Introduction

Abstract

This collection of essays has been written by an international team of scholars on a range of issues around the theme of the state and caring. Each of the contributors focuses on an aspect of state care which is to be found in all modern societies — that is, in all those societies of the advanced industrial, liberal democratic type. It is in such societies that the state ostensibly plays a leading and major caring role, promoting people’s welfare through a wide range of social activities, arrangements and devices, including social policy, social services, education, housing provision, health facilities, income maintenance and the legal framework. A prominent thread running through the essays is composed of the following questions: How well does the state ‘care’? Does the state through its caring activities and devices simply add to — or does it also subtract from — people’s welfare? How might the answers to the previous questions be accounted for? Why does the state care in the way it does? Is there an associated or hidden agenda behind the state’s caring role? In particular, to what extent does state care also entail state control — and to what extent can state care be accounted for in terms of state control?