Public policies: welfare, recognition, simulacrum

Abstract

Public policies were born out of the growth of Post-renaissance States and out of the needs for administrative planning on mass societies. Conservative policies reinforce the subsidiarity of the State, center on families and fear democracy and sindicates. Liberal ones anchor on correcting market failures and biological contingencies. Social democracies, more ambicious, aim to prevent every illegitimate contingency and inequality, from a State leader of the market functionning, non subsidiary. Welfare States appear out of the attempt to overcome recessions, unemployment and social deprivation by means of State investment, even incurring in public debt, hoping to recover through future returns. The notions of sovereignity and human rights made difficult such returns and paved the way to an explosion of consumption imaginaries that eroded a previously successful system. Investments and interventions are already factors on collective and individual calculation of welfare rather than emergencies and exceptions. Victims of their success. Despite their highlight of theoretical restrictions and historical shortcomings of classical public policies, when in power, everyone apply them because political cultural include them, up to the point of judging suicidial its confrontation. Even the ideologically reluctant Marxists use them. However, consumption society and postmodern culture go digging a progressive gap between the modern, enlighted, technoburocratic supply and the more recent demand, much more demanding and varied than before. One should expect, then, a decreasing marginal political-electoral utility. But, since they are appreciated, not just for their material content, but on behalf of the symbolic recognition they give, and because the recipients have internalized as legitimate such supply offers, public policies still enjoy satisfying potential and political returns, paradoxical simulacrum, à la Baudrillard.

Key words: social policies, public policies, Welfare States, consumption societies, postmodern culture, simulacrum, politically marginal return.