The Scandinavian Origins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State Author(S): Peter Baldwin Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History The Scandinavian Origins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State Author(s): Peter Baldwin Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 3-24 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178792 . Accessed: 31/01/2011 12:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History. http://www.jstor.org The ScandinavianOrigins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State PETER BALDWIN Harvard University If a question can be mal posee, surely an interpretationcan be mal etendue. This has been the fate of the social interpretationof the welfare state. The cousin of social theories of bourgeois revolution, the social interpretationof the welfare state is part of a broader conception of the course of modem Europeanhistory that until recently has laid claim to the status of a standard. The social interpretationsees the welfare states of certain countries as a victory for the working class and confirmationof the ability of its political representativeson the Left to use universalist, egalitarian, solidaristic measures of social policy on behalf of the least advantaged.Because the poor and the workingclass were groups that overlappedduring the initial development of the welfare state, social policy was linked with the worker's needs. Faced with the ever-presentprobability of immiseration,the proletariatchampioned the cause of all needy and developed more pronounced sentiments of soli- daritythan other classes.2 Where it achieved sufficient power, the privileged classes were forced to consent to measuresthat apportionedthe cost of risks among all, helping those buffetedby fate and social injusticeat the expense of those docked in safe berths. One of the attractionsof the social interpretationof the welfare state has been its snug fit with a broader social interpretationof Western European history. In this, the bourgeois revolution paved the way for liberal capitalist democracy, which, in turn, would eventually be swept away in the proletariat'srise to power. Merely a reading of past events, the first half of this analysis was left to historiansto pick over. The second containeda prediction that has proven to be inaccurate.As a result, there developed an alternative This essay is partof a largerstudy on "The Politics of Social Solidarityand the Class Basis of the EuropeanWelfare State, 1875-1975" that will also cover France, Germany, and Britain. I am gratefulto LawrenceStone, Peter Mandler,and other membersof the Davis Seminarat Princeton for a thorough working over, and to the American-ScandinavianFoundation for resources to conduct the research. I also owe Daniel Levine a helpful reading of the manuscript. 1 Jean-JacquesDupeyroux, Evolution et tendances des systemes de Securite sociale des pays membresdes communauteseuropeennes et de la Grande-Bretagne(Luxembourg, 1966), 55-59. 2 Franz-XaverKaufmann, Sicherheit als soziologisches und sozialpolitischesProblem: Unter- suchungen zu einer Wertideehochdifferenzierter Gesellschaften (Stuttgart, 1970), 18. 0010-4175/89/1163-2336 $5.00 ? 1989 Society for ComparativeStudy of Society and History 3 4 PETER BALDWIN version of the social interpretation,a reformistsocialist account that sought to identify significant victories won peacefully by the Left to mark a gradual transformationfrom the bourgeois era to that of the working class. In this scheme, certainsocial-policy reformsin certaincountries took the place of the socialist revolution.Under the right circumstances,social policy went beyond fine tuning the capitalist system or appeasing the laboring classes. Certain kinds of social policy restrictedthe rule of the marketover basic conditions of existence, taking a step beyond capitalism. The social interpretationof the welfare state became part of a social-democratic variant of the traditional Marxist reading of modem history. Its outcome was social reform, not socialist revolution; a pensioned, not a dictatorial,proletariat; not the stateless society, but the welfare state. Although simple, the social interpretationof the welfare state was not immediatelyobvious. It seemed to work only for some countries. It fit certain periods better than others. In liberal Britain, the working class was at best partially responsible for first forays into welfare statism. Even worse, Bismarck's Bonapartistgoals were impossible to reconcile with the social interpretation.The working class was the passive object of social policy, not its initiator. Welfare measures were meant to preserve an unjust order by improving, while not fundamentallychanging it. On the other hand, William Beveridge and Labour'sreforms in Britainafter World War II and the success of egalitarian social policy in socialist Scandinavia, offered examples of an alternativeapproach to the welfare state, one that went beyond liberal tinker- ing, one that reflected the interestsof workers, not their masters. Out of this contrast a conceptual tension developed between at least two kinds of social policy, two kinds of welfare states: the conservative and the authentically reformist. Observersof the Anglo-Scandinavianscene (especially afterWorld War II) could, and largely did, rest content with some variantof the social interpretation.3Observers of other countrieswere left to seek explanationsfor why social policy there did not resemble this ideal. The result has been a curious ambivalence about the social interpretation.Often taken for granted, rarely articulated, it frequently lies implicit in discussions of social policy without informingthem. The cause of this mixtureof widespreadassumption and rudimentaryexpression is a fundamentalambiguity at the heart of the welfare state as an historical concept. The bourgeois revolution, in the mannerthat constructwas used before its recent decline, assumed its classic form in France. Subsequentand analogous events in Germanywere judged a failurein comparisonto what they ought, by 3 This is why general histories only of Britainand Sweden seek to define the essence of their currentincarnations as welfare states: T. O. Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State: English History, 1906-1967 (Oxford, 1970); Pauline Gregg, The WelfareState: An Economic and Social History of Great Britainfrom 1945 to the Present Day (London, 1967); Kurt Samuelson, From Great Power to WelfareState: Three Hundred Years of Swedish Social Development (London, 1968). SCANDINAVIAN ORIGINS OF WELFARE STATE 5 this account, to have been. The ideal natureof the French phenomenon was not marredby Germany's inability to emulate it. On the contrary, not the model, but the circumstancesacross the Rhine were pronouncedan aberra- tion. For the welfare state, the path from event to interpretation,from the classic historicalexample to its deviations, was reversed. At almost the same time as Bismarcktainted the bourgeois revolutionin Germanyby imposing it from above on the class that ought, in the traditionalsocial interpretation,to have been its initiator,he associatedthe inaugurationof the welfare state with the preservationof an archaic social order, the smooth functioning of the capitalist system, the political dominationof conservatives.4 The social interpretationof the welfare state has been made possible only to the extent that social policy was freed from its tie to Bismarck and Bonaparte and associatedpositively with the downtrodden,particularly the workers, and their strivings for greaterequality and a fairerdistribution of burdens. Based on a selective reading of certain historical experiences, it was first made plausible by the world-wide push for a universalist, egalitariansocial policy that culminated during the final years of World War II, spilling over into majorattempts at change, of which the Beveridge Plan and Clement Attlee's legislation were the crowning achievements. The postwar wave of reform underminedthe Bonapartistview of social policy that Bismarck's legislation had encouraged. Social policy could be used for reactionarypurposes, but, given the right circumstances, social legislation could also be the autono- mous, authenticallyemancipatory action of the underprivileged. While Labour's reforms inaugurateda new conception of social policy, they were

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