Social Welfare History in the Age of Diversity

This policy perspective discusses three important social welfare programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families—and offers an explanation of how they have expanded over time.

Domestic Contradictions

In Domestic Contradictions, Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the “vagrant” and “welfare queen” in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers—to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity —and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.

Rethinking welfare history through a transnational and global lens. A gender-focused analysis of the Italian case

This article examines recent Italian historiography on welfare, with a particular focus on gender-oriented research. It relates recent Italian studies to the international debate, in order to identify acquisitions, open problems and perspectives. Its aim is to show how these studies could improve if a transnational and, broadly speaking, global approach was adopted, and it discusses a series of possible themes and issues to be addressed.

Von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003)

G.H. von Wright was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Helsinki, Finland, von Wright did his early work on logic, probability and induction under the influence of logical empiricism. In 1948–51 he served as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s successor at Cambridge, but returned to his homeland and later became a member of the Academy of Finland. He did pioneering work on the new applications of logic: modal logic, deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality and determinism. In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation and understanding of human action helped to establish new links between the analytic tradition and Continental hermeneutics. Von Wright’s later works, which are eloquent books and essays written originally in his two native languages (Swedish and Finnish), deal with issues of humanism and human welfare, history and future, technology and ecology.