Abstract
This article appropriates the concept of energy in order to analyze the interaction between the Danish welfare state and the category of citizens referred to among social workers and health professionals as “passive citizens.” While passivity might commonly be seen as mere inactivity—a certain non-action beyond the unfolding of social life—this article argues that in the Danish welfare society, the opposite is the case. In fact, in this context various forms of passivity have become the object of concerted political and media attention and the general schism between energy and passivity has become part of a public discourse on elderly health care and aging. By examining the way health care professionals talk about passive senior citizens in terms of a lack of energy, this article shows how, in a wider sense, passivity is framed as a particular problem that can be overcome through the right health care intervention. I argue that energy and passivity have become of key interest to the Danish welfare state in managing its aging population and that the attempt to activate the passive citizen in fact energizes the welfare state.
Highlights
How are we to understand this strange situation by which Bartleby, as a kind of hero of passivity, excludes himself from society, but through this very act somehow becomes included in the social order as an obstruction that unleashes an immense activity around him? Taking this question as the vantage point for this article, I seek to explore certain analogous relations between the story of Bartleby and the Danish welfare state
The critics of the welfare system tend to favor the view that the welfare state breeds a politically detached and passive citizenship, which may pose a threat to democracy itself
Rather than referring to the redemption of work, the proverb identifies a certain contagious malevolence lurking at the core of passivity, as if passivity itself poses a threat to the social order
Summary
Rather than threatening the social order, as in the story of Bartleby, passivity is a core catalyst of the energy of the welfare state. This is not a comprehensive case study, but rather a window into a more conceptual discussion of energy and passivity, and the way these are related to ideas of care within the Danish welfare state.
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