Beyond the Lib/Lab Societal Order: Toward a Relational Society?

Pierpaolo Donati’s chapter opens the second part of the volume, where he tries to overcome the dialectical opposition highlighted by the first contributions and explores the possibility of working at the cultural matrix level to explore the possibilities of future development of liberalism. Donati, in his careful analysis of the welfare state, shows how not only liberalism is in a meta-crisis, as Milbank and Pabst claim, but also highlights that this meta-crisis involves socialism too. This would be a consequence of the crisis of modernity from which the lib-lab model, i.e., the management of the welfare state based on the correction of market excess (lib) with the introduction of more control (lab) and vice versa, would have developed. The limit of this approach would be the closure on itself of the interaction between the market and the state regardless of the relationship with civil society and the family. Correction of this situation with the introduction of ethical elements at the cultural level, as suggested by Griffiths and Schlag, would be impossible, because the hyper-modern conception of society treats all sub-systems as autonomous, immunizing their relations from a reference to the common good. Donati’s proposal is to replace the dialectical opposition between state and market with a vision of society as a ‘relational complex’ between market, state, family and civil community. From this would arise a relational state and a relational economy, where the ‘well’ of the ‘welfare’ state would not be defined autonomously, but would be founded in the very relationality of the person and her lifeworld. The implementation of relational policies, capable of recognizing the economic value of the family and associations, would not oppose the market economic performance, but would treat the lib-lab trade-off as a particular mechanism. Money would no longer be the end of the economic process, but only a means for the production of relational goods. The transition desired and pointed out by Donati would mark the passage from a hyper-modern society to a transmodern relational society, in which the current crisis of a liberalism forced to remain in the lib-lab dialectic could be overcome by reconfiguring society from the point of view of a relational trans-liberalism.