Can We Define a European Welfare State Model?

Abstract

Typologizing, as anyone who can still remember the tedium of memorizing the Linnaean hierarchy in high school biology will agree, is the lowest form of intellectual endeavour: necessary perhaps, a precondition no doubt for loftier and more sophisticated pursuits, but the preserve nonetheless of the bean counter and bookkeeper. The point of typologizing, of deciding which category or box something belongs in, is to highlight certain features shared in common that distinguish the members of one group from another. But unless the members of a certain category are identical, alike in all their characteristics, the act of typologizing will involve a decision that some features are important in a certain respect and others not. It is thus the theory that creates the typology, not the typology the theory. Linnaeus for example divided humans into six varieties: four-footed, red, white, yellow, black, and monstrous. A century later, in the mid-nineteenth century, his colleague Lorenz Oken, a speculative philosopher of the Romantic period, wondered why, given black, yellow and white humans, there were no blue or green ones and decided that colour was not the right criterion by which to categorize them, preferring instead a fivefold classification based on the sense organs: humans of the eye, nose, ear and so on. The typologizers of Linnaeus’s generation generally agreed that, all humans being descendant from Adam and Eve, no more essential a difference separated black and white people than did cows of a different hue (Banton, 1987, ch. 1).