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Social Forces 82.1 (2003) 423-425



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Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. By Lynne Haney. University of California Press, 2002. 338 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $24.95.

Lynne Haney's Inventing the Needy challenges some of the central concepts we use to analyze social change in Eastern Europe (among them the very notions of "state socialism" and "capitalism") as well as the ways in which we conventionally carry out such analysis.

In this conceptually creative and abundantly well documented examination of the transformations of Hungary's welfare regimes in the second part of the twentieth century, Haney identifies three distinct periods and describes their specific architectures of need, that is, the ways in which state policies and those who devised and executed them constructed "needs" and, as a consequence, the "needy."

In the welfare society of the immediate post-World War II era the population's needs were defined in a relatively inclusive manner as social policy and redistribution came to be located in the emerging new social institutions that were designed to fulfill the Communist party's ambitious five-year plans. Welfare workers saw their role as enabling the realization of these plans and in this capacity attempted to solve a wide range of problems: those of alcoholic husbands, unhappy marital unions, misbehaving children, truant fathers, and difficult work hours, in addition to inadequate financial resources. Haney's empirical investigations uncover that this welfare regime meted out "more resources than is usually posited." Indeed, scholars often fail to look beyond the political oppression of the Stalinist period in early state socialist Hungary. Of course, Haney also notes elements of surveillance embedded in the all-encompassing nature of need definition as well as in the practices of welfare workers themselves. Indeed, clients in this period made claims to social provisions on the basis of good work performance, as well as, no doubt, political loyalty and working-class status. The archives of the party apparatus reveal that at least some caseworkers who so persistently sought work opportunities for women in need were also simultaneously sending secret reports to the local party cells that listed the names of those recalcitrant middle-class women who refused to give up their homemaker status. In this respect too, welfare policies along with their agents and clients became institutionalized as part of the larger political goal of building a better society. Haney's analysis "from below" provides a new understanding of this period and gives voice to some of the real — and [End Page 423] often forgotten — beneficiaries of welfare society: urban blue-collar workers, whose needs came to be recognized and met more efficiently in the post-World War II era than it had been at any time before.

After 1968 new concerns emerge in Hungarian policymaking: economic trends as well as a declining birth rate precipitate a reconfiguration of the architecture of needs. The architects of the new era include professionals and intellectuals, as well as the political and economic planners of the previous period. The emerging welfare regime, which Haney calls "maternalist," narrows the circle of the needy and redefines it to privilege mothers — on the condition that they provide the correct kind of mothering. Domesticity tests of all kinds, as well as "scientific" interpretative work and institutional change, help establish mothers as the new group of welfare clients. Women themselves learn to make demands on the basis of their mothering — rather than work — performance. Haney's enlightening and richly illustrated description of the construction of the good mother/bad mother tracks provides a wonderful contrast to similar efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere. Correcting previous accounts that characterize this period as that of a decline in state involvement in everyday life, Haney argues that rather than withdrawing, the state shifted its focus and redefined its role and clientele.

Finally, Haney's discussion of the third period is refreshingly devoid of prescriptive patterns and models of transformation. She argues that the most recent welfare regime started to take shape in 1985 — not in...

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