John O'Neill, Civic Capitalism: The State of Childhood.

Proctor, Helen

John O'Neill, Civic Capitalism: The State of Childhood, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005. 131 pp., including index. ISBN 0-8020-9392-2, pbk.

The theme and tenor of this short book by the sociologist and philosopher John O'Neill is announced right at the outset: 'To the extent that we tax ourselves for the sake of a society where any child might be our own, we secure our own childhood in another child's--circuitously and charitably' (p. ix). The book is a passionately argued contribution to the academy's critique of neo-liberalism in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom in which O'Neill aligns himself squarely with the critics of the unfettered market. 'Capitalism' he argues, 'is currently in love with itself as a wild, untamed, and quasi-natural field of energy' (p.4). It is time that capitalism was civilised and the appropriate institution for this job is the nation state. O'Neill uses the term 'civic capital' for those common or public goods and services, including education, which have languished in the post-Keynesian world. In Civic Capitalism he argues that they must urgently be both rediscovered and reconceptualised. While the main argument of his essay is a critique of the right O'Neill is also critical of the 'stigmatization' of the old welfare state by the left, particularly the academic left (pp. 82-85). Its preoccupation with the evils of the regulatory processes of public institutions, as he sees it, 'throws the bath out with the bathwater'(p.85). Rather he places himself in the tradition of mid twentieth-century reformers such as R. H. Tawney and T. H. Marshall in his advocacy of a workable relationship between the state and the markets and in his belief in the moral possibilities of state power.

Implicit in Civic Capitalism is the message that it is the duty of academics to speak out. Taking seriously his civic duty as a publicly-funded, public intellectual O'Neill engages with the work of other social critics including Anthony Giddens, Nancy Fraser and Christopher Lasch. O'Neill's particular contribution is his placing of children at the centre of his argument. It is in the current circumstances of childhood that O'Neill locates the fatal flaw in hard market economics, even judged by its own rules. In privatising childhood and treating children as belonging only to their own parents and by refusing to address structural social inequality, certain classes of children do not have a chance even to enter the market, excluded by the fortunes of birth from the neo-liberal game. 'Any child' he argues, 'must be seen as a richly capitalized subject whose development is the work of both family and state provisions of assurances of well-being and learning that will foster its membership in a civic society' (p.23, italics in original). This includes--but is not limited to--the generous public funding of public schools. O'Neill is scathing about the late twentieth century transformation of education into a 'positional good, that is, a good enjoyed insofar as others are excluded from its possession' (p.94). Good schooling for every child, no matter who their parents are, is as necessary for the proper functioning of the market as is it for the collective moral health of society.

The arguments of Civic Capitalism are rhetorically persuasive and some of them beautifully put or even quite funny. For me this made the essay very readable but also a little frustrating. O'Neill argues through his set of propositions at a high level of generality. His descriptions of the injuries of post-Keynesian capitalism, which range from the suburban selfishness of middle class mothers who hog the roads in dangerous gas-guzzling SUVs to the increasing disparity between rich and poor families, are mostly unsupported by hard evidence. The sole statistical table in the book, for example, is inadequately sourced and uses figures from the early 1990s (p. 82). O'Neill undertakes to propose civic capitalism 'in broad outlines' (p. 3) and this is what he achieves. The idea of civic capitalism is a plausible reconceptualisation of the welfare state, at least in outline. The book is also of interest as a historical artefact in itself, an indication of the very thoroughness of the overturning of settlements about public and private provision which thirty-odd years ago seemed pretty stable, in two out of three of the nations addressed here.

HELEN PROCTOR

University of Sydney