The rhetoric of “personal responsibility” emerges from the collusion of two interrelated but distinct bodies of thought from the postwar era: “culture of poverty” scholarship and theories of neoliberalism. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1959) coined the term “culture of poverty” to indicate the ways that young people learn poverty-inducing behaviors from previous generations. Lewis posited a culture of poverty to counterbalance arguments that rooted poverty in the specific characteristics of individual communities. By comparing poor families in Mexico and Puerto Rico, Lewis argued that different communities shared similar characteristics that perpetuate poverty. He labeled these behaviors as cultural “in the traditional anthropological sense” because they “[provide] human beings with a design for living, with a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so [serve] a significant adaptive function.” (19) Political scientist Michael Harrington’s 1962 The Other America articulated similar observations about the role of culture in perpetuating poverty in America, as did the work of Anthropologist Walter B. Miller. Though these authors did not assign blame to individual members of poor communities, as would become increasingly common in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the cultural argument nonetheless opened up the possibility for thinking of poverty as the result of actions from people within the communities themselves as opposed to a structural form of discrimination perpetuated by racist institutions such as slavery. Similarly, while cultural accounts of poverty moved the analytical focus of poverty’s causes, it did not authorize a rhetorical focus on personal responsibility.
Emerging theories of neoliberalism supplied a more overt focus on the individual behavior that inflects contemporary invocations of personal responsibility. Neoliberalism refers to an economic theory of vastly reduced government services and regulation in an effort to spur productivity and increase competition. Though it has roots in the classical liberal theories of John Locke and Adam Smith, its twentieth century advocates were followers of Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. For these thinkers, the Keynesian welfare state stifled the competition that was the lifeblood of successful capitalist systems. More worrisome, perhaps, was the effect that generous social programs had on the moral fabric of citizens. By providing for people’s needs, the welfare state replaced community values of initiative and thrift with its own, setting individuals down “the road to serfdom,” the title of Hayek’s famous treatise. Post-Hayekian neoliberals like Milton Friedman (1962) praised the free market as the surest mechanism for protecting freedom and characterized government as “a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.” (10) For Friedman, government should provide national defense, a modicum of economic regulation to prevent monopoly, and little else.
Culture of poverty thinkers were, for the most part, supportive of government programs to help the poor. The language of personal responsibility and its connotations of fulfilling one’s duties to self, family, and community emerged from the collusion of the cultural account of poverty with neoliberal economic theory. For cultural theorists, poverty extended across generations through behavior learned at an early age. For neoliberals, on the other hand, poverty was the result of government action that subsidizes adults’ poor decisions. Whereas for culture of poverty thinkers government action was important, perhaps even necessary, to counteract cultural discrepancies, for neoliberals government perpetuated the very problem by subsidizing bad behavior.
Cultural explanations of poverty provided concrete examples of neoliberal observations. Said another way, culture of poverty theory provided the sociological justification for the ideological thrust behind neoliberal economics. Whereas neoliberalism described abstract principles like individuals, collectivism, and state programs, cultural explanations provided people, neighborhoods, and communities. The result was a rhetorical focus on the actions of individuals that culminated in larger phenomena of dependency and irresponsibility.
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