The Social Programs of Sweden: A Search for Security in a Free Society.

Abstract

The achievement of a welfare society has been a major objective of every modern industrial state. Quite appropriately, this emphasis upon the protection of the individual against economic misfortune has led to a growing interest in the study of social welfare problems and programs. The two volumes reviewed here are timely contributions to a vast yet still deficient literature on the subject. Although they cover different countries, they complement each other in a very meaningful way. The late Professor Mencher is concerned with the question of how the welfare society came to be, whereas Professor Rosenthal discusses the characteristics of one of the most advanced welfare societies in the world today. The central theme of Mencher's book is the development of social responsibility for the economic welfare of the individual. He is not so much interested in specific methods or levels of protection as in the essential willingness of society to adopt a policy of protection. His study covers the historical experience of England and America from roughly the sixteenth century to the present. Such a vast subject inevitably poses difficult problems of historical analysis. Mencher tackles this problem by using contract and status as his frame of reference. He sees the evolution of social policy since the Reformation as a continuing conflict between contract and status relationships, and he notes three distinguishable historical periods. The first, from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century, was a period of growing contract relationships; the second is the nineteenth century, which is characterized by a revival of status influences; the third period is the twentieth century, which is interpreted as a mixture of status and contract relationships (p. xviii). The concepts of contract and status are useful in understanding the development of social rights. Whether such rights are acquired as a matter of contract or status has important implications for social policy. This is especially true with regard to the right to protection of able-bodied individuals. It is the development of their rights, as Mencher correctly emphasizes, which has historically aroused the most controversy. Unfortunately, as a framework for the historical analysis of social policy, the contract-status concepts leave much to be desired. They have a raflier limited heuristic value, either for identifying broad historical patterns or for analysing particular forms of behaviour. This is illustrated by the doubtful value of the periodization that Mencher derives from these concepts. He may have been aware of this, since he organizes the book around a more conventional periodization. He divides the study into four parts: Mercantilism; From Mercantilism to Laissez-Faire; the Era of Laissez-Faire; and Toward the Welfare State. The weakness of the analytical framework is evident also in the rather diffuse character of the book. Mencher sets the evolution of social policy