Peter Baldwin

Can We Define a European Welfare State Model

Typologizing, as anyone who can still remember the tedium of memorizing the Linnaean hierarchy in high school biology will agree, is the lowest form of intellectual endeavour: necessary perhaps, a precondition no doubt for loftier and more sophisticated pursuits, but the preserve nonetheless of the bean counter and bookkeeper. The point of typologizing, of deciding which category or box something belongs in, is to highlight certain features shared in common that distinguish the members of one group from another. But unless the members of a certain category are identical, alike in all their characteristics, the act of typologizing will involve a decision that some features are important in a certain respect and others not. It is thus the theory that creates the typology, not the typology the theory. Linnaeus for example divided humans into six varieties: four-footed, red, white, yellow, black, and monstrous. A century later, in the mid-nineteenth century, his colleague Lorenz Oken, a speculative philosopher of the Romantic period, wondered why, given black, yellow and white humans, there were no blue or green ones and decided that colour was not the right criterion by which to categorize them, preferring instead a fivefold classification based on the sense organs: humans of the eye, nose, ear and so on. The typologizers of Linnaeus’s generation generally agreed that, all humans being descendant from Adam and Eve, no more essential a difference separated black and white people than did cows of a different hue (Banton, 1987, ch. 1).

The Scandinavian Origins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State

If a question can be mal posee , surely an interpretation can be mal etendue . This has been the fate of the social interpretation of the welfare state. The cousin of social theories of bourgeois revolution, the social interpretation of the welfare state is part of a broader conception of the course of modern European history that until recently has laid claim to the status of a standard. The social interpretation sees the welfare states of certain countries as a victory for the working class and confirmation of the ability of its political representatives on the Left to use universalist, egalitarian, solidaristic measures of social policy on behalf of the least advantaged. Because the poor and the working class were groups that overlapped during the initial development of the welfare state, social policy was linked with the workers needs. Faced with the ever-present probability of immiseration, the proletariat championed the cause of all needy and developed more pronounced sentiments of solidarity than other classes. Where it achieved sufficient power, the privileged classes were forced to consent to measures that apportioned the cost of risks among all, helping those buffeted by fate and social injustice at the expense of those docked in safe berths.

The Welfare State for Historians. A Review Article

ions of its universal features, are among the ways that history has long distinguished itself from the hard-core social sciences. It is precisely such a particularizing, contextualizing attitude among the remaining works on the welfare state under consideration here that sets them apart from earlier social scientific accounts. Take the intellectual development of G0sta Esping-Andersen as an example. Esping-Andersen is well known as one of the most supple and sophisticated formulators of the social democratic theory of the welfare state. He was among a group of scholars who first attacked the functionalist birds-eye approach to social policy that saw all nations passing through the crucible of industrialization or modernization and emerging willy-nilly as welfare states of one stripe or another. Esping-Andersen and his colleagues did not deny that all industrialized nations have social policies of some sort but argued that there were as many differences among them as similarities. The various degrees to which nations exerted themselves in social policy terms was due, they claimed, to their divergent political complexions. When the labor movement and the left was strong and well-organized (or, as in Castless corollary, when the right was fragmented), social policy of a particularly generous and expansive nature could be implemented; elsewhere, the sort of residual and rudimentary social programs required for merely functional reasons were all that was possible. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 04:46:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Liberalism, Nationalism, and Degeneration: The Case of Max Nordau

therefore of imperfectly formed mind. For Draculas and Nordaus contemporaries, however, no such fortuitous encounters were necessary. Nordau was a household name whose most popular books appeared in scores of editions in a dozen languages. As a personality he was as colossal as his reputation. As critic, philosopher, novelist, playwright, sociologist, versifier, orator, journalist, polyglot, Zionist, psychologist, and physician, his versatility is impressive even when measured against an age when many tried their hand at more than one thing. Scant traces are all that are left of his fame. As a critic of late nine?

The Past Rise of Social Security: Historical Trends and Patterns

When the hard social sciences seek the opinion of historians on any topic, it is usually a matter of politeness and courtesy rather than a trawl for real enlightenment. The attitude of the social sciences to history, or so it seems to most historians, is summed up in Catherine Morland’s famous line from Northanger Abbey: “History tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilence; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Nor, truth be told, have the lines of communication been more open in the other direction. Historians envy the influence and pecuniary pull of their methodological cousins while disdaining the—in their eyes—narrowly pragmatic and temporally blinkered approach followed by the more quantitatively oriented and generalizing of the social sciences.

Smug Britannia: The Dominance of (the) English in Current History Writing and Its Pathologies

Richard Evans, in his recent inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, claimed that British historians are more cosmopolitan than their continental European colleagues. They write more about other nations and they participate more in debates abroad. If true, this is a provocative assertion, raising the question as to why some cultures are curious about the world, while others rest self-contentedly in themselves. If restless curiosity about the world is laudable, then it is rare that a prominent historian trumpets the virtues of his country. Only in the nineteenth century did historians proclaim national pre-eminence, practically as part of their jobs. For Evans praises not just his colleagues. His tribute is to the cultural curiosity of the English-speaking world. ‘Anglophone societies’, he approvingly quotes a colleague, ‘seem to be fundamentally as interested in the pasts of other cultures as they are in their own’ (p. 8). Much of the book into which Evans’s lecture was padded (Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent, Oxford, 2009) is given over to summaries of modern British historiography and excerpts from colleagues’ emails. The interesting parts are quantitative. He has classified historians in the UK and US, France, Germany and Italy – whether they work on their national histories, on foreign countries, or on both. English-speaking historians, Evans shows, are much more active in writing the history of other countries than is true – mutatis mutandis – on the continent. Over half of Italian historians are working on their own nation. Substantially less than a

How Socialist is Solidaristic Social Policy? Swedish Postwar Reform as a Case in Point

The postwar welfare state, as epitomized by Beveridges Plan, seemed to mark a major departure from social policys traditional Bismarckian ambition to ameliorate and preserve existing social circumstances. Many have found the reason for this turnabout in the power that parties of the Left achieved in the immediate postwar years, in Britain and especially in Scandinavia where reform was most pronounced. The article questions this political pedigree by examining the origins of postwar reforms, in this case in Sweden, in the ambitions and interests of the bourgeois parties and by analyzing the initial reluctance of the Social Democrats to follow the new reforming initiatives coming from the parties of the middle classes.

Response to Evans

Because my article was not a review of Richard J. Evanss book, but a thought piece on broader topics prompted by his work, it does not stick only to issues discussed by him. What a shame that Cosmopolitan Islanders was largely ignored, as Evans reports, for he raises important questions. Part of the reason for the books stillbirth is exemplified in Evans’ response here: the self-isolation of the historical profession that is met by increasing indifference from the rest of the thinking world. Evanss concern to draw fine distinctions and quarantine history apart from all other social science is telling. Yes, Myrdal was a sociologist (well actually an economist, but no matter). And, yes, some of the foreign scholars I mention who write about the Anglosphere work on literature, not history as such. Why such vigorous policing of the disciplinary boundaries when larger issues are at stake? No wonder historians now have their largest audiences among the military history buffs while the more adventurous social sciences cash in on our work in ways we spurn. What William McNeill used to do has become the province of Francis Fukuyama.

Riding the subways of Gemeinschaft

the social democratic parties continued the Lutheran tradition in the construction of the welfare state (Østergård 1997:69)! These insights and suggestions for further research would enable us to root the Scandinavian welfare state in a large institutional and historical context. One could even argue that the fusion of state, society and church has been instrumental in creating a specific Scandinavian ’organization society’ (Selle 1996:86), permeated by social organization in which explicitly formulated ’democratic’ rules and obligations regulate people’s lives perhaps more than anywhere else. The state is only the highest level or stage in this process of organization. It is really a ’membership association’ (Brubaker 1992:71-72), which guarantees equal treatment, respect for everybody’s needs, etc., but for club members only. The pervasiveness of the organizational principle heightens the distinction between inclusion and exclusion that holds true for all modern states. No wonder that nationalistic exclusion

Book Reviews : Alfred Pfaller, Ian Gough and Göran Therbom (eds.), Can the Welfare State Compete? A Comparative Study of Five Advanced Capitalist Countries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991):

workers out of employment. These territorializing trends in combination with the continued one-party system and the lack of real democracy provided an excellent breeding ground for a new wave of ethnonationalisms that also fed on each other: in Kosovo, among Serbs, in Slovenia, and so forth. One essential point in Schierup’s analysis is its implication that the lightning ethnification of the Yugoslav party system in 1990-91 is only superficially similar to that after World War I; the causes are in important respects different. In his concluding chapter, ’Towards a