In the course of an off blog conversation about the respective merits of statism and individualism/libertarianism, I said that I didn’t think this was in fact a zero sum game. Although the idea of a powerful state can certainly be associated with authoritarianism or simply bossiness, some alternatives to statist models have their own, not dissimilar, problems. In the anarchist society depicted by Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed, the maverick hero Shevek is oppressed by peer group disapproval. Although the idea of a large rather impersonal force making decisions on your behalf may seem irksome, being at the mercy of a smaller, more personal, decision-making body (a religious charity or one’s close family members for example) is arguably a still less inviting prospect.
I then remembered that I had read something touching on just these issues a while back. This was an article in the Economist about ‘statist-individualism’ in Sweden. Here is a key passage:
Finally, “The Nordic Way” cites a paper that compares Sweden to Germany and the United States, when considering the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual. Americans favour a Family-Individual axis, this suggests, suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries, they argue, the state and the individual form the dominant alliance. The paper cited, by the way, is entitled: “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State”. It hails Pippi (the strongest girl in the world and an anarchic individualist who lives without parents in her own house, with only a monkey, horse, a bag of gold and a strong moral compass for company) as a Nordic archetype.
Clearly there are different kinds and degrees of ‘statism’, and some manifestations are very unwelcome – but this idea of the state as an enabler rather than a stifler of individualism certainly resonated with me.
