From the Golden to the Dark Decade, From Reforms to Isms and Ologies

1980 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
John Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Demand Management ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Applied Social Science ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

THE 1950s WERE A WONDERFUL DECADE FOR APPLIED SOCIAL science: for the belief that reason addressed to economic and social problems can improve the human condition. Compare the 1950s with the 1930s and ask how much of the improvement was due to Keynes and Beveridge. It is inevitable that a generation of debunkers should follow whose answer would be ‘not much’. But that would have seemed a strange conclusion in the 1950s; and the view of the 1950s was surely right. We had full employment in place of 10 per cent unemployment in the 1920s and nearly 15 per cent in the 1930s; and after the first years of post-war reconstruction, it was reasonable to attribute this to Keynesian demand management. We had a safety net through which relatively few fell into poverty; and this was Beveridge's social security and the welfare state.

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fionna Barber
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Human Condition

British painter Francis Bacon was one of the most important figures of international post-war modernism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he developed a characteristic painting format used throughout his career, generally featuring an isolated figure within an armature or stage-like setting. Bacon’s work is renowned for its raw emotional appeal, and also its ability to convey an existential sense of the human condition. Bacon’s painting developed sporadically until Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) attracted considerable critical attention. During the 1950s, a series of variations on Diego Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650) supported the development of Bacon’s international reputation, consolidated by a major retrospective at the Tate in 1962. In 1970, however, on the eve of his major retrospective exhibition at Grand Palais, Paris, his former lover George Dyer died of an overdose, a tragedy Bacon later commemorated in a group of triptychs. After this event he withdrew considerably from Soho Bohemia, in which he had played such a leading role during the previous two decades.

Confusion and divergence: Origins and meanings of the term ‘welfare state’ in Germany and Britain, 1840–1940

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Petersen ◽  
Jørn Henrik Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Policy History ◽  
Standard Definition ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Post War ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Welfare State

It is often stated that there is no standard definition of a ‘welfare state’. A survey of the standard textbooks supports this claim. It is also often the case that academic works on welfare state and social policy history earmark lines or even pages to discussing the origins of the term welfare state. However, these brief accounts are often wrong in the details and are missing important aspects. In our article we offer the first detailed study of the origin of the term ‘welfare state’ tracing it back to the mid-19th century Germany and following its diverse and changing definitions in the German and British context until the 1940s. The study adds decades to the conventional understanding of this history and offers a more nuanced understanding of the different definitions attributed to the term before its political breakthrough in the late 1940s. Projecting this post-war understanding backwards in time – what the literature generally does – is too simple and anachronistic. Both in Germany and Britain the dominating understandings differ from our present day understanding of the ‘welfare state’ as a social security system.

Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Butler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War

In the mid-twentieth century the social sciences significantly expanded, and played a major role in shaping British intellectual, political, and cultural life. Central to this shift was the left-wing policy maker and sociologist Michael Young. In the 1940s Young was a key architect of the Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future. He became a sociologist in the 1950s, publishing a classic study of the London working class, Family and Kinship in East London, with Peter Willmott in 1957, and the 1958 dystopian satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy, about a future society in which status was determined entirely by intelligence. Young also founded dozens of organizations, including the Institute of Community Studies, the Consumers’ Association, and the Open University. Moving between politics, academia, and activism, Young believed that the social sciences could help policy makers and politicians understand human nature and build better social and political institutions. This book examines the relationship between social science and public policy in left-wing politics between the end of the Second World War and the end of the first Wilson government through the figure of Michael Young. It shows how Young and other researchers and policy makers challenged Labour values like full employment and nationalization, and argued that the Labour Party should put more emphasis on relationships, family, and community. Showing that the social sciences were embedded in the politics of the post-war left, this book argues that historians and scholars should take their role in British politics and political thought seriously.

The Irreversible Welfare State: Its Recent Maturation, its Encounter with the Economic Crisis, and its Future Prospects

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran Therborn ◽  
Joop Roebroek
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
State Growth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Welfare State

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s meant important changes within the Western states: apparatuses of armed forces, bureaucratic ordering, and public transport and communication became institutions of transfer payments to households, and public education, caring and social services. In this article we describe the influence of the current economic crisis on the welfare state. Average yearly growth of social security expenditure continues, but has declined since 1981. Generous systems of social security clearly provide no security against the consequences of the economic crisis, especially unemployment. Public commitment to social security and full employment are largely independent of each other. We describe how, under the surface of welfare state growth, the political relations of force have changed in favor of those social forces advocating fundamental reappraisal of the welfare state over those supporting its maintenance or extension. The resistance to significant changes is so strong, however, that fundamental reconstruction of the welfare state is as yet excluded. We hold that the welfare state is an irreversible major institution of advanced capitalist countries, as long as democracy prevails. The building of a majoritarian anti-welfare state coalition seems impossible for the foreseeable future, but in some countries significant cuts must be expected; we end by specifying some economic and political preconditions for such cuts.

Social Assistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 623-640
Author(s):  
Thomas Bahle ◽  
Claus Wendt
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Security System ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Security System ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Welfare Regime ◽  
The Welfare State

Social assistance guarantees basic social rights and provides means-tested, residual benefits to persons in need. It is the last safety net of the welfare state. The actual significance of social assistance varies by welfare regime: the more inclusive and generous a social security system, the less important usually is social assistance. In the Nordic countries, for example, with highly developed social security, few persons actually depend on social assistance. By contrast, in most countries with a liberal welfare regime, social assistance is an essential part of the welfare state. Yet in most cases, social assistance is not a viable alternative to inclusive social security. In Southern or Eastern European countries with rudimentary welfare states, social assistance is also patchy, exclusive, and rudimentary. In continental European countries, the situation varies by population group: most systems are more generous to the elderly than to families with children, and in particular to the unemployed. Moreover, in almost all countries social assistance benefits do not actually lift people out of poverty. Social assistance thus provides a basic minimum income for some groups, but does not effectively prevent poverty. In general, social assistance is more effective in countries in which it clearly operates as a last safety net within an otherwise well-developed overall social security system.

Applied Social Science Methodology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gerring ◽  
Dino Christenson
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Applied Social Science ◽  
Science Methodology ◽  
Social Science Methodology

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
International Policies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War

In examining the practice of socialist internationalism, this book has sought to combine three fields of historical scholarship (socialism, internationalism, and international politics) in the aim of contributing to each one. The contribution to the first area, socialism, is perhaps the most obvious. Contrary to numerous claims, socialist internationalism did not die in August 1914 but survived the outbreak of war and afterwards even flourished at times. Indeed, during the two post-war periods, European socialists worked closely together on a variety of pressing issues, endowing the policymaking of the British, French, and German parties with an important international dimension. This international dimension was never all-important: it rarely, if ever, trumped the domestic political and intra-party dimensions of policymaking. But its existence means that the international policies of any one socialist party cannot be fully understood in isolation from the policies of other parties. The practice of socialist internationalism was rarely easy: contention was present and sometimes rife. Equally pertinent, idealism could be in short supply. Often enough, European socialists instrumentalized internationalism for their own ends, whether it was Ramsay MacDonald with the Geneva Protocol during the 1920s or Guy Mollet, who hoped to discredit internal party critics of his Algerian policy during the 1950s. Nevertheless, the attempts to instrumentalize socialist internationalism underscore the latter’s significance. After all, such attempts would be inconceivable unless socialist internationalism meant something to European socialists....

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Block Grant ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

Bauen nach dem Bauhaus

Architectura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 154-183
Author(s):  
Andreas Schwarting
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Industrial Architecture ◽  
Construction Tasks ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
Contemporary Architecture ◽  
Second World

Abstract Hermann Blomeier is one of around 80 graduates from the Bau- und Ausbauabteilung, a comparatively small group among the more than 1200 students at the Bauhaus who have only recently come under the spotlight of research. The biographies of several graduates are known, such as Franz Ehrlich, Erich Consemüller, Howard Dearstyne, Selman Selmanagić, Herbert Hirche or Arieh Sharon; many more are lost, however. Although the Bauhaus was not a ›school‹ in the sense of a unified design approach and a binding canon of forms, it is instructive on an individual level to study the work of Blomeier, one of the Bauhaus graduates and students of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who has so far received little attention. On the basis of three projects from the 1950s, the viability of the design approaches conveyed at the Bauhaus for the construction tasks of the post-war period are examined. First, the ferry ports connecting Konstanz and Meersburg will be considered as the first major project by Blomeier after the Second World War. The buildings for the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung – at times the largest construction site in West Germany of the 1950s – represent an outstanding example of industrial architecture and technical infrastructure in their fusion of art, technology and landscape. The smallest of the three projects, the building for the rowing club Neptun, located directly opposite the old town of Konstanz on the Seerhein, points with its innovative modular primary structure well beyond contemporary architecture and anticipates developments of the late 1960s, such as the Japanese Metabolists or the Plug-In-City of Archigram.

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