We have now introduced a social critique into our discussion of autonomy and paternalism.

So far it has been proposed that the marketisation of society and social risks is important because, by engendering economic and cultural fragmentation, contemporary social policies are characterised less by interventions intended to reduce structural inequalities and more by a pre-emptive management of agency, the latter being a kind of ‘situational engineering’ through which the environmental possibilities of action are manipulated. According to this prevailing logic, if we can neither eliminate those fragments (there supposedly being ‘no alternative’ to free markets), nor pacify them, the best we can do is to limit the ground over which they are scattered. The freedom to earn, consume, possess and exchange must therefore be accompanied by the enforceable obligation to do so responsibly. Thus we have experienced the simultaneous and often paradoxical expansion of autonomy and governance, active citizenship and prohibitive paternalism, mobility and surveillance, information highways and identity scans, market competition and social re-regulation, individualism and legislative hyperactivity, decentralisation and micro-management (Dean, 2007). This has led not only to a punitiveness directed towards those who will not or cannot ‘play by the rules’ but also to social spaces that are more regulated, scrutinised and distrustful than before. Paternalism becomes less about respecting individuals’ freedom to choose from a plurality of goods, even at the risk of self-harm, and more about ensuring that they do not make the wrong choice in the first place. The freer we are to wander the aisles of the internet, the naves of supermarkets and malls, and the arterial transits of airport hubs, the greater the need to emphasise common roots, boundaries and understandings, no longer through socioeconomic position (class) but in terms of certain values, codes, laws, norms and identities. Social institutions must remoralise if market liberations are to be tamed.

We will now explore some of the ethical dimensions of this ‘social politics’ as it plays out across the traditional sectors of policy analysis. In this chapter, we look at the increased use of market principles and assumptions in welfare institutions. In Chapter Eight, we turn to relations of family and intimacy. As before, we use specific questions to focus and organise our journey.