Shuggie Bain and the Moral Economy of the Welfare State
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Theorized by E. P. Thompson, moral economy refers to an unwritten but communally shared consensus among people about what economic practices are fair and acceptable, thereby preserving the idea of the common good. Drawing from this, I argue that Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020) promotes the moral economy of the welfare state, which I define as the collective moral understanding and a tacit social agreement that a person should be given social protection in times of predicament so as not to go hungry, homeless, or sick without care. In so doing, the novel shares with some postwar British fiction a long-standing preoccupation with cultivating collective care and responsibility, or what Kelly M. Rich calls the “reparative potential” of the welfare state. Admittedly, because of the lack of a social security system in the Thatcherite Glasgow that Stuart depicts, the novel appears to have no choice but to promote the narrative of self-reliant, individualist survival in its depiction of a boy burdened by numerous hardships: as one character puts it, “you can only save yourself.” But the very dearth of social protection in the story has the effect of prompting readers to contemplate positively about social welfare, concluding on its indispensability for the characters who become the victims of numerous social ills. Even with the many problems that the idea of the welfare state entails, with its potentially punitive and stigmatizing practices, the novel suggests that it can serve as the bare minimum in the worst of situations.
Abstract
Theorized by E. P. Thompson, moral economy refers to an unwritten but communally shared consensus among people about what economic practices are fair and acceptable, thereby preserving the idea of the common good. Drawing from this, I argue that Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020) promotes the moral economy of the welfare state, which I define as the collective moral understanding and a tacit social agreement that a person should be given social protection in times of predicament so as not to go hungry, homeless, or sick without care. In so doing, the novel shares with some postwar British fiction a long-standing preoccupation with cultivating collective care and responsibility, or what Kelly M. Rich calls the “reparative potential” of the welfare state. Admittedly, because of the lack of a social security system in the Thatcherite Glasgow that Stuart depicts, the novel appears to have no choice but to promote the narrative of self-reliant, individualist survival in its depiction of a boy burdened by numerous hardships: as one character puts it, “you can only save yourself.” But the very dearth of social protection in the story has the effect of prompting readers to contemplate positively about social welfare, concluding on its indispensability for the characters who become the victims of numerous social ills. Even with the many problems that the idea of the welfare state entails, with its potentially punitive and stigmatizing practices, the novel suggests that it can serve as the bare minimum in the worst of situations.