Reagan

En la década del 70, el concepto de “Administración Pública”, vinculado hasta entonces a la gestión de una serie de derechos y a la existencia de valores -como democracia, responsabilidad, equidad y probidad-, y sólo parcialmente a la eficacia, fue migrando hacia el de “Gerenciamiento Público” o "Public Management”. Dentro de una visión histórica, no pueden separarse las reformas más extremas del Estado en los 80 del debilitamiento y caída del modelo anticapitalista de la URSS ni de la personalidad de los algunos actores intervinientes (Reagan, Thatcher, etc.). Aquí se analiza como tres sociedades unidas por una matriz original institucional común, avanzaron en direcciones bien diferentes, empleando como justificativo las mismas ideas. El paradigma que devino en alternativa al Estado de Bienestar, se expandió como receta, sin considerar que ese cambio de visión no es un dogma y depende de múltiples condiciones. Es un medio para lograr eficiencia, vincular inversión pública con impactos concretos, reducir gastos indeseables y evitar disipar los esfuerzos de una sociedad.  ¿Por qué confundir método con doctrina?

This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the term “economic rights” in American political discourse from the perspective of democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of “economic rights” as a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises. Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles.

This paper sets out an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This framework, while rigorous and broadly applicable and an advance on the frameworks currently employed, primarily seeks to incorporate an a priori element. Until now the frameworks utilized in examining critical junctures were entirely postdictive. Adding a predictive element to the concept will constitute a significant advance. The new framework, and its predictive element, termed the “differentiating factor,” is tested here in examining macro-economic crises and subsequent changes in macro-economic policy, in America and Sweden.