Citizens, Doing It for Themselves? The Big Society and Government through Community

Abstract

Since its launch, David Cameron's flagship Big Society agenda has attracted hostility and incomprehension in roughly equal measure. An important criticism of the Big Society is that it contains a rather confused view of motivations. In attempting to correct an overmighty state, the Big Society urges involvement in different ways: through market mechanisms (where profit is the prompt to action), increasingly, through ‘nudges’ and, finally, citizen exhortation (where civic duty is the motivation). These represent, I argue, dissonant views of the individual and what motivates them, with the former two representing ‘anti-political’ positions, as they discourage debate, contestation and authorship. Yet, placing it in a longer line of initiatives aimed at prompting greater levels of citizen engagement and responsibility, I argue that the Big Society represents the most recent iteration of a process that has a much longer heritage in British politics. Governments from the late 1970s onwards have sought to mobilise citizens to take on ever greater responsibilities. From this perspective, attempts to mobilise citizens, particularly through incentives and nudges, should be seen less as prompts to civic participation and more as diverse governance techniques to prompt self-government and responsibilisation.

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