The Changing Meanings of the Welfare State: Histories of a Key Concept in the Nordic Countries

In discussions of economics, governance, and society in the Nordic countries, “the welfare state” is a well-worn analytical concept. However, there has been much less scholarly energy devoted to historicizing this idea beyond its postwar emergence. In this volume, specialists from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland chronicle the historical trajectory of “the welfare state,” tracing the variable ways in which it has been interpreted, valued, and challenged over time. Each case study generates valuable historical insights into not only the history of Northern Europe, but also the welfare state itself as both a phenomenon and a concept.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jan 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789201253

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Multiple Welfare States – Histories of a Keyword

Nils Edling

Distinguished French historian Marc Bloch made the point that historians easily idolize origins.¹ His warning that ancestry by itself does not explain later development supports a basic tenet of conceptual history: concepts are historically situated and contingent. They are used for different purposes by different actors in different situations, and usage and connotations are subject to change. In other words, the first appearance of a term may not matter a lot for the later usages and understandings of that term. This means that there are no necessary, intrinsic connections between the Wohlfahrtsstaat of the nineteenth century and ‘the welfare state’ we know from the post-1945 era. That said, earlier usages and understandings make up important historical layers in the modern usage of the term and that makes the longer perspective relevant. This background sets out to excavate some of these layers dating from the last century and a half. It addresses the basic questions about when, in which ways and by whom ‘the welfare state’ was used in divergent historical settings. As a study in concept formation it highlights certain aspects in order to give a background to the subsequent, more detailed studies of the Nordic countries. After a short introduction about older welfare, the chapter is loosely structured around the four main usages ca 1860–1940: the paternalistic, the regulating, the social and the democratic welfare states. Germany dominates much of the chapter, with excursions to the United States and, occasionally, to Britain as well. The topic is enormous, complex and underexplored, and this calls for a narrow focus, which means that this chapter deals with the keyword’s history, and the intention is not to survey the history of modern ideas about social reform or welfare policies and institutions in general. Studies of that kind abound, whereas the history of the keyword has remained unknown.²

The Common Good and Welfare

As noted already in the introduction, ‘welfare’ is an old term with multiple meanings and, as a fundamental political objective, considerably older than modern conceptions of a welfare state. It would be possible to delineate a long historical tradition of thinking about governance and policies centred around ‘the common good’ and its multiple conceptual histories, but such an undertaking cannot fit into the limited space available here. Then again, it should be remembered that ‘welfare’, meaning happiness and security in the tradition from Aristotle and Cicero, formed an integral part of a common Western definition of public affairs; politics – virtuous men striving for the wellbeing of the community – and ‘the common good’ could not be separated. This notion, open for different interpretations, stood absolutely central in early modern statecraft, and ‘the common good’ – det allmänna/gemena/gemensamma bästa/väl (Swedish), det almene/almindelige/fælles bedste/vel (Danish and Norwegian) with relatives like ‘Commonweal’ in English and Gemeinwohl in German – signified the final aim of legitimate power. Salus publica/salus populi constituted a core value, the rationale, in early modern Northern Europe as elsewhere in the West. ‘Public welfare’ of this kind concerned the wellbeing of the community or the realm, the relations between rulers and subjects and the protection of peace, justice and moral order in society.³ Not at all original, Jonas Magni, professor of theology and politics at Uppsala University, in 1624 declared that the objective of politics, a branch of practical philosophy, is to direct societal and civic life ‘towards society’s common good, happiness and welfare’.⁴ Following mainly Pufendorf, the German jurist whose well-known textbook from 1673 saw more than 150 later editions in different languages, playwright, philosopher and historian Ludvig Holberg, a giant in the history of Scandinavian literature, published a bestselling treatise on natural law making the same fundamental point: a virtuous ruler ‘should at all times have the welfare of his subjects in view’ and make ‘laws that serve the common good’.⁵

In the Lutheran kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, numerous administrative police regulations on matters concerning religion, privileges, consumption, vagrancy, migration and all trades were introduced in order to protect harmonious societal relations and produce wealth and prosperity. This notion of a well-ordered state entailed a moral theory, which stated that the state administration should be used for development of society and the improvement of the subjects. In this way, god politie (good administration, Gute Policey), good order and welfare maintained by the state ‘legitimated comprehensive regulation in terms of an elastic concept of the public interest’.⁶ In Nordic cameralist thinking of the eighteenth century, much inspired by the proliferation of German works of this kind, the actively regulating state and the need to improve the economy constituted main themes with well-known policy objectives and recommendations: increased population, agricultural reforms, subsidies to manufactures, sumptuary laws and export subsidies etc. Consequently, welfare, in the sense of material prosperity or wealth (velstand in Danish and Norwegian, välstånd in Swedish) became far more important than previously when Lutheran orthodoxy ruled. It was a Christian and patriotic duty to make all branches of the economy flourish, it was repeated, and in this endeavour there existed no opposition between the interests of the state and those of the individuals. The prosperity and happiness of the society, protected and promoted by regulating authorities, had precedence, and patriotism, economic improvements and ‘public welfare’ were in this way closely linked. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the enlightened absolutist rulers in Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland tried to put these ideas into dynamic regulating practices.

The Paternalistic Welfare State

The German innovations Rechtsstaat and Wohlfahrtsstaat were introduced in the scholarly and political debates on the constitutional character and sociopolitical role of the state in the mid nineteenth century. Rechtsstaat, ‘the legal state’, has remained a key concept for two centuries and produced a substantial literature in German.⁷ ‘The welfare state’ has definitely been less important than its younger sibling Sozialstaat and, consequently, not the object of much conceptually oriented scholarly interest in Germany.⁸ Drawing on Kant’s critique of eudaimonistic conceptions of the state, the early adherents of the Rechtsstaat rejected the idea of the state as something God-given, restricted its functions to upholding personal liberty and security and, finally, argued that the state must be governed by the law of reason (civil liberties, rule of law, constitutional government etc.). Politically speaking, this was a liberal conception of the state, a programme for constitutional and legal reform directed against the contemporary rulers in the German states and the old absolutist regimes of Frederick the Great, Joseph II of Habsburg and Catherine the Great of Russia – or for that matter Denmark’s Fredrik VI and Sweden’s Gustav III. Such regimes were labelled Polizei- und Wohlfahrtsstaat, Polizeistaat or sometimes just Wohlfahrtsstaat. ‘The welfare state’ was in this fundamental sense a counter-concept, a negation of the liberal legal state of the nineteenth century. It was a negation because it subordinated individual freedom to the promotion of welfare and happiness, and these were not proper tasks of the state. To follow Kant, the paternalistic contract of the old regime violated the human right to freedom: ‘the principle of benevolence toward the people like that of a father toward his children’ is ‘the greatest despotism thinkable’.⁹

During the course of the century the Rechtsstaat concept was reformulated in multiple ways; the widespread formal definition reduced the political elements and limited it to concern the legality and procedural rule of law. This reformulation, where administrative law became a prime focus, accompanied the march of constitutionalism in the German states in the latter half of the century. In the 1890s, Otto Mayer in his influential Deutsche Verwaltungsrecht defined the Rechtsstaat formally as the ‘state with well-ordered administrative law’.¹⁰ For Rudolf von Gneist, who wrote extensively on English constitutional history and was an active liberal politician, the Rechtsstaat was fundamentally used to underpin constitutional reform; he favoured self-government, and ‘the legal state’ provided the alternative to the bureaucratic machinery of Bismarck’s ‘power state’.¹¹ According to Mayer ‘the legal state’ succeeded ‘the police state’ (Polizeistaat) of the previous century, whereas Gneist set up the Rechtsstaat as the opposite of ‘the welfare state’ (Wohlfahrtsstaat). His critique was principal and political in character: ‘the welfare state’ threatened individual rights and proper administrative practices. For Gneist, who used the term pejoratively to describe France, the problem was not historical but contemporary: ‘the welfare state’ negated the fundamental principles of ‘the legal state’. It lacked proper division of power and was ruled by groups susceptible to the changing expression of the will of the people, which in its turn opened for despotism.¹² Gneist did not reject social reforms as such but criticized the lack of judicial control of administrative action. In this critique he followed Lorenz von Stein, professor of political economy in Vienna, who in his systematic seven-volume work on administrative law (Die Verwaltungslehre 1865–68) sharply distinguished between the forms of state: the old absolutist welfare state, the transitional police state and the contemporary Rechtsstaat. In the later so often repeated manner, Stein identified the Wohlfahrtsstaat with cameralism and the teachings of Pufendorf, Wolff, Justi and others, who defined the promotion of happiness and welfare as the primary purposes of the state. He stressed the ethical content – the unity of philosophy, law and administration in the old regime – and labelled the Wohlfahrtsstaat ‘a compulsory institution for the happiness and well-being of the people’ (eine Zwangsanstalt für das Glück der Völker).¹³ The administrative state of the early nineteenth century, the Polizeistaat, which shared many traits of its predecessor save for the unified philosophical foundation, had to be abandoned in favour of the Rechtsstaat, which secured freedom, security and the rule of law. The French revolution, Kant’s redefinition of the common good and the rise of constitutionalism made the old conception untenable, stated Stein; state and society were separated, individual rights transformed social relations, and social classes with different interests emerged.¹⁴ Stein’s all-encompassing work tried to grasp these epochal changes, and his programme for the necessary conciliation of the social conflicts brought about by industrial society included ‘the social kingdom’ and ‘the social state’ – that is, a monarchy and civil service capable of social reform – in order to alleviate the conditions of the working class. His ‘social state’ took on the task to regulate society without circumscribing individual freedom, and this formula for reform guided Bismarck’s groundbreaking social policies. In this way, Stein is considered a key thinker in the history of German social policy and founder of an ‘administrative science’, Verwaltungswisssenschaft, with the ideas, procedures and techniques for the state to manage ‘the social’ within the limits set by the law.¹⁵

From Stein and Gneist onwards, the binary distinction between an old welfare state, a Wohlfahrtsstaat characterized by absolutism, paternalism and state dirigisme in matters large and small, and the Rechtsstaat with a constitution, equality before the law and civil rights became a common description of Germany’s development over time. It told a story of progress from the old regime to the modern world, and numerous German works have since then contributed to establishing one of the standard definitions of ‘the welfare state’ as a premodern, paternalistic and bureaucratic state.¹⁶ It was mainly associated with the cameralism and enlightened absolutism of the eighteenth century, but once established, the new term could be applied to different historical periods and studies of the ancient and medieval ‘welfare state-thinking’ were published.¹⁷ This historical usage of ‘the welfare state’ with reference to pre-1789 doctrines and regimes lacked contestation and had a clearly defined content with a specific temporality, as it referred to a passed stage in the historical development of the (Western) state.¹⁸ Outside of the German- speaking world, this usage does not appear to have been particularly well known; in scholarly German texts it was not uncommon. Into the interwar period, the old paternalistic welfare state constituted the most established variant of welfare state in German discourse.

Kulturstaat and Social Policy

In the 1860s and 1870s, Stein and Gneist cemented the binary distinction between the different state forms, but they did not invent the term Wohlfahrtsstaat.¹⁹ The earliest known usage dates from the 1840s and a text by the young Hegelian journalist Karl Nauwerck. In 1844, he emphasized that ‘the legal state [der Rechtsstaat] does not suffice; it has to develop into the welfare state [der Wohlfahrtsstaat] in order to satisfy all societal needs’. Writing from a radical perspective at a time when then ‘the social question’ and pauperism received more and more attention, Nauwerck argued for the need for the collective – the members of society – to care for the weak.²⁰ His linguistic originality should not be exaggerated; it might have been accidental. Wohlfahrt, welfare, was a very well-established concept in German political philosophy, jurisprudence and sciences of state, where it could be found in many novel compounds such as ‘state welfare’ (Staatswohlfahrt), ‘national welfare’ (Nationalwohlfahrt), ‘welfare of the people’ (Volkswohlfahrt), ‘public welfare’ (öffentliche Wohlfahrt) and ‘welfare administration’ (Wohlfahrtspolizei).²¹ ‘Public welfare’ and ‘the common good’ were also central objectives of the Prussian Civil Code of 1794.²² ‘Freedom’, ‘security’ and ‘welfare’ stood at the centre of the German theorizing about the purposes of the state (Staatszweckslehre), a fundamental concern in much constitutional and legal theory, practical philosophy, theology and political economy, where highly contested issues about natural rights and the metaphysical justifications of law and state power were at stake. The dichotomies between state and society – between public and private spheres, the collective and the individual – and their political and legal consequences constituted central themes.²³ As the many welfare nouns indicate, the more mundane issue of public administration also attracted scholars. The cameralist tradition, reduced in scale and scope in ‘the legal state’, remained a starting point in the massive body of works on administration. For Robert von Mohl, the leading pre-1848 proponent of the idea of the Rechtsstaat, the proper areas of public policy included trade and industry, health and sanitation, poverty and public relief and, of course, education and public order. This state was definitely not absent or inactive in matters that concerned the wellbeing of the population: it was a Kulturstaat, a civilized state (literally ‘Culture state’), which had both positive and preventive administrative powers at its disposal.²⁴

During the latter half of the century, the Kulturstaat emerged as yet another potent concept in the German political vocabulary, a concept deployed to describe the progress of contemporary society vis-à-vis both earlier periods and non-Western cultures. The unified German Reich was a Kulturstaat; it embodied culture, education and learning (Bildung) and rule of law, and included the idea of the modern state as ‘a moral institution for the education of mankind’, as the young political economist Gustav Schmoller declared in 1872.²⁵ For Schmoller, a Kulturstaat represented much more than just social reforms, but the interventionist state, which worked to reduce class conflicts in industrial society, formed a central dimension in his conception of the unified German state. Fellow academic heavyweight, the professed state socialist Adolph Wagner, professor of Staatswissenschaften at the university in Berlin, gave this position a strong framing in his textbook on political