Della Zurick
1368 Social Sciences Building
E-mail: dzurick@polisci.umn.edu
Phone: 612-624-4029
Office Hours:
Tues. & Thurs. 9:45 - 11:00, and by appointment

Teaching Assistant:

The homeless occupy a peculiar place in Iris Young's framework. Though they are not one of the groups listed as oppressed in U.S. society (see page 270), many of you wrote about how the homeless are indeed oppressed, awfully and tragically so. This to me seems right, but it is hard to explain their precise position given Young's five conditions of oppression.

Before they were homeless, many homeless persons held menial, exploitative jobs, and thus were quite powerless. Persons and families become homeless for many reasons, most of which stem from the consequences of being unemployed, or having a criminal record, mental illness or physical handicap which make it difficult to gain employment. These disadvantages in themselves make it difficult to gain employment, let alone maintain a job. A homeless person qua homeless makes one doubly marginalized: employers are reluctant to hire homeless persons, and those who get hired have a hard time maintaining their job because when you sleep on the street every night, it is hard to keep yourself and your clothes clean, in addition to being bereft of an address, mailbox and phone. Homeless persons are also often objects of police brutality. In general, as one student put it nicely, homeless persons are “victims of circumstance.”

But exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness and violence together do not capture the unique position and plight of the homeless (and I think this is a real problem with or limit to Young's five categories of analysis). If we take all the ways in which women, blacks, gays, lesbians, poor people, old people, disabled people, and others are oppressed, and add homelessness to their condition, their oppression, it seems, gets much worse. The homeless lack practically every resource, they are disrespected and treated as lazy, corrupt, criminal--in a word, no better than scum.

Here is an interesting passage from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London:

“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart-outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work,' beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable….Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.” (Orwell is being a bit bombastic in the last line to accentuate his point about the importance of money to gain respect in our society).

Many thinkers disagree with Locke. They argue that tacit consent cannot be binding on people in the way the social contract requires. They say, in effect, that consent cannot be tacit, that it must be given more freely, and with a more genuine alternate choice, than just by declining to build a life from nothing under a foreign flag.

"For a Marxist, capitalist societies do not vary as to who wields power, no matter what the constitution or the party in office; supposed variations in these dimensions, which are central to a great many theories, are sham; the crucial dimension is that concerning class structure."
—Charles Taylor, "Neutrality in Political Science"

In these words, Taylor summarizes Marx's insight that rules and norms (such as those defining capitalist economic institutions and practices) constrain not only those at the bottom of social hierarchies (like workers) but also those at the top (capitalists).

"For Marx, as for the elite theorists of democracy [i.e. Mills], power was also always located in one place--whether in the hands of the bourgeoisie or its 'executive committee,' or in those of some political elite working behind the scenes."
--Ian Shapiro, THE STATE OF DEMOCRATIC THEORY (2003), P. 55.

Lukes: The Conceptual Analysis of Power is Endless

There is a long footnote in Lukes that I want to highlight. On page 27, Lukes discusses John Rawls's account of the difference between “concepts,” such as power, and “conceptions,” various definitions or views of concepts such as power. Lukes belives that there are not just different conceptions of power, but that the very concept of power is “essentially contested.”

The term “essential contestability” was coined by W.B. Gallie in a lecture in 1955-6 (“Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society), meaning that many disputes about concepts are intractable and actually endless. Such concepts have an “open” character to them, that is, there is no way of obtaining the best use. Although the same concept is at issue, for Gallie, there is “no clearly definable general use which can be set up as a correct or standard use” (p. 168).

Lukes urges that power is such a concept. Therefore, though he believes that the three-dimensional view of power “allows one to give a deeper and more satisfactory analysis of power relations than either of the other two” (p. 10), he is careful not elevate his radical conception to the best or correct view of power. It is merely one among many views; it illuminates one face of power while obscuring others. By setting the three faces of power in contrast, and pointing out their conceptual limits, Lukes demonstrates how choosing one view will have consequences in how one views the world, which differ from those in the other views. As Dahl says in a book we didn't read, “One is likely to start with a definition and end with a Weltanschauung [worldview]."

Bush: Agenda for America