Morality materialized: Notes on public prevention as a policy system

Abstract

Public prevention is discussed as a policy system that owes its coherence to a number of “constitutive principles” rather than to an institutional fabric of its own. Notions from Luhmann's autopoietic social systems theory are combined with some recent developments in discourse analysis to outline this discussion theoretically. As to the constitutive principles, first, it is argued that public prevention is negatively constituted by its divorce from the regular healthcare system. Second, it is demonstrated that the constitutive principles of the public prevention system itself stem from the basic insecurities of this type of social policy. Public prevention strategies always have to impose themselves on existing (social) policy fields, and, more importantly, they often intrude upon people's private lives. That is why they tend to locate responsibility “outside,” moralizing the environment and moralizing things.