The Challenge of Taking Rights Seriously in Fiscal Sociology

Abstract

The first chapter of the third part of this book—addressing the question: “what are the social processes which are behind the superficial facts of the budget figures?”—sets the foundation for the consideration of law, as a social process. It does so by acknowledging that there are important challenges to expanding fiscal sociological analysis to questions of equality and development. First, however, it is important to note that the New Fiscal Sociology already has expanded to include these issues, and explicitly is interested in questions of rights, justice and equality. In doing so, however, it did not necessarily tread paths set by Schumpeter, and this chapter seeks to clarify why (and why it may not matter). Additionally, as the final chapters of this book will consider budget law as a social process, this chapter acknowledges the difficulties for legal analysis of probing bureaucratic structures and processes. Although this chapter acknowledges difficulties, its message, for fiscal sociologists, aims to be an optimistic one: the perspectives of fiscal sociology clearly extend to legal scholarship and carry the promise of continuing to enrich the field. The search for rights and remedies in bureaucratic processes is not simply the preserve of the lawyer, of course, and thus this chapter ends with an acknowledgement of the importance of inter-disciplinarity.