Introduction and overview: Capitalist welfare societies

Abstract

Are European welfare states sustainable? How can social citizenship be financed in the future? These are the questions this book attempts to answer. According to our perspective, welfare states are not independent entities, as social policy studies might suggest. On the contrary, instituted welfare arrangements are organic ingredients of European capitalist societies, and are characteristic of the particular development of capitalist societies in Europe. Not situating the welfare state arrangements in capitalist development imposes, in our view, a limited perspective on the subject. Indeed, in Western Europe an original development took place with the development of capitalist welfare societies in the last two centuries, which only much later began to spread to other parts of the world. Indeed, starting in the nineteenth century, a number of social entitlements have been instituted in Western European societies, enabling aspects of social citizenship. What was new was not so much the fact that forms of support are provided for certain categories of residents. Churches, local communities, factory owners and professional organisations, such as guilds, all provided specific kinds of support, but generally with a rather paternalistic attitude, and directed at specific and very limited populations.