Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany (review)

Greg Eghigian. Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany. Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. xiii + 297 pp. Ill. $59.50; £37.00 (0-472-11122-1).

In this wide-ranging and perceptive study, Greg Eghigian seeks to explain how social security gained its " privileged place" in modern Germany and became the "raison d'etre" of the nation-state (p. 7). His general answer also elucidates the meaning of "making security social" in the title. The state in Germany, he points out, had for centuries been deeply concerned with the security of the realm. With the founding of the German Empire and the widespread disruptions associated with industrialization, it was hoped that the introduction of accident, disability, and old age insurance would reduce the social tensions and "would mean the restoration of trust, security, and certainty. Insurance made security social" (p. 281). To explain how it became "possible to think social insurance" (p. 31), Eghigian does not limit himself to the economic and social changes of the founding years of the Empire, but stresses that preceding practices and ideas—the long tradition of state responsibilities, the emergence of social science, and the appeal of Christian social policy—created conditions favorable for establishing the initial insurance program that was a "hybrid of natural scientific, medical, statistical, legal, and bureaucratic rationalities and values" (p. 66). Above all, he emphasizes that the initial program, centered as it was on "occupational risks to health," must be understood as "public health insurance" (p. 58).

The heart of the book treats the period from the 1880s to 1933, but Eghigian reaches back in time to locate the sources of modern social security, and he concludes by discussing continuities and differences during the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In order to make the large topic of social security manageable, he concentrates on the history of insurance for physical and mental disabilities. This does not result, however, in a narrowly focused treatment with limited implications or conclusions. On the contrary, he frequently comments on other components of social security and adeptly relates all insurance topics to broader economic, social, and political contexts.

Eghigian structures the history of social insurance around a number of trends, concepts, and turning points. The overriding trend, and the dominant theme of the book, is the transformation from disability insurance, provided to individuals for specific physical incapacities, to broad, collective entitlements—that is, to the social entitlement state. The chief turning point came toward the end of the First World War and during the revolutionary upheaval that spawned the "organized collective, and mass politics of social entitlement that came to dominate the Weimar years" (p. 189). The expansion of social entitlements between 1918 and 1927 went hand in hand with a "politics of victimization" that was marked, he argues, by the way disabled civilians exploited symbolic language to merge their disabilities with the sacrifices of soldiers disabled in warfare (p. 194).

A major theme that parallels the transformation to social entitlement is Eghigian's contrast between the "regenerative welfare state" and the almost concurrent rise of the "degenerative welfare state" of the Weimar era. The principle of regeneration was to rehabilitate disabled workers so that their productive labor would not be lost permanently. Employing the concept of the "degenerative welfare state," Eghigian analyzes the backlash against social security, stressing in particular the debates around the so-called pension neurosis; the cause of this illness, it was claimed, was the unending frustration experienced by claimants in their struggles with the excessively complicated application process. In the eyes of its critics, "the German welfare state, by extension of its own workings, became identified as both pathological and pathogenic" (p. 255).

This is a rewarding study, not...