Postwar Welfare Research Articles

A Polanyi-inspired perspective on social-ecological transformations of cities

ABSTRACT Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally specific modes of living, grounded in different classes and milieus. We show how, today, two modes of living—“traditional,” established during postwar welfare capitalism, and “liberal,” formed during neoliberal capitalism—co-exist. In the current conjuncture of rising inequality, neoliberal urban regeneration, and accelerating climate crisis, these modes of living are not only increasingly polarized and antagonistic, but also increasingly unable to satisfy needs and self-defined aspirations. Therefore, we explore the potential of social-ecological infrastructural configurations as an alliance-building project for a systemic social-ecological transformation, potentially linking different classes, social segments and forces around a common eco-social endeavor.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

Abstract This article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

How Poverty Became a Violation of Human Rights: The Production of a New Political Subject, France and Belgium, 1964–88

The institutionalization of guaranteed minimum income systems in France and Belgium, carried out through the modernization of assistance schemes (Minimex in 1974, RMI in 1988), has generally been presented as the political outcome of the “rediscovery” of “hidden” poverty in the “affluent” societies of the mid-1960s. This article argues that a vision of this shift in terms of a “discovery,” however, suffers from significant limitations. To understand the historical pedigree of the reforms, this article will examine how the issue of “poverty” as such, was not simply “discovered” as a neglected social ill, but rather, “produced” to allow for new techniques of social intervention. The theoretical discovery of the “poverty” issue then, was marked by the slow constitution of a new political subject known as the “poor,” whose categorization and conceptualization would stand in stark opposition to the postwar welfare state notions of social justice and equality.

Sources and Resources'The NHS … Should not be Condemned to the History Books': Public Engagement as a Method in Social Histories of Medicine.

SummaryThis article explores the public engagement work of the Cultural History of the National Health Service (NHS) project, conducted at the University of Warwick between 2016 and 2019 and aiming to explore the meanings attached to Britain’s NHS over its 70-year history. The article situates public engagement as a critical methodology for social historians of medicine, exploring how events deepened this project’s understandings of post-war welfare, childhood treatments and activist cultures. Through reflection on these themes, the article emphasises that public engagement can generate rich new forms of qualitative testimony, complementing archival documents; point us towards ‘hidden archives’; and challenge cultural visions of historical research as ‘condemning’ or ‘celebrating’ its subjects. Finally, the article provides critical reflection on the challenges of such work and argues that engagement around health makes visible the broader research challenges of emotional intensity, personal and professional boundaries, and the hierarchies ingrained in academic research.

“Good” and “Bad” Workers and the Collapse of the Expected Life Course: The Postwar Working Class in Detroit (USA) and Łódź (Poland), 1940s–1980s

Two former industrial giants on opposite sides of the globe—the well-known and extensively studied city of Detroit (USA) and the lesser-known but regionally important city of Łódź (Poland)—developed in historically differing economic and political circumstances but have much in common. In both cases, postwar prosperity brought the working class to the center of the social imaginary, resulting in the emergence of a corporate welfare state on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and a socialist one on the other. Thus, two “workers’ El Dorados” were based on almost opposite lifestyles, values and models of society, and each lasted for no more than one generation. Changes in industrial structures and locations, the inflexibility of the mono-industrial giants, and a general shift to late capitalism and the post-Fordist mode of production affected both cities. Workers’ biographies were experienced through the primacy of work as a means of individual, social, and state reproduction. Factory work offered a device for the allocation of social worth and welfare benefits across time in both contexts. The latter is examined by the construct of a “good worker” and the creation of an imagined, expected life course in the postwar welfare projects, as well as the generational division of workers.

Radio Broadcasting, Disability Activism, and the Remaking of the Postwar Welfare State

Through the history of the short-lived 1947 radio show La Tribune de l’Invalide, this article examines how the social and political context of the Liberation offered disability activists a unique opportunity to demand pensions, medical care, and social services hitherto denied to them by the French state. Drawing on transcripts of the broadcasts and correspondence between listeners and the show’s host Maurice Didier, the article demonstrates how disability activists played a pivotal, if little acknowledged, role in the construction of the postwar welfare state by highlighting French society’s historic neglect of disabled civilians.

La famille après la Shoah : les maisons d’enfants à l’épreuve de la reconstruction

This article examines the crisis that confronted French Jewry as it struggled to reconstruct families that had been torn asunder by the war in the first few years following the Liberation.. At the moment when politicians and psychologists throughout Europe promoted the family as instrumental to social reconstruction, Jewish child welfare activists preferred a collectivist approach. This article focuses on the debates, as well as the policies and educational programs instituted by postwar child welfare workers, as they experimented with new models for social organization.

“Hard Times Make for Hard Arteries and Hard Livers”: Deindustrialization, Biopolitics, and the Making of a New Working Class

Abstract This article argues for a view of “actually existing neoliberalism,” identifying points of continuity from midcentury social democracy and showing how American neoliberalism developed unevenly across a preexisting landscape. It does so with a case study of labor market transformation in Pittsburgh, showing a causal relationship between the New Deal state’s institutional structures and the rise of low-wage employment in health care in the 1970s and 1980s. The low-wage service economy did not only come after the high-wage industrial economy: it grew out of it, sped by the decline of steel manufacturing and shaped within the distinctive matrix of the postwar public-private welfare. In establishing this historical process, the article also suggests that social history can play a useful conceptual role linking Foucauldian and Marxist accounts of neoliberalism, by showing concretely the role of the production of subjectivity and the governance of population in the establishment of the neoliberal economic regime. Pointing to a homology between the structural role of incarceration in neoliberalism and that of health care, the article suggests the term “biopolitical Keynesianism” for understanding this conceptual synthesis, which uncovers new contradictions within neoliberalism.

Exhausted Women, Exhausted Welfare and the Role of Religion

This themed collection is bound together by some foundational observations which have been well documented in earlier research. European post-war welfare systems face challenges related to aging populations, globalization, migration, changing patterns of family and gender roles. The post-war model of welfare dependent on the idea of stable heterosexual families, with male breadwinners and women carers is giving way to more individualized and mobile systems. The four articles and commentary in this issue provide glimpses of the issues within this field that unite contexts as diverse as the Nordic countries, Brazil and the United States. They explore the intersection of welfare, religion and gender charting gendered problems in welfare provision in relation to religious organisation, affiliation and identity. This issue provides examples of how the exhaustion of women and welfare systems is interconnected and the understanding of this crucial to any attempts to reform welfare systems to enhance social inclusion or reduce exclusion.

Conceptualizing Activation Policies Targeted at Single Mothers: A Case Study of Australia and the United Kingdom

AbstractSingle parents are increasingly a target group for “activation” through new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterize new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as “carers” or “mothers”. This characterization downplays the degree to which the postwar welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the degree to which contemporary reforms view them as carers. Based on historical research and drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power, this article seeks to extend existing characterizations of activation policies for single parents.

A new materiality in praise of the ordinary, in Palestine-Israel c. 1940–66

This article examines the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s. I refer here to two distinct but interrelated senses of the word materiality. The first is predicated on the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions in which architecture, like all fields of artistic production, takes shape; the second reflects the use, handling, and finishing of materials in construction. I show how several key figures in architectural circles in the recently founded State of Israel expressed this new materiality by developing a new style, characterised by restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use and exposure of local materials, an emphasis on the legibility of structure, and an appeal to rational building procedures. This style was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the postwar welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks from the interwar period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as disciplinary.

Creating a common world through action: what participation in community activities means to older people

AbstractAs a response to demographic ageing, various governments have been promoting social policies that promote older people's participation in productive activities, including those outside the formal labour market. Nevertheless, older people's behaviours do not simply reflect government policies and intentions. This paper explores how older people themselves interpret their social roles within a policy context that seeks to position them as providers of welfare through their participation in community activities. For this purpose, this paper draws on a qualitative case study of older people in Japan engaging in health promotion and mutual aid among local residents. By employing Hannah Arendt's distinction between the human activities of labour, work and action as a conceptual framework, it finds that although the purported purpose of community activities was to substitute decreasing pensions and family care or to create a better community, participants in this study valued their activities as a process of creating new relations and new realities through action. The paper argues that while labour has occupied a predominant position in the post-war welfare paradigm, community activities by an expanding population of older people may offer opportunities for action, which were not always available through paid work or care-giving in the household.

‘Make America Great Again’ and the Constitutive Loss of Nothingness

Trump’s campaign slogan forces us to ask a simple question: when was America great? Surely, what he has in mind here is the America of the post-war Fordist and Keynesian social welfare models, which saw both the rise of the new suburban middle class and the rise of the white patriarchal figure, the Oedipal agent of the ‘father who knows best’. But the coming post-Fordist society has figured the dismantling of the welfare model under the austerity regimes of neoliberalism, at the same time displacing the phallic signifier of paternal authority. Is it possible to bring back white masculine power and the model that made possible the suburban middle class? Or is ‘America’ the lost object that cuts into the Trumpian imaginary? The American utopia in ‘Make America Great Again’, is the very nothingness out of which the loss constitutive of Trumpian ideology consists, turning it instead into an American nightmare.

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

ABSTRACTBritish idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.

Visions of Utopia

Drawing on manuscripts and transcripts of BBC programme output, and material from the Radio Times, and the BBC’s The Listener magazine, this article analyses radio talks and programmes that focused on Sweden in the immediate years after the Second World War when the Swedish model was widely popularised abroad. The article argues that BBC output entangled domestic politics and transnational ideas around post-war reconstruction and welfare. Sweden was used as a lens through which a modern welfare state could be visualised and justified. This was however Utopia in two senses since the image of Sweden presented was in itself a highly idealised representation.

Decolonizing the New Town: Roy Gazzard and the Making of Killingworth Township

AbstractWhat better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.

The Welfare State and Modern Sovereignty

The paper analyses the current position of the welfare state and how it is reflected in the recent literature. It criticizes contributions that try to advocate the welfare state as a hallmark of European civilization, as they lack the proper analytical method to do so. It proposes an original approach that reveals a structural analogy that exists between the welfare state and the modern sovereign state. In a short historical survey, it demonstrates that during the process of its formation, the modern state gained structural elements that on one hand created a foundation for its later transformation into the welfare state, but on the other hand became a source of deep distrust. As this distrust also influenced the development of the post-war welfare system, the entire project eventually became vulnerable to ideological criticism. The paper shows that today’s condemnations of the welfare state for its alleged non-affordability are but an echo of an older ideological – populist and liberal – distrust of the state itself. Finally, the paper attempts to argue in favour of both the modern sovereign state and the welfare state by developing an argument for their de facto existence and usefulness and showing the fundamental fallacy of the counter-arguments of its critics.

Citizenship and Learning Disabled People: The Mental Health Charity MIND's 1970s Campaign in HistoricalContext.

Current policy and practice directed towards people with learning disabilities originates in the deinstitutionalisation processes, civil rights concerns and integrationist philosophies of the 1970s and 1980s. However, historians know little about the specific contexts within which these were mobilised. Although it is rarely acknowledged in the secondary literature, MIND was prominent in campaigning for rights-based services for learning disabled people during this time. This article sets MIND’s campaign within the wider historical context of the organisation’s origins as a main institution of the inter-war mental hygiene movement. The article begins by outlining the mental hygiene movement’s original conceptualisation of ‘mental deficiency’ as the antithesis of the self-sustaining and responsible individuals that it considered the basis of citizenship and mental health. It then traces how this equation became unravelled, in part by the altered conditions under the post-war Welfare State, in part by the mental hygiene movement’s own theorising. The final section describes the reconceptualisation of citizenship that eventually emerged with the collapse of the mental hygiene movement and the emergence of MIND. It shows that representations of MIND’s rights-based campaigning (which have, in any case, focused on mental illness) as individualist, and fundamentally opposed to medicine and psychiatry, are inaccurate. In fact, MIND sought a comprehensive community-based service, integrated with the general health and welfare services and oriented around a reconstruction of learning disabled people’s citizenship rights.

Housing the Citizen-Consumer in Post-war Britain: The Parker Morris Report, Affluence and the Even Briefer Life of Social Democracy.

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Politics of ‘Minimum Wage’ Welfare States: The Changing Significance of the Minimum Wage in the Liberal Welfare Regime

AbstractIt is an indisputable reality that the English‐speaking welfare states have retreated from their distinct postwar welfare state compromises in ways that prompt many to wonder what is still liberal about the liberal welfare states. Considering developments in minimum wage institutions and politics in five liberal welfare states, this article argues that the apparent renewed politicization of the minimum wage – driven by legislative action and activist campaigns from below – is an inevitable consequence of the twin policies of labour market deregulation and workfare‐centred social policies. A larger electorate of low‐paid workers, including those in full‐time work, combined with rising concerns from the public about the extent and injustice of poverty wages are important factors drawing renewed attention to the politics and policy of minimum wages. However, I also show that policymakers have additional incentives to embrace higher minimum wages: the economic orthodoxy in favour of low minimum wages has steadily lost credibility, and legislating for wage increases enables a predistributive strategy with the potential to shift the burden of addressing inequalities from fiscally‐strained governments to employers. Drawing on policy and political developments from across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, I make the claim that the politicization of minimum wages offers genuine insight into the future battles over what is ‘liberal’ about the liberal welfare states.