At some point in the last half-century, American politicians started talking about responsibility in a new way. Where “responsibility” once referred to the duties of the nation to its citizens, or of the citizens to the nation, or of fellow citizens to one another, it now came to mean the obligations of the individual to himself. Responsibility was personal responsibility. You might date the beginning of this shift to 1968, when Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, announced in a speech at the Republican National Convention that it was time to stop blaming “society” for people’s failings and to start accepting that “each individual is accountable for his actions.” You might date the completion of this shift to 1993, when President Bill Clinton exhorted Americans in his first Inaugural Address to “demand responsibility from all” and “to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing.”

This was more than just a change in political rhetoric. As the political theorist Yascha Mounk argues in his smart and engaging book, THE AGE OF RESPONSIBILITY: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Harvard University, $29.95), the move from “responsibility-as-duty” to “responsibility-as-accountability” was also evident in scholarly debates about distributive justice, in everyday moral language and, most consequentially, in public policy. In 1971, Reagan turned his words into reality by signing a welfare-reform bill in California that made state assistance conditional on people’s good behavior, as judged by work status, child-support arrangements and other proxies for conscientious conduct. In 1996, Clinton signed a similar welfare reform bill that withheld benefits from those thought to show an inadequate willingness to work or an overlong history of requiring assistance. Responsibility, Mounk observes, was no longer, in the first instance, about looking after those in need; it was about rewarding the good and punishing the bad.

Mounk is not opposed to accountability per se. He does not advocate for a state that compensates its citizens for any and all bad decisions whatever the cost may be. But he does worry that we have embraced accountability to the exclusion of other important values (such as equality and solidarity); at the price of predictability (and the peace of mind that follows from knowing what you can rely on, come what may); and to the neglect of overall social well-being. Does it make sense, he wonders, to focus so much on whether a sick poor person is responsible for not having acquired health insurance? Given that studies suggest public health and economic growth would benefit if he (and others like him) had coverage, shouldn’t we consider providing it regardless of whether he “deserves” it? Or do we so value holding people accountable that we are willing to jeopardize our own welfare for a proper comeuppance?

To appreciate how deeply the paradigm of accountability has penetrated our culture, Mounk suggests, you need only look at how it has shaped — and distorted — the arguments of those who take themselves to be resisting it. Would-be defenders of the poor and powerless spend a lot of time and effort “denying that people bear responsibility for the way their life has turned out,” because helplessness seems the sole condition for granting them assistance. The underprivileged are depicted as mere playthings of the forces of poverty and racism, “perennial victims,” incapable of agency. Their defenders might have chosen to argue that although the underprivileged sometimes make bad decisions, our duties toward them don’t disappear “merely because they could have avoided needing our assistance” — indeed, that the right policies can help them make better decisions. Instead, Mounk contends, too many advocates unwittingly accept the punitive framework of accountability and, following its logic, end up patronizing those they want to help.