‘Aspirations’ and Imagined Futures: The Im/possibilities for Britain’s Young Working Class

Abstract

Since the 1970s, successive governments have overseen a retrenchment of the welfare state alongside a concomitant lowering and alteration of individuals' expectations of entitlement and the relationship with the state more broadly. Davidson explains that this is in line with the ways in which `neo-liberal governance aims to ensure that the state's goals become synonymous with individual goals'.1 Building on Bourdieu's notion of pseudo-concepts,2 Raco theorises that this approach has given rise to `existential politics', whereby:governments actively define, categorise, and institutionalise the essential characteristics of human nature, well-being, responsibility, and virtue…by defining some of the fundamentals of human condition such as: what it means to be happy, fulfilled, and contented; what constitutes essential and non-essential human needs; what processes shape the ways in which the social and cultural status of individuals and groups is defined…More broadly an existential politics is also about the processes through which dominant social values are defined and institutionalised.3