LAUSR

Walker, Moral Understandings, 1998) and its consequences for a generation. Critics of neoliberalism (e.g., Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 2015) have made deeper and more trenchant critiques of the discourse of personal responsibility. And there is a wide and ongoing discussion about more institutional/political accounts of responsibility; from Stephen Esquith’s concerns with bystanders (The Political Responsibilities of Everyday Bystanders, 2010), to Jade Schiff (Burdens of Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, 2014) to Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo (Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power, 2016), to Iris Young’s formidable account of a “social connection model of responsibility” (Responsibility for Justice, 2011). As another example, while Mounk’s account of the difference between “responsibilitybuffering” and “responsibility-tracking” forms of policy is interesting, it is curious that he does not notice that this distinction tracks one between universal entitlements and means-tested benefits that has been at the core of feminist and other critical analyses of social policy since the 1980s (e.g., Barbara Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems, 1986). Mounk has not really considered the opposing views with much sympathy or depth. His refrain is that “the Left” ignores cultural arguments in order to emphasize structural ones. After quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates on the deeply historical and structural nature of racism, Mounk avers, “But rather than challenging the normative premise that gives rise to a lot of this rhetoric—that is to say, the idea that people’s bad choices in the past undermine their claim to assistance in the present—[the Left] has challenged the idea that good or bad choices are an important causal factor in explaining poverty at all. In other words, it has focused its energies on denying that most people are responsible for their lot in life” (p. 105). Even if the first sentence were true, the second does not follow from it. And the first claim represents a misleading account of “left” positions about the ongoing weight of domination. That “the past” may extend to systems of domination (racism) that go beyond the lifetimes of individual people is not an idea that Mounk entertains. But had he entertained this idea, it might help to explain why his “positive notion of responsibility” (p. 24) to use institutions “in part by providing [people] with the educational and financial preconditions for exercising real agency in their lives” (p. 24)—is insufficient. The institutions themselves (for example, those providing educational and financial preconditions) may be embedded in, and reflect, structures of domination that not only make achieving such “real agency” difficult but that then revert back to the personalized critiques of responsibility that Mounk has identified as the mean-spirited problem in the first place. Mounk’s creative rhetorical fix for the deeply warped senses of responsibility that exist in the United States is worth our consideration, but will not, ultimately, help to transform anything absent a deeper consideration of the sorts of structural, systemic, and historical issues underpinning American welfare policy. He is correct to say that our current conceptions of responsibility are “punitive” (p. 178), but his analysis does not reach down deeply enough to convince supporters of such a view that they should change to his more “positive notion of responsibility” (p. 181), or to show that such a change would address the deeper problems. My criticisms of both of these books raises an issue about how political theorists might engage with contemporary political debates. Perhaps we need to have a larger, discipline-wide discussion of how best to engage in such discussions. In that sense, both books are valuable for initiating this important conversation.