The Welfare State: a general theory Paul Spicker First published 2000 by Sage Publications, ISBN 0-7619-6704-4 and 0-7619-6705-2 © Paul Spicker The author retains the intellectual property. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, under the following conditions: ! Attribution: you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). ! Noncommercial: you may not use this work for commercial purposes. ! No Derivative Works: you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. To view a copy of the licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. 2 CONTENTS Method 6 I. PEOPLE AND SOCIETY 18 I.1. The person 15 People in society 15 The nature of the personal 17 Social obligations 20 I.2. Society 25 Collective action 25 Society and social relationships 29 Social structure 32 I.3. Social responsibility 38 Solidarity: altruism and responsibility 38 Mutual aid 41 Cohesion and exclusion 46 Social responsibility and social borders I.4. The moral community 52 Moral rules 52 The social construction of morality 54 Deviance and control 57 Moral approaches to social action 60 The moral community 61 II. WELFARE 65 II.1 The nature of welfare 66 Welfare 66 Poverty and exclusion 69 Responding to need 72 3 II.2 The preconditions for welfare 75 Economic development 75 Basic security 77 The structure of rights 79 II.3 Social protection 84 Social protection 84 The limits of the market 86 The social services 89 The moral basis of welfare provision II.4 Welfare and redistribution 94 Welfare in society 94 Social justice 98 Inequality 99 Redistribution 101 Redistribution between societies 104 III. THE STATE AND WELFARE 106 III.1 The role of the state 107 The nature of government 107 The state and society 111 Legitimate authority 113 III.2 The Welfare States 116 The state and welfare 116 Securing welfare 118 The provision of welfare 120 The welfare states 125 III.3 Social Policy 131 The promotion of welfare 131 Functions of social policy 133 Legitimate and illegitimate activity 135 III.4 State action 139 The state and social policy 139 4 Provision by the state 143 The production of welfare 146 Welfare strategies 149 Assessing social policy 151 Summary of the argument 153 Afterword 161 5 6 AUTHOR'S NOTE, 2015 The welfare state: a general theory was first published by Sage in 2000. Sage have agreed that the rights should revert to me, and I am making it freely available on the internet. Theory dates slowly, and I have not felt the need significantly to update what I wrote here, but in my later writing I have gone beyond some of the arguments raised here - particularly in relation to the final sections. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (2006) I looked at the arguments about principles in much greater depth, and Reclaiming individualism (Policy Press, 2013) makes a liberal case for expanding the role of government. I have made some alterations, but those are more about presentation than about content. The rather unusual format makes some demands of the typography - I had explained to the publishers that the book needed nine different layouts for headings. I have cut out some figures and tables, which don’t really display well in e-books, and have concentrated instead on making sure that the book will still make sense if someone tries to read it on an e-reader. The book had mixed reviews when it came out. Colin Clark wrote in the British Journal of Social Work: “This is an audacious book ... The attempt to lay out of the propositions of welfare in their barest form, and demonstrate their relations, is novel and challenging. It is the kind of book we may value as much for the disagreements it provokes as the answers it offers.” Others disliked the unconventional approach. It’s true that the effect of opening arguments with propositions - something I’d adapted from writers in philosophy - had a major effect on the style of the argument. Although I’ve largely left the text alone, I should say something about the evidence for the argument, which certainly has moved on. When I wrote this book, over fifteen years ago, much of what was happening in the world seemed to suggest I was running against the tide. People were writing about the crisis of welfare states; international organisations were still heavily committed to ‘structural adjustment’, expanding the private sector and cutting public policy down to size. If the argument in this book was right, that should not have been what was happening. I was making a case that welfare did not begin with the state, but that states had become increasingly committed to welfare, that welfare provision was becoming more generalised, and that once they had started on the road they found the pressures to do more hard to resist. It seems to me that this argument has been borne out very strongly in the intervening years. In the 1990s, some governments in developing countries had started to introduce Essential Health Care Packages; several had developed major schemes for universal primary education; others had started to develop systems of social assistance, which have taken root in the form of ‘conditional cash transfers’. It has been called a ‘quiet revolution’. In a field where most works focus on the differences between welfare states rather than their similarities, no-one has challenged me on the basic propositions. Paul Spicker 7 METHOD This book is a study in Social Policy, an academic subject concerned with the application of the social sciences to the study of social welfare. Social Policy does not have a distinctive disciplinary approach. The material which is used in this study is drawn from a number of sources, principally sociology, philosophy, politics and economics; at other times, there are references to material from history, psychology, anthropology and law. The argument develops a general theory of the welfare state. What is meant by a 'welfare state' will be explained in the course of the argument, but it is also important to explain what a 'general theory' is, and so what kind of book this is. Theory in social science Theory in social science begins with the process of describing empirical material, by disentangling facts from each other, and laying out a framework through which it can subsequently be analysed and understood. Scientific knowledge generally needs much more than description to flourish, but description comes first: biology has its taxonomies, carefully describing the classes of species, and social science has its descriptive systems, which help to explain what is happening and why it matters. The best known schemes for describing welfare states are probably those introduced by Richard Titmuss1 and Gøsta Esping-Andersen2. These models have important deficiencies3, and the kinds of generalisation they make are difficult to relate to welfare states in practice4. This book is concerned with a different type of description, and it` takes a different approach. The method of the book depends on a closely structured, and sometimes formal, reasoning. Formal reasoning in social science has largely been confined to economic theory, though there is also a specialised literature within sociology.5 Economic analysis, and particularly welfare economics, is largely based in a formalistic argument which describes the implications of certain types of action, rather than the question of whether people really behave in that way. If certain conditions obtain, the argument runs, then, other things being equal, certain consequences will follow. This kind of reasoning has been applied at several points in the argument of this book. For example, comparative advantage - the idea that people can produce more through specialisation and exchange than they can 1 R Titmuss, 1974, Social policy: an introduction, London: Allen and Unwin. 2 G Esping-Andersen, 1990, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Brighton: Polity. 3 P Spicker, 1996, Normative comparisons of social security systems, in L Hantrais, S Mangen (eds) Cross-national research methods in the social sciences, London: Pinter, pp.66-75. 4 D Mabbett, H Bolderson, 1999, Theories and methods in comparative social policy, in J Clasen (ed) Comparative social policy: concepts, theories and methods, Oxford: Blackwell. 5 R Boudon, 1974, The logic of sociological explanations, Harmondsworth: Penguin Education. 8 individually - is not a hypothesis; it can be demonstrated arithmetically or geometrically.6 The proof is not falsifiable, any more than the statement that “2 + 2 = 4” is falsifiable. References to the evidence serve, not to prove or disprove the theory, but to ground it - to show whether such conditions do, in fact, apply. This is the pattern of much of the argument of the book. The method is strongly associated with analytical theory, but this book is not simply an exercise in abstract reasoning. The formal arguments are related to the available evidence. This is not an argument a priori; it is grounded theory. Grounded theory is not the same thing as scientific deduction. Part of the received wisdom of social science is that a scientific theory should be empirically testable, and so that it must be falsifiable.7 This is right, but it is only half-right. In natural science, there is a place for classificatory systems, and for formal reasoning. (Karl Popper, the principal exponent of the test of falsifiability, accepted that it did not apply to every form of scientific activity8.) The same applies to social science.