for battered women, bringing companionship to lonely seniors. These good works deserve our praise, they deserve our personal support and, when appropriate, they deserve the assistance of the federal government.”10 In the context of a federal policy speech, “compassion” invokes an ideal of the benevolent state, a government that identifies need and suffering and acts to address it. Yet Bush’s compassionate conservativism sees compassion not as a value that the state itself possesses but one provided by its citizens.11 It is a policy goal that seeks to pave the way for the empowerment of the private sector and private individuals who may address need and show compassion in their everyday lives, theoretically reviving a sense of civic responsibility and restoring the balance of moral governance in American society. Bush famously referred to charities and religious groups as “armies of compassion,” better equipped than the state to address social problems like homelessness and poverty.12 This was a compassion effected through the nurturing of a relationship not between the state and its needy citizens but between the state and a private sector sanctioned to serve the needy—battered women and lonely seniors—in ways believed to be more efficient and effective than those undertaken by the government itself.
This shift underscores how Bush’s interpretation of compassion was marked by a broader inflection of neoliberal principles in his approach to governance and international aid. In the wake of 1990s domestic welfare reforms, individuals and the private sector were encouraged to participate in work previously relegated to the state and in turn were made more responsible for their own and their community’s well-being.13 The state’s role in social programs was criticized by conservative backers of such reforms as inefficient, lumbering, and part of a legacy of progressive Democratic approaches to the problems of poverty that had supposedly created a relationship of dependency, rather than accountability, between citizens and the state. In the 1990s public policy rhetoric in the United States increasingly emphasized qualities like personal empowerment, self-esteem, and individual responsibility as the end products of a new free-market-dominated system characterized by looser labor regulations and a global corporate system hinged to a post-Fordist strategy of “flexible capital accumulation.”14 In the wake of these reforms, Bush’s “compassionate” turn injected the image of the caring state back into the public consciousness. Yet the language of compassion, like these earlier policy endeavors, transferred the onus and responsibility of social services onto the citizen-volunteer, who was emboldened to take charge of social problems in lieu of state services.
The rise of a volunteerism as an expression of civic duty and as a key element of the transformation of the late capitalist state has been well documented.15 President George H. W. Bush’s famous “thousand points of light” speech, made at the 1988 Republican National Convention, presaged the celebration of volunteerism as an essential aspect of new forms of citizenship and social action that would come later. The Big Society program of British prime minister David Cameron provides a more contemporary corollary for how volunteer organizations have been heralded as essential tools through which society may compensate for the reduction of social welfare programs. Andrea Muehlebach’s analysis of an emergent “moral” form of citizenship at the heart of the northern Italian neoliberal state has highlighted some of the key contradictions behind these trends;16 her study of voluntarism in and around Milan from 2003 to 2005 notes how the heightened political emphasis placed on volunteer organizations during this period was driven by the desire to create a new “species of citizen” whose unpaid charitable productivity would fill the gaps created by a retreating postwelfare state.17 Yet, contrary to a purely critical analysis, Muehlebach argues that the effect of this trend has been to complicate depictions of the neoliberal state as purely a rationalizing, amoral project. Similar to American conservative discourse, Italian reformers emphasize the emotional social bonds that are enhanced through volunteer labor; citizens are encouraged in Milan to “live with the heart,” the message being that personal sentiment may animate state policy and make it more effective.18 In this way the rise of volunteerism in Italy has been embraced by formerly critical sectors of society—such as the Communist Party and labor unions—for the ways in which such reforms are believed to generate new forms of “solidarity.”
A notable aspect of this shift from state welfare to volunteer labor in both Italy and the United States is the way that services once considered to be the right of citizenship are encountered in this new version as a privilege, a “gift”—albeit ideally an emotionally resonate one, the product of a fraternal sentiment between citizen-donor and recipient. Marcel Mauss, in the conclusion to his famous essay on the gift, highlights connections between the emergent welfare state in early twentieth-century France and the reciprocal moral obligations that he views as emblematic of gift exchange.19 In his idealized description, the interconnections among labor unions, workers, employers, and the state create a web of obligations that ensures security and solidarity for all. But in its late twentieth-century iterations the “gift” of compassion becomes both highly personalized and one-directional. The emphasis on volunteerism reimagines the gift of social services as unrequited, a demonstration of care in the face of abject need, seemingly given without expectation of compensation or reward. As much as the language of compassion sought to empower and mobilize American and European volunteers, it also undermined the agency of those who received aid. The needy were not partners in such works of compassion, viewed as members of a broader interdependent society, but instead were characterized as recipients of their neighbors’ benevolence and care. The “right” to health care, safe housing, and food is reinterpreted in conservative language as a problem of “entitlements,” a system that emphasizes the dependency, rather than the productivity, of the poor.
The context of international aid shifts the dynamic of the relationship of citizen and state to one of donor and recipient, but many of the effects of this rhetorical turn remain. The idea of compassion may be contextualized as part of the broader emergence in recent years of a “politics of care” that has shaped contemporary responses to humanitarian crises worldwide.20 Erica James describes the “political economy of trauma” in Haiti as a “compassion economy,” one that “can transform pain and suffering into something productive.”21 As Miriam Ticktin points out in her study of French asylum policies, the emergence of care as a platform for governance has shaped the subjects of the state’s concern in particular ways.22 The compassionate response is provoked by images of suffering, the recognition of a “morally legitimate” subject whose abject physical need compels our action. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” a term he coined to explain the mechanisms through which life becomes the object of the state’s “explicit calculation,” Ticktin, James, and others have highlighted how the suffering body has emerged in recent years as the dominant platform upon which claims to state and nonstate resources may be made—a platform that has in many instances displaced and closed off other possibilities for collective political action.23 This trend has perhaps been nowhere more evident than in the realm of international AIDS relief, where the ability to convey abject suffering to nongovernmental agents with the power to provide access to scarce medical resources may mean the difference between life and death.24
This recent work has brought about a question: When care or compassion becomes the central focus of international governance, what forms of subjectivity and political advocacy gain leverage? In the wake of policy reforms like PEPFAR, which infused major American global aid programs with the ethic of compassion and mercy, this question took a new shape: What kinds of “healthy” subjects and behaviors were made recognizable by the language of compassion, and why? Moreover, what effect did an emphasis on compassion have on long-standing and successful local efforts to prevent the spread of HIV in Uganda?
For President Bush and his advisers, the compassionate response was driven not only by the recognition of the suffering of others but also by the effect compassion itself was believed to engender. Bush described the compassionate approach as “outcome based, driven by results” and called for “compassionate results, not compassionate intentions.”25 He wrote in his administration’s Armies of Compassion policy overview that “government should help the needy achieve independence and personal responsibility.”26
