The end of the welfare state?

The halcyon days The founders themselves would have been keenly sensitive to the diversity of motives and models underlying what we now know as ‘the’ welfare state. Bismarck’s conservative corporatist version built on frankly neo-feudal foundations to buy social peace. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s social democratic model aimed to generate more Swedish babies (Tilton 1990). The British welfare state was principally the product of two renegade Liberals, Lloyd George and Beveridge (Beveridge 1942). The American welfare state was a patrician Democrat’s noblesse oblige response to the Great Depression, relieving distress among the old and disabled, the widowed and the chronically ill (Hofstadter 1948, ch. 12). These distinctive trajectories are regularly revisited by theorists of the welfare state, some in search of typologies (Titmuss 1974, ch. 2; Esping-Andersen 1990; Goodin et al. 1999), others simply revelling in the utter uniqueness of their own country’s distinctive history and particular programmes (Skocpol 1992; Castles 1985). As a matter of historical record, no doubt they are right. In terms of policy analysis likewise, causes and consequences of different welfare regimes sometimes clearly matter (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981). Still, the received view of ‘the welfare state’ that has passed into contemporary political thought is of a much more unified phenomenon. In popular memory and broader political discourse ‘the welfare state’ was something born of shared wartime suffering and the Great Depression; it was animated by the desire to meet needs and promote social equality; and it operates on and through broadly capitalist economies managed along broadly Keynesian lines.