it, was thus very much on her mind: people should cooperate, they should work together for the common good and no one should be left out.
Welfare states were not necessarily socialist in origin or purpose. They were the product of another sea change in public affairs that overtook the West between the ’30s and the ’60s: one that drew experts and scholars, intellectuals and technocrats into the business of administration. The result, at its best, was the American Social Security system, or Britain’s National Health Service. Both were extraordinarily expensive innovations, breaking with the piecemeal reforms and repairs of the past.
The importance of such welfare undertakings did not lie in the ideas themselves—the thought that it would be good to guarantee all Americans a secure old age, or to make available to every British citizen first-class medical treatment at no point-of-service cost, was hardly original. But the thought that such things were best done by the government and that therefore they should be done by the government: this was unprecedented.
Precisely how such services and resources should be made available was always a contentious issue. Universalists, influential in Britain, favored high across-the-board taxation to pay for services and resources to which all would have equal access. Selectivists preferred to calibrate costs and benefits according to the needs and capacities of each citizen. These were practical choices, but they also reflected deeply held social and moral theories.
The Scandinavian model followed a more selective but also more ambitious program: its goal, as articulated by the influential Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, was to institutionalize the state’s responsibility to “protect people against themselves.” 10 Neither Americans nor British had any such ambitions. The idea that it was the state’s business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.
Even at their height, the Scandinavian welfare states left the economy to the private sector—which was then taxed at very high rates to pay for social, cultural and other services. What Swedes, Finns, Danes and Norwegians offered themselves was not collective ownership but the guarantee of collective protection . With the exception of Finland, Scandinavians all had private pension schemes—something that would have seemed very odd to the English or even most Americans in those days. But they looked to the state for almost everything else, and freely accepted the heavy hand of moral intrusion that this entailed.
The welfare states of continental Europe—what the French call the Etat providence , or providential state—followed yet a third model. Here, the emphasis was primarily on protecting the employed citizen against the ravages of the market economy. It should be noted that ‘employed’ here is no casual adjective. In France, Italy and West Germany it was the maintenance of jobs and incomes in the face of economic misfortune that preoccupied the welfare state.
To the American or even the modern English eye, this must seem peculiar indeed. Why protect a man or woman against the loss of a job which no longer produces anything people want? Surely it is better to acknowledge capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ and wait for better jobs to come along? But from the continental European perspective, the political implications of throwing large numbers of people onto the street at times of economic downturn were far more consequential than the hypothetical efficiency loss in maintaining ‘unnecessary’ jobs. Like the 18th century guilds, French or German labor unions learned how to protect ‘insiders’—men and women who already have secure employment—against ‘outsiders’: the young, the unskilled and others in search of work.
The effect of this sort of social protection state was and is to
Welfare states were not necessarily socialist in origin or purpose. They were the product of another sea change in public affairs that overtook the West between the ’30s and the ’60s: one that drew experts and scholars, intellectuals and technocrats into the business of administration. The result, at its best, was the American Social Security system, or Britain’s National Health Service. Both were extraordinarily expensive innovations, breaking with the piecemeal reforms and repairs of the past.
The importance of such welfare undertakings did not lie in the ideas themselves—the thought that it would be good to guarantee all Americans a secure old age, or to make available to every British citizen first-class medical treatment at no point-of-service cost, was hardly original. But the thought that such things were best done by the government and that therefore they should be done by the government: this was unprecedented.
Precisely how such services and resources should be made available was always a contentious issue. Universalists, influential in Britain, favored high across-the-board taxation to pay for services and resources to which all would have equal access. Selectivists preferred to calibrate costs and benefits according to the needs and capacities of each citizen. These were practical choices, but they also reflected deeply held social and moral theories.
The Scandinavian model followed a more selective but also more ambitious program: its goal, as articulated by the influential Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, was to institutionalize the state’s responsibility to “protect people against themselves.” 10 Neither Americans nor British had any such ambitions. The idea that it was the state’s business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.
Even at their height, the Scandinavian welfare states left the economy to the private sector—which was then taxed at very high rates to pay for social, cultural and other services. What Swedes, Finns, Danes and Norwegians offered themselves was not collective ownership but the guarantee of collective protection . With the exception of Finland, Scandinavians all had private pension schemes—something that would have seemed very odd to the English or even most Americans in those days. But they looked to the state for almost everything else, and freely accepted the heavy hand of moral intrusion that this entailed.
The welfare states of continental Europe—what the French call the Etat providence , or providential state—followed yet a third model. Here, the emphasis was primarily on protecting the employed citizen against the ravages of the market economy. It should be noted that ‘employed’ here is no casual adjective. In France, Italy and West Germany it was the maintenance of jobs and incomes in the face of economic misfortune that preoccupied the welfare state.
To the American or even the modern English eye, this must seem peculiar indeed. Why protect a man or woman against the loss of a job which no longer produces anything people want? Surely it is better to acknowledge capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ and wait for better jobs to come along? But from the continental European perspective, the political implications of throwing large numbers of people onto the street at times of economic downturn were far more consequential than the hypothetical efficiency loss in maintaining ‘unnecessary’ jobs. Like the 18th century guilds, French or German labor unions learned how to protect ‘insiders’—men and women who already have secure employment—against ‘outsiders’: the young, the unskilled and others in search of work.
The effect of this sort of social protection state was and is to
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