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citováno z http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv4-69
WELFARE STATE
THE TERM "welfare state" in English is of recent origin. First used during the Second World
War, it passed into general currency only after 1945. There had been intermittent discussion,
however, some of it sophisticated, about the contribution the state should make to the social
welfare of all its citizens from the eighteenth century onwards. "It is the duty of a government
to do whatever is conducive to the welfare of the governed," the political economist Nassau
Senior, one of the main architects of the new English Poor Law of 1834, argued in his Oxford
lectures of 1847-48. In the meantime, Richard Oastler, a tory-radical critic both of early
factory industrialism and of political economy, had advocated in his journal, The Fleet
Papers, in 1842 the creation of what he called the "social state." This state would seek "to
secure the prosperity and happiness of every class of society": it would be particularly
concerned, also, with "the protection of the poor and needy, because they require the shelter
of the constitution and the laws more than any other classes."
Oastler was a traditionalist, and his conception of the "social state" was different from that of
Senior, who believed in a market economy and in the substitution of contract for status in the
pattern of social relations. Yet both men rejected the idea of the property-protecting "night-
watchman state" caricatured by Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany (where the authority of the
state was far greater than in Britain). They both recognized that it was no longer possible to
provide adequate welfare services to support individuals through the family, the Church, the
guild or private "charity." They were both aware of the fact that the rise of factory industry
had posed new problems which demanded urgent solutions. In particular, they identified,
though in contrasting styles, social contingencies associated with industrialization,
particularly unemployment.
Sickness, old age, and death entail hardships in any society: poverty was in no sense a
postindustrial phenomenon. Yet the massing of large numbers of people in factories and in
cities changed the language and content of social and political analysis. As the nineteenth
century went by and, after struggles, new groups of the population had secured the right to
vote, politics became more directly concerned with what to do with newly acquired political
power. The demand for the provision by the state of particular social services--a piecemeal
process explicable in terms of cumulative administrative processes and political pressures--
was accompanied by the articulation of comprehensive theories of the state which rested
on arguments for positive state intervention. Thus, John Ruskin, defying the fashionable
economic orthodoxy of the day, urged that the state should ensure that all its citizens received
a living wage and were guaranteed full employment in the name of social justice. Thus, T. H.
Green, arguing that "citizenship makes the moral man," urged the case for "positive
liberalism," and Arnold Toynbee (1852-83), historian of early industrialization, demanded in
a popular lecture of 1882 that "where the people are unable to provide a thing for themselves,
and that thing is of primary social importance, then... the state should interfere and provide it
for them."
These were minority views, even then not always free from ambiguity. Throughout the
nineteenth century there were four curbs on effective state action in Britain, for long the most
industrialized society. First, political economists, even when they refused to talk in slogan
terms of laissez-faire, were skeptical about the interference of the state with the operations of
the market: at most, they pressed for an abandonment of social laissez-faire while accepting
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the need for economic laissez-faire and international free trade. Second, belief in the
importance of individual self-help or mutual self-help through voluntary organizations
(including the friendly society and the trade union) held back any effective talk of "reliance"
on the state: people were expected to fend for themselves through savings and insurance.
Action on the part of the state was deemed to be both expensive and debilitating. Third, the
receipt of help from the state or from local authorities carried with it a stigma. People
who accepted "relief" were not thought of as full citizens. The Poor Law of 1834 was based
on this assumption: it was never abandoned even when the operations of the 1834 Act were
refined and mollified. Fourth, the apparatus of the state was viewed with suspicion not only
by businessmen but by workingmen: they identified it with unpopular social institutions and
coercive action, and judged it not in terms of purposes which it might fulfil but in terms of
restraints which it imposed. Instead of looking to the state, they looked rather to the trade
union and instead of seeking direct political action (or, except when deemed
absolutely necessary, resort to the law), they preferred to work voluntarily through collective
bargaining. There was, indeed, surprisingly little political talk of the state as such. As
Matthew Arnold put it in 1861, "we have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and
to antiquity, of the state--the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with
stringent powers for the general advantage and controlling individual wills in the name of an
interest wider than that of individuals."
In Germany the position was different. The word "state" was generally used, and was
endowed with a sense of authority. Moreover, the extension of the administrative apparatus of
the state long preceded the advent of industrialism. At the same time, belief in
the autonomous market economy was far less strong, and an influential group of historically
minded political economists argued fervently that national economy (Volkswirtschaft) had to
be converted into state econ- omy (Staatswirtschaft) with "welfare" as the
objective. Bismarck did not go anywhere near as far as many of the "socialists of the Chair,"
academic protagonists of a state dedicated to welfare, but through laws passed in 1882, 1884,
and 1889 he introduced compulsory national insurance against sickness, accidents, old
age, and invalidity. "The state," it was laid down in his first unsuccessful bill of 1881, "is not
merely a necessary but a beneficent institution." In the last years of his life Bismarck also
contemplated insurance against unemployment and talked with assurance about "the right to
work." His objectives were, of course, mixed. He wished to provide an alternative to laissez-
faire liberalism, but he also wished to sap the strength of the rising socialist movement. The
national state was to become an instrument of welfare within the limits set by the capitalist
system and the traditional frame- work of the social order: in return the masses, he believed,
would be attached through greater patriotism to the state. He conceived of social insurance,
indeed, as a form of political insurance, and the kind of society in which he put his trust was
as hierarchical as that extolled by Oastler.
Other continental countries introduced insurance schemes without necessarily accepting
Bismarck's cal- culations, and in Australia and New Zealand there were politicians who
believed in what the French called "socialism without doctrines" and went much further than
any Europeans did in urging in the name of equal citizenship that "the more the state does for
the citizen, the more it fulfills its purpose... the functions of the state shall be extended as
much as possible.... True democracy consists in the extension of state activity" (from a speech
by New Zealand politician, W. Pember Reeves, 1895). The New Zealand Old Age Pensions
Act of 1898 was the first to be passed in a British dominion. Though it has been described as
a "social palliative," it marked the all-important beginning of a noncontrib- utory pensions
system.
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When in the early twentieth century the British Liberal party carried a series of social service
measures which have been noted in retrospect as landmarks on the way to the welfare state, it
had both German and "colonial" experience in mind. At the same time, the driving force
behind three new welfare measures--the feeding of school children, the school medical
service, and old age pensions--had indigenous motivation. By contrast, unemployment and
health insurance, in par- ticular, were strongly influenced by Germany, with Winston
Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, writing to H. Asquith in 1908 that "the
Minister who will apply to this country the successful experi- ences of Germany in Social
Organisation may or may not be supported at the polls, but he will at least have left a
memorial which time will not deface of his administration." The self-helping activities of
working- class movements were no longer thought to be ade- quate either by a growing
number of socialists anxious to exert political influence to eliminate "poverty in the midst of
plenty" or by trade-union groups like the miners and the agricultural laborers who, for
various reasons, could not secure their union objectives (for example, a shortening of the
length of the working day or a minimum wage) simply through the machinery of collective
bargaining. The charitable efforts of philanthropists, it was increasingly recognized even
by philanthropists themselves, could not alleviate all the social problems of an increasingly
complex industrial society. In this recognition the publication of social statistics played a big
part: well-documented poverty surveys by Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree, and others
revealed the continuing extent of poverty in British cities after a century of economic growth
and relative affluence. Once their statistics had been pub- lished, wrote the Fabian socialist
Beatrice Webb, "the net effect was to give an entirely fresh impetus to the general adoption of
the policy of securing to every individual, as the basis of his life and work, a prescribed
national minimum of the requisites for efficient par- enthood and citizenship" (My
Apprenticeship [1926], p. 239).
Beatrice Webb was prominent in the campaign which accompanied and followed the
meetings of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905-09) to substitute new welfare
policies for the Poor Law of 1834, policies which would remove the stigma attach- ing to the
receipt of public money. She claimed that the introduction of these policies would not only
mark a new stage in the history of citizenship but would constitute a return to older theories of
the relationship between the individual and the community. "The whole theory of the mutual
obligation between the individual and the state, which I find myself working out in my poor
law scheme, is taken straight out of the nobler aspect of the mediaeval manor. It will come as
a new idea to the present generation--it is really a very old one that has been thrust out of
sight in order to attain some measure of equality in political rights. There are some who wish
to attain to a socialist state by the assertion of economic equality--they desire to force the
property-owners to yield to the non-property owners. I prefer to have the forward movement
based on the obligation of each individual to serve" (Our Partnership, London [1948], p.
385). Political affinities have often been traced between the Fabian socialists and the
Benthamites who played such a big part in initiating and implementing the Poor Law of
1834: it is interesting to note that in this statement Beatrice Webb was echoing rather the kind
of arguments used by Oastler, though in a very different kind of language.
Yet the socialists, Fabian or otherwise, were less important in the introduction of new welfare
measures than the Liberals, some of whom called themselves "new liberals" and rejected all
arguments in favor of laissez-faire. Their theories, well set out, for example, by J. A. Hobson,
were reinforced by other sets of statistics besides those collected by Booth and Rowntree.
Statistics released in the aftermath of the Boer War concerning ill health and malnutrition
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raised fundamental questions about "national efficiency." So, too, did later figures concerning
rural distress. It was for reasons embedded in British history, therefore, that after 1906 a
Liberal government with a large majority introduced legislation, much of it controversial,
to extend welfare services. The Education (Provision of Meals) Act, 1906, permitting the
provision of free meals at school for needy children, was the first of a number of measures
which entailed direct intervention on the part of the state in an activity previously
falling entirely within a sphere of family responsibility. Old Age Pensions followed in 1908,
though the Act was hedged round with qualifications limiting the right to receive pensions. In
1900 trade boards were set up to deal with conditions and wages in sweated industries, where
collective bargaining was ineffective, and in 1911, in face of Fabian as well as Conservative
criti- cism, national insurance was introduced. The term "welfare state" was not used, but
much of the language of parliamentary and public debate centered on the issue of state
provision of welfare. "A new spirit was disclosing itself," wrote R. B. Haldane, a Liberal min-
ister of the year 1906. "It is not about details that the people care or are stirred. What they
seem to desire is that they should seem to have something approach- ing to equality of chance
of life with those among whom they live.... There was earnestness about state intervention to
be seen everywhere" (R. B. Haldane, Autobiography [1929], p. 213).
The measures initiated largely by Lloyd George and Churchill after 1908, culminating in the
insurance acts, represented a major achievement. They were explicitly nonsocialist--they left
the profit system intact--but they introduced a greater note of responsibility into social
politics and a firmer basis of collective orga- nization. They were pushed even further as a
result of the First World War when Lloyd George, in a different capacity, talked of creating "a
land fit for heroes," and a Ministry of Reconstruction turned to new proposals for change.
"The public," a committee of 1918 reported, "not only has its conscience aroused and its heart
stirred, but also has its mind open... to an unprecedented degree." Immediate postwar re-
forms did not go far to meet the high hopes of the war years, but the Unemployment
Insurance Act of 1920, passed with little criticism, greatly increased the numbers of people
insured under national schemes, and the Housing Act of 1919 not only required
local authorities to survey housing needs but offered govern- ment subsidies to help them to
provide houses. Refer- ring to this act, the National Housing and Town Plan- ning Council
commented that "it has needed the earthquake shock of war to bring the nation to
the recognition of the truth... that it is the duty of the community... to take the necessary
action, however drastic."
The process of extending the social services con- tinued in Britain between 1919 and 1939
with public provision of housing constituting the major postwar innovation. Yet there was
little doubt in Britain, as in other European countries and in the United States, that large-scale
involuntary mass unemployment following the world depression of 1929 constituted a
major watershed. Heavy unemployment strained poor law, social service, and above all
insurance systems beyond the limit. Insurance benefits, limited to contributions, were
stringently restricted, and while there were fierce arguments between socialists and
nonsocialists about the imposition of a "means test" on those in receipt of unemployment
relief, an Unemployment Board, founded in 1934, was providing a second-line
income maintenance service, centrally administered. Keynesian economic policies to
eliminate unemployment were rejected by the government in power, but the
social consequences of unemployment were studied carefully by advocates of a more active
social service policy.
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The main theorists of large-scale intervention were to be found not in Britain but in Sweden
and in New Zealand, with spokesmen of the New Deal in the United States urging if not the
creation of a "welfare state" the extension of "welfare capitalism." In Sweden, where a social
democratic government came into power in the wake of the world depression (in Britain the
Labour government went out of power) a series of welfare measures was introduced based
on the assumption, as Gunnar Myrdal put it, that the state must achieve certain social goals: a
high standard of nutrition, full employment, and social welfare for all its citizens. In New
Zealand a Labour government, which took office in 1935, placed in the center of its program
proposals which had been set out since 1919: sustenance payments instead of relief work
(the right to work was proclaimed); a national health service as free as education; state
housing and a statu- tory minimum wage. The 1938 Social Security Act marked "a radical and
far-reaching effort to place the claims of welfare before those of wealth."
In the United States the position was more complex. There had always been Americans who
had urged the need for state action in welfare matters. Thus, the institutional economist
Richard T. Ely had argued in the late nineteenth century that the state was "an educational and
ethical agency whose positive aim is an indispensable condition of human progress" and
that "the doctrine of laissez faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals and... suggests an
inadequate explanation of the relations between the state and the citizens." More than 1500
labor laws were passed by different American states in the decade after 1887. Yet American
society had been shaped more by market forces than any other society in the world, and
there were far more critics of state interference than there were supporters, both in periods of
affluence and in periods of recession. There were over thirteen million unemployed when F.
D. Roosevelt became President in 1933 and one of the objects of his New Deal was to widen
the concept of social justice in the course of dealing with economic emergency. The policies
of the New Deal were derived from many different sources, but they all entailed increasing
state interven- tion. No comprehensive national structure of social security was introduced,
but steps were taken to raise low incomes (through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), to
offer aid to the disabled (through the important Social Security Act of 1935), and to
reduce unemployment. Roosevelt's policies, eclectic in char- acter, have been hailed as
landmarks in the history of the welfare idea and in the evolution of empirical collectivism.
They certainly generated enough bitter opposition to account for the fact that when the
term "welfare state" began to be used after 1945 it was almost always used in the United
States in a pejorative sense, even after a number of new welfare provisions had been
introduced both in individual states and by the federal government. Yet it is certainly difficult
to call the United States of the 1930's a "welfare state." At best it was a society where a series
of improvisations reduced the extent to which the market dictated the living conditions of
individuals and families and where social and political gospels were publicly expressed.
What was true of the United States was true, indeed, of most countries in 1939, with the
possible exception of New Zealand and of the Soviet Union where there was no problem of
relating a network of state social services to a market-based and privately owned indus- trial
system. Russian social services were regulated rather in terms of the assessed exigencies of
"socialist development," and there was no theory of welfare outside the framework of
Marxist-Leninist analysis. In Britain, too, it was clear in 1939 that the network of social
services which had been created during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not
constitute a system. The services were financed separately, covered only limited sections of
the population, and were restricted in duration and scope. They had cer- tainly not proved
adequate to deal with the brute facts of poverty and malnutrition, social insecurity and
mass unemployment.
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The great turning point came during the Second World War which was sufficiently protracted
in length and extensive in its influence on the lives of the masses of the population
everywhere to promote talk of a "better world" when the war ended. There was no shortage of
such talk in the occupied countries and even in Nazi Germany itself, and in Britain, where
the powers of the state were greatly extended after 1939, the belief was widely held that, in
the words of an official paper on social security policy published in 1944, "in a matter so
fundamental, it is right for all citizens to stand in together, without exclusion based on
differences of status, function or wealth." The argu- ment was not just that administrative
processes affect- ing the operation of the social services would be simplified if structures were
"comprehensive" or "uni- versal," but that through universal services, "concrete expression
would be given to the solidarity and unity of the nation." What had been achieved in war
could be achieved in peace "in the fight against individual want and mischance."
In such statements, as in the writings of Sir William Beveridge who did much to propound
and to publicize this philosophy, there was a significant shift from the idea of a social service
state, improvising and extending welfare networks for people in misfortune, to that of a
"welfare state" providing a basic minimum for everybody. There were other shifts too. As
Richard Titmuss, the historian of British social policy during the war has remarked, "it was
increasingly regarded as a proper function or even obligation of government to ward off
distress and strain not only among the poor but among all classes of society. And because the
area of responsibility had so perceptibly widened, it was no longer thought sufficient to
provide through various branches of social assistance a standard of service hith- erto
considered appropriate for those in receipt of poor assistance" (Problems of Social Policy
[1950], p. 506). In other words, the standards of provision on the part of the state were
expected to rise. "The deep desire of men to free themselves from the fear of want," a desire
identified in the deliberations of the Interna- tional Labour Organisation Conference at
Philadelphia in 1944, was a foundation of policy, but welfare policy would be expected to
fulfill further aspirations also.
It was perhaps in relation to unemployment, how- ever, the social scourge of the 1930's, that
the war produced the greatest transformation of attitudes. The virtual disappearance of
unemployment in war condi- tions suggested that it could be kept to a very low figure in
peacetime. Sir William Beveridge, who had written his first study of unemployment as early
as 1909, argued in his influential Full Employment in a Free Society (1945), which was
strongly influenced by Keynes, that "it must be a function of the state... to protect its citizens
against mass unemployment, as definitely as it is now the function of the state to defend the
citizens against attack from abroad and against robbery and violence at home" (p. 25). The
doctrine received less general assent in the United States, al- though it was strongly supported
by a number of economists, including Alvin H. Hansen, and in 1946 an important
Employment Act laid down that it was "the continuing policy and responsibility of the
Federal Government to use all practicable means... to pro- mote maximum employment,
production and purchas- ing power [and] to co-ordinate and utilize all its plans, functions and
resources for the purpose of creating and maintaining, in a manner calculated to foster and
pro- mote free competitive enterprise and the general wel- fare, conditions under which there
will be afforded useful employment opportunities, including self-em- ployment, for those
able, willing and seeking to work."
Soon after the Employment Act was passed, the term "welfare state" began to be used on both
sides of the Atlantic. It was the program of the British Labour government, brought into
power at the general election of 1945, which, in particular, focussed international attention on
welfare policies and stimulated both its critics and its supporters to sum up its objective as the
creation of a "welfare state." In this connection, the National Health Act of 1947 was of
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central impor- tance. "Homes, health, education and social security, these are your birthright,"
exclaimed Aneurin Bevan, its architect. The act provided a universal and com- prehensive
health service "without any insurance qualifications of any sort": "it is available,"
Bevan pointed out, "to the whole population, and not only is it available to the whole
population freely, but it is intended, through the health service to generalise the best health
advice and treatment." The Act was more strongly attacked in the United States, where there
was no state-provided "medicare," than in Britain, and it did much to stimulate debate on
the merits and pitfalls of a "welfare state."
Meanwhile, historians and sociologists as well as socialists and anti-socialists were
connecting the poli- cies of the British Labour government between 1945 and 1950 with
earlier landmarks in the history of the social services and looking for "origins" and strands of
continuity and "development." Different metaphors were employed. Hitherto, T. H. Marshall
wrote in 1949--concerning himself less with the increased powers of the state than with the
changing fabric of citizenship--social service policy had always been thought of as a
remedial policy dealing with the base- ment of society and ignoring its upper floors. Now
the purpose was being extended. "It has begun to re-model the whole building," and it might
even end by "converting a skyscraper into a bungalow" or at least into a "bungalow
surmounted by an architecturally insignificant turret." The "welfare state," to use a different
metaphor, was seeking to provide a fence to ensure that people do not fall over a cliff,
whereas the older social-service state provided an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to carry
away for treatment all those who fell.
Between 1947 and 1960 the term "welfare state" reached its peak currency. Two new
developments took place. First, the term began to be used everywhere, even in relation to the
policies of nonindustrialized societies like India. It was very fashionable in newly independent
countries which were formerly part of the British Commonwealth, and where the British
Colonial Office after 1945 had emphasized the need for framing comprehensive welfare
programs. The International Labour Organisation spotlighted its universal implications. In an
ILO report of 1950, for example, it was stated that "the transformation of social insurance
is accompanied by the absorption of co-ordination of social assistance, and there begins to
emerge a new organisation for social security, which we can only describe as a service for the
citizenry at large. This new organisation now concerns society as a whole, though it is
primarily directed to the welfare of the workers and their families. It tends, therefore, to be-
come a part of national government, and social security policy accordingly becomes co-
ordinated closely with national policy for raising the standard of welfare and, in particular, for
promoting the vitality of the popula- tion."
Second, most "advanced" countries introduced sub- stantial welfare legislation. Scandinavia
led the way both in ideas and in scope of provision, but countries like France and Germany,
which had inherited very different patterns of provision, developed new systems, particularly
of social security, which by 1960 provided more generous benefits in real terms than those
offered in Britain. The British "welfare state" survived the fall of the Labour government in
1951, but it was before that fall that the costs of providing certain services under the national
health scheme forced the govern- ment--with Bevan resigning in protest--to impose
new direct charges. Britain ceased to lead the way in wel- fare legislation after 1951, although
nothing was done to dismantle existing structures, and in a period of increasing prosperity
there was no danger of the prob- lems of the 1930's repeating themselves in a new ver- sion of
economic and social crisis. In all countries unemployment, the main catalyst of prewar
discontent, was kept well below its prewar figures.
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The term "welfare state" itself lost its initial force during the 1960's, when "welfare" issues
were rede- fined, particularly in the United States. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964
launched a "war on poverty," but the difficulties of dealing adequately (locally or federally)
with poverty, in a society where the problem was inextricably entangled with ethnic
questions, explicitly directed attention to the "values" underlying the approach to all welfare
issues. They also led to a more searching examination of the basic economic and social
structures which most, though not all, of the sociologists and historians of the "welfare
state" had disposed of far too easily. New slogans emerged, and it became plain that the
circumstances which had led to the coinage of a lively new term after the end of the Second
World War had radically altered.
Given the difficulties of carrying over into historical analysis a term used in recent if not in
current politics, it is possible nonetheless to identify descriptively what a "welfare state" seeks
to do. It is a state in which organized power is deliberately used (through politics and
administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions:
first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum in- come irrespective of their work
or their property; second, by narrowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and
families to meet certain "so- cial contingencies" (for example, sickness, old age,
and unemployment) which could lead otherwise to indi- vidual or family crises; and third, by
ensuring that all individuals as citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the
best services available in relation to a certain agreed, if never finally fixed, range of
social services.
Such a definition points to some of the historical considerations which must always be
emphasized. First, the concept of "market forces" sets the problems of the "welfare state"
within the context of the age of modern political economy. In societies without
market economics, the problem of "welfare" raises quite sepa- rate issues. Second, the
concept of "social contin- gencies, is strongly influenced by the experience of industrialism.
Third, the idea of using organized power (through politics and administration) to determine
par- ticular patterns of welfare services rather than relying on other agencies must be set
within particular chronological frameworks. It was only with the advent of or the threat of
democratic politics and with the introduction of administrations which included or employed
experts that power could be deployed in this manner. Fourth, the range of agreed social
services must be a shifting range, with both economic and political factors influencing the
scope and scale of constituent itesm. Fifth, the idea of offering not "minima" but "optima," at
least in relation to some specified services, represented the major historical shift, from "the
social service state" to the "welfare state." Sixth, the definition leaves out motives and values.
For some advocates of a "welfare state," like Archbishop William Temple, one of the first
people to use the phrase in 1941, the "welfare state" rested on a moral ideal. For others it
crystallized as a set of expedients. For others it emerged as the product of inexorable political
pressures over a long period of time.
It follows from this historical account that the term "welfare state" even in its heyday has
usually been used vaguely rather than precisely, and that it has been employed more
frequently in political debate, often as a slogan, than in social and economic analysis.
Most usually, it has been identified through contrast rather than through explicit definition--
through contrast with a "laissez-faire" state or more recently with a "power state" or a
"warfare state," and little attention has been devoted to the different social and political
structures or institutions in the different societies to which the label has been attached.
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Socialist critics of the concept, like Richard M. Titmuss, have talked of going "be- yond" the
welfare state, drawing attention not only to its limits (in terms of redistribution of incomes
and the implementation of economic planning) but also to the uneven efforts of its operations
(for example, in satisfying the middle-class demand for health and edu- cation more
completely than the working-class need for health and education). They have agreed,
indeed, that the term hinders rather than assists an under- standing of "what is actually being
done in different societies." From a nonsocialist vantage point, Jacob Viner claimed in 1962
that "the welfare state is at best a hastily improvised system having characteristics stretching
all the way through the range from near- statism to near-anarchy. It is an unplanned
response to a host of historical forces and of political pressures which has not yet acquired
and may never acquire, an internally coherent and logically formulated philos- ophy. It is
undergoing constant change, and its move- ments forward, backwards and sideways, are not
guided by any clear and widely accepted consensus as it knows where it is going or where it
should go from here" (p. 226). Since 1962 the most interesting studies of the term have
concentrated on persisting patterns of stratification, and on differences of values within
the same society. The "consensus" of the wartime years helped to generate the dream, and the
reality of the "welfare state" has itself passed into history.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is a useful collection of articles and papers in S. P. Aiyer, ed., Perspectives on the
Welfare State (Bombay, 1966). There is no adequate history of the term or of the institutions
associated with it, but M. Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State (London, 1961) deals with
British expe- rience as a whole, and B. S. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in
Great Britain: the Origins of the Welfare State (London, 1966) and idem, British Social
Policy, 1916-1939 (London, 1970) examine fully some of the critical chapters. T. H.
Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1949) is a basic analysis. See also B.
Kirkman Gray, Philanthropy and the State (London, 1908); G. Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare
State (New Haven, 1958); R. M. Titmuss, Essays on "The Welfare State" (London, 1958) and
idem, Income Distribution and Social Change (London, 1962); W. G. Runciman, Relative
Deprivation and Social Justice (Berkeley, 1966); J. B. Condliffe, The Welfare State in
New Zealand (New York, 1959); S. B. Fry, "Bismarck's Welfare State," Current History, 18
(1950); C. W. Pitkin, Social Politics and Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (New York, 1931); H.
L. Wilenski and C. N. Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare Services in the United
States (New York, 1958); J. Viner, "The United States as a Welfare State," in S. W.
Higginbotham, ed., Man, Science, Learning and Education (Houston, 1962); M. L. Zald, ed.,
Social Welfare Institutions (New York, 1965).
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