The Post-War Welfare State

Brian Easton

The modern welfare state developed in most rich countries in the post-war era in response to three major traumas: the interwar depression, which drove a need for a kinder way of organising society; the war itself, which instilled a desire to regenerate social cohesiveness; and industrial society, which was sweeping away the old forms of social provision. The welfare state is now under considerable pressure to change.

This paper looks at the pressures to change (especially financial), and argues that while many of the contentions favouring reform are spurious, many of the assumptions that implicitly underpinned the first fifty years of the welfare state no longer hold. Identifying these assumptions undermines the politics of nostalgia ? the belief that we can go back to the old approach.

The perspective of this paper is that the welfare state is a response to the deteriorating social coherence of industrial society, that there is no new coherence in post-industrial society (especially with respect to economic protection), but the human demand for social coherence is such that we will continue to seek means of expressing it, probably in a modified welfare state.