Peter Sloterdijk on the predatory German welfare state
Posted on | January 27, 2010 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf
As the United States makes rapid progress to become just another European-style welfare state, one of Germany’s most controversial intellectuals, Peter Sloterdijk, initiates a public debate with an offensive on the welfare state that takes no prisoners, even by American standards:
To assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it is useful to recall the historical kinship between two movements that emerged at its birth: classical liberalism and anarchism. Both were motivated by the mistaken hypothesis that the world was heading toward an era of the weakening of the state….But the political history of the twentieth century, and not just in its totalitarian extremes, proved unkind to both classical liberalism and anarchism.
…each year, modern states claim half the economic proceeds of their productive classes and pass them on to tax collectors, and yet these productive classes do not attempt to remedy their situation with the most obvious reaction: an antitax civil rebellion. This submissiveness is a political tour de force that would have made a king’s finance minister swoon.
Not surprisingly, as discussed in this piece at GlobalPost, identifying the welfare state as an instrument of organized plunder, instead of praising it as a vehicle to realize “social justice”, can be expected to put the dominant intellectual class on the defensive:
Sloterdijk probably didn’t anticipate the level of ire he ended up inciting. Axel Honneth, director of the Frankfurt School for Social Research — the institution with the most storied ties to the post-war German welfare-state economy — felt compelled to publish a lengthy article in the pages of a leading weekly newspaper attacking Sloterdijk’s philosophic corpus and declaring his lack of earnestness to be a menace to German society
It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Continental Europe takes the lead in a meaningful debate about the welfare state. Then again, few people would have imagined a future for the United States as is unfolding today.
Tags: Frankfurter Schule > Peter Sloterdijk > Philosophy > Welfare State
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