The Emancipatory Ruse: From Reflexive Justice to Administrative Abandonment

In his theory of justice, John Rawls emphasizes that regulating economic and social inequalities through a principle of reciprocity is essential—but notably absent from both laissez-faire and welfare-state capitalism. This forms part of his justification for rejecting both in favor of either property-owning democracy or democratic socialism: models which, he believes, more effectively embed justice into the structure of society itself. Unlike the welfare state, which attempts to mitigate inequality after the fact, these alternatives aim to prevent domination and dependency at the source. For Rawls, justice must be proactive, not merely compensatory.

In a similar register, Jürgen Habermas— as interpreted by Christopher Pierson in Modernity and the Welfare State—argues that the welfare state’s original emancipatory purpose can only be realized if it evolves beyond the binary of economy (commodification) and state (bureaucratization). Pierson, following Habermas, contends that a third strand must be introduced: one oriented around the generation of solidarity and meaning, grounded in the defense of the lifeworld, and sustained through intersubjective, discursive will-formation. This vision calls not merely for managing capitalism or reforming state function, but for reflexively confronting both. As Pierson writes, “If the project of the social welfare state were not simply carried on or abandoned, but rather continued at a higher level of reflection, as Habermas recommends that it should be, it would need to become reflexive to a certain extent and aim at taming not just the capitalistic economy, but the state itself.”

Yet the category of intersubjectivity—so crucial for Habermas—is most often subordinated to the overarching paradigm of labour and production. Within this frame, humans are valorized to the extent that they function as productive and otherwise abandoned. As Achille Mbembe warns, capitalism dissolves all taboos, including prohibitions against turning persons into waste. It sorts between productive and unproductive lives, and increasingly targets the latter as objects of abjection—as lives deemed killable.

Dean Spade and Michelle Ciurria extend such critiques by revealing how the welfare state—often celebrated as a site of redistributive justice—has, from its inception, been structured to pacify, punish, and demoralize. Welfare is not merely insufficient; it is humiliating and marginalizing by design. It disciplines the poor, deters reform, it is a system which has it that “some must grovel for small concessions from those who would, as a self sacrificing favour, lord over them” (Hakim). Beneath its gestures of support lies a logic of humiliation, where small concessions are granted only to those willing to grovel, to be governed, to remain within bounds. Its “emancipatory purpose” is, in this light, not just moot but strategically misleading. The security it offers is always conditional, always revocable, and often weaponized as a disciplinary measure.

Where Habermas seeks to reclaim the welfare state as a site of reflexive solidarity, these critics show how solidarity itself has been institutionally domesticated—subordinated to the needs of capital and state alike. Arendt’s skepticism about the will and its relation to sovereignty deepens this diagnosis. She does not place hope in decisionistic will or rational consensus, but in unpredictable action, which emerges relationally—among “men in the plural”—not from procedural agreement. In this context, the Habermasian ideal of deliberative will-formation appears overly rationalistic, unable to contend with the sheer violence and arbitrariness of the systems it presumes to reform.

Taken together, these critiques expose the limits of liberal visions of justice—even in their most reflexive forms. They point to a political horizon beyond proceduralism, one that begins not with discourse or redistribution, but with a reckoning: with the expendability of certain lives, with the necropolitical sorting of bodies, and with the demand not for integration, but for rupture. Man the machine—or be fed to it: this is not a mere metaphor, it is policy.