Needs, Entitlements and Obligations: Towards a New Consensus on Welfare Policy

Abstract

Welfare policy, more than most other forms of public administration, is a poor, makeshift thing. It is vulnerable not only to the limitations of our collective resources, but also to the limitations of our common knowledge. As such, it is a branch of political activity susceptible to the cant of ‘moralism’, and to the sententious pursuit of nebulous political goals under the guise of humanitarian generosity.² But, at last, it has become possible — if not quite respectable — to say so. During the last decade, beginning in the United States, but now spreading across Western Europe, a new theoretical consensus has emerged amongst welfare analysts which has drawn considered opinion away from some of the vaguer invocations of political utopianism, and has concentrated critical attention upon the record — the mundane sociological record — of what forty years of state-sponsored welfarism have actually done for the poor and for the not-so-poor, in advanced societies. In the wake of this reappraisal, there are encouraging signs that welfare policy may yet mature into a branch of political activity and public administration that will be judged by its results, and not by its intentions, and still less by the self-justifications of those who earn their living from its provision. For the results of those four decades of effort, in this country as elsewhere, suggest, to those who would look at the evidence with open eyes, that an old theoretical orthodoxy about the provision of public welfare has finally hit the buffers.

I would like to thank the editor and Professor Nathan Glazer for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.