| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Phillip Hansen, Taxing Illusions: Taxation, Democracy and Embedded Political Theory (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing 2003)

IN THIS ENGAGING little book, Phillip Hansen attempts two interrelated assignments. On the one hand the book is an exploration of the competing value assumptions underlying a pair of taxation policies in Saskatchewan in a period when neo-liberalism displaced Keynesianism as the dominant economic paradigm. But it is equally a meditation on how to deliberate about public policy normatively, which for the author means among other things how to apprehend the relationship between the market and democracy. On his own account the book emerged from Hansen's intuition that an examination of two tax studies conducted for provincial NDP governments three decades apart, the McLeod Royal Commission in the mid-1960s and the Vicq Tax Report undertaken in the late 1990s, could illustrate the degree to which public policy discourse has been transformed in recent decades, while also prompting fundamental questions about how one should conceive of community and collective action.

The explicit normative concerns of this book set it apart from typical policy studies not because the author assiduously raises value questions, but rather because he rejects the conventional understanding of policy as technique in the service of politically-chosen goals. Whereas students of politics are often directed to regard public policies as just so many technical instruments, distinct from the preferences and values which inform political decision-making, Hansen insists that they in fact are suffused with claims and judgements about our collective lives and are thus inescapably normative. The author coins the term "embedded political theory" to indicate that public policies, and the institutions and processes of government in general, comprise value judgements and commitments, and are accordingly fitting subjects for philosophical inquiry into the nature of self and society.

The chapters given over to an analysis of the two tax studies do demonstrate quite distinctly the changes in value commitments which governments (in this case, social-democratic), and supposedly society at large, entertained in the latter part of the 20th century. For instance, the McLeod Royal Commission in 1965 relied on presuppositions variously associated with Keynesianism in which the goal of tax policy was presumed to be to provide for those public goods desired by the community and which a steadily expanding state could be reasonably expected to provide. The McLeod Commission was relatively unconcerned with questions of the impact of taxation rates on investment, observing that these were largely matters of political culture rather than subject to any precise economic calculation. By contrast, the Vicq Tax Review Committee some 30 years later was consumed by precisely these questions of the marginal disutility to investment and growth reputedly associated with different tax loads, especially in light of diverging tax structures in other jurisdictions. According to Hansen, this shift in emphasis from a complex appreciation of the well-being of the community to a narrow actuarial understanding of economic behaviour reveals starkly the emergent neo-liberal understanding of the self and community.

While the author quite skillfully teases out the value suppositions and implications of these two tax studies, this interpretive labour is preliminary to a larger theoretical engagement with what might be termed the social ontology of neo-liberalism. This latter venture is not always easy to follow because Hansen alternates between trying to discredit the methodology underlying the instrumentalist view of public policy, and decrying neo-liberal hyper-individualism which he thinks is as incoherent conceptually as it is calamitous politically. Insofar as methodology is concerned, the author argues for a fully interpretive or hermeneutical attitude in which policy is always and forever regarded as a contingent, contested domain through which we collectively constitute our shared world. Enlisting at various times the authority of Hegel, Charles Taylor, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, among others, Hansen covers territory made quite familiar by contemporary critics of vulgar scientism and rational choice theory. There is a problem, however, in this extended discussion of knowledge claims and the foundation of identity and intersubjectivity, for when all is said and done, conceding the situational and purposive foundations of social life still does not tell us how "meaning production" actually takes place. In the absence of such an explanation, we are left with rather more questions than answers, particularly with respect to the central political concern of this book to subvert the spurious individualism which the author (rightly, in my view) attributes to neo-liberalism.

The extent of this problem can be gathered by observing what Hansen notes as a simultaneous conceptual and practical dilemma in the neo-liberal consecration of individualism, a consecration which has cashed out in recent years in a dedicated commitment to reduce public expenditures and cut taxes. Advocates of this type of fiscal regime are fond of appealing to the self-interested calculations of tax-payers, effectively transforming the discourse (and identity) of citizenship from one which stresses the active contribution to and participation in a shared public good to one which emphasizes a ceaseless individual cost-benefit analyses of collective action. The virtuous citizen has become the prudent personal accountant. Hansen is critical of this neo-liberal "common sense," partly because he claims the image of the calculating individual attentively weighing the relative costs and benefits of personally defined choices is faulty in its conception. The reason is simply that there is no such thing as a self-construing individual whose preferences and commitments can be identified independently from the community of which he or she is a part. Interdependence in a meaning-producing community is the condition under which individual identities are formed, and it is only in the context of our commitments to the community of which we are a part that we can sensibly speak of what counts as goods much less what figures as benefits or costs.

But there is another interdependence that also needs to be acknowledged. Commenting on the McLeod Commission's deliberations during an era when Keynesianism still held sway, Hansen notes that the commissioners were of the view that public provisioning through a progressive tax system was not only desirable but rationally necessary precisely because of the degree of social interdependence brought about by modern industrial capitalist society. That this view is no longer shared by contemporary tax-cutters is obvious. Less obvious is why this has happened. "How did a reinvigorated individualism," asks Hansen, "come to the fore in the face of such interdependence?" His book, unfortunately, provides no real answer because it does not speculate directly on how meaning-production actually takes place. And without making more vivid what is involved in meaning-production, the author leaves the reader wondering how the two types of interdependence described above affect the prospects of the neo-liberal political agenda. For example, in a jurisdiction like present-day Ontario where principled neo-liberals held office for nearly a decade, the social interdependence generated by industrial capitalism proved to be a stubborn fact that no amount of fantasizing about the rational self-interested individual could dispel, with the result that deep tax reductions were complemented by an entirely predictable deficit. Does this episode portend crises in the political domain as the exigencies of social interdependence in the realm of production come into conflict with the antediluvian ideology and policies of neo-liberalism? Or are citizens so fully constituted in their identities by the "common sense" of their community that the specter of neo-liberal governments generating deficits likely will produce only a discomfiting case of cognitive dissonance?

Naturally there is no absolutely reliable way of answering questions like these. But a more fully-developed theory of the social production of meaning could at least furnish us with material for hypotheses about the operation of the political process in contemporary capitalism. What Hansen provides us instead are normative arguments about how the impoverished view of the individual and community can be confuted. The conceptual site for a challenge to neo-liberalism, Hansen contends, is the notion of democracy. If informed by ethical commitments to self-development as described by thinkers like C.B. Macpherson, and constituted by genuine discursive pluralism as advocated by theorists of deliberative democracy, it can attract conceptions of self and community more convivial than that on offer by current neo-liberalism. While this last argument has something of the air of a wish, it is not a wayward wish but entirely in keeping with the overall normative structure of Hansen's policy study. More successful in his analysis and critique of the value components of discrete policies than in working out a well-developed theory of the production of meaning, Hansen nonetheless has accomplished something very important in this book by illustrating how seemingly technical policy reports are replete with a rich array of philosophical, political, and cultural representations. Students of public policy are encouraged to read this study.


Ray Bazowski York University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.