the elected government, although those goals and parameters must be set with the consent of the government. Elected governments always have the power to simply end the existence of the arts council, which must be remembered in any discussion of independence. Decades ago, Karen King and Mark Blaug (1976) asked “Does the Arts Council know what it is doing?” They were referring to the Arts Council of Great Britain, and they used the technique known as cost-effectiveness analysis: suppose one wishes to evaluate whether a policy is worthwhile, but cannot weigh the costs and benefits because while costs are easy to identify, in terms of expenditures, benefits are very difficult to value in monetary terms. Unmeasurable benefits are common across policy areas: national defense, for example, or different means of improving public health. And so, with cost-benefit analysis ruled out since benefits are immeasurable, cost-effectiveness analysis takes policy goals as given, and asks about the effectiveness of the means employed to reach the goals, often comparing the chosen means with alternatives. Could the goals have been obtained at less cost? King and Blaug take Arts Council annual reports dating back to its founding to ask whether the rhetoric and stated goals in the reports align well with actual expenditures, and whether changes in stated goals lead to changes in patterns of the allocation of funds (not surprisingly, given the inevitable inertia in allocations, rhetoric might change for purposes of relations with stakeholders while the allocations themselves do not shift so much). I am taking one further step back from King and Blaug, and looking into how the broad goals of public arts funding could be shaped from different perspectives in moral philosophy. King and Blaug, as economists, see that public arts funding can be justified in terms of market failure; markets on their own will not provide the right amount, or the right sort, of arts production and consumption. The economic method,

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consequentialist, and heavily influenced by utilitarianism, is one possible moral framework—though as I will describe in Chap. 2 it comes with many, often unstated, assumptions within its workings. But there are other approaches to be considered as well. How do social contract theories of the state, with their focus on individual rights rather than the sum of all consequences to individuals, justify, or not, state funding for the arts? Or communitarian theories that would reject both the economists and the social contract theorists on the grounds that they are based upon an unrealistic conception of the individual and society? There are implications for public funding for the arts from each of these models. In this way, while I will sometimes, necessarily, engage in some abstract theorizing, I will always attempt to bring the theories down to earth in terms of their direction on the existence of public funding for the arts, and on what it ought to prioritize if it is to exist at all. This book is not about the administration of public arts councils, or about the various interactions of centers of political power who try to use their weight to influence the criteria for funding such that it will work for their private interests. Rather, my intent is to take a few steps back, and ask more fundamental questions about the very existence of public arts funding, and, where it exists, its purpose and justification. As such, I will raise at various places specific programs for funding the arts, but only insofar as they help illustrate the way in which a particular ethical approach would justify or evaluate such a program. Around the world there are a variety of methods for giving state support to the arts: ways of giving grants to presenters, to artists, to consumers; different ways of organizing the bureaucracy of arts funding; and different methods for evaluating what gets funded and what does not. These are all very interesting questions, but not the focus of this work. Likewise, the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the devastating loss of lives worldwide, led to widespread disruption in the cultural sector. Different nations approached the question of how to give temporary emergency support to artists and arts presenters differently, and there may be some practical lessons that arise in terms of how the more permanent structures for public arts support work, including from the quickening of the pace of digital arts consumption. Again, I leave this to the many scholars who have engaged in this topic (for a start, see the special issue of the journal Cultural Trends introduced by Banks and O’Connor (2021)). Is there much point in my project of looking to the foundations of public arts support? Obviously, I think so; let me try to illustrate with a

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recent case. In May, 2021, the French government introduced the “Culture Pass”: a smartphone app that gives 300 Euros to every 18-year-­ old in the country for cultural spending (New York Times 2021). Three months later, it was found that over 75 percent of all purchases were books, and about two-thirds of those books were manga, Japanese comic books: In a speech to launch the Culture Pass in May, President Emmanuel Macron, who had made the initiative one of his campaign promises, said that France would mark a “formidable victory” when young people stop saying, “This work of literature, this movie is not for me.” Yet critics argue that letting 825,000 teenagers loose with free cash and expecting them to be nudged away from the nearest multiplex and into an art-house movie theater is a naïve waste of taxpayer money. Jean-Michel Tobelem, an associate professor at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne who specializes in the economics of culture, said that it was a laudable effort but that it would largely benefit the mainstream media. “You don’t need to push young people to go see the latest Marvel movie,” he said. There is nothing wrong with pop music or blockbusters, he stressed, acknowledging that “you can enter Korean culture through K-Pop and then discover that there is a whole cinema, a literature, painters and composers that go with it.” (New York Times 2021)

The Culture Pass debate involves a challenging question, one that has been debated for a very long time (as we shall see later in this book): is it the role of the state to try to guide people (and I am treating 18-year-olds as adults here, not schoolchildren) toward what it judges is most worthy in culture, or should arts policy follow the existing tastes of individuals, financing whatever is their preference? Is pushpin as good as poetry? Is manga as good as Flaubert? If pleasure is the only thing that matters, then we must ask: why restrict a transfer of funds to teenagers to culture in the first place? What if they would rather have 300 Euros for railway tickets, or some new clothes, or for some proper kitchen utensils for their first apartment? If the concern is that only teenagers from wealthier and/or more formally educated families will take part in culture, what of it, if other teenagers would really rather have funds to spend on something else? And this is the narrow path arts policy must tread: on the one side it wants to say the arts matter in a very specific way to people’s well-being. But it also as far as possible wants to avoid being too prescriptive. What King and Blaug wrote in the 1970s remains true:

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[T]he Council has never openly assumed the dynamic role of catalyst in the Arts. Repeated references in the Annual Reports suggest that the conflict between a hands-off policy and one of ‘effective leadership’ has never been decisively resolved. The problem is that of avoiding the Scylla of laissez-faire while likewise avoiding the Charybdis of artistic paternalism. (1976, p. 103)

I hope that this book can help shed at least some light on this longstanding issue, among others, and in the process provoke discussion of the foundations of arts policy. Before giving an outline of the book, let me first say what I will not be doing. While I will be presenting descriptions of different ways of thinking about applying moral philosophy to arts funding and will note what criticisms have arisen for the different approaches, I will not be advocating for one approach or another in particular; rather, my goal is to try to articulate what people working in applied moral philosophy have said and how following their ideas leads to ways of thinking about arts funding. I will try to find where there is some overlapping consensus on arts funding between approaches, and where there are irreconcilable differences, such that making a choice cannot be avoided. This book neither advocates for a particular moral philosophy, nor does it advocate for a particular policy of arts funding. It is descriptive, comparative, and focuses on the implications of different ways of thinking about the arts. There is no deep critique here of any of the strands of moral philosophy discussed, since that would demand far more pages than can fit; I try in the references to each chapter to point readers to more detailed treatments. I do not assume much prior knowledge of what is discussed, and hopefully I can provide a useful introduction for students, as well as scholars, of cultural policy. Alternative moral frameworks tend to emphasize one specific goal over others, but I take the approach of Isaiah Berlin (1990) in recognizing that the various ideals we might wish to pursue nearly always involve trade-offs of one over another, such that there is no formula for an optimal policy. All we can hope for is a balance we can live with. To illustrate, suppose we think (and as it turns out, I do think) that all of the following are good things to have: an efficient use of our scarce resources to satisfy the preferences of individuals over public and private goods; the freedom of individuals to form their own conception of a life worth pursuing, without the government trying to steer them into this or that direction; greater equality between individuals in their quality of life; and excellent and lasting achievement in artistic creation. But the economist’s goal of the efficient

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use of resources can mean interference in people’s liberty, as they are made to pay taxes for things they do not wish to fund, it might mean policies that work against greater equality between individuals, and there is no guarantee at all that following the preference of the population on arts funding is the route to excellence. A strict pursuit of “neutrality” by the state, and not undertaking any funding of the arts unless there is near unanimity in the populace, can prevent policies that would satisfy the criterion of efficiency, and prevent any support for the pursuit of excellence in the arts. A government committed to excellence might well be going against what the general population thinks is worth spending money on. And so on. While I hope this book is able to stimulate thinking in new ways about public funding for the arts, it does not arrive at a solution to the problem. The book is limited in its scope of applied moral philosophy, working almost exclusively within the Anglo-American tradition. This is not because it is more worthy than other philosophical traditions, but simply reflects the limitations of the author: I am writing about philosophers I know better than I know others. I realize that this fact about me itself raises questions about diversity and inclusion in cultural education, but I hope that others will take up the challenge to discuss arts funding in philosophical traditions where I am not qualified to do so. In Chap. 2, “The Economic Method,” I examine the economic approach to public funding for the arts. The goal here is to bring to the fore the moral assumptions that guide mainstream economic analyses of public policy in general, and arts policy in particular. Specifically, the economic method is solely concerned with the aggregate consequences of policy, notwithstanding concerns about, for example, individual liberties, and restricts the consideration of the consequences of policy to the effect on people’s welfare; like utilitarianism, it is welfarist. Further, individual welfare is judged by people’s own conceptions of well-being, and changes in well-being are measured by how much a person would be willing to pay to achieve it. So, for example, the value to Abi of a new work of public art in her neighborhood is measured by the amount she would be willing to pay in taxes for it to be installed, and the value to the community is the sum of the willingness-to-pay by all affected individuals. If the value to the whole community is greater than the cost of the installation, then economic policy analysis would recommend the project go forward. This is true even if there are some people who will be paying higher taxes even though they do not like the proposed artwork at all, and is true even if the

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primary beneficiaries of the installation are already relatively well-off. The value of spillover effects from arts institutions like museums and theatre companies is measured in the same way. Economics relies on consumer sovereignty in terms of valuing goods, even where the goods are provided by, or subsidized by, the government. Willingness-to-pay proves to be difficult to measure, though techniques for doing so, if imperfect, have been developed and used by cultural economists. But beyond measurement issues, what is key is that voter preferences are the foundation of value. People might take actions to try to change how they value different genres of art, engaging in learning to understand and appreciate art forms that are not easily accessible. But again, these are individual choices. Attempts were made in past decades to incorporate the idea that consumer preferences might be “wrong” in different ways: too hasty or impulsive, too influenced by a biased presentation of choices, or not what people would see as their best selves. But these attempts have not made much headway in the study of arts policy, since it is not clear at all what would represent “good” as opposed to “bad” preferences. De gustibus non est disputandum. In general, economists and sociologists, for analytical purposes, do not make judgments on the quality of people’s cultural preferences. This does not mean a person cannot ever criticize someone else’s taste, or that there is no such thing as better taste. But social science, appropriately, stays out of such arguments. The implications of the economic method for arts policy are that public funding for the arts is very public driven, and what constitutes valuable public goods, or externalities worth subsidizing, are determined by the public. In Chap. 3, “Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Arts,” I consider the liberal, egalitarian social contract framework of John Rawls, and how he comes to conclude that public funding for the arts, unless it can be accomplished with near unanimous support in the community, cannot be justified, even when it satisfies the criteria set by economic policy analysis. Rawls begins with the thought experiment of people negotiating and coming to consensus on a social contract, where the participants debate from an original position not knowing what their attributes—strengths and weaknesses, preferences and life goals—will be in the society they create. He believes they would agree to extensive personal liberties and equal opportunities, with inequalities to be permitted only where they work to the benefit of the worst off, and that there would be no place for the state to pursue any form of “perfectionism,” promoting certain goods even where not everyone particularly valued them, for their own good.

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Participants in his social contract would fear that the state could choose to pursue goals quite at odds with their own personal goals. Can a liberal state support the arts? There are different ways to approach this. One is to see if there is a way that mild forms of perfectionism can be consistent with Rawls’s principal goal of fairness, that is, a social framework on which all participants could basically agree. For example, people might agree that there are forms of excellence, in science and the arts, that deserve respect, and in turn support, even if they do not personally understand them or feel much interest in trying to understand. Or it might be that the arts, with the support of public funding, enhance the mutual respect we give to one another, noting that having the bases of self-respect is considered by Rawls to be a “primary good” that would be valued by all and ought to be distributed equally. A different way to try to reconcile liberal neutrality with public funding for the arts is Ronald Dworkin’s approach, which is to consider equality between generations: we have an obligation to provide to future generations a cultural heritage at least as rich as the one we inherited from prior generations, such that future generations have a set of cultural opportunities that would enable them to imagine and reflect upon different conceptions of a life worth leading. The difficulty here is in the details. If we were concerned about future generations having a rich cultural inheritance, then what specifically ought we to subsidize? Would it be the canon of Western “high art,” leaving popular and folk art to the commercial sector? Would it be to protect art genres particularly at risk of extinction if not otherwise supported, and if so, would this apply to all such art genres or only those that pass some test of timeless value? The unavoidable question in arts policy is whether it is right to permit state funders of the arts to be non-neutral, and to make value judgments on the arts that might be at odds with the preferences of the public. In Chap. 4, “Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts,” I ask whether public funding for the arts can serve egalitarian goals. The question here is not “how can arts council spending be more egalitarian?”, but rather “would an egalitarian support public funding for the arts at all?” An egalitarian is someone who puts equality between individuals as a moral priority, even if not the only goal of public policy. Any egalitarian must consider the question of what sort of equality matters. Pursuit of equality in income might in some cases work against equality of welfare, and vice versa. In this chapter I consider three possible “currencies” of egalitarian justice: resources, capabilities, and welfare. Resource equality is the usual concern of economists, and also of liberal egalitarians such as Rawls and

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Dworkin; concern with resources, specifically income and wealth, leaves individuals free to decide how to use their resources according to their wants. Economists who study questions such as “how progressive should the income tax be?” are focused on income equality, and assume a rather simple correlation with well-being. In general, though not always, redistribution of income is more efficient than trying to redistribute amounts of various commodities. But this approach leaves little room for public funding of the arts as an egalitarian measure (although there might still be other reasons for public funding of the arts). The capabilities approach to equality takes as it concern whether individuals have the specific resources needed to obtain valuable “functionings,” which are various things we can do and people we can be—what sort of lives can we lead? Equal resources might still leave inequalities in people’s ability to fully participate in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of their community. There have been recent attempts in cultural policy scholarship to see whether capabilities could serve as a justification, and focus, for arts funding. Finally, I consider equality of welfare. This is rather difficult to measure, since the actual subjective welfare of people depends on many more factors than the more easily measured levels of income and primary goods. As such, it seems difficult to see how “equality of welfare” could be made operational as a goal. But there is one angle to this approach that might be very relevant for arts policy, and that is the question of “expensive tastes.” Suppose there are some people whose level of well-being is highly dependent on their ability to consume some quite specific goods, and, unfortunately for them, these goods happen to be very expensive to obtain, because of market conditions. Should public policy aim to help such people, by subsidizing their ability to obtain these goods? Consider, for example, a small group of people who very highly value particular cultural practices, but because they are small in number the practice is expensive on a per person basis, as there are no opportunities to exploit economies of scale. A subsidy could make a large difference in their well-being, with the aim not to make them better off than everyone else, but just to raise their well-being to that held by people whose cultural tastes are much more cheaply provided in the market. In Chap. 5, the analysis takes a different turn from the first half of the book. The economic approach of Chap. 2, the liberal social contract of Chap. 3, and the egalitarian perspectives of Chap. 4, have in common a methodological individualism: a way of thinking about society, and, in turn, public policy, where the individual, with her tastes and life goals, her

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attributes, and her well-being, are the unit of analysis. Economists and social contract theorists alike take the value of public goods, and questions around the appropriate role of the state in providing funding for the arts, in terms of what individuals believe is worthwhile, or fair. Chapter 5 looks at the communitarian critique of methodological individualism, in terms of how it frames the individual’s place in society, and, in turn, the implications for public policy. In simple terms, communitarianism reverses the lens between individuals and society, and sees the individual as a creation of the society in which she lives, rather than the other way around. The values we place on cultural practices and artistic traditions are formed by our social and cultural attachments, which means, first, the value we place on the arts comes from the fact that it is a shared culture (which is not a universal culture, but is specific to our time and place and attachments), and, second, that we cannot use methods from methodological individualism to value that culture, since the culture itself shaped our values. Asking people how much they value the arts is an impossible question not just because people don’t often think about it, and might give biased or uninformed answers, but because the question itself is logically impossible. The implications for public funding for the arts are difficult to assess. On the one hand, a communitarian would advocate for a cultural policy that preserves and enhances the traditions of the shared culture, over simply leaving matters to individual choice, and this would require judgment from policymakers in the arts on what aspects of culture most matter, which might be some combination of folk traditions and the high arts. On the other hand, such a cultural policy requires a light touch, recognizing that an emphasis on what is considered the “true” local or national culture has the danger of leading to very illiberal restrictions on expression, and on the politicization of arts institutions. The strongest case for a liberal approach to arts, and to personal freedoms in general, comes from seeing from history, and, unfortunately, from some contemporary examples, the results of governments that have opted to oppose liberalism in favor of national cultural goals. Chapter 6 asks what a philosophically conservative arts funding policy would look like. This is somewhat of a challenge in the context of this book in that conservatism has no structured framework as such, but combines what has been called the conservative disposition—the value placed on what is ours and what is familiar, over and above practical usefulness— with a conservative approach to politics. The conservative disposition is just that: not a theory but a way in which people, to varying degrees, are,

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with attachments to present goods and practices, over promises of an even better and improved future. Political conservatism holds that politics is an activity that ought not to be guided by any firm theoretical doctrine or utopian goals, but instead is a practical activity that follows, rather than leads, the desires of its population for stable laws, institutions, and practical solutions to collective problems. It eschews what Michael Oakeshott referred to as “rationalism in politics,” which is the notion that one can apply formulas or systematic rules, drawn from abstract theory, to the world of political practice, the ordinary activities of making sure the streetlights are turned on, laws enforced, and, maybe, some funding for the arts. It is against radical change, and what change is called for ought to arise organically out of changes in society itself. “Cultural” conservatism arises in the nineteenth century, and I summarize the views of three preeminent cultural conservatives who also happened to be poets: Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot. Each of these saw the importance of cultural education, and an understanding of cultural heritage, as crucial to social harmony as well as the cultivation of the arts. Drawing these threads together, I list features of what conservatives might agree to as a guide to arts policy, including an appreciation of artistic tradition, recognition of standards of quality and excellence in the arts, a distinction between entertainment and art proper, say as proposed by R.G.  Collingwood, and a rejection of politicization of the arts, which only distracts and diminishes artists from their most valuable contribution to society (though one might see this list as being itself very political). The chapter concludes by noting that the problem of reconciling a liberal, democratic political order with the pursuit of perfectionism in policy remains unresolved. Chapter 7 concerns multiculturalism. The presence of different races, ethnicities, and cultures within a single nation tends to hamper the ability of governments to gain consensus on how to tax and spend. Where there is a majority culture, and one or a few minority cultures, those minorities can feel particularly vulnerable in terms of losing their distinct traditions and languages, either through gradual assimilation, or through active policies by the majority to discriminate or to suppress. The policy of multiculturalism can take a variety of forms, but in essence involves efforts by the state to recognize, respect, and support minority cultures, whether they have had a long presence in the country, or are relatively recent

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immigrants. Most of this book is about whether and how one could justify public spending on the arts, and in this chapter the analysis goes a little further, asking, within the context of different moral frameworks, whether a multicultural policy is justified. Not everyone would agree it is justified: has the world not become a global mix of offerings, allowing cultural omnivores to enjoy the fruits of every sort of creative expression, along with the technologies and higher incomes that make them widely accessible? And is this cosmopolitanism not good for individuals being able to shape, and question and revise, their sense of self and of what is valuable, and not be defined by the cultural boundaries of their upbringing? Chapter 8 goes back to why Keynes believed there ought to be an arts council, looking to his personal beliefs on what is ultimately good in life, and his hopes for the future (which could be thought of as the situation of the current generation). For him, beauty and contemplation are intrinsic goods, and a good life will involve taking the time to learn to properly appreciate them, and to put aside the drive for the acquisition of material wants. I propose two lessons from what we can gather from the material we have surveyed: one is a dilemma that must be faced squarely, the other is a caution in the practical aspects of arts funding, and the criteria that ought to guide it. Is it justified to use public funds to subsidize the Cleveland Orchestra, or a local theatre-in-the-park with free admission, or to give a “Culture Pass” to teenagers to spend on any goods they choose that sit under the umbrella of what is considered “culture”? If there were unanimity, or very close to it, among people as to whether it was worth giving any public funds to the arts, and agreement on how those funds would be best allocated (or even agreement that a panel of experts ought to be left to decide), then matters would be quite simple. What makes discussion of arts funding difficult is that people do not agree on how funds ought to be allocated, and they do not agree whether there should be any public funding at all. Advocates for public arts funding need to be able to make a coherent case for why it should exist even in the face of some people not supporting it, and their not believing they receive anything of value from the subsidized arts. I hope this book provides some perspective and contributes to the ongoing conversation concerning the proper role for the state in our cultural lives.

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References Banks, Mark, and Justin O’Connor. 2021. ‘A Plague Upon Your Howling’: Art and Culture in the Viral Emergency. Cultural Trends 30 (1): 3–18. Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Pursuit of the Ideal. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: John Murray. Cleveland Orchestra. 2020. 2019/2020 Annual Report. Cleveland: Cleveland Orchestra. Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. 2021. Grantmaking History by Organization. Cleveland: Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Horowitz, Joseph. 2005. Classical Music in America: A History. New York: Norton. King, Karen, and Mark Blaug. 1976. Does the Arts Council Know What It Is Doing? In The Economics of the Arts, ed. M.  Blaug, 101–125. London: Martin Robinson. National Endowment for the Arts. 2021. Winter Award Announcement for Fiscal Year 2021. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. New York Times. 2021. France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books. (July 28). Ohio Arts Council. 2020. Annual Report: Fiscal Year 2020. Columbus: Ohio Arts Council. Remler, Dahlia K. 2004. Poor Smokers, Poor Quitters, and Cigarette Tax Regressivity. American Journal of Public Health 94 (2): 225–229. Upchurch, Anna Rosser. 2016. The Origins of the Arts Council Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

The Economic Method

Economic analysis is a tool that can be used to evaluate public funding of the arts: when it would be valuable, and how it would be best allocated. It is but one way of thinking about the world, although it has become an especially powerful one in practice, for good or ill (Berman 2022). This chapter looks at how economists treat the question of public funding of the arts, the moral assumptions that underlie their methods, even if often unstated, and the implications of following the economic method for how funding should be allocated. Economic analysis is consequentialist: as the word suggests, it assesses policy initiatives, such as whether to increase arts funding, in terms of what the consequences would be, rather than in terms of rights and duties which might apply regardless of consequences. Further, and more restrictive, it is welfarist: the only consequences that matter are those that affect individuals’ well-being. There is no room for “art for art’s sake”; rather, welfarism restricts itself to “art for people’s sake.” Economic method is focused on individuals, that is, it uses a methodological individualism: it is individual well-being that matters, with the benefits of policy summed across all individuals, rather than any notion of a community of individuals which has its own social welfare greater than the sum of the individual parts. And economic method generally assumes, with some cautious

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exceptions that will be discussed later in the chapter, consumer sovereignty: individuals are their own best judge of what constitutes an improvement in their well-being, and of what constitutes a preferred choice. In this chapter I first outline the economic case for public funding as it is typically presented in handbooks and textbooks on cultural policy, and then turn to the implications. For the most part this chapter will focus on the efficiency rationale for public funding for the arts, or how arts policy could improve aggregate welfare, rather than considerations of equality, which are discussed in depth in Chap. 4.

The Power of Markets Economists approach the subject of public economics—the analysis of government taxation, spending, and regulation—from what might seem to be a surprising direction. Specifically, they begin by considering a world in which the government is rather superfluous. In short, the first theorem of welfare economics holds that if markets are competitive, and there is a complete set of markets, then the equilibrium outcome of the market process will be efficient, requiring no government intervention. This needs some unpacking. By competitive we mean that in each market there are many buyers and many sellers, each of whom is well-informed about prices and the goods and services on offer, and each of whom can enter or leave the market as they prefer, and no single buyer or seller is so large with respect to the other traders that she has the power to influence market prices. By complete set of markets we mean that every good that affects our well-­ being has a market price and is tradeable (we will see below that this is an important consideration for arts funding). By equilibrium we mean the set of prices, and purchases and sales, to which markets will tend, at which no person, given the set of prices, has any incentive to change what they buy or sell. And by efficient we mean that there is no conceivable rearrangement of markets that could make at least some people better off without at the same time making at least some people worse off. This particular way of conceiving efficiency is known as Pareto efficiency. A change in arrangements which does make some better off while leaving no one worse off is known as a Pareto improvement. The claim of the first theorem is a limited one. Market failures, either through lack of competition, lack of complete information, or simply the

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lack of a market at all, are commonplace in the real world. And a Pareto efficient outcome could be one with tremendous inequality of welfare. And yet at the same time the result is astonishing. Buyers and sellers, out and about pursuing their own interests (which need not be selfish ones), without any authority ordering them to buy more of this and less of that, to grow more rye and less wheat, are led as if by an invisible hand to generate an outcome that is efficient. If in my town of Bloomington the equilibrium competitive price for a basic haircut is $24, and about 21,000 haircuts are sold each month, there is no good reason for the state to question that outcome, to mandate a different price, or to say that the haircuts ought to have gone to others rather than to the people that actually bought them. In fact, as Hayek (1945) made clear, this decentralized method of markets is the only way to reach such an efficient outcome, since there is no way a centrally planned economy could possibly accumulate, update, and process all the necessary information about consumer and supplier preferences in haircuts, as well as the ever-changing conditions in every other market. How does this world of buyers and sellers lead to an efficient outcome? Let’s stay with the example of haircuts. The number of haircuts per month that, in aggregate, people will want to purchase depends on the market price. With a higher price, at least some people (it doesn’t need to be everybody) will wait longer between professional haircuts, or might even switch to just cutting their own hair at home. If the equilibrium price is $24, then while some buyers would have been willing to pay more than this (we call the difference between what a person would have been willing to pay and what they actually pay consumer surplus), there are buyers who are just on the margin, who find it worth paying $24 but no more. On the supply side, openings for haircuts are also a function of the market price: the higher the price, the more openings a barber will be willing to schedule, and the more people will decide to open a barber shop. If the equilibrium price is $24, then for most haircuts this is a good exchange for the barber; some might be willing to cut hair even if the price is only $20, but they are able to charge $24. But at the margin, there are some openings that are just barely worth it, and if the price were only $23.90 the barber would not stay open quite so many hours. If we put the two sides of the market together, it means that at equilibrium, the value of a haircut to the marginal buyer is exactly equal to the cost of providing the cut to the marginal seller, with each of these being equal to price. But in any optimization problem, we want a level of activity to the point where marginal

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benefits equal marginal costs, but no further. If Bloomington, owing to some external constraint, were unable to provide the equilibrium 21,000 haircuts per month—say the government imposes a quota of just 15,000 cuts—then some people will wish they could get a cut, and be willing to pay a price that some seller would happily accept, yet the mutually beneficial transaction is prohibited. That’s not Pareto efficient, since by allowing the number of cuts to rise to the competitive equilibrium there are buyers and sellers who would mutually gain. Likewise, having more than 21,000 haircuts per month does not make sense, since that would take us to a level where the value of the cut to the marginal buyer is less than what the seller is required to receive. At equilibrium in a competitive market, the marginal value of the good or service to buyers is just equal to the marginal cost to sellers of providing the good or service, and any departure from this outcome will make at least some people worse off.

The Arts and Market Failure: Public Goods So why subsidize the arts? Aren’t there markets for concerts and films and paintings? For economists, the standard story is that there are market failures, mainly of two types. The first is what we call public goods. Economists have a very particular way of defining this: it means goods that are (1) non-rival—once provided to the public, any extra users do not diminish the benefits to anyone else enjoying the good, and (2) non-exclusive—once provided to the public, there is no practical way to keep people from enjoying the good, no feasible way to set up gates and a ticket booth. Public art generally fits this bill—sculptures and murals and other installations. My pausing to enjoy an outdoor work doesn’t block anyone else from doing the same at the same time, and it would be impractical to try to sell tickets to see the work. We could also add non-commercial public broadcast radio to the list of public goods, as it is non-rival and non-exclusive. (Non-arts examples of public goods would be national defense, city streets and streetlights and sidewalks, small urban parks, etc.) Markets do not work well for public goods, since these goods entail a cost—for public art, this would include the space taken up by the work, the creation of the work itself, for which the artist must be compensated, and upkeep and maintenance—but since they are non-exclusive there is no easy way for the supplier to collect revenue. And yet it might well be the

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case that an addition to a town’s collection of public art is worth more to people, in aggregate, than what it would cost to provide the addition. As an exception to the general rule, we can think of cases where a public good can be financed privately without any problem. Consider three roommates sharing an apartment, and the microwave oven has reached the end of its useful life. All three roommates use the microwave, and they could (one hopes!) arrange to each contribute to the cost of purchasing a new one. If the microwave is worth buying at all, it must be that the sum of the benefits to the roommates exceeds the cost. If one of the roommates rarely uses the microwave, relative to the other two, it might be that she is willing to contribute 10 percent of the price while the other two are each willing to pay 45 percent. If the benefits of the new microwave exceed the cost, there must be some possible allocation of the cost that leaves no one feeling worse off; in other words, a Pareto improvement. Finding an allocation of costs to fund public goods so that no one is worse off is going to become exponentially, impossibly high as we move from three roommates to the entire population of a city. The breaking point will be when the costs of getting all affected parties together and negotiating an arrangement become impracticably high. In larger groups, beyond one’s roommates and friends, beyond one’s social club or house of worship, people can be less than forthcoming about the benefits they would receive from a public good, hoping to “free ride” on others who would step forward to offer to pay for it. And so public goods at the local, provincial, and national levels are funded from tax revenues. Funding public goods, such as public art, thus has the problem that even if it is estimated that the total benefits from expanding the city’s collection of public art, which would be the sum of the benefits at the margin to each individual, exceeds the cost of the additions, some people will be made worse off—they have no interest in the art, might even find it an eyesore, and yet are paying taxes to fund it. Rushton (2003) (drawing on Atkinson and Stiglitz (1980)) finds that the more people diverge in their preferences for public spending on the arts, the more likely we will have at least some of the population feeling worse off (just as the more consensus there is on public spending on a budget item, the more likely something close to an actual Pareto improvement is possible). Note that the test for the funding of public goods—that the sum across all individuals of benefits from the good at the margin exceeds the cost at the margin of providing it—takes consumer preferences as given (discussed further below). And it assumes that the value of a public good can

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be expressed purely and exclusively as the sum of the benefits to individuals (we will shine particular light on this conception of public goods in Chap. 5 on Communitarianism). And it is here that we come to a position taken by the economic method and cost-benefit analysis with very important moral implications: so long as the sum of benefits from a public good, or any other public spending or regulatory policy, exceeds its cost, it is justified, on the grounds that, mathematically, those who experience a net gain from the spending could, in principle, compensate those who experience a net loss in such a way that no one is left worse off. Importantly, the compensation need not actually take place; what matters is that it would, although perhaps very impracticably, be possible. This is known as a Potential Pareto Improvement, also as the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, after the economists who proposed it (Kaldor 1939; Hicks 1939); it is a foundation of contemporary cost-benefit analysis (see Sugden and Williams (1978) for example; also see Harberger (1971) for a defense of the method). It is a method that puts questions of equitable distribution to one side. This doesn’t mean that a policymaker would necessarily approve a policy that passed the Kaldor-Hicks cost-­ benefit test even though low-income people were most harmed and high-­ income people received the lion’s share of the benefits. But the distributional considerations would be separate from the basic framework for evaluating spending on public goods (or, as we see below, subsidizing positive externalities). The Kaldor-Hicks criterion can be defended as follows, taking the example from Kaldor (1939): the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846, freeing trade in grain. From this change in policy, landlords suffered a loss, and other manufacturers and consumers gained. Can we say that in aggregate welfare improved? Economists can estimate the changes in incomes resulting from a policy change, and in this case aggregate income certainly rose. But economics gives no guidance on aggregate welfare, because it is unknowable how much the loss in income to landlords cost them in terms of well-being; we cannot compare well-being across individuals, I cannot compare my happiness to yours. All we can observe are changes in income. But, Kaldor points out, we can say that since national income rose as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws, it is at least possible that those who gained monetarily from the change could compensate the landlords for their loss such that after the transfers nobody suffered a loss, and at least some people gained; that is, there is a Potential Pareto Improvement. Whether such compensation should be paid is a separate

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question, and beyond the expertise of economics—it falls to morals and politics. Using the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to evaluate a policy change is not a matter of economists saying the distribution of gains and losses does not matter. It is, rather, economists saying that the ethics of distribution is a question that goes beyond what economists can do within the economic method. If a new work of public art would cost five dollars in extra taxes from each resident, and some people would value the new art at more than five dollars, and some would value it less, but the total value placed upon it would exceed the total cost, then cost-benefit analysis, using the Kaldor-­ Hicks criterion, would advise going forward with the project. In essence, it values monetary gains and losses as if the circumstances of the winners and losers did not matter; a gain worth one dollar to Abdul is valued as equivalent to a gain worth one dollar to Benjamin, regardless of Abdul and Benjamin’s relative income or welfare. Note that the effects of arts policy on the overall distribution of income in practice are going to be slight. The distribution of income is far more dependent upon other policies: the tax and transfer system, the provision of health insurance and public education, the bargaining power of labor, competition policy restricting the formation of powerful monopolies and cartels, and macroeconomic policies that contribute to stable long-term economic growth. Is this defense of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion adequate? Scitovsky (1941) draws attention to the implicit, unstated assumption behind the analysis that the distribution of income prior to the policy change is already at a desired level, achieved through various taxes and transfers that influence distribution: For instance, it might be argued that the abolition of the Corn Laws should not have been advocated by economists in their capacity of pure economists without advocating at the same time the full compensation of landowners out of taxes levied on those favoured by the cheapening of corn. Yet, in a sense, and regarded from a long-run point of view, such propositions are not independent of value judgments between alternative income distributions either. For, going out of their way to preserve the existing distribution of income, they imply a preference for the status quo. (p. 79)

That said, Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) show that if we have something of an optimal income tax and transfer system in place, optimal in the sense

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of balancing efficiency concerns with a judgment on how to weigh varying levels of income when calculating social welfare, then the Kaldor-Hicks criterion can be justified; with an optimal tax system, we have already solved the problem of an additional dollar to one person being of equivalent value to an additional dollar to another person. This suggests that the more we believe the actual tax and transfer system in play departs from an optimal one, the more cautious one would need to be in applying the Kaldor-Hicks criterion.

The Arts and Market Failure: Externalities For the most part arts councils do not provide much funding for the economist’s conception of public goods. Concerts, film screenings, museums, are all exclusive, it being possible, and common, to charge for admission, and to restrict from entering those who will not pay. When it comes to public subsidy for the arts, economists have tended to focus on externalities. An externality occurs when activities of firms or consumers affect third parties in a beneficial or harmful way, and where there is no market or transaction in those third-party benefits or costs. In other words, the effect is external to the price system. These effects are also known as “spillovers.” In arts policy, the claim has long been made in the field of cultural economics that there are possibly positive (i.e., beneficial) externalities from the arts, and this would warrant some form of subsidy. Why a subsidy? Ordinary competitive markets are good at producing an efficient level of output, one that brings into equality the marginal benefits to consumers and the marginal costs to suppliers. With an externality, however, there are benefits (for positive externalities) or costs (for negative externalities) that are ignored by the market participants, who are simply seeking the best outcome for their own interests. With positive externalities, the social benefits at the margin for the good, which involve the benefits to consumers as well as the external benefits, are greater than the private benefits to actual consumers of the good, meaning from a social perspective we would ideally like output to be higher than what the market will yield. A subsidy, which could take the form of subsidies to producers of the good (in the arts, grants to artists and/or arts presenters) or to consumers (say in the form of “vouchers” for the arts that could be redeemed by consumers for eligible arts-related purchases, an example being the French Culture Pass discussed in Chap. 1), is meant to increase

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the production and consumption of the arts. It is important that the subsidy actually do something in terms of increasing the activity which is presumed to generate the externality; a grant to an orchestra that is mostly wasted on unnecessary internal expenditures, and that does not affect the artistic output of the orchestra in any way, is pointless, as it is not fulfilling the purpose of the subsidy. But first, it is important to be clear on what is, and what is not, an externality. The third-party effects must be external to the price system. So, to take an example suggested by Cheung (1973), the fact that apple growers benefit from bees pollinating their crop does not in itself suggest a positive externality from beekeepers to apple growers, as a quick internet search in any region where apples are grown will reveal that in fact markets do exist for this service, and beekeepers will locate hives in one’s orchard for a price; there is no rationale on these grounds for any sort of subsidy to beekeepers. With externalities, the key is that it is difficult to design a market. Ronald Coase (1960), in what became known as the Coase theorem, showed that as long as property rights were clear—who owns what, who is liable or not for damages—and transaction costs, being, as the name suggests, the costs of drawing up a contract, negotiating prices, monitoring the contracted performance, and all the other costs of engaging in a market transaction, are low, then the relevant parties would be able to come to an efficient arrangement of contracts and prices. Coase’s point was not that the market would solve any and every externality problem. Rather, it was that the core of the problem is transaction costs, just as it is for the market failure of public goods. One confusion that has arisen around externalities and the arts has to do with the distinction between the “intrinsic benefits” of the arts and “instrumental benefits” of the arts. Suppose I attended a live theatre performance. I enjoyed the play: it was well-written and well-acted, had many memorable scenes, and left me thinking about what I had seen well after I left the theatre. These have been called intrinsic benefits. But there were other things I liked. I had the chance to chat with other audience members, some of whom I knew but had not seen for some time, and it pleased me to reconnect. One of the people I met let me know about a job opportunity that had just come open that might be ideal for me; I never would have learned about this had I not gone to the play. I’ve been advised that I ought to get out more, that it is not good for me to spend so many nights at home. These are “instrumental benefits,” benefits to me that

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were not strictly related to the work of art that I experienced, but were simply a function of “a night out at the theatre.” But none of these instrumental benefits are externalities, since they are all benefits to me. There are no third-party effects. What happened was that the benefits of going to the theatre took many forms. But they did not benefit third parties at all. The intrinsic / instrumental divide does not give us much to work with when it comes to public subsidy; much more to the point is whether the benefits of my going to the theatre all accrue to me, or whether there are others that are affected. An economic factor in the cultural sector, particularly (but not exclusively) in the live performing arts, is “cost disease” (Baumol and Bowen 1965). Neither does this constitute an externality. Cost disease is the phenomenon of different sectors of the economy having different abilities over time to adopt labor-saving technological advances. The average rate of productivity increase across the economy determines the growth in wages, and wage differentials across sectors for workers of roughly equivalent levels of skills and training cannot become too high, for if they did all workers would leave low-wage sectors for where the pay is better. This means that over time the relative costs of producing goods and services where labor-saving technology rates have been high will fall, and the relative costs of producing goods and services where labor-saving technology rates have been low will rise. Examples of the latter would be education (one schoolteacher can have only a limited number of students in the classroom at one time, and the students can only learn so much at a time), many aspects of health care (there have been major technological advances in health care, to be sure, but there is a human element to care from doctors and nurses that cannot be replaced by technology), and the live performing arts. Manufactured goods, information and communication technology, transportation of goods and people, agricultural goods, have all had relative cost and price declines over the decades. Services that require a certain amount of person-hours of labor at a more or less constant rate—classroom instruction, haircuts, personal counseling, performances of Twelfth Night—have all become relatively more expensive. Recorded arts have generally fallen in price, in terms of the costs of obtaining recordings and the cost of good-quality equipment on which to play it. Live performance is a different thing. But this is not an externality; there are no third-party effects lacking a functioning market. It does mean that some arts presenters are going to face challenges in balancing their budgets over the long term, but that is going to be true of any firm

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providing personal services. The relative price of my getting a haircut has risen faster than other prices over the decades, but that is not in itself grounds for subsidizing the hair-styling sector. Note that “cost disease” is an odd term, since it implies something has gone wrong. But it is a result of the economy becoming richer, not poorer, a function of rising wages across the economy. Finally, so-called economic impacts are not an externality, even though they are endlessly, and to me incomprehensibly, promoted as a rationale for public support of the arts. An “economic impact” study begins by calculating the total spending on a particular good, for example the entire creative sector, or perhaps just non-profit arts organizations, for a particular city or region. It then uses input-output tables to generate estimates of how the incomes generated by that arts spending were subsequently spent by its recipients. That next round of spending becomes income for yet another group, and so on. Each round has a diminishing magnitude, resulting from people saving some of their income, and some spending being on imported goods. All these rounds of spending are called “indirect” effects, and when added to the original spending are called the total “economic impact.” But there is no externality or other market failure in play here; this is simply a sum of different market transactions, one that we could calculate for any sector. One of the odd things about the use of the studies in advocacy for public spending on the arts is that rather than making a claim that the arts are different from other goods, it presents the arts as just another sector, no different from restaurants, accounting services, or barbershops. No economist takes these studies very seriously, and so we move on. So what are the possible externalities from the arts? Here I draw from common suggestions of texts in cultural economics, including Cowen (2006), Frey (2000), Heilbrun and Gray (2001), Netzer (1978), O’Hagan (1998), Throsby (2001, 2010), and Towse (2010). Peacock (1969) is an early analytical piece on arts externalities. It is helpful here to separate externalities from funding individual artists and externalities from funding arts presenters, like festivals, performing arts companies, galleries, and the like. For individual artists, there are two principal market failures. The first is in investment in human capital. A young person wishing to pursue a career in the arts needs time and guidance in building skills and an artistic vision. The hoped-for return from this investment in human capital are the rewards that come from working as an artist. But financing human capital

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investment is very different from financing investment in physical capital; one cannot borrow against highly uncertain future earnings. A young person can more easily acquire financing for a car than a year at art school, since the finance company will insist the car is insured against damage, and the car can be repossessed should the borrower fail to repay the loan. Personal investment in printmaking or cello technique cannot be repossessed in such a manner. This is why governments almost universally subsidize higher education and training: private capital markets do not work efficiently when it comes to investments in persons. Note this is true for all skilled professions, and is an argument for subsidizing the education of future financial advisors and arc welders as well as painters and musicians. The building of an artistic career requires years beyond the conservatory, and so support for artists trying to become established post-graduation can also be justified on the grounds of it being very difficult to finance in the market. The second market failure involving individual artists is in the realm of intellectual property. Copyright gives the opportunity for artists to earn a return on their investments in creating their works. But copyright only protects specific expressions of an idea or inspiration—the text of a novel; the lyrics and musical phrases of a song—but does not protect a new style of writing fiction, or songs, or painting, new styles that can inspire other artists (and commercial firms) in their own art and design. Innovative artists create works which are only to a degree covered by copyright, but also contain elements of what immediately becomes a public good. Firms investing in research and development have a similar issue; patents protect specific aspects of design, but not the new ideas they spur in other firms. So, just as many governments subsidize firm spending on research and development through various tax expenditures, so there is a case for subsidizing new creative ideas in the arts. There is an important point to be made here, sometimes lost in policy discussions: the goal of subsidies to individual artists, whether they are starting out or experienced, is to ultimately increase the amount and/or quality of art produced for the benefit of the public that consumes and experiences it. Artists receive the funds, market failures are corrected through granting them funds, but the goal is not to have a transfer program to artists for their benefit alone. From Adam Smith, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it

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would be absurd to attempt to prove it” (Smith 1981/1776, p. 660). For example, if we take the recently (2022) enacted pilot program, Basic Income for the Arts, in Ireland, which provides to working artists, selected by lottery, a grant of 325 Euros per week (of taxable income), the policy goal, for an economist, would be that Ireland has more and better art for its people to enjoy, correcting for the market underproduction considering the positive externalities from the arts. Artists will undoubtedly be pleased to be selected for the program. But that would be true for any sort of worker selected to receive such an income supplement, and cannot be the rationale for the program; why not a similar grant for hair stylists or physio therapists? The purpose of grants to artists is, in the end, art for consumers, not the happiness of artists. I now turn to arts presenters, and the possibilities for positive externalities. First, there might be in some individuals a sense of regional or national pride in its arts presenters and their traditions and renown, that exists even if they do not themselves attend (remember, a person who does attend the theatre and enjoys it for a variety of reasons, including some reasons not directly associated with the experience of the art, does not in itself constitute an externality, which relies on benefits from other people attending). Although this possibility is commonly mentioned in cultural economics textbooks, the evidence for the externality, particularly in the subsidized arts sector, is not immediately obvious. Second, it might be that people believe that society is made better by people participating in the arts, that literature, theatre, music, and visual art aid in mutual understanding and empathy between individuals, and this makes life better for all, even those who do not directly participate themselves. Evidence on this question is mixed: there do seem to be correlations between measures of empathy and the reading of literature, but we cannot tell if people who are generally empathetic to begin with are drawn to literature, or if reading literature is a cause of the empathy. Carey (2006) believes that literature alone has the ability to enable this sort of perspective-taking, while it is very difficult to see how other arts have this capability; see Rushton (2017) for a review of this literature. We also have to be wary of believing in positive externalities from art in terms of community and empathy without recognizing there might be art which has the opposite effect, reinforcing biases toward others rather than ameliorating them (Goffin and Friend 2022). Third, there is concern for future generations, and concern for our future selves. “Option demand” is the idea that one benefits from others

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attending the ballet, for example, even if not attending oneself, on the grounds of wanting the art form, and the presenting organization, to survive into the future so that the option of one day being able to attend will be preserved. Preserving the arts for future generations is a topic that will recur in this book—see Chap. 3 on liberalism and Chap. 6 on conservatism—and here I will focus on the economic approach. Arts conservation is an externality if one gets personal satisfaction, even if not attending the arts, that it is being preserved for the future. Scheffler (2018) asks us to consider the world depicted in P.D. James’s (1992) novel The Children of Men, in which the entire human population of the earth has become infertile, and is gradually dying off; at the time the novel is set the youngest humans are in their late teens. The England she portrays is a melancholy place, to say the least, where people can listen to a record, or view a painting, knowing that in a few years’ time there will be no one left to enjoy that music or painting, it will have come to an end. A part of the value we place on art is that it will last for generations yet to be born, whom we will never know. There is also the question of our obligations to future generations. Welfare economics, and the utilitarian tradition generally, has held that it is wrong to discount the well-being of future generations as being of lesser importance that the well-being of the current generation. We discount our own personal consumption, in preferring goods now to goods later, and we might take account of the likely probability that future generations will be materially richer than this generation, through ongoing improvements in productivity. But future well-being still matters as much as our own. This moral claim is in the seminal work on saving and investment for the future (Ramsey 1928), through Parfit (1984), and in contemporary work on the economics of climate change: “there is no serious ethical argument in favour of pure-time discounting” (Stern 2022, p. 1279).

Contingent Valuation The arts have a positive externality not because cultural economists have thought of plausible ways in which they might, but because individuals actually place a value on these external effects, just as they do for public goods. The value of public art and arts externalities, if any, are in the eye of the beholder. But how could that value be measured? The problem to be overcome is that there are no market prices to guide us in calculating how the public values government spending on the arts.

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I can learn, at the margin, how consumers value haircuts, blueberries, and hats, simply by looking at market prices; the data sits right in front of us. For some public goods, there are no direct market prices to see, but there are related prices that can give us some indications. For example, if the government department of transportation is looking at spending on an upgrade to a highway, and wondering whether the expenditure would be worthwhile, it can obtain estimates of how many people typically use the existing road, and relevant alternative routes, how much driving time each driver would save with an improved road, and, based on wage levels, how much people value time, how much safer the new road would be, and based on other markets how much people tend to value safety improvements, and so on. But how would one measure the value of new sculptural works to be placed along the city’s main bicycle path, or of the external benefits that come from the local orchestra? Contingent valuation is a method of opinion polling in which a representative sample of the population is asked: what if there were a market for public art, and externalities from the arts? What would be your willingness-­ to-­pay for these goods? The central difficulty with the method is that people are being asked a question of valuation that they almost certainly have never considered before. I shop at the grocery store a few days a week and have long observed how prices in the fruits and vegetables section fluctuate week to week, season to season, and am very used to making judgments over whether a particular good is worth buying this week, or that its current price is too high, such that I should seek out a substitute. I am used to market prices for ordinary goods and make purchases accordingly. Even in the arts, I am used to making judgments on prices: is this play, this used vinyl record, this art book, worth buying or not? But I don’t think about the personal monetary value of public goods or externalities because I never have to make decisions about them. The contingent valuation survey taker is asking me something very new, whether how much I value the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen (Hansen 1997), or a Scandinavian music festival (Andersson et al. 2012), or libraries in England (Fujiwara et al. 2019). Contingent valuation has stirred an extensive literature (especially in the field of environmental policy, where it was first applied; valuation of the natural environment and the cultural environment have a lot of issues in common) on best practices and on whether the difficulties in getting accurate information from respondents are simply insurmountable; see Diamond and Hausman (1994), Carson (2012), and Hausman (2012).

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These practical issues are important, but the primary interest here is the concept: that the values people place on public goods and externalities are to be found through the thought experiment of imagining a market where none currently exists and invoking the principle of consumer sovereignty in that imaginary market. Responses to the survey are taken as data, and there are no ”correct” answers as to whether someone who does not use public libraries in England values them at 5, 20, or 40 pounds.

Merit Goods The economic approach to public goods and externalities takes consumer preferences as given; the preferences are assumed to be “rational,” which here has the narrow definition of consistency (if I prefer the blue tie to the red tie, and prefer the red tie to the green tie, rationality means I must therefore prefer the blue tie to the green tie, but does not imply much else), and does not question the ends for which the consumer makes choices. Economics also works on the assumption that individuals are the best judge of their own interests, and so does not question what choices are made, again so long as they are consistent. There are a few angles from which we could question this working assumption. The first is the recognition that people might make efforts to change their own preferences. The second is that there might be levels of preferences, where whatever we might decide to do on impulse, we would see in the cool calm of reason is not actually in our best interests. The third is that people might make decisions against their own best interests even when they have had time to reflect. And a fourth is that we might have preferences over community outcomes that are entirely separate from our personal interests. We look at each of these in turn. People often take actions to change their own preferences. Suppose there is a genre of art that you really have never quite understood, and yet you know that there are many people who are knowledgeable about it and seem to get a great deal of satisfaction out of it. I grew up in a household that was relatively rich in music, but where no one knew much about or was very involved in visual art. As an adult, I took it upon myself to read about it, attend gallery openings, and make a point of going to museums when I visited cities, in order to understand better the history and contemporary state of visual art, and in turn have something new in my life that was enjoyable and stimulating. I also made a point of trying to see classic films, in the hope of being able to get a deeper pleasure out of

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watching great movies. In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1989/1910) Leonard Bast hopes that enough exposure to high culture will lift him to a new plane of understanding. Reading John Ruskin, “he felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe” (p. 62). Economists, maybe not surprisingly, have formalized this notion. Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy’s (1988) theory of “rational addiction” supposes that an individual gets pleasure from ordinary goods, and also some goods where the pleasure received from them depends on her history of consumption of it. Knowing this, she might begin to consume a good, say opera, even if it doesn’t immediately yield a lot of pleasure, on the expectation that eventually it will, and the future pleasure will be more than worth the initial cost of sometimes being befuddled or bored by what is happening on stage. People who have done long-distance running for many years will advise someone just getting started that at first it is hard to feel motivated, that one might be tempted just to stay in if feeling tired, or the weather is inclement, but that eventually what you want will change, and that you become addicted to your daily run. Everybody is different, and so will perceive the beneficial possibilities of various possible addictions (and note their paper is mostly, though not exclusively, addressed to harmful addictions) differently. People who do not heavily discount future benefits are more likely to try to develop a beneficial addiction (and less likely to cultivate a destructive one). Importantly, there is, at least to this point, no market failure, no opportunity for beneficial government intervention. Mr. Bast can simply go on reading his Ruskin and listening to Beethoven at Queen’s Hall. Now consider that we might have different levels of preferences, that people make some decisions on impulse, or through a habitual short-cut in reasoning, that is at odds with what they themselves would recognize as their best interests. We procrastinate on tasks to a degree that makes us worse off than if we had simply got the task done when it was presented to us (for academics, grading papers is a familiar example). We choose default options on complicated transactions without looking closely at what our actual best option would be. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1962) writes that a man can be unjust toward himself by allowing the irrational part of his soul to frustrate the desires of the rational part, and (echoing Plato) the rational needs to rule over the irrational within us just as the ruler of a state must govern the ruled (1138b). Economists have

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long recognized that we have different levels of preferences (see Pigou (1938), for example), but the question has remained what if anything ought to be done about it. The field of behavioral economics represents an effort to incorporate various aspects of that “irrational part of our soul” into the field of economics, to better understand why people make the choices they do, and perhaps to find public policies that improve our well-being. Thaler and Sunstein’s (2003) paper on “libertarian paternalism” led to their book of recommendations Nudge (2009), where “nudges” have now entered the policy lexicon. Does the term “libertarian paternalism” make sense? Suppose we define “paternalism” (following Le Grand and New (2015)) as a government intervention to address individual failures of judgment, for the individual’s own good. A “libertarian paternalism” would not force individuals to make a particular choice, or pay them subsidies to do so (or to tax them to steer them away from particular choices), but would simply design the architecture around which we make choices to favor what most individuals would agree is in their long-run interest. So, for example, people have a tendency to assent to what is presented as the status quo option. If people agree that saving adequately for one’s retirement is a sensible thing to do, then companies that make enrollment in the company pension plan the status quo option for new employees, though where they retain the right to opt out, is a superior design to a company that requires new employees to opt in to the pension plan. A cafeteria that puts healthier food options at the front of the line, and puts desserts at a separate table, will induce people to choose a better lunch, while still allowing people to pick from the offerings whatever they want. State regulations that enforce a “cooling off” period for major financial and legal transactions also serve to lead people to better choices without actually restricting their choices. It is important to note that these “nudges” are meant to steer people toward choices they would agree are in their best interests, but might not choose under different choice architectures. Nudges are not about getting people to do what they would not choose under careful reflection. They do go somewhat further than simply providing information—a sign put up by park authorities that a particular trail is so infested with ticks that hiking is not recommended is useful information, since most hikers might not realize this, but it is neither paternalism nor a nudge (once in southern Indiana I chose to ignore this warning, as I was free to do, and came to regret it).

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Are there implications for cultural policy? These nudges are not about externalities; they are concerned with individuals’ personal well-being. Coate and Hoffmann (2022) provide a review of the possible implications of the findings of behavioral economics for the field of cultural economics, but the policy implications remain unclear. The key problem is: to what decisions do we think people ought to be nudged? Proper retirement planning and a healthy diet are uncontroversial goods that most everybody’s rational self would agree to. But what does the rational self want regarding the arts that the irrational self will thwart? Rational, positive addictions are more likely to be developed when we have a low rate of discounting future benefits, and one aspect of our irrational self can be a tendency to adopt discount rates higher than we rationally know make sense. So maybe we could nudge people toward developing rational addictions to the arts. But what art, exactly? How could people be nudged in this direction without an explicit paternalism that holds this art form is difficult and takes time to appreciate but is worth it in the end, and continuing to wallow in that art form, popular and catchy, will in the long run fail to generate the same pleasures? The arts are more difficult than decisions over savings and health, where the ends are much clearer. Next consider a third possible departure from standard economic analysis, that even with deliberation and full information people make decisions that are contrary to what is truly in their best interest. Richard Musgrave (1959) introduced into his work on public economics the concept of “merit wants” (also known as “merit goods”). He was looking at goods supplied by the market, but which were so “meritorious” that they warranted public subsidy to increase production and consumption beyond what the market would provide. He was careful to distinguish merit wants from externalities (which would also warrant subsidy, although for different reasons), and claimed that “the satisfaction of merit wants, by its very nature, involves interference with consumer sovereignty” (p.  13). He went on: “A position of extreme individualism could demand that all merit wants be disallowed, but this is not a sensible view“ (p. 13). He advocates paternalism over some goods, recognizing that this might be subject to abuse by an authoritarian state, but which could be permissible in a democratic society. While consumer sovereignty is the general rule, situations may arise, within the context of a democratic community, where an informed group is justified in imposing its decision upon others. … The advantages of education

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are more evident to the informed than the uninformed. … In the modern economy, the consumer is subject to advertising, screaming at him through the media of mass communication and designed to sway his choice rather than give complete information. Thus, there may arise a distortion in the preference structure that needs to be counteracted. The ideal of consumer sovereignty and the reality of consumer choice in high-pressure markets may be quite different things. (p. 14)

Musgrave (1959) does not specifically mention the arts in his discussion of merit wants. Revisiting the topic almost 30 years later, Musgrave (1987) tries to set out more details on what merit goods could be. He notes that many policies we see are in fact paternalistic. In the United States, aid to poor families with children is partly through “food stamps,” which are income supplements that not only must be spent on food, but on particular sorts of eligible “appropriate” foods (note that libertarian Milton Friedman (1962) opposed this, saying that if we wish to help the poor by increasing their purchasing power, a cash transfer is called for, and the poor ought to be as trusted as anyone to make their own spending decisions; we return to this topic in Chap. 4, on equality). There is a call for treating the arts as a merit good (although he does not use the term), from Tibor Scitovsky (1972): “The only valid argument for government aid to the arts is that it is a means of educating the public’s taste and that the public would benefit from a more educated taste” (p. 68). The field of public economics never really “took” to this paternalistic idea (although the very “soft” paternalism (Kirchgässner 2017) of nudges has been at least slightly better received). Musgrave claims paternalistic interventions can be justified in a democratic society, but democracies are very imperfect vehicles, subject to all manner of irrationalities in public voting, in legislation, and in bureaucracy. Who decides how the public’s taste ought to be changed? Scitovsky was explicit: Americans ought to listen to more classical music. But how can that be justified without stepping far beyond the bounds of economic analysis? (We return to this question in Chap. 6 on conservative arts policy.) Finally, a consideration of an aspect of merit goods that Musgrave introduced in his (1987) New Palgrave entry, that of “community preferences.” These are also called “ethical preferences” by Harsanyi (1955) and in Head’s (1991) review of the literature on merit goods, and “commitment” by Amartya Sen (1977). Suppose I don’t really have much interest in attending the symphony, but I do support government grants to it.

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Why might I do that? One possible reason is externalities; I might feel benefits from the existence of the symphony and people attending it, even if I do not attend myself. But suppose I don’t sense any externalities, I don’t feel in any way affected by symphony concerts that other people attend, and yet regardless I believe it is the right thing for the government to support the symphony. It is important for the well-being of others that there is live classical music beyond what the market alone could support, that it may be especially important to a small number of people, that it is an obligation to preserve classical music for future generations, and that in a fair and just world this is something that ought to be funded. There is a cost to me in terms of my taxes being used to fund this, and no “egoistic” benefits to me (as there are with externalities), but it is something I want to see happen. It is not uncommon for us to make choices out of a sense of duty than out of personal benefit; for example, we take on the cost of voting in elections even when the chance of our ballot determining the outcome of the vote is vanishingly small. Textbooks on cultural economics frequently raise the preservation of the arts for future generations as an externality. It certainly does rank as a reason for subsidy, but it would seem to arise from “ethical preferences” rather than direct gains to personal welfare. It is difficult to disentangle externalities from ethical preferences. As West (1991) notes in his commentary on Head (1991), when he surveyed people about public funding for the arts (West 1985) there was at least some support for arts funding even by people who never attended the subsidized arts, though whether this was from personal benefits through externalities or rather through a sense that it is simply the right thing for government to do is hard to determine. Reflecting ethical preferences in public funding is not paternalistic at all, it is reflecting the preferences of voters. But the question of how to recognize where this is the case, or what levels of arts funding would be appropriate given all the various alternative uses of funds, remains a challenge.

Implications for Public Funding of the Arts Consider the following thought experiment: suppose, contrary to what critics believed would ever be possible, all of the problems that beset contingent valuation estimates were solved, so that we could ascertain with a great deal of certainty how members of the public, on careful

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consideration, truly value public art, and the external benefits of people other than themselves attending the arts. Should those estimates guide the allocation of public funds to the arts? To answer “yes” to this question, one would be accepting the following foundations of economic analysis: • That any arts spending should be judged on its consequences for individual welfare, and only for individual welfare; • That individuals are the best, indeed the only, judges of their own welfare; • That individual preferences regarding arts policy are taken as given, and while people might themselves choose to engage in activities that will change their preferences, it is not up to the state to do this, or to rank particular tastes as being better than others; • That the benefits to people from arts spending are represented by their willingness-to-pay for it through higher taxes, and that spending is worthwhile only if at the margin the benefits across all individuals exceed the costs of the arts subsidy; • That some people will almost certainly be made worse off by arts spending policies, being taxed more than they believe the spending is worth, but that is an acceptable outcome so long as aggregate willingness-to-pay exceeds the costs of the arts spending; • That how subsidies are allocated is to be guided by the preferences of the public in terms of what they believe is worth spending money on; the value of positive externalities is what the public thinks it is. Specific allocations from an arts council could still be determined through a traditional peer review, arm’s length process. But the criteria to be used in review depends on what the public actually values. It might seem surprising to see arts policy framed in this way, although it is the standard set of assumptions that would be used in ordinary cost-­ benefit projects, such as an upgrade to a highway, or a flood control project. For any advocate of public spending on the arts to invoke positive externalities is to not only rely on public perceptions of the value of those externalities, but also to direct spending in those areas where the externalities are seen to be significant. This is an implication worth remembering; if, for example, the principal externality from the arts that people believe exists is that certain works of art can help build empathy between diverse members of society, then there ought to be a preference for funding those

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artists and presenters whose works seem to best fulfill that function. Arts councils need to have some criteria for how to allocate funds; a reliance on externalities as the rationale for funding points to particular criteria to be used. The economic method restricts public funding to where there are market failures; the term “neoliberalism” can be difficult to define, but the idea that competitive markets are efficient, that market failures are the justification for public spending, and that public spending should reflect how people would choose to spend themselves if there were a market, is perhaps useful as a working definition, and that is what sole reliance on economic method yields. A final point needs to be made regarding the economic way of thinking: not everyone trained as an economist (as I am), and, I will speculate, not even the majority of those trained as economists believe that the economic method is the sure solution to every policy problem. The method has a working set of assumptions that can be very useful in constructing explanatory models, models that often have very good predictive power about consumer and firm and market behavior. But there is no oath economists must take that commits them to unwavering belief in methodological individualism, or universal consumer sovereignty. David Throsby (2003) gets to the heart of the issue: there might be “cultural value” in the arts, “their aesthetic properties, their spiritual significance, their role as purveyors of symbolic meaning, their historical importance, their significance in influencing artistic trends, their authenticity, their integrity, their uniqueness,” that cannot be captured in estimates of “economic value” even with the most sophisticated techniques for determining the monetary values the public places on public goods and externalities. This means arts-policymakers will sometimes face a trade-off between stated economic values, calculated through the methods described in this chapter, and other values that exist outside of the economic method. These “other values” will take up much of the rest of this book.

References Andersson, Tommy D., John Armbrecht, and Erik Lundberg. 2012. Estimating Use and Non-Use Values of a Music Festival. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 12 (3): 215–231. Aristotle. 1962. Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

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Atkinson, Anthony B., and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 1976. The Design of Tax Structure: Direct versus Indirect Taxation. Journal of Public Economics 6 (1–2): 55–75. ———. 1980. Lectures on Public Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Baumol, W.J., and W.G. Bowen. 1965. On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems. American Economic Review 55 (1/2): 495–502. Becker, Gary S., and Kevin M. Murphy. 1988. A Theory of Rational Addiction. Journal of Political Economy 96 (4): 675–700. Berman, Elizabeth Popp. 2022. Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carey, John. 2006. What Good are the Arts? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carson, Richard T. 2012. Contingent Valuation: A Practical Alternative When Prices Aren’t Available. Journal of Economic Perspectives 26 (4): 27–42. Cheung, S.N.S. 1973. The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation. Journal of Law and Economics 16 (1): 11–33. Coase, R.H. 1960. The Problem of Social Cost. Journal of Law and Economics 3: 1–44. Coate, Bronwyn, and Robert Hoffmann. 2022. The Behavioural Economics of Culture. Journal of Cultural Economics 46 (1): 3–26. Cowen, Tyler. 2006. Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Diamond, Peter A., and Jerry A. Hausman. 1994. Contingent Valuation: Is Some Number Better than No Number? Journal of Economic Perspectives 8 (4): 45–64. Forster, E.M. 1989/1910. Howards End. London: Penguin. Frey, Bruno S. 2000. Arts and Economics: Analysis and Cultural Policy. Berlin: Springer. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fujiwara, Daniel, Ricky N.  Lawton, and Susana Mourato. 2019. More than a Good Book: Contingent Valuation of Public Library Services in England. Journal of Cultural Economics 43 (4): 639–666. Goffin, Kris, and Stacie Friend. 2022. Learning Implicit Biases from Fiction. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2): 129–139. Hansen, Trine Bille. 1997. The Willingness-to-Pay for the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen as a Public Good. Journal of Cultural Economics 21 (1): 1–28. Harberger, Arnold C. 1971. Three Basic Postulates for Applied Welfare Economics: An Interpretive Essay. Journal of Economic Literature 9 (3): 785–797. Harsanyi, John. 1955. Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility. Journal of Political Economy 63: 309–321. Hausman, Jerry. 2012. Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless. Journal of Economic Perspectives 26 (4): 43–56. Hayek, F.A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530.

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Head, John G. 1991. Merit Wants: Analysis and Taxonomy. In Retrospectives on Public Finance, ed. L. Eden. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heilbrun, James, and Charles M. Gray. 2001. The Economics of Art and Culture. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hicks, John. 1939. The Foundations of Welfare Economics. Economic Journal 49: 696–712. James, P.D. 1992. The Children of Men. London: Faber and Faber. Kaldor, Nicholas. 1939. Welfare Propositions of Economics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility. Economic Journal 49: 549–552. Kirchgässner, Gebhard. 2017. Soft Paternalism, Merit Goods, and Normative Individualism. European Journal of Law and Economics 43: 125–152. Le Grand, Julian, and Bill New. 2015. Government Paternalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Musgrave, Richard. 1959. The Theory of Public Finance. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1987. Merit Goods. In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, ed. J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and P. Newman. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Netzer, Dick. 1978. The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Hagan, John W. 1998. The State and the Arts. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacock, Alan T. 1969. Welfare Economics and Public Subsidies to the Arts. Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 37 (4): 323–335. Pigou, A.C. 1938. The Economics of Welfare. 4th ed. London: Macmillan. Ramsey, Frank P. 1928. A Mathematical Theory of Saving. Economic Journal 38: 543–559. Rushton, Michael. 2003. Cultural Diversity and Public Funding of the Arts: A View from Cultural Economics. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 33 (2): 85–97. ———. 2017. Thinking Outside the Empathy Box. Cultural Trends 26 (3): 260–271. Scheffler, Samuel. 2018. Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scitovsky, Tibor. 1941. A Note on Welfare Propositions in Economics. Review of Economic Studies 9: 77–88. ———. 1972. What’s Wrong with the Arts is What’s Wrong with Society. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 62 (2): 62–69. Sen, Amartya. 1977. Rational Fools: A Critique of the Bahavioural Foundations of Economic Theory. Philosophy and Public Affairs 6: 317–344. Smith, Adam. 1981/1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Stern, Nicholas. 2022. A Time for Action on Climate Change and a Time for Change in Economics. Economic Journal 132: 1259–1289.

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Sugden, Robert, and Alan Williams. 1978. The Principles of Practical Cost-Benefit Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2003. Libertarian Paternalism. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 93 (2): 175–179. Thaler, Richard H, and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge. Revised and expanded ed. London: Penguin. Throsby, David. 2001. Economics and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Determining the Value of Cultural Goods: How Much (or How Little) Does Contingent Valuation Tell Us? Journal of Cultural Economics 27 (3–4): 275–285. ———. 2010. The Economics of Cultural Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Towse, Ruth. 2010. A Textbook of Cultural Economics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. West, Edwin G. 1985. Subsidizing the Performing Arts. Toronto: Ontario Economic Council. ———. 1991. Comment: Merit Wants and Public Goods Theory. In Retrospectives on Public Finance, ed. L. Eden. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Arts

In the previous chapter we considered the economic approach to public funding of the arts, noting that the method is consequentialist: whether increasing funding for the arts is a good policy depends upon the estimated consequences in terms of benefits and costs. It is a method that, as with utilitarianism, deals in aggregates: if the aggregate willingness-to-pay for an increase in the arts council budget exceeds the cost, then the policy is justified even if there is a set of individuals (and in practice there almost certainly will be) who do not think the spending is worthwhile. In contemporary moral philosophy, one of the principal alternatives to utilitarianism and the economic method is deontological ethics. By this is meant a system of rules for moral decisions that is not dependent on the consequences for the population as a whole. It is not necessarily the case that the consequentialist and the deontologist will always come to different conclusions. For example, one could be in favor of general provisions for freedom of people to choose their own paths to happiness on the grounds that it would have good consequences for society, that it is the route to maximizing the sum of well-being; John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1974/1859) takes this approach. On the other hand one could favor such rights on the basis that the essence of civil society is that free people come together to create laws that provide for mutual protection from harm but preserve their freedom to pursue the good because that is the

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rational aim of all people, and they possess these freedoms in light of being human, regardless of whether a coercive government might make a claim that it could increase people’s well-being through using its powers as such; Immanuel Kant (1970/1793) presents this contractarian view. There are multiple paths to liberalism (in Chap. 6 I add another, conservative route to liberal institutions). But conflicts between the approaches exist. Students in introductory classes in philosophy are presented with Philippa Foot’s (2002) “trolley problem,” which presents a choice between minimizing the loss of life (the consequentialist approach) and not taking an action that would take the life of a single person, in other words not using that one person as a means to a preferred consequentialist end (the deontological approach). Runaway trolleys with various combinations of people on different tracks are a rare thing, but we have more commonplace examples, such as the dilemma in which telling a lie would, on balance, prevent needless hurt feelings and suffering. In my experience, the difficulty this dilemma presents is that neither telling the truth, nor lying, sits comfortably; regardless of my choice, there is a convincing moral framework telling me I have chosen wrongly, and it is a rare person who can claim to be either a pure consequentialist or a pure follower of deontological rules—we tend to carry both within us, a tension (see Nagel 2021). It is not my purpose to weigh the relative merits of these moral frameworks, but rather to examine where they lead us on the question of public funding for the arts. In Chap. 2 I covered the consequentialist method of economics, and in this chapter will pursue the implications of deontological liberalism. In contemporary moral philosophy, the most influential figure in the Kantian liberal tradition is John Rawls. His relevance to this project is that he was explicitly opposed to public funding for the arts. Here I will describe Rawls’s principles of justice, and how it led to his position on arts funding, and consider Ronald Dworkin’s attempt to justify arts funding within a liberal framework.

The Rawlsian Framework Rawls’s theory is most comprehensively presented in his A Theory of Justice (1971), and I will focus upon that, though there are later writings that further develop particular aspects of the theory, in light of responses and criticisms. The essence of the theory is “justice as fairness,” in which by fairness is meant a set of rules upon which reasonable people, setting aside

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their own personal interests, could agree, that is, they could form a social contract. By “setting aside their own personal interests” Rawls uses the thought experiment of people being in what he calls the original position, where the people deliberating the rules for the society do not know what their attributes, their advantages and disadvantages, will be in that society— they might have highly valued talents, or have rather limited abilities in the marketplace, for example. They form this contract behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding what their situation will be. Rawls does not hold that this is actually how societies historically came into being. Rather, it is a means of discovering what our society could hold to be principles of fairness. Rawls holds that from the original position, no one would advocate for a utilitarian basis for society, since no one would agree to the possibility of a situation arising where their life and well-being would be sacrificed on the grounds that such a sacrifice would lead to an increase in society’s aggregate utility. Rather, he describes the core of a fair arrangement thus: I shall maintain instead that the persons in the initial situation would choose two rather different principles: the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1971, pp. 14–15)

We could call this a liberal egalitarian framework, his first principle guaranteeing liberal rights, and the second social and economic equality. Unpacking the principles a bit: The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights. The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and command must be accessible to all. (Rawls 1971, p. 61)

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The rights and opportunities he lists are what he names primary goods— goods that every person, regardless of their conception of what constitutes a good life, of what goals are worth pursuing, would agree to. Each person will have a long list of things they think are valuable and worthwhile, but it is the set of primary goods that represents an overlapping consensus in terms of what would appear on everyone’s list: equal liberties and opportunities, and wealth and income that are only unequal if it serves to raise everyone’s position. A key to understanding his reliance upon his list of primary goods as the basis of fairness, is that it is neutral regarding the ends in life a person might choose. When our social contracting parties emerge into the actual world (to extend the metaphor), some might have great ambitions, for wealth, political participation, artistic creation, while others prefer a more contemplative life, earning enough to get by, choosing to remain fairly detached from the political world, preferring an afternoon fishing over listening to opera recordings. The distribution of primary goods allows each of these people, and all the other diverse personalities, to go their own way, with nothing in the initial allocation that favors one view of a life well-lived over another. This will be an important consideration when we come to the specific question of funding for the arts. I can only touch on some of the issues that A Theory of Justice sparked (Forrester (2019) provides a history of its early reception), and a full survey of the literature would fill volumes. Obviously there remain committed utilitarians unpersuaded by the contractarian logic. In the following Chap. 4, on egalitarianism, I consider in greater detail the second principle of justice, whereby the only fair inequalities are those that work to the benefit of all. In that chapter I also deal with the question of resources as the measure of inequality rather than alternatives such as capabilities, or welfare. Amartya Sen (2006) asks whether a grand theory of justice is either necessary or sufficient as a guide to political action. In our current state of large inequalities across many domains, how would the two principles guide us in terms of what to prioritize, or what gains in one dimension might outweigh losses in another? And do we need a theory of justice to address reparable instances of inequality? A Theory of Justice is a long book, with details on implications for constitutions and the legal and economic system, but we are left with the participants to then work through those rules and institutions to actual policy. There are also questions around the idea of a social contract, specifically who is involved in the deliberations? Okin (2005) notes that Rawls has

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little to say about fairness within the household, and the implications for how women can be free and equal members of this just society. And Charles Mills (2015) in a sharp critique finds that the Rawlsian framework, and the body of Western political theory that precedes him, seems to exist on a planet free from its history of colonialism and exploitation: “Here is a 600-page book on social justice … in which no answers are given about correction of injustices of the past” (p.  19, emphasis in original; see also Kelly (2017), Thompson (2001), and Young (1995)). I do not wish to minimize the implications of these criticisms, nor am I able to defend Rawls (and Rawlsians) from them. But I do want to turn to the question of why in Rawls’s just society there is no room for public funding of the arts. It is a wider issue than just Rawls’s model, such that even if one is not committed to Rawls’s project, it is a problem that needs to be addressed, and this is the question of perfectionism.

Perfectionism The ideal of liberalism holds that individuals are themselves the appropriate judge of what things they wish to value in their lives, what goals are worth pursuing, what constitutes a good life. Although economic method doesn’t always say so explicitly, it takes consumer preferences as given, and the concept of efficiency is based on those preferences held by individuals. As was stressed in Chap. 2, this is very important for consideration of public funding for the arts, since individual preferences over how to value public goods and externalities are also taken as data. Whether a city ought to spend more on public art depends on how members of the community individually would value public art at the margin, and their preferences cannot be “wrong.” Likewise, the Rawlsian principles of justice insist on equality in primary goods, those basic rights and resources that anybody would need in pursuing goals, but beyond that, what goals are chosen, what goods are valued, are up to individuals. The state must be neutral regarding different conceptions of the good. Perfectionism allows for the possibility of their being things of value that are beyond the scope of what people themselves might subjectively think of as valuable. “In a broad sense perfectionism is any moral view centered on a conception of the good that values human excellences regardless of how much a person enjoys or wants them” (Hurka 2007, p. 10). There are varieties of perfectionism. One form of perfectionism is that there are achievements that are intrinsically valuable, such as artistic

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achievements, beyond how they might impact the well-being of people. This view takes its strongest form in Nietzsche, who valued the greatest achievements in culture, and the artists like Shakespeare and Goethe who created them, so highly as to exclude conditions of ordinary human well-­ being. A second form, most associated with Aristotle, though with many contemporary advocates (as we shall see below), sees human nature as possessing the potential for perfection, in the sense of completeness, and that this perfection ought to be the aim of true human welfare, beyond what people might think gives them immediate happiness. A third form does not rely on human nature, but does insist that there are goods, such as an appreciation of true beauty, that make people better off whether they realize it or not. Political perfectionism is the claim that the state is justified, perhaps within constraints that protect certain individual liberties, of encouraging excellence, or the fulfillment of human nature, or various goods, and discouraging those things that work against excellence. I will discuss various contemporary arguments for political perfectionism below, but first we consider why Rawls was so opposed to it, since almost all contemporary perfectionist accounts are at least in part a response to Rawls. Rawls (1971, pp. 325–332) devotes Chapter 50 of A Theory of Justice to “The Principle of Perfection.” He begins by distinguishing between the more extreme views of Nietzsche to a (slightly) more moderate view that excellence is of high importance, but would be weighed against other considerations like the liberty or general well-being of the people. “If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming this practice was necessary for those achievements), surely the conception is highly perfectionist” (p. 325). This kind of perfectionism has always had its advocates. Rawls cites Rashdall (1924), and we also have, from Clive Bell’s Civilization (1928): Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves – of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others. If you feel that such inequality is intolerable, have the courage to admit that you can dispense with civilization and that equality, not good, is what you want. Complete human equality is compatible only with complete savagery. But before plumping for barbarism let the philanthropist remember that there are such things as willing servants or, if he pleases, people content to make sacrifices for an ideal. (pp. 127–128)

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Henry James (1977/1886) provides a nice encapsulation of the idea in his novel The Princess Casamassima: ‘The world will become beautiful enough when it is good enough,’ the Princess resumed. ‘Is there anything so ugly as unjust distinctions, as the privileges of the few contrasted with the degradation of the many? When we want to beautify we must begin at the right end.’ … ‘I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of art,’ Hyacinth broke out. ‘The more the better, whether people are hungry or not. …’ (p. 368)

Rawls claims that people forming a social contract from the original position would be wary of allowing perfectionism as a principle in their society: For while the persons in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. To acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty, if not to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfection. Thus it seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by a teleological principle of justice. (pp. 327–328)

Rawls goes on to make clear that individuals can certainly hold beliefs about the nature of excellence, and advocate to their fellow citizens as to their ideals for what pursuits are valuable in life, or of what art is of the highest aesthetic value, and can form associations with like-minded citizens to follow these ideas, to jointly fund the artistic or scientific pursuits they value. But from the original position people would not empower the

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state to make such judgments. We will see below that advocates for various forms of political perfectionism want to find a way to address Rawls’s claim in this paragraph: are there mild forms of perfectionism that reasonable people could in fact agree upon from the original position? And where does this leave public funding for the arts? Rawls allows that (1) if the two principles of justice as agreed upon from the original position were being fulfilled, and (2) if a means of using a system of taxes for funding public goods and subsidizing externalities were available that was Pareto Efficient—that is, no one, or nearly no one, felt they were made worse off by the scheme of taxes to fund the arts (and recall from Chap. 2 that if a public funding proposal has greater aggregate benefits than costs, there is always in theory a way of taxing individuals on a very specific basis such that no one is paying a greater amount in tax than the value they place on the public good; in practice this is tremendously difficult beyond very small communities)–then it would be permissible. There would be no reason for anyone in the original position to object. But if either (1) or (2) fails, then people in the original position would not agree to general tax revenues being used to fund the arts, since they could well end up worse off. And this makes the chances for public funding for the arts slim. There are profound inequalities that leave countries some distance from fulfilling the two principles of justice, and a tax system for the arts that would leave no one feeling worse off, or even just a very small number worse off, would be virtually impossible to implement—local authorities must rely on broad-based taxes, and these inevitably have opposition. In the United States, local arts funding through earmarked taxes is generally approved through referenda, which can sometimes fail (Rushton 2015), and even when generally considered a success garner some opposition; in Metropolitan Denver, for example, The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD) is funded through an additional one-tenth of 1 percent on the retail sales tax in the seven-county region, and although generally considered a success story in local arts funding, was reapproved in its last referendum, in 2016, with only 63 percent approval. And so Rawls (1971) concludes: …[T]he principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as

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promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in an appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. (p. 332)

How do perfectionists address this claim by Rawls? Let’s begin with the variant of perfectionism that values excellence in the arts and believes the state ought to foster it through general taxation, even if only a small proportion of the population believe that such excellence matters to them. Thomas Nagel (1991), who refers to his view as “mildly Nietzschean,” holds that excellence is intrinsically good, and that a democratic society, while at the same time protecting liberal values of freedom and equality, could come to agree to allow experts to recommend what was most worthy of public support. Some people, maybe most people, might not enjoy excellence in classical music or theatre or sculpture, but they could at the same time respect it. I cannot pretend to understand, much less enjoy, the scholarship done in my university’s mathematics department, nor do I take much enjoyment from compositions in serial music, but I can respect them both in the sense that I know there are people dedicated to these sciences and arts who do understand it, and can claim to recognize what works best exemplify excellence, and I can agree that this science and music are worth funding even with no personal benefit to me (In his essay “Who Cares if you Listen?”, composer Milton Babbitt (1958) makes a similar claim). Although Quong (2011) claims that any attempt at perfectionism, such as public funding for the arts, inevitably involves paternalism, that is not true in Nagel’s framework, which is political perfectionism in funding and promoting activities which are beyond the tastes and preferences of much of the population, and yet which they would agree to out of respect. Kramer, in Liberalism with Excellence (2017), as the title implies, believes that support of excellence as suggested by Nagel, again within a generally liberal framework, is consistent with the Rawlsian social contract in light of Rawls holding that “the bases of self-respect” are a primary good needed for the flourishing of all individuals, and that excellence in the arts, science, athletics, will serve to boost that self-respect even if the actual achievements in those fields are not fully understood. Kramer calls this aspirational perfectionism, meaning that the goal of funding excellence is not to try to improve people’s lives beyond what is required by Rawls’s principles of justice, but to fulfill the principles of justice by enhancing self-respect, a “primary good.” He contrasts this with an

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edificatory perfectionism that tries to improve people’s lives beyond the requirements of justice—“democratization of culture” goals for public funding for the arts would be an example. Like economists’ arguments for how there might be positive externalities from the arts (and local, regional, or national pride in world-renowned artists and their art is often cited as one of these potential externalities), the empirical evidence is rather slim (and if it does at all exist, might be much smaller than pride in local or national sports champions). But what sort of arts funding fosters this excellence? The commonplace general subsidies to non-profit arts presenters might serve to maintain the audiences that are necessary for excellence to be able to emerge. A nation with little active interest in live theatre is not likely to produce playwrights of world renown. Without resorting to authoritarian systems that take promising young children into isolated and intense training in the arts or athletics, all a country can do to inspire excellence is to make sure the cultural environment provides fertile soil for it. Prizes and awards can also serve to inspire excellence. The debate thus far raises the issue of how to resolve the differences between neutrality and perfectionism. Advocates and opponents of Rawlsian strict neutrality by the state in terms of conceptions of the good are all trying to frame an argument in terms of negotiating from the “original position,” which less esoterically could be thought of as citizens trying to come to an agreement as they put their own status and preferences over goods to the side, making their own interests no more important than anyone else’s (Scarry 1996). But from a policymaker’s perspective, how are we to know what people would do? It is important to avoid imagining that rational, moral people from an original position would choose a social framework that just happens to be much like the one we would personally prefer. Why would I, an economist by training, not think that reasonable people would agree to protections of personal liberties, democracy, and equal opportunity, combined with using a cost-benefit approach to public goods and externalities, such that the arts could be funded even without unanimity so long as aggregate willingness-to-pay exceeded the cost? Perfectionism can take other forms, where the well-being of every person is the primary concern, but where their well-being has an objective element that does not necessarily (though in some cases it might) differ from their own subjective sense of well-being, and their subjective views on what choices would increase their well-being.

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One possibility is to follow Aristotle, where true happiness resides in the pursuit of excellence, fulfilling the heights of human possibility (Griffin (1986, p. 331) notes that the etymology of “perfection” in moral theory is from the Latin perficare, meaning “thoroughly-made, completed” which is a different thing from the modern use of the term, to mean “flawless”). There are many paths to this notion of perfection, since we have different capabilities and desires and circumstances. Gifted athletes, musicians, scientists, cabinet-makers, lawyers, potters, teachers, all have their own professional notions of excellence, but then all people might share a set of achievements to which we could all aspire. In addition to accomplishment, Griffin (1986, pp.  67–68) lists: understanding; enjoyment (“the perception of beauty, absorption in and appreciation of nature”); and deep personal relations. Nussbaum (2004) directs us to William Wordsworth’s (1923/1807) poem “Character of the Happy Warrior” for a catalogue of perfections—and it is worth noting that the happy warrior who develops his compassion, self-knowledge, courage, and appreciation of “homefelt pleasures and … gentle scenes” is happy in ways that go beyond mere hedonism. Bernard Williams (1985) notes that the more people are led to pursue these perfections in character, the better we will treat one another—Aristotle’s notion of perfection is an ethical framework. George Sher (1997) concurs, and his perfectionist account aligns with Griffin’s; knowledge and understanding and deep relations with others are goals the state is right to try to foster. Sher sees perfectionism as a set of interrelated goals, mutually reinforcing. For example, a true appreciation of beauty, and an aversion to the degradation of culture, changes how we see and act toward one another: When critics deplore the coarseness of our culture, their main emphasis is usually aesthetic. They say – and I agree – that an endless diet of punk rock or sitcoms leaves one ill-equipped to appreciate the music of a Mozart or the prose of a Jane Austen. But as damaging as these effects are, the interpersonal effects of coarseness and vulgarity are far worse yet. The main elements of our public culture – its stories, stereotypes, taboos, concepts, v­ ocabulary – all profoundly influence our sense of what goes on within and among people. They shape our understanding of how others see both themselves and us – our understanding of the nested structures of belief, feeling, and conditional intention that each person directs at other people and their beliefs, feelings, and conditional intentions. Hence, if our stories, stereotypes and the like are crude, one-sided, distorted, then our ability to recognize what

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goes on within and among people will be crude, one-sided, and distorted too. And this cannot but diminish our ability to attain a whole range of fundamental goals. (pp. 213–214)

A first thing to notice in this passage is that the claims Sher is making about the power of culture to shape our beliefs about, and interactions with, others is not an unusual view among advocates for public funding of the arts, who often cite the arts power in terms of its ability to foster understanding and empathy of others (Rushton 2017), and that this is a positive externality from the arts. Sher, though, is noting the other side of this coin. If there are works of art that contribute to understanding and empathy of others, might there not be other works or genres that distort understanding, that perpetuate false stereotypes, that breed cynicism? And if so, should a system of public arts funding use criteria for the allocation of funds that rewards works that impact in a positive way our beliefs, and reject those that do the opposite? Perfectionism as a justification for overruling strict liberal neutrality and allowing for support of deep engagement with the arts and an appreciation of beauty is not only non-neutral with regard to the question of whether there ought to be funding the arts at all, it also entails the state somehow making judgments about what culture is worth promoting, what is of intrinsic worth beyond people’s immediate cultural tastes. Most people with any interest in the arts at all have personal thoughts on what is more, or less, valuable as art, and perhaps also how the various trends in the arts affect human understanding and interactions. But state perfectionism brings the state into making such judgments. What would be the limits that one would impose on the state in such a situation? The perfectionist might say “let arts councils promote the appreciation of the finest in music, art, and literature,” but would there at the same time be discouragement of what is the worst in our culture? To use Rawls’s metaphor, from an original position, not knowing our cultural preferences (much less our other ideals for what is good), would we entrust a state to make such judgments and to take such actions, knowing at least the possibility that we might be someone who prefers the Sex Pistols to Shostakovich? Robert Nozick (1985), on the heart of the matter:

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[T]here is one general notion that the arts do provide in our culture. That is the notion of objective value – a value that is objective apart from personal preferences. … This notion of “ought” as distinct from what you want and your personal preferences is an important resource for us to have available in the culture. One place that a notion of objective value is importantly supported is in the arts. At least, it has been provided historically to people who think one can develop taste and standards of judgment. There is some objective notion you can be wrong about it; taste can be educated. The arts and humanities generally provide us with some notion of a standard other than mere personal preference. However, if this provides a case for subsidy it is not clear that it can provide a case for the general subsidy of all artistic activities. If anything, that looks like it fits better with a subjective or relativist notion of value. If you care about support of the arts because of some notion of objective value, then if you support all art independently of merit, then you undercut your purpose. At the same time that you are supporting the arts to give people the notion of real objective value and not just personal preference, you are refusing to draw lines and establish standards, saying all art is equally good for our purposes; hence, you undercut the very notion of objective value that you want to be supporting through publicly supporting the arts and its general currency in the society. It looks, then, like you must only support art and artistic endeavors that are judged to be meritorious by some group; the dangers here are obvious. So it is difficult to make the case for subsidy. (pp. 165–166)

Is there no way a liberal committed to state neutrality with regard to the good could find a way to justify state funding of the arts? I now turn to what I think is the strongest, though not entirely successful, attempt.

Dworkin, the Liberal State, and the Arts Ronald Dworkin’s (1985) “Can a Liberal State Support Art?”, included in his collection of essays A Matter of Principle, was first presented at a 1984 gathering of scholars and others at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dworkin includes himself among those “wanting to find some justification for a generous level of state support [for the arts]” (p. 222), but realizes the task of finding this justification is difficult, precisely because of the issues we have been raising here: if a liberal state is committed to neutrality in its policies regarding various conceptions people might hold

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over what is good, does public arts funding, for good or ill, not violate that neutrality? Dworkin begins by comparing two ways of approaching the question: the “economic” (substantively the approach that was covered in Chap. 2 of this book), which relies upon the preferences of individuals as we find them in the world; and what he refers to as the “lofty” approach, which is his term for what we have been calling “perfectionism,” the idea that there are objectively valuable goods, such as excellence in the arts, that are good beyond what values the members of society might individually place upon them. Regarding the economic approach, he outlines the standard story of welfare economics, that under certain conditions competitive markets are quite efficient at the allocation of resources, such that no special state subsidies, or excise taxes, are called for, but that there are situations where the government might intervene, for example public goods (which, as discussed in Chap. 2, are not all that common in the subsidized arts), and positive externalities, which would apply to cultural goods that are excludable but that might have positive spillovers, such as museums and the live performing arts. A standard problem in determining optimal government expenditures and subsidies is to find by how much people value public goods and externalities at the margin; for example, if we poll a sample of the population on how much they would value an expansion of the collections and programs at their local public library, the respondents are being asked to place a monetary value on something which they don’t ordinarily purchase, making their estimate of their own preferences to a large degree a matter of guesswork. The same problem would hold for other public goods like policing, or improvements in streetlights. But, Dworkin notes, the positive externalities from the subsidized “high arts” are even more difficult to determine than for more “ordinary” public goods, because we cannot tell how the high arts canon has, over the past centuries and currently, affected all aspects of our culture; even people who believe there is a distinction to be made between high and popular culture (and I realize this is highly contested territory) will agree that they are tied, that popular culture draws upon canonical works and genres of high culture. And then this valuation problem becomes more difficult still when we realize that most of these effects, the benefits of preserving the best in the arts, and the spillovers to all aspects of culture, are long term. When asked about the benefits of better streetlighting or expanded library programs, the benefits, large or small, would accrue to me and my

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neighbors. But the preservation of, say, opera, has effects on future generations and their enjoyment of opera, and on what the continuation of operatic tradition means for other genres of art. We cannot ask future generations how much they would value the preservation of cultural traditions; we have to make funding decisions here and now, and this generation is the only generation available to make that valuation. But how would we do that? We cannot argue that opera deserves subsidy so that it can be available for future generations, if we don’t know what that future generation would feel. Should opera disappear from the cultural landscape, future generations won’t actually know what they are missing. They will have other cultural genres, and so, how would we say that they have suffered. Dworkin writes: We would certainly want to say they are missing something, that their lives are impoverished in some way compared to ours. But that is very different. It is not their judgment about their lives, which is what the economic approach in general and the public goods argument in particular requires, but rather our judgment about their lives. We might want to say: If they knew what they were missing, they would miss it. But that is saying if they did want it, they would want it – which is true but unhelpful. Someone may say: They would in any case want pleasure, and they would have more pleasure if they had opera. But this won’t do. Set aside the thorny question whether it is always (or ever) right to say that people want pleasure. Set aside the question whether we can measure pleasure in the way this suggestion assumes. How can we say that people whose culture has developed without opera, and is therefore different from ours in countless other ways, would have less pleasure from what their culture does provide than we have from our own? We, who know opera, take pleasure in it – or some of us do – and we would be pained at suddenly finding it unavailable. But this is because the structure of our culture has that consequence for people fully immersed in it, and we can draw no conclusions about the hedonic states of people whose culture is entirely different. A taste for opera is in this way unlike some raw material – oil – that future generations might have to do without. If we assume their desires are much like our own – they want heat and light and transportation – we can say that not having oil gives them less of what they want, even if they have never heard of oil. But we cannot make a parallel assumption about people whose culture is unlike ours: we cannot say their desires are otherwise like our own, because the desires now in question are those produced by and bound up in the culture we assume they do not have. (p. 227)

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In Kingsley Amis’s dystopian, counter-factual novel Russian Hide-and-­ Seek (1980), Great Britain had fallen into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence after the Second World War, and now, in the twenty-first century in which the novel is set, British cultural heritage has for the most part been suppressed and, except for a few scholars working within the regime, largely forgotten. Fragments, musical scores, and plays exist in textual form, but the population has neither understanding nor interest in it. In a politically motivated cultural heritage festival, meant to quell unrest among the subject people, a production of Romeo and Juliet is mounted. It is, of course, a disaster. The actors themselves barely understand what they are saying, the director has cut the text to make it an acceptable length for the audience, with no sense of how best to do so. He leaves in most of the text spoken by Mercutio and the Nurse because he has read that they are supposed to be very funny, but the audience is uncomprehending when these characters say their lines, finding nothing funny in it at all (such that they loudly applaud Mercutio’s death). [The audience] had been looking forward to enjoying themselves and had been bewildered and bored. They had been told over and over again that this was a great play by a great Englishman and there was nothing in it. They had put on these ridiculous clothes and come all this way to be made fools of. (Amis 1980, p. 181)

To Dworkin’s point: when I read this novel I feel very sorry for the English people and what has been done to them. But while the people in the novel wish they had better food and heating and were not bossed around so much—in this way they are like us—they don’t miss Shakespeare at all. They have found attending the play an imposition and waste of time. They are unable to wish for a richer culture, because they cannot imagine what that would be, any more than our generation could imagine genres and works of art that do not exist for us. In a more recent fictional work, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), following a global pandemic that wipes out nearly the entirety of the world’s population, a theatre troupe, traveling by horse-drawn carriages, performs Shakespeare’s, and only Shakespeare’s, works to isolated, small settlements. When asked in an interview why she chose Shakespeare, Mandel replied, “As I began thinking about this novel, my husband said people would want what was best about the world. In my completely subjective judgement that would include Shakespeare” (BBC 2014). She has

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the novelist’s freedom to make that choice, but it does serve to highlight the more practical concerns of contemporary arts policy: how can policymakers choose what is “best about the world”? Our artistic heritage and current practices play a large part in determining what it is we value and how we value it; Dworkin points out that our appreciation of nature, in parks and in preserved environments, is influenced by our experiences of landscape painting, of fiction in natural settings. It makes problems of economic valuation insurmountable: [T]he economic approach is simply unavailable either way as a test of whether art should be publicly supported or at what level. The issue of public support lies beneath or beyond the kinds of tastes, preferences, and values that can sensibly be deployed in an economic analysis. (Dworkin 1985, p. 229)

But if economic method is not going to be of much help here, neither does Dworkin want to embrace the “lofty,” or perfectionist stance on arts funding. But the problem of valuation remains. We cannot get around the difficulties of trying to apply the economic method of valuing public goods and externalities by declaring that excellence in the arts is simply intrinsically good, because that is not any guide as to what specifically to fund, or by how much, or how future generations would be grateful to this generation. And so Dworkin looks to a third option, preserving a “rich cultural structure,” … one that multiplies distinct possibilities or opportunities of value, and count ourselves trustees for protecting the richness of our culture for those who will live their lives in it after us. We cannot say that in so doing we will give them more pleasure, or provide a world they will prefer as against other worlds we could possibly create. That is the language of the economic approach, and it is unavailable here. We can, however, insist – how can we deny this? - that it is better for people to have complexity and depth in the forms of life open to them, and then pause to see whether, if we act on that principle, we are open to any objection of elitism or paternalism. (Dworkin 1985, p. 229)

Ultimately, Dworkin advocates for public funding of the arts on the basis of equitable and fair consideration of future generations, without wanting to adopt a perfectionist stance on the inherent value of the arts. Our

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generation inherited a varied cultural structure that has enabled us to pursue the arts as we individually see fit, and we ought to allow future generations to have at least that, so that they too can make choices. We don’t have the ability to call our cultural inheritance “rich”—rich compared to what? We have no basis for comparison. But we did inherit varied genres and ideas that give us possibilities. Dworkin insists his advocacy is not paternalism, it is not about trying to choose for future generations what art would be best for them and thus worthy of sustaining. He compares culture to language, in that we do well to preserve a deep and complex language that creates the widest possibilities for sophisticated expression, without dictating what people ought to say with that language. Can art degenerate? What would count as a violation of this duty to preserve a rich cultural structure? Our ability to innovate is based on tradition in two ways, or on two levels. We must have a tradition of innovation, and we must have particular forms of art sufficiently open-ended and amenable to reinterpretation so that continuity can be preserved through innovation, so that people can see what is new as sufficiently connected to what they already regard as a mode of art, sufficiently connected to be embraced as falling within the same overall mode of experience. These traditions can languish into an academic or conventionalist settlement when the boundaries of what can count as art are drawn too tightly, and art degenerates into what is merely familiar or only pretty or, worse still, what is useful for some nonaesthetic goal. The state of art in some tyrannies is a depressing reminder of what is possible by way of degeneration. (Dworkin 1985, p. 232)

Dworkin is one of the most distinguished liberal theorists of our age, but this strikes me as at its heart a conservative case for supporting the arts, to allow the conditions for new creation to arise out of the cultural traditions that have been preserved—see T.S. Eliot (1950) for example (conservatism and public funding for the arts is the topic of Chap. 6 of this book, and so we will return to this question). What are the obligations of a liberal state, one committed to neutrality over individual conceptions of what is good, to future generations? Rawls (1971), in trying to solve how individuals from an original position would bargain over this—do we assume a “veil of ignorance” over in which generation we will be born?—assumes that we ought to think of the parties to the social contract as heads of families:

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What is essential is that each person in the original position should care about the well-being of some of those in the next generation, it being presumed that their concern is for different individuals in each case. Moreover for anyone in the next generation, there is someone who cares about him in the present generation. Thus, the interests of all are looked after and, given the veil of ignorance, the whole strand is tied together. It should be noted that I make no restrictive assumptions about the parties’ conceptions of the good except that they are rational long-term plans. (Rawls 1971, pp. 128–129)

In determining a principle for how much one generation ought to save for the next (the utilitarian solution to which was first devised by Ramsey (1928)), Rawls continues to use the metaphor of the family: In attempting to estimate the fair rate of saving the persons in the original position ask what is reasonable for members of adjacent generations to expect of one another at each level of advance. They try to piece together a just savings schedule by balancing how much they would be willing to save for their immediate descendants against what they would feel entitled to claim of their immediate predecessors. Thus imagining themselves to be fathers, say, they are to ascertain how much they should set aside for their sons by noting what they would believe themselves entitled to claim of their fathers. (Rawls 1971, p. 289)

There are a few things to note here. One is that there are intergenerational concerns that extend well beyond one or two generations to come; a barrier to the political means to address climate change is that its effects are slow, and, until recently, without catastrophic effects on this generation or the very next (see Barry 1977), and so Rawls may be reinforcing the temporal myopia that is turning out to be very harmful. A related point is that “savings” in the macroeconomic sense of the term doesn’t really capture well the idea of “preservation,” which is our greatest environmental and cultural concern. The idea of taking what had been a set of somewhat self-interested, though with a moral grounding, individuals to form a social contract from behind a veil of ignorance, and then simply invoking the idea that in terms of future generations they would be like fathers to sons in terms of moral intuition, seems a bit of a cheat. But, as Laslett (1979) notes, not entirely: like the relationship between parents and children, our present society’s

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relationship to future generations is asymmetric. Edmund Burke (1881/1790) wrote that “Society is indeed a contract”: It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. (p. 114)

But this is not what we normally think of as a contract, which involves two or more parties who mutually agree to terms, rights, and obligations. But generations past made no contract with me, and I cannot make a contract with those yet to be born. So when we talk about what we “owe” to other generations, we are talking about something that is not a contract, but something else. Dworkin does not invoke Rawls’s social contract in his arts essay, he simply presents the idea of passing along to the next generation a set of cultural resources from which to draw at least as rich as what this generation inherited, as a matter of fairness and equality. But there is a lingering question as to whether he succeeds in avoiding perfectionism, which he clearly wishes to do. In practical terms, it does not seem that he succeeds. Public funding of the arts requires some sort of criteria. Which genres are to be included and excluded, what organizational forms will be eligible for funding (non-­ profits but not commercial firms? Organizations but not individual artists?), and, within each genre and allowable type of organization, the criteria by which proposals are ranked and allocated resources. No system of public funding can proceed without sorting out these initial questions. Dworkin rejects the economic approach to justifying public funding, noting that the claims of positive externalities are terribly vague. But, as discussed in Chap. 2, the economic approach does provide a way to answer the list of questions above: what genres, organizations, and criteria contribute the most at the margin to the market failure the public funding is supposed to help solve? It might prove to be very difficult to pin the answer down, but at least we are pointed in the right direction, in terms of the framework within which the questions are posed. Dworkin wants to ensure a rich cultural inheritance for future generations, or, at least as good as this generation inherited, but he leaves the details of how this would be accomplished to the imagination (in fairness,

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we are discussing a talk he turned into an essay, not a complete treatise of the matter). Dworkin draws a comparison between the arts and language, how each of them give individuals the ability to explore and question and act upon ideas of the good, and that since a rich and complex language allows for a greater scope of options, and means to question one’s own choices, so do the arts. But language is shared in a way that is far more common than any genre of art (note the language / art analogy will be discussed further in Chap. 5 of this book, on “communitarianism”). Furthermore, in general we do not have public policy devoted to the preservation and development of national languages (with the exception of those countries, and Canadian provinces, who have language policies generally enacted as a protective measure against creeping anglicization more than anything else); outside of formal schooling language is a free space. And so could be the arts; no one, including Dworkin, claims that culture would disappear with the demise of the public arts council. It would just be different, and, Dworkin claims, something less. But devising criteria for public funding that would preserve a rich set of cultural goods for future generations necessarily involves saying: “here is where we could improve upon what a purely commercial and privately-­ funded nonprofit art world would provide.” And, as numerous commentators on Dworkin (Black 1992; Brighouse 1995; Carroll 1987; Kymlicka 1989, 2004; Macleod 1997; Nathan 1994; Quong 2011) have shown, that simply cannot be done in a neutral way by the state. More precisely, liberal theorists make the distinction between consequential neutrality, whereby government policies in their implementation do not have different implications for different conceptions of the good, and justificatory neutrality, whereby the government’s policies might have different consequences for different people’s pursuit of the good in practice, but it was not the government’s intent to favor any particular conception of the good. Consequential neutrality is very difficult to achieve in practice. For example, it is consistent with Rawlsian principles of justice that cities provide those public goods necessary for people to be able to get from one place to another: streets and sidewalks (where the sidewalks are well-designed for people who might have additional needs regarding mobility), streetlights, buses (also made accessible to all users of different abilities), and bicycle paths. Everybody needs ways to get around, or, if they are housebound, they need the people who care for them and deliver goods and services to them to be able to get around, and this is true regardless of the different conceptions people have for what constitutes a

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good life; providing transportation options satisfies justificatory neutrality. But it does not necessarily satisfy consequential neutrality. For example, it is important for me personally that there are bicycle paths, as riding my bike gives me a lot of enjoyment and benefits my mental and physical health, and I get a great deal of benefits out of my home city’s recent investment in expanding its network of bicycle trails, even though I do this purely as a recreational activity. So simply by providing a range of transportation options, some people’s idea of what constitutes a life well-lived are going to be particularly favored. That was not the intent of the bike paths, but that is how it has worked out. Now on the other hand if the city had said “we are building these bike paths because we think it is important for people to get outside more and get some exercise,” it would violate justificatory neutrality (note: it has not done this). When it comes to public funding for the arts, it will be unavoidable, regardless of the government’s intent, to violate consequential neutrality. Whatever criteria the state chooses to guide its funding allocations, some people are going to find the aspects of culture they particularly enjoy and think are important are going to be favored, and some people are going to find that the aspects of culture most important to them have been left aside by the funding system. When we look at actual arts funding practices across different nations, it is beyond debate that some people’s ideas of what is valuable in culture are more favored than others. But can arts policy be justificatorily neutral? This would be to avoid perfectionism in its intent, even if not ultimately in its consequences. The example that I think comes closest to satisfying the justificatory neutrality condition would be a well-stocked and diverse public library (Macleod 1997). The library contributes to satisfying the Rawlsian principles of justice of enabling all positions and stations in society, and participation in the democratic process, to be open to all, and could be said to work to the benefit of the least well-off in society, but beyond that does not favor any particular set of religious or moral beliefs, or cultural preferences (In the contemporary United States there are illiberal forces who have chosen to target libraries and their collections precisely because the libraries hold such varied works describing beliefs and ways of life that their opponents would wish to keep hidden). But in practical terms it is very hard to see how an arts council could achieve this level of neutrality. Dworkin never makes the mechanism clear, and in a liberal order “the actual reasons for government action must be

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understandable to, and available for scrutiny by, reasonable citizens” (Brighouse 1995, p. 41—he calls this the “publicity” requirement). We cannot make arts funding choices based upon bequeathing to future generations a rich cultural inheritance, without defining and favoring those aspects of our culture that this generation thinks are of most importance in that cultural inheritance.

Arts Funding in the Liberal State So, can a liberal state support art? It comes down to how we define a liberal state. Suppose we had a country with broad protections for democratic governance, vigorous promotion of equal opportunity for political, social, and economic participation, and extensive and equal rights of personal liberty, in belief and expression, of freedom of the press and association, and the protection of the person from arbitrary and unwarranted police action. I would call this a liberal state. Suppose in addition to all this, there was a publicly funded arts council which had as a goal the promotion of excellence in the high arts, even though the public had very diverse cultural tastes, with many having little interest in the subsidized arts. Would this arts council disqualify our state as a member of the league of liberal nations? I don’t think it would, and neither would having publicly funded universities devoted to excellence in scholarship. The question is not one of “liberalism,” but rather how far one wishes to insist upon neutrality as a principle of government. Perfectionism is consistent with a broad range of liberal institutions but is not consistent with strict neutrality over people’s conceptions of the good. If a publicly funded arts council is unable to say “this art is worthy of public support, even though it is a minority taste, because it is, in our judgement, of greater value than the cultural offerings currently preferred by much of the public and which they access through commercial channels” but instead must take the tastes of the public as they are, and show no discrimination between and within genres, then it is very hard to justify the existence of the arts council. What is it supposed to do under such a constraint? The debates in moral philosophy over liberalism, neutrality, and perfectionism might at first seem rather esoteric and detached, but in fact this is an absolutely critical question for public funding of the arts. Publicly funded arts councils can be quite consistent with a liberal order, but not if there is a strict rule regarding state neutrality. Arts councils were founded

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on the idea that some art was worth supporting based upon its aesthetic value. If arts councils are forced to take a stance of neutrality regarding excellence, then what is their point?

References Amis, Kingsley. 1980. Russian Hide-and-Seek. London: Hutchinson. Babbitt, Milton. 1958. Who Cares If You Listen. High Fidelity, February. Barry, Brian. 1977. Justice Between Generations. In Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.L.A.  Hart, ed. P.M.S.  Hacker and J.  Raz. Oxford: Clarendon Press. BBC. 2014. Emily Mandel on Why Shakespeare Could Survive the Apocalypse. October 9. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-­arts-­29426210. Bell, Clive. 1928. Civilization. West Drayton, UK: Penguin. Black, Samuel. 1992. Revisionist Liberalism and the Decline of Culture. Ethics 102 (2): 244–267. Brighouse, Harry. 1995. Neutrality, Publicity, and State Funding of the Arts. Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1): 35–63. Burke, Edmund. 1881/1790. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carroll, Noël. 1987. Can Government Funding of the Arts Be Justified Theoretically? Journal of Aesthetic Education 21 (1): 21–35. Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. Can a Liberal State Support Art? In A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eliot, T.S. 1950. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt. Foot, Philippa. 2002. Virtues and Vices: and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forrester, Katrina. 2019. In the Shadow of Justice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Griffin, James. 1986. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hurka, Thomas. 2007. Nietzsche: Perfectionist. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry. 1977/1886. The Princess Casamassima. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Kant, Immanuel. 1970/1793. On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right. In Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H.  Reiss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Erin I. 2017. The Historical Injustice Problem for Political Liberalism. Ethics 128 (1): 75–94.

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Kramer, Matthew H. 2017. Liberalism with Excellence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality. Ethics 99: 883–905. ———. 2004. Dworkin on Freedom and Culture. In Dworkin and His Critics, ed. J. Burley. Oxford: Blackwell. Laslett, Peter. 1979. The Conversation Between the Generations. In Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Fifth Series, ed. P. Laslett and J. Fishkin. Oxford: Blackwell. Macleod, Colin M. 1997. Liberal Neutrality or Liberal Tolerance? Law and Philosophy 16: 529–559. Mandel, Emily St. John. 2014. Station Eleven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mill, John Stuart. 1974/1859. On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mills, Charles W. 2015. Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy. New Political Science 37 (1): 1–24. Nagel, Thomas. 1991. Equality and Partiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. Types of Intuition. London Review of Books 43 (3): 3–7. Nathan, Daniel O. 1994. Liberal Principles and Government Support for the Arts. Public Affairs Quarterly 8 (2): 141–151. Nozick, Robert. 1985. Panel Discussion: Art as a Public Good. Columbia Journal of Art and the Law 9 (1): 143–178. Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Mill Between Aristotle and Betham. Daedalus 133 (2): 60–68. Okin, Susan Moller. 2005. ‘Forty Acres and a Mule’: Rawls and Feminism. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (2): 233–248. Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism Without Perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramsey, F.P. 1928. A Mathematical Theory of Saving. Economic Journal 38: 543–559. Rashdall, Hastings. 1924. The Theory of Good and Evil. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rushton, Michael. 2015. Support for Earmarked Public Spending on Culture: Evidence from a Referendum in Metropolitan Detroit. Public Budgeting and Finance 25 (4): 72–85. ———. 2017. Thinking Outside the Empathy Box. Cultural Trends 26 (3): 260–271. Scarry, Elaine. 1996. The Difficulty of Imagining Other People. In For Love of Country? ed. M. Nussbaum, 98–110. Boston: Beacon Press. Sen, Amartya. 2006. What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice? Journal of Philosophy 103 (5): 215–238. Sher, George. 1997. Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Thompson, Janna. 2001. Historical Injustice and Reparation: Justifying Claims of Descendants. Ethics 112: 114–135. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1923/1807. Character of the Happy Warrior. In Poetical Works, 493–494. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1995. Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (2): 181–190.

CHAPTER 4

Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts

In contemporary discussions around arts funding, discussion of inequality usually begins with the fact that public funding of the arts does already exist, and from there moves to the question of whether the allocation of funding is, or has historically been, equitable between the artists and arts organizations that receive funds. I take a different approach here, since my project is to investigate the justification for arts funding in the first place, and then to ask, if X is our justification, what are the implications for how funding ought to be allocated. So, in this chapter I am looking at how an egalitarian could, or could not, justify public arts funding. If we began with a state with no arts council, would an egalitarian say: “we really ought to start one”? I see this as a necessary preliminary to the question of equality in arts funding across groups, which is a subject of Chap. 7. I will define an egalitarian as someone who believes that equality between individuals is a core value in a just society, and that any inequalities between individuals need justification. The justification cannot be arbitrary, such as the color of one’s skin, but morally relevant (Williams 1973). One possible justification for an inequality would be that it is not an inequality in the metric that matters the most in terms of justice. As we will see below, given the differences between individuals it is impossible to simultaneously achieve equality in people’s resources and in their subjective level of well-being, and so egalitarians must make a choice as to which

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inequality matters the most. Another possible justification is the inequality metric has been chosen rightly, but equality is only one of a set of core values that matter—individual liberty, and aggregate well-being, for example, being others—and not all values can simultaneously be attained to perfection (Berlin 1990). What would an egalitarian have to say about public funding for the arts, not necessarily as it is currently done, but in an ideal world? Is public arts funding an effective tool for advancing the cause of equality? If so, then, first, along what metric are we defining inequality, and second, how does public arts funding, resourced by taxation, effectively reduce inequality? (A note on language: Bronfenbrenner (1973) defines equality and inequality as objective, measurable relations, say in height, age, income, and arts attendance, and equity and inequity as subjective terms involving whether a particular distribution is fair or unfair, better or worse, and where we care about the distribution enough to want to engage public policy in pursuing something more equitable. This could be a useful framework, but so much of the literature I will be citing uses the term inequality to refer to inequity, that I will just use the word inequality throughout, and the distinctions made will be around which inequalities are of moral concern and which are not.) Moral philosophers have differed on the question of where exactly there is an obligation to pursue greater equality among people. If we wish to pursue greater equality, we need to ask, “equality of what?” As Cohen (2011) puts it, what is the “currency” of egalitarian justice? Beginning with the widely held principle that everyone is due some basic level of equality—“Every man to count for one and no one to count for more than one,” as Mill (1973/1863, p. 468), quoting the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, put it—how ought policy, if at all, seek a further equality, something beyond the principle that all people are entitled to equal respect and consideration? Should the focus be on pursuing equality of resources that people have, with which they can pursue their own ends, or should the focus be on levels of welfare? If resources, how would we define them, and what could be done about inequalities in resources about which policy can do little, say in terms of the families into which people are born, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come from their parents’ character and socio-­ economic status, and from innate abilities and disabilities? If the focus ought to be on welfare, how could we measure that? What would we do about people who are well-resourced but simply unhappy? What would we do about people who have expensive tastes in terms of what makes them

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happy? Would it matter if they had made special efforts to acquire those tastes? If we compensate people for “brute” bad luck (which is bad luck over which the individual had no control or choice in the risk involved) in terms of their circumstances, do we also have an obligation to compensate people who experienced bad luck in a calculated gamble, say an ambitious business venture that fails and reduces their fortune? And in the pursuit of equality, to what degree should we be willing to sacrifice other things we value: individual liberties, average productivity and income, and even, as some used to hold (though it is not often voiced now), excellence in a nation’s artistic achievement? Should we put resources and welfare aside, and instead focus on the nature of the lives people are capable of living? Once the question of “equality of what” has been addressed, then we have the question of how the arts fit in. What makes this a difficult problem is that people have such varying tastes when it comes to the arts, across genres, and regarding whether the arts matter all that much to them. In this chapter I will not try to advance any claim for a superior answer to the “equality of what” question. I will give an overview of how different answers to the question have been framed, and ask what implications different conceptions of equity have for public funding of the arts. I will assume here the state has no role in trying to change people’s cultural preferences, but rather will take them as given. I am also going to continue to focus on enjoying the arts as a consumer; the question of equity in who gets the chance to work as an artist is an important one, and related to arts consumption (if arts workers are all from one part of society, it is much more likely that art will be produced that appeals to that same part of society), but it is extensively covered elsewhere (see especially Brook et al. (2020)) and through this book I will continue to focus on the arts consumption side of the question. Finally, I will treat public funding of the arts as a redistribution of income: it involves taxing at least some people who have little interest in the work of subsidized artists and arts presenters, to the benefit of those people who, while they also pay taxes, do have interest in the subsidized arts. If everybody gained from the existence and activities of public arts councils, there wouldn’t be a lot of point to this book.

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Should Income be the Sole Metric and Concern of Inequality? For a very wide range of goods and services, we do not much care about equality in distribution. If I own fourteen neckties and my neighbor owns three, if my neighbor gets his hair cut every three weeks but I only get mine cut every six weeks, it does not rise to the level of a public policy concern. Much more attention, rightly, is devoted to inequalities in income, where there is consensus that the state has an obligation to ensure individuals and households do not fall below some minimum level of income, and where transfers to lower-income individuals is through a progressive tax and transfer system (although there are differences of opinion in terms of how progressive that system ought to be, and where the minimum level ought to be set). With this after-tax-and-transfer income, people can then buy as many neckties and haircuts as they prefer. Should income be the sole matter of concern when it comes to inequality, or are there specific goods whose distribution should matter? For goods that are needed by all individuals, adequate redistribution of income might be all that is required. In the United States, there is a program of assistance for low-income (and low-financial asset) households known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as “food stamps.” This assistance can only be used on food, and only on particular types of food—they cannot be used for food that is hot at point of sale, or for beer or wine, they cannot be used for vitamins, or for household cleaning and personal hygiene products. This method of income support is patronizing—it does not trust the poor to spend their income wisely. And it is inefficient—what if someone is very frugal and cost-effective in food preparation, such that the food stamps are more than they need for food, but they could use the income on other expenditures, such as rent or transportation? Programs like food stamps have been opposed by economists who advocate for simple unrestricted transfers of income (Simons 1948; Friedman 1962). There are other efficiency grounds for focusing on income. Suppose we could put in place an income tax, which took on negative values for low-­ income individuals (i.e., they would receive money) while those with more income paid into the system. And suppose we could also have a system of indirect taxes on different goods and services, which could take on different rates for different products. A key result in tax theory (Atkinson and Stiglitz 1976) is that under fairly reasonable assumptions, welfare goals are

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best reached solely through the income tax and transfer system, with no need for setting a complex set of varying indirect tax rates. How progressive the income tax ought to be goes beyond the scope of efficiency alone, and models of optimal income taxation generally proceed along the lines of “if this is the weight we wish to place on making well-being more equal, and we value efficiency, then this would be the optimal set of tax rates. If the weight were different, so would be the tax rates” (Mirrlees (1971) is the seminal work). In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina wreaked devastation on the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas, causing many fatalities, and destroying much of New Orleans’ housing stock. Edward Glaeser (2005) generated a lot of discussion—much of it about the callousness of economists—when he argued that if the government were going to provide relief to New Orleans residents who had lost their homes, jobs, and businesses, it would be far more efficient to grant them cash relief, to be used as recipients individually saw fit, which might include the option of using the funds to relocate to a different city and begin anew, rather than to use the same funds to try to rebuild what capital had been destroyed in New Orleans, a city that had long been in economic decline. Why bind people to living in a city whose economic base (with the exception of tourism) had been lost, as both the petroleum industry and the port had steadily lost employment from labor-saving technological change? At this date New Orleans remains one of the poorest, and most dangerous, American cities. What I found interesting about this debate was the degree to which it separated economists, who (in my admittedly non-rigorous data sampling) generally agreed with Glaeser, and the many non-­economist commentators who did not. But even economists can think of exceptions to the rule of solely relying on income transfers (here I draw upon Tobin (1970)). There are some goods that are, for some set of individuals, of urgent importance, and possibly of an expense that could not be afforded even with a reasonably generous income redistribution system—a catastrophic health care need, or legal fees, for example. Here the state can ensure that should this need arise for someone, there would be assistance, through publicly provided or subsidized health insurance, or through a legal aid office. Some goods are provided equally and are inalienable, for the good of liberal democracy; voters receive one election ballot, which cannot be sold. Tobin calls this “specific egalitarianism.” If a country has compulsory military service, there might be limits placed on the ability to purchase an exemption, to

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hire a substitute to take one’s place (Forrester (2019) recounts how John Rawls, together with other Harvard scholars, in 1966 led a motion in protest against the deferments eligible to students and faculty that enabled them to avoid the draft (at the time for the US war in Vietnam), on the grounds that such a violation of individual liberty could only possibly be justified if it were applied to all, students and non-students, rich and poor, alike). And sometimes goods are rationed by the state rather than through the market pricing system, in wartime or during a natural disaster, in an effort at fair distribution of goods, although the economic method would generally say that the price system is very good at directing goods to where their value would be highest. We can also imagine cases where direct provision of particular goods by the state is a more efficient way of achieving specific distributional goals. Suppose, for example, that a small proportion of adults in a community are functionally illiterate, and that this has a significant negative impact on their life opportunities and well-being. One could say: “ensure that the income tax and transfer system ensures that everyone has enough resources such that if they needed to pay for enrollment in a literacy course provided in the market they could do so.” But that is very ill-targeted. If the state simply provides free adult literacy classes at the public library, for example, then people who could benefit from the course would be able to do so, without having to extend income transfers beyond what is the optimal balance of efficiency and redistribution. It is also more efficient than having people apply for funds to pay for a market-provided literacy course, since in that framework some people might feign illiteracy in order to receive a grant, which they would then spend as they pleased. But nobody (at least in my acquaintance) will feign illiteracy in order to attend a free class. See Blackorby and Donaldson (1988). Are the arts like health care, or more like literacy classes, or more like neckties and haircuts, when it comes to equality?

Equality of What? In Chap. 3 we considered the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls, and the implications for public funding of the arts that arose from his rejection of any form of “perfectionism.” Here I want to consider a different aspect of his theory of justice, his ideal of equality. Rawls’s (1971) two principles of justice, that he imagined could be agreed upon by individuals negotiating from an original position from

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which they had no idea, during deliberations, of what their talents, disabilities, and preferences, would be as such: [T]he first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities in wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society. (pp. 14–15)

The idea that from an original position people would be so extremely risk averse as to only allow inequalities if they worked to the advantage of the least well-off has been challenged: why, for example, would we not choose arrangements that maximized average well-being, together with some “floor” of well-being below which no one would be allowed to fall? Frohlich et al. (1987) come to this result through experimental studies, a result that is something of a compromise between Rawls’s “maximin” and the expected utility theory of Harsanyi (1975). But let’s consider in more detail a different aspect of Rawls’s theory, namely how he would define inequalities in the first place: inequality of what, exactly? How would one define “the least advantaged members of society”? If one is an egalitarian at all, in the sense of thinking that equality between persons is an important good worth pursuing (along with other goods, like individual liberty and freedom to make choices, and efficiency and average levels of well-being), what is it that ought to be equalized? Let’s consider some possibilities—I’ll talk about each in more depth later. One possibility would be to focus on inequality of welfare, or well-­ being. Welfare can be assessed in subjective terms, generally by asking people how well they think their lives are going, all things considered. Or we could additionally consider measuring welfare objectively, from the perspective of a sympathetic observer (as per Adam Smith (1969/1753)); this observer might take account of whether the subject is of sound mind, or of whether they have over time lowered their expectations of life to deal with a situation in which they are not well-off at all, lacking basic freedoms and material resources. A challenge to trying to achieve greater equality in welfare is that people are different in their dispositions and preferences, some generally content even in the face of hardships, some miserable even when in possession of great material wealth. There is also a concern regarding paternalism when it comes to objective perceptions of well-being; I

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might happen to think someone would be happier if they took part in community cultural activities more often, but at the same time be wary of the state pursuing that as a goal in the name of equalizing well-being. If equalizing welfare is not feasible, suppose instead there was a focus on how people are able to live their lives: what things are they able to do, and what roles in the world are they able to fill? Amartya Sen (1982), in the lecture from which I have taken the title of this section, calls these doings and beings functionings. They could include such things as expressing oneself openly without fear of state sanction, through art or through speech, or freely meeting with others, or taking part as a respected member of the community in its social, economic, and political life, or living without fear of destitution or violence, and so on. Not everybody is interested in achieving every possible valuable functioning—some might have little interest in taking part in political debate, or openly and freely practicing a religion—but freedom consists in having the capabilities to achieve various functionings. And so, a different metric of equality could be to look at people’s capabilities. People with the same capabilities would choose to exercise them in different ways, and would have different levels of subjective welfare, but those differences would be beyond the scope of egalitarian policy concerns. Capabilities require individual liberties and material resources: in general, wealth and income. We could focus on equalizing resources, and then let people pursue various possibilities and lifestyles using those resources. But if functionings are what matter in terms of well-being, it might be that some people require more resources than others to gain equal capabilities—someone might have above-average needs in terms of health care, or physical mobility, or achieving equal respect in the community, in order to have the same capabilities as those without those needs. Should an egalitarian concern herself with resources, capabilities, or welfare? Perhaps it doesn’t make a lot of difference: resources allow us to attain capabilities to achieve functionings that give us welfare. What makes the choice matter is that we are all different, in terms of what resources we might need to attain particular capabilities, the choices we make given the capabilities we have, the welfare we achieve as a result of our choices, and the good or bad luck we experience, the outcomes of the various gambles we take in life. The diversity of individuals and their experiences is one of the things that makes the choice over what to try to equalize challenging. There is also the challenge that there is much about people we do not know. When I file my personal income taxes, I tell the government my

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income, and a small number of other personal details, such as how many dependents I have, but they do not know whether I worked very hard to earn my income or if it came easily, or whether I could have earned more had I chosen to. It can’t observe in much depth what capabilities I have, nor my level of well-being, and could not even begin to find out without becoming intrusive. With these limitations in mind, let’s consider each of equalizing resources, capabilities, or welfare in turn, with the implications for the role, if any, of public funding for the arts.

Resources Rawls (1971) would have social primary goods as our proper concern for equality: “rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth” (p.  62), to which he later adds self-respect. What can we say about this? The first thing to note is that Rawls comes to this through a contractarian framework. Equality in social primary goods is what he contends that people detached from the influence of their own abilities and preferences and understandings of the good—from behind a “veil of ignorance”— could agree on; the set of social primary goods would be an overlapping consensus. Whatever other things diverse individuals might think are worth having, everybody could agree to this list, since it allows for people to then make life choices according to their own, perhaps unique, ideas of what constitutes a good life (and can change their minds about it later if they wish). Primary goods are “things that every rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever a person’s rational plan of life” (p. 62). Rawls defines as unjustified an inequality in primary goods which does not work to the benefit of all. Although Rawls rejects utilitarianism as a moral framework, and he notes that utility is going to be something impossible to measure across individuals, his primary goods framework is not that different from what we see in the utility-based models of economics. Consider the seminal paper on how progressive the income tax ought to be, from Mirrlees (1971). His model assumes people who are very similar to one another, with identical utility functions over consumable goods and leisure time, the only difference between people being their labor-market productivity, which generates a distribution of wages. A tax-and-transfer policy concerned with equality will balance distribution of income—that is, a

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“primary good”—with the fact that the higher the marginal tax rate on anyone, the less interested they are at the margin in giving up leisure to earn taxable income. Make the tax too progressive, and national income will suffer. It is even possible in such a model to adopt a quasi-Rawlsian social welfare function that seeks the tax-and-transfer system that would maximize the utility of the worst-off (essentially, lowest-productivity) person. (As an historical footnote: the tax reforms instituted by governments in the 1980s that sharply reduced top marginal tax rates were to an extent driven by the results of this stream of economic research, which showed that extremely high marginal rates for top earners was very costly and did not serve progressive goals very well at all.) Throughout this discussion of the different ways to think about inequality, and the metric over which we ought to most value the pursuit of equality, we don’t want to overstate the differences between approaches. There are many aspects of people’s resources that are beyond society’s ability to equalize them: talents and abilities and aptitudes, or the home environment in which they were born and raised, for example. A focus on primary goods would mean equalizing what can be done: provision of additional resources for necessary health care or for those with disabilities, equal opportunities for education (although, as Williams (1973) notes, this is always going to be a challenge given different aptitudes for formal education among children), and compensation for natural disasters or other bad “brute luck” that might befall people. It is an open question as to how a focus on primary goods plays out over time. It will not take long at all for incomes, and then wealth, to begin to vary from an initial situation of equality. Taking an example from Nozick (1974), if many people, beginning with an equal allocation of primary goods, value the chance to pay money to watch top football, or to hear emotional ballads of lost love, then Mohamed Salah, and Adele, each performing in “superstar” sectors, are going to quickly get rich. Further, they will get rich not through force or deception or exploitation, but simply by being so very good at what they do that people are quite happy, without coercion, to pay them for it. Some sort of progressive tax-and-­ transfer system will be needed, although, as noted above, there are limits as to how progressive it can be. Ronald Dworkin (2000) similarly advocates for “resources” as being the preferred target of egalitarian concerns. Although sharing much in common with Rawls, Dworkin’s is not explicitly a contractarian model. Rather, he develops his case from the egalitarian principle that all people

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are of equal importance—“equal concern is the sovereign virtue of political community” (p. 1)—and that people ought to be held responsible for the choices they make. Dworkin begins with a thought experiment, of which my presentation here is an adaptation: a shipwrecked crew lands on a previously uninhabited island. There are many different “goods” on the island: land, water, naturally growing food, timber, and so on. Suppose each crew member were given an equal number of otherwise-valueless clam shells, which would be used as currency. An auction is then held over all the different goods on the island that are divisible and could be held in private hands. The crew members have different preferences regarding various goods, and different interests and aptitudes in how they might productively use any resources, and as such they bid different amounts. The initial allocation of goods that comes from this auction satisfies an egalitarian concern: no one envies the bundle of goods that anyone else has. After all, if they like someone else’s bundle better than their own, they were perfectly capable of buying it themselves at the auction. But they chose not to. It is a simple model, but it illustrates an important insight: if people differ in tastes and abilities, then ensuring equality in resources allows people to obtain the goods that best suit them. A person might wish they had more goods of all sorts, but that could only be achieved by depriving someone else of their resources and purchases, which would be very difficult to justify if each person was of equal moral concern. It is interesting to note how markets—in this case through a hypothetical auction—aid in the pursuit of egalitarian goals. If there is a specific good that is rather scarce, and of particularly high value to some people, then anyone who wants a share will pay a high price for it, a price that reflects the burden to the community of one person taking a larger share. If puffin’s eggs are in limited supply, and a tasty delicacy, then anyone who wants some of them will have to give up a lot of clam shells, and in turn other goods to be found on the island, to obtain them. But there is something just in that. It reminds us of the argument made by Hayek (1945) that the great value of the market economy is that prices carry a signal to participants; when a price rises it is a signal that either some people have increased their want of the good, or that it has become more costly to produce, and as such it would be good to try to conserve on its use. But beyond primary goods and resources, there will be inequalities in skills and talents, and also in the distribution of luck, good and bad, brute luck (in that the good or bad luck had nothing to do with choices made

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by the individual), and option luck (where the good or bad luck was the outcome of decisions—gambles and risk-taking—over which the individual made a conscious choice). Dworkin imagines a hypothetical market in insurance that people would choose from an original position, and we could think of our varied social safety nets, and a progressive tax-and-­ transfer system, as fulfilling that function. If equal resources are to be the egalitarian’s “currency,” then the arts are not special in any sense—the focus is on the resources people have to spend as they wish, according to their own preferences. These wishes might be hedonistic or not, philanthropic or self-interested, but it is up to the individual to choose. Rawls held that people would, from the original position, agree to equality in primary goods not because there is some metaphysical truth in this, but simply because it would allow them the freedom to set their own path in life, their own conception of what is good. For some people that will be the arts, others might gain their aesthetic rewards elsewhere. If there are individuals who place a high personal value on a form of art that is expensive to obtain, due to market conditions and scarcity, then they are themselves responsible for having that art as one of their values, and for using their primary resources to purchase it, even if it means making sacrifices with respect to other goods. If equality of resources is our concern, there is no egalitarian rationale for public subsidy of the arts (although there might still be other rationales, such as perfectionism (which, as discussed in Chap. 3, Rawls rejected), or market failures in terms of efficiency (as described in Chap. 2).

Capabilities The capabilities approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (although, as we will see below, they take the approach in somewhat different directions), arose out of a dissatisfaction with using resources, or Rawlsian primary goods, as the concern for equality, as well as dissatisfaction with utilitarian approaches to subjective valuation of welfare. As noted above, functionings describe various things a person can be or do—someone can be well-nourished, healthy, mobile, safe, respected, and enjoy basic liberal freedoms, they can take part in different occupations, political and social and cultural life, or perhaps enjoy none of these beings and doings—and capabilities are the combinations of functionings available to a person, even if they do not choose to exercise them all.

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This is a different approach to equality than the focus on resources, because, as Sen emphasizes, people are different, and might need different levels and types of resources to achieve equality in capabilities, and it is capabilities that ultimately matter more for well-being than simply having some bundle of resources. A capabilities approach would account for some individuals having greater needs for health services, or to enable mobility or communication, than others. It can account for group differences, say if there is a class of people in society who have traditionally been denied the opportunity to fully participate in political or cultural life, or certain professions. And Sen notes that the resources needed for various capabilities might vary a lot from place to place and over time. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1981/1776), in a passage on taxation and what goods could properly considered “luxuries,” writes: By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in publick without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, no body can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. (pp. 869–870)

The respect of society, and self-respect, are capabilities that are necessary to be able to fully partake in valuable functionings—getting certain types of jobs, attending a museum or a concert, or, as in Smith’s example, simply going out and about in public. A response might be “well, give people equal resources and then they can purchase these necessary things, whether it be a linen shirt or whatever this time and place demands.” But there are people who, even with some necessary amount of monetary resources, and constitutional guarantees of freedoms and equal opportunity, require more to be able to have a rich set of functionings available to them: does someone have the ability to open a bank account, or to negotiate complex government bureaucratic procedures, or to safely travel after dark? Sen (1987a, 1987b, 1993, 1999) has been influential in our thinking about what it means to talk about a “developing” country: developing into what? From the title of Sen (1999), development is freedom for people to have

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an expanded set of opportunities of things they can be and do. And capabilities give a richer way to conceive of people’s opportunities than do resources, in the same way that a set of capabilities such as embodied in the United Nations’ Human Development Index gives a better sense of how a country is developing than does a narrow focus on Gross Domestic Product. In addition, capabilities and functionings give policymakers a set of observable inequalities that they can then, likely in a piece-meal way, try to rectify, beginning with where the deprivation appears to be most severe, whereas the Rawlsian focus on resources and primary goods does not provide us with clear direction on how best to proceed in a society with inequalities across a wide set of dimensions (Sen 2006). Where Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2011) parts ways with Sen, while staying within the capabilities approach, is that while Sen is, deliberately, open as to specifically what capabilities matter the most, as it would vary depending upon local circumstances, Nussbaum seeks to find a set of capabilities that are universally valuable, across time and across cultures: I shall argue that certain universal norms of human capability should be central for political purposes in thinking about basic political principles that can provide the underpinning for a set of constitutional guarantees of all nations. (Nussbaum 2000, pp. 34–35)

These norms are not meant to dictate how people ought to lead their lives, but rather to ensure that everyone has the capabilities of pursuing their goals. Her suggested capabilities are a set that does not provide an order of importance (as do, e.g., Rawls’s two principles of justice as fairness, which prioritize equal and extensive liberties over the principle that any inequality must be of benefit to the worst-off group); she wishes to recognize the plurality of goods. Her capabilities approach also treats the individual, not the household, as the unit of analysis, another departure from Rawls; this is of crucial importance where women are prevented from enjoying as full a set of capabilities as men. Both Nussbaum and Sen hold that fundamental capabilities matter whether individuals themselves happen to value them; following Scanlon (1975), there are objective goods. This matters because if there is a reliance solely on subjective accounts of well-being, we might have some people who have been so long denied important capabilities that they simply adjust their expectations in life to their state of deprivation. But Sen is looking for a better means of evaluating equality in the quality of life,

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while Nussbaum is, like Rawls, motivated by a pursuit of the principles of justice (Robeyns 2016). Nussbaum lists ten “central human functional capabilities,” including being able to live a lifespan of normal length, bodily health and integrity, to form attachments and have normal emotional development, to use practical reason to form one’s own conception of the good, to form affiliations, to have the social bases of self-respect, to enjoy and have concern for nature, to enjoy play and recreation, and to be a full participant in political and economic life (Nussbaum 2000, pp.  78–80). Here is the capability most concerned with the arts: Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to search for the ultimate meaning of life in one’s own way. Being able to have pleasurable experiences, and to avoid non-necessary pain. (pp. 78–79)

How different is Nussbaum’s list from the Rawls-Dworkin set of primary resources? Many items overlap: individual rights of the person, conscience, expression, association, and the bases of self-respect; equal opportunities for political and economic participation. But Rawls, as we discussed in Chap. 3, is at pains that state intervention on the basis of equality must be in ways that are neutral with respect to the good, and Nussbaum is not; any state that took action to ensure equal capabilities regarding “Senses, Imagination, and Thought” as articulated above cannot be neutral, or the result of a universal overlapping consensus (Nelson 2008). That is not to criticize Nussbaum’s list; arts policy might be in conflict with liberal neutrality, but it is highly contestable whether arts policy is bound by liberal neutrality. And Nussbaum makes a point of saying she is presenting a political proposal, which is open to discussion. A way to avoid any sort of paternalism in this approach is to ensure that it is capabilities, and not functionings, that are being promoted, though this might be a difficult distinction to enforce. One cannot really have the

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capability of fully enjoying complex orchestral music unless one has first participated in listening to and focusing on it—the capability and the functioning are tied. Arts education is, necessarily, arts participation. Claassen (2014) asks: is the capability approach a “functionings” approach in disguise? If, for example, the threshold for Nussbaum’s capability to be ‘able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth’ is set at such a level that people should be able to appreciate complicated artistic performances (say, opera or tragedy), a good deal more paternalism will be required than when this capability is just related to simpler artistic expressions (say, folk songs and Hollywood movies). Such an artistic appreciation arguably requires continuous nourishment over a lifetime, this will require (more or less compulsory) artistic education by government, for children and adults alike …. (Claassen 2014, p. 71)

And so to obtain equality in the “senses” capability, there needs to be a perfectionist intervention by the state (one, we should remember, that will be funded by taxpayers in general (Pogge 2010)). In arts policy, how would one operationalize the capabilities approach? One possibility is to reevaluate public funding of the arts from its roots. Gross and Wilson (2020) see the capabilities approach as a path to pursuing a more concrete embodiment of the concept of “cultural democracy” in England, a departure from the different extant strands of conceptualizing policy such as “democratizing culture” (i.e., the fostering of excellence in the arts together with increasing the population’s access to the arts) and “creative industries” (which they refer to as “neoliberal,” although it involves a significantly greater amount of state involvement in the commercial sector than economists would typically advise). Their work is suggestive of an approach, and so it would be wrong to criticize on the grounds of a lack of a detailed template for action. But there are issues that will necessarily arise. For example, they hope for a pluralist, anti-­ paternalist and anti-hierarchical range of cultural possibilities to be pursued within a capabilities framework, but, whether in arts education for children or in programs for adults, some genres of art, especially those traditionally funded and regarded as the high arts, require significant investments in time to develop the capability to fully enjoy it. A claim that there is nothing special about these art forms over more common

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“everyday” arts participation is one that could be made, but that will not solve the problem of what to prioritize, or of whether anything is worth state funding at all. To say of public funding of the arts “pursuing wider and more equally distributed capabilities ought to be the priority” raises questions regarding people who do not have much interest in developing cultural capabilities beyond what they enjoy in the commercial or informal, non-funded arts space, and for those who do have an interest, what programming is most appropriate (should arts spending be on the familiar, or the new?), and, how public funding would be justified for such expenditures, since there is bound to be redistribution from the people who are least interested in cultural programs to the people who are most interested. In other words, all of the familiar problems of arts policy continue to be present. Zitcer et al. (2016) apply the capabilities approach to the arts opportunities for the residents of three lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia. They gathered a large amount of data on cultural assets and participation, with much attention focused on location, density, and ease of access (in many large American cities, what appears to be a short distance on a map is a much longer distance for people to cover, perhaps around rail tracks, interstate highways, and other barriers). Qualitative methods were also used—interviews on the streets and at community gatherings, at different days and times over the week to gain a representative sample. They found people who valued the arts for the enrichment it brought to their lives, as a helpful tool in building community, and as valuable activities for their children, who often do not have a full range of opportunities. Barriers they faced were a long-term decline in the number of free programs offered, geographic isolation that left people cut off from the rest of the city, large organizations such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art not feeling especially welcoming, and the demise of the local community newspaper that would let people know what was going on nearby. Respondents also lamented the decline in arts programs in their local schools. In practical terms, studies such as this point to simple ways that capabilities, and, in turn, functionings in the arts, can be enhanced: better means of communication, arts programs in schools, smarter urban design, and arts institutions finding ways to present as more welcoming. Nations that constitutionally protect artistic and political expression, and freedom of the press and association, and that ensure education for the young, are already some distance toward fulfilling Nussbaum’s “senses” capability as she described it. The difficult question is to see what more is

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called for in terms of public sector expenditure. If there is agreement that public funding for the arts is justified, and if a goal is to ensure the benefits of that spending are widely distributed, the capabilities approach can be a useful start to thinking about equality, perhaps a more useful concept than the data we already possess on arts participation (which is a measure of the number of people who choose to exercise a capability they have, but gives no indication of whether non-participants have or lack the capability to attend). But it is not obvious that the concept can take us much further, as it leaves contestable the (opposing) claims that the state has no business in the arts beyond guaranteeing basic freedoms, and that the state has a role in funding the pursuit of excellence in the arts as a priority, with all the value judgments that come with that.

Welfare, and the Problem of Expensive Tastes Rather than focusing on resources or capabilities, why would an egalitarian not focus upon people’s actual levels of well-being, or welfare? Equalizing welfare immediately comes up against the problem of people who are unhappy even though they are well-provided with resources and capabilities, and people who are content even though relatively deprived in resources and capabilities. Would we be obliged to focus our attention upon the rich-but-morose? Scanlon (1975) suggests there are things that are objectively good for people’s well-being, that are urgent, and the focus could be placed there. The provision of universal health care helps equalize well-being in an objective way, apart from the subjective welfare that people might be experiencing. But sometimes the provision of public goods based upon impact on welfare is not necessarily progressive (Arrow 1971). Consider a public university and its doctoral program in mathematics. This program might pass a cost-benefit test for public spending, increasing the total well-being of society, in advancing knowledge in mathematics and in preparing a new generation of mathematicians. But in supporting those students most qualified to succeed, the program might well be regressive in terms of distribution, and not working to equalize welfare at all (although as the national income rises from such investments, transfers could be made to the least well-off through a progressive tax-and-transfer system). Rawls (1971) and Dworkin (2000) reject welfare as the currency of egalitarianism, in favor of resources, since individuals ought to have some responsibility for making their own decisions, and choosing their own life

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path; they claim it is not an obligation of society to ensure that the outcome of those decisions is a certain level of subjective happiness. In practical terms it would be nearly impossible to accomplish—how would a government agency even know how happy people are? If the solution to that problem is to look to more objective measures of welfare, such as good health, education for children, proper housing, and so on, then we are simply returning to some version of resource equality, albeit with perhaps a wider definition of what counts as “primary goods.” A reader of the literature on what constitutes egalitarian justice might be struck by the fact that the differences between a focus on resources, capabilities, and objective welfare, are simply not that great, and that progress on one front—say, progressive policies that aim to provide greater equality of resources–will almost certainly lead to progress on greater equality by the other measures. Of much greater importance in the world is the difference between people who place a high value on egalitarianism at all, regardless of the chosen metric, and those who place much less importance upon equality, relative to individual liberties, and aggregate wealth. And so Arneson’s (1989) proposal for focusing on “equal opportunity for welfare,” and Cohen’s (2011) “equality of access to advantage,” are awfully close (as they agree) to Sen’s (1982, 1993) capabilities approach to equality. When Sen points out that a focus purely on primary goods might ignore the special needs of people with issues in mobility, Rawls (1993, pp. 182–183) responds that of course his principles of justice as fairness would account for that. What differences there are in these approaches come down to what differences between individuals one believes should matter in terms of public policy, and which should not. But there is one difference between people that might seem small in the grand overview of inequality, but that has some importance for arts policy and egalitarianism, and that is the problem of expensive tastes. In simple terms, suppose public policy has done well, if not perfectly, in equalizing resources and/or capabilities, but that there are some people whose happiness depends on being able to consume a good that happens to be relatively expensive. They do not value this good because it is expensive, that is, because it is relatively scarce, uses up a lot of resources in production, and is highly valued by others. I know of no moral theory that would suggest people who value expensive things simply because they are expensive deserve special consideration. Rather, they value these goods for their intrinsic properties, and it is their bad luck that these things have turned out to be expensive. For example, suppose someone has a deep love for

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live performances of opera, and this is not because the art form requires a lot of resources for staging a live production, and, because opera audiences are not large, has a very high cost per member of the audience, but simply because they love the art, and would do so even if by some magic it could be produced much less expensively. Does egalitarian justice suggest that opera-lovers deserve special consideration, over people whose cultural tastes can be satisfied at much less expense? One approach would be to start by asking if the person was simply born with a disposition toward these expensive tastes, or if they were deliberately acquired by the person over time, a “rational addiction” (Becker and Murphy (1988), as discussed in Chap. 2). There are some egalitarians, Dworkin (2000) being an example, who give more consideration to compensating people for bad “brute luck,” over which they had no control, than they give to compensating for “option luck,” where things work out badly for people who take calculated risks (see Anderson (1999) for a sharp critique of a framework which stretches the idea of what is even meant by “egalitarian”). But the origin of our tastes is a complicated business, to say the least. My father enjoyed opera (my mother less so) and would play records at home when I was a boy, and I came to recognize some of the more famous arias and overtures. He took me to my first live opera when I was 16 years old. When I first left home to set out on my own I didn’t listen to much opera. But in my thirties I regained an interest, and started buying records (and “borrowing” records from home) and occasionally attending performances. I tried out new works, and became a committed fan, even for the Wagner of which my father was decidedly not a fan—the last performance of any type I saw before the COVID pandemic shut the arts world down was Parsifal. Live opera is an expensive taste. Did I choose it? I could not really say, I don’t have enough faith in my own memories or self-­ understanding. If I cannot answer this question about myself, I could hardly do so for others. For Rawls, with his focus on equality of primary goods, the origins of our preferences do not matter: [T]hat we can take responsibility for our ends is part of what free citizens may expect of one another. Taking responsibility for our tastes and preferences, whether or not they have arisen from our actual choices, is a special case of that responsibility. As citizens with realized moral powers, this is something we must learn to deal with. (Rawls 1993, p. 185)

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He adds, in a footnote to this passage, “it is a normal part of being human to cope with the preferences our upbringing leaves us with.” Are expensive tastes a misfortune? Cohen (2011) suggests that we do not regret having expensive tastes; we are simply worse off because these goods we like happen to be expensive. The goal in finding a way to accommodate people with expensive tastes is not to make them better off than everyone else, but rather to raise them to the same level of welfare as everyone else. Further, our tastes are a part of our conception of ourselves. I have a set of cultural preferences, rather omnivorous, as well as a set of cultural goods in which I have little interest. What would it mean to wish I had different tastes, other than to wish I was something of a different person? I cannot help but note that arts councils actively encourage the development of a taste for opera, funding outreach, and educational programs (see Kaplow (2006)). The literature on expensive tastes relies on some stock examples— opera, plover’s eggs, and pre-phylloxera claret—and this serves to give a sense of rather spoiled individuals demanding compensation that would enable them to continue living in the style to which they have become accustomed. But this is a misleading picture. In the state of Minnesota, there is a Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul, and in its twin city of Minneapolis, a Somali Museum, Hmong and Somali people being small immigrant communities in the United States, but relatively concentrated there. For these immigrant communities, a cultural center, in a place geographically and culturally very distant from their homelands of Laos and Somalia, means a great deal to those two groups of people. Because they are small in number, and, generally, of low income, maintaining such cultural gathering places could be fairly considered an “expensive taste”— after all, there is all manner of American popular culture that is cheaply obtained for anyone who wants it. What does it mean to say a migrant from Somalia is “responsible” for her tastes? Again, the idea is not to confer some sort of extra privilege on these immigrant communities, but rather to help their members have a chance for a level of well-being equal to the well-being of those who can satisfy their own cultural needs at relatively low expense (I return to the question of multiculturalism, and the Hmong Cultural Center, in Chap. 7). Perhaps expensive tastes for particular cultural goods suggest a possible egalitarian rationale for public funding of the arts, that is, if one thinks expensive tastes are a moral concern. Recall earlier in this chapter I used the example of a library program for teaching adult literacy. The argument

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there was that if we thought egalitarian justice demanded assistance for adults who were not yet functionally literate, the most efficient way to provide assistance would be through directly providing programs, rather than simply trying to equalize monetary resources; the state providing the actual program would be far better targeted to the people who would actually gain the most benefit. Now suppose it were the case that arts policy, subsidies to specific providers, was in a sense some compensation to those with expensive tastes, ensuring that cultural goods of great particular importance to people with those expensive tastes would be available to them at costs that were not prohibitive, whether this be for live opera and orchestral music, theatre, experimental visual art, or cultural centers for small communities of immigrants. In the summer of 2022, as the performing arts sector began to emerge from the COVID shutdowns, I was able to attend a free, outdoor performance of Henry IV, Part 1, in my small city. It was low budget, low tech, and supported by local government grants. When I attended, on a Saturday night, the audience size was around 100, very appreciative, people. It was a diverse audience (obviously I am engaging in a very casual empiricism here). Shakespeare is not for everyone; the only people who attended were those who had a real interest in it, seeing something simply not commonly available. I think it is fair to claim a taste for live performances of Shakespeare’s historical plays is an “expensive taste.” And the support given by local government for this performance catered to, for performers and audience alike, an expensive taste. One advantage of seeing public subsidies to the arts through this particular egalitarian lens is that it is relatively non-invasive. As Wolff (1998) reminds us, egalitarianism is not only about how the state redistributes resources and goods in the population, but is also about preserving equal respect for individuals, and avoiding situations that would be burdensome or embarrassing to them. There is something good about programs that ask for as little information from people as possible, and not only in terms of the pure practicality of it. Broad-based taxes and income supplements such as administered through the personal income tax and its various tax credits, together with subsidies to particular public goods such as the arts and culture, parks and recreation, education and health, enable the pursuit of egalitarian goals without asking much of people in terms of their capabilities, their levels of well-being, or whether they are “deserving” of support (Scheffler 2005). Such a system is not perfect in equalizing resources or capabilities or welfare, and the degrees of progressivity in taxes and

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subsidies for public goods will depend upon the relevant local and national preferences as manifested through democratic politics. But this is as relevant a place as any to recall the maxim that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

References Anderson, Elizabeth S. 1999. What Is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109 (2): 287–337. Arneson, Richard J. 1989. Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare. Philosophical Studies 56 (1): 77–93. Arrow, Kenneth. 1971. A Utilitarian Approach to the Concept of Equality in Public Expenditures. Quarterly Journal of Economics 85 (3): 409–415. Atkinson, Anthony B., and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 1976. The Design of Tax Structure: Direct versus Indirect Taxation. Journal of Public Economics 6 (1–2): 55–75. Becker, Gary S., and Kevin M. Murphy. 1988. A Theory of Rational Addiction. Journal of Political Economy 96 (4): 675–700. Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Pursuit of the Ideal. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: John Murray. Blackorby, Charles, and David Donaldson. 1988. Cash versus Kind, Self-selection, and Efficient Transfers. American Economic Review 78 (4): 691–700. Bronfenbrenner, Martin. 1973. Equality and Equity. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 409 (1): 9–23. Brook, Orion, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor. 2020. Culture is Bad for You. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Claassen, Rutger. 2014. Capability Paternalism. Economics and Philosophy 30 (1): 57–73. Cohen, G.A. 2011. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forrester, Katrina. 2019. In the Shadow of Justice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frohlich, Norman, Joe A. Oppenheimer, and Cheryl L. Eavey. 1987. Choices of Principles of Distributive Justice in Experimental Groups. American Journal of Political Science 31 (3): 606–636. Glaeser, Edward L. 2005. Should the Government Rebuild New Orleans or Just Give Residents Checks? The Economists’ Voice 2 (4): 4.

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Gross, Jonathan, and Nick Wilson. 2020. Cultural Democracy: An Ecological and Capabilities Approach. International Journal of Cultural Policy 26 (3): 328–343. Harsanyi, John C. 1975. Review: Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls’s Theory. American Political Science Review 69 (2): 594–606. Hayek, F.A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530. Kaplow, Louis. 2006. Choosing Expensive Tastes. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (3): 415–425. Mill, John Stuart. 1973/1863. Utilitarianism. New York: Anchor Books. Mirrlees, J.A. 1971. An Exploration in the Theory of Optimal Income Taxation. Review of Economic Studies 38 (2): 175–208. Nelson, Eric. 2008. From Primary Goods to Capabilities: Distributive Justice and the Problem of Neutrality. Political Theory 36 (1): 93–122. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pogge, Thomas. 2010. A Critique of the Capability Approach. In Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, ed. H.  Brighouse and I.  Robeyns, 17–60. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. The Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. Political Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robeyns, Ingrid. 2016. Capabilitarianism. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 17 (3): 397–414. Scanlon, T.M. 1975. Preference and Urgency. Journal of Philosophy 72 (19): 655–669. Scheffler, Samuel. 2005. Choice, Circumstance, and the Value of Equality. Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 4 (1): 5–28. Sen, Amartya. 1982. Equality of What? In Choice, Welfare and Measurement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1987a. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1987b. The Standard of Living. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. Capability and Well-Being. In The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 30–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Random House. ———. 2006. What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice? Journal of Philosophy 103 (5): 215–238. Simons, Henry. 1948. Economic Policy for a Free Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Smith, Adam. 1969/1753. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. ———. 1981/1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Tobin, James. 1970. On Limiting the Domain of Inequality. Journal of Law and Economics 13 (2): 263–277. Williams, Bernard. 1973. The Idea of Equality. In Problems of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Jonathan. 1998. Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos. Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (2): 97–122. Zitcer, Andrew, Julie Hawkins, and Neville Vakharia. 2016. A Capabilities Approach to Arts and Culture? Theorizing Community Development in West Philadelphia. Planning Theory and Practice 17 (1): 35–51.

CHAPTER 5

Communitarianism

The first half of this book explored different ways of setting the question of public funding for the arts: the economic approach in Chap. 2, the Rawlsian liberal social contract in Chap. 3, and various approaches to egalitarianism in Chap. 4. We looked at the implications of these ways of framing the arts funding question, and the core assumptions of the models, and various challenges to them that have been put forth. But for all the ways these models differ, there was a common, though unstated, element throughout, which has been termed methodological individualism: the idea that the analysis of economic, social, and political phenomena needs to begin with the recognition that all the outcomes we observe are the result of choices and actions of individuals. Economic analysis begins with the individual, with her tastes and preferences over goods and services, public goods and externalities, and choices about education, skills acquisition, and work. The same framework has been used by economists to cover choices such as marriage and childbearing, political activity, and crime, among others. We can say colloquially that a “firm” or a “government” or a “university” has decided to take a particular action, but when we look closer, we find that it is a set of individuals within these organizations who ultimately decided on a particular action, and other individuals who were directed to carry it out.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_5

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In Rawls’s social contract, it is individuals (more specifically, heads of households) who come to an agreement on the principles of justice; the essence of “justice as fairness” is that the individuals involved in the deliberations, from behind their veils of ignorance, will each agree that the principles are fair, that they can justify the principles to one another. The principles in place, individuals then form their own conceptions of the good, and work with the resources and the rights they have to pursue them. In the discussion of different approaches to egalitarianism, and whether the goal of policy ought to be to mitigate inequalities in resources and/or capabilities and/or welfare, the concern was the position of the individual and whether it was appropriate to provide him benefits through a redistribution away from others. Two important questions arise. The first is: what if methodological individualism is a misguided approach to thinking about society and morals? Suppose that instead of looking at social outcomes and thinking of them in terms of their being the result of millions of individual choices through the ages and in the present, we reversed the lens, and saw individuals and their characters as arising out of the society that formed them? Would this give us a better understanding of the nature of society? The second question is: does the answer to the methodological question have implications for public policy? An undercurrent of the first half of this book, which relied on models in the tradition of methodological individualism, was that the moral case for public funding for the arts was not very robust: the economic model of market failures relied upon individual preferences, in general not to be disputed, for the valuation of public goods and positive externalities. The Rawlsian social contract rejected perfectionism, and in turn public funding for the arts. The egalitarian case for public funding for the arts was weak, especially so if individuals’ resources, to be spent as they wished, were to be the “currency” of egalitarian justice. But if we look for an alternative model for society that does not rely on methodological individualism, will the case for public funding for the arts change? Whether moving away from methodological individualism to an alternative approach would change the justification for public funding for the arts is a subtle question, because in any policy question, there are two parts: how do we think the world works, and what are the values we think the state ought to pursue? These two parts can become confounded, as we will see below, and so we will want to be sure to know, if a change in approach to arts funding is suggested, from where it is arising.

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In this chapter I will begin by looking deeper into methodological individualism, why it was so widely adopted in the social sciences, and pitfalls in the approach, especially where the choice of method in studying society becomes conflated with an advocacy for individualism as a moral stance and political goal. I will then turn to critiques of the approach, and an advocacy for placing society as something prior to the individual, that has come to be known as communitarianism (although there is variation among the communitarians, and the name itself is not typically used by the philosophers most identified with it). And finally, I will look at how the communitarian approach leads to different ways of evaluating public funding for the arts.

Methodological Individualism Although there were a few earlier instances of the concept, the earliest clear case for methodological individualism in social science is found in sociologist Max Weber’s Economy and Society (1968/1922): Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behavior exists only as the behavior of one or more individual human beings. … [I]t may … be convenient or even indispensable to treat social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual persons. Thus they may be treated as the subjects of rights and duties or as the performers of legally significant actions. But for the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in the course of subjectively understandable action. … For sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts.” When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family, or an army corps, or to similar collectivities, what is meant is … only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons. (pp. 13–14, emphasis in the original)

Applied to legislatures and bureaucracies, Weber’s method became known as the field of public choice (Mueller 1989). In their seminal work in public choice, The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan and Tullock (1962) state in the first page of text:

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Collective action must be, under our postulate, composed of individual actions. The first step in our construction is, therefore, some assumption about individual motivation and individual behavior in social as contrasted with private or individualized activity. Our theory thus begins with the acting or decision-making individual as he participates in the processes through which group choices are organized. Since our model incorporates individual behavior as its central feature, our “theory” can perhaps best be classified as being methodologically individualistic. (p. 1, emphasis in the original)

Through the recent history of economic science there has been a drive to reject models that do not have at their foundation the purposive choices of individuals. The consumption function employed by Keynes in his General Theory (1936), where aggregate consumption is a simple linear function of aggregate national income, was criticized on the grounds that there was no coherent model of individual behavior that would generate this outcome (Blaug 1978); the “permanent income hypothesis” of Milton Friedman (1957) was in this sense more methodologically sound. Likewise the “Phillips curve” which showed the historical negative correlation between a nation’s inflation rate and unemployment rate, and which textbooks from the 1960s suggested contained useful information for policymakers in setting macroeconomic policy, was undermined by a research program begun by Friedman (1968), and more formally by Lucas (1972), that showed a model built from individual behavior and individuals’ responses to expected inflation undermined any stable relationship between inflation and labor markets. Methodological individualism is at the foundation of game theory, which is not so much an actual “theory” as a way of modeling the outcomes of individuals’ pursuing their goals based upon the information they have, where the outcome for any single individual depends upon the choices made by all individuals. The prisoner’s dilemma is the most familiar example; Axelrod (1984) makes use of it to describe the evolution of cooperative behavior between individuals. Schelling (1978) shows how individual motives in game theory settings can lead to surprising aggregate outcomes. Elster (1982) suggests Marxist economics could benefit from the application of methodological individualism—consider the position of individual laborers and their incentives before analyzing the behavior of the class known as Labor.

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I will consider communitarian objections to this approach later, but for now it is worth noting that within economics there are misgivings about strict adherence to methodological individualism: [T]he key element in the classic statements of methodological individualism is a refusal to examine the institutional or other forces which are involved in the moulding of individual preferences and purposes. We are thus confronted with a remarkable optimism about the possibility of explanation of social phenomena in terms of individuals, but an extreme reluctance to give even partial explanations of individual behaviour in social or even psychological terms. (Hodgson 1986, p. 211)

It is not so much that economists would ordinarily deny that the society in which we have been raised and where we live has had an influence on our desires, and on how we conceive of the world—even that most staunch advocate for methodological individualism, Hayek (1948), writes that it is “the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society” (p. 6). Rather, it is that in the formal models of the economy that economists employ, the way individuals develop and change as a part of society is put to the side. Stigler and Becker’s (1977) essay “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum” is not actually about whether we can argue over tastes, but instead is a claim that most observed changes in individual behavior come not from changes in their preferences and ideas, but from changes to the prices and constraints they face in making optimizing decisions, with a very stable utility function. Arrow (1994) notes that a “pure” methodological individualism is impossible in economics, since there are factors that are necessarily social. Consider the concept of general equilibrium, where all prices in the economy have adjusted to the levels that ensure there is no excess demand or excess supply in any market. That set of prices has indeed arisen from the decisions made by millions of individuals in terms of what to buy, produce, and sell. But who “set” the prices? If I were a farmer of soybeans, I would take the price of soybeans as a given in my decision-making; I would be a “price taker.” But a model of competitive markets that assumes everyone is a price taker posits no individual in charge of setting the price. Austrian-­ school critics of mainstream economic analysis agree, rejecting notions of

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general equilibrium precisely because they violate the concept of individualism (see Lachmann 1969). A final note on economic method: does a strict adherence to methodological individualism as a social science method lead to individualism as a moral and political goal? In principle it shouldn’t—following Hume, the “is” results of analysis by means of methodological individualism cannot be enough to generate the “ought” of a minimal state. Yet in the writings of the advocates of individualism, see Hayek (1948) for example, it is difficult to discern where the modeling strategy ends and the advocacy for individualism in constitutions and policies begins. And yet things need not be this way: the economic analysis we presented in Chap. 2 includes provisions for the optimal funding of public goods and subsidies to positive externalities, including those that might arise in the arts, and while this analysis was firmly grounded in the foundation of individual preferences over private and public goods and externalities, it could at the same time lead us to a very interventionist government regarding publicly provided goods and subsidies to individuals and firms. That being said, fundamental to the economic approach to state intervention is the autonomy of individual preferences, which are accepted as data not subject to question. This has deep implications for applying the method to such policy questions as public funding for the arts. Turning now to the social contract models of Kant (1970/1793) and Rawls (1971), although their conceptions of the principles of justice for a society differ in significant ways from the economic approach, in particular their unwillingness to look to aggregate costs and benefits, that is, the consequences, of state actions, but rather to abide by principles for individual autonomy that might well conflict with the consequences for society as a whole, they share with economists the free and autonomous individual as the foundation for principles of the social order. In particular, the constitution is an agreement of free individuals that protects their liberty against coercion, and that leaves individuals themselves to pursue their own conception of the good: Men have different views on the empirical end of happiness and what it consists of, so that as far as happiness is concerned, their will cannot be brought under any common principle nor thus any external law harmonising with the freedom of everyone. (Kant 1970/1793, pp. 73–74)

And further:

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My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. … the guiding idea is that ­principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the subject of the original agreement. They are principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. (Rawls 1971, p. 11)

Importantly, the state, or “society,” does not have goals or interests that it plans to accomplish; that is a task for individuals, and the laws agreed upon by individuals foster their being able to pursue their goals with only those infringements on their liberty as is necessary to prevent coercion or violence from others. Oakeshott (1983) defines the “rule of law” as, among other things, the arrangements made by individuals to allow them to pursue their goals, and that its converse is a state which fashions itself as an enterprise in the pursuit of certain goals, rather than a means for individuals to do so.

The Communitarian Critique The critique of methodological individualism can be applied to both the economic / consequentialist approach and the models of the social contract, and while it is a common concern, it is easiest to take the targets in turn. So let me begin with the criticism of economic modeling, using Charles Taylor’s (1995) essay “Irreducibly Social Goods” as an exemplar. Recall the discussion of the economic approach to public goods in Chap. 2. Individuals are assumed to have preferences, and an associated willingness-to-pay, for private goods such as neckties, haircuts, and books, but also for public goods like national defense, lighthouses, and public art, where public goods are defined by the features that (1) once provided, no single person’s benefit from using the good diminishes the benefits of anyone else using the good, and (2) it is very difficult, once provided, to exclude anyone from using the good, thus making it very difficult for private firms to provide the good in a profitable way, since they have no means of collecting revenue from users. Traditional methods of cost-benefit analysis over the expanded provision of a public good ask, first, over the individuals who will conceivably benefit from the good, how much would each of them be willing to pay in

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additional taxes to fund the increment. This number will vary across individuals; I might be willing to pay $50 a year in additional taxes to fund increased provision of bike lanes, others might be willing to pay only $10, and many people will not be willing to pay anything at all, having no interest in using them. The sum of this willingness-to-pay across all individuals is then compared to the cost of producing the expansion of the public good in question, and if the costs are less than the total willingness-­to-­pay, the project should be given the green light. Taylor reminds us that this approach is: consequentialist, in that whether the policy should be undertaken is assessed in terms of its total costs and benefits, and it might be that the project is approved even though some citizens are displeased by it; welfarist, in that it is only the subjective well-­ being of individuals that is taken into consideration in the analysis, nothing more and nothing less; and is based on methodological individualism, or, as Taylor calls it, atomism, in that individuals are treated as separate and independent beings, each with their own evaluation of the public good in question. Now let’s compare two proposals for public goods. The first is a flood control project: there is a rural road a few miles from my town that often floods in spring, making travel for people who live nearby difficult, as they need to take a very circuitous route to get into town or to school, and which also puts their properties at risk of flood damage. A new dam built by the county government could significantly reduce the incidence of floods. The second is a public art project: there is a sizeable, though at present rather empty, plaza in town, and a proposal is made for a major work of sculpture to become the centerpiece of the space. Traditional economic analysis would say there is no conceptual difference between these two cases: they both involve public goods; different individuals will place different values on them; and we can do surveys, or base estimates on previous surveys, to find the aggregate benefits people place on the projects and compare that to the costs. But Taylor suggests these two projects are in fact different. The way that people value the dam and the flood control is straightforward; it is costly to have to drive extra miles to get to anywhere, and nobody likes the risk of having their home flooded, with the possible damage to possessions and to the foundations of the house. If I were to compare flood control projects in different places around the world, for all the cultural differences people might have, there would be universal agreement that having

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a dependable road year-round, and less risk of homes or businesses being flooded, are good things and worth paying for. But a public sculpture is a different thing. How people in my city would see and value a sculpture by, say, Robert Calder or Richard Senna, critically depends upon the meaning of the sculpture to them, and that is culturally specific. There is a great difference between looking at a solid, tilted steel arc, 120 feet long, and looking at Serra’s Tilted Arc. In a public park, there is a great difference between hearing men and women using different instruments, producing sounds with varying pitch, timbre, and duration, and hearing Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” The value of abstract sculpture, or Western classical music, presupposes a shared cultural tradition that produces in people the ability to value them; otherwise, we have just a block of steel, or noise. A response from economics might be: so what? Even if it is true that the values people place on public art depend upon local cultural background, that doesn’t prevent us from using a contingent valuation model to ask people how much in taxes they are willing to pay for it, and, proceeding from there, to make a cost-benefit analysis recommendation. But that response is not adequate, because it neglects the value of the culture itself: It is not a mere instrument of the individual goods. It can’t be distinguished from them as their merely contingent condition, something they could in principle exist without. That makes no sense. It is essentially linked to what we have identified as good. Consequently, it is hard to see how we could deny it the title of good, not just in some weakened, instrumental sense, like the dam, but as intrinsically good. To say that a certain kind of self-giving heroism is good, or a certain quality of aesthetic experience, must be to judge the cultures in which this kind of heroism and that kind of experience are conceivable options as good cultures. If such virtue and experience are worth cultivating, then the cultures have to be worth fostering, not as contingent instruments, but for themselves. (Taylor 1995, p. 137)

So now we are faced with a new question: how do we place a value on the culture itself, as something over and above specific manifestations of that culture, like an abstract sculpture or Schubert in the park? Is this just another chance to ask people how they value it? But we cannot do that. It is impossible to ask people how they value the culture that produced in them the values they have. If asked, I could respond to a question about whether I would be willing to pay more for arts funding (though my

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answer would be of questionable value), but if asked how much I value the culture that produced and continues to produce our visual art, music, theatre and literature, there is nothing I can say. I can imagine, sadly, a city cutting its budget for theatre in the park, but it is impossible to imagine not having the culture that has fostered our traditions in theatre. That would be to imagine not just that I was lacking in some goods to consume, but rather that I was a different person. So, while the methods of economics might work passably well for dam projects, they fail when it comes to aspects of culture that shape our values; the culture is embedded within us, and so it is not possible to rely upon subjective valuation of the culture (note Throsby (2003) also raises this issue with respect to using subjective valuation methods in the arts). But just because we cannot use individualistic methods to measure the value of the culture, that by no means implies the culture does not have value. Further, culture is irreducibly social: [T]he valuable culture, unlike the dam, is an irreducible feature of the society as a whole. The dam, just as an instrument, is not a feature of society at all. This opens up another crucial disanalogy. A good is public in a common sense of welfarist theory, we saw, when its provision to one requires its being supplied for all. But this too, in the ordinary case, is a contingent restriction. In fact, with available technology and taking account of cost factors, the only solution to my flooding problem is a dam which also will protect all of you. But with a different gamut of possible technologies, or if I had much larger resources, there might be another solution: I encase my property in some force field that only operates against water pressing from the outside; and then I watch all of you with smug satisfaction, as you rush to evacuate in your boats. But this possibility makes no sense in the cultural case. The good is inherently social. (Taylor 1995, p. 138)

Put another way, without using the analogy of fantastical force fields: I can decompose the benefits of the dam into the benefits to each individual household: the Smith’s will benefit by $5000, the Sayed’s by $6000, and so on, and then add these figures to come up with the total benefits to people in the flood-prone area. But there is no sensible way I can do this for the culture of meaning we have, the value of our artistic traditions, our language, our social practices. What we have could only have arisen through a society; there are no private languages or musical forms or ethics. I will now turn to the (related) communitarian critique of the model of the social contract, which also relies upon a methodological individualism,

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or atomism. Here I will draw upon Sandel (1982, 1984) and Taylor (1985). Recall from Chap. 3 the discussion of Rawls’s two principles of justice: The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights. The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and command must be accessible to all. (Rawls 1971, p. 61)

The first principle illustrates what we could call the “priority of rights”: not only is it treated by Rawls as prior to the second principle of justice, or the “difference principle,” it is also prior to any obligations and duties people might have toward their fellow citizens. Obligations might later come to be agreed upon—say, for example, if almost everybody is satisfied with a means of taxation to finance a public good, then that can be implemented, and citizens would be obliged to pay their taxes according to what was agreed upon—but there are no obligations that arise simply as a matter of being a part of the society in the first place. These are, as Sandel (1982) puts it, unencumbered selves. But consider the rights listed above: liberty of conscience and thought, freedom of speech and assembly, the ability to hold property. Why these rights? Not every society in the world upholds these rights, but the liberal tradition does. Taylor (1985) argues that these rights matter because they come from a conception of what a person is, and what freedoms are needed to fully develop our capacity as humans. Our human capacities—and we can trace this back to Aristotle—have a moral status, and those who argue for the primacy of rights respect this. But this undermines the assumptions of methodological individualism: All choices are equally valid; but they must be choices. The view that makes freedom of choice this absolute is one that exalts choice as a human capacity.

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It carries with it the demand that we become beings capable of choice, that we rise to the level of self-consciousness and autonomy where we can exercise choice, that we not remain enmired through fear, sloth, ignorance, or superstition in some code imposed by tradition, society, or fate which tells us how we should dispose of what belongs to us. Ultra-liberalism can only appear unconnected with any affirmation of worth and hence obligation of self-fulfillment, where people have come to accept the utterly facile moral psychology of traditional empiricism, according to which agents possess the full capacity of choice as a given rather than as a potential that has to be developed. … If we cannot ascribe natural rights without affirming the worth of certain human capacities, and if this affirmation has other normative consequences (i.e., that we should foster and nurture those capacities in ourselves and others), then any proof that these capacities can only develop in society or in a society of a certain kind is a proof that we ought to belong to or sustain society or this kind of society. But then, provided a social (i.e., an anti-­ atomist) thesis of the right kind can be true, an assertion of the primacy of rights is impossible; for to assert the rights in question is to affirm the capacities, and granted the social thesis is true concerning these capacities, this commits us to an obligation to belong. This will be as fundamental as the assertion of rights, because it will be inseparable from it. (Taylor 1985, pp. 197–198, emphasis in the original)

Notice the connection between Taylor’s concept of culture as an irreducibly social good, necessary and prior to any valuation we can make toward cultural artifacts and performances, and a society that recognizes the need to develop in individuals the capacity for choice, if the liberal rights we wish to protect are to have any meaning, and our obligation is to help foster those capacities. (Also recall the discussion in Chap. 4 of Martha Nussbaum’s (2000) list of universally valuable capabilities, and the argument that whether one believes she has identified the right list, it is difficult to claim it is “neutral” with respect to ideas of the good.) [T]he free and autonomous moral agent can only achieve and maintain his identity in a certain type of culture … They are carried on in institutions and associations which require stability and continuity and frequently also support from society as a whole  – almost always the moral support of being commonly recognized as important, but frequently also material support. These bearers of our culture include museums, symphony orchestras, universities, laboratories, political parties, law courts, representative assemblies, newspapers, publishing houses, television stations, and so on. (Taylor 1985, p. 205)

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Adopting a holistic as opposed to atomist perspective on the individual does seem to bring with it an agenda for public policy, one that nurtures and respects the institutions and aspects of our culture that create the conditions for the full development of human capacities. To this point I have focused on Rawls’s first principle of justice, defining and defending rights, but what of the second principle, regarding the distribution of income and wealth? Sandel (1984) notes that, although it is hidden, the difference principle presumes an attachment and commitment to society. Suppose I am born with the good luck to be very handsome and smart and strong. In a libertarian society these factors might combine to help me have the chance to be near the top of the income distribution. The difference principle says that I can only reap the benefits of my good fortune if it works out to the advantage of the least well-off, but this will probably only work through some sort of progressive tax-and-­ transfer system. But where does my obligation to the least well-off come from? The difference principle presupposes a community to which the fortunate have obligations. In summary: in neither the economic / utilitarian model, nor the Kantian / Rawlsian social contract, does methodological individualism give a full account of our social or moral life. Human capacity for freedom and choice, and obligations to our fellow citizens, can only arise out of a more holistic view of the individual and the society into which she was born. But where does that leave us? If the communitarians have succeeded in tearing down the atomist view of society, with what do we replace it, and what are the implications for arts policy?

Communitarianism in the World Charles Taylor presents this anecdote: Jacques lives in Saint Jérôme, and his greatest desire was to hear the Montreal symphony under Charles Dutoît playing in a live concert. He had heard them on records and the radio, but he was convinced that these media could never give total fidelity, and he wanted to hear the real thing. The obvious solution was to travel to Montreal, but his aged mother would fall into a state of acute anxiety whenever he went farther than Saint Janvier. So Jacques got the idea of recruiting other music lovers in the town to raise the required fee to bring the orchestra to Saint Jérôme. Finally the great moment

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came. As Jacques walked into the concert that night, he looked on the Montreal Symphony Orchestra visit as a convergent good between him and his fellow subscribers. But then, when he actually experienced his first live concert, he was enraptured not only by the quality of the sound, which was as he expected quite different from what you get on records, but also by the dialogue between the orchestra and the audience. His own love of the music fused with that of the crowd in the darkened hall, resonated with theirs, and found expression in an enthusiastic common act of applause at the end. Jacques also enjoyed the concert in a way he had not expected, as a mediately common good. (Taylor 1989, p. 169)

I have always had difficulty in seeing the holistic level of analysis in this story, since even a methodological individualist cultural economist could say that we enjoy listening to live music, that a live performance of an orchestra will require a critical mass of audience to be able to cover the costs of the performance, and that in addition to the aesthetic experience an individual receives, there is the externality of being pleased that others are also enjoying the music. There needs to be something more to a communitarian approach to arts funding. Let me try a different route. Recall in Chap. 3 the discussion of Ronald Dworkin’s “Can a Liberal State Support Art?” (1985). In that essay he argued that we ought to support the arts because we owe it to future generations to leave them a rich and varied cultural heritage from which they can draw for their own enjoyment as consumers, and also as the framework that allows for the creation of new works and movements in art. He hoped that this could pass the test of “liberal neutrality.” But when the arts council needs to make decisions on precisely what art to support, judgment must come into play as to what is worthy of funding and what ought to be left to its own fortunes in the commercial or informal worlds of art and music. A communitarian arts funding advocate might respond to Dworkin: perhaps the widest possible set of choices for future generations (or for this generation, come to that) is not what is fully in their interest, and is a shallow view of what constitutes a valuable cultural life. That the streaming service Spotify now holds (at time of writing) over 80 million songs is not a measure of the richness of this generation’s musical life or of our collective aesthetic appreciation of it, or of the potential avenues for new musical creation. The liberal emphasis on choice as the key to the good life is overstated (Bell 1993). A more directed arts policy, one that has as a

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guiding principle a social relationship to the arts, might be of much more value. When I was 15 years old, I had the chance to take part in a Canadian federal government program to get young people to see other parts of the country, to stay with other families (and, in particular, to introduce young Quebecois to other young Canadians), to help build a sense of our belonging to a nation-wide Canadian community. It was a life-changing experience for me; I had never in my life ventured more than a few hundred miles from the West Coast where I was born and raised. For the trip— there were 20 of us in our group of “Young Voyageurs” from North Vancouver—we each received a small songbook, of old Canadian folksongs, some of which were relatively new at the time, like “The Circle Game” and “Mon Pays,” with the motive that while these were not the most popular songs in the teenaged repertoire, it was important for us to know them, and that these traditions be upheld, our own version of the collections of Ralph Vaughan Williams in England decades earlier. Should the arts be used as a device to shape character and build social bonds? In his Principles of Art, Collingwood (1938) distinguishes “magical art” from art proper, where magical art is the use of artistic forms— music and dance and images—to stimulate and preserve certain emotions in the participants (this is distinguished from art as “amusement,” made to stimulate emotions in the moment—laughter, sadness, fright—but with no intent for a lasting effect). Magical art could be songs and dances and social rituals that inspire community bonding, patriotism, or joint optimism and effort in work or in sport. This kind of quasi-art is present in some form in every society; in my city, the playing of the national anthem at sporting events, and the various murals meant to inspire pride in our civic history, or to “raise awareness” of climate change, come to mind. A communitarian might find that “magical art” is important, both in shaping the character of individuals, and in particular in shaping character in a way that values and maintains social bonds. What could be wrong with this? First, an emphasis on the community-building aspects of art can distract from the creation and aesthetic appreciation of art proper: Regarded from a strictly aesthetic point of view, all these rituals are in general as mediocre as an average Academy portrait, and for the same reason. The artistic motive is present in them all; but it is enslaved and denatured by its subordination to the magical. Hymn-tunes and patriotic songs do not as a rule inspire respect in a musician. A ballet-master is not likely to feel much

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enthusiasm for a meet of foxhounds or a cricket-match. The stage management of a wedding or dinner-party is seldom of high quality; and a ­professional dancer would have little praise for what goes on at a fashionable ball. But this is of a piece with the strictly magical character of these rituals: or rather, with the representative character of which their magical character is one specific form. They are not art proper, and more than a portrait or a landscape. Like these things, they have a primary function which is wholly non-aesthetic: the function of generating specific emotions. Like them, they may in the hands of a true artist (who is never to be thought of as separable from a public that demands true art) become art as well; and if the artistic and magical motives are felt as one motive, this is bound to happen, as it happened among the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cave-men, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the medieval Europeans. It can never happen so long as the motives are felt as distinct, as among ourselves they invariably are. (Collingwood 1938, pp. 76–77)

This raises a general problem with public funding of the arts, of which the emphasis on community-building magical art is but one example: if the criterion by which artists and art presenters receive priority for funding departs from the excellence of the art itself, as determined by peer review panels of experts in the field, then the activities of artists and arts presenters will shift in the direction of what it is that gets funded, whether it be community-building, or pursuing certain political goals, or perceived opportunities for economic development, or public health. The purpose of subsidies of any sort in any sector is to shift activities toward the kind of production that is subsidized: that is what subsidies are meant to do. So, care must be taken: if the focus of arts funding is not to be to preserve as wide a set of cultural possibilities as possible, so that future generations can have all the cultural choices they want, but rather is to be more focused on art that works to maintain community bonds and shared aesthetic experience, then the funding must not fall into the trap of focusing on the “magic” rather than focusing on the art. Second, can communitarian concerns about culture begin to infringe upon liberal rights? Let’s follow Taylor in defining “patriotism” as “a common allegiance to a particular historical community” (Taylor 1989, p. 176). Patriotism might involve an allegiance to liberal rights and institutions, but on the other hand might be tied to a conception of nationhood: There are other societies where the fusion between patriotism and the free institutions is not so total as in the United States, whose defining political

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culture from the beginning was centered on free institutions. There are also modern democratic societies where patriotism centers on a national culture, which in many cases has come (sometimes late and painfully) to incorporate free institutions, but which is also defined in terms of some language or history. Quebec is the prominent example in my experience, but there are many others. The procedural liberal model cannot fit these societies, because they cannot declare neutrality between all possible definitions of the good life. A society like Quebec cannot but be dedicated to the promotion of French culture and language, even if this involves some restriction on individual freedoms. It cannot make cultural-linguistic orientation a matter of indifference. (Taylor 1989, pp. 181–182)

But what appears to be relatively benign in this passage can lead to infringements on rights that are difficult to justify. “Promotion of French culture and language” means restrictions on parents’ abilities to freely choose the language of instruction for their children in public schools between Canada’s two official languages. Further acts in Quebec (imposed after he had written this passage) involve restrictions on the wearing of any symbols that can be linked to religion: teachers and other civil servants may not wear the hijab, or Jewish skullcaps, or Sikh turbans at work (this even though federal law does permit this; for example, for many years Sikhs have been able to wear turbans as part of the dress uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). Where explicitly illiberal governments have been elected to power in European countries, cultural policy has extended beyond promotion of national culture—say, the provision of songbooks to young people—into restrictions on expression. Protections on the existing character of a community often result in restrictions on who may enter the community, whether it be international migration, or at the local level measures to preserve neighborhoods with their existing community of residents through rent controls, whose main effect is to prevent others from moving into the neighborhood (Radin 1986, offers a defense of rent control on the grounds of individual identity being tied to place and community; she is not wrong that people do build ties and a sense of identity to place, but laws meant to prevent movement also mean restricting who may enter the community). Judith Shklar holds that the political value of liberalism is the rational fear of what a state, with all its coercive powers, might do if not contained within a constitution that explicitly protects individual freedoms:

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Liberalism does not have to enter into speculations about what the potentialities of this or that “self” may be, but it does have to take into account the actual political conditions under which people live, in order to act here and now to prevent known and real dangers. A concern for human freedom cannot stop with the satisfactions of one’s own society or clan. We must therefore be suspicious of ideologies of solidarity, precisely because they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying, and who have gone on in our [twentieth] century to create oppressive and cruel regimes of unparalleled horror. The assumption that these offer something wholesome to the atomized citizen may or may not be true, but the political consequences are not, on the historical record, open to much doubt. (Shklar 1989, p. 36)

As Stephen Holmes (1993) notes, the history of societies that abandoned liberalism in favor of ideals that stressed the belonging to a settled community should give everyone pause. To take but one current example, the government of Hungary, which has explicitly declared itself to be opposed to liberalism, and in favor of protecting what it claims to be a distinctly Hungarian culture, has put restrictions on artists’ freedoms, and has politicized its arts institutions (Artistic Freedom Initiative 2022). The point here is not that academics who advocate for a holistic, communitarian approach to understanding the individual in society have an agenda of the state imposing various illiberal restrictions on speech, art, education, and the movement of people—that would be unfair and untrue. In fact one can adopt a holistic view of the individual and through that come to advocacy for extensive liberties; Humboldt (1993/1852) is an example. But, as we see in the following Chap. 6, on Conservatism, the fight against individualism as a method, in favor of starting with the community, can lead to dangerous place: The communitarian critics want us to live in Salem, but not to believe in witches. Or human rights. Perhaps the Moral Majority would cease to be a threat were the United States a communitarian society; benevolence and fraternity might take the place of justice. Almost anything is possible, but it does not make moral sense to leave liberal politics behind on the strengths of such speculations. (Gutmann 1985, p. 319)

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Or, consider the caveat from Marilyn Friedman: [C]ommunitarian philosophy as a whole is a perilous ally for feminist theory. Communitarians invoke a model of community which is focused particularly on families, neighborhoods, and nations. These sorts of communities have harbored social roles and structures which have been highly oppressive for women, as recent feminist critiques have shown. But communitarians seem oblivious to those criticisms and manifest a troubling complacency about the moral authority claimed or presupposed by these communities in regard to their members. (Friedman 1989, p. 277)

Third, we have the general problem of how to define communities. No one denies that our sense of self, and what things are worthy of value, and how we go about questioning and revising each of these through our lives, are shaped by some notion of community: our families, neighbors, schools, libraries, cultural institutions and traditions. Recognizing this is not, on its own, cause for rejecting the methods of individualism or the values of liberalism. But what does it mean to belong to a community? Who is included or excluded? What if the common values, and ways of expressing those values, in our community are intolerable or oppressive? What are our powers to leave a culture behind, to be a cosmopolitan within or without the society in which we were raised? These are important questions for public funding for the arts. We have in our societies embedded institutions that conserve the arts and foster new creativity—what would it mean for these institutions to explicitly recognize communitarian values over liberalism, whether a liberalism that leaves all cultural questions to the individual and the marketplace, or a Keynesian liberalism of funding excellence and what is worthy of aesthetic appreciation but with no social goals beyond the individual being able to experience beauty? (An exploration of the question of a communitarian aesthetics is provided by Riggle (2022).) The communitarian literature on its own does not provide a clear way forward on this question, but it is suggestive of certain roads that could be taken. The following two chapters take two different paths. In Chap. 6, I consider what a cultural conservative arts policy might look like. And in Chap. 7 I look at multiculturalism, which is a way of recognizing distinct cultural communities and the way they shape individual values, but where there is explicit recognition of multiple communities deserving of recognition.

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References Arrow, Kenneth. 1994. Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 84 (2): 1–9. Artistic Freedom Initiative. 2022. Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts and Culture in Crisis. https://artisticfreedominitiative.org/projects/ artistic-­freedom-­monitor/. Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Bell, Daniel. 1993. Communitarianism and Its Critics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blaug, Mark. 1978. Economic Theory in Retrospect. 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. Can a Liberal State Support Art? In A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elster, Jon. 1982. The Case for Methodological Individualism. Theory and Society 11 (4): 453–482. Friedman, Milton. 1957. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1968. The Role of Monetary Policy. American Economic Review 58 (1): 1–17. Friedman, Marilyn. 1989. Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community. Ethics 99 (2): 275–290. Gutmann, Amy. 1985. Communitarian Critics of Liberalism. Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (3): 308–322. Hayek, F.A. 1948. Individualism: True and False. In Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hodgson, Geoff. 1986. Behind Methodological Individualism. Cambridge Journal of Economics 10 (3): 211–224. Holmes, Stephen. 1993. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. von Humboldt, Wilhelm. 1993/1852. The Limits of State Action. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Kant, Immanuel. 1970/1793. On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right. In Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H.  Reiss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. Lachmann, Ludwig M. 1969. Methodological Individualism and the Market Economy. In Roads to Freedom: Essays in Honour of F.A. von Hayek, ed.

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E. Streissler, G. Haberler, F. Lutz, and F. Machlup. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lucas, Robert E., Jr. 1972. Expectations and the Neutrality of Money. Journal of Economic Theory 4 (2): 103–124. Mueller, Dennis C. 1989. Public Choice II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1983. The Rule of Law. In On History and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell. Radin, Margaret Jane. 1986. Residential Rent Control. Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (4): 350–380. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riggle, Nick. 2022. Toward a Communitarian Theory of Aesthetic Value. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1): 16–30. Sandel, Michael J. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sandel, Michael. 1984. The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self. Political Theory 12 (1): 81–96. Schelling, Thomas C. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton. Shklar, Judith N. 1989. The Liberalism of Fear. In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. N.L. Rosenblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. 1977. De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. American Economic Review 67 (2): 76–90. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Atomism. In Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate. In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. N.L.  Rosenblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1995. Irreducibly Social Goods. In Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Throsby, David. 2003. Determining the Value of Cultural Goods: How Much (or How Little) Does Contingent Valuation Tell Us? Journal of Cultural Economics 27 (3–4): 275–285. Weber, Max. 1968/1922. Economy and Society. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press.

CHAPTER 6

Conservatism

Like the Communitarian approaches discussed in Chap. 5, Conservatism presents an opposition to the economic approach to public policy, a variant of utilitarianism, and the egalitarian liberalism of the Rawlsian social contract. But there is no conservative doctrine as such; part of its essence is to be anti-doctrine. And so, this chapter is necessarily selective in terms of themes that represent cultural conservatism, and the implications for public funding for the arts. I have heard it said that the most accurate way to define conservatism is to look at what people who self-identify as conservatives say and do. But it is best to avoid focusing on what, say, the Conservative parties in the United Kingdom or Canada, or the Republican party in the United States, currently pursue in the policy arena, as it has been so unstable over the past few decades, and often quite at odds with what would have been the generally held small-c conservative attitudes of 50 years ago. As in the other chapters of this book, I want to focus on moral and political philosophy, especially as it pertains to public policy toward the arts, rather than on the different policies and agendas that have been pursued by political parties when in power. I recognize that this might appear to be something of a dodge: Corey Robin, in The Reactionary Mind (2018), makes a point of treating conservative philosophers, politicians, and right-wing popular writers as all of a kind, united in a supreme goal of protecting social and

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economic hierarchies from popular forces that seek to overturn them. But, just as in other chapters I have focused on moral and political philosophers rather than public figures who have adopted some of their ideals, I will do the same for conservatives. I will focus on the philosophical and cultural positions that began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, in response to the Industrial Revolution and the Democratic Revolution as manifested in the American and French Revolutions, and the subsequent pressure for democratic reform elsewhere. What is it in our culture that warrants efforts to conserve it, and why? What is the role of the state in this conservation? What constitutes acceptable and appropriate change to the culture? And, to the goal of this book, what are the implications for arts funding? I will frequently turn to the writings of Michael Oakeshott, since I find his vision of conservatism coherent, and one that draws together politics and the arts, which is the focus of this book. But I will also try to show tensions between conservative thinkers when it comes to cultural policy.

The Conservative Disposition In a famous passage, Oakeshott (1991b) presents conservatism as a disposition: To be a conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate, and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated. (pp. 408–409)

This disposition is not an attachment to the past, or nostalgia, but is the enjoyment of the present, and our attachments to what we have now, with all their imperfections. This enjoyment can be of personal items that objectively might seem of low value—a favorite coffee mug, an old sweater,

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a collection of broken-spined, weathered-paged books—and of public things—a park, a museum, an annual community event, or a tradition shared with friends. G.A. Cohen (2013), from the opposite end of the political spectrum from Oakeshott, explains that the attachments are to things that have intrinsic value in themselves beyond the instrumental values that they produce, and as such the conservative would resist (up to a point) their replacement even if the replacement were in practical terms more valuable. I don’t want to replace my old, worn orange-spined paperbacks from the Penguin English Library with newer, cleaner, versions of the same books; I value the books I have because I am attached to them in themselves, and not just for their utility as books. It doesn’t mean change is never acceptable; sometimes, all things considered, it is best to replace the old with the new. But it does mean there is a value in the thing itself, and an attachment to it, that ought to be a part of the deliberations on whether to make a change. In this account of conservatism, there is no rational argument for why one ought to be conservative. Instead, it is a call for the recognition that this disposition, and these values, exist, and should not be ignored. I have a favorite hike in the woods near my house. The full loop takes two hours if I walk briskly, and when the weather is clement, I go once a week, sometimes twice, for physical and mental health, and to think things through; there are many sections of this book that have been reconsidered and refined during these walks. If the Forest Service made a decision to abandon the maintenance of this trail in favor of another, new path through the same woods, they might give all sorts of reasons: it will be easier to maintain, and it will provide a better experience for the walker in terms of views of the reservoir, a more even distribution of climbs and descents, and so on. These might all be very good reasons, and the policy decision might ultimately make sense. But I would regret, greatly, the loss of this very particular trail, not because I think it offers the best possible vistas or the best possible mix of terrain, but just because it has become valuable to me just as it is, a familiar comfort. Let me suggest two examples from the arts. First, an area of controversy in the museum world, especially in the United States, has been the practice of “deaccessioning,” the selling off of works held in the collection to generate funds either to acquire different works (which is generally agreed to be an acceptable practice so long as it is done transparently), or to finance debt repayment or a capital expansion (which is generally held by museum professionals to be an unacceptable practice). Let me focus on the former

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case, where old works will be traded for new. A non-conservative would look at the options in terms of which set of works best serves the museum’s mission as an art museum, in terms of the works’ artistic excellence, their importance to the history of the medium, their contribution to either the diversity of the museum’s collection, or, alternatively, to its building upon an existing strength. But a conservative, in the Oakeshott or Cohen sense, would add: “while all of these factors are worth considering, an additional factor to consider is that dedicated patrons of the museum have an attachment to the old works because of their familiarity, and their being an anticipated part of their museum visit, notwithstanding that these old works might not be what professional curators, all with good intentions, believe is most valuable.” The museum in my town has a painting, “The Boatman,” by local artist T.C. Steele. It might be the case that it could be sold, and the resulting funds used to buy paintings of value, some of which I might really like. But the sale would be a loss to me; I am attached to that particular painting, even if an outsider might not find it particularly interesting. Its value to me goes beyond its aesthetic value. Consideration of these sorts of attachments ought to give museum administrators pause when they consider a deaccessioning; it does not mean a sale should never take place, but that there are more values at stake than the objective values of the evaluator of the art as art. For a second example, consider the funding allocations by Arts Council England. It funds organizations in a three-year cycle, and its most recent allocation is for the years 2023–2026. In explaining its recent allocation decision, it claims that: [I]n some places our funding has been too low for too long. Those include some of the towns and cities which were the powerhouses of the industrial revolution. They are also rural areas which inspired countless poets and artists. And they also include our seaside resorts that are as integral to our cultural heritage as their names are to the sticks of rock sold there. This investment programme changes that. Wigan, Gloucester, Stoke, Blackpool, Mansfield and North Devon are among 78 places where organisations will receive a share of £130 million over the next three years. (Arts Council England 2022)

With a constrained budget, any new allocations require cuts elsewhere, and some organizations that had long depended upon arts council funding were dropped, including major London-based organizations like the

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English National Opera, which stood to lose its £12.8 million grant unless it agreed to relocate to northern England (The Guardian 2022). Arts funding is notoriously difficult to change when funding amounts are of a large enough significance to recipient organizations that being cut from funding involves major disruption, perhaps even closure (it is worth comparing to the strategy of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose grants are very welcome in terms of funds, and of prestige that might be used to leverage increased private funding, but which are never so large that one could say any recipient organization was vitally dependent on it). That alone means that adjustments in funding priorities will be slow and cautious. But consider what ordinary policy analysis would say in this recent case. Arts Council England has adopted a policy of redressing historically low funding outside of London, and so will gradually make adjustments. It would consider the relative benefits, in terms of its goals, in spending on a new set of organizations rather than everything from the old set, and would account for the (perhaps quite substantial) costs involved in relocating a large organization, with its very large staff, to a new city. If the company decided to acquiesce and undertake the move, the gain would be a new opera company for some city in the north, and the loss would be one less company in London, plus the one-off costs of financing the move. But a conservative would, in addition to these factors, consider there are people who were patrons of the English National Opera in London who had developed an attachment to it that was something beyond its various productions, but was valued as a familiar thing in itself, an eagerly anticipated night out beyond just attending any very good opera production, which might be had elsewhere in the city. The point is not that nothing should ever change, or that initial patterns of funding should be fixed forever more (I have argued against the guarantee of permanent funding shares in  local government funding of the arts in the United States in Rushton (2004, 2005)), or that regions that have historically been disfavored in arts funding should simply become accustomed to their disadvantage. Arts Council England’s decision regarding the English National Opera might well be the right one. But a conservative would add an extra consideration to the analysis; in a reallocation, there are factors on the losing side that are not mirrored on the side that gains.

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Politics Here again I need to distinguish between the political goals of parties which identify as Conservative with a small-c conservative approach to politics as a practice. My goal is ultimately to tie together the personal conservative disposition, with approaches toward politics and culture, that can result, possibly, in some coherent results for arts policy. The first step is to see politics as a practical activity, requiring acquired skills and knowledge, much of it tacit and only learned through practice. In my own experience working in a parliamentary Cabinet Office, my Ph.D. in Economics provided me with some useful tools, at times applicable, but much of my activity, and what I needed to learn, arose out of the traditional “ways of doing things” that were specific to that office, an understanding of the practical limits to governing, and the need to ruthlessly prioritize legislative goals. Political theory is of great value in trying to understand the nature of humankind’s political relations and their histories, but it does not provide any sort of guide to the practice of politics. The critique of “rationalism” in politics presented by Oakeshott (1991a) is directed against the idea of using theoretical models taken from realms outside of the practice of politics to direct the activity of politics: [The Rationalist] stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason.’ His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason’ (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument … He has no sense of the cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a formula: the past is significant to him only as an encumbrance. (Oakeshott 1991a, pp. 5–6, emphasis his)

If we try to give shape to this caricature, with whom is Oakeshott engaging? Rationalism is, like conservatism, a disposition, one that has an

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overconfidence in technical knowledge, of what can be learned from a reading list or set of courses in various skills, and an underappreciation of the tacit knowledge so necessary in the effective functioning of organizations (not just in politics—this would apply to firms, hospitals, schools, and arts organizations as well). To take a metaphor from Oakeshott, we can acquire and study the best published cookbooks on the market, but the route to becoming a great chef is working in a kitchen with experienced professionals. The Rationalist in politics does not recognize that it is also a skill requiring the gradual acquisition of tacit knowledge; the “technocrat” has some useful skills, but it is only a part of what is needed to be effective. Oakeshott also alludes to the idea that traditional ways of going about politics might have a wisdom that is not immediately apparent, and that an understanding of the history of an institution is essential: There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” (Chesterton 1990)

An example of a Chesterton fence is given by Winston Churchill (1997/1943) in his speech to the House of Commons for why, after being bombed, the House ought to be rebuilt with the same features as before, some of which, to the rationalist, might not seem to make sense: why have sides facing one another rather than a horseshoe shape where everyone can get a better view of everyone else? Why not build it big enough to seat all members at once comfortably? Churchill presents the practical reasons, based upon how the chamber actually functions, for retaining the old. Perhaps the best statement of the conservative approach to administration in politics is from Charles Lindblom (1959) and his description of “muddling through”: although contemporary public and non-profit agencies regularly conduct “strategic planning” exercises, which in theory would carefully delineate the ends of the organization and the options for various means of achieving them, and quantifying the resulting success or failure of the execution of the plans, in practice we make plans at the outermost branches of the organization, not at the roots of it, and work

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within the constraints of the current environment, our tacit knowledge of what is likely to be possible, the lessons from the history of the organization, and the realization of how much we are unable to know or calculate regarding significant departures from the usual ways of doing things. A contemporary motto might be: move slowly, and do not break things. If the first step in a conservative politics is to eschew rationalism, the second is to understand the purpose of political activity. I will continue to follow the philosophical conservatism of Oakeshott rather than the actions of contemporary political parties who self-identify as Conservative. In Oakeshott’s vision, political activity does not have a goal that it seeks to achieve, a metric that it wishes to maximize. People have goals for themselves, with great variation between individuals. And sometimes people can voluntarily form an organization that has goals: a business that has the goal of earning money (though often not only that); a charity with a specific mission, such as a food bank, an animal shelter, or a community theatre company. But the state does not have a goal other than to provide the infrastructure and laws that allow people to pursue their own aims, either as individuals or in the associations they form; it is a civil association between individuals, not an enterprise association with a common goal (Oakeshott 1975, 1983). Public policy and legislation are meant to facilitate what individuals wish to strive for. Politics is the “pursuit of intimations,” the skill of ascertaining what people wish in terms of policy, public funding, and the provision of shared goods. This conception seems to have an affinity with Rawls’s principles of justice, and in particular the idea that it is not for the state to assume what goals people ought to pursue, and that what state action there is needs to arise from a consensus of citizens. But the small-c conservative does not draw these small-l liberal ideals from a model of social contract or rational conception of individual rights. Instead, the freedoms we have are an accomplishment of our societies, and have arisen organically within them through centuries of practice, not through constitutional conventions: A political system is primarily for the protection and occasional modification of a recognized legal and social order. It is not self-explanatory; its end and meaning lie beyond itself in the social whole to which it belongs, a social whole already determined by law and custom and tradition, none of which is the creation of political activity. Political activity may have given us Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of those documents, which came from a stratum far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians. (Oakeshott 1939, p. 148)

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It needs to be said that Oakeshott’s is a very “liberal” conservatism, and other conservatives are willing to see a state more active in pursuing cultural goals, as we see below.

Cultural Conservatism: Three Poets Cultural conservatism is about conserving what things are valuable in our lives from disruptions that would put them at risk. Those disruptions can arise out of the development of societies, such as economic change or calls for increased political and social equality, and also from the world of ideas, such as, in the nineteenth century, utilitarianism, and in the twentieth century, socialism. In politics, it can incorporate policies we would recognize as progressive, such as relief for the poor, and universal education, although the means are partly toward an end of protecting existing social and economic hierarchies. There is a common thread from the early nineteenth century to the present in cultural conservatism: “Throughout, the critics had to ask, ‘who or what are we fighting for?’ … The true and obvious answer to the question was that they were fighting to keep and propagate high cultural values” (Fawcett 2020, pp. 140–141). In this section I look at the prose writings of three poets, also leading figures in cultural conservatism: Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot. The place to begin is with Samuel Coleridge (1976/1830), and his call for a clerisy, a “third estate” in addition to the landowners and farmers, who represent “permanence,” and the commercial sector which represents “progress”: Now, as in the former state, the permanency of the nation was provided for; and in the second estate its progressiveness, and personal freedom; while in the king the cohesion by interdependence, and the unity of the country, were established; there remains for the third estate only that interest, which is the ground, the necessary antecedent condition, of both the former. Now these depend on a continuing and progressive civilization. But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people; where this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens. The Nationalty, therefore, was reserved for the support and maintenance of a permanent class or order, with the following duties. A certain smaller

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number were to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science; being likewise, the instructors of such as constituted, or were to constitute, the remaining more numerous classes of the order. This latter and far more numerous body were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part or division without a resident guide, guardian, and instructor; the objects and final intention of the whole order being these—to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present to the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of duties correspondent. … The object of the National Church, the third remaining estate of the realm, was to secure and improve that civilization, without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive. (Coleridge 1976/1830, pp.  42–44, emphasis his)

“It fell to the poet Coleridge to call in national politics for the creation and nurture of a figure that barely existed in their lives but which received recognition and authority in ours: the conservative intellectual” (Fawcett 2020, p. 137; see also Scruton (2017) who notes the “distinctively modern faith in the role of the intellectual” (p.  84)). Coleridge saw that a functioning nation needs a common civic creed and culture, but that this would not flourish in a laissez-faire economy; as with the cultural conservatives to follow, he saw that the utilitarian political economy of Jeremy Bentham might lead to some material gains, but also to an atomized people, culturally adrift. Coleridge distinguishes between civilization, the ordinary progress of a society, and, what he saw as much more important, its cultivation. Though he refers to a National Church, it is not about religious doctrine; the clerisy is not the same as a clergy. By “The Nationalty” Coleridge means the public purse; this was to be a tax-financed venture. John Stuart Mill’s essays on Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Coleridge (Leavis 1950), written in 1838 and 1840, are remarkable texts, as he tries to assess and reconcile, if possible, the ideas of the utilitarian and the conservative; this is an attempt more relevant to contemporary arts policy than any other nineteenth-century document I have ever encountered, as it gets to the very heart of the issue of the role of the state, if any, in shaping

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the cultural lives of the population. “Mill’s attempt to absorb, and by discrimination and discarding to unify, the truths alike of the utilitarian and idealist positions is, after all, a prologue to a very large part pf the subsequent history of English thinking: in particular, to the greater part of English thinking about society and culture” (Williams 1958, p. 53). This is where Mill subjects utilitarianism, and the free play of markets, to close scrutiny. He is critical of the economists’ lack of understanding of history, and credits Coleridge with producing “not a piece of party advocacy, but a philosophy of society, in the only form in which it is yet possible, that of a philosophy of history; not a defence of particular ethical or religious doctrines, but a contribution, the largest made by any class of thinkers, towards a philosophy of human culture” (Mill, in Leavis 1950, p. 130). And here is Mill on Bentham, and the state of English political economy generally: It will enable a society which has attained a certain state of spiritual development, and the maintenance of which in that state is otherwise provided for, to prescribe the rules by which it may protect its material interests. It will do nothing (except sometimes as an instrument in the hands of a higher doctrine) for the spiritual interests of society; nor does it suffice of itself even for the material interests. That which alone causes any material interests to exist, which alone enables any body of human beings to exist as a society, is national character: that it is, which causes one nation to succeed in what it attempts, another to fail; one nation to understand and aspire to elevated things, another to grovel in mean ones; which makes the greatness of one nation lasting, and dooms another to early and rapid decay. (Mill, in Leavis 1950, pp. 72–73, emphasis Mill’s)

We need to remember that in the end, Mill remained a utilitarian, and was still to write his Principles of Political Economy (1848). But he saw the dangers in Benthamism, and in Coleridge’s idealism, of acting as if “half of the truth were the whole of it” (Mill, in Leavis 1950, p. 106). He did not fully resolve the tension; it is not clear that it can be resolved. Matthew Arnold (1987/1869) comes to the questions of culture and education decades after Coleridge, and as such faced the onward march of utilitarianism, and the fuller effects of industrialization and working-class agitation (Williams 1958). That he titled his book Culture and Anarchy is an indication of what he saw as the two alternative courses for society: the promotion of culture as a unifying force across class divisions, or anarchy if things were simply left to a weak state and a laissez-faire economy:

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[Culture] does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, – nourished, and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. (Arnold 1987/1869, pp. 205–206, emphasis his)

Do not conclude that Arnold is a great defender of the working classes: he is not, and elsewhere he describes them as something of a mob—that is why without culture society will tend toward anarchy. But he was a great champion of education, especially after his trip to France in 1859 where, from his position as an inspector of schools in England, he was sent to the continent to prepare a report on educational practices there; his report on “The Popular Education of France” included a call for a significant increase in state involvement in education in Britain, against the prevailing tendency: With many Englishmen, perhaps with the majority, it is a maxim that the State, the executive power, ought to be entrusted with no more means of action than those which it is impossible to withhold from it; that the State neither would nor could make a safe use of any more extended liberty; would not, because it has in itself a natural instinct of despotism, which, if not jealously checked, would become outrageous; could not, because it is, in truth, not at all more enlightened, or fit to assume a lead, than the mass of this enlightened community. … I desire to lead them to consider with me, whether, in the present altered conjuncture, that State-action, which was once dangerous, may not become, not only without danger in itself, but the means of helping us against dangers from another quarter. (Arnold 1987/1869, pp. 71–72)

It is interesting to see Arnold, and other cultural conservatives into the mid-twentieth century, advocate for a public, humanistic education for all

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rather than simply teaching skills useful for trades and business; we see this through F.R. Leavis and Michael Oakeshott (1989), and it provides something of a defense of my choice to avoid wading into contemporary conservative politics, where the position has been reversed, with Conservatives calling for increased training in economically “useful” skills, and the progressive left remaining to defend the value of the humanities. Charles Dickens created the great utilitarian caricature of education in his novel Hard Times (1969/1854) with the teacher Mr. Gradgrind: ‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’ ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer. ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is’. (p. 50)

Bentham/Gradgrind remains above all the primary target of cultural conservatism (see Winch (2000)); for Arnold, utilitarian doctrines are most prevalent in the commercial, middle classes. But he sees this as a center that cannot hold without reform, and with the diffusion of the best that has been thought and said. Finally, I turn to the poet T.S. Eliot. His great admirer, Roger Scruton, writes: “Without Eliot, the philosophy of Toryism would have lost all substance during the last century” (Scruton 2006, p. 191). Eliot is important to our purposes for two reasons: his understanding of what an artist does, and his understanding of what a critic does. On the former, I draw from his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: No poet, no artist of any sort, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing

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order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. …And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by canons of dead critics. It is a judgement, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. (Eliot 1950, pp. 4–5)

This helps us to understand how such a great conservative poet and critic could compose such a shattering, modernist work as “The Waste Land.” The artist must work from a tradition, but her work not only adds to that tradition, but changes slightly how we see it. The composer of a new opera, say, works within the tradition of “this is what opera is” (otherwise what has been composed is not an opera, but something else), but in so doing adds to the tradition and changes it, including, in some cases, changing how we see and hear the operatic canon of the past three centuries. This is true for any living art form. The understanding of tradition, and a historic sense, is “what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity” (Eliot 1950, p. 4). A conservative approach to the artist thus cannot be bound by nostalgia. It must be in the present, an appreciation and understanding of our place in time. The role of the critic is key. In “The Function of Criticism,” he reminds us that this most important critic is the artist himself: Probably, …, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and … that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior. (Eliot 1950, p. 18)

Or, from a contemporary of Eliot’s: Any theory of art should be able to show, if it wishes to be taken seriously, how an artist, in pursuing his artistic labour, is able to tell whether he is pursuing it successfully or unsuccessfully: how, for example, it is possible for him to say, ‘I am not satisfied with that line; let us try it this way … and this way … and this way … there! that will do’. (Collingwood 1938, p. 281)

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Furthermore: The most important qualification which I have been able to find, which accounts for the peculiar importance of the criticism of practitioners, is that a critic must have a highly developed sense of fact. This is by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense of fact is something very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization. (Eliot 1950, p. 19)

In 1922 Eliot founded the literary journal The Criterion, whose first issue included “The Waste Land,” and continued until 1939, publishing works by Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others, along with criticism. “As the title of the journal suggests, the project was animated by Eliot’s sense of the importance of criticism, and of the futility of modernist experiments when not informed by literary judgment, moral seriousness and a sense of the importance of the written word” (Scruton 2006, p. 194). From this conservative tradition of thinking about what art is, what criticism does, and why culture, widely disseminated, is key to the cultivation of society as a whole, we can try to form an idea of how a conservative arts policy might take shape in contemporary times. Even if it is not the preferred approach, we might keep in mind, from the not-conservative Raymond Williams, “We can say of Eliot what Mill said of Coleridge, that an ‘enlightened Radical or Liberal’ ought ‘to rejoice over such a Conservative’ … that such a thinker is ‘the natural means of rescuing from oblivion truths which Tories have forgotten, and which the prevailing schools of Liberalism never knew” (Williams 1958, p. 243).

A Conservative Arts Policy From these observations on the conservative disposition, the conservative approach to politics, and the writings of the most prominent cultural conservative figures (by which I mean the ones most likely to be cited by contemporary conservatives in their writings), can we fashion an idea of what a conservative arts policy, in terms of public support of the arts, might look like? What follows are what I think would represent some components of a conservative arts policy, without going so far as to claim there would be consensus around each of these.

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First, following T.S. Eliot: the way to understand the state of the arts in this moment is to understand the traditions that have evolved over the centuries, and how contemporary artists work within this tradition while at the same time adding to it, and changing it. Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know. (Eliot 1950, p. 6)

This is at the core of Modernism, and it represents the metanarrative toward which postmodernists are incredulous. We might ponder that Anglo-American arm’s length arts councils were founded as Modernism became the more common understanding of what art is; Kramer (1988) suggests that the United States was late to this, Modernism only becoming popularly understood, through mainstream magazines and newspapers, in the early 1960s, and this was just the moment when President Kennedy determined that the United States ought to have a federal arts funding body devoted to the high arts, with spending to be determined by peer review panels. Importantly, this would mean that funding support of various genres of the arts where tradition plays a vital role, in music, opera, theatre, dance, and the visual arts, is not based on nostalgia for a lost era, or the presumption that older works represent the best ever, but rather that an audience understanding and deep aesthetic experience of new work can only come from a knowledge of what has come before. New works are “relevant” to contemporary audiences not through the portrayal of contemporary characters, or the inclusion of themes taken from the current political situation, but only through the audience’s understanding of the art form. In November 2022, New York City’s Metropolitan Opera premiered “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, which was also turned into a very successful and popular film in 2002 by director Stephen Daldry. But the new opera is, well, an opera, which places demands on the audience that are different from the demands placed upon the reader of a work of literary fiction, or the viewer of a film. Throughout the literature of cultural conservatism is a stress on education in the arts, but this is not about being able to recognize famous artists and their works, or to build a sort of national pride in what has been accomplished, but to learn to see, read, or hear what makes a work of art. This leads directly to the second point I would put forward as a part of conservative arts policy: that there are standards of quality, such that while

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people will forever, contrary to the old saying, dispute tastes, the disputes can be informed by experienced and educated judgment. From Coleridge’s clerisy to T.S. Eliot’s ideal critic, we should rely upon those who have substantial experience in their genres of art to educate and try to influence the tastes of the layperson. David Hume, in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1985/1757), holds that works of art do not hold intrinsic beauty or ugliness, but that beauty or ugliness is entirely in the sensibilities of the beholder. Nevertheless, through experience, and dispassionate consideration, and close observation of the works that have historically endured, one can acquire a “delicacy of taste,” a keen eye or ear for the subtle qualities in a work, and this skill can then be used to inform others; as Eliot put it, a “highly developed sense of fact.” This might seem uncontroversial: of course it is the case when we read a critic writing about film, or music, or painting, we expect them to have a refined sense of taste in their discipline, to see things we might not be able to at first see for ourselves, and as they describe these features and why they matter lead to our better developing our own taste and judgment. And this is what arts councils have historically meant when they claim a goal of fostering artistic excellence, as judged by peer review panels. A conservative arts policy would defend this idea against any claims that “excellence” is, after all, a purely subjective judgment, reflecting the views of a particular class of judges from a privileged background, and is not in any sense grounded in objectivity or a “sense of fact.” A third aspect of a conservative arts policy would be to maintain the distinction between true art and mere entertainment or amusement. Cultural conservatives in the early twentieth century feared that the new middle classes, that were settling in after the economic disruption of the nineteenth century, had available to them various cheap amusements: the radio, the cinema, and the rapid diffusion of the ownership of automobiles. What then for engagement in literature or live theatre and orchestral music? In Chap. 5 I raised R.G. Collingwood’s (1938) concept of “magical art,” a quasi-art that had as its primary purpose something other than a true aesthetic experience, but rather was meant to achieve a lasting effect on the community through inspiration or remembrance; the playing of the national anthem before a sporting event is “music,” but is not meant to be appreciated as a musical work in the same way we would hear a performance of an orchestral piece in a concert hall or on our headphones— instead, it is about a communal expression of patriotism and the rallying of support for the home team. “They have a primary function which is wholly

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non-aesthetic” (Collingwood 1938, p.  76). But Collingwood named another “quasi-art”: amusement: If an artifact is designed to stimulate a certain emotion, and if this emotion is intended not for discharge into the occupations of ordinary life, but for enjoyment as something of value in itself, the function of the artifact is to amuse or entertain. Magic is useful, in the sense that the emotions it excites have a practical function in the affairs of every day; amusement is not useful but only enjoyable, because there is a watertight bulkhead between its world and the world of common affairs. The emotions generated by amusement run their course within this watertight compartment. … The experience of being amused is sought not for the sake of anything to which it stands as means, but for its own sake. Hence, while magic is utilitarian, amusement is not utilitarian but hedonistic. The work of art, so called, which provides the amusement, is, on the contrary, strictly utilitarian. Unlike a work of art proper, it has no value in itself, it is simply a means to an end. (Collingwood 1938, pp. 78–81)

A work of amusement is meant to make us laugh, or feel suspense, or shed sentimental tears, but in the end that is all it is meant to do. “Art proper,” for Collingwood, is the artist’s expression of an emotion which is not designed to elicit any response from the reader other than understanding of it: The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’ It is no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. Nothing will serve as a substitute. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing. This is why the kind of person who takes his literature as psychology, saying ‘How admirably this writer depicts the feelings of women, or bus-drivers, or homosexuals …’, necessarily misunderstands every real work of art with which he comes into contact, and takes for good art, with infallible precision, what is not art at all. (Collingwood 1938, pp. 114–115)

Genres of art can change. In the 1920s and 1930s, jazz, and cinema, and some genres of fiction, for example, would have been widely regarded as amusement but eventually came to be recognized as having the possibility (though not in every instance) of being art proper. The key here is not the medium of the art, but what the creator is trying to do. Not every conservative would agree with this: novelist Kingsley Amis (1990), in his critique

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of the direction of arts policy, notes that Schubert and Mozart cared very much about entertaining their audiences, and that the primary effect of jazz coming to be regarded as a true art was simply to make it worse. But in the main, cultural conservatives would insist upon distinctions between art proper and entertainment, that classical music is fundamentally different from pop (Johnson 2002), that Marvel movies are not cinema (Scorsese 2019). In addition to the intention of the artist, which is Collingwood’s concern, the cultural conservative would add, drawing from Eliot, that the “high art” of our time has embodied within it the accumulated efforts over centuries to strive for perfection in its works, that a contemporary orchestral composer embodies in her work all of the development of that art, and that popular culture cannot make the same claim: It is my view that the high culture of our civilization contains knowledge which is far more significant than anything that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication. This is a hard belief to justify, and a harder one to live with; indeed, it has nothing to recommend it apart from its truth. (Scruton 2000, p. 2, quoted by Stevens 2012)

This does not mean that there is nothing good in entertainment, no pleasure to be had from it. It has been the case for some decades that audiences for the traditional high arts are for the most part cultural “omnivores,” enjoying a mix of various genres, including some from each of Collingwood’s art proper and amusements (Peterson and Kern 1996). But while the standard method of the social science of culture has been to use as a working assumption that there are no qualitative differences between different cultural genres—and this is entirely proper for economic or sociological analysis—cultural conservatives hold that in fact there is a qualitative difference, and that this ought to be recognized in arts policy. A fourth aspect of conservative cultural policy is its opposition to the use of art to pursue a political agenda. The slogan “all art is political” is rejected both as an empirical claim and as a call to action. This is a lively area of contemporary debate, but is not a new issue. In the 1930s, for example, a time of great political unrest and uncertainty, there were calls for those in the cultural world to “take a stand” in terms of a political position, in particular whether to be for or against Marxism. Some pressure was directed toward F.R Leavis’s literary journal Scrutiny, and in response he convened a symposium of leading intellectuals to consider the matter (I

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recount this episode in more detail in Rushton (2021)); for the most part the contributors were against the journal taking an institutional stand, as it could only lessen the impact it had as a journal of independent thought. Since we have already looked at Michael Oakeshott’s views on politics and the conservative disposition in this chapter, I turn to his contribution (Oakeshott 1939) which didn’t deal so much with Leavis’s journal as with the role of the artist in society: To ask the poet and the artist to provide a programme for political or other social action, or an incentive or an inspiration for such action, is to require them to be false to their own genius and to deprive society of a necessary service. What they provide is action itself, but in another and deeper sphere of consciousness. It is not their business to suggest a political remedy for political defects, but to provide an actual remedy for more fundamental defects by making a society conscious of its own character. The emotional and intellectual integrity and insight for which they stand is something foreign to the political world, foreign not merely in fact, but in essence. This integrity and insight cannot be introduced into that world without changing their character; and to attempt to introduce them makes a chaos of what is otherwise a restricted but nevertheless ordered view. It is not their business to come out of a retreat, bringing with them some superior wisdom, and enter the world of political activity, but to stay where they are, remain true to their genius, which is to mitigate a little their society’s ignorance of itself. (Oakeshott 1939, pp. 150–151)

Artists, or arts presenters like museums, do not have particular insights into political issues any more than the ordinary citizen, and so have little new to contribute to political thinking; but in an explicit political advocacy—“we must take greater action against climate change,” to take a prominent contemporary example—they diminish what great powers they do have in the realm of the arts, and, as Oakeshott says, our consciousness of our own character. This is not a view restricted to “political” conservatives: George Orwell, who, famously, dealt with political issues in his fiction, wrote: When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer. I do not think he has the right, merely on the score of his sensibilities, to shirk the ordinary dirty work of politics. Just as much as anyone else, he should be prepared to deliver lectures in draughty halls, to chalk pavements, to canvas voters, to distribute leaflets, even to

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fight in civil wars if it seems necessary. But whatever else he does in the service of his party, he should never write for it. He should make it clear that his writing is a thing apart. … But does all this mean that a writer should not only refuse to be dictated to by political bosses, but also that he should refrain from writing about politics? Once again, certainly not! There is no reason he should not write in the most crudely political way, if he wishes to. Only he should do so as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army. (Orwell 1968/1948, pp. 468–469)

A fifth part of a conservative arts policy goes back to the idea that opened this chapter, on the conservative disposition. As a rule, people become attached to things, places, traditions, and feel a loss even with the promise that the new thing to come will more effectively achieve the ends people want. In the arts, attachment to favorite works at the museum, or to musical works that the local ensemble regularly performs, to annual festivals, to the maintaining of folk-art traditions, and in all cases to the way that works are presented, what one expects when they go to attend the museum, or an orchestra performance. This does not mean change is never for the good. But it does mean these feelings are to be taken into account in decision-making, that for conservatives the perfect is the enemy of the good. Finally, I would suggest that cultural conservatives in general, and this dates from Coleridge’s clerisy, favor a role for the state in funding and promoting what is valuable in the arts. While there are certainly political conservatives, especially in the United States, who have adopted a libertarian view of arts funding, that there is no role for the state to play, it remains a minority position (it is worth noting that for all the news stories over the past decades about Republican politicians in the United States promising to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, they have never gotten around to implementing this policy). But that does not mean there are no complaints about how arts funding is currently done. I would draw upon two examples: Roger Scruton (2008) on Arts Council England, and Joseph Epstein (1995) on the National Endowment for the Arts. Each of these is written for a conservative journal, and so to some extent involves preaching to the choir. Scruton is protesting that a worthy festival of English classical music has been denied arts council funding, and accuses it (without evidence, it should be said) of basing this upon politics, namely a reluctance to fund anything that might have hints of English

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nationalism. My point here is not to evaluate Scruton’s accusation, but simply to draw attention to the fact that he does see a role for the arts council, even if, in his view, it is not fulfilling it. Epstein served on the National Council for the Arts, a sort of Board of Trustees of the National Endowment for the Arts, and so speaks as something of an insider. Again, he sees a role for the NEA, but that it has lost focus: In 1984 I was appointed a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, a body on which I sat for six years. One of the most impressive moments I can recall from my years on the Council was when the director of the music program mentioned that a particular orchestra had had its grant reduced by something like $20,000 because of some “spotty playing in the cello section.” I was much taken with how the NEA music panelists were able to pin down this fault, by the professionalism with which they went about the task of judgment. It seemed to me the way things ought to operate. But outside certain select programs at the NEA, they seldom did. (Epstein 1995)

What went wrong? To the point made above, Epstein believes he saw the political relevance of proposed work as being of more importance than artistic excellence. He sees that in its early years the NEA made a real difference to help small, but laden with potential, arts organizations gain their footing, and to make live performance more accessible outside of major cities (which harkens back to the earliest days of the Arts Council of Great Britain). But, like Scruton, he sensed he was in an arts funding body that actually did not think very highly of the very society that was providing its funding, and that, in the long run, this is untenable. In a sense it did prove to be untenable. When, in 1990, the creations of some NEA-funded artists proved to be beyond the tolerance of some members of the population and their elected representatives, the NEA added language to its funding criteria that applicants should take into consideration “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” Predictably, when a group of artists were denied funding on this criterion, it was taken to court as an unconstitutional use of government funds to favor some sorts of viewpoint expression over others. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NEA, but in the end the Endowment decided that funding individual artists was more trouble than it was worth, and so it turned its focus more exclusively to organizations and community development projects.

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All arts councils are ultimately subject to legislative approval and funds— “arm’s length” is a finite distance—and thus no council, even with the most prestigious artists and critics sitting on its peer review panels, can stray too far from what the general public is willing to accept (Rushton 2000). “Excellence” has become a controversial term in arts policy, with stakeholders objecting that it cannot be the only, or even the primary, goal of arts funding; there are other things to consider. The best illustration of this comes from 2009, when Rocco Landesman was first appointed as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. On August 17, Mr. Landesman accepted an invitation to visit the mid-sized city of Peoria, Illinois. What prompted the visit was this: In an article published in The New York Times on Aug. 8, Mr. Landesman talked about his inclination to support art on the basis of quality, not geography, in implied contrast to his predecessor’s policy of directing agency funds to every Congressional district. “I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman,” Mr. Landesman said in the article, making reference to two acclaimed Chicago theater companies. “There is going to be some push back from me about democratizing arts grants to the point where you really have to answer some questions about artistic merit”. (New York Times 2009)

His statement about the relative quality of theatres in the state of Illinois proved to be a well-publicized faux-pas, one which no subsequent chair of the NEA has made. It is not just a matter of believing that a relatively equal geographic allocation of arts funding is desirable; a case could certainly be made for that. His error was that he said something about the quality of art; that is what upset the Peorians. If that is a sketch of what might be the elements of a conservative arts policy, where are the weak points? I would say there are two types of criticism we could expect here. The first set of criticisms would be addressed to the first four points I made above: what if these claims about the nature of art are simply not true? Is Eliot’s vision of tradition and the individual talent nothing more than a defense of a subset of the culture that is by and for an elite, and, worse, that the argument of cultural conservatives is not even made in good faith, but serves as a mask over a reactionary political agenda? This would likewise apply to claims about standards of taste in the arts, and what one might see as a false distinction between “high” and “low” art.

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What if it is true, both as historical fact and as an understanding of current practice, that all art is political? The first issue to be resolved in considering a conservative arts policy is whether the claims about the nature of art and society are true. The second kind of criticism is one we have encountered before, especially in Chap. 3 on Liberalism. Suppose one held that, after considering all the evidence and argument, cultural conservatives are for the most part right about what art is, that there are standards in the arts that one can learn through guidance and study and experience, that there are genuine differences between amusements and art proper, and that political art is mostly banal politics presented in mediocre art. All of this could be argued in seminars and in articles. But the question of whether the state has a role in using funds to promote any of these ideals—excellence in the arts, with a specific conception of what constitutes excellence, and what constitutes art—is a separate matter. John Rawls did not think we could reconcile a liberal political order with a state’s pursuit of perfectionist goals. It is the essential question in public funding of the arts, one wrestled with by Mill in his essays on Bentham and Coleridge, and one that remains unresolved.

References Amis, Kingsley. 1990. An Arts Policy? In The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990. London: Hutchinson. Arnold, Matthew. 1987/1869. Culture and Anarchy, and Other Selected Prose. London: Penguin. Arts Council England. 2022. What the 2023–2026 Investment Program Means for Creativity and Culture. November 4. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ blog/what-­2023-­26-­investment-­programme-­means-­creativity-­and-­culture. Accessed December 8, 2022. Chesterton, G.K. 1990. The Thing. In Collected Works, vol. 3. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Churchill, Winston S. 1997/1943. Speech on Rebuilding the House of Commons. In Conservatism, ed. J.Z. Muller. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, G.A. 2013. Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value (All Souls Version). In Finding Oneself in the Other. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleridge, Samuel. 1976/1830. On the Constitution of the Church and State, Collected Works, Volume 10. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickens, Charles. 1969/1854. Hard Times. London: Penguin.

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Eliot, T.S. 1950. Selected Essays. New ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Epstein, Joseph. 1995. What to Do About the Arts. Commentary, April. Fawcett, Edmund. 2020. Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Guardian. 2022. English National Opera’s Funding to be Cut to Zero Unless It Moves from London. November 9. Hume, David. 1985/1757. Of the Standard of Taste. In Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Johnson, Julian. 2002. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramer, Hilton. 1988. Modernism and Its Enemies. In The New Criterion Reader: The First Five Years, ed. H. Kramer. New York: Free Press. Leavis, F.R. 1950. Mill on Bentham and Coleridge. London: Chatto and Windus. Lindblom, Charles E. 1959. The Science of “Muddling Through”. Public Administration Review 19 (2): 79–88. Mill, John Stuart. 1848. Principles of Political Economy. London: John W. Parker. New York Times. 2009. Arts Chief to See What Plays in Peoria. August 17. Oakeshott, Michael. 1939. The Claims of Politics. Scrutiny 8 (2): 146–151. ———. 1975. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1983. The Rule of Law. In On History and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1989. The Idea of a University. In The Voice of Liberal Learning. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1991a. Rationalism in Politics. In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. ———. 1991b. On Being Conservative. In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Orwell, George. 1968/1948. Writers and Leviathan. In Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 4. London: Penguin. Peterson, Richard, and Roger M. Kern. 1996. Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. American Sociological Review 61 (5): 900–907. Robin, Corey. 2018. The Reactionary Mind. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rushton, Michael. 2000. Public Funding of Controversial Art. Journal of Cultural Economics 24 (4): 267–282. ———. 2004. Earmarked Taxes for the Arts: US Experience and Policy Implications. International Journal of Arts Management 6 (3): 38–48. ———. 2005. Support for Earmarked Public Spending on Culture: Evidence from a Referendum in Metropolitan Detroit. Public Budgeting and Finance 25 (4): 72–85. ———. 2021. The Claims of Politics on the Arts? Oakeshott and Scrutiny in the 1930s. Journal of Aesthetic Education 55 (4): 60–69.

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Scorsese, Martin. 2019. I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain. New York Times, November 4. Scruton, Roger. 2000. Modern Culture. London: Continuum. ———. 2006. A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2008. We Need the English Music That the Arts Council Hates. The Spectator, April 19. ———. 2017. Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition. London: All Points. Stevens, Christopher. 2012. Who’s Afraid of Roger Scruton? In Scruton’s Aesthetics, ed. A. Hamilton and N. Zangwell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus. Winch, Donald. 2000. Mr Gradgrind and Jerusalem. In Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. S.  Collini, R.  Whatmore, and B. Young. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Multiculturalism

This book is about whether the state use of public funds to support the arts can be morally justified, looking at the question from different moral frameworks, such as economics/welfarism, liberal egalitarianism, communitarianism, different conceptions of what constitutes the proper scope of equality, and so on. In this chapter I do not introduce a new moral framework to the range of possibilities. Instead, I ask how the analysis of prior chapters changes, if at all, if we factor into the analysis the empirical fact of there being different identifiable cultural traditions within the nation (or sub-national unit with some jurisdiction over arts funding), where by “traditions” I mean something deeper than the simple diversity of cultural tastes we have dealt with in earlier chapters. Multiculturalism refers to cultural policy that explicitly recognizes and takes some account of these different cultural traditions; the term is included in the Canadian constitution, and, as it provides good examples of policy debates, as well as a number of the most recognized scholars in the field, this chapter will be more focused on Canada than the book has been so far. Because they would take us far beyond the scope of this book, I do not in this chapter deal deeply with policies regarding different cultural traditions outside of the arts, such as religious and moral beliefs, family law, and so on, especially where there are conflicts between cultures on different

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_7

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individual freedoms. Neither do I discuss an important issue in cultural policy, namely copyright and the protections it gives, or not, to artistic themes and methods that have arisen in Indigenous societies but for which there is no individual “author.” The focus will remain on direct state support of the arts.

The Economics of Cultural Diversity In Chap. 2, on the economic method, I raised the issue that the more diverse are the valuations people place on public goods or positive externalities from the arts, the more difficult it will be to find consensus on public funding; if everyone has close to the same valuation of a public good, then funding from a roughly equal amount of tax per person, so long as the public good project has aggregate benefits exceeding the total cost of the project, should have near-unanimous support. If the valuation per person is roughly proportional to their income, then tax-funding of the project based on a personal income tax should have wide approval. But if valuations are very divergent, and are not easily correlated with any tax base, then even if a public good or externality has a higher value than the cost of public subsidy, it is probable that some of the public will be disaffected, paying more for the arts funding than they believe it is worth, and people who highly value the public good of the arts will be dissatisfied with the government spending being too low (see Atkinson and Stiglitz 1980). If the differences in valuations are correlated with race, ethnicity, or cultural group, then as a rule we might expect countries with higher levels of diversity to have greater challenges in gaining the approval for, and provision of, all public goods. There is substantial evidence to this effect: Easterly and Levine (1997) find that Sub-Saharan African countries with greater ethnic divisions, typically due to colonial imposition of borders between nations that do not reflect historic boundaries, have greater difficulty achieving consensus and action on growth-promoting public policies. In the United States, greater ethnic and racial diversity at the local level is associated with less public spending on productive public goods (Alesina et al. 1999), racial disparity between elderly taxpayers and school-­ aged children leads to less funding for public schools (Poterba 1997), and in general ethnic and racial diversity has prevented the United States from developing the more extensive welfare-state apparatus one tends to find in other countries with similar levels of average income (Alesina et al. 2001).

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When ethnic and racial diversity are coupled with segregation, the problems tend to be amplified (Boisjoly et al. 2007; Roch and Rushton 2008). As a rule—and obviously this is painting with broad brushstrokes—many people are averse to paying taxes for goods and services they believe will be of benefit to members of some other group, and the less positive interaction there is between members of different ethnic groups, the greater this aversion. [W]e need to take seriously the enduring power of group loyalty and attachment, and the durability of ethnic and cultural groups. Ethnocultural identities are strongly felt, and experienced by many people at many, perhaps most, times to be permanent and immutable. Persons identify and empathize more easily with those with whom they have more in common than with those with whom they have less. They rally around their fellow religionists; they seek the familiar comforts of native speakers of their native languages; they support those they see as kin against those they see as strangers. They seek places that feel like home, and seek to protect those places; they are raised in particular cultures, with particular sets of local knowledge, norms, and traditions, which come to seem normal and enduring. (Levy 2000, pp. 5–6)

What can be done, beyond policies that promote changes in attitudes toward those from other groups? Alesina and Spolaore (2003) enquire into the optimal size of countries, based on the trade-offs between the economies of scale and free exchange that come from bigness, and the costs in terms of increased population heterogeneity that typically come with that bigness. While changes in national borders are rare, and often provoked by aggression and violent conflict (there have been “velvet divorces” in nations, but they are few in number), there are other measures that can be taken: nations can engage in treaties and various sorts of union to exploit economies of scale, and federalism can decentralize the provision of some public goods such that there can be variance within the nation based upon local preferences. There is a sound reason that public arts funding in the United States is so decentralized, with local and state governments spending far more per capita than does the National Endowment for the Arts. Federalism can allow provinces or regions with distinct cultural and linguistic identities, like Quebec in Canada or Catalonia in Spain, to have education and cultural policies that better reflect local preferences (Paquette 2019). A federal system allows the national government to care for matters where economies of scale are

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significant—national defense, foreign relations, national transportation networks, for example—while allowing provinces to care for more local matters like education, social services, and health care. Since it is easier for national governments to raise tax revenue than it is for provinces, who, if left to their own tax-raising capabilities, would be put in competition with each other to offer the most favorable terms to interjurisdictionally mobile capital and talent (observe US state film tax credits as an example), the national government can raise more revenue than needed for its own public goods provision and then transfer funds back to provinces or states (this can be arranged in a way that helps equalize resource disparities across sub-national jurisdictions). Another economics-based approach would be to direct state support of the arts more toward the indirect means of subsidizing or otherwise encouraging private giving to arts presenters. One reason the non-profit organizational form is so prevalent in many arts genres is that while the value people place on the organizations exceeds the total cost of running them, there is no market mechanism that would enable the organizations to survive in commercial markets where all revenues come from ticket sales; there is great variance in the amount of value different people place on the arts, with the very rich having valuations in the thousands or even millions of dollars, yet even the most sophisticated means of price discrimination in ticket sales could not hope to capture that value. Private donations thus become a form of “voluntary price discrimination” (Hansmann 1980; Kuan 2001), and only the non-profit organizational form can facilitate donations, since they are bound by law to devote raised funds to mission-related activities of the organization, and cannot direct funds to managers or shareholders (there are no shareholders). An advantage of a system of non-profit arts organizations is that the firms can cater to subsets of the population for whom their art is important and valuable, even if the subset is a very small minority of the population; the problem of trying to subsidize positive externalities from the arts in the face of high or increasing cultural diversity might be to maintain a generous system of subsidy for private donations (Rushton 2003). These are pragmatic policies, commonly observed, and are a response to the fact of cultural diversity. But there is a common thread of what we could call “economism”: taking individual people’s preferences as data, and asking what institutional arrangements can best satisfy those preferences, and in turn individual welfare, in aggregate, within constraints. “Ethnic divisions” captures something real, but it is not a part of

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economic analysis (and this is not a criticism of economics) to delve into why those divisions exist; differences in preferences over spending on public goods are taken as given, but we do not know much about the origins of those differences, or about the moral context. Racism is unambiguously bad; having different preferences over cultural spending as a result of one’s primary language and community cultural experiences, and wishing to preserve one’s cultural traditions, especially if one is a member of a minority culture within a nation, is a very different thing. As discussed in Chap. 5, economics is a mode of analysis with methodological individualism at its core. Economists can construct models where a group of individuals has a more similar set of cultural and economic preferences with each other than with those outside of the group, but they will be limited in how far economics can take us in terms of understanding those groups, and of what “culture” means in this context.

Is Culture a Primary Social Good? In Chap. 3 we looked at John Rawls’s (1971) vision for a liberal egalitarian state, one that could be imagined as the result of a social contract between individuals deliberating from an “original position,” from which they do not know what their attributes, advantages, and disadvantages will be in the nation whose social and political arrangements they are working to determine. In the model of the social contract, justice constitutes fairness; it represents something all parties could agree to. One conclusion drawn by Rawls was that participants in the social contract would want a government that was neutral with respect to different possible individual visions of what constituted worthy goals for themselves; they would reject the possibility of the state pursuing any version of “perfectionism” (and recall this result made Rawls skeptical about the merits of public funding for the arts). A second conclusion was that the participants would only allow inequalities in society so long as any such inequality worked to the advantage of the least advantaged in society. But inequality of what? Rawls’s answer was that the key metric of inequality was “social primary goods.” These, “to give them broad categories, are rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth” (Rawls 1971, p. 92), and, in addition, “perhaps the most important primary good is that of self-respect … a person’s sense of his own value … [and] a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is in one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions” (p. 440). In the same chapter we also looked at Ronald Dworkin’s (1985) liberal case in favor of

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public funding for the arts; people need a rich cultural and linguistic inheritance if they are to be able to envision and articulate that personal conception of the good that liberal theory says is her right, and her responsibility. Rawls and Dworkin stress the essential value of equal political citizenship: Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. … Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. (Rawls 1971, pp. 3–4)

Will Kymlicka (1989, 2003) draws our attention to the fact that in many countries, people may all share the rights of political citizenship, but belong to different cultural communities, oftentimes belonging to a minority culture within the political entity. Suppose we consider that a person’s cultural community, defined by language, art, traditions, norms, beliefs and ways of knowing, gives shape to how that person can shape, follow, or change, their conception of the good, and what sort of life they wish to pursue. Dworkin (1985) acknowledges this—it is how he is able to justify government funding for the arts. But Dworkin does not acknowledge (at least in his venture into the topic of arts policy) that there might be multiple cultures. What if we thought of being a part of a living cultural tradition as a primary social good, alongside equal rights and opportunities and the provisions for self-respect? Kymlicka notes that recognizing cultural rights might conflict with other valuable liberal rights; for example, the preservation of a minority culture, under threat from being swamped by the majority culture, might entail granting special provisions to members of the minority culture that are not available to all. This brings inequality into one dimension of rights in order to enhance equality in another dimension. Kymlicka (2002) recounts that in some older writings on the question of multiculturalism and public policy, the frame was the existing debate between liberals and communitarians (see Chap. 5); liberals were in favor of individual rights (and so equality meant ensuring that all individuals had equal liberal rights) and communitarians were for “group rights,” where communities as entities deserved rights as something separate and in addition to individual rights, and this is one way to approach

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the problem (see Johnston 1995). But his own approach is to see cultural rights as a question of liberal rights, and what justice requires for the full equality of individuals (also see Raz 1998). The recent policy initiatives of the Canada Council for the Arts (2016, 2021, 2022) provide a good example. The Council has created programs specifically for Indigenous (in Canada, these are First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) artists and arts organizations. In one sense, this presents an inequality within Canada: some Canadian artists can apply for these grants, and others are not eligible. In part, and the Council recognizes this, the programs are meant to make amends for the longstanding neglect of Indigenous arts in Canadian arts funding, or in Canadian education (Battiste 2000; Battiste and Henderson 2000). As I noted in Chap. 3, a lacuna in Rawls’s “justice as fairness” is any recognition of historic injustice (Mills 2015). And as Nathan Glazer (1997) argues, in the context of African Americans, a nation cannot have a history of excluding a people from the mainstream of the culture of the majority, in addition to economic, political, and legal depredation, and then claim the move to a system of equal statutory liberties has solved the cultural inequity problem. Paquette et  al. (2017) recount how the Massey Report (Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1951), which led ultimately to the creation of the Canada Council in 1958 (see Upchurch 2016) saw the need for a new nationalism in the arts that would bridge the divides between French- and English-speaking Canadians: We thought it deeply significant to hear repeatedly from representatives of the two Canadian cultures expressions of hopes and of confidence that in our common cultivation of things of the mind, Canadians—French and English speaking—can find true “Canadianism”. Through this shared confidence, we can nurture what we have in common and resist those influences [here the concern was American culture] which could impair and even destroy our integrity. (Royal Commission 1951, p. 271)

but that the Commission also made the claim: It is argued that Indian arts emerged naturally from that combination of religious practices and economic and social customs which constituted the culture of the tribe and the region. The impact of the white man with his more advanced civilization and his infinitely superior techniques resulted in

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the gradual destruction of the Indian was of life. (Royal Commission 1951, p. 240)

In addition to making amends, the current Canada Council programs are also a recognition of the fact of a different cultural community, with different ways of understanding and making art, where the survival of that culture in the face of its being a small minority of the population, and of having endured appalling oppression from the settler majority in the country for centuries (including explicit and deliberate attempts to eliminate Indigenous languages and traditions), is crucial for Indigenous people in Canada to have a full opportunity for a worthwhile life: Unlike the dominant French or English cultures [in Canada], the very existence of aboriginal cultural communities is vulnerable to the decisions of the non-aboriginal majority around them. They could be outbid or outvoted on resources crucial to the survival of their communities, a possibility that members of majority cultures simply do not face. As a result, they have to spend their resources on securing the cultural membership which makes sense of their lives, something which non-aboriginal people get for free. (Kymlicka 1989, p. 187)

Kymlicka (1995, p.  223, n. 15) also points out that special funding for cultural minorities should easily fit into Dworkin’s (1985) “preserve a living culture for future generations” rationale for public funding of the arts. The Canada Council (2022) puts particular emphasis on having Indigenous Canadians as equal partners in forming these specific arts policies, to ensure a full understanding of the different ways of understanding art and knowledge. This is a mark of recognition and respect, which is not a trivial matter in arts funding policy. In Chap. 6, on conservative arts policy, I cited two pieces lamenting the decline in standards in arts council decisions: Roger Scruton (2008) on Arts Council England, and Joseph Epstein (1995) on the National Endowment for the Arts. Each of these pieces cites, without explanation, “multiculturalism” as one of the causes of the decline in standards. This is not just careless writing; it also indicates a deeper issue, that funding devoted to arts from non-majority cultures must involve laxity, an unwillingness to evaluate art on its aesthetic merits. This in turn contributes to a lack of respect for Indigenous art, falsely suggesting that it lacks seriousness of purpose, craftsmanship, or rigorous critical appraisal (including, as T.S. Eliot emphasized, by the artist herself).

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The Canada Council’s programs specifically for Indigenous artists still abide by peer review and, given the ever-present scarcity of funds, selectivity in what gets funded. I will add the reminder here that, as we saw in earlier chapters in this book, the question of whether there ought to be an arts council at all remains contested; a strict liberal neutrality regarding the state pursuing through its actions particular conceptions of the good—in this case, the subsidy of the arts even in the face of public disagreement over whether it is worthwhile—would neither fund the art of the majority nor the art of the more fragile cultural traditions of certain minorities. If we accept Dworkin’s, and Kymlicka’s, argument that a rich cultural tradition is a part of what is necessary for people to be able to form ideals, and as a result it is proper for a liberal state to give support to the arts, then structuring arts policy to give proper recognition to cultural minorities, like Indigenous peoples, makes sense. But this is only if we accept the claim about having any government role in supporting the arts in the first place, and this question is not entirely settled. In fact, the entire liberal framework, whether one can find support within it for cultural funding or not, remains contested, and critics of Kymlicka’s approach to cultural pluralism have noted that he begins with the assumptions that the liberal state as envisioned by Rawls and Dworkin is the best starting point for asking how people can best live a good life. But this is not the only way of seeing the world, or of seeing where the best possibilities for human flourishing lie. Responding to Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh writes: [D]irectly or indirectly and subtly or crudely, liberals continue to absolutize liberalism. Hence their persistent tendency to make it their central frame of reference, divide all ways of life into liberal and nonliberal, equate the latter with illiberal, and to talk of tolerating and rarely of respecting or cherishing them. The crudity of this distinction would become clear if someone were to divide all religions into Christianity and non-Christianity and equate the latter with anti-Christianity. If liberals are to do justice to alternative ways of life and thought, they need to break away from this crude binary distinction. They cannot do this unless they stop absolutizing the liberal way of life and making it their central point of comparison. (Parekh 2000, p. 110)

Homi Bhabha (1999) similarly writes of the prominence in Western writing on multiculturalism to adopt from the start liberal premises and to proceed from there, especially in concerns over whether minority cultures

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ought to be protected if they do not rise to the level of autonomy and liberty promised by liberal theory (if not by actually existing liberal democracies). Jacob Levy, in his The Multiculturalism of Fear (2000), presents a different kind of liberal argument for government recognition of cultural pluralism than Kymlicka’s. His title is a homage to Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989); drawing on Shklar, and also on Margalit (1996), Levy sees policy acknowledging multiculturalism as a protection for the individual, especially individuals from cultural minorities, from the state’s enormous power to do harm, through its laws and policies, statements and symbols, in the same way Shklar’s liberalism of fear was an advocacy for liberal rights primarily for protection against what a state might be capable of in the absence of those rights. In addition to the state’s ability to enforce discriminatory laws against minorities, leaving members of the minorities economically disadvantaged and politically disenfranchised, in more subtle ways it can, through its policies and symbols, perpetuate a sense of inferiority and exclusion. The language from Canada’s Royal Commission quoted above, insisting that the art of Indigenous Canadians is not actually a part of “Canadian” art, that it is primitive and without a future, matters more than just the unequal funding support for artists and arts organizations in Canada, as bad as that was. It influences how the majority population understands Indigenous people, and how the Indigenous population sees itself, its cultural traditions, and current artistic activities. Remember that in 1951, when the Massey Commission issued its report, Canadian Indigenous children were still being taken from their families against their will and put into residential boarding schools, where, in addition to the almost indescribable cruelty to which they were subjected, a goal of the schools was to hasten the death of native language and customs, ostensibly in the students’ best interests. The liberalism of fear, emphasizing the avoidance of cruelty, humiliation, and political violence, is distinctly well-suited to a discussion of multiculturalism and nationalism. This may cut against the grain of some of the beliefs that Shklar herself held. It might seem that what liberals of fear need to do with ethnicity is figure out how to constrain its pernicious influence, nothing more. Nothing in the modern world is more prone to generate political violence and cruelty than the claimed ties of ethnicity and culture. Surely, then, the last thing liberalism should do is encourage persons to see themselves as parts of tribes rather than as individuals.

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Such a reaction is too simplistic by far, though it exaggerates a caution that is of critical importance. The violence, cruelty, and humiliation which routinely accompany ethnic politics are not avoided by attacking ethnicity, any more than the violence, cruelty, and humiliation of the wars of religion were ended by convincing people not to be religious. The institutional accommodations and arrangements which make up the separation of church and state and the protection of freedom of religious exercise are the model to be followed (in spirit if not in all particulars). The liberal of fear does not say that the proper way to handle religious pluralism is to govern as if everyone were an atheist, and ought not to say the proper way to handle cultural pluralism is to govern as though everyone were a worldly cosmopolitan. (Levy 2000, pp. 26–27)

Levy and Kymlicka arrive at liberal defenses of state policy recognizing and respecting cultural pluralism from slightly different directions, but that should not distract from what they hold in common: that if all individuals are to be able to have the opportunity to flourish in society, to pursue their ideals, it must be that the cultural community into which they were born is given respect by the state, and that being from a minority culture is not seen as being from a culture of lesser worth. This enables persons to draw from their culture, language, and communities, ideals and possibilities, and the means to communicate them. Policies that accomplish this include arts funding policies that recognize particular challenges some cultural minorities might face in sustaining themselves, and ensuring that people from cultural minorities have a voice in the determination and the administration of arts policy. It is also important to remember that the purpose of giving respect and funding support to cultural minorities is not to satisfy the majority culture’s need for “diversity.” British novelist Kamila Shamsie (The Guardian 2017) said, of authors from minority cultures, “The literary merit of their work – as opposed to its social function – simply isn’t talked about as much as it should or could be.” When audiences from the majority culture experience works produced by minority-culture artists, it certainly could have the effect of increasing cross-cultural understanding. But it is not for minority artists to serve this social function, while artists from the majority culture create art proper. Film director Hanif Kureishi, speaking about his film My Beautiful Laundrette, about which he was asked why he did not include more positive images of characters from minorities, said:

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If contemporary writing which emerges from oppressed groups ignores the central concerns and major conflicts of the larger society, and if these are willing simply to accept themselves as marginal or enclave literatures, they will automatically designate themselves as permanently minor, as a sub-­ genre. They must not allow themselves now to be rendered invisible and marginalized in this way by stepping outside of the maelstrom of contemporary history. (Quoted by Hall 1997, p. 60)

It is also true that the state cannot enforce the survival of a minority culture if there is not a critical mass of individuals who are invested in cultural preservation. Languages and musical styles can in the end only survive, outside of university departments of folklore, if there are people who want to speak in those languages, and not abandon them in favor of the country’s official language, and the music and art styles of the cultural majority. Arts policy can support minority cultures and give them special consideration in light of their threatened status. But artists themselves must make the choice as to whether to produce their work through that cultural tradition, or to venture into some new direction.

Culture and Recognition [W]here Kymlicka’s interesting argument fails to recapture the actual demands made by the groups concerned – say Indian bands in Canada, or French-speaking Canadians  – is with respect to their goal of survival. Kymlicka’s reasoning is valid (perhaps) for existing people who find themselves trapped within a culture under pressure, and can flourish within it or not at all. But it doesn’t justify measures designed to ensure survival through indefinite future generations. For populations concerned, however, that is what is at stake. (Taylor 1994, p. 41, n. 16, emphasis his)

In Chap. 5, on the topic of communitarianism, I devoted significant attention to Charles Taylor’s critique of methodological individualism, in its manifestations in the welfarism of mainstream economic analysis, and the liberalism whose most influential modern articulation is through John Rawls. How does this critique affect our understanding of cultural pluralism, and policies toward minority cultures and languages? Since it generated substantial response, my focus will be on his essay “The Politics of Recognition” (Taylor 1994). Kymlicka’s goal was to embed support for multiple cultures, including protection of minority cultures, as a part of the liberal project of guaranteeing extensive personal liberties with the

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rights of individuals to determine their own substantive life goals. But Taylor asks where there could be justification for the state pursuing the substantive goal of protection of a language and culture, including where it involves infringing upon other rights, such as, for example, the restrictive laws in the province of Quebec that are aimed not just at maintaining French usage in this generation, but, importantly, through educational policies designed to ensure the predominance of the French language into future generations. Or, for another example, restrictive policies around who may claim First Nations status among Canada’s Indigenous communities. Taylor identifies the expansion of liberalism in the politics of Western nations, with “Bill of Rights”-influenced constitutional protections of extensive personal freedoms, as coming into conflict with cultural minorities’ desires for illiberal legislation that would preserve cultural survival; in recent years we might say there has been a resurgence of the “cultural survival” argument in a number of countries. By “the politics of recognition,” Taylor means how our sense of self-­ worth and self-understanding come about, and he writes in opposition to the notion of the “unencumbered” atomistic individuals who form their own ideas of their identity, and of the good: [A] crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. For my purposes here, I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. … The monological ideal seriously underestimates the place of dialogical in human life. It wants to confine it as much as possible to the genesis. It forgets how our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love; how some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment. … Consider what we mean by identity. It is who we are, “where we’re coming from.” As such it is the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense. (Taylor 1994, pp. 32–34, emphasis his)

Now if it is through our communities, “where we’re coming from,” that people’s lives are shaped, then it does great harm to people when their community, their culture, is deemed by those in the majority (typically

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economically and politically dominant) culture to be inferior, backwards, uncivilized, primitive. Thus, a politics of recognition would hold, at a minimum, that at least as a starting point different cultures are deserving of respect as cultures (and here I reiterate that I am using the narrow sense of culture as language and art, not of systems of morals and law). And that artifacts of different cultures not be evaluated in terms of the dominant culture: “to approach, say, a raga with the presumptions of value implicit in the well-tempered clavier would be forever to miss the point” (p. 67). In this sense, The Canada Council’s decision to explicitly give recognition, funding, and an apology for past neglect, to Indigenous arts matters for the flourishing of the culture. The ability of Indigenous Canadians to have a continuing, vital tradition in the arts, matters greatly to the individual’s self-understanding, and to mutual respect. Other state policies can support the recognition of cultures, such as ridding public symbols and art of images that present minority or Indigenous cultures in a subservient position. Taylor does not want to go so far as to say we are morally obliged, on due consideration and attempts at understanding, to find the aesthetic values of all cultures in all eras as equal, and that any differences we find are purely a matter of wholly subjective tastes. This issue is particularly salient in the debates on cultural pluralism and school and university curricula, where due to the finite amount of time available, judgments over what to include cannot be avoided. Nancy Fraser highlights a fundamental difference between Kymlicka and Taylor in terms of cultural pluralism. Specifically, how should one think about justice? Kymlicka’s starting point is Rawlsian, and claims that a sound and secure culture from which one can form and question ideals, and have one of the bases for self-respect, ought to be considered a primary good, which is the Rawlsian “currency” of a just distribution. In Kymlicka’s setting redistribution is key to the project of attaining justice, and protection of cultures is a means (not the only one) of achieving that. In Taylor’s approach, the emphasis is not on redistribution, but on recognition as the means to justice. So, Fraser asks, how should we approach the question of redistribution or recognition? Her approach, informed by debates within feminism over the redistribution-or-recognition dichotomy, is “perspectival dualist,” which “casts the two categories as co-­ fundamental and mutually irreducible dimensions of justice” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 3). In other words, while recognizing the importance of recognition, one should not lose sight of the basic issues such as the

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distribution of income and wealth in the search for justice. See also Iris Marion Young (1995) who similarly sees the need for recognition of difference while at the same time building consensus on the need for redistribution as justice. Criticism of official recognition of minority cultures, whether it be special funding programs, or special efforts to widen school curricula to present a wide range of cultural traditions, can come from the left and the right of the political spectrum. On the left, the concern is that it leads to an identity politics that distracts from efforts to build a common front for progressive economic policy (Gitlin 1995), and that it creates a misunderstanding of what it means to have rights: The fundamental error, which is central to Taylor’s project, is encapsulated in the title of a collection of essays edited by Will Kymlicka: The Rights of Minority Cultures. Cultures are simply not the kind of entity to which rights can properly be ascribed. Communities defined by some shared cultural characteristic (for example, a language) may under some circumstances have some valid claims, but the claims then arise from the legitimate interests of the members of the group. (Barry 2001, p. 67)

This can especially lead to conflict where some members of the cultural minority do not value the protections ostensibly given by policy. Policies in Canada protecting the French language in Quebec, and various policies surrounding Treaty lands for Indigenous tribes, impose restrictions on “insiders” as well as “outsiders” to the group. From the right, recognition of cultural pluralism diminishes, rather than enhances, the individuality of people from cultural minorities: Civilization’s enemies attack civilization’s foundational idea, the proposition that human nature is not infinitely plastic and therefore that people cannot be socialized to accept or do whatever those in charge of socialization desire. These enemies believe that human beings have no common nature, no shared moral sense that is a component of universal human nature. Rather, they say, all we have in common is a capacity to acquire an infinite variety of cultures. The cult of cultural diversity in higher education contains an aggressive ideology concerning the meaning of culture, the aims of education, and the merits of the United States. Multiculturalism is a fact: Americans have various racial and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. But multiculturalism as a policy is not primarily a response to this fact. Rather, it is an ideology, the core tenet of which is this: Because all standards for

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j­udging cultures are themselves culture-bound, it is wrong to “privilege” Western culture and right to tailor university curricula to rectify the failure to extend proper “recognition” and “validation” to other cultures. Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues. This explains the multiculturalists’ attempts to politicize and purge higher education curriculums. (Will 2019, p. 372)

I return to this criticism in the discussion of cosmopolitanism, later in this chapter. In response to criticisms of official multiculturalist policies, Kymlicka (2012) notes that there have been many successes, reminding us that the goal of cultural recognition is not to separate us into different cultural groups, but to widen the net of who is included as full and equal participants in liberal democratic society. It is transformative: immigrant cultures are given recognition, but on the understanding that there is inclusion into the values and laws of liberal democracy and human rights. And there is transformation of the historically dominant majority, which must “abandon attempts to fashion public institutions solely in its own (typically white / Christian) image” (p. 9). In Canada, which has constitutionalized and vigorously pursued policies of multiculturalism: Immigrants … are more likely to become citizens, to vote and to run for office, and to be elected to office than immigrants in other Western democracies, in part because voters in Canada do not discriminate against such candidates. … multiculturalism serves as a source of shared national identity and pride for native-born citizens and immigrants alike. (Kymlicka 2012, pp. 10–11)

In other words, a respect for cultural pluralism also serves as a means of nation-building.

Immigration In the preceding section a lot of attention was devoted to cultural minorities we could think of as historic, specifically the Indigenous peoples and the French-speaking Québécois of Canada. What about cultural

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minorities that exist due to relatively recent immigration? How should public arts funding respond, if at all? I raised this question briefly in Chap. 4, on Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts, where I suggested the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul, Minnesota—the Center has at various times received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Saint Paul Star Program (an earmarked tax to help support neighborhood non-profits), the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (for the greater Twin Cities of Minnesota region), and the Minnesota Arts Council—could be thought of as arts funding supporting an “expensive taste.” The choice of language is not the best, since while the desire for Laotian immigrants to the United States to have a place to share and enjoy the culture of the country in which they were raised is indeed expensive, in that they are a small community that cannot exploit returns to scale in their cultural activities, it is not a “taste” in the same way that I have tastes for interwar English fiction and dark beers. I post this statement from their home web page [hmongcc.org, last accessed December 1, 2022], since it captures many of the issues around immigration and culture: HCC’s Mission is to promote the personal development of children, youth, and adults through education while providing resources that enhance cross-cultural awareness between Hmong and non-Hmong. Hmong Cultural Center celebrates and nourishes Hmong culture by teaching music, dance and ceremonial arts. We support new immigrants and refugees through free English classes and citizenship classes. Our storefront museum, speaker’s bureau, and online classes about Hmong history and culture elevate individuals to become culturally aware members of the community. In addition to our museum, we host the Hmong Resource Center Library, the site of the most comprehensive collection of Hmong-related literature in North America. … Hmong Cultural Center uses art and education to promote positive race relations in the Twin Cities community. We are the only non-profit in Minnesota that focuses on sustaining and teaching about Hmong culture through multicultural education and cultural arts programs.

One first notices the reciprocal nature of the Center’s activities: it provides the non-Hmong people of Minnesota with greater understanding of this relatively new people to the state (immigration of the Hmong people for the most part only began around 1975, with refugees from the

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conflicts in South-East Asia), but also provides language and citizenship classes to the Hmong people (note acquisition of some ability in English is a requirement for gaining United States citizenship). It provides what Miller (2016) calls civic integration—citizenship, broadly defined—while at the same time maintaining recognition of cultural distinctiveness. Civic integration involves an understanding of the essential liberalism of the West: broad, constitutional protections for individual freedoms, and cultural norms that value those freedoms as a means for individuals to determine, question, and revise their ideas of the good (as Mill pointed out in On Liberty (1974/1859), freedom depends not just on legislation, but on the character of society itself; I cannot find the reference, but I remember when I moved to Australia in the 1980s being given an official handbook for immigrants that stressed not just the constitutional protections for individual rights, but also the Australian culture of tolerance for difference. The Center also serves to ease what must be a difficult process, moving from one very different culture to another. It provides one of Martha Nussbaum’s (2000) essential capabilities, to have a place where, with others who share the same background, one can share stories, and express oneself through familiar musical instruments and dances, that are so important to well-being. The work of the Center in preserving Hmong culture is complex, in that, first, any living culture changes through the decades, from global influences and economic and political changes, and, second, second- and third-generation immigrants become more integrated into the majority culture; for the Hmong in Minnesota, those born now to parents whose own parents fled Laos in the 1970s have English as a first language, play ice hockey, and are as American as children can be. My own ancestors left the Lithuania of the Russian empire at the turn of the last century, for a better life working in the coalfields of Lanarkshire, but while my very Scottish mother could remember a few words and songs in Lithuanian, I know none. As such, it is important to recognize the limited scope of cultural pluralism, since there is constant evolution of culture and art, to the point where origins of immigrants do not disappear, but become enmeshed in the new land’s culture in complex and diverse ways. People emigrate because they see a better life in a new place; sometimes the reasons are cultural—they seek a land of greater personal freedoms—and sometimes economic—the new land offers better opportunities to provide for

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oneself, one’s family, and for their future generations (these two reasons are not entirely separate; the political and social culture of a nation has influence on its economic fortunes). As Samuel Scheffler (2007) puts it: “immigration does involve change – that’s the point” (p. 98, emphasis his). Even within-country migration is a search for change, and not only job-­ seeking: people move between urban and suburban and rural areas because they want the change in lifestyle that this would bring. But a free society allows immigrants to choose their own paths with regard to culture. As David Miller argues, this is for the best: The value of civic integration is rarely questioned. Cultural integration is another matter, however, and it is very contestable whether states have any business trying to encourage (or force) immigrants to integrate culturally with the native population (which anyway is not a cultural monolith, but is likely to be divided by social class, region, religion, and so forth). The case against cultural integration is essentially twofold. First, it is oppressive: it involves forcing or inducing people to abandon their own cultural matrix in order to assimilate to somebody else’s. It offends against the basic liberal principle that people should be free to follow their own path (which might also be the path of their ancestral group) in matters of belief, taste, and value, so long as they don’t trample on anyone else’s equal freedom. Second, it is unnecessary. Provided immigrants integrate civically, and to a sufficient extent socially, that will create the social bonds needed to avoid conflict and enable a democratic state to function effectively. In practice, so the argument goes, the culture of immigrant groups is likely to change over time as they adjust to life in their new surroundings, but there is no need for the state to do anything to steer or hasten the process. Instead, the state’s role with respect to culture is to provide an environment in which many different cultures can coexist and flourish; in other words, its basic policy should be one of (liberal) multiculturalism. … Multiculturalism for immigrants, at least in Kymlicka’s version, is a claim about how the state should respond to the private cultures of different groups – a claim that members of minorities should not be disadvantaged in pursuing economic and other opportunities by virtue of their cultural membership. The rules of the receiving society must adjust in certain ways to accommodate the religious beliefs or ethnic practices of migrants. So here a line is being drawn between private and public culture. On one side stands the culture of the wider society, expressed in its language, its symbols, and its institutions: these must be common property, since there can only be one national flag or national legislature. On the other side, there is room for many different forms of private culture – different religions, different forms

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of art and literature, different cuisines, and so forth. Multiculturalism is a matter of showing respect for, or perhaps even celebrating, these differences. (Miller 2016, pp. 141–142)

Note that “civic integration” is not necessarily quite so simple. Parekh (1995) considers the affair of the protests (he focuses on Britain) by Muslims over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Civic integration was the expectation in the majority community, with stress on ideals of free expression even when the text of the novel was seen as grossly offensive, and that while British Muslims ought to be free to publicly condemn the book, it was not right to demand it be removed from libraries or that the publication of newer editions be blocked: When Muslims were campaigning against The Satanic Verses, they were constantly reminded of the terms of engagement between immigrants and the host society. They were told that in coming to settle in Britain they had consented to its way of life and incurred an obligation to abide by its laws, norms and values. They were to respect and adjust to the British way of life rather than expect it to adjust to them. If they found it oppressive or unhospitable, they were free and indeed honour bound to leave the country. Muslim spokesmen interpreted the concept of consent differently. Consent was a bilateral relationship and entailed commitment on both sides. As immigrants they did have an obligation to obey the laws of the land, but British society too had obligations to them. By not only admitting but positively recruiting them to help rebuild its post-war economy in full knowledge of who they were and what they stood for, Britain had consented to and incurred an obligation to respect at least the fundamentals of their way of life. It was true that British society might find some of their practices and values unacceptable, even as they might find some of its practices offensive. The way out lay in negotiating a consensus in a spirit of goodwill and mutual tolerance. (Parekh 1995, p. 310)

Cosmopolitanism In Creative Destruction (2002), Tyler Cowen notes an often overlooked factor in the analysis of how increased openness of economies and societies, and international trade, have affected local cultures: while it might seem to an observer that the world, lamentably, is becoming less diverse, as various peoples in distant locations come more and more to consume a global culture, in music, film, cuisine, and dress, for any individual the

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cultural opportunities in their own city have become more diverse, which, he claims is to their good. If we enjoy it when our own city becomes home to a wider set of cultural offerings from around the world, why would we not see that as a good thing for people in places and countries far away from our own? After all, it is not the duty of people in other countries to maintain a distinct, unified culture for the benefit of us when we visit and want to experience something far different from what we have at home: A typical American yuppie drinks French wine, listens to Beethoven on a Japanese audio system, uses the internet to buy Persian textiles from a dealer in London, watches Hollywood movies funded by foreign capital and filmed by a European director, and vacations in Bali; an upper middle-class Japanese may do much the same. A teenager in Bangkok may see Hollywood movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (an Austrian), study Japanese, and listen to new pop music from Hong Kong and China, in addition to the Latino singer Ricky Martin. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein selected Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. (Cowen 2002, p. 4)

If all cultures are fluid, then what rationale could there be for treaties that aim to “protect” global cultural diversity, such as UNESCO’s (1995) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, generally through restrictions on international trade, when it is global trade that is working to enhance diversity, albeit on a different, and what Cowen claims is more relevant, dimension? Further, why would any nation enact policies designed to “protect” minority cultures in what is such an open society? Jeremy Waldron (1995) gives a sharp critique of the policy of multiculturalism and the protection of minority cultures, as well as the rationales given by both Taylor and Kymlicka. On Taylor, he goes to the foundations of his communitarian philosophy. Waldron asks, what precisely is the “community” of which communitarians speak, that provides the individual with the necessary language, art, and understanding for forming one’s ideas? Is it a neighborhood, a region, a nation-state, an Indian band, or Indigenous peoples writ large, descendants of immigrants from a specific place, or religion? Many people would be unable to define their own “community” much less anyone else’s, and, as Cowen writes, our cultural lives are unique to ourselves, drawn from a staggeringly diverse set of options. This also presents a problem with Kymlicka’s liberal case for the protection of cultural minorities: while it is true that we need some cultural framework to help us shape our

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ideals, it does not follow that there is for each of us a single, bounded culture from which we draw. Waldron goes further to say that anyone who believes a minority culture can remain pure is (literally) living in a fantasy land: From a cosmopolitan point of view, immersion in the traditions of a particular community in the modern world is like living in Disneyland and thinking one’s surroundings epitomize what it is for a culture to really exist. Worse still, it is like demanding the funds to live in Disneyland and the protection of modern society for the boundaries of Disneyland, while still managing to convince oneself that what happens inside Disneyland is all there is to an adequate and fulfilling life. It is like thinking that what every person most deeply needs is for one of the Magic Kingdoms to provide a framework for her choices and her beliefs, completely neglecting the fact that the framework of Disneyland depends on commitments, structures, and infrastructures that far outstrip the character of any particular façade. It is to imagine that one could belong to Disneyland while professing complete indifference towards, or even disdain for, Los Angeles. (Waldron 1995, p. 101)

This is overstepping, as I’m not sure who (certainly not Kymlicka or Taylor) thinks in anything like these terms. Of course minority cultures exist in a very real world, from which they draw economic opportunities and cultural influences. Inuit people in Canada’s far north make movies, drive snowmobiles, and sign their children up for junior hockey leagues. But they also have a language that is not one of Canada’s official languages, and have unique traditions and means of cultural expression. Negotiating the intersection of traditional and Western culture is not always easy, but programs like those developed by the Canada Council to give extra support to Inuit artists and arts presenters do not amount to a fantasy of a culture sealed off from the Western world in perpetuity. Throughout history, and in contemporary times, there are many examples of states, in the name of the majority culture, seeking to eliminate all traces of minority cultures, sometimes through great oppression and violence. Those seeking the elimination of specific minority cultures certainly believe there is something very real in what they are hoping to bury. K. Anthony Appiah (1994) (more gently than Waldron) advocates for a cosmopolitan ideal, or at least for a cosmopolitan choice; he agrees with Taylor that the way we form our self-conception is through a dialogue between ourselves and our (as Waldron notes) vaguely defined community, but that going from there to a call for “recognition” of community

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based on ethnic or linguistic status can be a step too far, in that it puts limits on possible ways of being. If I identify as, among other things, a member of community X, that can place demands upon me to act in ways that are defined as appropriate for community X, perhaps against what I feel is my true self: [W]e need to ask … whether the identities constructed in this way are ones we – I speak here as someone who counts in America as a gay black man – can be happy with in the longer run. Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays requires that there are some scripts that go with being an African-­ American or having same-sex desires. There will be proper ways of being black and gay, there will be expectations to be met, demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another. (Appiah 1994, pp. 162–163)

Or, “we cannot enfranchise the claims of community cultures and norms over individuals without at the same time expanding—not only ideally but in practice—the right of individuals as bearers of rights to dissent from, exit from and oppose if necessary, their communities of origin” (Hall 2000, p. 236). And this is not just a matter of recognizing that the distinctive features of minority cultures can change; as both Taylor and Kymlicka note, the life of a contemporary Québécois is enormously different now than in the 1950s, with many of the changes related to the province becoming much more aligned with Western liberal political norms. It is about the autonomy of individuals within the recognized community, even should that community as a whole undergo changes. Also see Modood (2013, pp. 38–39) on what recognition of a minority culture or status entails. In a scathing critique of Cowen (2002), anthropologist Clifford Geertz (2003) raises a very important issue for perspectives in arts policy: does the great global, diverse cultural marketplace, from which we can pick and choose what items suit our omnivorous tastes, give us a deeper cultural life, a more sophisticated understanding of ourselves and the world, than a more bounded, defined, cultural heritage? If we are to come to any conclusions about “how globalization is changing the world’s cultures,” other than the simple fact that it is indeed changing it and profoundly, we need a language of perception and sensibility capable of sorting it out and guiding us through it. It is not clear that economics can

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produce that. What it seems likely to produce, on the evidence before us, is the higher complacency, and a great many all-for-the-best accounts of loss and upheaval. (Geertz 2003, p. 30)

A cosmopolitan world, shorn of any attachments to specific cultures, certainly provides for a wide set of choices. But who rates the best restaurant in town as the one with the biggest menu?

References Alesina, Alberto, and Enrico Spolaore. 2003. The Size of Nations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Alesina, Alberto, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly. 1999. Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions. Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (4): 1243–1284. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001. Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2: 187–277. Appiah, K. Anthony. 1994. Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction. In Multiculturalism, ed. A.  Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Atkinson, Anthony, and Joseph Stiglitz. 1980. Lectures on Public Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Barry, Brian. 2001. Culture and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Battiste, Marie. 2000. Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language, and Culture in Modern Society. In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. M. Battiste. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Battiste, Marie, and James Sa’ke’j Youngblood Henderson. 2000. Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing. Bhabha, Homi K. 1999. Liberalism’s Sacred Cow. In Susan Okin: Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, ed. J.  Cohen, M.  Howard, and M.C. Nussbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boisjoly, Johanna, Greg J.  Duncan, Michael Kremer, Dan M.  Levy, and Jacque Eccles. 2007. Empathy or Apathy: The Impact of Diversity. American Economic Review 96 (5): 1890–1905. Canada Council for the Arts. 2016. Shaping a New Future: Strategic Plan 2016–2021. Ottawa: Government of Canada. ———. 2021. Art, Now More Than Ever: Strategic Plan 2021–2026. Ottawa: Government of Canada. ———. 2022. Research on the Value of Public Funding for Indigenous Arts and Cultures. Ottawa: Government of Canada.

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Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization in Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. Can a Liberal State Support Art? In A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Easterly, WIlliam, and Ross Levine. 1997. Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (4): 1203–1250. Epstein, Joseph. 1995. What to Do About the Arts. Commentary, April. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-­ Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Geertz, Clifford. 2003. Off the Menu. The New Republic, February 17. Gitlin, Todd. 1995. The Twilight of Common Dreams. New York: Henry Holt. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The Guardian. 2017. Literature Report Shows British Readers Stuck in a Very White Past. March 1. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities. In Culture, Globalization, and the World-System. Rev. ed., ed. A.D.  King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. The Multi-cultural Question. In Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. B. Hesse. London: Zed Books. Hansmann, Henry. 1980. The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise. Yale Law Journal 89 (5): 835–901. Johnston, Darlene M. 1995. Native Rights as Collective Rights: A Question of Group Self-Preservation. In The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. W. Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuan, Jennifer. 2001. The Phantom Profits of the Opera: Nonprofit Ownership in the Arts as a Make-Buy Decision. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 17 (2): 507–520. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. Contemporary Political Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism. In Rights, Culture and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. L.H. Meyer, S.L. Paulson, and T.W. Pogge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future. Brussels: Transatlantic Council on Migration. Levy, Jacob T. 2000. The Multiculturalism of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margalit, Avishai. 1996. The Decent Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1974/1859. On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Miller, David. 2016. Strangers in our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mills, Charles W. 2015. Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy. New Political Science 37 (1): 1–24. Modood, Tariq. 2013. Multiculturalism. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Paquette, Jonathan. 2019. Cultural Policy and Federalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Paquette, Jonathan, Devin Beauregard, and Christopher Gunter. 2017. Settler Colonialism and Cultural Policy: The Colonial Foundations and Refoundations of Canadian Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy 23 (3): 269–284. Parekh, Bhikhu. 1995. The Rushdie Affair: Research Agenda for Political Philosophy. In The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. W.  Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Rethinking Multiculturalism. London: Macmillan. Poterba, James. 1997. Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Public Education. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 16 (1): 48–66. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raz, Joseph. 1998. Multiculturalism. Ratio Juris 11 (3): 193–205. Roch, Christine H., and Michael Rushton. 2008. Racial Context and Voting Over Taxes: Evidence from a Referendum in Alabama. Public Finance Review 36 (5): 614–634. Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. 1951. Report Part I and II. Ottawa: Government of Canada. Rushdie, Salman. 1988. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking Penguin. Rushton, Michael. 2003. Cultural Diversity and Public Funding of the Arts: A View from Cultural Economics. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 33 (2): 85–97. Scheffler, Samuel. 2007. Immigration and the Significance of Culture. Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2): 93–125. Scruton, Roger. 2008. We Need the English Music That the Arts Council Hates. The Spectator, April 19. Shklar, Judith N. 1989. The Liberalism of Fear. In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. N.L. Rosenblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1994. The Politics of Recognition. In Multiculturalism, ed. A. Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. UNESCO. 1995. Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Paris: UNESCO. Upchurch, Anna Rosser. 2016. The Origins of the Arts Council Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Waldron, Jeremy. 1995. Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative. In The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. W.  Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Will, George F. 2019. The Conservative Sensibility. New York: Hachette. Young, Iris Marion. 1995. Together in Difference: Transforming the Logic of Group Political Conflict. In The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. W. Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Keynes’s Grandchildren

On July 12, 1945, John Maynard Keynes gave a broadcast talk on the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain: In the early days of the war, when all sources of comfort to our spirits were at a low ebb, there came into existence, with the aid of the Pilgrim Trust, a body officially styled the “Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts”, but commonly known from its initial letters as C.E.M.A. It was the task of C.E.M.A. to carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times; to air raid shelters, to war-time hostels, to factories, to mining villages. E.N.S.A. was charged with the entertainment of the Services; the British Council kept contact with other countries overseas; the duty of C.E.M.A. was to maintain the opportunities of artistic performance for the hard-pressed and often exiled civilians. With experience our ambitions and our scope increased. I should explain that whilst C.E.M.A. was started by private aid, the time soon came when it was sponsored by a Treasury grant. We were never given much money, but by care and good housekeeping we made it go a long way. At the start our aim was to replace what war had taken away; but we soon found that we were providing what had never existed even in peace time. That is why one of the last acts of the Coalition Government was to decide that C.E.M.A. with a new name and wider opportunities should be continued into time of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_8

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peace. Henceforward we are to be a permanent body, independent in ­constitution, free from red tape, but financed by the Treasury and ultimately responsible to Parliament, which will have to be satisfied with what we are doing when from time to time it votes us money. If we behave foolishly any Member of Parliament will be able to question the Chancellor of the Exchequer and ask why. Our name is to be the Arts Council of Great Britain. I hope you will call us the Arts Council for short, and not try to turn our initials into a false, invented word. We have carefully selected initials which we believe are unpronounceable. (As reported in Harrod (1951, pp.  520–521); Keynes did not survive to see the creation of Arts Council England)

A biographer writes that the broadcast “recalls that era of wise and good governors planning, with high seriousness, the future happiness of their peoples” (Skidelsky 2003, p. 729). Keynes had become chair of C.E.M.A. in 1942, even though he had a great many other pressing duties, and his personal health was beginning to deteriorate. The “democratization of culture” deeply mattered to him. Often cited is his relationship with the Bloomsbury group (Upchurch 2004) and his deep friendships with prominent artists, critics, and writers. But his own writings indicate his beliefs on beauty and the good were rather constant through his life. I turn to two essays by Keynes: “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1963/1930), and “My Early Beliefs” (1949/1938).

Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren “Economic Possibilities” was first published in The Nation and Athenæum in two parts, October 11 and 18, 1930. In it, Keynes tries to put to one side the contemporary fluctuations and uncertainty in the world economy at that time, and take a very long view, 100 years hence. He notes, with the aid of those examples of the application of compound interest of the sort we teach to schoolchildren, that were the rates of technological change and, in turn, personal income growth to continue at the pace begun with the Industrial Revolution, per capita income would rise to such heights that, in terms of the needs of a basic, decent standard of living, the “economic problem” would be solved: “I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day” (p. 364) (in fact per capita income

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in the United States in 2022 was about six times as high as in 1922, in constant dollars, so his prediction was a very good one). The economic possibilities for Keynes’s (metaphorical—he never actually had any) grandchildren were bright. The question is: what would people choose to do with these possibilities? A disheartening possibility, and one that we know is chosen by at least some people, is to continue the pursuit of money, possessions, and hierarchical status, far beyond the needs of a good and secure life. Keynes hoped that we would know better: “The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-­ criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease” (p. 369). Another possibility is that we would give ourselves time away from the workplace, where even a 15-hour workweek would only exist to fulfill our felt need to do some paid work: For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines [Keynes himself was not afraid of getting his hands dirty at his small farm in Sussex, see Bell (1995) – MR]. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-­ hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! (pp. 368–369)

Over the span of 100 years our working hours falling by two-thirds with our hourly productivity rising six-fold would still leave us twice as well-off in terms of earned income, and with much more time to enjoy it. But we all know this drastic shortening of the workweek never happened. Why is that? Economic analysis would suggest that the typical workweek would be a function of two factors: the nature of work, in particular how hourly productivity is affected by the number of hours worked per week, and employee preferences over work hours, with employees either unwilling to accept, or requiring a premium in the hourly wage to accept, hours that are contrary to the preferred amount. If hourly productivity is barely affected by the standard workweek, employers have an incentive to

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cater to the preferences of employees (they will get a better selection of job applicants, and not have to pay a wage premium). So, if hourly wages have increased dramatically over 100 years, but the average workweek has only slightly fallen (in 1930, the year of the “Grandchildren” essay, the average workweek in the United States had already fallen to 50 hours—it now sits between 38 and 40 hours), it must be either because of something in the nature of productivity, or in employee preferences. It is true that some occupations require a minimum number of hours per week; one could not function as a corporate lawyer working five hours per week, it is simply the nature of the work that long hours are required. Goldin (2014) suggests that a primary explanation for the gender wage gap is professions with little flexibility over the number, or the timing, of hours per week, and this is especially difficult for women with carer responsibilities in the home. Professions where hourly productivity is not affected by the number of hours worked per week—she suggests pharmacy is an example—have near gender wage parity. But how many jobs are like corporate law? It is easy to imagine an academic working a half-time position, or a schoolteacher (classes could have different teachers in the morning and in the afternoon), restaurant work, hair stylists, construction workers, cab drivers, and on and on, with no real change in productivity based on hours worked per week. That turns our attention to employee preferences: perhaps many people (not all) want to work 38 hours per week, and if offered a chance to work fewer hours would not take it, even if all important material needs are well taken care of. And here we come to Keynes’s greatest concern: people will not want all that leisure time, because they will not have the capacity to fully enjoy it. Not in a material sense, but in a psychological one: To those who sweat for their daily bread, leisure is a longed-for sweet – until they get it. … [F]or the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. (pp. 367–368)

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People will need to learn the good that is in a life of contemplation of art and nature, the pursuit of knowledge, and creative activity whether at the piano or the easel or in the garden. They will need to adjust their worldview to accommodate the new freedom, which begins with understanding its value in the first place. This view of Keynes’s represented his long-held beliefs.

My Early Beliefs “My Early Beliefs” (1949/1938) was written by Keynes to be read to his close friends of the Bloomsbury Group, in a meeting of the “Memoir Club” at Tilton, his country home (the National Portrait Gallery in London holds Vanessa Bell’s painting of the Memoir Club, circa 1943, Keynes slumped in the middle of the group, next to his wife, the ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova). It recalls Keynes’s undergraduate days at Cambridge around 1903, as well as some events near the beginning of the First World War, and the profound influence on him of G.E. Moore, and Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). Moore, and Keynes in turn, believed there were things that were intrinsically good: love; the pursuit of knowledge; the appreciation of beauty in nature and in art. This was so whether or not everyone was aware of it and was independent of the personal pleasures these activities might bring; there was a rejection of hedonism as a guide to what is good. Moore’s morals were consequentialist, but the consequences were not to be evaluated in terms of utilitarian pleasure and pain. In any case, Keynes adopted Moore’s outlook selectively: We accepted Moore’s religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary  – meaning by ‘religion’ one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by ‘morals’ one’s attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate. (Keynes 1949/1938, p. 82)

Later he writes: It seems to me looking back, that this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under. It remains nearer the truth than any other that I know, with less irrelevant extraneous matter and nothing to be ashamed of. (p. 92)

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And further: I see no reason to shift from the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica; though they are much too few and too narrow to fit actual experience which provides a richer and more various content. That they furnish a justification of experience wholly independent of outside events has become an added comfort, even though one cannot live to-day secure in the undisturbed individualism which was the extraordinary achievement of the early Edwardian days, not for our little lot only, but for everyone else, too. (pp. 94–95)

In addition to adopting the idea of intrinsic goods, and what things are intrinsic goods, Keynes departed from utilitarianism, and here we see a thread linking his early beliefs to the ideas put forward in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: In practice, of course, at least so far as I was concerned, the outside world was not forgotten or forsworn. But I am recalling what our Ideal was in those early days when the life of passionate contemplation and communion was supposed to oust all other purposes whatever. It can be no part of this memoir for me to try to explain why it was such a big advantage for us to have escaped from the Benthamite tradition. But I do now regard that as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on over-­ valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal. (pp. 96–97)

The interest for us in this essay is not so much what Keynes actually believed when he was an undergraduate, for which in any case he is bound to be a somewhat unreliable narrator (as I will speculate most of us would be, recalling our undergraduate beliefs 35 years after the fact). Correspondence following the publication of “My Early Beliefs” suggests Keynes badly misread the thoughts of D.H.  Lawrence, in a meeting he recounts in the essay (Leavis 1952), and Leonard Woolf insists that Keynes’s claim that he and his fellow students adopted Moore’s “religion” but not his “morals” is widely off the mark (Rosenbaum 1982). Instead, “My Early Beliefs” tells us a lot about Keynes’s philosophy in 1938, just four years before he began work with C.E.M.A. and just seven years before the transition to the Arts Council of Great Britain.

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I believe there are three things to take from these two essays, and how they shaped not just the Arts Council of Great Britain but of all the arm’s length publicly funded arts councils that arose in its wake. First, the contemplation of beauty is an intrinsic good, independent of what hedonistic pleasures might arise from it, and independent of any effects on the world beyond the contemplation. Having the state act upon this idea, through public funding for the arts, violates both the economists’ reliance on individual preference rankings as to what is worth funding—the “Benthamite calculus”—and violates the notion of strict neutrality over conceptions of the good that we find in Rawls and his followers (Skidelsky and Skidelsky (2012), in their defense of Keynes, claim that strict neutrality is an unnecessarily strict condition for a liberal society). Second, there will need to be a significant change in attitudes toward the unceasing desire for the accumulation of wealth and material goods that characterizes those societies rich enough to satisfy—for all, given very reasonable and attainable provisions for redistribution of income—all basic material needs for a good life. The possibility of a reduction in working hours overall, and an increase in leisure time, is attainable if we want it, but we need to want it. Third, there should not be coercion in this respect, but persuasion regarding the value of leisure time (which is not, and should not be, the same thing as idleness): I have said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthamism. But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders. We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. (Keynes 1949/1938, pp. 98–99)

As Zachary Carter writes: [Keynes’s] artistic ideas tracked his development as a political thinker. The people were no longer simply a dangerous variable that must be controlled to prevent militarist outrages; they were also pillars of civilizational greatness. If the common man could teach himself to appreciate a symphony, so,

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too, could he be taught to wield power responsibly. Democracy created a virtuous cycle in which wise economic management enabled artistic flowerings, which encouraged a generosity of spirit and further bound the political community together in the cause of shared prosperity. (Carter 2020, p. 366)

Why Public Funding for the Arts? Throughout this book I have tried to give as generous as possible a presentation of different approaches to public funding for the arts. But as the goal was to have something interesting to say about the practice of arts funding, and not just theoretical underpinnings, it is necessary to attempt some reconciliation of approaches, and a suggestion of ways forward. I think we can say two things. First, to make a claim for public funding for the arts it is necessary, as it was for Keynes, to assert there is an intrinsic value to the appreciation of art. Sociologists and economists who study cultural goods in society generally, as an aspect of their methods, do not make judgments over people’s cultural preferences. The economist takes consumer preferences, not only for private goods but also over public goods and externalities, as data, imposing no evaluation over whether an individual is interested or relatively uninterested in aesthetic contemplation, or, if they are interested, as to whether they have directed their contemplation to works that are worthy of such contemplation. Through the economists’ method, public funding is warranted only for those public goods or externalities that are valued (in terms of their benefits being greater than their costs) by the general public. It is conceptually possible to fund the arts this way, though it will have the practical difficulty of trying to discover precisely what those consumer valuations of non-market goods are, and whether it is worth the process at all regarding genres of art that are only loved by a minority. That this method has never been the basis of a public arts funding system is telling. Social contract theorists have concluded that from an original position, people would insist on state neutrality regarding conceptions of the good, thus ruling out any notion of art being intrinsically good, and would only allow public funding where a near-unanimous arrangement could be made between local citizens; as with the economic method, a daunting task. Within this framework, the option of saying that it would be neutral simply to ensure future generations have a rich cultural framework from which to draw simply raises the question of what constitutes a rich cultural framework, and who is to decide what ought to be prioritized

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in a funding system that adopted this as a goal. Public funding for the arts requires a turn away from economists’ consumer sovereignty, and contractarian state strict neutrality. This is a rejection of “liberalism” only under a very constricted meaning of the term. ‘Who are we to tell the people what they should want?’ is the telling question here. What this reveals is a terrible crisis of confidence among the intellectual class of the Western world. Keynes believed that it was up to him and people like him to guide  – persuasively, not despotically  – the tastes and opinions of the British people; a belief he put into practice in the founding of the Arts Council. His successors, saddled by cultural guilt, have lost this belief: value-neutralism and value-relativism are the result. (Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012, p. xxi)

This is strongly put, but not wrong on the nature of the conflict in play: one can insist on a neutral state regarding the good, but it is not how the arts council (and all the subsequent arts councils) were founded, and the rationale for public spending on the arts quickly withers without the guiding assumption that there is something intrinsically good in appreciating beauty and the arts (these not being the only intrinsic goods) and that people are better off with encouragement and subsidy that connects them to the arts. Further, the point of arts funding is to promote the intrinsic value of aesthetic appreciation, which means that there must be judgments in the funding body as to what artists and presenters rise to the level of artistic excellence where such appreciation is warranted. It is not simply a matter of “more art,” but art that enhances people’s well-being beyond the cultural goods that are easily and cheaply obtained in commercial markets. In his recent work on “longtermism,” William MacAskill writes: Because art is so subjective, it is nigh-on impossible to assess trends in artistic accomplishment, but one often neglected factor is that, because of our sheer numbers, the artistic output of our species has increased dramatically: a higher population means more artists. And the artistic capacity of the population has, in some respects, greatly increased because of rising literacy and rising wealth: a more literate population has more writers, and the fewer people there are in dire poverty, the more artists there will be. In light of these considerations, it is likely that art has progressively reached new heights over time and will continue to do so at least for the next hundred years. The same applies to other non-wellbeing goods. The more people there are and the higher living standards there are, the more likely it is that

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there will be individuals, like Usain Bolt, Margaret Atwood, or Maryam Mirzakhani, who go on to achieve great things. (MacAskill, 2022, p. 215)

But our cultural lives are not a function of the sheer number of artists, and the quality of art depends not upon sheer volume, but on the ability of great artists to connect with, and move, those people who form her audience. If quantity were all that mattered, we would hardly need public funding of the arts; we are overwhelmed with cultural options without any arts council grants. The goal is something different—a capacity for engagement—that requires something more of the public funding scheme than simply increasing the number of books published in a year, or the number of songs uploaded to Spotify. The dilemma raised by King and Blaug, “the problem is that of avoiding the Scylla of laissez-faire while likewise avoiding the Charybdis of artistic paternalism” (1976, p. 103) cannot be evaded. Second, caution must be exercised in any motives for public funding of the arts that go beyond the intrinsic good of aesthetic engagement. When I drive through my home state of Indiana, once I have left the Uplands region and come onto the flat lands, I see miles and miles of fields of just two crops: corn and soybeans. This is because those two crops are two of the most heavily subsidized by the United States government. Agricultural subsidies have a large influence on what farmers grow, and in turn what consumers eat (as Michael Pollan (2006) finds, Americans, whether they know it or not, eat an awful lot of corn, in one form or another). Subsidize something and you will get more of it. If the decision has been made to provide state subsidies to the arts, the immediate question is: what sort of art? How will allocation decisions be made, whether the decision is made by an arm’s length arts council, or more directly through a Minister of Culture? Artists, and arts presenting organizations, will naturally want to know the criteria used in funding decisions, and to at least some degree will be influenced by them. When the funding criteria are determined, that is exactly what the funders hope for: “we are going to reward this sort of thing, in the hopes you will do more of it.” If it is made clear in the criteria for funding that non-aesthetic, instrumental benefits are the justification for the subsidy, perhaps because there is a perceived positive externality through the arts for “community

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development,” or “national unity,” or for political messaging of a particular type (though careful not to offend community standards), or for increasing “arts participation,” then arts organizations and artists will respond. That is the point. But the pursuit of any of these goals distracts artists from focusing on their art as art. And that is a genuine loss. It is not that community development, or people feeling a sense of national unity, are bad things. But they are being achieved at a cost. The effects of artists pursuing these “instrumental goals” might in fact have very minimal impact on their targets, but we will have lost what would have been the outcome of the artist’s pursuit of her artistic goals and vision. There are other policies that can contribute to community development, or better public health outcomes—and if advocates for public arts spending base their argument on instrumental benefits, it is only natural that the government will ask whether there are more effective means of achieving those benefits other than through the arts—but there is no substitute for art proper. While some conservative authors conflate multiculturalism with the politicization of art, each contributing to the decline of standards in arts funding, I do not. It is completely possible to recognize minority cultures in arts funding and, within each category of art, give awards on the basis of excellence, or on the anticipated potential for excellence. In any government program involving a small amount of funds, and that characterizes arts funding, it makes sense to ask where those funds could have the most impact, where they could do the most good, in ways that other programs could not do better. Lowering inequalities between people is a very worthy goal, but there is not much that a public arts budget will be able to do about that, relative to simple redistribution of income. The same is true for improvements in public health, and for the economic prospects of a region. There are other types of infrastructure and spending that can be activated that more directly targets the problem to be solved. What arts funding can do is affect the arts—encouraging artists and presenters to produce great work, and presenting it to audiences. If one is convinced that there is a moral foundation for public funding for the arts, and is willing to allow the state some leeway to encourage our having a richer cultural life, then the focus is best placed on the art itself.

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References Bell, Quentin. 1995. Bloomsbury Recalled. New York: Columbia University Press. Carter, Zachary D. 2020. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. New York: Random House. Goldin, Claudia. 2014. A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter. American Economic Review 104 (4): 1091–1119. Harrod, R.F. 1951. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard. 1949/1938. My Early Beliefs. In Two Memoirs. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. ———. 1963/1930. Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In Essays in Persuasion. New York: Norton. King, Karen, and Mark Blaug. 1976. Does the Arts Council Know What It Is Doing? In The Economics of the Arts, ed. M.  Blaug, 101–125. London: Martin Robinson. Leavis, F.R. 1952. Keynes, Lawrence, and Cambridge. In The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto and Windus. MacAskill, William. 2022. What We Owe the Future. New York: Basic Books. Moore, G.E. 1903. Principia Ethica. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin. Rosenbaum, S.P. 1982. Keynes, Lawrence, and Cambridge Revisited. Cambridge Quarterly 11 (1): 252–264. Skidelsky, Robert. 2003. John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Pan Macmillan. Skidelsky, Robert, and Edward Skidelsky. 2012. How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life. London: Penguin. Upchurch, Anna. 2004. John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury Group and the Origins of the Arts Council Movement. International Journal of Cultural Policy 10 (2): 203–217.

Index

A Adele, 76 Alesina, Alberto, 142, 143 Amis, Kingsley, 56, 132 Anderson, Elizabeth A., 86 Andersson, Tommy D., 29 Appiah, K. Anthony, 162, 163 Aristotle, 31, 46, 51, 103 Armbrecht, John, 29 Arneson, Richard J., 85 Arnold, Matthew, 123, 125–127 Arrow, Kenneth, 84, 97 Artistic Freedom Initiative, 110 Arts Council England, 2, 118, 119, 135, 148, 170 Arts Council of Great Britain, 3, 136, 169, 170, 174, 175 Atkinson, Anthony B., 19, 21, 70, 142 Axelrod, Robert, 96 B Babbitt, Milton, 49 Banks, Mark, 4

Baqir, Reza, 142 Barry, Brian, 59, 155 Battiste, Marie, 147 Baumol, William J., 24 Beauregard, Devin, 147 Becker, Gary S., 31, 86, 97 Bell, Clive, 46 Bell, Daniel, 106 Bell, Quentin, 171 Bell, Vanessa, 173 Berlin, Isaiah, 6, 68 Berman, Elizabeth Popp, 15 Bhabha, Homi K., 149 Black, Samuel, 61 Blackorby, Charles, 72 Blaug, Mark, 3, 5, 96, 178 Boisjoly, Johanna, 143 Bowen, William G., 24 Brighouse, Harry, 61, 63 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 56 Bronfenbrenner, Martin, 68 Brook, Orian, 69

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8

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182 

INDEX

Buchanan, James M., 95 Burke, Edmund, 60 C Calder, Robert, 101 Canada Council for the Arts, 2, 147 Carey, John, 27 Carroll, Noël, 61 Carson, Richard, 29 Carter, Zachary D., 175, 176 Chesterton, G.K., 121 Cheung, S.N.S., 23 Churchill, Winston S., 121 Claassen, Rutger, 82 Cleveland Orchestra, 1, 2, 13 Coase, R.H., 23 Coate, Bronwyn, 33 Cohen, G.A., 68, 85, 87, 117, 118 Coleridge, Samuel, 12, 123–125, 129, 131, 135, 138 Collingwood, R.G., 12, 107, 108, 128, 131–133 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, 169 COVID-19, 4, 86, 88 Cowen, Tyler, 25, 160, 161, 163 Culture Pass (France), 5, 13 Cunningham, Michael, 130 Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, 1, 2 D Daldry, Stephen, 130 Denver, 48 Diamond, Peter A., 29 Dickens, Charles, 127 Donaldson, David, 72 Duncan, Greg J., 143 Dworkin, Ronald, 9, 10, 42, 53–63, 76–78, 81, 84, 86, 106, 145, 146, 148, 149

E Easterly, William, 142 Eavey, Cheryl L., 73 Eccles, Jacque, 143 Eliot, T.S., 12, 58, 123, 127–131, 133, 137, 148 Elster, Jon, 96 English National Opera, 119 Epstein, Joseph, 135, 136, 148 F Fawcett, Edmund, 123, 124 Foot, Philippa, 42 Forrester, Katrina, 44, 72 Forster, E.M., 31 Fraser, Nancy, 154 Frey, Bruno, 25 Friedman, Marilyn, 111 Friedman, Milton, 34, 70, 96 Friend, Stacie, 27 Frohlich, Norman, 73 Fujiwara, Daniel, 29 G Geertz, Clifford, 163, 164 Gitlin, Todd, 155 Glaeser, Edward L., 71 Glazer, Nathan, 147 Goffin, Kris, 27 Goldin, Claudia, 172 Gray, Charles M., 25 Griffin, James, 51 Gross, Jonathan, 82 Guardian, The, 119, 151 Gunter, Christopher, 147 Gutmann, Amy, 110 H Hall, Stuart, 152, 163 Hansen, Trine Bille, 29

 INDEX 

Hansmann, Henry, 144 Harberger, Arnold C., 20 Harrod, R.F., 170 Harsanyi, John, 34, 73 Hausman, Jerry A., 29 Hawkins, Julie, 88 Hayek, F.A., 17, 77, 97, 98 Head, John G., 34, 35 Heilbrun, James, 25 Henderson, James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood, 147 Hicks, John, 20–22 Hmong Cultural Center (St. Paul), 87, 157 Hodgson, Geoff, 97 Hoffmann, Robert, 33 Holmes, Stephen, 110 Honneth, Axel, 154 Horowitz, Joseph, 1 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 110 Hume, David, 98, 131 Hurka, Thomas, 45 I Ireland, 27 J James, Henry, 47 James, P.D., 28 Johnson, Julian, 133 Johnston, Darlene M., 147 K Kaldor, Nicholas, 20 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 98, 99 Kaplow, Louis, 87 Kelly, Erin I., 45 Kern, Roger M., 133 Keynes, John Maynard, 3, 13, 96, 169–179

King, Karen, 3, 5, 178 Kirchgässner, Gebhard, 34 Kramer, Hilton, 130 Kramer, Matthew H., 49 Kremer, Michael, 143 Kuan, Jennifer, 144 Kureishi, Hanif, 151 Kymlicka, Will, 61, 146, 148–152, 154–156, 159, 161–163 L Lachmann, Ludwig M., 98 Laslett, Peter, 59 Lawrence, D.H., 174 Lawton, Ricky N., 29 Leavis, F.R., 124, 125, 127, 133, 134, 174 Levine, Ross, 142 Levy, Dan M., 143 Levy, Jacob T., 143, 150, 151 Lindblom, Charles E., 121 Lopokova, Lydia, 173 Lucas, Robert E., Jr., 96 Lundberg, Erik, 29 M MacAskill, William, 177, 178 Macleod, Colin M., 61, 62 Macron, Emmanuel, 5 Mandel, Emily St. John, 56 Mandel Foundation, 1 Margalit, Avishai, 150 Marvel (films), 5, 133 Memoir Club, 173 Milgate, M., 33–34 Mill, John Stuart, 68, 125, 129, 138, 158 Miller, David, 158–160 Mills, Charles W., 45, 147 Mirrlees, J.A., 71, 75 Modood, Tariq, 163

183

184 

INDEX

Montreal Symphony Orchestra, 106 Moore, G.E., 173, 174 Mourato, Susana, 29 Mueller, Dennis C., 95 Murphy, Kevin M., 31, 86 Musgrave, Richard, 33, 34 N Nagel, Thomas, 42, 49 Nathan, Daniel O., 61 National Endowment for the Arts, 1, 2, 119, 135–137, 143, 148, 157 Nelson, Eric, 81 Netzer, Dick, 25 New, Bill, 32 New Orleans, 71 New York Times, 5, 137 Newman, P., 33–34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46 Nozick, Robert, 52, 76 Nussbaum, Martha, 51, 78, 80–83, 104, 158 O Oakeshott, Michael, 12, 99, 116–118, 120–123, 127, 134 O’Brien, Dave, 69 O’Connor, Justin, 4 O’Hagan, John W., 25 Ohio Arts Council, 1 Orwell, George, 134, 135 P Paquette, Jonathan, 143, 147 Parekh, Bhikhu, 149, 160 Pareto efficiency, 16 Parfit, Derek, 28

Peacock, Alan T., 25 Peterson, Richard, 133 Philadelphia, 83 Pigou, A.C., 32 Plato, 31 Pogge, Thomas, 82 Pollan, Michael, 178 Poterba, James, 142 Prentiss, Adella, 1 Q Quebec, 109, 143, 153, 155 Quong, Jonathan, 49, 61 R Radin, Margaret Jane, 109 Ramsey, Frank P., 28, 59 Rashdall, Hastings, 46 Rawls, John, 8, 9, 42–49, 52, 58–60, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84–86, 94, 98, 99, 103, 105, 122, 138, 145–147, 149, 152, 175 Raz, Joseph, 147 Remler, Dahlia K., 2 Riggle, Nick, 111 Robeyns, Ingrid, 81 Robin, Corey, 115 Roch, Christine H., 143 Rosenbaum, S.P., 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Canada), 147 Rushdie, Salman, 160 Rushton, Michael, 19, 27, 48, 52, 119, 134, 137, 144 Ruskin, John, 31

 INDEX 

S Salah, Mohamed, 76 Sandel, Michael J., 103, 105 Scanlon, T.M., 80, 84 Scarry, Elaine, 50 Scheffler, Samuel, 28, 88, 159 Schelling, Thomas C., 96 Schubert, Franz, 101, 133 Scitovsky, Tibor, 21, 34 Scorsese, Martin, 133 Scruton, Roger, 124, 127, 129, 133, 135, 136, 148 Sen, Amartya, 34, 44, 74, 78–80, 85 Senna, Richard, 101 Shakespeare, William, 46, 56, 88 Shamsie, Kamila, 151 Sher, George, 51, 52 Shklar, Judith, 109, 110, 150 Simons, Henry, 70 Skidelsky, Edward, 175, 177 Skidelsky, Robert, 170, 175, 177 Smith, Adam, 26, 27, 73, 79, 102 Somali Museum (Minneapolis), 87 Spolaore, Enrico, 143 Steele, T.C., 118 Stern, Nicholas, 28 Stevens, Christopher, 133 Stigler, George J., 97 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 19, 21, 70, 142 Sugden, Robert, 20 Sunstein, Cass R., 32 Szell, George, 1 T Taylor, Charles, 99–106, 108, 109, 152–155, 161–163 Taylor, Mark, 69 Thaler, Richard H., 32 Thompson, Janna, 45 Throsby, David, 25, 37, 102

185

Tobelem, Jean-Michel, 5 Tobin, James, 71 Towse, Ruth, 25 Tullock, Gordon, 95 U UNESCO, 161 United Nations Human Development Index, 80 Upchurch, Anna Rosser, 3, 147, 170 V Vakharia, Neville, 83 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 107 W Waldron, Jeremy, 161, 162 Weber, Max, 95 West, Edwin G., 35 Will, George, 156 Williams, Alan, 20 Williams, Bernard, 51, 67, 76 Williams, Raymond, 125, 129 Wilson, Nick, 82 Winch, Donald, 127 Wolff, Jonathan, 88 Woolf, Leonard, 174 Wordsworth, William, 51 Y Young, Iris Marion, 45, 155 Young Voyageurs (Canada), 107 Z Zitcer, Andrew, 83