The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914: Social Policies Compared (review)

Hennock has in the past made an important contribution to the comparative history of British and German social policy. This volume takes his work further by examining poor relief, sickness and industrial injury, invalidity, old age, and unemployment policies between the mid-nineteenth century and 1914. Its main focus is the new light shed on German social policy by three volumes of documents on German (mainly Prussian, as Hennock points out) social policy; a fourth volume is forthcoming).¹ As Hennock also makes clear, the survey of social policy in England and Wales (Scottish social policy often followed different tracks) is essentially a synthesis of secondary work, much of it a summary of sections in his British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance (New York, 1987) and of other, sometimes dated, secondary works by other authors. A central purpose of the volume is to bring the new German material to the attention of English speakers and to provide a fresh perspective on the history of British policy through this comparison.

Hennock initially supposed a consistent difference between German and British policy—the former based upon compulsion, state bureaucratic control, and professionalism and the latter on voluntarism, local initiative, and amateurism—as much inºuential British opinion insisted during the formative years of the welfare states of both countries. This new work, however, does much to substantiate, and to complicate, such a comparison.

The perception that Germany under Bismarck pioneered modern social policy with the introduction of sickness and old age insurance in the 1880s is a commonplace of comparative social-science analyses. As Hennock interestingly points out, both parts of divided post-1945 Germany invoked the precedent: West Germany lauded it, but East Germany challenged it as insufficiently redistributive, echoing the conventional criticism that its original intent was to undermine the emerging Social Democratic Party by demonstrating the beneficence of the liberal state, not actually to extend benefits.

Hennock repeatedly challenges this view, arguing that Bismarck’s particular aim was to stimulate German economic growth by giving workers greater security. But he does not demolish it entirely, since he shows Otto von Bismarck commending state pensions “as a way to undermine socialist inºuence among workers” as early as 1880. A new finding is that Bismarck was hostile to extending the insurance principle to pensions, preferring direct state funding, although he was overruled by his civil servants. Unfortunately, the documents on which Hennock relies do not enable him adequately to explain Bismarck’s reasons.

The book is stronger on processes of policy formation than on outcomes, partly because statistics in Germany—for example, on coverage and costs of provision—are less comprehensive than in Britain. It provides much new information on Germany but no significant new perspectives on British policy. The British government was not, as Hennock suggests, “ignorant” of the German pension system. The British examined it thoroughly and made a conscious choice to adopt a different, noncontributory model. As Hennock, and others, suggest, the two schemes had different aims—the German one to increase the security and productivity of skilled workers and the British one to relieve most of the poor. Gender does not loom large in Hennock’s analysis, but the British government was aware that females were difficult to fit into an insurance system based upon regular work at adequate pay.

Hennock also fails to understand that Britain introduced health insurance in 1911 to serve a different purpose than pensions—namely, to stimulate, as in Germany, worker security and productivity rather than to reduce severe poverty. He provides no clear comparison between the beneficiaries of these different schemes in the two countries. He rightly, however, points to an important, enduring difference between the two systems. British state benefits have always been, and remain, minimal, relying on individuals to supplement them with their own saving, whereas the German...