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

It has become commonplace to speak of a crisis of the welfare state in England. The predictions of future pension shortfalls and the never-ending financial problems of the National Health Service are just two of the most talked-about aspects of this crisis. While there has been no shortage of discussion about the nature of this crisis and its immediate and short-term causes, far less attention has been paid to longer-term factors. This is one of the purposes of Peter Hennock's comparative study of the origin of the welfare state in nineteenth-century England and Prussia, and subsequently in Germany. He argues that the fundamental nature of what would become the welfare state in these two countries had been established by 1914. Hennock, however, does not satisfactorily define "welfare state"-at least not explicitly and comprehensively. Arguably, this is partly the result of his essentially empirical approach to the subject and his dismissal of the more theoretically sophisticated methodologies and a priori models employed by what he derisively terms "quantifying sociologists." As the subtitle of this book conveys, this is really a comparative study of specific social policies: poor laws; industrial injury; sickness, invalidity, and old age; and unemployment.

Hennock is concerned with how these specific policies were introduced, how they were paid for, how they were to be delivered, andto a lesser extenthow much people benefited from them. As he acknowledges, his book is not a monograph based on intensive archival research but neither is it a textbook. Rather, it is a work of historiographical synthesisa task he is more qualified to perform than most. As a native German speaker, he has been able to distill the fruits of a large and growing body of literature on the history of German social policy, most of which has not been translated into english. Furthermore, this book represents the culmination of his three decades of research into social reform, urban governance, and public health. the result is a rich, dense, but highly accessible thematic study.

The comparative approach enables Hennock to pose questions that have hitherto been overlooked and also to challenge the prevailing historiographical stereotypes of the english and German welfare states that have emerged from their casual juxtaposition. Hennock demonstrates that the provision of welfare in Germany has relied less on compulsion, centralization, and professionalization, while the english system turns out to have been less voluntarist, decentralized, and amateurish than was once thought. the reader is thus presented with numerous examples of "role reversal" and of the similarities between the two countries. And yet there were some very real differences, too. This is most evident in the degree to which the respective states were willing to trust their citizens to "save for a rainy day." The German state, with its traditions of top-down reform and authoritarian political culture, had little faith in its citizens and therefore compelled them and their employers to save; the English state, imbued with liberal values of individualism and faith in the voluntary institutions of civil society, only assumed the role of enforcer in exceptional circumstances and with the greatest reluctance. Conversely, the English state has been more willing than the German state to be the provider by making contributions to social security and through recourse to general taxation, expedients that the German state employed exceptionally and reluctantly.

Here we come to the fundamental difference between the two welfare states. Although Hennock rightly draws attention to the role of the Poor Law in German welfare policy-in which policy makers, like their English counterparts, were concerned to reform the Poor Law so as to facilitate labor mobility and subsequently to reduce the tax burden on ratepayers-he also shows how the Poor Law, and the assumptions that underpinned it, continued to exert a longer and more powerful influence on English social policy down...