Staatseingriff und Ökonomiefunktion / State intervention and the economic function

1978 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Vobruba

AbstractThe origin of the function of the Welfare State is to be explained as a reaction, firstly, to forceful social claims by the working class and, secondly, to its hereby increasing political weight which the state had to take into account for the sake of its own survival. With the adoption of social obligations, the state in capitalism enters into a specific dependence from the economic system. Since the state is not a producer, it has to acquire the necessary financial means from the economic system to function as a Welfare State. The extraction of financial means from the economic system (especially in the form of taxes) can occur all the more easily, the more smoothly the economic system itself functions. The state is, therefore ‚out of its own interests‘ dependent on the promotion of the economic system. The intervention of the Welfare State affects, on the other hand, the function of the economy. Whilst the Welfare State provides an, at least rudimentary, existence beyond the labour market and occupation, it evades the constraintive situation: wage labour or starvation, to which the non owners of the means of production were subject to under ‚classical‘ conditions, and therefore strenghtens their conflict potential. The corollary of this is that the function of the capitalist crisis to purge wage costs, can no longer unfold itself. Consequently this results in a change of the particular character of capitalist crisis and in a development, which in its tendency burdens the state with ever increasing social problems, to be solved, without enableing the state to sufficiently expand its financial margin.

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Hume

Within the last twenty years, historians' views about the significance of ‘Benthamism’ for the development of British government in the nineteenth century have fluctuated pretty widely. In 1948 J. B. Brebner set decisively in motion a movement away from the interpretation, stated in classic but curiously ambivalent form by A. V. Dicey, which made Bentham the philosopher and advocate of an allegedly dominant policy of laissez faire or ‘individualism’. Brebner attacked both legs of Dicey's argument, contending that in the years 1825–70 (which Dicey had identified as the period of individualism) the scale and variety of State intervention were extensive, and that the State intervention of the time ‘in practically all of its many forms was basically Benthamite—Benthamite in the sense of conforming closely to that forbidding, detailed blueprint for a collectivist state, the Constitutional Code’. More recently, some specialists in nineteenth-century administrative history have accepted, and have in some directions extended, one side of Brebner's thesis, but have cast doubt on the other side. Thus, reinforcing Brebner's interpretation of Victorian policy-making, David Roberts has located ‘the origins of the welfare state’ in the period 1832–54, and Oliver MacDonagh has argued that in ‘the middle quarters of the nineteenth-century…(contrary to all expectation and desire) the collectivist system of the present day began to take its shape’. But in developing their themes Roberts and MacDonagh have tended to attach little importance to what Dicey called ‘opinion’—consciously formulated and coherently worked-out beliefs or programmes—and to stress instead the pragmatic responses of politicians and administrators to problems and events.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann

The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.


Author(s):  
Simon Ball

This chapter characterizes the relationship of the British state to war over the long term. It analyses two epistemic turning points for the war–state relationship, one occurring in the 1860s, the other in the 1970s. It explains the importance of war to the British state under the ‘fiscal security’ compromise.The chapter traces the long and uneven emergence of the ‘welfare state’ as a successor to the ‘warfare state’. It argues that the ‘warfare state’ paradigm loses much of its empirical and conceptual force if it were to be extended beyond 1970. The relationship of the state to war changed so fundamentally at that point that history, the chapter suggests, ceased to be a useful guide for future conduct.


2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIMI AJZENSTADT ◽  
ZEEV ROSENHEK

This article analyses the formulation and implementation of a relatively new statutory programme of care services for dependent elderly people in Israel, which has as a basic characteristic the supply of services by non-state agencies. The analysis serves as a basis for an exploration of the effects of privatisation and the emergence of quasi-markets upon the functioning of the welfare state both as a benefits provider and as a major employer. In contrast to the perspectives that consider privatisation as leading to the weakening of the state in the welfare domain, we argue that through the transfer of services supplied by non-state agencies the state protects itself from demands and pressures from clients, while maintaining its control and regulation capabilities. This process decreases the state's accountability towards its citizens, enhancing in turn its autonomy. Privatisation policies do not imply, therefore, the dissolution of the welfare state, but rather the emergence of a new mode of state intervention.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-171
Author(s):  
Serhii Shcherbak ◽  

Annotation. Introduction. The article discusses the views of scientists on the “welfare state” model of the implementation of the principles of a socially oriented market economy. Purpose. Analysis of versatile scientific works and researches. Research of the theorical and methodological principles of “welfare state” as a variable conceptual model of modern socially oriented market economy. Results. The implementation of the tactical and strategic task that fundamentally faces the state and the national economy of Ukraine – a significant improvement in the welfare and level of social protection of citizens – is possible only if the socially oriented market economy is consistently developed according to the “state of general welfare” model. Fundamentally, this model should include, as shown earlier: effective private and public sectors of the economy, effective state macroeconomic regulation, high level of social protection and health care, correctly defined goals of investment and innovation development, stimulation of entrepreneurial initiative and competition, a clear focus on a high level of international competitiveness. Conclusions. The socially oriented market economy, built in developed countries in the last third of the twentieth century, was studied as a generalized and practically implemented model of the “welfare state”. Theoretical and methodological directions of its analysis as a conceptual model in variative theoretical and practical approaches and their application in the context of possibilities of realization of general principles, principles and peculiarities of certain countries are defined. It has been shown that in the target orientation of the “welfare state” as a conceptual model of the social market economy, the welfare of the country’s citizens occupies the first place, that is, the standard of living, which includes not only the material component (the level of income per capita), but also such a concept as quality of life (ecology, quality of food, medicines, social standards, etc.). The theoretic and methodological approach to the analysis of the socio-economic system as a model of development and functioning is substantiated, which allows to find out more thoroughly and clearly the main directions of society’s progress in the XXI century. Keywords: welfare state; socio-economic system; socially oriented economy; welfare of the nation; social protection.


Author(s):  
Jordanna Bailkin

This chapter asks how refugee camps transformed people as well as spaces, altering the identities of the individuals and communities who lived in and near them. It considers how camps forged and fractured economic, religious, and ethnic identities, constructing different kinds of unity and disunity. Camps had unpredictable effects on how refugees and Britons thought of themselves, and how they saw their relationship to upward and downward mobility. As the impoverished Briton emerged more clearly in the imagination of the welfare state, the refugee was his constant companion and critic. The state struggled to determine whether refugees required the same care as the poor, or if they warranted their own structures of aid.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Doğa Başar Sariipek ◽  
Gökçe Cerev ◽  
Bora Yenihan

The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today’s world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition; gaining more power of the actors other than the state – the market, civil society organisations and the family – does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards “enabling” or “active” welfare state.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110344
Author(s):  
David Garland

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.


Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.


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