- A guaranteed income is in the interests of all. A basic income would (along with
many other egalitarian measures) help to reduce crime and the consumption of
drugs, and make society as a whole a more secure and safer place. Would not
the rich benefit from such a measure? Capitalism’s beneficiaries, Adair Turner
argues, should support investment in measures that promote social cohesion, out
of their own self-interest (2002: 244). Gray argues that British public opinion
wishes to see some goods – basic medical care, schooling, protection from crime- provided to all as a mark of citizenship (1999: 34). Is it not possible that given
the right leadership and explanation, this could extend to the kind of economic
security provided by a citizens’ income?
Of course, it could be argued that a basic income will destroy incentives, just as
it was said that a minimum wage would create unemployment and, in the nineteenth
century, it was contended that a 10-hour day would undermine the labour process.
But a government committed to such a dramatic victory of ‘the political economy
of the working class’ (in Marx’s celebrated phrase) could find ways of presenting
the case for a guaranteed income that would isolate diehard reactionaries.
It is important to stress that while a basic income would do much to increase
the quality of citizenship, it would still leave open the question of including people
from other countries in a global citizenship. Such an innovation would initially be
limited to people of a particular community (Faulks, 2000: 123). It would only
really succeed if it was part and parcel of policies that addressed the problem of
inequalities between societies.
- provided to all as a mark of citizenship (1999: 34). Is it not possible that given
Citizenship and women
Are women citizens in modern liberal states? Although women have been citizens
in a formal sense in Britain, for example, since 1928 (when they received the vote),
there are important senses in which women have yet to obtain real citizenship as
opposed to a more conventional, classically defined citizenship.
Women, even in developed liberal societies like Britain, are significantly under-
represented in decision-making, and this occurs because of structural and attitudinal
factors. The exclusion of women from political processes has been justified by a
liberal conception of a public/private divide.
It is true that with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792)
(see Chapter 14 on Feminism), the Enlightenment concepts of freedom and
autonomy are extended to women. At the same time Wollstonecraft does not
(explicitly at any rate) challenge the division of labour between the sexes or the
argument for a male-only franchise. Women, she contends, if they are recognised
as rational and autonomous beings, become better wives, mothers and domestic
workers as a result – ‘in a word, better citizens’ (Bryson, 1992: 22–7). Here the
term does not imply someone with voting rights, although it does suggest that the
citizen is an individual whose activity is both public and private in character. Of
course, when Wollstonecraft was writing most men could not vote, and there is
some evidence to suggest that Wollstonecraft was in favour of female suffrage, but
felt that it was not a demand worth raising at the time she wrote.126 Part 1 Classical ideas