Short Abstract:

This paper aims to unpack the concept of crisis which in capabilities approach relates to the agents' experience of material and identity crises. Using sociological theory I explore areas in need of illumination within the capability approach (e.g. its lack of a system perspective, a risk of a fundamentalism of commitments) and I propose a problem shift that can perhaps mitigate this risk.

Long Abstract:

For Jürgen Habermas, and sociological system theories in general, the analytical idea of crisis is attributed to a system’s incapacity to steer the expected societal functions; this shortage of expected performances and functions jeopardizes a social system’s continued existence. A sociological approach is held to locate crises on the levels of systems’ incapacity to solve specific problems central to the system’s identity (e.g. the economy’s goal of growth). These problems stem from a system’s environment (e.g. other social systems), but mainly from a system’s own structurally-inherent contradictions. As this year’s HDCA umbrella topic indicates we live in an era when “many multi-faceted crises assail us”. The protracted sense of a series of crises encompasses the global and the local level. For capability approach (CA) scholars, crises indicate, among others, capability deprivations that stem from deep inequalities as well as from singular identity affiliations (e.g. the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis). If crises tend to manifest themselves through instances of societal disintegration often attributed to neo-liberalism’s global hegemony, then one question that arises addresses the state of the legitimacy of collective values that are held to be disturbed by crises as well as the normative buttressing of institutional arrangements that foster and protect human capabilities. However, if crises tend to be widely perceived as global and interlinked, what must be addressed is if the current categories that normative programs like CA draw upon to identify and explain them are themselves free of explanatory crises. By explanatory crises we can consider situations where theoretical categories cannot steer sufficient problem-solving potential.

Drawing on this perception of multifaceted crises that afflict contemporary societies and burden citizens with capability deprivations, undue risks, insecurities, unfreedoms and suffering, this paper asks the following questions:

a) How are ‘crises’ theorized? If crises reflect systemic accumulations of anomalies how do social systems generate them and overcome them? The fact that the CA lacks a theory of social systems calls for an urgent deployment of relevant theoretical models, mainly from sociology, that can illuminate the wider systemic framework within which capability empowerment can be activated. CA seems to presuppose a pattern of institutions across contemporary societies: in identifying crises levels, CA addresses ‘economic policies’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social solidarity’, the ‘welfare state’, ‘collective action’ among others. It also, as is the case with Sen in his Development as Freedom (1999), prioritizes certain instrumental freedoms, but it seems that a logic of connectedness between these discrete social sub-systems (or ‘instrumental freedoms’) is wanting.

b) Social systems also draw on legitimation processes. Sociologically, these are theorized in terms of mechanisms conducive to ‘latent pattern maintenance’, but in less technical language they reflect collective values. CA had always a robust value-orientation and, as Hilary Putnam has argued, its theoretical categories cross the fact-value dichotomy. The relevant question now is: Do values tend to regress to fundamentalist patterns of legitimation and thus generate crises rather than resolving them? In different words how does value-tyranny (Hartmann) in various shapes (communitarian, merit-based, cultural, ideological, economic, religious, ethnic, etc.) exacerbates what Sen had identified as identity confinement and hoped to rectify through the heuristic trope of ‘comparative broadening’, namely the ability to see oneself through the lens of different identities. This brings us to the third question of this paper:

c) CA claims to be a normative and policy program that aspires to resolving crises through commitments (i.e. values) along the local, national, regional and global level. Against the aforementioned risk of value-inflation Sen’s and Nussbaum’s cautionary calls against some sort of value-imperialism of value-colonization seem to preempt the risk. Moreover, the pragmatic turn in CA aims, among others, to mitigate risks of value fundamentalism, despite its emphatic democratic and ethical commitments. While CA and other normative programs call for processes that energize commitments across different publics and contexts, the problem of coordination (and convergence) among such commitment seems to be caught into the ‘steering problems’ (Habermas) that different social systems face. A logic that accounts of how systems’ internal problems of compatibility of imperatives (e.g. the polity’s frequent interventions to what is set up as an intervention-free social system of market economy) spill over to people’s identity crises that are manifested in a wide scope of capability deprivations must be accommodated by CA. According to Habermas “only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises” (Legitimation Crisis, 3). If CA struggles to empower such agents through approximate accomplishments of, say, a Central Capabilities List (Nussbaum) the risk, on account of a systems-theoretical perspective, is that capability-empowerment may enhance contingency and thus contribute to new steering problems within a system. A CA policy would risk inflating normative and ethical commitments within a social system (e.g. education) the concomitant implication being an intensification of its resource management imperatives. We thus confront a paradox: enhancing capabilities leads to greater complexity (i.e. stemming from agents’ freedoms to choose the lifestyles they have reason to value) and reopens a problem that is endemic to system differentiation: namely, the activation of the system’s reactive reflexes that could escalate to forms of ‘exclusion’ as a means to manage a hyper-complexity that stems from an ever-inclusive capability enhancement. It must be underlined that CA deploys such a logic of distinctions between central and, by default, ‘peripheral’ capabilities, but transfers its immanent paradoxes to the sphere of public deliberation rather than endorsing top-down implementations. But if the reasoning about prioritizing certain capabilities (as in the shape of human rights) is worth pursuing, then the very necessity to ‘qualify’ these must somehow tilt focus: capabilities as conditions for the integration of societies and the well-being of its citizens could be a progressive problem shift within CA; in this fashion people’s exclusion from capabilities would be seen as enhancing a contingency that can jeopardize social systems.