The Sociological Context

Abstract

Changes to the economic and political circumstances of advanced capitalist societies over recent years make a reassessment of our way of theorising about welfare an urgent matter. These changes consist of a complex of factors, but important among them is an increasing reluctance on the part of governments to finance the welfare state. Governments in the liberal democracies are attempting to reverse the expansion of state provisions, that universal trend of the postwar decades which led theorists to coin the term ‘interventionist state’. The aim of this reversal was, very broadly, to strengthen the market and reduce the directly distributive role of the state.