Enterprise and the Welfare State: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Do ‘welfare states’ enhance or subvert economic enterprise, civic virtue, private moral character, the integrity of social life? Though these questions have a piquantly contemporary ring in modern British politics, they are nevertheless old quandaries in the history of social policy. Since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, practitioners, theorists and critics of public welfare schemes have argued for and against such schemes in contradictory and adversarial terms; claiming on the one hand that social welfare schemes would supply a humanitarian corrective to the rigours of market economy; and on the other hand that they would support and streamline market forces by enhancing individual effort and collective efficiency. Similarly, for several hundred years models of civic morality which emphasise independence and self-sufficiency have jostled with alternative models which emphasise paternalism, altruism and organic solidarity.¹ Few phases of social policy in Britain and elsewhere have not contained elements of more than one approach. Even the New Poor Law, notorious for its subordination to market pressures, nevertheless harboured certain residual anti-market principles and often lapsed into practices that were suspiciously communitarian;²